I’m always intrigued by new ways to use the Internet to improve the way we do and share physics. It was something of a coincidence that within a week of each other I received two e-mails introducing new question-and-answer websites of interest to the high energy physics community and the general public interested in physics.
- A proposal for a High-Energy Physics Q&A site based on the popular Stack Overflow framework. This is still in the “definition” phase where it’s looking to gather a critical number of followers and model questions to demonstrate the viability of the project. A shining example of this sort of site in a related field is Math Overflow.
- Quora, a similar website built on a slightly different architecture. Quora is a Q&A site for any kind of question (not just science) and is tied into social networking; it requires a Facebook or Twitter account to join. Quora already has High-Energy Physics and Particle Physics sections. (I don’t actually understand the difference between the two categories.)
Both sites show a lot of promise and I look forward to seeing how they progress. These are the Web 2.0 progeny of newsgroups (like sci.physics.research) and forums (e.g. Physics Forums) that really piqued my interest in physics as a teenager.
I guess at this point I should make an obligatory reference to CERN’s role in the history of the Internet.
Anyway, I encourage people to check out the proposed HEP-overflow (my own made up name) and Quora. HEP-overflow, in particular, needs community support to move on so I especially encourage researchers to take a look at it.
Finally, as always, we’re still very happy to try to answer any questions that you leave in the comments of our blog! 
Cheers,
Flip (US LHC blogs)
Quora already has High-Energy Physics and Particle Physics sections. (I don’t actually understand the difference between the two categories.)……meaning they are similar?
I got my undergrad degree in physics from MIT a few years ago, but after leaving school, I found it’s been pretty hard to stay up to date with current research (besides reading blogs like this one).
I think that Quora could be a great place to talk about physics, so I’m trying to get the physics community on Quora going. There’s already a bunch of active users, including people from MIT, Caltech, and other top schools, but it’d be great if we could start expanding the community.
Since I also work at Quora (full-disclosure), I’ve recently been pushing us to start building features that’ll help attract more physicists to the site.
I’ve made a new page to welcome new folks interested in physics, and highlight different areas (such as HEP) and people who are active in physics:
http://www.quora.com/Physics/signup
If you have friends outside of this blog who you think might be interested in checking it out, feel free to pass along the link too.
As Flip mentioned, there are already areas like High Energy Physics and Particle Physics. (I agree these two categories have high overlap, but there is still a subtle distinction between the two. For example, some dark matter and neutrino experiments could be considered low to medium energy. One nice feature of Quora though is questions can belong to multiple topics, so we don’t always need to make that distinction.)
If you want to check out a feed of recent physics questions and answers, you can also go directly to:
http://www.quora.com/Physics
and drill down into some subtopics like HEP and the LHC from there.
I also wanted to say that I’m here for you guys, so if you think there’s anything that could make Quora better for you, let me know (shreyes@quora.com) and I can build it.