| This solution is like trying to stir a pot of chili with an absinthe spoon. I'm not sure why there's this holy grail of "the unified master version of" whatever. Let me give an example. Say I write a paper on the shape of the non-dark-matter (stellar) density in the milky way by looking at y-type stars and I get an answer x. Now Bob comes along and looks at y2-type stars and gets answer x2. People have the idea that you just go to the first paper, add a footnote to y and x showing alternate values for y2 and x2... But what that doesn't take into account is the fact that I used telescope a (a 10 meter hawaiian behemoth) and pointed it in one beam of the sky for 8 hours to get an ultra-deep pencil; but bob used telescope a2 (a modest 1.8 meter in la palma) that took an all sky survey and only goes very shallow. Now we add this in a footnote. Next, there's a critical difference in the stars we studied. My y-type stars take 8 Gyr just to form, but Bob was using y2-type stars which live anywhere from 100 Myr to 15 Gyr. So I'm looking at the old stars and he's looking at all the stars. Since we know that different age stars live in different parts of the galaxy (old in the halo, young in the disk and bulge), our results are starting to look not as comparable as we thought... but it's minor, we'll add a footnote. But then we realize that, since my old stars are giants and his all age stars are dwarfs, my stars are way brighter than his. Since my telescope is monstrous, and his is a small surveyor, my stars actually end up being observed to a distance 10 times that of his sample. In fact at these distances, the original model is a bad fit and we need to change from a power law to an Einasto profile. Bob can do that too, so our answers are easily comparable, but the Einasto law has more parameters so it would give a worse fit per parameter value than the power law he wanted to use originally... We add an appendix to the paper to explain this bit. Then I notice that Bob's been using infrared data, and in the infrared there's a well known problem separating stars and galaxies in the data on telescope a2. In fact, Bob has to write a whole new section on some probabilistic tests and models he uses to adequately remove these galaxies from his y2 star sample. My telescope, observing in the optical at high resolution, has no such problem, so that section doesn't exist in my paper. Bob looks around awkwardly and stickies a hyperlink to his meta-analysis somewhere in my data section. Then Jill comes along and says she doesn't agree at all with us; she got value x3 using the distribution of dwarf galaxies and if you believe in theory z, then _hers_ is the most accurate answer. And we tell Jill to go write her own fucking paper. |