Discussing New Arxiv Papers on PhysicsForums: Possibilities & Challenges

[garrett]

I've been musing for awhile about using physicsforums as a place to discuss papers that come out on the arxiv. After lurking a bit, it does look like the right place for it. Now a recent development makes this possibility even more interesting: the arxiv now uses trackback, and attaches the trackback links to paper abstracts.

This raises the possibility that people could open threads here discussing papers, and have links to the threads appear on the arxiv abstract pages.

Of course, there are political and technical issues. One of the first being, would the arxiv acknowledge trackback pings from physics forums as sufficiently legitimate to accept. And one of the second... is that I haven't made a trackback before so I'm not at all sure how to implement them.

What do you think?

-Garrett

 

[Chronos]

Interesting. I wonder what the arxiv crowd thinks of this. I imagine some like the idea while others could probably care less - especially if they are personally acquainted with everyone on Earth with enough expertise to make an intelligible remark.

Indeed, we regularly discuss recent arxiv papers - especially here and in the astronomy forums. And we don't necessarily let our own lack of published credentials get in the way of a conflicting opinion. It certainly would liven things up if the authors started popping in here to comment. A few of them already do.

 

[selfAdjoint]

Discussions over on Not Even Wrong suggest that this is not all it seems. There apoppears to be some panel that will only admit "approved" links.

 

[Sam Owen]

I'd like to get Marcus to take us through a paper or two in much the same way as Hypnogoque has with the book on consciouness in the philosophy section. Even if it meant paraphrasing sections in laymans terms and explaining terms of reference

Maybe start off with the "Smolin case for BI"

I'd also like SetAI to do the same with some of the quantum computer stuff of Seth Lloyds

maybe if a select group picked a paper they feel is important enough to dissect for the average Joe I'm sure me and a lot of others would be most grateful

 

[garrett]

Yes, it's not at all clear how restrictive the arxiv semi-moderators intend to be. I propose we try tackling the techinical issue of making a trackback first, and then pick an arxiv paper to discuss and try to make a trackback to that work. I am inexperienced in this, but am foolhardy enough to give it a go.

Peter Woit's journal is where I saw this announced first. And I hope he doesn't think it overshadowed the announcement of his book, which is also an interesting development. But, in an effort to get trackback working from Physics Forums, I'll go ahead and try sending a trackback ping to Peter's page by using this:

http://www.alwardfamily.com/content/tbing.asp

And putting things in by hand... There, now to go see if that works.

 

[garrett]

It does not appear to have worked. Anyone else care to try and figure it out? Or determine it's not possible to send a manual trackback from this Physics Forums thread URL?

 

[marcus]

Hi garrett,
fraid I've nothing useful to say. Just want to express interest. Trackback among physics blogs, with arxiv in the picture, seems like a really good idea. I hope to be able to observe it in use over the coming weeks and months, to see how it actually plays out. Not sure how it will be. Can't be, with a new thing. Hope you figure out the current difficulty you are experiencing

 

[garrett]

Ahh, tricky, but I found the mistake I was making. In doing the trackback ping manually, I didn't see that the trackback link off of the thread on Peter's blog was to a page that immediately redirected to a slightly different url. By using the right link it appears to have worked, as you can tell by the trackback added to the bottom of Peter's thread. I used haloscan to make this one, but I suspect the Wizbang Pinger would have worked as well with the correct link.

Hmm, now it only remains to pick a paper on the arxiv to be discussed and see if they accept the trackback.

Any suggestions?

 

[garrett]

This really is a pivotal moment in the history of physics, or at least in the history of physics publishing. As all working physicists know, the arxiv has become the medium of choice for distributing physics papers to the research community. It is, though, lacking peer review, other than minimal automatic restrictions and some controversial blacklisting. I think it was Paul Ginsparg's original vision to include some form of collaborative filtering to replace the peer review process. And it now appears the arxiv is trying out trackbacks to fulfill this roll.

