Project 1. Resulted in a paper due to having a decent student who could do the numerical stuff I neither have any stomach for nor am any good at. Have been waiting for journal's decision for three months. In limbo.
Project 2. Began with literature check. Discovered it was done in the sixties. Aborted.
Project 3. Spent several weeks struggling with an extremely simple toy model. Finally understood it all. Extenstion to interesting cases immediate. Cool. Pause. Discovered an uncited paper in a back-water journal which contained most of my "new" results. Now have to find a way to salvage my time. ARGHH.
Project 4. Boring. Will be very hard to sell. Hoping collaborators will think of a way to spin it. Waiting for collaborators. Who are on holiday...
Project 5. Missing entirely. Needed for a masters student. Help.
Project 6. Impossibly difficult. All simple cases, already in the literature, abosrbed, digested and understood. Very, very, stuck.
Project 7. Initiated by collaborator's suggestions. Spent some time elaborating on suggestions and creating lists of positive and negatives of each. Returned to collaborator. Collaborator had decided it was no longer interesting. RAGE.
Project 8. Theory done. Numerics to be done. Project on hold because numerical collaborator is entirely distracted by own research and....
Prject 9. ... which is rather more interesting, but somewhat harder, than project 8. Have reduced problem to one extremely tough differential equation. Buggered.
Sunday, 31 July 2011
Saturday, 9 July 2011
Dear Professor. I am not an idiot.
Hmm. I come across a reference to an intriguing looking paper. I cannot find this paper online. A spires search reveals nothing. A lot of googling reveals nothing. It appears to be an unpublished preprint. No-one references the paper except the author, in another unpublished preprint which does happen to be on the webnets.
I e-mail the author and politely request of the elusive missive. The author is a bigshot, so I try to be extra polite and sickeningly flattering.
"Dear bigshot,
You are superawesome. I am frankly gasping to get my hands on a copy of your undoubtedly brilliant opus "clever shit I did on holiday", which sadly I have been unable to obtain. I cannot find a journal reference nor an online copy. Would you please be super sweet and send me a copy, you great big hunk of lovely, you?
Yours with best wishes and huggles,
Lowely postdoc who worships the ground your sweet smelling footsies dain to walk upon."
And a couple of days later I get this reply:
"try looking on spires"
What. Do. You. Think. I. Tried. First. You. Sod.
Now the bigshot thinks I am a blethering idiot. Excellent self publicity there. On top of that, I still don't have the paper I want, and am faced with the prospect of writing back to said bigshot without using any of the following words or phrases:
"numpty"
"no, really"
"a bit of effort"
"porpoise up your sodding"
I e-mail the author and politely request of the elusive missive. The author is a bigshot, so I try to be extra polite and sickeningly flattering.
"Dear bigshot,
You are superawesome. I am frankly gasping to get my hands on a copy of your undoubtedly brilliant opus "clever shit I did on holiday", which sadly I have been unable to obtain. I cannot find a journal reference nor an online copy. Would you please be super sweet and send me a copy, you great big hunk of lovely, you?
Yours with best wishes and huggles,
Lowely postdoc who worships the ground your sweet smelling footsies dain to walk upon."
And a couple of days later I get this reply:
"try looking on spires"
What. Do. You. Think. I. Tried. First. You. Sod.
Now the bigshot thinks I am a blethering idiot. Excellent self publicity there. On top of that, I still don't have the paper I want, and am faced with the prospect of writing back to said bigshot without using any of the following words or phrases:
"numpty"
"no, really"
"a bit of effort"
"porpoise up your sodding"
The summer lull.
This is currently the status of my paper.
29Jun11 Review request to referee; response not yet received
07Jun11 27Jun11 Review request to referee; message received
(not a report)
26May11 26Jun11 Review request to referee; report received
21Jun11 Reminder to referee
8Jun11 Reminder to referee
25May11 28May11 Review request to referee; message received
(not a report)
26May11 Correspondence (miscellaneous) sent to author
26May11 Right to publish signature received
25May11 Correspondence (miscellaneous) sent to author
18May11 Acknowledgment sent to author
18May11 Correspondence (miscellaneous) sent to author
So, the paper is recieved by the editor and a week is sent out to two reviewers. This means the editor didn't bother with the paper for a week. (It's not that he didn't think it was suitable -- that decision would have been a lot quicker in coming.) One referee replies almost immediately -- either he's too busy or it's not his subject. The remaining referee does nothing. For a month. Then he sends a report. Yey!
