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I agree. His attempts to get his type of paper being published in established physics journals are sort of explained in his last paragraph though. He thinks that there's "room in the world of publishing for science motivated primarily BY public interest, instead of IN THE public interest". Certainly there's no reason why such a journal to exist--free speech and all.

I'm not a physicist, but certainly saying that such a journal does physics is a bit of a stretch? Ignoring the fact that he hopes such a journal could accept hard sci-fi (of which I am a fan), how could such a journal be maintained properly if it was driven "BY public interest, instead of IN THE public interest"? The general public is ignorant about science, especially deep science -- which is absolutely fine. Funding agencies (as I understand them) are here to help us decide what to do so that not all of us have to go through graduate school to get an idea about the state of science. Moreover, it sounds to me that he wants a more "democratic" process of science. Democracy makes sense in politics -- we vote on politicians because they have the power to change our lives. But scientists, especially physicists, are powerless to change Mother Nature. Regardless of who we choose, as long as the physics is done half-decently, we're going to get to more or less identical answers.

I read him not as suggesting that the public should decide what is good science, but in suggesting that it would be beneficial for more actual science to be done on subjects that interests the public, even if more conventional journal considers it beneath them and funding agencies don't consider them important.

Such as this time travel paper: Clearly it capture public imagination, even if the result was negative.

I'm honestly not sure what outcome he's asking for, though. This paper did capture the public imagination! He put it on arXiv.org (where it was accepted after their very minimal but non-zero peer review), and within days he was doing a whole bunch of press interviews.

What was he hoping to accomplish beyond that? Is this about getting another entry on the peer-reviewed publications list in his CV? The paper probably isn't worth that, at least as work in physics. But he's welcome to add a section to his CV about "public outreach" and talk about it there: he'd probably have a lot to say.

He wants more papers that capture the public imagination?

Can you elaborate on "beneficial"? Beneficial for what? Sure, perhaps the time travel paper captured the public imagination. But so does movies and novels.

Though I didn't see him talk about it at length in the blog, I can see that he might have meant that such a journal would be good for interesting future generations in science. But is this really a good idea? They would come into physics, or whatever, with the expectation that such research actually constituted hard science. It is not.

Interesting future generations about science is hugely important, but this is just a dishonest way of doing so.

And also, this may sound a bit harsh, and I might be out of line here, but I think the point of the paper was really to get some attention. And personally I think there's a trend of this happening in physics' interface with the public -- scientists wanting attention for themselves, apparently for the sake of future interest in the field. There seem to be a lot of popular science books these days, many written by genuinely brilliant scientists, who seem to be trying to sell their own theories as truth, like the various string theories and other GUTs. While I am sure that the authors don't really mean to say that their theories have passed the sniff test of science, and that we can put their theories on the same shelf as GR and QM, my observations from friends and people on the internet tell me that a lot of them just gobble it up as truth.

PS: Not saying that the GUT formulations are in anyway comparable to Nemiroff paper.

Can't edit, so correction: "...no reason why such a journal should not exist..."

Yeah, he described Omni magazine basically didn't he?

Which was pushed by "public interest" into a lot of fringe silliness and ads from outright con artists selling pseudoscience.

>> motivated primarily BY public interest, instead of IN THE public interest

Isn't this what the Discovery Channel or a show like Myth Buster's does?

This is a good question, although if that is the case, it appears that public interest mainly involves fire, guns, explosions, and a risk of self-harm.

Yes, my first thought reading through this was surprise that he didn't try any non-physics journals. I think any number of journals devoted to a topic like network science, internet research, web science, etc., would have found the topic of the study more within their area of interest. They would also be able to provide better peer review of the methodological/modeling choices, which mostly aren't related to physics.

So then why didn't the editors suggest it for a more appropriate journal rather than call it unpublishable entirely?

One guess is that the average physicist, which might include both the journal editors and the author of this paper, have no clue about journals outside of physics. :)

Probably because the editors are so siloed in their physics mindset that they aren't aware that there are journals in these fields, or if they are aware, they almost certainly don't know which journals are reputable.

Because (for example) I, as a physicist, didn't even know enough to immediately suggest topics like "network science, internet research, web science", and instead said the work was "sociological(?)".

For all we know from this story, the rejection letters might have suggested trying a non-physics journal. But even then, the result reported here just provides weak evidence supporting an overwhelmingly expected null hypothesis ("time travel doesn't happen"). I wouldn't expect physics journal editors to be good judges of whether a possibly novel method would be publishable in another discipline when it did not lead to a noteworthy result.

You don't have to be aware of any of that stuff in order to know the difference between "this can't be published" and "this can't be published in a physics journal".

The latter is (perhaps) good judgment; the former, a poor understanding of the limits of one's expertise.

I can't seem to find the claim in the post where the journal editors actually said "this can't be publishable, period".

I am pretty sure that when the physics journal editor rejects your paper, she isn't even actually saying "this can't be published in a physics journal", she's really saying "this can't be published in this physics journal" (unless she says otherwise, explicitly, of course).

> she isn't even actually saying

Why not go with "they aren't even actually saying" rather than the faux-affirmative-action sexism of using "she" there? This really grates with me, even more so when used with traditionally male-dominated roles, such as physicists or system administrators. Yes, you're freaking out the squares with your right-on craziness, but it's really rather childish. If you (100% rightly) want to be non-sexist, use a gender-neutral phrase, such as in my example above.

You're easily irritated, no?

