Music.

Finally. Finally, I have beaten my collaborators into submission and convinved them to publish the (frankly sweet) result we've been sitting on for months. Which means I need good music to listen to while I type. Furiously. So that my fucking competitors don't beat me to it. (I happen to have... found out... what they're working on.)

This is what I'm listening to just now. Why should you care? You shouldn't. But you might like it.

Ultrasound Check out "Black Hole" here, and make sure your speakers are turned up.

Automatic Writing, listen to "Continuous" here. If the 80's had been this good we wouldn't regret them so much.

The frankly awesome Breton,
check out "Edward the Confessor", and you can get download some tracks from the facebook page. By sharing your personal infromation, of course.

Last but not least, Ulterior, listen at the same page.

Siggggghhhh.

Suppose that there were a handfull of papers every year bleating on about the same "problem" and how to fix it. Suppose that the "problem" was really no more than a curiosity to do with the method of calculation, and which didn't impact physics in any way.

As such, any attempt to "fix" the non-existent problem by making changes to the relevant theory would be (very rightly) viewed as crackpot nonsense.

Suppose, then, that someone came along and showed in a simple way how to do away with this issue without making any changes to the theory. A short paper, drawing a line under a silly argument once and for all.

Do you think anyone would publish that paper? Well we'll see. Three journals didn't even send it out for review. Now that it's finally been sent to a reviewer, the report has come back after 5 days. Do we imagine the report is positive? No. No we do not. Hey ho.

Journals. Again. Yes, again.

Journal gripe one.

I had to withdraw a paper from a journal this morning because they have had it for over two months and despite requests don't seem to be prompting the referee to get off his sloth ass and read my extremely short paper.

Journal gripe two.

Springer. Yes, it's fashionable to hate them so I'm jumping on that bandwagon. I have conference proceedings `in transit' with them, but after that I'm not submitting anything else to springer. Their corrections team has done nothing to change my mind. First they send me proofs without a list of corrections and queries, then they ignore my corrections and ask why I haven't responded to theirs. Grrr. They finally send me their list of queries, but don't give me access to the proofs any more so I can't make changes. Idiots. Utter idiots.

1. Was there a "time" when there was "nothing"?

Roland, Lagos

What was said
The origin of the universe can be explained by the laws of physics, without any need for miracles or Divine intervention. These laws predict that the universe was spontaneously created out of nothing in a rapidly expanding state.

This is called inflation because it is like the way prices in the shops go up at an ever increasing rate.

Time is defined only with the universe, so it makes no sense to talk about time before the universe began, it would be like asking for a point south of the South Pole.

A more honest response

We have some good guesses about how and when the universe began. One of these is that the universe was spontaneously created out of nothing. We do not know if this is really true.

Physics is the study of our universe, the way it is now, the way it was in the past and the prediction of how it will behave in the future. We have no way, precisely none, of probing what goes on "outside", "before" or "after" our universe. The very ideas are a bit fuzzy. Questions of this nature therefore belong to a different field. That may seem unsatisfactory. If so, go talk to a science philosopher, if you can stand it.

Some other comments Unsure why SH...um, Coxy, thought it was worth the time to respond to this kind of toss. You can't give an honest answer without seeming like you're giving up. Where does god live? Where is the edge of the universe? What's outside it? Funky questions, but you'll never get the answer out of a physicist.

And what was that waffle about inflation for? Did they have a lot of whitespace to fill?

Did like the south pole analogy though, that was good.

Imagine he could stand up.

Before reading the following, imagine that Stephen Hawking wasn't horribly afflicted by a crippling disease. Let's put that to one side and imagine he was physically well. I want to focus on the physics and I want to avoid anyone saying, however it be dressed up as snivelling sanctimonious drivel, that you can't say anything against the man because he is disabled.

So imagine, if it makes you happy, and I can't imagine how it would, that it was actually Brian Cox (too obvious even for this self-referential nod to a pun) who gave this interview over at the BBC.

I wouldn't dream of trying to put words in SH's mouth, but I'll gladly do the same for Coxy, and he was the interviewee, right? Right. Let's take a look at what he said, what he meant, and what he should have said. Over the course of several posts, I think.

Fed up.

Everything I want to publish has already been done.

Except it's been done badly. And when I say "badly", what I mean is that Physical Review, and in particular PRL, is full, literally bursting, with results which are so stupidly wrong they defy belief. Statements like "we artificially and without motivation or proof of reliability completely ignore the fact that this diagram is as infra-red divergent as fuck, so we can produce a pretty picture".

Which, oddly, makes publishing the correct results somewhat tricky, since you have to convince Phys Rev that the same thing is worth publishing again, convience the reviewer that the results in the literature are shit, and simultaneously avoid pissing off entire research groups. This is deeply, deeply frustrating.

It's hard not to sound arrogant, but I've spent my career to date doing field thoery, and my competitors have spent their careers to date doing something barely above engineering. And frankly I'm right and they're wrong and .

Photon photon scattering.

I'm sure I mentioned this before somewhere on the blog... yup, here:

It's heating up

Some chaps claimed that all the old photon-photon scattering calculations were wrong. It looked to me like they'd written "infinity - infinity =0" at some point. And here's the response! From the asbtract alone these guys seem to be better informed than the new radicals.

http://xxx.soton.ac.uk/abs/1111.6126.

I feel a comment approaching.....