Well, before I start I should say that most journals I have dealt with have been fair, but I'm having a bad month it seems, and every so often one is entitled to a rant. It's therapeutic for me and I think it is illuminating, maybe, for people to see the agonizing effort I'm making to try and squeeze my papers through peer review.
I've written a paper that gives good observational evidence that quantised inertia / MiHsC models 153 galaxies in the SPARC dataset without dark matter and without any adjustment of any kind. I've discussed this comparison on this blog too. I've submitted the paper on it to four journals so far. I've just received this frustrating reply from the editor of the 4th one:
Dear Dr. McCulloch:
I am writing to you with regard to your manuscript cited above, which you recently submitted to the (name of journal)
In case you are waiting for the scientific reason, that is the end of the message! This isn't the only meaningless response I've had in my career but surely science can do better! The whole point of science is that an empirical, or at least rational, reason has to be given for decisions. The Royal Society decided in about 1600 that science worked better this way. Otherwise, instead of rational progress you get hidden elites deciding whatever they want in their own interests. Recently, as I have written papers that show more and more clearly that quantised inertia works far better than dark matter, I have increasingly received vague responses like this. The editor clearly is unable to find any fault with quantised inertia, and yet is unwilling to even consider it. Why? I don't mind being rejected for a rational reason, but I get a mediaeval or Kafkaesque chill when my papers are rejected for no reason at all.
My reply to the editor was:
Dear Editor,
You have to give a reason, since you represent a scientific journal.
Mike
No response. If you have any advice on which journal I can next submit myself to, please let me know. Readers Digest? I always wanted to submit there..
35 comments:
I'm going to go out on a limb and do some web psychology here: I think most physics journal editors nowadays don't feel safe publishing papers that have "only" data to back them up. They seem to need hand-holding in the form of an approved theory to wrap up the ideas in the paper. If you just try to forge ahead explaining data, then they get nervous.
Maybe you should try to out-Kafka them and weld MiHsC to some other "approved" theory. Call it "hyper-MOND theory" or something ;-)
Answering to the ENEA DeNinno report proving He4/heat correlation in LENR PdD experiments
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/DeNinnoAexperiment.pdf
Science answered
http://www.fusione-fredda.it/clemario/Altri/02-Lettera%20di%20Science.pdf
"
SCIENCE INTERNATIONAL,
23 July 2002
Dear Dr. De Ninno:
Thank you for submitting your manuscript "EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE OF 4He PRODUCTION IN A COLD FUSION EXPERIMENT." to Science. Because your manuscript was not given a high priority rating during the initial screening process, we will not be able to send it out for in-depth review. Although your analysis is interesting, we feel that the scope and focus of your paper make it more appropriate for a more specialized journal. We are therefore notifying you so that you can seek publication elsewhere.
We now receive many more interesting papers than we can publish. We therefore send for in-depth review only those papers most likely to be ultimately published in Science. Papers are selected on the basis of discipline, novelty, and general significance, in addition to the usual criteria for publication in specialized journals. Therefore, our decision is not necessarily a reflection of the quality of your research but rather of our stringent space limitations.
We wish you every success when you submit the paper elsewhere.
Sincerely,
Ian Osborne, Ph.D. Associate Editor
"
It was pushed by a Nobel, Carlo Rubbia, who now seems so frightened that he no more support the domain.
Hi Mike,
Maybe you should word the content differently to soften the blow the reader may have when reading your paper?
You're going from flat earth to round earth model with MiHsC.
Also, most reader know that Casimir effect works at the nano scale. Not Hubble scale. Couldn't this be already confusing from a start?
The people doing peer review certainly approved a lot of paper talking about dark matter... And now, there is a paper saying, DM is BS, found a nicer way to explain that.
This can be really hard to digest imo.
All is about marketing even in science! ;)
Anyway. Keep pushing.
Mike,
The reason you are not getting published is the same reason you won't find The Book of Mormon in the Vatican book store.
Mike,
Not a physicist, but I noticed an error in your political calculus. This:
"Energy. No longer will big companies own the means of energy production, huge oil or nuclear installations, and be able to charge up to the limit."
Should read:
"Energy. No longer will we be forced to generate carbon emissions to power our lives. New sources of energy will enable today's energy companies to generate fuel through things like Fischer–Tropsch processes, drawing excess CO2 from the air to generate the gasoline and the like our existing infrastructure requires.
David: Well, if data is no longer good enough for some journals, then those ones are not doing science. The excuse is often given to me by editors that the theories are now backed by so much evidence that they are unassailable. That is complete rubbish, since they are being supported by an huge amount of invisible (!) evidence (96%..). In science, data, real not imaginary, comes before theories and it always will. I know you are joking but I don't wish to play games, and it not necessary because I've found in the past that journals do eventually accept my papers when I give empirical evidence. This is just a particularly unlucky patch.
