A community of Physics Phans!

ilovephysics.com is a community of physics phans! A community that Science Magazine considers one of the “best of the web in science“. Really! Isn’t that cool?

Specifically, this site is an outlet for educators and students to discuss topics in physics and physics education. The  site has three missions: (1) to highlight advances being made in the scholarship of physics teaching, (2) to expose online physics quackery and psuedoscience, and (3) to provide a venue for students to increase their understanding of physics. At this time these missions are being satisfied by two site features: a blog and a forum. Mostly, the blog is a one-man operation (though we are adding more contributors), where the main focus of conversation is on the scholarship of physics teaching, crack-pot physics theories, and common student misconceptions/problems. The forum is supported by its several-thousand members, and just about anything physics-y can be found in there.

 A brief history
I founded ilovephysics.com in January 2004 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.

Authors

Christopher Moore is an Assistant Professor of Physics in the Department of Chemistry and Physics at Longwood University. In the past he has taught high-school physics at St. Catherine’s School and J.R. Tucker High School.

His research is in the field of experimental solid state physics, where he has focused specifically on fundamental and applied surface science for the last 6 years. Christopher is currently studying surfaces of large band-gap semiconductors, and his work has been discussed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Lynchburg News & Advance and the Farmville Herald.

 
Jason Sterlace teaches physics at J.R. Tucker High School in Henrico, VA. When he’s not doing that, he’s probably running for no good reason.

Other Contributors
Maybe you! I am currently looking for contributors to blog about the following topics: (1) physics pedagogy, (2) physics and society, (3) crack-pot physics, (4) the student perspective, and (5) whatever else you may find interesting that pertains to the mission of the site. Click here to contribute.

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.