Comments on: A Lengthy Exercise

By: Eugene

Eugene — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 00:07:55 +0000

I remember my Quantum Fridays of my graduate school days. Where every Friday evening, I would sit down with my weekly Quantum Mechanics (year 1)/Quantum Field Theory (year 2)/String Theory (year 3) homework set and work through them till (a) they were done or (b) I dropped dead from exhaustion.

Ah, Quantum Friday. How I don’t miss thee!

By: Allyson

Allyson — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 23:15:20 +0000

Mark!

This is made out of awesome.

http://scienceblogs.com/loom/2007/08/06/branded_with_science.php

By: Yvette

Yvette — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 15:50:27 +0000

Glad to hear you go through the paper alright! Somehow I think I’ll have more fun with the “show” problems when they’re no longer in exam situations, though.

By: daniel

daniel — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 22:45:58 +0000

I was all ready to regale everyone with wild tales from my undergraduate days. But, sadly, most of what I remember involved precisely these sorts of physics exercises. Graduate school, on the other hand…no, those tales are best left unwritten.

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 22:37:33 +0000

Indeed Tez, and that’s one reason going through in this way is particularly useful – one gets to see where laying out more detail is helpful and, in fact, where one is spending too much time explaining something. Often these dead ends arise where the related calculations of two collaborators come together and more interim explanation is required.

Having said that, even going through moderately well-explained papers can take some time, even for an expert, if you want to get ever factor of 2 and multiple of 2\pi correct.

Neil, what Jason Dick said is what I’d have said – it is all free software that most people use.

By: Jason Dick

Jason Dick — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 18:49:09 +0000

By the way, Neil, in my experience people in the scientific community also use nothing but public software for composing LaTeX. I use emacs under Linux (you can also run it under cygwin in Windows), along with a few style files that you can nab from the source of uploaded papers.

By: Count Iblis

Count Iblis — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 17:07:23 +0000

Tez, I agree about the co-authors, but readers will have to do more work. You cannot show all the details in the paper. I actually once received a referee report that said that I had explained things in too much detail. The referee wanted me to revise the paper and cut back drastically on the maths.

By: Tez

Tez — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 16:45:27 +0000

I would hope that any of my papers are such that an expert in the field (as I’d expect a co-author to be) would not have to spend three days trying to redo the calculations (especially not having to try and “find the right path” as you seem to describe.) I think the path to follow should at least be described in sufficient detail that “hitting dead ends” and “finding a strategy” are unnecessary!!

By: Count Iblis

Count Iblis — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 15:14:35 +0000

Neil, Physical Review accepts documents in MS Word format.

By: Neil B.

Neil B. — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 15:08:45 +0000

Hi, good luck with publication. I am indirectly affiliated with research institutions here in SE Virginia, and don’t have the same privileges as the regulars. I want to submit some papers in the usually approved LaTeX format, but don’t have access to any but “public”/commercial composing or conversion SW. I already have some docs in Word, that I want to convert adequately. When I downloaded Word2Tex it didn’t seem to install properly. I also want to compose in LaTeX, but admit to being lazy: I’d rather type in and have the SW do the composing. Thanks for any tips you can offer. In justifying my comment, this subject should be useful to many readers (since we’ve had lots of discussion of paper writing, judging, collaborating, etc. but I don’t recall much about the technical issues.)

PS: I remember, back in the 80s I got complements for my very nicely hand-written Greek etc. symbols, but now that’s a lost art. (Some journals supposedly still, or recently did, accept hand-typed or even hand-written articles for the sake of contributors from third-world countries.)