Quote of the Week
Thanks to Dynamics of Cats for an article about physics publishing, by Rick Trebino. My favourite line:
Assure the senior editor that, if anyone even considered asking about this, you would immediately and emphatically confirm under oath, on a stack of Newton’s Principia Mathematicas, and under penalty of torture and death that, in this matter, the journal was most definitely not biased in your favor in any way, shape, or form in the current geological epoch or any other and in this universe or any other, whether real or imagined.
posted by Kea | 11:20 PM
2 Comments:
A new non-mainstream field of science probably needs a new journal to publish papers on the subject between one set of covers. However, if the subject is too new, nobody is going to be switched on to the new subject enough to submit to, or buy, the journal.
If you think about it, when a journal publishes a paper it is giving its backing to the paper to some extent. This can anger some people who see something published that they regard as a waste of print. E.g., Woit gave an example of Cambridge University Press being boycotted by certain (particularly) bigoted string theorists after accepting Carlo Rovelli's non-string theory Quantum gravity loopy book for publication years ago.
I can imagine an editor at Cambridge University Press defensively responding with the kind of thing you quoted from Rick Trebino, arguing that they're not endorsing ideas just by publishing them, they're not biased in favour of the enemy, blah, blah.
I don't see how this is similar to the case of Strings vs Loops. These are both failed attempts to understand quantum gravity. The case of this post is about a technical comment on an ERROR in another paper.
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