Cheers,
T.

yes, science cannot do much progress without peer review, especially in these days (see the Say of the Week of this week!) where one can find support for whatever crazy idea one has, even the flatness of the earth or similar outlandish thoughts.

Hi Marianne,

usually, in our field there is no need for a science writer. We have our standards, but they have little to do with the form and the flow, and much to do with contents.

Hello Changcho,

in fact, I would have been happier to recommend publication. The good thing, at least, is that (save some intuition by the authors if they visit here) I remain anonymous to them, otherwise bad feelings would be easy to foster.

Jeff, yes, the disagreement of data and sum of contributing processes was clear, but I asked the authors to work on it more mainly because of the lack of information… The fact is, one got the impression that the disagreement (a largish effect) was having a sizable impact on the measurement, but they did not quantify it in any way, nor commented it. That is what really caused me to reject the current version of the manuscript…

Cheers all,
T.

Jeff

p.s. don’t people go to conferences to communicate results and THERE get all the flak and even personal attacks from all types of “peers”, both from serious and talented ones AND also from complete jerks? Of course if one instead submits a paper straight to a journal then the work should be well prepared. In the particular case of the paper refereed by Tommaso I imagine that the disaggrement of data with the simulations would have been noticed by most in the audience of a serious conference. Indeed I expect that the authors, anticipating that, would not have even gone to such a conference. They might have chosen a foolish conference instead.

well, this is official refereeing for a journal, and the paper comes from a large collaboration of physicists, many smarter than I am. So I would hesitate to liken my experience to your professor’s…

In any case yes, accuracy is of paramount importance. It is the focus of the refereeing, rather than assessing whether something is “right” or “wrong”, which nobody can usually determine anyway from just the paper (one usually finds mistakes only in the source code!).

As for free energy -better call it dark energy- I have a guest post on the matter, click on “guest posts” on the tab above. It was written by somebody who knows the topic more than I do.

Cheers,
T.

I’m seeing that it’s pretty easy to make mistakes in physics, and one of the most important things you do is stay accurate in everything you do.

Later,
Nick

P.S. on a side note, you should make a post about “free energy”. I know it’s not possible (unless it’s more along the lines of “grabbing” the vast amounts of energy in the universe thought already to exist), but it would be interesting to hear your thoughts on it. I came across stuff like zero point energy and the Casimir effect which both looked pretty interesting.

I really hope I remain anonymous – in any case, my review was very thorough and I do not think anybody will take it personally. First of all, I did not wait for the deadline (had ten more days to review the manuscript but sent in my comments today), and second, I described in detail the checks that I thought were necessary. Of course, it might just be that those checks were already made. In that case, they just need to rewrite the text, which is now a bit too vague.

Cheers,
T.

Although you said that you did it “anonymously”, the fact that you had the courage to put it on your blog means that you are really not “anonymous” to the authors (actually, given the way rumors etc get around, you probably were not really anonymous anyway).

Back decades ago when I did journal refereeing, I never acted anonymously. If I rejected a paper, I always sent an email to the authors saying why I rejected it and describing in some detail how they could get it into acceptable shape.

I am happy to see you doing similarly, and I hope the authors appreciate that you did them a favor.

Tony Smith

It is possible, in this case, that there was no one there to fulfill this role at the time, and it slipped through.

marianne
scientific writer