Proposal: Sociology Threads Should Have Their Own Subforum

[Coin]

I think that the "sociology of physics" posts are pretty easy to ignore-- there aren't that many of them. And the subforum feature on this forum is a little wonky.

 

[shoehorn]

Thanks for the supportive comment, Mike. We seem to be outnumbered here
I agree. Rates of publication in scholarly journals, and citation counts, are very important to getting perspective on the progress and directions of research. I don't think that sort of information should be bannished or suppressed. It is hardly proper to call it "sociology" and it forms a common part of academic discussion.

Does anyone else find this to be utterly disingenuous? Nobody is calling for citation results or the latest news about how much money some publishing houses are making to be banned. The point is simply that in a forum whose stated purpose is to discuss physics, talking about sales figures for a book or rehashing the same tired, bloodless anti-$THEORY arguments and their thinly disguised groupthink is off topic.

 

[Gokul43201]

I'm not sure why Moving Dimensions Theory, with a definitive equation and physical model is labeled as such; while string theory, lqg, and garrett lisi, without physical equations and physical models, are exalted.

First off, your idea about string theory, lqg, etc. having no physical model or equations is completely off. Secondly, what makes something sound science is not whether it has equations but whether they are testable and not already inconsistent with what has been established.

 

[robphy]

I think that summaries of papers, book sales figures, and various indicators of which scientists are succeeding or not in gaining interest and adherents to their views are in fact a vital part of the scientific process. Such things are indirect evidence of what practicing scientists think is actually worth following up or working through. I am sure that those who hire or evaluate scientists are paying attention to such things.

There is of course a vital difference between interest shown by practicing researchers, especially but by no means exclusively those in respected institutions, and some other sorts of people (like me) who also are welcome on this list.

Regards,
Mike Gogins

Thanks for the supportive comment, Mike. We seem to be outnumbered here
I agree. Rates of publication in scholarly journals, and citation counts, are very important to getting perspective on the progress and directions of research. I don't think that sort of information should be bannished or suppressed. It is hardly proper to call it "sociology" and it forms a common part of academic discussion.

In my opinion, that sort of discussion sounds like it could belong in
"Academic & Career Guidance"
https://www.physicsforums.com/forumdisplay.php?f=139
if the description
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=92717
can be expanded to encompass, e.g.,
what to study in graduate school,
what to do to get a postdoc or a faculty position
or a grant or a peer-reviewed publication,
what hot topic should a postdoc work on,
what surges in funding are expected, etc...
...things of concern when one has an "academic career".

[EDIT: If "Academic & Career Guidance" really refers to only "applying to college and to graduate school and choosing courses", then maybe that name should be changed.]

 

[marcus]

In my opinion, that sort of discussion sounds like it could belong in
"Academic & Career Guidance"
...

Robphy, that's a constructive suggestion but it doesn't work, at least for me. Information on, for example, citations could be used for career guidance or self-guidance if there was a clear interpretation. I don't offer it in that spirit or with that intent.

I've presented some objective information about the BSM field of research and would be pleased to hear some discussion of it. It would be interesting to get various interpretations. As to career choices, maybe it is relevant and maybe not. I'm interested in the information itself. So far the reaction has tended to be dismissal or attempts to have the data suppressed. Take this for example.
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=1711027#post1711027

Number of recent papers making the citations Top Fifty list down by more than an order of magnitude between 2002 and 2007. How to explain, how interpret?

have to go to lunch but I will be back later.

 

[founding]

Perhaps we could discuss more foundational papers here.

Just read this: cultural-science.org/blog/?p=10

"As Lee Smolin emphasized in his book „The Trouble with Physics“ recently, even in physics there is a need to go back to the original texts in order to be able to generate fresh thoughts. The fact is that many of the fundamental concepts of the sciences do not have an entirely empirical foundation, but are shaped by worldviews and values."
--from cultural-science.org/blog/?p=10

The fascinating thing I saw about Moving Dimensions Theory at Michio Kaku's forums was that dx4/dt = ic comes straight from Einstein's original 1912 manuscript where he doesn't state that time is the fourth dimension, but rather that the fourth dimension x4 is ict.

