FBI files on Richard Feynman published

In 1955 Richard Feynman got invited to a prestigious conference in Moscow, with all the expenses payed by the Soviets.

And here we go: "The FBI found out about the proposed trip while sifting through the trash of Soviet Union Ambassador Georgi Zaroubin’s office."

In the end of the day Feynman didn't go, but the FBI surveillance continued for another few years anyway. Now we can enjoy the original documents from that time.

Take care,

Misha

Two most useful papers of this week :-)

(1) D. Kobak, S. Shpilkin, M. S. Pshenichnikov, "Statistical anomalies in 2011-2012 Russian elections revealed by 2D correlation analysis", arXiv:1205.0741

A solid scientific base for what basically everyone knows already :-) Also, unlike previous analyses appearing on the internet, this one is in English, so everyone can understand it and spread the word.

(2) H. C. Mayer, R. Krechetnikov, "Walking with coffee: Why does it spill?", Phys. Rev. E 85, 046117 (2012). There is also a popular synopsis about it.

I was used to think that spilling coffee while walking (and then making innocent eyes and speeding up) was my own problem, because I basically break everything I touch. This article made me feel normal, just as everyone else. Finally, there is a scientific base for spilling coffee!

Take care,

Misha

Overlap with other authors

If you feel desperate this Saturday night and think life has no meaning – search for "by other authors" on arxiv.org. Of course, it doesn't mean all of these papers are plagiarized, but lots of fun anyway.

Take care,

Misha

Scientific Peer Review, ca. 1945

There were so many remakes on this war movie episode, but this one is probably the best. The embedding is disabled, so here we go: Scientific Peer Review, ca. 1945.

Take care,

Misha

How to write awesome conclusions

A friend of mine Jerome Loreau sent me an article:

R. Breslow "Evidence for the Likely Origin of Homochirality in Amino Acids, Sugars, and Nucleosides on Prebiotic Earth", Published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

This part of conclusions is just awesome:

"...An implication from this work is that elsewhere in the universe there could be life forms based on D-amino acids and L-sugars, depending on the chirality of circular polarized light in that sector of the universe or whatever other process operated to favor the L-α-methyl amino acids in the meteorites that have landed on Earth. Such life forms could well be advanced versions of dinosaurs, if mammals did not have the good fortune to have the dinosaurs wiped out by an asteroidal collision, as on Earth. We would be better off not meeting them."

Take care,

Misha

UPD. The article was temporarily retracted for alleged duplication (self-plagiarism)

Some links for 25.03.12

(1) Picture-hanging puzzles by Demaine and coauthors

(2) What the referee reports on some citation classics might have looked like? (computer science)

(3) Why do physicists need a salary raise?


Take care,

Misha

How long does it take for an article to be accepted?

I posted it on facebook at some point, but it certainly deserves a wider audience :-)

Take care,

Misha

The 1917 in mathematics

You probably know that in 1917 the October Revolution happened in Russia: the bolsheviks got power and created the Soviet Union five years later. The revolution split many lives into the "before" and "after" the 1917.

Here is how famous Russian mathematician Dmitrii Menshov tells about those times:

"...In 1915 we studied function series, in 1916 - orthogonal series. And then the 1917 happened. That was a very memorable year in our lives, this year there happened an event that had drastically affected our future lives: we started looking at trigonometric series."

source (in Russian)

I wish I could care that little about anything that's not science :-D

Take care,

Misha

The Journal of Irreproducible Results

I didn't know that a predecessor of the famous Annals of Improbable Research (whose staff runs the Ig Nobel Prize award) was The Journal of Irreproducible Results.

It was founded almost 60 years ago and apparently became a very credible scientific magazine. At least, some people take it very seriously:

"...JIR received attention from American military intelligence when a copy of one of their articles was found among other papers in an abandoned terrorist headquarters in the Middle East. The article was a highly unrealistic and farcical explanation of how to build a nuclear weapon that some unwitting Al Qaida member had filed away. Nonetheless the discovery prompted a short-lived official investigation..." (wiki)

Take care,

Misha

Vavilov, Cherenkov, and credit for discoveries

We all know that accelerated charged particles emit light - that's how modern high-intensity light sources, synchrotrons, function. Interestingly, uniformly moving particles can emit light too.

