Physics Overflow is live

Off-topic, breaking news: Jester believes that there are rumors suggesting that Planck refutes BICEP2 and many experimenters, including those in the BICEP Collaboration, are admitting that the B-modes came from the dust. Clement Pryke of BICEP refutes Adam's rumors about the planned retraction in the Science Magazine while he admits that they don't quite know the right interpretation of a key Planck map. I won't say what I guess about these claims.

Some of you may know Physics Stack Exchange where people may ask and answer physics-related questions. But you may often have the feeling that no one is trying to keep the quality of the traffic sufficiently high. Thanks to Dilaton, Dimension10 etc., a new very promising competition has emerged. It's called Physics Overflow:

PhysicsOverflow.ORG (click here and try!)

You may see that the name was inspired by MathOverflow.NET.




Especially if you're a student or a professional physicist who sometimes feels that he or she wants to ask a question or train his or her brain by answering a question from someone else, you should create an account over there. You may be pleasantly surprised by the professional flavor of the new website and if it is so, you may want to encourage your colleagues to join, too.




Much of the useful stuff – but not all the stuff – from the Physics Stack Exchange has been helpfully reproduced on Physics Overflow. The quantity and quality of the traffic has looked encouraging so far. Give it a try!


I hope that the hard-working people behind the new website will answer your questions in the comment section of this blog post if you happen to have some questions. Incidentally, the TRF discussion on old and new theoretical physics forums started in August 2013 has over 750 comments right now but be sure that the folks had to do much more work outside similar discussion threads!

Thanks for the work.