(c) Dr Paul Kinsler. [Acknowledgements & Feedback]
Index: ( Information; Organisations; Miscellaneous )
What are good ways to find out about physics on the net? First, consider whether it might be easier to visit a library first. Looking in a good encylopedia or textbook might well be faster and more productive than spending several hours following links and browsing through different web sites. Dont forget to look at back issues of popular physics magazines either. If you want non technical articles on a certain subject, the best places to look are usually magazines such as Scientific American or New Scientist. The American Journal of Physics can be good for general physics and new angles or explanations of old problems, as well as historical and educational information. If you can get access to one of their index issues, then finding articles on what you are interested in is straightforward. Libraries that have back issues of the magazines should have the indexes too. Other magazines to try are Physics World or Physics Today, but both of these are aimed more at physicists than the wider public, but they do have articles on the history of physics and famous physicists as well.
However, using a library is not as "neat" as using the net, so I'll try to give you some ideas about how to proceed using the net.
If you want to know something reasonably specific, the fastest way is probably to use a good search engine and some well chosen search keywords. Often it is easier to look for sites that will have links to whatever you are looking for - this way the website you find has done all the hard work of categorising and sorting the information you want. Often personal homepages will have links to such sites as well. Dont just expect to find it with a single seach and a single click. Be prepared to follow the thread through a few links to get to the information. Learn to use the advanced search options -- AND, OR, NOT, NEAR and so on, as well as the tags to restrict searches to within URLs, host domains, filetypes, etc.
If that fails, then browsing through a few of the physics web sites, virtual text books and physics FAQ's shown below might help. If you still have no sucess, then consider again the option of using a library.
The next stage is to try asking some other person on the net as opposed to just reading documents and files. Here you have two main options ... either try asking on one of the IRC #physics* channels, or posting your question to a suitable sci.physics.* USENET newsgroup. If you intend to post, then be sure to read the sci.physics FAQ first.
Rather than wanting to know something specific, you may be interested in the latest developments in physics. In that case, the best approach is probably to follow the physics news links given below. Also, the physics magazines with web pages often have short news digests from their lastest issues.
You may want to find departments who specialise in certain areas. If using a web search engine like those listed in the information section above doesn't help then use the subject or citation indexes of relevant journals to do a keyword search on your topic of interest. Looking at the papers will tell you the department and university doing this research.
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#physics page;
Finding Information;
Info-maze;
Graphics etc;
Channel logs;
Solved problems;
Suggested Reading;
Researchers on IRC
)
Date=0610 19980318 Author=P.Kinsler Created=19960409
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