It still remains to be seen how open the arxiv is to trackbacks from various sources. If, for example, they accept a manual trackback from Physics Forums, that would mean PF members could open threads and link to them from the arxiv article abstracts themselves. This would be great! We must try this.

Since I have been harassing Peter Woit here already, we might as well try a trackback to his manifesto:

Quantum Field Theory and Representation Theory: A Sketch
And open a discussion on it. It really is an interesting paper. As far as I can tell, though I am much more a physicist than mathematician, the main meta idea from the paper is that we should be paying more attention to theories involving the space of connections. This is certainly an idea I can support. In the paper, it seems what he's after is to derive the path integral and action from geometric arguments using representation theory. Sadly though, I wasn't able to follow all the details. It would be great if someone could help clarify what he did here.

But, even if not, this will serve as a test of whether the arxiv accepts manual trackbacks from PF... and potentially open the possibility of using almost any discussion forum to discuss, and have links from, papers on the arxiv.

 

[garrett]

An unofficial disclosure on this issue just appeared in the Cosmic Variance comments:

http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/03/03/crackpots-contrarians-and-the-free-market-of-ideas/#comments

Apparently the arxiv policy is to:
"allow trackbacks only to blogs run by active researchers."

Remarkably, this seems to exclude Peter Woit, regardless of how much I liked his last arxiv paper. It also excludes trackback links from PF.

So, sadly, I imagine what's going on is more like a bunch of guys sitting around deciding which people are cool enough to come to their party.

 

[marcus]

...
Apparently the arxiv policy is to:
"allow trackbacks only to blogs run by active researchers."

Remarkably, this seems to exclude Peter Woit, regardless of how much I liked his last arxiv paper. It also excludes trackback links from PF.

So, sadly, I imagine what's going on is more like a bunch of guys sitting around deciding which people are cool enough to come to their party.

Maybe Peter's kind of critical evaluation should be called "passive" research
not clear how they tell what's active research and what's not

seriously, people who don't recognize the role of critic, dissident, whistleblower are missing some essential cogs

 

[arivero]

Maybe Peter's kind of critical evaluation should be called "passive" research

I like this concept.

I wonder even if a "Journal of Passive Reseach" could be founded. And passively peer reviewed.

 

[marcus]

I like this concept.

I wonder even if a "Journal of Passive Reseach" could be founded. And passively peer reviewed.

does this mean that only passive peers would be allowed to review the submitted articles?
I think it might be more generous to allow active researchers also to review the articles, but then to passively ignore what they say.

 

[selfAdjoint]

I think it's active researchers (in the restricted sense of properly employed active researchers) that are allowed, and passive researchers, such as Woit, who are rejected.

 

[garrett]

I think it's active researchers (in the restricted sense of properly employed active researchers) that are allowed, and passive researchers, such as Woit, who are rejected.

He teaches math at Columbia, occasionally posts research articles, and has a PhD in physics from Princeton. What does it take? If anything, Woit is an anti-crank.

I just can't believe this censorship is the result of a fair system. My guess is it's the entrenched arxiv physics board members protecting their position through nefarious means, because they're in a position to get away with it, for now. The surprise to me is that they got this past Paul Ginsparg.

 

[selfAdjoint]

He teaches math at Columbia, occasionally posts research articles, and has a PhD in physics from Princeton. What does it take? If anything, Woit is an anti-crank.

I just can't believe this censorship is the result of a fair system. My guess is it's the entrenched arxiv physics board members protecting their position through nefarious means, because they're in a position to get away with it, for now. The surprise to me is that they got this past Paul Ginsparg.

He's not employed in the math department at Columbia, but in the administrative department. From a certain angle he looks like someone who has left research to do other work, and occasionally produces a paper, not a deep research one, as a hobby. This isn't my view of him but my conjectural Distleroid view. Jack Sarfatti has a Ph.D. in physics too.

 

[garrett]

I should preface this post by saying my own situation is probably too close to Peter Woit's for mine to be anywhere near an objective view.

