Comment by jckt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jckt | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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

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