From: columbus@strident.think.com (Michael Weiss)
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: sci.physics.research: research-level only?
Date: 8 Jan 93 15:31:22
Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge MA, USA
Distribution: sci
NNTP-Posting-Host: strident.think.com


Do the proposed moderators for sci.physics.research regard research-level
questions only as appropriate, or is any "real physics" suitable, so long
as it is not in the FAQ?

A few examples, to make the question more concrete:

1.  There have been a few posts recently on Huygens' principle.  John Baez
    posted at his usual erudite level on two ways to see that HP holds for
    all odd dimensions, except 1, and fails in all even dimensions.  I was
    puzzled about the exception of dimension 1, and Herbert Kranzer
    straightened me out.  There have also been a couple of posts on
    Hadamard's "method of descent".  (Dave Ring's question on the descent
    from 5 to 3 dimensions remains unanswered.)

    Little of this could be called current research, I would think, since
    most of it is in Courant-Hilbert.  (John: is the conformal invariance
    stuff somewhere in Courant-Hilbert?  How old is Lax's stuff?)

2.  About a year ago, someone posted a paradox involving a collision
    between an infinitely massive object and an object of finite mass.  The
    resolution hinged on the fact that momentum depends linearly on
    velocity (in Newtonian dynamics) but energy depends quadratically.

    The level here is high-school physics, the math just algebra.  I found
    it a fun puzzle to work out; I wish I'd seen it in high-school

3.  I asked recently about the QM explanation of ferro-magnetism, and got a
    couple of very informative posts.

4.  QM at all levels generates a lot of questions.  Some recent examples:
    (a) What is the "size" of an elementary particle?  (b) What is the
    difference between angular momentum in classical physics and in QM?
    (c) Why do eigenstates of the position operator "spread out" with time,
    while eigenstates of the momentum operator do not?  (d) Why is the
    angular momentum of a free particle quantized, when the momentum isn't?

5.  GR also generates a lot of questions.  I'll give one example, from
    maybe a year ago: does it make any sense to ask whether the universe as
    a whole is rotating (Mach's principle, Newton's buckets)?

Elementary SR and thermodynamics also produce their share of questions.
For some reason, the SR posts to sci.physics mostly rehash stuff already in
the FAQ, but there are occasional exceptions.

Should sci.physics.research include such threads?  If its goal is to serve
the needs of research physicists only, then I guess not.
(Sci.math.research does seem to have this kind of charter.)

I would prefer a newsgroup that did include such stuff.  It's great to have
a forum where amateurs such as myself can pester professionals with
questions for the sheer love of the subject, and toss in their own two
cents when they think they have something to say.  (I think
"sci.physics.moderated" is a better name for such a group than
"sci.physics.research".) 

On the other hand, the moderators will be doing the work of filtering, and
professionals have their own needs, so I merely state my preference.

Finally, Dale has pointed out that sci.physics will still exist.  True
enough.  It will still have Abian and co., plus endless threads on
"Religion and Science", "Jesus loves you", "the SSC--- boon or boondoggle?"
etc. etc.  It will still be worth wading through the dreck, if sci.physics
contains a reasonable percentage of stuff like:

    Dale's series on the Feynman sprinkler problem;
    Dale's mini-essay on film boiling;
    Dale's posts on Hunt's book, "The Maxwellians";
    The first 3 or 4 posts in the thread, started (if memory serves) 
      by Dale, on how much theory had to do with the invention
      of the transistor; 
    Posts by Dale and others in the recent "GR without Einstein" thread;

and many others.  (I mention only Dale's posts here because he has come
under unmerited attack as a proposed moderator.)  Still better to have such
stuff without the dreck...


Newsgroups: sci.physics