Smolin, Penrose, Hawking et al often say we need to reconceptualize our notion of time. So going back to Einstein's original equations, and agreeing with them to come up with something new, and point out a modern fallacy of time being an actual fourth dimension, is kind cool!

This combination of 1) foundational documents with 2) new ideas based on logic and reason might just be what is needed.

Just my 2 humble cents. :)

Funny how with good cheer, humor, and humility, things kinda sort themselves out one way or another... Mark Twain once said, "one cannot pray a lie." ha!

 

[ZapperZ]

Let's be very clear on this from this point onwards.

This forum should be used for the discussion of the physics, first and foremost.

If it contains anything else, then be forewarned that the post may be deleted, edited, moved, etc at the discretion of the Mentors.

Is this clear, or is there still something people don't quite understand yet?

Zz.

 

[marcus]

Let's be very clear on this from this point onwards.

This forum should be used for the discussion of the physics, first and foremost.

If it contains anything else, then be forewarned that the post may be deleted, edited, moved, etc at the discretion of the Mentors.

Is this clear, or is there still something people don't quite understand yet?

Zz.

Point of clarification, Zapper. Is this of the physics? Here is an example:

Number of recent string papers making the Spires Top Fifty, by year

Year  Number of papers   Total cites during that year
2002        10                   2955
2007         1                    225

I think this is enormously significant and it has not been discussed or explained. I brought it up earlier---see the link a couple of posts back. It points to something very basic that has been going on in Beyond Standard research, or fundamental physics.

In case anyone is unfamiliar with the context, recent here means published in the past 5 years. In 2002 the recent string papers got 2955 cites (ten papers made the Spires list.)
And in 2007 one paper made the list and it received 225 cites. It seems that the string theorists themselves are attributing an order of magnitude less significance to their own recent work! How can this be explained? What does it say about what is going on?

OK, is raising this kind of question ABOUT PHYSICS or not? Is it appropriate and welcome in this subforum? Or is it liable to be suppressed or moved?

If it is not deemed proper to the BSM subforum----but is about the general overview of BSM research---where does it belong?

 

[ZapperZ]

Point of clarification, Zapper. Is this of the physics? Here is an example:

Number of recent string papers making the Spires Top Fifty, by year

Year  Number of papers   Total cites during that year
2002        10                   2955
2007         1                    225

I think this is enormously significant and it has not been discussed or explained. I brought it up earlier---see the link a couple of posts back. It points to something very basic that has been going on in Beyond Standard research, or fundamental physics.

In case anyone is unfamiliar with the context, recent here means published in the past 5 years. In 2002 the recent string papers got 2955 cites (ten papers made the Spires list.)
And in 2007 one paper made the list and it received 225 cites. It seems that the string theorists themselves are attributing an order of magnitude less significance to their own recent work! How can this be explained? What does it say about what is going on?

OK, is raising this kind of question ABOUT PHYSICS or not? Is it appropriate and welcome in this subforum? Or is it liable to be suppressed or moved?

If it is not deemed proper to the BSM subforum----but is about the general overview of BSM research---where does it belong?

This is ABOUT physics. It doesn't discuss physics.

You may discuss this in either the Social Science forum, or the General Discussion forum.

Zz.

 

[arivero]

I think that limiting this forum to LQG, string theory, and garret lisi inevitably directs the conversations away...

I agree but because of different reasons. There is a failure from the start: Almost everyone in the subforum seems to adhere to the thinking that any BSM thing must be about gravity or must include gravity.

Thus particle physics beyond the standard model has not a place in PhysicsForums.

 

[nrqed]

I agree but because of different reasons. There is a failure from the start: Almost everyone in the subforum seems to adhere to the thinking that any BSM thing must be about gravity or must include gravity.

Thus particle physics beyond the standard model has not a place in PhysicsForums.

I did not think that the lisi theory involved gravity but I am probably wrong about this.

In any case, there is nothing preventing people from starting thread on non-gravity Beyond the Standard Model theories. I would love to have discussions about point particle SUSY, for example.

But it's not surprising that there is a lot of gravity talk in a BSM forum. AFter all, one of the biggest challenge is to unify QM and GR so it's natural for gravity to be involved in a lot of the BSM theories.

