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Comment by nottim | Hacker News Reader

The first sentence of the abstract is a helluva mouthful: "We observe that the three-gluon form factor of the chiral part of the stress-tensor multiplet in planar N = 4 super-Yang-Mills theory is dual to the six-gluon MHV amplitude on its parity preserving surface."

For any of you paper-writers out there, some advice: the abstract shouldn't contain undefined acronyms, and should be readable by anyone who you would expect to be at a conference where you present your paper. Exchanging a bit of the technical correctness for readability is the entire point of the abstract, and the source paper's abstract could really use some work.

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I have a PhD in this field. I understood everything in the title straight off, apart from the context of which 'parity preserving surface' they were talking about (which was fine). I think this was a concise and well-written abstract, which was easily readable within the target audience. There are very many different concepts that you have to build on and learn to be able to write something like this paper. It's unfortunate that abstracts in the field are not more accessible to a wider range of people, but I don't see an easy solution to that. If you went to the yearly conference on this field and started asking people to define 'MHV' in their abstracts I don't think you'd get many converts. This acronym is cryptic, unintuitive and completely ubiquitous and ingrained in the literature.

Every writing course I attended in grad school told us that the first sentence of the abstract should be understandable by any scientist, the second sentence should be comprehensible to a scientist in a related field. After that, you address the specialists community. However, it seems that more and more people are skipping the first and second sentences and jumping directly to talking to specialists. I have mixed feelings about that. On one hand, it's nice to skip the generalities but at the same time some times its nice to have some context.

That sentence is very readable for anyone who would be at a relevant conference.

As an experimental physicist, everything but the MHV (maximally helicity violating) was readable/comprehensible to me. Theorists in the field will read that as easily as breathing.

Context is king. It's the abstract of a paper, not simple Wikipedia. Everyone reading the paper itself is expected to either know or make the effort the become knowledgeable enough to understand. In any other context, I'd agree but we're taking about a paper on theoretical physics on a potential new interaction lol

I think this would be a great task (and challenge) for AI: Make abstracts understandable to a wider audience.

I take it as a sign that I would have to understand a bunch of prerequisites before I could understand the content of this paper, its implications, and the possibilities it raises.

It's a paper, not an introductory textbook...

Precisely...

In a field like this, the abstract is more about conciseness than accessibility. It's for a fellow specialist skimming through dozens of papers looking for something interesting.

Do you maybe have a concrete suggestion for how you would rewrite it? Which parts do you think are not understandable for anyone attending, say, the annual Strings conference?

> and should be readable by anyone who you would expect to be at a conference where you present your paper.

Yes, I guess this is pretty much the case here. There's no much way to simplify this

Conciseness is important in abstracts and it beats general simplifications.

The abstract looks perfectly fine - it is written so anyone working in this area would know what the paper is going to do. Writing it at a basic level would either require the abstract to be absurdly long or to leave unspecified what the paper contains.

I'm not in particle physics, but have read textbooks and papers in many areas of theoretical physics, and I understand enough of this abstract to know what it's going to do.

If MHV is an acronym you think should be expanded, it is not. There's well over 500,000 hits on google for MHV physics, and only 2900 hits for the expanded term. It is a widely used term in the field.

They're not writing for you.

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