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The authors describe an observation of similarity between two plots of completely different things. That could be an interesting paper, if they investigated thi
by posix_me_less 6y ago
The authors describe an observation of similarity between two plots of completely different things. That could be an interesting paper, if they investigated this similarity with some skepticism and the similarity was shown to be robust, independent of the particular choices they made (bin width, choice of the subset of all spectral lines).
But they apparently did not do their job. Instead, they indulge in speculations about even crazier connections with a past state of the universe or with behaviour and biases of scientific community.
This kind of half-baked observation and speculation is an interesting discussion topic for a lunchtime that can potentially lead to something substantial, but really should not be published as scientific paper.
Also this paper is a good example of what is wrong with physics academia (and perhaps other academic workers as well). 4 authors, 18 references to other people work, and a statement of conflict of interest.
Sad state of physics, year 2020.
- kaffeemitsahne 6y agoDo you think there should be more, or less authors? And more, or less references? I don't get your objection.
- foobarbecue 6y agoAlso, is it bad that the conflict of interest was disclosed?
- posix_me_less 6y agoIt's a meaningless section.
- foobarbecue 6y agoAre you saying that conflict of interest disclosures in general are meaningless? Or this one is just poorly implemented? I'm having a hard time interpreting your meaning here.
- posix_me_less 6y agoI do not know in general, but in case of paper on theoretical physics, I have trouble seeing how such a statement provides anything to the reader.
- SiempreViernes 6y agoUh, they could as a start include the theoretical predictions for all spectral lines? Instead they take the subset of lines that have ended up in one (out of several) databases on spectral lines and, without any real motivation, declare this to be a complete sample. Finally, putting the main result (Figure 2) before the section on data collection ("Experimental Section") is just rude.
- posix_me_less 6y agoIn the context of what this paper brings to the reader, this should not have been published. If the paper at least did the chores and proposed some scientifically valuable hypothesis, then it could be OK to publish. But. If one guy had the original idea, worked his way through the required steps and the other discussed with him a little, he should have published himself, possibly with acknowledgement of the others. There is no work for 4 people here. The references are ridiculously long and nobody is going to read them all in order to "get" this paper. Clearly, this is a product of the cultural, societal and economic pressure to "get published" often, quality or value be damned. My cousin who knows a little about science or academia once told me scientist should publish at least once a month, otherwise they do too little work. Obviously, the academia agrees.
- SiempreViernes 6y agoThey also just take NIST as the holy source of truth, which seems highly suspicious if one was out to get some sort of fundamental truth in the wavelength distribution of the lines.
- crankylinuxuser 6y agoOr it can be seen as "we need some standard, so we'll use NIST". Then the data is at least normalized with respect to NIST.
- SiempreViernes 6y agoYou'll have to explain why using a single database, when there are several available that focus on being extra reliable on different elements, is a defensible choice. I fully understand "let's just use NIST because that's easiest", but that's not a serious attitude if you want to claim something about reality rather than the NIST database itself.
- crankylinuxuser 6y agoI see that you only attacked the data source, NIST. You didn't attack/discuss normalization of said data, which was 1/2 of what I said.
- SiempreViernes 6y agoWhat normalisation? There's certainly no clear talk of normalisation in the paper.
- simplicio 6y agoEh, one of their proposed explanations (really, their only explanation beyond the vague "coincidence" and "unknown physical law") is specific to how the NIST database is compiled, so disagree they're taking them as a "holy source of truth".
- kortex 6y agoWhat are the "two plots of completely different things?" You have two plots of intensity vs wavelength, where one is spectral intensity, and the other is a histogram binning. On its face, there's zero reason why these plots line up as well as they do, this goes beyond conincidence.
- posix_me_less 6y ago"two plots of completely different things" is not meant as criticism, just a description of what the paper is suggesting. It's ok to seek and investigate similarities between completely different things. They are plots against wavelength axis, yes, but the "things" plotted on y-axis are completely different concepts.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jhoechtl 6y agoSounds like someone in defence of citation circles. I welcome the fresh view of the team. A genuinely new observation brought to paper instead of dead-chewing (albeit rigorously citing) papers of academic brethrens.
- posix_me_less 6y agoI think those references are too trivial and too numerous.