(NOT)serious science

What you won't read in scientific journals

Ekaterina Borovikova, "The Attic"

An article without a single word, a cat in co–authors, dozens of pages of the purest nonsense generated by a computer - you don't expect to see all this in a scientific journal. Nevertheless, in magazines, solid and not so, very interesting publications periodically come across, several vivid examples of which were collected by "Attic".

In 2011, physicists got a sensational result by discovering that neutrinos can move at a speed greater than the speed of light. As it turned out six months later, the result was just a technical error, but during that time dozens of articles were written trying to explain the impossible result. In particular, a group of researchers from the Wills Physics Laboratory in Bristol and the Indian Institute of Technology published an article with a long title: "Can the possible superluminal velocity of neutrinos be explained by the shortcomings of quantum measurements?" and an extremely short synopsis: "Probably not."

In 2014, the journal Evolutionary Anthropology published an article in which there were only two words "Enough is enough". Its author was the curator of the American Museum of Natural History, Ian Tattersall, who had been conducting a debate on biological taxonomy issues on the pages of this journal for a year with his colleague from Boston University.

An even shorter scientific article was published by clinical psychologist Dennis Upper in 1974. He described an unsuccessful attempt to cope with his own creative crisis on his own. It is logical that the article did not contain a single word. It was accepted for publication with the following reviewer's comment: "I carefully examined the manuscript with lemon juice and X-rays, but I did not notice a single flaw either in the design [of the experiment] or in the style of presentation. I propose to publish the work without editing. Obviously, this is the shortest manuscript I have ever seen, but it contains enough details to allow other researchers to repeat Dr. Apper's failure. Compared to other manuscripts, which contain many complex details, it was a pleasure to study this one. Of course, we will be able to find a place for this work in our magazine – perhaps in the margins of a blank page."

Article by Dennis Apper
"Unsuccessful experience of self-recovery from a creative crisis"

The Learned Cat

In 1975, a physicist from the University of Michigan, Jack H. Hetherington, wrote an article on research in the field of low temperature physics, and intended to publish it in the reputable journal Physical Review Letters. However, at the last moment, Hetherington's colleague, whom he asked to read the text, noticed that the author uses the academic "we" ("we conducted an experiment...", "we believe ..." and so on). However, the article was written by Hetherington alone and the use of the pronoun "we" was contrary to the rules of the magazine. The article had to have at least one other author.

The physicist did not want to reprint an article typed on a typewriter, so instead of correcting the text, he indicated a certain F. D. C. Willard as a co-author. F. D. (F. D.) in his new name meant Felis domesticus – a domestic cat, Ch. – Chester, the nickname of the animal, Willard – the name of his parent. The resulting F. D. C. Willard was also an employee of the University of Michigan. The article was published. At first, the true nature of F. D. C. Willard was known only to Hetherington's close colleagues, but soon the deception was revealed, and Hetherington printed several copies of the article with his personal signature and an imprint of the co-author's paw.

An article with a paw print by F. D. C. Willard

Grubber and company

In 2008, the famous "Grubber" was published in the "Journal of Scientific Publications of Postgraduates and Doctoral Students". The text, the full title of which is "Uprooting: an algorithm for typical unification of access points and redundancy", was submitted to the journal on behalf of a fictional graduate student of the Institute of Information Transmission Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences Mikhail Zhukov. It was prepared by the editorial board of the newspaper "Troitsky variant" headed by Mikhail Gelfand. The text was first written by the pseudoscientific text generator program SCIgen in English, then automatically translated into Russian and accepted for publication after paying 4,500 rubles with "small comments from the reviewer". The hoax was revealed by the "Trinity Variant" itself, after which the magazine that published the "Grubber" was excluded from the list of publications of the Higher Attestation Commission.

The "Grubber" had many followers and predecessors. For example, in 2014, two journals at once, the Journal of Computational Intelligence and Electronic Systems and the Aperito Journal of NanoScience Technology, accepted for publication an article written with the help of SCIgen by American engineer Alex Smolyanitsky. The article was signed by the characters of The Simpsons – Maggie Simpson and Edna Krabapple – and a fictional Korean scientist. This did not stop the journals, which, although they claim to be peer-reviewed, publish anything for money.

Such magazines offer their services so persistently that a couple of scientists from the University of New York wrote an article with the title "Get me off your fucking mailing list" (Get me off your f*cking mailing list), in the text and illustrations of which the title was simply repeated over and over again. The article was accepted for publication by the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology with an excellent review by an anonymous reviewer.

The authors of the article "Get me out of your damn mailing list" tried to be clear

Before the advent of computer bredogenerators, the publication of such jokes, of course, was more time-consuming and rare. Nevertheless, they were. For example, in 1965, the article "Some relations between physical constants" was published in the "Reports of the USSR Academy of Sciences". Its author was the aircraft designer Roberto Oros de Bartini, and it was submitted to the journal by academician Bruno Pontecorvo, who for the first time predicted the existence of a neutrino mass. The article supposedly calculates world constants – both real (for example, the gravitational constant, the mass of an electron) and fictional (such as the cosmic radius or cosmic mass). Mathematician Vladimir I. Arnold called it an evil parody of "pseudo–mathematical nonsense", and astrophysicist Boris Stern does not exclude that the article could have been written by de Bartini in all seriousness - there are cases when a scientist who is quite successful in his science goes into pseudoscientific research in another field. Pontecorvo, in this version, submitted an article to the magazine either for a joke or out of pity.

In 1996, an article by Alan Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, "Breaking Boundaries: Towards the Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" was published in the journal Social Text. It is a discussion about physics and its history, stated in some places correctly, in some places not, mixed with quotations from famous postmodern philosophers and loud conclusions about the reform of science at the end: "The fundamental goal of any emancipation movement should be to demystify and democratize the production of scientific knowledge, to break down artificial barriers that divide"scientists" and "the public".

The article, according to the Russian scientist and popularizer of science Sergey Kapitsa, "was an artfully written parody of modern philosophical interdisciplinary research and devoid of any physical meaning." Sokal himself, on the day of the publication of the article, published the exposure of his hoax in a separate article claiming that Social Text had printed "a text richly seasoned with nonsense, since it a) sounded good, b) flattered the ideological prejudices of the editors."

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru  19.09.2016