Physics education research, electronic materials, and the musings of Christopher Moore, Ph.D.

Welcome to the blog of Christopher Moore. This site is the home of my personal musing on science, technology and education. Also, I frequently blog about current developments in my physics education research and the Electronic Materials Lab at Coastal Carolina University. I may even force a student or two to keep a log of their projects here.

About Me
I’m an Assistant Professor of Physics in the Department of Chemistry and Physics at Coastal Carolina University. In the past I have taught at Longwood University, St. Catherine’s School and J.R. Tucker High School.

My research is in the field of experimental solid state physics, where I have focused specifically on fundamental and applied surface science for the past 6 years. I’m currently studying surfaces of large band-gap semiconductors such as GaN and ZnO. My work has been discussed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Lynchburg News & Advance, the Farmville Herald, and many scientific journals.

I also study scientific reasoning patterns in the non-science population. Specifically, we are working on techniques for improving scientific reasoning among students in conceptual physics and astronomy courses. This work has been discussed in The Physics Teacher and Physics Education.

About ilovephysics.com
ilovephysics.com started as a community of physics phans! A community that Science Magazine considers one of the “best of the web in science“. Really?! Yes, they said exactly that.

The main missions of this site are: (1) to highlight advances being made in the scholarship of physics teaching, (2) to expose online physics quackery and psuedoscience, and (3) to provide an outlet for my lab’s work in electronic materials.

 A brief history
I founded ilovephysics.com in December of 2003 with the purpose of promoting and facilitating physics education. Bold goals for a website I mainly built for my high-school students. It was also my first real website, sort of my self-study introduction to HTML and PHP. The only visitors back then were my students with a few stray physics phans here and there. How they found me, I haven’t the slightest clue. The site was getting up to about 1,000 unique visitors per month by the end of that year.

Originally, the site was run on a weird CGI-based portal platform that was confusing and difficult to work with. It was also very limiting and search-engine un-friendly. I scraped everything around the summer of 2005 and re-built the site around WordPress and a lightweight forum package called punBB. Unfortunately, I also scraped the database, so we lost about 1,000 members and a LOT of old content.

Since then, though, the site has grown. It currently serves over 50,000 visitors, almost 200,000 pageviews, and about a half million hits every month. Since its inception the site has reached literally millions around the world with its message. In November 2006, ilovephysics.com was featured in Science Magazine in their “Best of the Web in Science” series. Read more by clicking here.

The site is a not-for-profit venture with the sole purpose of promoting a love of physics. All revenue generated from advertising (what little there is) is used for the operation of the site.

Disclaimer
Many of the ideas and opinions presented herein are those of Nature, and are not necessarily shared by the publisher. Blame God, not me.