Bye!

I'm quitting. I've had enough.

Enough of not being able to spend time on interesting research because it isn't trendy, of battling with problems for weeks only to find that they were probably solved fourty years ago and published in some obscure Russian journal which is impossible to find either online or physically, of reading crap papers which appear in the best journals, of being looked over for promotion/conference attendence/citations in favour of people who couldn't tell their arse from an impala, of having to correct all the mistakes typsetting services introduce into my papers, of wasting my research time on admin and beaurocracy, and most of all, of arrogant, rude, unwashed old men with hyperinflated egos.

Goodbye physics. I expect I will miss you sometimes. I would say you're in good hands, but you're not. Best of luck with that. Try not to find SUSY.

A.

Schrödinger's cat. HA HA HA!

http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.4375

"But hair, in particular cat hair, is not alive."

If you want me, I'll be on the floor, laughing myself sick

APS Becon

This is what I think of when I think about APS Beacon proofing "services".

And again...

http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.3280

He continues....

Mansuripur again.

This is fascinating. Click the following link to go to

Mansuripur's publications on the arXiv.

Same Mansuripur who thought he's found a big problem with special rel. and had the paper published in PRL, but whom was summarily shot down in a rain of PRL-aimed Comment arrows tipped with venemous physicist PRL-salivating BILE. Except for McDonald's response, which was rather more measured and mature.

Anyway, Mansuripur is now bombarding (and that is the right word) the arXiv with uploads of his previous papers and conference proceedings from as far back as 2005. (When there were dinosaurs and shit.) What's he up to? Here's a potential list.

1. He's protesting against open-access charges. Good on you my son!
   
2. He's posturing. "Look at my beautiful peakcock feather papers! See how well they sit with my magnificent PRL beak!" Or something along those lines. In this case one has to presume that he's sticking by his "Einstein was wrong" guns.
   
3. He's panicing. "Oh crap, I messed up. I know, I''ll overcompensate by producing loads of papers. Oh wait, I don't have any ideas. I'll upload old papers to the arXiv instead! Everyone will read those instead of the dodgy "Einstein-sucks" paper.
   
4. He's quitting and is, either in fury (see 1.), defiance (2.) or regret (3.), throwing his legacy into the public domain.
   
   
   
   
   
   

Place your bets!

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.

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.