Friday 2 July 2010

PRL

A paper by my rivals has been accepted by PRL. It is manifestly rubbish -- there is a problematic divergence in their calculation which they avoid by applying a random, unphysical, ad-hoc prescription which manifestly violates the most basic tennent of gauge invariance. It is therefore, total nonsense. But it's in PRL now.

Thoughts.

1) What am I supposed to do? I can prove their arguments are wrong in a second, but I don't understand how to solve the problem. I have ideas, but they're not working out yet. So do I write a comment? I'm a postdoc, and one of the rivals is a "top level" proffessor with, you know, The Power. Who do you think is going to come out on top?

2) This is what happens when people who were, two years ago, still writing the Dirac equation down with "alpha" and "beta" matrices in it, think that they understand QED all of a sudden and rush a paper out.

3) Walking into PRL seems to be easy for these people, whether what they write is bullshit or not.

4) Annoyed.