I recently turned down a tenure track physics position because it would have taken too much time from my research. After a few years I probably could have obtained some grant funding and carved out time to do research, but these are important years, and I am impatient. Strangely enough, if you want to have large swaths of uninterrupted time to do theoretical research, the best way to do it is avoid traditional academia and get paid, computer related work that takes very little time. If you love teaching you can lecture a class or two, which also gives access to a university library and services. This, apparently, is what Peter Woit has done, and it's what I do. It's an odd path, but the time overhead in pursuing or holding an academic position leaves very little time left for research -- I don't know how so many people do it without performing their academic duties poorly. Me, I made the choice of turning away from a respectable academic physics post in order to do physics.

In my opinion, holding a PhD from a reputable university should be sufficient certification for taking part in the scientific community. As you point out, there will be people such as Saffarti who manage to get that certification while still being waaaaay out there. I think the community is well equipped to handle that -- a process you can see in this recent arxiv paper which came out in response to Saffarti's:
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0602111

What is bad for the community is when qualified and competent voices are silenced -- because they might not be wrong.

 

[notevenwrong]

selfAdjoint,

Sorry, but I am employed by the math department at Columbia, not by an administrative department at Columbia. I've explained this repeatedly elsewhere, but here's the exact situation:

I am a full-time faculty member at Columbia with the title of "Lecturer in Discipline". This is a permanent, off-tenure track faculty of Arts and Sciences position, which includes responsibility for teaching one course each semester (in recent years I have taught graduate courses in representation theory, differential geometry, and quantum field theory), administering the department computer system, and conducting research in my specialty.

No, research is not my hobby, and I happen to think the research paper Garrett is referring to is a rather deep one.

 

[selfAdjoint]

I am deeplly sorry for the error.

 

[notevenwrong]

Thanks, selfAdjoint, for the gracious apology.

 

[selfAdjoint]

So, back to the arxiv "backtrack board" and their curious behavior. This behavior like that of Sherlock Holmes' hound, was that they did nothing. Can we infer anything from the observed facts that "they" allowed Sarfatti to post, but not "Tony" Smith, and yet won't countenance your backtracks. This seems a curious dance, suggesting different people are involved in different decisions. Any rumors?

 

[marcus]

notevenwrong, unless you think it inappropriate for some reason, would it be all right for us to take a look at your online course notes to see anything might be useful to us here?

In some cases I believe you may have posted only the homework problems and such---but those can often give a notion of content---and in another instance IIRC more is available, even quite substantial lecture notes.

I suppose that since you have thought about where QFT may be heading----and the difficulties confronting any approach to QG---your courses in Modern Geometry and more advanced topics might be colored by your research interests. Possibly the treatment of some topics is adapted to current developments in physics----I don't know, but if there is no objection perhaps we will have a look.

 

[notevenwrong]

Marcus,

I only have written up notes for the representation theory course, and those are on-line. For differential geometry and QFT, I just have my hand-written notes to myself, which are kind of a mess. For differential geometry, pretty much everything I did is in one text or another elsewhere, so I don't know if I'll ever try and write those notes up carefully. For QFT, I'd like to write the notes up, hoping to teach this class again in a couple years, and would probably do it then, unless I miraculously get a lot of free time before then.

selfAdjoint,

Pretty much all I know about what is going on at the arXiv is on my blog. No idea at all about the Tony Smith situation, which I gather goes back quite a few years. Why Sarfatti's paper was allowed on gr-qc is also not known to me. Presumably gr-qc has different moderators than hep-th, which may be part of the story

 

[marcus]

Marcus,

I only have written up notes for the representation theory course, and those are on-line. ...

impressive
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/repthy.html

 

[CarlB]

I recently turned down a tenure track physics position because it would have taken too much time from my research. After a few years I probably could have obtained some grant funding and carved out time to do research, but these are important years, and I am impatient. Strangely enough, if you want to have large swaths of uninterrupted time to do theoretical research, the best way to do it is avoid traditional academia and get paid, computer related work that takes very little time.

This is so true. If you want even more time, get a part time blue collar job that is the equivalent of working out at the gym for a few hours per day.

Carl