Maybe I'm a girl and, try as I might to say "he" all the time (to avoid comments like yours), the one time it slips and I say "she" the Internet thinks it's all about some "femi-nazi" agenda of mine?

Chill out and talk to me about sexism/feminism/SJW when it's actually relevant (clue: not here).

Maybe. Or maybe your wording was intentional, politically motivated, and equally as out-of-place as the attention it predictably draws.

I feel bad derailing this thread further, but you know bloody nothing about me.

My comment was on-topic. grkvlt's was not, regardless of what he thinks I meant with that one pronoun (which was wrong, anyway).

Maybe you should realise that sane women, just as much as sane men, don't think pronouns will "solve" sexism. If I'm referring to a specific person, I'll be specific. If it's some random imaginary person, it's none of your bloody business what pronoun I choose.

Sure, but if I were to strip away the inflammatory comments, I'd still be left with the question of why you chose to assume the journal editor was female. Since this is unusual in the physics world, it sort of looks like you have an agenda. Therefore, it would have been more helpful to use gender neutral language, rather than simply flipping the gender over and hoping that makes up for it.

Your trolling is transparent and uninspired. 2/10.

You're assuming they actually read the paper. I'm guessing the editors simply rejected it based on the title / topic. This might be understandable, given that they probably get lots of cranks submitting similar sounding papers.

On a different note, I think you have the responsibilities of authors and editors mixed up: it is up to the author of a paper to select an appropriate journal and weigh their chances, the editor is only responsible for the quality of their own journal. Yes it would be great if they also gave you free advice about other journals, but it's really not their job.

> So then why didn't the editors suggest it for a more appropriate journal rather than call it unpublishable entirely?

Because knowledge of out-of-domain journals to which an out-of-domain paper might be appropriate is neither the role nor general competency of a journal's editors (OTOH, general familiarity with the published work in the area in which you are attempting to publish, which necessarily includes some familiarity with the venues in which works in that field are published, is part of the role and presumed competency of a researcher in any field.)

I'm not suggesting they should have said, "Resubmit this to the International Journal of Experimental Sociology." Just "Hey, this is more of a question for sociologists; maybe try that kind of journal."

Much like how Sokal criticized Social Text for not recognizing when something was a question for physicists.

Why should they have to give less direct feedback or make suggestions like that? To avoid hurting his feelings? To point him in the right direction so he knows what to do next? The author is a tenured university professor, not some high school student.

Why do you say less direct? The impression I get from the article is that none of the article actually gave a specific reason why the paper was not appropriate for the journal.

EDIT: The second "the article" should read "the editors".

Because it is blindingly obvious that his paper had nothing even remotely connected to physics research in it.

Did you know Sokal submitted his paper to several journals before getting accepted? And that he rewrote it to make it appeal to what he thought the editors would want to read? The paper wasn't even peer reviewed, so the fact that it was published is not significant at all, even though I found the discussion interesting and justified. I just think that the deception he used was not warranted and only served to generate attention and sensation.

I agree. "How I Tried to Solve a Tough Physics Problem Only Using Google Searches" isn't a classic research paper, and seems to be no surprise that it didn't get accepted in the biggest physics journals.

And I'm not convinced that's publishable in any sort of competitive journal.

I wholeheartedly agree with the vast majority of your comment. However, I take issue with this last sentence. A novel technique is worth publishing even if it is only used in a pilot study of questionable value. Now, anyone can take the technique and expand it to a far greater number of search terms. They can also attempt address potential drawbacks of the technique (as you have done) in future studies.

My decision to use the weasel word "competitive" there was based on very much this point. My reading of the article suggested that this author was submitting his article to fairly prestigious journals: two of the three were "a classic physics journal... [whose rejection letter was] signed by a very famous physicist" and "a really famous journal".

The other was merely "a reputable physics journal" (whose editorial board had to spend time soliciting papers), which sounds like a more reasonable target. I'm not saying he should have been trying to publish work like this in a journal that has no standards and will print anything, but I think it needs to be aimed at a journal whose rejections are primarily for lack of quality rather than for lack of importance.

And a non-physics journal at that level, in particular.

The biggest issue that I see with publishing this work in a physics journal is that although time travel is certainly a concept in physics, the research involved here is not physics research.

To clarify, physics papers about time travel are published from time to time. There was a group at the University of South Carolina that had a hobby of doing this.

The author isn't the first person to think of this, most notably Steven Hawking tried something similar

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/07/02/stephen-hawking-t...

I think the main difference is that this paper outlines a method to possibly find time travelers that weren't necessarily intending to publicize their existence, while Hawking's method presupposed that the time travelers

a) Had access to that specific time

b) could get to his specific location

c) did not mind it being known they were time travelers

d) viewed his party was worthy of their attention.

Can someone explain the different views of time? If someone were to time travel and make the mistake of doing a google search like that, then after they are caught, couldn't they go back and tell themselves not to do the search?

By "different views of time" do you mean a scientific view, or a philosophical view? If it's the scientific view, the idea regarding time and macroscopic bodies -- general relativity -- specifically what you'd need to describe someone travelling in time, explicitly forbids that, so I don't think there is actually any possible scientific answer to your question.

Philosophically, but something vaguely based on physics, there's the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. But as far as I know the "physical meaning" has no bearing on science. There's a good sci-fi novel about a universe where the MWI is true -- Anathem by Neal Stephenson.

For the sake of nitpicking, it was never clear to me that MWI was true in Anathem. In any case, you need much more than that to reproduce Anathem's plot -- it runs on consensus deciding reality.