The idea goes back to the 1904 Sommerfeld's paper, where he studied the motion of charged particles in a vacuum, and demonstrated that particles flying faster than the speed of light emit radiation even when moving uniformly [1]. Of course, the special relativity theory that appeared next year, rendered Sommerfeld's discovery just a funny mathematical result that has nothing to do with reality, since according to the special relativity no particle can move faster than light in a vacuum.

It's worth noting that the velocity restrictions imposed by the special relativity apply only to a single particle (a group velocity of a bunch of particles can be anything) moving in a vacuum (the speed of light in a medium is much smaller than in a vacuum and particles can move faster than that). However, it took more than 30 years to generalize the Sommerfeld idea to the case of charged particles propagating through a material.

Pavel Cherenkov was pursuing a PhD under Sergey Vavilov, a brother of a famous geneticist Nikolai Vavilov (who was imprisoned and eventually killed by the Soviet regime). Cherenkov was studying the luminescence of uranium salts in solutions irradiated by gamma-rays, and was quite surprised to see the "luminescence" of a pure liquid (sulfuric acid it was), with no salts added. Actually, he was convinced that his PhD work was completely ruined [2].

And it was Vavilov who suggested that this radiation was not luminescence but something completely new, and encouraged Cherenkov to continue the measurements. Indeed, very soon Igor Tamm and Ilya Frank developed a theory for the effect, showing that the radiation is emitted by electrons propagating faster than the speed of light in this particular solution. In 1958 Cherenkov, Tamm, and Frank shared a Nobel Prize for this discovery (unfortunately, without Vavilov who deceased in 1951).

Although Russians call it the "Vavilov-Cherenkov effect", it seems that the name of Vavilov is omitted in the rest of the world where people simply refer to the "Cherenkov Radiation". Why do they?

The funny thing is that immediately after the discovery Vavilov (himself) wrote a paper and submitted it to Nature, where it was rejected (!), and then to Physical Review. This paper had a single author - Cherenkov [3].

I wonder whether such an extreme academic generosity would be possible nowadays :-)

Take care,

Misha

[1] A. Sommerfeld, Göttingen Nachrichten 9, 363 (1904); 201 (1905)

[2] V. L. Ginsburg "About science and about myself" (2001)

[3] P. A. Čerenkov, Phys. Rev. 52, 378 (1937)

How to Publish a Scientific Comment

A nice essay by Prof. Rick Trebino from Georgia Tech (here is the comment he finally published). I heard people complaining that publishing comments is hard  - a lot of politics involved, journal editors don't want to confess in publishing wrong articles, and so on.

Perhaps, it might be a good idea to make a separate journal publishing only comments and replies to them, as guys propose here (in Russian). In such a way one may highlight all the fraud/misconduct/delusion cases via peer-reviewed comments and replies, without any troubles due to politics of a given journal.

No, really, why don't people do that.

Take care,

Misha

Fibonacci salad

Bad food in the university cantine can be described by simple math. Every day they feed us with Fibonacci Salad - it's when you mix a yesterday salad with a salad from two days ago to get the salad for today.

(via Valera Yundin)

Take care,

Misha

For you, little angular momentum fans

- Why in the Varshalovich book active and passive rotations are defined in opposite way to the book of Edmonds?

- Because in Soviet Russia you don't rotate a coordinate system. Coordinate system rotates you.


Take care,

Misha

The new invention of integrals

Oh mein lieber Gott, make me unsee it! Integration was invented only in 1994, in case you didn't know:

Tai, "A mathematical model for the determination of total area under glucose tolerance and other metabolic curves.", Diabetes Care 17, 152 (1994).


Some phrases from the abstract:

...In Tai's Model, the total area under a curve is computed by dividing the area under the curve between two designated values on the X-axis (abscissas) into small segments (rectangles and triangles) whose areas can be accurately calculated from their respective geometrical formulas. The total sum of these individual areas thus represents the total area under the curve...
....The Tai model allows flexibility in experimental conditions, which means, in the case of the glucose-response curve, samples can be taken with differing time intervals and total area under the curve can still be determined with precision.