 

[arivero]

For instance, just today the following threads in the subforum "High Energy, Nuclear, Particle Physics " should/could be moved here:

Tachyon Question
Dangers of the LHC
BPS states.
NO Planck Scale!
Low energy Neutrinos
Where is Higgs boson?
...

Ok, I am exagerating, but I expect to show that there is a problem here.

 

[ZapperZ]

For instance, just today the following threads in the subforum "High Energy, Nuclear, Particle Physics " should/could be moved here:

Tachyon Question
Dangers of the LHC
BPS states.
NO Planck Scale!
Low energy Neutrinos
Where is Higgs boson?

I don't think so.

Zz.

 

[Gokul43201]

Not those, but the "All the Lepton masses..." thread is definitely better suited to BtSM than HEP! Oops! I guess this tells you how I voted in that poll.

 

[josh1]

Number of recent string papers making the Spires Top Fifty, by year

Year  Number of papers   Total cites during that year
2002        10                   2955
2007         1                    225

I think the exclusion from this forum of posts like the above example is long past due. I feel they've given rise to a kind of tension in this forum that doesn't actually exist in the real world of physics and it`s astonishing to me that they've been allowed to continue for so long. So thank-you very much Bentheman for intiating this thread.

 

[Fra]

My personal impression is that focusing on the foundations of BSM physics: discussing what is science, what directions to pursue and fund is an important point, and moving them to the sociology sections somehow doesn't seem fair.

It's like banning questioning the questions and the context generating them, which is something that disheartens me at least, and it also goes against my personal idea of openminded science.

If most people want to use this forum to discuss more hands-on theories withing a given choice of context then I guess that has to be respected but then how about something more appropriate like "foundations of BSM" section where people can discuss the foundations, scientific methodology that provide the context and breething ground for any BSM theories? After all, if the foundational platform is skewed, there seems to be at least a possible risk that the right questions aren't asked. My interpretation of many of marucs posts is to hightlight that.

To dismiss that to sociology doesn't sound like progress IMHO.

/Fredrik

 

[ZapperZ]

My personal impression is that focusing on the foundations of BSM physics: discussing what is science, what directions to pursue and fund is an important point, and moving them to the sociology sections somehow doesn't seem fair.

It's like banning questioning the questions and the context generating them, which is something that disheartens me at least, and it also goes against my personal idea of openminded science.

If most people want to use this forum to discuss more hands-on theories withing a given choice of context then I guess that has to be respected but then how about something more appropriate like "foundations of BSM" section where people can discuss the foundations, scientific methodology that provide the context and breething ground for any BSM theories? After all, if the foundational platform is skewed, there seems to be at least a possible risk that the right questions aren't asked. My interpretation of many of marucs posts is to hightlight that.

To dismiss that to sociology doesn't sound like progress IMHO.

/Fredrik

We have done it for all the other physics forums. So far, it has worked very well that philosophical issues are moved to the Philosophy forum. It doesn't relegate them to anything less, other than in the minds of some people here. It certainly doesn't impede the "progress" by any stretch of the imagination.

The problem here is that this particular forum has enjoyed a bit more leeway than others, so you are assuming that those were your "rights" in the first place. That's a faulty impression. Those leeway were totally at the discretion of the Mentors, and that covers the use of non-published sources as well. You will note that such liberal usage of only-Arxiv sources are not allowed or encouraged in other physics forums here outside of BTSM forum.

In other words, people in here become spoiled with certain relaxation in policy that is applied to the rest of the physics forums. However, since those were imposed at our discretion, it can also be changed whenever the situation calls for it. While the use of ArXiv and Spires sources are not going to be disallowed anytime soon in this forum, simply because the relevant field of studies involved here have the propensity to use them, we will tighten the type of posting that is allowed on here to match our policy with the rest of the other physics forums.

So if one posts something that isn't on physics, but rather about physics, one does that at one's own risk.

Zz.

 

[arivero]

Not those, but the "All the Lepton masses..." thread is definitely better suited to BtSM than HEP! Oops! I guess this tells you how I voted in that poll.

