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How do I make this "academia" question not opinion based?
Standard practices to turn a career of research in pure maths into fundamental physics?
Many popular questions in SE academia seems to have the same level of "possibly opinion based". I don't this particular question being different from the other. Still it has been closed as supposedly opinion based.
I feel like real examples of transitions would be actual data points and absolutely not opinions. Any way that this could be transformed into something that fit the moderator idea of what is not opinion based?

Examples from even a dozen individuals still don't create a standard, especially if they reflect different social and cultural norms. By the time you have enough "actual data points" you're not asking a question, you're conducting a poll, not what Stack Exchange is for.

Your question is opinion-based because it is highly improbable that the evidence needed to answer the question exists.

First, there are vanishingly few academics in your (unspecified) part of the world that have done a PhD + postdocs in math, left academia, and then successfully pursued a career in physics research. So, I think you are unlikely to get any super helpful answers. We could speculate (and some of the existing answers already have), but as a PhD yourself, your ability to speculate is probably comparable to ours.
I assume this is why certain users voted to close. That said, I am not convinced this decision was correct. It's possible (albeit unlikely) that we have a member here who has been in physics at a high enough level for a long enough time that could give an authoritative answer. It's true that there are probably no statistics or references that anyone could provide, but "personal expertise in academia" is routinely used as the basis for answers here. Again, I think it's unlikely that you'll get an answer like this, but we do not close questions just because they are unlikely to find an answer.
Anyway, I'll leave this as it is for a while to see if we get any other points of view. To the other points you raise....

I feel like real examples of transitions would be actual data points and absolutely not opinions.

Perhaps not opinions, but we don't really take "poll" questions. Our format is that we vote for the best answer; if you ask for examples, then all answers are equally good. But you are correct that if you ask for an authoritative answer, one could provide an answer based on a single data point (it would then be for the voters to judge this type of answer).

Would contacting professor working on the topic I'm interested in help me make progress towards that aim?
Could doing student projects with a professor work as a preliminary step (and learning exercise) towards a real postdoc?
I doubt that without guidance I could make any meaningful contribution to the topic, but maybe I'm wrong to think like that?
Is there any concrete step I could do to achieve my goal of becoming a researcher in say, the mathematics of particle physics?

Note that you are asking four different, though related, questions here. I think it's okay in this case, but it is a bit of a "red flag"; you might consider making your question a bit crisper.

This post has been reasonably well received (and no other answers were submitted), so I have made some edits to the post and reopened it.


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Do we have even high level guidelines on how controversial posts are moderated?
I've been somewhat confused by how the moderation on our controversial questions is conducted. That's not to say that the mods need to be superhuman, but I really do think things are frequently handled inconsistently.
In January, we had this question go through: Examples of successful push-backs against DEI (diversity, etc.) initiatives in academia?
This was obviously a controversial post, and the moderation philosophy was aggressively focused on deleting comments (even those that weren't consulted) and on keeping the post open. I'm not really happy about how it was handled, but at least that is one policy.
Today, we've had the controversial post Was it appropriate to discuss the reply-all? come through, where the response was to issue a 24 hour lock because a moderator was unhappy with the original poster's edit strategy.
Is there something I'm missing that differentiates these questions substantially enough that they require such different strategies? I feel like we could have just let a regular close vote of one sort or another execute on the second question and that would've been closer to the spirit of how the first was handled.

And the lock has now been removed.

Different issues need different responses.
I’ve locked today’s post not because it is controversial, but because in a few hours it was edited twenty times in a way that completely changed the core question and context, thus invalidating existing answers and making it impossible for users to answer.
The lock lasts for one day, and it does not correspond to the closure of the question: it is meant to prevent further rushed changes (closing a question does not prevent this), but it can be removed by us moderators any time the author reaches a final decision on the content (as it happened shortly after I wrote this). It also (again temporarily) prevents further answers because such answers would be at risk of being invalidated by new edits.
The January’s question didn’t have this issue: it was edited just six times and none of the edits changed the core question.

