[posix_me_less]

The authors describe an observation of similarity between two plots of completely different things. That could be an interesting paper, if they investigated this similarity with some skepticism and the similarity was shown to be robust, independent of the particular choices they made (bin width, choice of the subset of all spectral lines).

But they apparently did not do their job. Instead, they indulge in speculations about even crazier connections with a past state of the universe or with behaviour and biases of scientific community.

This kind of half-baked observation and speculation is an interesting discussion topic for a lunchtime that can potentially lead to something substantial, but really should not be published as scientific paper.

Also this paper is a good example of what is wrong with physics academia (and perhaps other academic workers as well). 4 authors, 18 references to other people work, and a statement of conflict of interest.

Sad state of physics, year 2020.

[kaffeemitsahne]

Do you think there should be more, or less authors? And more, or less references? I don't get your objection.

[SiempreViernes]

Uh, they could as a start include the theoretical predictions for all spectral lines?

Instead they take the subset of lines that have ended up in one (out of several) databases on spectral lines and, without any real motivation, declare this to be a complete sample.

Finally, putting the main result (Figure 2) before the section on data collection ("Experimental Section") is just rude.

[foobarbecue]

Also, is it bad that the conflict of interest was disclosed?

[posix_me_less]

It's a meaningless section.

[foobarbecue]

Are you saying that conflict of interest disclosures in general are meaningless? Or this one is just poorly implemented? I'm having a hard time interpreting your meaning here.

[posix_me_less]

I do not know in general, but in case of paper on theoretical physics, I have trouble seeing how such a statement provides anything to the reader.

[posix_me_less]

In the context of what this paper brings to the reader, this should not have been published. If the paper at least did the chores and proposed some scientifically valuable hypothesis, then it could be OK to publish. But. If one guy had the original idea, worked his way through the required steps and the other discussed with him a little, he should have published himself, possibly with acknowledgement of the others. There is no work for 4 people here. The references are ridiculously long and nobody is going to read them all in order to "get" this paper.

Clearly, this is a product of the cultural, societal and economic pressure to "get published" often, quality or value be damned. My cousin who knows a little about science or academia once told me scientist should publish at least once a month, otherwise they do too little work. Obviously, the academia agrees.

[kortex]

What are the "two plots of completely different things?" You have two plots of intensity vs wavelength, where one is spectral intensity, and the other is a histogram binning.

On its face, there's zero reason why these plots line up as well as they do, this goes beyond conincidence.

[posix_me_less]

"two plots of completely different things" is not meant as criticism, just a description of what the paper is suggesting. It's ok to seek and investigate similarities between completely different things.

They are plots against wavelength axis, yes, but the "things" plotted on y-axis are completely different concepts.

[jhoechtl]

Sounds like someone in defence of citation circles.

I welcome the fresh view of the team. A genuinely new observation brought to paper instead of dead-chewing (albeit rigorously citing) papers of academic brethrens.

[posix_me_less]

I think those references are too trivial and too numerous.

[SiempreViernes]

They also just take NIST as the holy source of truth, which seems highly suspicious if one was out to get some sort of fundamental truth in the wavelength distribution of the lines.

[simplicio]

Eh, one of their proposed explanations (really, their only explanation beyond the vague "coincidence" and "unknown physical law") is specific to how the NIST database is compiled, so disagree they're taking them as a "holy source of truth".

[SiempreViernes]

I can't find any description by the authors of how NIST is compiled besides "comprehensive", so I don't understand what you refer to.

[cyphar]

They're referring to this argument for where the distribution may come from (where the authors "model" the scientific community -- namely the contributors to the NIST database -- as a Boltzmann distribution in possibly the most hand-wavey argument I've seen in a paper):

> An entirely different yet equally fascinating possibility would be that, in an abstract sense, the scientific community itself can be interpreted as a thermodynamic ensemble. In this line of thinking, the individual members would be subject to a Boltzmann distribution in “curiosity” associated with a “temperature” determining how likely each researcher is to carry out research more or less closely tethered to a specific area of interest.

It's a cute idea, and maybe something I'd enjoy arguing over a drink. But the obvious problem with such a model is that there is no theoretical basis to argue it from -- if only because Boltzmann distributions (as with most thermodynamic effects) only start to apply when you have so many indistinguishable particles and thus so many microstates that multiplicative factors on the scale of Avogadro's number become trivial. Scientists are neither indistinguishable, nor are they this numerous.

To be fair, the effect described here is something that I wouldn't expect a-priori. I'm just disappointed the paper doesn't really offer much of a conclusion (or even hints at a decent argument).

[SiempreViernes]

> To be fair, the effect described here is something that I wouldn't expect a-priori.

True, but I'm not that convinced the Boltzmann really is the most natural distribution to claim fits. Especially on the blue side it looks like the residuals could be pretty atrocious. Why didn't they try to some other right-skewed distributions? You could try a log-normal for instance, that would have a much simpler interpretation.

I think this crazy thermodynamic idea is really the entire motivation for the paper, and explains why they didn't really spend any effort exploring it.

[cyphar]

I guess my point is that I wouldn't necessarily expect there to be any clear trend to the set of all spectral lines. The Boltzmann fit looks fairly iffy to me as well -- it seems like they just picked an arbitrary distribution (which had a cute pseudo-explanation) that was unimodal with a log tail.

One possible explanation I thought of (which I'm surprised the paper doesn't consider) is whether this is just showing the distribution of wavelength ranges of spectrometers that researchers are using. I tried to find some examples online, but I guess you'd need to be involved in the field to know what exactly to search for.

[crankylinuxuser]

Or it can be seen as "we need some standard, so we'll use NIST".

Then the data is at least normalized with respect to NIST.

[SiempreViernes]

You'll have to explain why using a single database, when there are several available that focus on being extra reliable on different elements, is a defensible choice.

I fully understand "let's just use NIST because that's easiest", but that's not a serious attitude if you want to claim something about reality rather than the NIST database itself.

[crankylinuxuser]

I see that you only attacked the data source, NIST. You didn't attack/discuss normalization of said data, which was 1/2 of what I said.

[SiempreViernes]

What normalisation? There's certainly no clear talk of normalisation in the paper.