Indeed it is; I didn't mentioned it because it is not in the first page today (yesterday). And yep, it is an amateur and numerology thread, but it even got a citation from in a PhysRev D article, and it collected most of the bibliography on "guessing mass". In fact I think that during the live time of the thread, the total of crackpot post in the internet trying to claim predictivity was below average... they were not competition

Now I ask myself, why did I start that thread in HEP subforum instead of BtSM? First, well, because it started to review the guessings of Hans, and I thought that such guessings had been done in a HEP subforum (sociology point: I was traveling across Europe at that time, with some posts done from internet cafes in Spain, Italy and Greece, and then no time to verify all the sources). But also because I had already got the feeling that the BtSM inhabitants were only interested on Gravity.

 

[nrqed]

My personal impression is that focusing on the foundations of BSM physics: discussing what is science, what directions to pursue and fund is an important point, and moving them to the sociology sections somehow doesn't seem fair.

It's like banning questioning the questions and the context generating them, which is something that disheartens me at least, and it also goes against my personal idea of openminded science.

If most people want to use this forum to discuss more hands-on theories withing a given choice of context then I guess that has to be respected but then how about something more appropriate like "foundations of BSM" section where people can discuss the foundations, scientific methodology that provide the context and breething ground for any BSM theories? After all, if the foundational platform is skewed, there seems to be at least a possible risk that the right questions aren't asked. My interpretation of many of marucs posts is to hightlight that.

To dismiss that to sociology doesn't sound like progress IMHO.

/Fredrik

One problem I have with all those discussions on number of citations, number of books sold is that it feels very unscientific so in that sense it feels to me completely opposite to sound scientific method . And just for that reason it does not belong to this subforum but would be appropriate to a sociology or career forum maybe. Because it feels like it is saying that a valid way to evaluate what is valid science and what area of research is worth pursuing is to basically take a poll! Ok, this is maybe a valid approach if you are an administrator and wants to hire someone or if you are a politician and you are deciding how much money to grant for different fields of research. But I feel that in a forum like here, we should be judging the different theories of BSM physics based on the physics itself. And that means learning the theories to start with, which is of course much more work than taking surveys and discussion sociological aspects.

And all these comments do not even involve the even more irrelevant comments such as "who did his PhD with whom and who is a rising star and deserves a postdoc at such and such institution" which , IMHO constitute noise which lowers the credibility of the forum.

 

[Cincinnatus]

I've stumbled onto this discussion late. Though I do sometimes lurk on this subforum so I'd like to say something about it. Also, it seems like you are making decisions here that affect all of physicsforums.

It is my humble opinion that threads about the social aspects of a subject are not only merely appropriate for a forum dedicated to that subject but that they should be actively encouraged.

I've been reading physicsforums probably longer than almost everyone else here. I started lurking on this board (the original version) when I was in high school. I am now in graduate school. So I've seen these forums evolve over a long time. I have always had a layman's interest in high energy physics so I've often read the beyond the standard model subforum.

For the last few years I've looked to this subforum as exactly how I'd hoped the rest of the board (particularly the now-defunct mind and brain forum) would evolve. This is the only forum (that I've read) on physicsforums that has a critical mass of professionals in the field. Thus it is the only subforum that very often has the potential for really substantive non explicitly didactic discussions.

This includes discussions of which direction the field is ultimately going. This is a real science question (not a question ABOUT science as you are saying). It just so happens that the only way to answer it involves social as well as physical factors. So what? We are ok with this in lots of other places. No one would ever say that a discussion of political science should not make reference to specific politicians.

There is a reason that the professionals on this board are all knowledgeable about social factors affecting the way physics gets done. Because no one gets to be as involved in a field as they are without becoming aware of these issues. I find that in real-life conversations with other scientists in my own field (theoretical neuroscience) a substantial portion of our conversation is about these social issues. Particularly in theoretical fields, so driven by fashion, understanding the social landscape of a field is just as important as understanding its theoretical foundations.

Lets say someone were able to learn all about theoretical physics exclusively from this board. Let's pretend this person was equally theoretically knowledgeable as any professional. I would argue that without these threads about the social aspects of the science, this person would be missing a vital part of their education in the field. I know that I felt like I understood my own field a lot better after I interviewed at many different graduate schools and met a large portion of the researchers working in my areas of interest.

I've been trying to start discussions in the Biology forum about these kinds of "larger" issues. Such as my thread on the role of quantitative methodology in the life sciences or my thread on the definition of systems biology. Neither of these threads has any explicit biological content, they are threads about biology as a field. So by some of your arguments here, my threads are inappropriate for the biology forum.

