4 ms·

The paper is open access: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5123794 https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5123794

• jfengel 7y ago
  I'm perplexed at what "AIP Advances" is supposed to be. This paper isn't an advance of any sort. It's an application of some decades-old formulas you can grab off Wikipedia; a high schooler could apply them to get this result. It adds nothing to "testability" (and is in fact wrong in its understanding of what "information" in a hard drive really is). The journal has an impact factor of 1.5. For comparison, Science and Nature are in the 40s. This was a cute letter, but it should not have passed peer-review, whether it's open-access or not, because it contributes nothing novel.
  • Sean1708 7y ago
    Weirdly it's not like the author is some crackpot nobody, he has actual papers under his belt[1] and is a Senior Lecturer[2] (although not at a particularly prestigious university, admittedly). [1]: https://researchportal.port.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/melvin-vopson(2065a4af-19b5-4624-8c75-e96822832377)/publications.html?pageSize=50&page=0 https://researchportal.port.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/melvin-v... [2]: https://www.port.ac.uk/about-us/structure-and-governance/our-people/our-staff/melvin-vopson https://www.port.ac.uk/about-us/structure-and-governance/our...
    • jfengel 7y ago
      His other papers are all in solid-state physics. He's a real scientist playing around outside his domain, discovering a well-known result, and writing a fun letter about it to a low-impact journal. All of which is fine. It just requires a bit more context than the headline yields. If this had linked to his blog, it would make a lot more sense.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]