Sometimes when I talk to experimentalists about their latest results they say something like, "We have this really interesting data. But we can't explain it and so we are not going to publish it until we can explain it." No doubt this is sometimes what referees say.
But, I disagree. The most interesting experimental results have no clear explaination!
Furthermore, many of the "explainations" I read in experimental papers seem to be either naive, wrong, or highly speculative.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
From Leo Szilard to the Tasmanian wilderness
Richard Flanagan is an esteemed Australian writer. My son recently gave our family a copy of Flanagan's recent book, Question 7 . It is...
-
Is it something to do with breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation? In molecular spectroscopy you occasionally hear this term thro... -
If you look on the arXiv and in Nature journals there is a continuing stream of people claiming to observe superconductivity in some new mat...
-
I welcome discussion on this point. I don't think it is as sensitive or as important a topic as the author order on papers. With rega...
Further, and worse, these "explanations" are often then cited as if they are "facts" "proven" by the data!
ReplyDeleteWe theorists do need something to do, after all!
ReplyDelete