On Sun, Jan 31, 2016 at 5:40 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: Once again, ALL real breakthroughs are initially "manifestly outlandish". > Hence > nothing really valuable will ever get published.
Apparently nothing paradigm-challenging, at any rate. There is someone on LENR Forum who does not think that there have been paradigm-changing discoveries in physics. His conceit is that physics has consisted of a series of incremental refinements. >From the Nature article: The grounds for rejection listed on arXiv should not be taken as > comprehensive, Gottesman adds. Moderators are also asked to check whether > the papers meet a certain minimum quality standard, based on their expert > judgement. The standards imposed by arXiv are less stringent than those of > a high-quality peer-reviewed journal, he says. “If a paper is rejected by > arXiv and accepted by a journal, that does not mean that arXiv is the one > that made a mistake.” You know arXiv has gone out on a limb when Nature follows up on a case of rejected papers. I would argue that if a paper is rejected by arXiv and accepted by Physics Letters A, arXiv is the one that has made a mistake. Perhaps this is not clear to them. Also from the Nature article: Ian Durham, a quantum physicist at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire, > agrees that the black-hole paper is wrong but should have been accepted by > arXiv, so that the students could be exposed to community feedback. “I do > not approve of the way in which the arXiv handled this,” he says. “I > understand that they have to protect against crackpots posting truly crazy > papers. But in that case the process should be more transparent and the > moderation must be more meaningful with some feedback provided.” If physicists see themselves as being under siege by crackpots and people writing truly crazy papers right now, once the LENR story gets out of fringe territory into the mainstream news, they will be under siege by journalists and many other people as well. Eric
