Comments on: Guest Post: Terry Rudolph on Nature versus Nurture

By: Ilja Schmelzer

Ilja Schmelzer — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 11:08:50 +0000

To publish preprints before publication in journals is very important for scientific progress, and I think it is sufficiently important to be enforced by the scientific community.

And there is a simple way to do it: To boycott journals with editorial policies against such prior publication.

The first level of such a boycott would be simply not to publish in such journals. The more rigorous one not to cite articles published in such journals, or to cite them as “unpublished manuscript”.

By: ☆ The Story of an Article « Mostly physics

☆ The Story of an Article « Mostly physics — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 04:43:27 +0000

[...] interested enough in the nitty-gritty details I’ll admit the idea was influenced by the fascinating guest post on the Cosmic Variance blog which I mentioned in a previous post, and also by the ideals of open [...]

By: aram

aram — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 04:07:22 +0000

Nature’s reply explains why their entire journal is unnecessary for advancing science: we have a vibrant culture of scientific communication without them. We have to pay lip service to their role in communicating results (e.g. consider the ironically named “Rapid Communications to Physical Review”) so we can gain the endorsements that are valuable only because of their artificial scarcity. Definitely this service of allocating credentials is going to be hard to replace, though.

By: Eugenie Samuel Reich

Eugenie Samuel Reich — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 14:25:26 +0000

@mattleifer I didn’t mean exactly that the contrary titles were just confusing, though that is true, but that they also seem kind of flippant (it’d be in line with what Terry describes as a laissez-faire attitude to publishing). And I am not sure that manuscript editors have (maybe can afford to have) a sense of humor along these lines. I am not offering this as a defense so much as trying to illuminate from my understanding of editorial decision-making.

The paper was published with a different title in the end, “on the reality of the wavefunction.”

One thing that occurred to me is the result really originated through the work of the first author, who is junior, and it seems unfair for it to have been bumped to a less prominent (although still very good) venue because of misperceptions of a second paper put out by co-authors that he’s not an author on.

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By: Matt Leifer

Matt Leifer — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 17:16:52 +0000

@Eugenie Samuel Reich

I will concede that the issue of the titles of the papers is unfortunate and probably did work against the authors. I was never a big fan of the original title of the original paper “The quantum state cannot be interpreted statistically” because it can be, and in fact was, widely misunderstood. Authors use provocative titles in order to garner attention and increase their chances of publication in the big journals. Although I am personally a fan of making titles as accurate as possible, I can’t blame the authors for choosing a provocative title as the practice is pretty common and the strategy obviously worked. Once you are in the game of having provocative titles, the title of the second paper is the obvious logical choice, so I find it hard to blame them for that little extra flourish.

I understand that having two papers with contradictory titles is confusing. However, I would like to think that Nature chooses which papers to publish based on their actual contents, i.e. the only thing about them that actually matters, rather than on superficial things like their titles. If the first paper had not already been accepted for publication, then I may have been a little more sympathetic with the actions of the Nature editor. However, in my opinion, accepting a paper for publication should be considered a verbal contract, and if you are going to break it then it needs to be for solid scientific reasons rather than because you don’t like the author’s perhaps slightly misguided PR strategy.

By: ☆ On the foundations of quantum mechanics « Mostly physics

☆ On the foundations of quantum mechanics « Mostly physics — Mon, 03 Sep 2012 15:33:40 +0000

[...] have an extremely interesting back story, explained on the excellent Cosmic Variance blog in a guest post by one of the authors, Terry Randolph. It gives a rare peek behind the curtain of scientific method, illustrating [...]

By: The ghost of reason

The ghost of reason — Sun, 02 Sep 2012 03:26:41 +0000

hmmm…
Apparently, the GHZ experiment is considered spam by the censors. The comment was eaten twice.

By: Marcus Morgan

Marcus Morgan — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 15:42:42 +0000

You might be interested in flipping through a plain English version of determinism, although perhaps not as you imagined it. It reconciles the diverse findings across the diverse fields of science, and uses (statistical) determinism to do so. It’s my free book, downloadable at http://www.thehumandesign.net (non-spiritual, just particles & fields in the design)

By: cb

cb — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 09:03:25 +0000

A (french) quantum superposition state of the forgotten theoretician Louis de Broglie and the famous experimentalist Alain Aspect would probably give the following moral if it was asked to reflect on the reality of today’s scientific publication

Ne pas interférer avec le processus de publicité de son éditeur scientifique virtuel! /
Do not interfere with the advertising process of your virtual publisher!

signé: le (mé)mor(i)aliste quantique anonyme