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.....

Phys. Rev. Zzzzzzzz

20Oct11 Reminder to referee [others sent (not shown) at 1-2 week intervals]
29Sep11 Correspondence (miscellaneous) sent to author
29Sep11 Right to publish signature received
29Sep11 Correspondence (miscellaneous) sent to author
29Sep11 Review request to referee; response not yet received
29Sep11 Acknowledgment sent to author
28Sep11 Correspondence (miscellaneous) sent to author

Come on you lazy lazy sod.

It's even been published.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1003.5729

Must. Avoid. Anna. Phys.

Neutrino cascade 2: the sickening.

Another barrage of suspiciously 4-page papers on neutrinos today. It's getting a bit sad, boys.

Neutrino cascade.

Of all the desperate attempts to grab citations from the OPERA results, my favourite so far is this one:

arXiv:1110.0449
Superluminal Neutrinos and Monopoles
Comments: 4 pages

In this letter, we show that superluminal neutrinos announced by OPERA could be explained by the existence of a monopole, which is left behind after the spontaneous symmetry braking (SSB) phase transition of some scalar fields in the universe.

Bless them. There are papers saying "the detectors were dodgy" and papers saying "string theory explains it", one of which is a sensible description, and then there's this, which tries to explain it using the Higgs. It had to happen. Genius. I love it.

The odd couple: part 3.

Touche, old man. You have closed the door and turned up the heating in the office. And on a particularly hot day. Touche.

People who should not be allowed to publish.

Those who think the Dirac equation should be written with the \alpha and \beta matrices.