Sadly, this report does not say "publish now, you fools, before he sends it to a journal with less infuriating response times!" but perhaps, and I hope here for the best option, "it's fine but not good enough for this journal", which I'm expecting. Worst case, it's "this is western rot which was covered in my magnificent soviet article in acta physica incomprehensiba, 1822".
Anyhoo. After three weeks, this third reviewer says he can't be arsed either. Three weeks to say "too busy, sorry". The paper is sent to a fourth reviewer. A fourth!! At least I'm getting some exposure.
I suspect the reason for this widening chasm between submission and rejection is that everyone has buggered off on holiday over the summer. I know I have. I'm on holiday right now. And I've still found time to write a paper. Why can't these buggers find the time to review one?
29Jun11 Review request to referee; response not yet received
07Jun11 27Jun11 Review request to referee; message received
(not a report)
26May11 26Jun11 Review request to referee; report received
21Jun11 Reminder to referee
8Jun11 Reminder to referee
25May11 28May11 Review request to referee; message received
(not a report)
26May11 Correspondence (miscellaneous) sent to author
26May11 Right to publish signature received
25May11 Correspondence (miscellaneous) sent to author
18May11 Acknowledgment sent to author
18May11 Correspondence (miscellaneous) sent to author
So, the paper is recieved by the editor and a week is sent out to two reviewers. This means the editor didn't bother with the paper for a week. (It's not that he didn't think it was suitable -- that decision would have been a lot quicker in coming.) One referee replies almost immediately -- either he's too busy or it's not his subject. The remaining referee does nothing. For a month. Then he sends a report. Yey!
Sadly, this report does not say "publish now, you fools, before he sends it to a journal with less infuriating response times!" but perhaps, and I hope here for the best option, "it's fine but not good enough for this journal", which I'm expecting. Worst case, it's "this is western rot which was covered in my magnificent soviet article in acta physica incomprehensiba, 1822".
Anyhoo. After three weeks, this third reviewer says he can't be arsed either. Three weeks to say "too busy, sorry". The paper is sent to a fourth reviewer. A fourth!! At least I'm getting some exposure.
I suspect the reason for this widening chasm between submission and rejection is that everyone has buggered off on holiday over the summer. I know I have. I'm on holiday right now. And I've still found time to write a paper. Why can't these buggers find the time to review one?
Monday, 13 June 2011
Did you try Google?
Suppose you have an idea for a research project. You wonder if someone else has already looked at the problem. You might Google it.
Then you start working on the project. You encounter problems, things you don't understand. You might Google, looking for related problems and solutions.
You get some results. You might Google certain likely phrases, to see if anyone has discovered the same, or related, results by different means.
You think about what journal to send your paper to. You might Google for "journal name" and "project title" to see which journals might go for it.
You wonder who to suggest as a reviewer. Someone who works on related problems. You might Google to find out who that would be.
Or you could just blindly write a shitty little paper without citing any of the tens of papers on the same subject published in the past couple of years, papers which contain every result you claim is new, and written in a much nicer way, and send the bastard thing to the arXiv with an air of distain which borders on the insulting.
And then you might get in your tank and drive over the "insulting" line and rattle off cackling like a banshee into the no-man's-land of "fuck you".
God I hope I get the paper to review. I really really do.
Then you start working on the project. You encounter problems, things you don't understand. You might Google, looking for related problems and solutions.
You get some results. You might Google certain likely phrases, to see if anyone has discovered the same, or related, results by different means.
You think about what journal to send your paper to. You might Google for "journal name" and "project title" to see which journals might go for it.
You wonder who to suggest as a reviewer. Someone who works on related problems. You might Google to find out who that would be.
Or you could just blindly write a shitty little paper without citing any of the tens of papers on the same subject published in the past couple of years, papers which contain every result you claim is new, and written in a much nicer way, and send the bastard thing to the arXiv with an air of distain which borders on the insulting.
And then you might get in your tank and drive over the "insulting" line and rattle off cackling like a banshee into the no-man's-land of "fuck you".
God I hope I get the paper to review. I really really do.
Saturday, 11 June 2011
Brian Cox: (even) better than the real thing
The Now Show has a great segment, about five minutes in, with Mitch Ben taking the piss out of Brian "I was partly responsible for the film Sunshine" Cox and simultaneously explaining the basics of quantum mechanics. Nice.
Listen here, it should be available for the next seven days from the date of this post.
Listen here, it should be available for the next seven days from the date of this post.
Tuesday, 7 June 2011
Sunday, 5 June 2011
It's heating up...
I'm very glad now that I didn't go down the "comment" route. Let's look at someone who did!
