Re: A journal for unpublished research?

From: Caroline Thompson (ch.thompson1_at_virgin.net)
Date: 06/28/04 

Date: 28 Jun 2004 13:10:01 -0400

Hi Doug
"Doug Sweetser" <sweetser@alum.mit.edu> wrote in message
news:carv0u$jbt$1@pcls4.std.com...

> I did like the idea of making the comments of reviewers public. If that
was done for mainstream journals, how would that effect things? The more
transparent the better, even peer review. I think any journal that gets
known in any way for lowering quality will necessarily be low traffic
because information quality matters.

In desperation I have put some editorial comments on my web site. They
include the editorial policy statement of Phys. Rev. A on my subject, which
has been indiscriminately applied not only to my own work but, to my
knowledge, as the main reason for rejection of at least one other.

It reads:

"In 1964, John Bell proved that local realistic theories led to an upper
bound on correlations between distant events (Bell's inequality) and that
quantum mechanics had predictions that violated that inequality. Ten years
later, experimenters started to test in the laboratory the violation of
Bell's inequality (or similar predictions of local realism). No experiment
is perfect, and various authors invented "loopholes" such that the
experiments were still compatible with local realism. Of course nobody
proposed a local realistic theory that would reproduce quantitative
predictions of quantum theory (energy levels, transition rates, etc.).

This loophole hunting has no interest whatsoever in physics. It tells us
nothing on the properties of nature. It makes no prediction that can be
tested in new experiments. Therefore I recommend not to publish such papers
in Physical Review A. Perhaps they could be suitable for a journal on the
philosophy of science."

As I say in a new appendix to the latest rejected paper:

"Despite my protestations that the loopholes are there to be discovered, not
"invented"; that it is unreasonable to expect a paper that explains the Bell
test results - essentially a matter of logic and experimental method - also
to discuss energy levels and transition rates; that my ideas do lead to new
physics (in that they give new reason to replace the photon model of light
by a wave model); that they do make testable predictions; and that it is not
philosophers of science who need to know about them but experimenters and
theorists, there seems never to have been any chance of acceptance of my
submissions."

Caroline

Caroline H Thompson

ch.thompson1@virgin.net
http://freespace.virgin.net/ch.thompson1/

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