/r/Physics
The aim of /r/Physics is to build a subreddit frequented by physicists, scientists, and those with a passion for physics. Papers from physics journals (free or otherwise) are encouraged. Posts should be pertinent, meme-free, and generate a discussion about physics. Please report trolls and incorrect/misleading comments.
The aim of /r/Physics is to build a subreddit frequented by physicists, scientists, and those with a passion for physics. Posts should be pertinent and generate a discussion about physics.
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IRC Channel: #physics on irc.snoonet.org
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Encouraged submissions
Debates and discussions on all topics related to physics are welcome. Please make an effort to engage the community rather than simply state your views and expect others to validate them.
Shorter questions which are more straightforward to answer will get a better response in /r/AskPhysics.
We invite links to all websites, but article and blog post submissions require proper sourcing from the literature or mainstream scientific journalism. The lack of quality sources is grounds for removal at moderator discretion.
If you are posting a link to your own website, please familiarise yourself with the global rules on self-promotion.
Encouraged in weekly threads
Due to a high volume of such questions, they are consolidated in weekly Physics Questions threads.
Please check the /r/AskScience FAQ or the Usenet physics FAQ before posting.
Note that these questions are always welcome in /r/AskPhysics and /r/AskScience (subject to subreddit rules).
Questions regarding job opportunities and working as a physicist have a dedicated weekly Careers and Education thread and should be posted there.
Additionally, you can search the subreddit to read dozens of past threads about this issue or check /r/AskAcademia for jobs in academia.
Inquiries about studying physics should be posted in our weekly Careers and Education thread.
Alternatively, try more specific subreddits such as /r/AskAcademia, /r/GradSchool, /r/GradAdmissions, and /r/PhysicsStudents.
Discouraged or not allowed
Questions that are specific homework problems or calculations should be redirected to /r/AskPhysics or /r/HomeworkHelp. Neither asking nor assisting with homework is allowed here.
Alternatively, try Physics Forums instead.
Please make sure that a submission on the same topic has not been posted already.
New findings are always reported by multiple publications, and the fact that a specific link has not been submitted does not mean that this topic is not already being discussed on /r/Physics. Feel free to provide links to additional sources in the comment section instead.
All threads are posted at 9am EDT (1pm UTC).
Day | Post |
---|---|
Mon | What are you working on? |
Tue | Physics Questions |
Thu | Careers/Education Questions |
Fri | Resource Recommendations |
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To include an equation typeset in LaTeX in your post, put the LaTeX code between [;
and ;]
.
[;i\hbar \frac{\partial}{\partial t} \Psi = \hat H\Psi;]
/r/Physics
I've known about the electroweak force for quite a bit of time, but I haven't really investigated it until I discovered this goofy-ah thing called electroweak burning that TURNS QUARKS INTO ANTILEPTONS! It also emits a massive amount of energy (9 quarks -> 3 antileptons + 300 GeV), and according to my (very crudely done) calculations, 1 gram of hydrogen contains the necessary amount of quarks that, using electroweak burning, is capable of releasing ~9,000,000,000,000,000 joules or ~2,000,000 tons of tnt worth of energy (the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was only 1,500 tons of tnt). This shouldn't be possible because that is ~100 times as efficient as using perfect mass-energy conversion.
Basically, how the hell does electroweak burning turn a quark into an antilepton, and why is it so efficient!?
Homemade-cloud-chamber fun
This is a thread dedicated to collating and collecting all of the great recommendations for textbooks, online lecture series, documentaries and other resources that are frequently made/requested on /r/Physics.
If you're in need of something to supplement your understanding, please feel welcome to ask in the comments.
Similarly, if you know of some amazing resource you would like to share, you're welcome to post it in the comments.
There remain several unanswered fundamental questions in physics. Due to field of study, professional obligations etc interest among them might vary for members of this sub. I wanted to see which of these mysteries confounds you the most and which one would you like solved the most - within your lifetime?
This is a dedicated thread for you to seek and provide advice concerning education and careers in physics.
If you need to make an important decision regarding your future, or want to know what your options are, please feel welcome to post a comment below.
A few years ago we held a graduate student panel, where many recently accepted grad students answered questions about the application process. That thread is here, and has a lot of great information in it.
Helpful subreddits: /r/PhysicsStudents, /r/GradSchool, /r/AskAcademia, /r/Jobs, /r/CareerGuidance
So I have a pretty big assignment coming up about The Manhattan Project and nuclear bombs. In relation to that I need to make a "simple" simulation of a chain fission reaction in which I need to show what degree of enrichment of the uranium (U-235 or U-236, I'm assuming) is necessary to be able to construct a nuclear bomb in said simulation. And lastly, I need to explain how it could be made more realistic.
I have already received some code to work with, but I need to improve it. How would I go about doing that?
The recent superconductor papers make it seem pretty obvious to me that the field needs greater transparency when it comes to publishing data. And it's probably not just condensed matter physics that can improve, it's probably most subfields. If you publish results based on some data, you should really do your best to publish the raw data and scripts that produced your results. For the recent superconductivity papers it really shouldn't be hard to share all of this data and analysis from start to finish.
I got my PhD in physics and now I'm in computational biology. Biology has got its own problems, but the fact that there are methods researchers in biology who specialize in data analysis means that there is a large push to get people to share data and methods online. Many journals now require a "data availability" statement about where/how the data will be available online, and genetics datasets are huge so most physicists don't have that excuse.
Here's a list of data repositories in physics and other fields where you can share your data: https://www.nature.com/sdata/policies/repositories
There's also Github for smaller datasets.
The goal of the methods section is to enable people reading your paper to reproduce your experiment or analysis. If they can't do that then you haven't done your job.
Sure, there are exceptions. Some datasets are going to be too large to reasonably share, but surely you could still share scripts and some processed data. I don't need to see every pixel imaged by your cameras, just the ones that are relevant to your results. Each subfield needs to come up with its own norms.
In recent years I have just created a Github page for each paper, post the data or links to the data, post the scripts, and post a readme that outlines how to generate the results of the data with the scripts. It's not that hard.
Someone on the other thread said something like, "Oh, I have gigabytes of data and an incomprehensible lab notebook, good luck sorting through all of that if I share it." But I feel like this is exactly the problem that data sharing is designed to prevent, and it's also basically scientific misconduct to not keep reasonable lab notebooks of your data.
When I was a physicist I did a bad job of this myself. I never shared data or scripts online. My PI would never have allowed it. I asked other research groups for the data they used to generate published images and they said no. Today, as an outsider, I think it's easier for me to point out the problems that existed back then, and it's possible for me to see where different fields can learn from each other now that I've been a part of both of them for so many years.
I really don't have any skin in the game anymore, except for the fact that I got into science because I thought it was more important than an exercise in story-telling and picture-making.