First there was this:
A proposal to measure photon-photon scattering
which contains equations in the abstract and was therefore never going to be a fun read. The paper opens with a reference to an unpublished paper by the same author which apparently shows that the calculation of light by light scattering from Euler-Heisenberg is wrong. That's quite a claim.
The gist of the paper is that a bog-standard perturbative calculation gives the correct answer, as you'd expect. There is also a reference to an old, independent, perturbative calculation which reproduced E&H's result, but seemingly can't be trusted as it was fudged in order to agree with E&H.
Interesting so far!
The paper ends though with some dodgy comments on both gauge and Lorentz invariance: for example, they claim that the QED polarisation tensor isn't transverse... I'm pretty sure it is, you know. There's a reference to one of their own papers where they show this. Note that they're using a UV cutoff which doesn't preserve gauge invariance, so it seems to me that they've broken gauge invariance and found that... oh... gauge invariance is broken. Check.
So this morning comes the comment:
Comment on : A Proposal to Measure Photon-Photon Scattering
which, somewhat disappointingly, open with neither a disgruntled "this contradicts my fabulous result" nor a direct "this is HORSESHIT" slap-down. Instead, it rather mildly points out that the "new" result gives a cross section 40 orders of magnitude larger than the old, and that this violates known _experimental_ bounds on the cross-section.
Pretty slap-downy, at a medium pace.
But today also sees the full calculation of the new result! It's here:
Light-Light Scattering
and lays the blame at the foot of an "unphysical gauge condition" which I can't see discussed explicitly. They say that the box diagram is finite in QED... really?! Can an expert on this confirm or deny it? I could get up and open a textbook but, you know, sleepy...
Personally, I'd love it if Euler-Heisenberg was wrong. It would be tremendous fun. I think it's more likely that these trailblazing chaps have just screwed their calculation, either because they've shagged gauge invariance or ... ah, they add three box diagrams together, say "each is divergent but the sum is not and therefore we don't need to regularise." Hunggg. This could be where they dropped the ball. If I have an expression which is finite then clearly no regularisation is needed. However, if I have three dodgy expressions then I can't just add them up and claim the whole thing will be fine. So I guess they've dropped an "infinity - infinity = 0 ball.
Still! Let's hope it doesn't end here. There's plenty of scope for more comments with ever increasing irritation. Physicists -- I know you won't let me down!
First there was this:
A proposal to measure photon-photon scattering
which contains equations in the abstract and was therefore never going to be a fun read. The paper opens with a reference to an unpublished paper by the same author which apparently shows that the calculation of light by light scattering from Euler-Heisenberg is wrong. That's quite a claim.
The gist of the paper is that a bog-standard perturbative calculation gives the correct answer, as you'd expect. There is also a reference to an old, independent, perturbative calculation which reproduced E&H's result, but seemingly can't be trusted as it was fudged in order to agree with E&H.
Interesting so far!
The paper ends though with some dodgy comments on both gauge and Lorentz invariance: for example, they claim that the QED polarisation tensor isn't transverse... I'm pretty sure it is, you know. There's a reference to one of their own papers where they show this. Note that they're using a UV cutoff which doesn't preserve gauge invariance, so it seems to me that they've broken gauge invariance and found that... oh... gauge invariance is broken. Check.
So this morning comes the comment:
Comment on : A Proposal to Measure Photon-Photon Scattering
which, somewhat disappointingly, open with neither a disgruntled "this contradicts my fabulous result" nor a direct "this is HORSESHIT" slap-down. Instead, it rather mildly points out that the "new" result gives a cross section 40 orders of magnitude larger than the old, and that this violates known _experimental_ bounds on the cross-section.
Pretty slap-downy, at a medium pace.
But today also sees the full calculation of the new result! It's here:
Light-Light Scattering
and lays the blame at the foot of an "unphysical gauge condition" which I can't see discussed explicitly. They say that the box diagram is finite in QED... really?! Can an expert on this confirm or deny it? I could get up and open a textbook but, you know, sleepy...
Personally, I'd love it if Euler-Heisenberg was wrong. It would be tremendous fun. I think it's more likely that these trailblazing chaps have just screwed their calculation, either because they've shagged gauge invariance or ... ah, they add three box diagrams together, say "each is divergent but the sum is not and therefore we don't need to regularise." Hunggg. This could be where they dropped the ball. If I have an expression which is finite then clearly no regularisation is needed. However, if I have three dodgy expressions then I can't just add them up and claim the whole thing will be fine. So I guess they've dropped an "infinity - infinity = 0 ball.
Still! Let's hope it doesn't end here. There's plenty of scope for more comments with ever increasing irritation. Physicists -- I know you won't let me down!
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