Alain: LENR (whatever process it is) is on the rise. It is another unexplained phenomenon that skeptics have been unable to bury.
Mike, sorry, I meant to put a ;) at the end of my last post, but I did want to ask you, do you really think you're theory could lead to something like free energy in reasonable time scales, or is that like the Jetson's projection into the future?
Czeko: OK, friendly persuasion. I need to gently show them the deep beauty of MiHsC, its solution of problems & its potential..
Roy: There is some of that, but I should point out that I am getting some papers published, and I think it is a great credit to some journals and some of the scientific establishment that they are publishing MiHsC, which is very different, but backed strongly by data. A part of the system does still value the scientific method.
Luke: MiHsC does say that the zero point field can be tapped using horizons. I am trying very hard to see practically how that can be done, which is difficult, maybe since I'm not very practical. To do it we need to make horizons and conducting shapes (metamaterials) may enable that. I wrote a paper and a blog here (see below) on a possibility:
http://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/a-shape-is-just-shape.html
Hi Mike,
Not a physicist, but I understand and respect what science and scientific method means.
I'm following your blog for a while and I'm very happy that it exists and that you're sharing with us your exciting, daring and mind-changing ideas ( perhaps world-changing ;).
I'm sure that there are a lot of readers like me in "hidden/shadow" mode and I just wanted to write this little note to express my support and to say: thank you!
Thanks for your response Mike. Ditto to what Alex said, its great to look into what you're doing and learn.
Alexandre & Luke: Thank you for your support. It means a lot. To all those in hidden/shadow mode. Welcome, and feel free to post questions or comments. Creative physics is not an elite pastime and dies every time it becomes so (though it does need the right attitude, and maths to be usefully predictive). To prove this, the two greatest physicists were not professionals, just curious: one was a seemingly unremarkable university graduate at home on the farm, the other of course was a patent clerk.
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." ~~ Max Planck
Dear Mike,
I am sorry to say I am not surprised! However, I am encouraged that someone recognised the disruption to the status quo, and this is how academic denial looks.
Keep providing testable hypotheses, eventually one will resonate.
Although, I think a lot of folks want it to propagate...(I'll see myself out..).
Regards,
PD.
Dear Mike,
It is like that for many scientific papers about alternative theories to the dominant standard model, even for mathematically well-grounded papers consistent with observations. It took about 40 mail posts to academic peer-review journals to Dr J.P. Petit, author of the Janus bimetric theory to be accepted for publication, over months, sometimes years for some papers. The vast majority of those journals didn't answered at all and a few of them didn't transferred the papers to their referees, a laconic answer was even:
"Sorry, we don't publish speculative works."
Can you believe it?
Those papers has been blocked in an eternal "waiting for treatment" parking lot in the ArXiv (even the papers already peer-reviewed and published in a journal!) and the author threaten to be banished from the web site (which is the same as the impossibility to upload a file, but whatever…) if he dared to continue sending mails to the moderators asking the reason why he has been blacklisted from one day to the next. So he had to switch to ResearchGate.
The ArXiv then acted as an anonymous selective post-print server (whereas it has been intended to be an open pre-print platform, before papers are accepted for publication in academic journals). Unbelievable. Who run the ArXiv, who take those decisions and how? Will a journalist ever enquire into such dysfunction?
When he proposed to Jayant Narlikar working together on the theory of gravity he codeveloped with Fred Hoyle, Narlikar answered:
"Unfortunately, my dear colleague, I am also on the black list."
The referees are the same anonymous scientists who then publish about the standard model, and co-opt each others to grow the number of publications and mutual citations of their papers, and deliberately throw a spanner in alternative challenging works.
For sure, there is something rotten in the kingdom of Science.
Dear Mike,
It is like that for many scientific papers about alternative theories to the dominant standard model, even for mathematically well-grounded papers consistent with observations. It took about 40 mail posts to academic peer-review journals to Dr J.P. Petit, author of the Janus bimetric theory to be accepted for publication, over months, sometimes years for some papers. The vast majority of those journals didn't answered at all and a few of them didn't transferred the papers to their referees, a laconic answer was even:
"Sorry, we don't publish speculative works."
Can you believe it?
Those papers has been blocked in an eternal "waiting for treatment" parking lot in the ArXiv (even the papers already peer-reviewed and published in a journal!) and the author threaten to be banished from the web site (which is the same as the impossibility to upload a file, but whatever…) if he dared to continue sending mails to the moderators asking the reason why he has been blacklisted from one day to the next. So he had to switch to ResearchGate.
The ArXiv then acted as an anonymous selective post-print server (whereas it has been intended to be an open pre-print platform, before papers are accepted for publication in academic journals). Unbelievable. Who run the ArXiv, who take those decisions and how? Will a journalist ever enquire into such dysfunction?
When he proposed to Jayant Narlikar working together on the theory of gravity he codeveloped with Fred Hoyle, Narlikar answered:
"Unfortunately, my dear colleague, I am also on the black list."