-----

More practically speaking, are threads on the social aspects of science really so offensive? Judging from the numbers of page views and replies they get, people are definitely reading them. So what's the point in stopping them from doing that? No one is requiring you to click on them.

Also, threads about the social aspects of physics are only really productive in this environment with a critical mass of professionals on this subforum. Let's not kid ourselves into thinking that they can just be moved to the social sciences forum and carry on in the same way. This would obviously be the kiss of death at least to the kinds of things that Marcus posts.

 

[shoehorn]

And all these comments do not even involve the even more irrelevant comemnts such as "who did his PhD with whom and who is a rising start and deserves a postdoc at such and such institution" which , IMHO constitute noise which lowers the credibility of the forum.

As evinced by the recent shambles of "Where should Lisi do a postdoc" or some other such gormless nonsense. Quite how anyone could post such a topic with a straight face is beyond me.

 

[humanino]

I've been reading physicsforums probably longer than almost everyone else here.

Cincinnatus joined 05.17.05
nqred joined 08.30.04
arivero joined 03.17.03
ZapperZ joined 01.20.04
...
Not that I am merely taking the people in chronological right before. Not trying to cheat.

This is the only forum (that I've read) on physicsforums that has a critical mass of professionals in the field. Thus it is the only subforum that very often has the potential for really substantive non explicitly didactic discussions.

What is this critical mass ?
What if you have another forum with only three Nobel prize scientists in another field spending their entire days on PF ?
What if you have a bunch of PhD and post-docs spending 5 minutes here and there on this forum ?

This includes discussions of which direction the field is ultimately going. This is a real science question (not a question ABOUT science as you are saying).

No this is not real science. This is ABOUT science.

Lets say someone were able to learn all about theoretical physics exclusively from this board. Let's pretend this person was equally theoretically knowledgeable as any professional. I would argue that without these threads about the social aspects of the science, this person would be missing a vital part of their education in the field.

No he would not ! There are published reviews on those questions. They are shorter, better written, peer-reviewed, better organized and structured, have clear disclaimers involving the identity of the author...

 

[nrqed]

I've stumbled onto this discussion late. Though I do sometimes lurk on this subforum so I'd like to say something about it. Also, it seems like you are making decisions here that affect all of physicsforums.

It is my humble opinion that threads about the social aspects of a subject are not only merely appropriate for a forum dedicated to that subject but that they should be actively encouraged.

I've been reading physicsforums probably longer than almost everyone else here. I started lurking on this board (the original version) when I was in high school. I am now in graduate school. So I've seen these forums evolve over a long time. I have always had a layman's interest in high energy physics so I've often read the beyond the standard model subforum.

For the last few years I've looked to this subforum as exactly how I'd hoped the rest of the board (particularly the now-defunct mind and brain forum) would evolve. This is the only forum (that I've read) on physicsforums that has a critical mass of professionals in the field. Thus it is the only subforum that very often has the potential for really substantive non explicitly didactic discussions.

This includes discussions of which direction the field is ultimately going. This is a real science question (not a question ABOUT science as you are saying). It just so happens that the only way to answer it involves social as well as physical factors. So what? ...

My reply is the following: governmental funding is also an important factor determining the direction science takes. So politics is also an important factor. Who will be elected and appointed in certain key positions will impact how much money will be devoted to fundamental research and to different labs etc etc.

So should we allow discussions on politics in the Particle Physics forum because politics has an impact on which labs and which projects will get funded in the next 5, 10 years?
You really want a bunch of threads on politics when you visit a forum on particle physics?


The point is not that threads on sociology are not interesting to some people. The point is whether they belong to a this subforum. If I am trying to understand a technical point of loop quantum gravity and visit this forum for the first time and I see threads on counting number of citations, listing papers abstract that I can find just by looking at the arxiv, talking about number of books sold, etc...well, frankly, I would conclude that this is not the place for me to learn new things about loop quantum gravity and I would not come back.

 

[Cincinnatus]

Cincinnatus joined 05.17.05
nqred joined 08.30.04
arivero joined 03.17.03
ZapperZ joined 01.20.04

I read the forums for years before making an account. I know that it must have been before 2004 when I started since that is the year I graduated from high school and I know I was lurking here before that... Anyway, forget it 'who joined when' doesn't matter.

