Category: Open Science

A new review system for high-risk high-reward scientific proposals

Scientific advancement includes two types: one is incremental and the other is transformative. The incremental one is typically consists of conservative small improvements based on widely agreed frameworks or principles. Obviously, effort of this type is easy to gain support from the community. Contrarily, the transformative one involves disruptive / unorthodox ideas which more often lie outside of the box of our collective thinking or even break some existing principles. Not surprisingly, these kind of so-called high-risk / high-reward ideas and studies are difficult to get funded, especially in the beginning. To balance both types of efforts, open science practices are in need.

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A crackpot’s counter-statement

Some physicists have labeled me as a crack pot when considering my works on the new theoretical framework of mirror matter theory. However, I disagree in the spirit of scientific principles. With three papers published in esteemed journals, seven invited seminars by unrelated people (or more than 10 in total), and grant-seeking in collaboration with several different groups, I don’t think that it is fair to categorize my work on this topic as crackpottery. It is not, especially when considering the unique concrete predictions from my new model that can be readily tested in the laboratory using existing technologies.

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New blog to continue my mission on open science and mirror matter theory

Under enormous pressures, I had to close my former blog hosted at Notre Dame. This is my new blog site that contains all my previous posts and articles. And I will continue my advocacy of open science principles and studies on the new mirror matter theory. I wish that the right of academic freedom and freedom of speech would not have to be such a luxury, at least in the United States. Join me if you believe in freedom and openness in both science and society.

Is arXiv a monopoly bully in scientific publication?

After decades of ever-increasing dominance, arXiv.org has become the largest and most popular storage space or eprint service for scientific publications in physics and other related fields. It would have been the most beneficial to the physics community had arXiv sticked to its original principles for sharing new ideas and works quickly. Sadly, arXiv.org is becoming more and more arrogant these days instead. Veiled censorship by arXiv is making it just like another giant refereed journal system but without any transparency.

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Over-moderation makes arXiv.org another refereed journal

I just so happened to stumble upon a very interesting comment on arXiv’s moderation issues (certainly more interesting than the original blog article). I could not agree more with the commenter. It is almost exactly like what I would like to write about the issue but probably not as well as the anonymous commenter articulated. In particular, I made similar comparisons between science and business; startup companies vs. researchers with risky/novel scientific ideas, etc. I can not help but fully quote the comment here,

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How should private foundations support science?

It is amazing that there exist quite some private foundations in the United States who care about science and are enthusiastic about funding scientific projects. However, a lot of them, if not all, don’t seem to know how they should support science in a complementary way when compared to government funding agencies like NSF and DoE.

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Time to reform peer-review

One of the critical features in scientific research is the application of the so-called peer-review process before a scientific paper is officially published in a journal. Ideally, peer-review, at least seemingly in its original purpose, should serve as a measure of quality control that benefits both the authors and the readers. However, nowadays, it becomes more and more like an obstruction to the advancement of science, in particular, in terms of radically new ideas and directions.

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Old Wine in New Bottles – How does science advance?

A lot of times science advances by incorporating or interpreting old ideas under new scenarios.

For example, Lorentz first proposed the so-called Lorentz transformation, but it was Einstein who correctly interpreted and applied it in his theory of special relativity. Yang and Mills first came up with the SU(2) gauge theory idea for studying nuclear isospin. But it was Glashow, Weinberg, Salam , and ‘t Hooft who found the best application of the idea to the electroweak interaction eventually leading to the most celebrated unification theory (called the Standard Model) for all three gauge interactions of the known elementary particles.

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A dream world and society

I had been totally immersed in further development of my supersymmetric mirror models early this year. The COVID-19 pandemic did not draw my attention until about a month ago when it hit the US really hard. Then all of a sudden it really changed me, not only my life but also my way of thinking. I could not focus well on my favorite mirror-matter projects. I should have finished my invisible-decay paper weeks earlier. Instead it has made me pondering more on what a dream world or society should or could be like. With an open universe of physical objects in mind, what an open world of creatures and an open society of human beings could we imagine?

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