Monday 28 May 2012

Pull. Your. FInger. Out.

CURRENT STATUS OF MANUSCRIPT: With editors

Copyright/Right to Publish received
CORRESPONDENCE:
SENT    RECEIVED    DESCRIPTION
16Apr12 23May12 Review request to referee; report received
16May12         Correspondence (misc.) sent to author
        16May12 Communication (misc.) received from author
16Apr12 02May12 Review request to referee; report received
31Apr12 01May12 Reminder to referee; response received
31Apr12         Reminder to referee [others at 1-2 week intervals]
16Apr12         Correspondence (miscellaneous) sent to author
16Apr12         Right to publish signature received
16Apr12         Correspondence (miscellaneous) sent to author
04Apr12         Acknowledgment sent to author
04Apr12         Correspondence (miscellaneous) sent to author

Tuesday 15 May 2012

PRL shoots itself in the foot. Or the head?

So, feast your eyes on this beauty:

http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v108/i19/e193901

(or you can get it here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.0096 )

So, the Lorentz force and special relativity are incompatible. Warning signs follow:

1) The paper is written in non-relativistic notation

2) The chap only cites 1) textbooks, 2) himself and 3) Einstein.

Apparently this did not give the editor of PRL pause for thought.  Here's a comment:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.1502'

and here is a reponse from McDonald, who I would trust as a bit of an expert on this stuff.

http://www.physics.princeton.edu/~mcdonald/examples/mansuripur.pdf

His conclusion (tastefully reserved for a footnote, I might add) is that Mansuripur dropped the ball.

I am going to watch how this one develops with glee. Either way, the outcome will be fantastic. Either

1) some random self-citing chap from an optics department fells Einstein

or

2) some random self-citing chap from an optics department provides delicious proof that PRL editors are right tits while simultaneously proving himself to be a right tit.