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.

Eistein was wrong! (crackpot alert)

Here we go! Todays awesome choice of approach/title/topic/presentation/behaviour.

Quitting. Not quite at the speed of light.

The head of Opera has resigned. Interesting! And typically lazy science reporting, too:

"If the findings had been confirmed, they would have disproved Albert Einstein's 1905 Special Theory of Relativity." Hnnnnnggggg.

Conference.

I'm off to a conference. Well, a workshop really. Week one: theory. My bag. Week two: experiment and stuff so applied it might as well be called engineering.

And where have they put my talk? At the end of the second week. And where have they put talks by others in my field, including my own sodding collaborators? At the beginning of the first week.

It's a bit insulting. My boss isn't as powerful as other bosses, so I automatically get less respect. It's starting to annoy me. I have three papers coming up and in each of them my main result is that everyone else is wrong, and has been wrong for years. That's a dangerous thing to claim, I know, it makes me sound like an arrogant crackpot. But that doesn't mean I'm not right. And, of course, I have to think of a nice way of saying it.... grief....

I love it.

While my collaborators continue to ignore me and I beat my head against a result which is utterly trivial but which will be impossible to explain because everyone believes the bullshit published in the literature, little things like this make me smile:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.2985

"We study the survival of a single diffusing lamb on the positive half line in the presence of N diffusing lions"

Awesome. Awesome.

Another classic

Awesome. Another fantastic choice of title. And it's a comment!

http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.2227

Best arxiv title today.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.1018