Natural Science Forum / Physics / General Physics / August 2007

On Aug 11, 11:04 am, John Schutkeker
<jschutke...@sbcglobal.net.nospam> wrote:

Hi, I'm the guy who "reamed" you out before.
If you are going to relate a story, please relate it accurately. To dp
other wise is know as "lying".

The reason I "reamed you out" was that I gave you good advice in good
faith, and you gave me wise-a.s answer. THEN I reamed you out.
Nevertheless, even the reaming contained useful advice.

I have published many papers, and I have reviewed papers for three
different journals. Note, that these were in chemistry, not in
physics.

If you wish to ask for useful advice from someone who isn't a crank,
who has actually published papers, who has reviewed one paper for the
best science journal that there is, and who is willing to actually
talk to you, I will be glad to give it to you.

If you want to trade insults, I can do that, too.

My specialty? Hmmm. I guess that would be relativity. My last name is Brown.

Best regard and best wishes for your paper.

Pete

Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to misdirect anyone. We did
that with a little rod in lab, I thought a match stick
would be a more convenient substitute for someone at
home.

I don't go into any length when it's not absolutely
needed (you mean spherical harmonics?). Even under
circumstances you described the simple (not the trivial
one) answer would do using the dependence of wave
travelling speed on density of the liquid. Then you can
check your answer with the tivial (mass divided by
volume) one for accuracy. Try to get it with less than
ten percent error if you can.

No! No way. One should masturbate on deceivable
matters. Sex, for example, is good enough for
masturbation, isn't that much of a waste of time and
energy. But physics? No. Physics is not sightseeing. It
is something you _do_. An undertaking. It involves
exertion, energy, plan, sense, purpose, management,
progress, checking results, finding out what's been
meaningfully gained by it. It is not something one
could "masturbate" with, with any degree of success. I
value hangout talk a hundred times more than doing
"sightseeing" in this forum.

Hahah :-)) Well, certainly not in doing the physics of
that experiment. That's where you seem to need it.
"Pete," why don't you bug off. Physics is not your
scene.

Same here. And believe me, there aren't many people in
the world who read them closely enough. Things in
physics are done well ahead of textbook stuff,
therefore each paper is built, by definition, on some
of the stuff from past that aren't available in
textbooks or covered in university courses. That's the
time consuming part. You must forge through them,
understanding every bit of information presented,
before reaching what's done in that paper itself. This
last part, the work in paper itself, is usually the
easiest to understand because such steps forward are
almost always made in very small steps. There isn't
much in there, and the writer is the best person in the
world to describe the work to the reader because he's
the one who did it.

So physics is certainly different from bio or med
fields where even textbook information almost covers
every essential material one needs to know to be able
to read papers in such fields. Two years ago I did not
understand one line in all the bio related papers or
texts or handbooks. They always had words in them that
were Chinese to me. A year ago I started to understand
the biotech papers of 1960's :-))) The courses I took
covered all such techniques and material. Later I got
better and better. Also I began to understand (for the
first time in my life) what Merck Manual has been
blabbering all these years when, each time that I had
to dig in to find out some answer to medical questions
I had, I had to go through a lot of jargon taking up
most of my time before understanding what the book
said. Now I read that wonderful source of quick
information (it is not the best but still is one of the
top two or three) and surprize myself that hardly ever
the book throws a jargon at me that I don't know
exactly what it means :-)) This was all done via a few
bio/med courses. Very much worth spending the time
learning them.

Anyway, in physics this is impossible to do. You cannot
read papers by taking a few courses, not even after
taking a hundred courses. The material you'd need as
_background_ are simply not there. What they teach in
universities are vast but they're only making it
possible for you to begin another long road to
understanding physics papers.

For this same last reason, sometimes papers are used,
and trusted, in developing further work upon them only
basing the decision on the trust of somebody else on
correctness of that paper. This can be a near-fatal
mistake, a career buster, or at least a very very
expensive mistake. In mid 1980s I once corrected a
paper from the best European journal that there is in
that field, which had been used by one of the space
science communities in USA for more than ten years!
Thus I found out that I was the only one who had read
it carefully. Not even the author of it knew about it,
or so I assumed. Tons and tons of computing work had
been based on its results, they all went to trash. As a
matter of fact the punch-cards of those programs filled
a small room that was locked and every now and then
somebody would get the key to use some of those
programs again. The author took the trouble of coming
from Europe to visit me in my measly meagre office room
that I had in the school where I was a grad student, to
defend himself (actually to save his well-established
fully paid and ongoing Summer trips to USA and to that
center every year for work and pleasure both). And
after shouting at me a few times trying to make things
"understood" to me, quieted down when I showed him
where his mistake was, because he couldn't deny it. The
way he defended it also showed he was actually aware of
it. Perhaps the head of the center had already told him
what it was, or he might've stumbled on it and known it
for years, I don't know. I remember very well what I
told him at the end before he left my "office".

    "You or I may care less for the
    Americans but when I'm doing physics for
    them I'm first doing physics and only
    then doing it for the Americans, and a
    mistake like that cannot ever occur or
    stay unnoticed as long as I am at it."

Sure enough I didn't see him the following three
Summers. Adios Muchachos till next weekend.

There are levels of readability. A truly unreadable paper is one where you
don't know what it's about. Usually, it's enough to understand the basic
idea of the paper - and this is where plain-English intro/conclusion are
good - and then you can either dive into it for the detail if you need it
now, or return to the paper to do so later if you need to do so later.
There are two many papers to spend days or weeks on unless they really
matter.

An adequate paper should convey the basic message in well under an hour.
Sure, the details might take days, but that's another story.

Not off-hand. The maths literature is also usually quite different in
style from physics. It might be worth browsing through a couple of issues
of likely journals to see what would suit your writing, style-wise.

There's also EPL (used to be Europhysics Letters, but the actual name
seems to have mutated to EPL recently).

The editors bin about 2/3 of the submissions. The referees filter out
another 2/3 of what is left. But they're general science journals (which
really means they're mostly biology journals), so demand that papers be
interesting to the general audience. Specialisation, unless it's
specialisation in something the editor likes, means rejection. If you're a
big shot, then you're more likely to get past the editors. Also the
referees. But one is a big shot due to past quality work, not connections.
Lack of a university position makes it harder to get past editors (in
general, not just Nature/Science) - perhaps some of this is due to past
experience with crank papers.

But given that even bad or mediocre work gets published, good work manages
to get there too, if competently written.

Well, I don't think the reviewers spend that much time on it, except for
procrastination.

Physics/optics. However, I seem to have drifted a tad into psych/special
education. A scattering of such can be found in my publications at
http://eprint.uq.edu.au/view/person/Nieminen,_Timo_A..html (conference
papers only so far). It's been an interesting effort to try to get the
full expanded version of
http://www.aare.edu.au/02pap/cho02101.htm
accepted as a journal paper. The problem is that it's a methodology paper,
but isn't a statistic paper (the psych methodology journals are basically
statistics journals in disguise). Acceptance notice came last week. 20
months since original first submission. One review from an earlier
submission was the most incompetent review I have ever seen - a critique
of grammar and style, including a demonstration of the reviewer's lack of
literacy, and _no_ comment on the technical/scientific content of the
paper. It was so badly done, and pointless, that I'm surprised that the
editor had so little respect for the reputation of the journal that they
forwarded such a review to an author.