Sunday 29 July 2012

This is what physicists are.

I've just been to a week long conference. At the end of my talk, two physicists claimed, in front of the entire audience, that they had solved the same problem as me two years previously. They also said that I owed them citations. This was extremely embarassing.

After the talk, it transpired that their "solution" was the same unmotivated, unphysical and manifestly incorrect result which my competitors have been pushing for the last two years, and which I have disproven. In other words, they lied. And they knew this. I actually felt sick. They desperately want citations to their badly written and vanilla quality research, and tried to push this by embarassing me in front of the bigshots of my field. There is no way to explain to an audience which has dispersed that these people flat out lied.

Friday 13 July 2012

From Phys. Rev.

Dear A.,

On [date] we sent you this manuscript for review.
Since Physical Review Letters is viewed as a rapid means of
publication, we wish to keep delays to a minimum. We have not yet
received your report and, therefore, would appreciate a message concerning its status.  You may respond via our referee server or by sending an email to prl@aps.org.


Dear PRL,

Ten weeks ago I sent you my manuscript for review. Two weeks ago the referees returned their reports to you. Since PRL is viewed as a rapid means of publication, I would like to keep delays to a minimum. I have not yet received the referee reports and, therefore, would apprecitae a message concerning their status.  You may respond via email, post, fax or bloody carrier pigeon for all I care, as long as I hear something, anything, which convinces me that you actually give the slightest hint of a rat's arse about my paper. Until then, don't be expecting any referee reports from me. I do those for free. All you have to do is act on the advice you're given, but that's your job. It does not take two weeks to click the "forward reports to author" button.


A.

Wednesday 4 July 2012

They found the Anderson!

Yup, it's true, looks like we're finally found the Anderson particle, which particle physicists have been searching for for 45 odd years, ever since they nicked the idea from Anderson himself.

Tuesday 3 July 2012

Fermilab... Higgs....Zzzzz.. whu? whu? Did I snore?

Are you a physicist, but not an experimental physicist? Were you perhaps fairly bored by the softly-softly-we-know-what-Cern-have-but-can't-say presentation from Fermilab yesterday? Do you simply not understand those baffling and never fucking explained green-yellow-95%-black-line-yellow-balloon-excluded-region-under-this-region-in-pink-on-a-tuesday plots which apparently say something very important about this bit of the curve here between 110 and 140 GeV even though it looks like any other bit of the same sodding curve?

Well, check out Philip Gibbs' posts over at viXra:

http://blog.vixra.org/2012/07/02/tevatron-squeeze-2-9-sigma-higgs-signal/

There's the latest (unofficial) results and if you link back to earlier posts on the Higgs he actually explains what those plots mean, which is rather good of him.