---

My reply is the following: governmental funding is also an important factor determining the direction science takes. So politics is also an important factor. Who will be elected and appointed in certain key positions will impact how much money will be devoted to fundamental research and to different labs etc etc.

I agree it is a slippery slope. Since threads about politics haven't been showing up here, I don't see why this is an issue. It doesn't seem to have been going quite that far.

---

Physicsforums needs to decide whether it wants to be an informal version of a journal article or a formal version of a "physicist's conversation by the coffee maker"

Some of us think the latter would be more valuable, some clearly the former. I don't really see why the conversations can't coexist on the same subforum. Surely if you want to make a good impression on a passing newcomer the best way to do that would be to post more of the threads you find interesting, not prevent others from posting what they find interesting.

 

[josh1]

I don't really see why the conversations can't coexist on the same subforum. Surely if you want to make a good impression on a passing newcomer the best way to do that would be to post more of the threads you find interesting, not prevent others from posting what they find interesting.

There's a nastier underlying problem here which is that the individuals making these sorts of posts do so for what I'll diplomatically call "personal reasons" that have nothing to do with physics as it's actually viewed by physicists and serve largely to mislead others who for one reason or another aren't able or willing to recognize this. It sounds like you might be among these, though I mean nothing personal by this. The question one must ask is why would a person who actually understands the physics instead choose to spend so much of their time making these sorts of useless posts? The answer is no one.

 

[nrqed]

I agree it is a slippery slope. Since threads about politics haven't been showing up here, I don't see why this is an issue. It doesn't seem to have been going quite that far.

---

But that's the key point. If you allow talking about citations, number of books sold, who should be hired by whom, etc, then you have no justification to remove a thread from someone talking about politics.

Physicsforums needs to decide whether it wants to be an informal version of a journal article or a formal version of a "physicist's conversation by the coffee maker"

But there is already a subforum General Discussion for coffee maker type of conversations.

Some of us think the latter would be more valuable, some clearly the former. I don't really see why the conversations can't coexist on the same subforum. Surely if you want to make a good impression on a passing newcomer the best way to do that would be to post more of the threads you find interesting, not prevent others from posting what they find interesting.

I think that this is flawed logic. Let's apply the same logic to a different situation. Let's say there are crackpots posting on a forum and someone wants to ban their posts. Applying your logic, you might say "don't ban crackpot posts, simply post more posts than the crackpots"!

 

[George Jones]

I don't think so.

Zz.

These days, BPS states usually arise in the context of supersymmetry and D-branes. In this context, their natural home is the Beyond the Standard Model forum.

The latest thread on BPS states in the High Energy, Nuclear, Particle Physics forum, doesn't appear to be in this context, but I'm not entirely sure. Even if this latest thread is in the "right" forum, it might have a better shot at being answered in the Beyond the Standard Model by people knowledgeable about BPS states.

It's not always clear where a thread belongs.

 

[robphy]

It is my humble opinion that threads about the social aspects of a subject are not only merely appropriate for a forum dedicated to that subject but that they should be actively encouraged.

One reason I like physicsforums (and don't like sci.physics.* ) is because there is some organization of topics... and, if a forum gets too diluted, some reorganization may occur.

I personally think that there is distinction between a discussion of PHYSICS and a discussion of PHYSICISTS (which includes the history and sociology of how the field of PHYSICS develops). Both are important (with PHYSICS more important for me)... but if there is sufficient interest in both, it might be better to split things off and restore the organization.

Here, I prefer the focus to stay on physics and would be willing to see an occasional discussion or two on physicists... as one would probably see in a future physics textbook on this subject, with occasional sprinkles of history and sociology. If I want to read more about the history or sociology, I'll try to find a different subforum (or book).

Maybe some threads need a label indicating it is more about PHYSICISTS than about PHYSICS.

 

[Cincinnatus]

These days, BPS states usually arise in the context of supersymmetry and D-branes. In this context, their natural home is the Beyond the Standard Model forum.