I appreciate the response (and Cag's) and understand the contrast between the questions regarding the edit pattern. I'll think it over. It does feel to me somewhat philosophically distinct to how the January question was approached, though, and I think they do have some similarities (the pace of comment generation is a big one). In the January case I felt like the moderation was very deferential to the asker and towards letting the non-mod procedures execute, whereas the intervention here was a quick lock.

@AnonymousM Generally, when two things are handled differently, I would focus on the ways they are different rather than the ways they are similar. If you focus on the similarities you're certainly going to find unexplained inconsistencies.

@BryanKrause I've appreciated the thoughts on this question including this one. But wrapping back to this particular comment: I personally think consistency is a worthwhile thing to strive for in moderation and this comment comes across to me as "Consistency isn't something the mods strive for."

@AnonymousM We moderators try to be consistent as possible when all things are equal, but here things were different, and we also look at the different responses of the community and of the poster. Moreover, mod tools allow us to take certain actions only, and this might be suboptimal in certain cases.

@AnonymousM That isn't the meaning of my comment at all. What I am saying is that if you have two situations that are handled differently, it will always appear like there is inconsistency if you choose to focus on the similarities in the situations and ignore the differences. If you want insight into the reasons for differences in action, you have to look to the differences in situation. We certainly should not strive to react to different situations consistently.

To the title question: The only difference in policy between a "controversial" question and a regular question is that the former have a post notice reminding people of the rules. Specifically, this notice reminds people (especially new users or hot-network-question users) that this is not a discussion site, and we do not welcome arguments, debates, or opinions, only authoritative answers backed by personal expertise in academia and/or references.
With respect to your first example, you say:

"the moderation philosophy was aggressively focused on deleting comments (even those that weren't consulted)."

I'm not sure what "consulted" means in this context. But as you know, the purpose of comments is to suggest improvements or request clarification. Comments that do not do either of those things may be deleted without notice.  In many cases, we do give grace periods or move comments to chat rather than just deleting; we do not want to be obnoxious with deleting comments that are just a hair over the line. But when the controversial post notice has already reminded people about the acceptable uses of comments, we are less likely to give the benefit of the doubt.

"and on keeping the post open"

I'm not sure what you mean by this; the mods did not take any special action to keep this post open. I suppose we could have unilaterally closed it, but we normally leave such decisions to the community.

the response was to issue a 24 hour lock because a moderator was unhappy with the original poster's edit strategy

Locking a question is pretty unusual; I don't think this is a routine "strategy." But I also don't think it's exactly a mystery why a moderator took this action -- this post has been through 20 revisions, many of which substantially change the question being asked, which will lead to a bunch of answers that address different questions. As the moderator said in the comments, this lock will be lifted as soon as OP tells us that the question has stabilized.

I feel like we could have just let a regular close vote of one sort or another execute on the second question

For this specific problem -- a constantly-changing question -- I doubt it. Getting five close votes takes some time, which will lead to confusion and delay. Further, closing the question is not really appropriate if the question itself is on-topic. This is the sort of "exceptional case" that moderators were designed for -- and indeed, a user correctly flagged this post so that we could intervene.
Anyway: thanks for asking, it is good to be able to explain our actions and get feedback. But I'm pretty comfortable with how our team handled these two cases.

Re the January question: I had multiple comments (as did others) moved to chat that were well within the scope of the "Controversial Post" rules, as they were suggesting specific improvements to the question. This is one approach, but seems fairly different compared to today's post.

I see. As noted above, we do not generally delete comments that are within the acceptable uses of comments, even on controversial questions. Of course, things do slip through -- please feel free to raise a flag next time.

Looking at it now: it looks to me like your comments were moved to chat, not deleted, and a moderator even said that your comments were "constructive" and he hoped the discussion would continue in the chat. By this point, the OP had already declined to make the change you suggested, so there did not seem to be a "realistic chance that the post would be edited." But these things are always judgment calls, and things do slip through, so we're usually happy to discuss/reconsider -- please don't be shy about sending a note in future if it seems like we've deleted valid comments.

