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Because it was important for the students to have their names on a published paper, we did not abandon our calculations immediately. We finished them and wrote
by greatgib 3y ago
Because it was important for the students to have their names on a published paper, we did not abandon our calculations immediately. We finished them and wrote a long paper that was duly published in the Physical Review with all our names on it.
Isn't that shameful for the advance of science? Publishing something that you know is most certainly wrong.
- rhelz 3y agoDon't hate the player, hate the game. Also, probably anything written by Freemon Dyson would be worth reading, just to see how a top-flight might engages with the subject matter, if nothing else.
- dylan604 3y agoIs there value in publishing the wrong even knowing that is wrong so that others might not have to spend the cycles doing the same wrong? Of course, that's assuming people are publishing wrong and not calling it right
- codethief 3y agoIf they hadn't published it, comments here on HN would probably complain how negative results are never published. You can't have it both ways, though.
- sanderjd 3y agoIt depends entirely on what the paper says. If it says "we found the perfect answer to this problem!", then yes, that is shameful. But if it says something more like "here are some potentially useful calculations, but the results are ultimately unsatsifying because of the cut-off procedures requiring arbitrarily chosen parameters", then it's still a useful result.
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- hermitcrab 3y agoI believe Dyson was a man of considerable integrity. I doubt he would have published anything misleading or plain wrong. But I haven't read the paper in question.
- Beretta_Vexee 3y agoThere are ways of presenting these results for what they are "we have explored the possibility of using cut-off functions to explain strong atomic interactions. It turns out that this solution is unsatisfactory because it requires four arbitrary coefiences."
- greatgib 3y agoTo be clear, I was meaning that it looks that they did publish it like they intended to. Not something like "this is what we tried but we are probably wrong". But also, even in the other way, this is not a scientific experiment that failed. It is more like a non sense mathematical demonstration with some magic variable that were made up to get the expected result. So it does not really have any value except the content of the current article. For example if I do a paper like: "Getting a glass of water from starting a TV" We were able to demonstrate that we can get a glass of water by starting a tv with the following steps: - take the tv remote - power on the tv - assume we have XX - result: we have a glass of water - note: we considered XX to be "Michel brings us a glass of water" for this experiment. - note2: famous mathematician told us that our study is gargabe
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