Timeline for Is it fair to desk-reject a manuscript because it breaks relativity?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
8 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Mar 21, 2023 at 0:02 | comment | added | Buffy | @WolfgangBangerth, see: daily.jstor.org/why-no-one-believed-einstein | |
| Mar 20, 2023 at 23:53 | comment | added | Wolfgang Bangerth | I'm not taking a position on Einstein's paper, but would like to restate part of my comment with added emphasis: "...does not mean that any paper that violates the current orthodoxy..." Others have made the point elsewhere: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Einstein's paper did. Those 99.99% of crank papers don't. | |
| Mar 20, 2023 at 20:42 | comment | added | Buffy | @NAMcMahon, I think you are misremembering Poincaré and his circle. And, FWIW, relativity is also showing a few cracks. | |
| Mar 20, 2023 at 20:39 | comment | added | N A McMahon | @Buffy by the time Einstein came around the theory of aether was having trouble due to the inability to detect it and the fact you needed to jump through a number of hoops to modify the theory so that non-detection of the aether was predicted. So a paper which proposed there was no aether wasn't going against the "current orthodoxy" since the "current orthodoxy" had already been beginning to break down. | |
| Mar 20, 2023 at 20:11 | comment | added | Buffy | @WolfgangBangerth, then the special relativity paper would have been rejected immediately. It clearly went against "current orthodoxy" which was the theory of aether as proposed by Poincaré, the leading scientific authority of the day. If the editor doesn't see a flaw and the claims are extraordinary then people with extraordinary skills should get a look. | |
| Mar 20, 2023 at 20:07 | comment | added | Wolfgang Bangerth | Just because there are occasional cases where going against current orthodoxy leads to substantial scientific advances does not mean that any paper that violates the current orthodoxy ought to be afforded "review by the big guns". 99.99% of those papers will still be wrong. | |
| Mar 20, 2023 at 17:58 | comment | added | N A McMahon | I think a key point is if the author doesn't comment on it and how it violates whats been seen in the past then the desk reject is warranted, if there is a discussion about how locally we preserve speed of light, but we have constructed an FTL drive, then this isn't a good reason to desk reject. Another example would be what if I said I had an effective algorithm for solving 3-SAT but didn't talk about P=NP then that suggests I don't understand the field and a desk reject may be appropriate (or a response saying that you'd like a section on how this relates to P=NP problem before review). | |
| Mar 20, 2023 at 16:13 | history | answered | Buffy | CC BY-SA 4.0 |