The latest thread on BPS states in the High Energy, Nuclear, Particle Physics forum, doesn't appear to be in this context, but I'm not entirely sure. Even if this latest thread is in the "right" forum, it might have a better shot at being answered in the Beyond the Standard Model by people knowledgeable about BPS states.

It's not always clear where a thread belongs.

and posts about social issues in theoretical physics have a better chance of being answered here (where the theoretical physicists are) than they do in the social sciences forum or general discussion...Maybe the original proposal of the first post in this thread is best. Why not create a sub-sub forum of beyond the standard model to house these posts? That way these conversations would be seen by knowledgeable people since there would be an explicit button you could click on when you want to find such a conversation. This would probably work much better than just requiring them to go in the social sciences forum which we know professional physicists are much less likely to click on.

 

[arivero]

About moving threads, again... are the blogs fully functional now? I tried to limit controversial topics by using the blog for the more speculative entries, this is an advantage we have over newsgroups. But they were not working... people reported of garbaged TeX and so. That was some months ago, so let's asume the problem is fixed. Then it could be possible to give admins the right to move threads not only to other subforums but also to the blog of the Original Poster. Given that the threads under discussion, say "stats of..." or "masses of..." are perceived by PF veterans as "oh, another Marcus's thread", "another arivero's thread", etc, they could be moved to the respective blogs AND marked as moved in the initial subforum.

 

[humanino]

Why not create a sub-sub forum of beyond the standard model to house these posts?

That's by far the best solution. However, it will require a lot of work and I am not sure admins will consider it worth.

 

[arivero]

And all these comments do not even involve the even more irrelevant comments such as "who did his PhD with whom and who is a rising star and deserves a postdoc at such and such institution" which , IMHO constitute noise which lowers the credibility of the forum.

Again, I think it is my fault here. Time ago I did some queries about the PhD advisor/student relationships in theoretical physics; in fact it is also my fault the existence of a "tree mode" in SPIRES HEPnames database (Not that I programmed it, but I suggested it). When my page on this genealogy was about to dissapear, it was transplanted into the wikipedia.

Whatever. The observation of this genealogy is that about one half of the Nobel Prizes are awarded to people whose "family" has already a Nobel Prize. And also the same seems to apply to minor rewards, as "topcites".

The interpretation is that it happens because there are only a few groups leading, across time, the research on key topics of fundamental/theoretical/particle physics. Why does it happen, that should be worth of a real sociology discussion. But the point is that adscription to one of the "key families" is a hint of possible hotness of a topic.

This was discussed a lot of time ago, and perhaps not even in PF. So when some mention of this kind appears here, it lacks context, I am afraid.

 

[Cincinnatus]

Again, I think it is my fault here. Time ago I did some queries about the PhD advisor/student relationships in theoretical physics; in fact it is also my fault the existence of a "tree mode" in SPIRES HEPnames database (Not that I programmed it, but I suggested it). When my page on this genealogy was about to dissapear, it was transplanted into the wikipedia.

Whatever. The observation of this genealogy is that about one half of the Nobel Prizes are awarded to people whose "family" has already a Nobel Prize. And also the same seems to apply to minor rewards, as "topcites".

The interpretation is that it happens because there are only a few groups leading, across time, the research on key topics of fundamental/theoretical/particle physics. Why does it happen, that should be worth of a real sociology discussion. But the point is that adscription to one of the "key families" is a hint of possible hotness of a topic.

This was discussed a lot of time ago, and perhaps not even in PF. So when some mention of this kind appears here, it lacks context, I am afraid.

This is really interesting, I wonder if the same is true for citations in theoretical neuroscience. I'll definitely look into it when I have time...

 

[josh1]

A compromise solution might be a sticky. But the initiating post would have to make quite clear the sociological and therefore fundamentally unscientific and even meaningless nature of the thread. It might even be a kind of trash thread.

 

[Cincinnatus]

A compromise solution might be a sticky. But the initiating post would have to make quite clear the sociological and therefore fundamentally unscientific and even meaningless nature of the thread. It might even be a kind of trash thread.

Hey now, that might be an ok compromise.

but why claim social issues are "meaningless"? Just because you aren't interested in them? Clearly some of the members of this forum are interested enough to track down real statistics and data on these matters.

Discussion of social issues in theoretical physics may not be appropriate for this forum but that certainly doesn't make them meaningless.