Скачать или смотреть Murray Gell-Mann - Proposing quarks. The Physical Review and Physics Letters (115/200)

To listen to more of Murray Gell-Mann’s stories, go to the playlist:    • Murray Gell-Mann (Scientist)  

New York-born physicist Murray Gell-Mann (1929-2019) was a theoretical physicist. His considerable contributions to physics include the theory of quantum chromodynamics. He was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. [Listener: Geoffrey West; date recorded: 1997]

TRANSCRIPT: I proposed the quarks in a letter to the Physical Rev... no, to Physical Review... no, not the Physical Review…

[GW] Physics Letters...

Physics Letters, to Physics Letters. See, I had no objection to publishing in a European journal. I had had so many problems with letters to the Physical Review and Physical Review Letters that I didn't really like to publish there at all. I still don't very much.

[GW] Do you want to tell any stories about that as an interlude, while we're on it, because that's a very sensitive subject,

Well, I find the policies absurd. It's based on a very reasonable hope, which is that by being very strict they will get high quality material. And by requiring that it be important they will get urgent material because it's an urgent type of publication as compared to the main body of the journal, or the main journal nowadays, which is supposed to take… which takes quite a while for publication. However, it doesn't work out very well in practice, because what happens is that articles that represent rather small improvements in our understanding, are… are easily accepted--letters, I should say, letters that represent rather modest improvements in our understanding are easily accepted and printed. Ones that are more revolutionary have a very, very, very hard time. But crank letters, which are the ones that they are presumably trying to avoid, those are often published because the cranks have infinite patience. The serious people get sick of arguing with referees who don't understand what they're doing and so on, but the cranks will wait as long as necessary to get their stuff into print. So that a number of crank letters actually get through, whereas the letters from serious people who are doing something a bit new have a terrible time. I don't care for that. I don't like it. I think it's silly. Physics Letters seemed to be better. They were… if they got letters from serious people they would publish them, except they did have referees, the referees were checking for mistakes. The serious person can easily make a mistake and then the referee's job is to point out the mistake. The referee's job is not to say, gosh, this interesting, really new idea is one that shouldn't be printed. That's not the purpose of a… of a referee in my opinion. So anyway, after all these bad experiences with letters to the Physical Review and letters to Physical Review Letters, I gave up.