Take care,

Misha

The swastikas

Researchers have designed the first emitter of circularly polarized light made from a stand-alone semiconductor device:

"Giving Light a Spin", Physical Review Focus

I doubt that a paper containing nazi symbols would be published in Germany nowadays :-)

Misha

Hell for scientists

First Circle: Limbo

"The uppermost circle is not a place of punishment, so much as regret. Those who have committed no scientific sins as such, but who turned a blind eye to it, and encouraged it by their awarding of grants and publications, spend eternity on top of this barren mountain, watching the carnage below and reflecting on how they are partially responsible..."

Second Circle: Overselling

"This circle is reserved for those who exaggerated the importantance of their work in order to get grants or write better papers. Sinners are trapped in a huge pit, neck-deep in horrible sludge. Each sinner is provided with the single rung of a ladder, labelled 'The Way Out - Scientists Crack Problem of Second Circle of Hell"

Third Circle: Post-Hoc Storytelling

"Sinners condemned to this circle must constantly dodge the attacks of demons armed with bows and arrows, firing more or less at random. Every time someone is hit in some part of their body, the demon proceeds to explain at enormous length how they were aiming for that exact spot all along."

Fourth Circle: P-Value Fishing

"Those who tried every statistical test in the book until they got a p value less than 0.05 find themselves here, an enormous lake of murky water. Sinners sit on boats and must fish for their food. Fortunately, they have a huge selection of different fishing rods and nets (brandnames include Bayes, Student, Spearman and many more). Unfortunately, only one in 20 fish are edible, so they are constantly hungry."

Fifth Circle: Creative Use of Outliers

"Those who 'cleaned up' their results by excluding inconvenient data-points are condemned here. Demons pluck out their hairs one by one, every time explaining that they are better off without that hair because there was something wrong with it."

Sixth Circle: Plagiarism

"This circle is entirely empty because as soon as a sinner arrives, a winged demon carries them to another circle and forces them to suffer the punishment meted out to the people there. After their 3 year "post" is up, they are carried to another circle, and so on..."

Seventh Circle: Non-Publication of Data

"Here sinners are chained to burning chairs in front of desks covered with broken typewriters. Only if they can write an article describing their predicament, will they be set free. Each desk has a file-drawer stuffed full of these, but the drawers are locked.

Eighth Circle: Partial Publication of Data

"At any one time exactly half of the sinners here are chased around by demons prodding them with spears. The demons choose who to chase at random after ensuring that the groups are matched for age, gender, height and weight. Howling desert winds blow a constant torrent of articles announcing the success of a new program to enhance participation in physical exercise - but with no mention of the side effects."

Ninth Circle: Inventing Data

"Here Satan himself lies trapped forever in a block of solid ice alongside the worst sinners of all. Frozen in front of their eyes is a paper explaining very convincingly that water cannot freeze in the environmental conditions of this part of Hell. Unfortunately, the data were made up."

via 

Take care,

Misha

Starting your car think about Einstein

Today a funny article appeared online:

R. Ahuja et al., "Relativity and the Lead-Acid Battery", Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 018301 (2011)

Scientists from Uppsala and Helsinki calculated the voltage produced by a lead-acid battery (such as we got in cars). The theory yielded 2.13 V, which is in compelling agreement with experiment (2.11 V).

The funny part is that most of this voltage (1.7-1.8 V) arises from the relativistic effects in Pb compounds.

As the authors put it: "Finally, we note that cars start due to relativity."


Take care,

Misha

8-year old kids publish an article

That's so-o-o sweet: Blackawton et al. "Blackawton bees", Biol. Lett. (2010).

via1, via2


Lev Landau was used to count the age of a scientist from the year he published the first article. Landau himself published his first one at the age of 18, so these kids have at least 10 years of a head start.


Take care,

Misha

Referees' quotes

That's awesome: referees's quotes 2010 from the journal of Enviromental Biology.


"This paper is desperate. Please reject it completely and then block the author’s email ID so they can’t use the online system in future." 

"The biggest problem with this manuscript, which has nearly sucked the will to live out of me, is the terrible writing style."

"Merry X-mas! First, my recommendation was reject with new submission, because it is necessary to investigate further, but reading a well written manuscript before X-mas makes me feel like Santa Claus."


Take care,

Misha

The shortest research paper ever

This one is really the shortest. :-) There is also a referee comment...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1311997/pdf/jaba00061-0143a.pdf

via Daniel Lemire

Misha