The referees are the same anonymous scientists who then publish about the standard model, and co-opt each others to grow the number of publications and mutual citations of their papers, and deliberately throw a spanner in alternative challenging works.
For sure, there is something rotten in the kingdom of Science.
Hi Mike,
Just to answer your question, try to publish in PLOS One, they charge 1495 USD but we all will support you. Open a GoFundMe like SeeShells in NASA forum, I and many others will contribute immediately. No doubt.
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/publication-fees
https://www.gofundme.com/
Forget about old peer review editors, frustrating and time consuming process for you, and continue your research. Everybody is going to PLOS One and its impact index in Thomson Reuters JCI index is one of the best. Go ahead, please!!! We need to read your paper now!!!
Dr. Jose Avelino Manzano Lizcano
Dear Jose,
I appreciate your offer and I am sincerely touched, but I don't feel right going that route. Things are not that bad: if Nature rejects it, then I'll put a copy up on research gate. I may indeed go to PLOS One and my university may pay for it (if I explain the importance).
Best regards,
Mike
Great!
PLOS One is a very influential publication and I think is good for you to try it. You can send your draft first, no need to pay in advance, and they are very fast answering you:
https://www.plos.org/publication-fees
Hi Mike,
Afair, Unruh radiation are still hypothetical and not widely accepted. Maybe you should also write a paper about this blogpost https://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.com/2016/09/unruh-radiation-confirmed.html and submit this as a side paper.
Also, there is maybe some clue to find with the LHC datas?
Sometime, solving a problem requires breaking it in smaller parts.
8 scientific papers that were rejected before going on to win a Nobel Prize at least you'll get into a good company
Hi Mike,
Persevere, is all I can offer. But it's a sad, sorry state of affairs that Journals tend to view themselves as bastions of truth, to defend at all costs, rather than sharing venues for ideas (albeit properly framed in scientific vocabulary etc.)
Czeko: Interesting you mention the LHC. It accelerates particles to such speeds around its loop that the Unruh waves they see may be short enough to detect, as in the Beversluis (2002) expt when the plasmons sped around the nanotip.
Zephir: I always admired Enrico Fermi for his simplicity and his 'back of the envelope' approach.
PLOS ONE tries to be theory agnostic and states"All work that reaches rigorous technical and ethical standards is published and freely and immediately available to everyone." Perhaps they will give MihSc/Horizon Mechanics a fair shake.
Hi Mike, how large/distant the Rindler horizon is in comparison to cosmic horizon
http://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.cz/2015/10/explaining-mihsc-with-schematics.html
https://i.imgur.com/OKTzJma.jpg
Zephir: the cosmic horizon is now 8.8x10^26 metres away. The distance to an object's Rindler horizon is d=c^2/acceleration. For the observed cosmic acceleration ~10^-10m/s^2 the Rindler horizon is at about the same distance as the cosmic horizon.
Peter Andrews: I'm about to find out about PLOS One, will submit tomorrow.
Based on some order of magnitude math, a high speed electron gun loop on the order of 30Mm/s with a diameter on the order of 10cm would develop centripetal acceleration corresponding to Unruh waves on the order of the ITU ELF band (3Hz to 30Hz).
With tighter math and tuning to get practical parameters, such an experiment might prove/disprove the horizon emission of such waves using an ELF antenna. The time delay (seconds to horizon) is under 10s.
Turn on the ELF antenna, start capturing data.
Turn on the loop and get it up to speed.
Then vary the speed of the loop (this would require increasing voltage for the gun and the loop coils in the correct proportion).
If the data shows a 1-10 second delay which decreases with loop speed, then horizon emission is the likely culprit with the huge implication that Unruh radiation is a sort of "revealed bath" made up of older horizon emissions from other "nearby" matter (and distant, it would seem).
AnalyticD: Good suggestion. Please see my 2010 paper (EPL, minimum accelerations) where I discuss using the LHC in a similar way - you also have to take account of relativity. Sometime after that Prof David Ianuzzi contacted me to suggest using the ELF detectors used for submarine communication (Clam Lake), and PIGs used in pipelines which emit/detect very low frequencies, and NEMs to create the high accelerations (Nano-ElectoMechanical Oscillators). To pursue, we'll need a friend who has access to this equipment..
Hi Mike,
Bit late to this party, but i'm another lurker coming out of the shadows to voice my support. Not sure what practical support I can offer - I'm a bit bashing Software Engineer, so I've no idea about where one would go to get hold of PIGs, ELFs and NEMs. But if there is something we (disclaimer: I don't speak for the whole lurker community) can do you must let us know, like a go fund me campaign, for instance.
James
James: Thank you for your support and welcome to the MiHsCreants! MiHsC / Quantised inertia will drag physics kicking and screaming towards information theory, so if you have any insights on that, please do write a comment. Maybe the best thing you can do at the moment though is tell people about quantised inertia.
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