@AnonymousM I have observed that moderators moving comments to chat/deleting them is more the default than the exception around here.  https://academia.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5091/2021-a-year-in-moderation

There is no relationship between the two questions.
I requested moderator intervention in Was it appropriate to discuss the reply-all? because there were an unreasonable number of edits to the question, making it impractical to tell what had been changed.  This seems like abuse to me.
I do not think the question should have been closed as "opinion based" because the several answers and most voters were in general agreement.

This seems like an understandable reason to request the particular intervention that ended up happening, but the intervention itself was very strong and it didn't take long after unlocking for a close vote to be approved (As an aside: I don't have the rep for those so didn't contribute to it at all). In the other question, the asker was also somewhat out of line in that they aggressively tried to turn every comment into a discussion prompting many moves to chat. But that question was left largely alone to remain on HNQ for a long while and moderation moved comments disagreeing with the asker.

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Why was this question closed by 1 person?
Is it normal to reject a peer-reviewed paper and then reject it after accepting it without specifying the exact reasons?
Usually, you need 4, but a moderator was quick to close the question. I just want to know if it is at all unusual to reject a peer-reviewed paper after accepting it. How can I change the question to prevent a moderator for closing it without any good reason?

I commented why I closed it. What was unclear about the comment?

I think @Mark's comment pretty much answered your question. Only the journal editors and reviewers can give you further explanations.

Note that a high rep user with appropriate gold "tag" badges can also close some questions on their own, especially those that are duplicates. Mods of course have the power always. You can also flag your own closed question and request a review. Or edit it to respond to the reason for closing.

I just want to know if it is at all unusual to reject a peer-reviewed paper after accepting it.

I think you know the answer to this question, which is that it is unusual.
The interesting question is of course whether this unusual procedure is justified, which is nothing we can answer as it requires dissecting the specific issue at hand and information not available to us.
Also, if this is what you wanted to know, you could have simply written that and only referenced the specific issue as an aside.
Instead you wrote things like:

I am thinking it's a bogus excuse and it's because of political reasons only

Whether intentional or not, this invites discussions about the contents of the paper and its political implications.
I don’t see a question related to this issue that is neither trivial (i.e., we all know the answer) nor opinion-based, off-topic or otherwise unsuitable for this site.

The interesting question is of course whether this unusual procedure is justified We really should answer the question that is asked, not the question we think is being asked.

@Allure: I wasn’t contesting this. But we need to take into account that most people answer the question they think is being asked, even when the asker takes extra care to point out what their question is not about. If a question is particularly prone to attracting answers that do not answer the explicit question (e.g., by large digressions or strong claims about something else), that is something that needs to be fixed. And if the explicit question is probably not the one that the asker wants to ask, then it’s best to close, so things can be clarified before anybody answers.

In that case I'd argue that the problem is the answer, not the question. if the explicit question is probably not the one that the asker wants to ask This is also not something for others to comment on. If the question is not what the asker wanted to ask, it's still the question that should be answered, and if the asker wants to ask something else then they can edit their question.

In that case I'd argue that the problem is the answer, not the question. – And …? Closing prevents answers and thus prevents problems. A singular non-answer can be deleted, but if a question is prone to attracting non-answers, we deleting all of them would be a major disturbance (particularly if people upvote them because they are accurate despite not answering the explicit question).

The asker didn't cause the problem, the answerer did, but you are blaming the asker. I don't see why you don't seem to think that's a problem - it's similar to victim blaming.

This is also not something for others to comment on. – I strongly disagree. If you have a reasonable suspicion that you (or others) misunderstand somebody’s communication, the only ethical thing is to seek to clarify this, ideally before more confusion arises further down the line. Think about how you would communicate outside the Internet.

Sure, but then you ask "are you sure you are asking X question instead of Y question", instead of (as Bryan Kreuse wrote) "This question appears to be about Y instead of X".

The asker didn't cause the problem, the answerer did, but you are blaming the asker. […] – This seems to boil down to the conception that closure is a punishment/blame for the asker. While I understand where this conception comes from, it is not a basis we can operate on. Closing simply means that answers to the question are prevented. Most questions we closed are not asked with bad intentions. Often there is some degree of neglecting guidance involved, but at times there isn’t. (Mind that in this particular case, I won’t put zero blame on the asker as outlined in this answer.)

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