July-August, 1999
The following is the latest in a series of rejections by the two most important journals in the field of quantum entanglement: Physical Review Letters and Physical Review A. I have included their standard attachment with instructions to the referees. You may find it of interest.
With my last submission, I had hoped that correspondence from the previous one was going to be sent out to referees, accompanying the paper. This appears not to have been done, though they did apparently send out new copies of the previous version. Had they sent the correspondence, the otherwise insuperable barrier to new ideas - that the author is normally given no opportunity to discuss and reason with the referees - could have been circumvented. I have in previous efforts tried the only option officially available, an appeal, but the appeal procedure is concerned purely with protocol, not with the scientific content. [Later information, August 1999, seems to indicate that this applies to PRL only, and the appeal system for PRA may be more reasonable, but I was not informed automatically that it even existed!]
As it stands, all my answers to criticisms (many of which are repeated in my response to this rejection) have been ignored. I did not at first intend to respond directly to PRA, as they seemed clearly not interested. However, when I told them I thought there's was a travesty of the peer review system and informed them of my intention to post this material on my web site, they did reply.
Unless a miracle happens, you see here a prime example of the failure of the system. "Science" is supposed to be self-correcting. It is not if journals refuse to publish corrections!
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1999
From: PR/A-email
To: c.h.thompson
Subject: ac7179 and av6320
Cc: pra@aps.org
AV6320
How Bell tests fail: The ``loopholes'' that favor local realism
Thompson,Caroline H./
AC7179 Subtraction of ``accidentals'' and the validity of Bell tests Thompson,
Caroline H./
Dear Dr. Thompson:
The above manuscript has been reviewed by one of our referees.
Comments from the report are enclosed. We regret that in view of these comments we cannot accept the paper for publication in the Physical Review.
In accordance with our standard practice, this concludes our review of your manuscript. No further revisions of the manuscript can be considered.
Sincerely,
Bernd Crasemann
Editor, Physical Review A
__________________________________________________________________
Report of the First Referee:
This is a report for both ms AV6320 and ms AC7197. The first paper (AV6320) is identical to the previous version. I therefore assume that it was not resubmitted for publication (otherwise I would reconfirm my previous report).
The second manuscript (AC7197) is, to say the least, surprising. It contains no new results, no practical suggestions, no proposals for new experiments. It does however contain some irrelevant information (see for example the end of the Introduction, page 3; there are many more examples in the text and in the footnotes) as well as 3 appendices in which previous work (by other authors) is reported. The author claims that these derivations "are rarely reproduced." I wonder why they should be reproduced: they were published in PR and PRL, they are available on the web, and I have been able to find them even in universities of developing countries.
The model in Eqs.(3)-(5) has been discussed many times in the literature. I would like to stress that one of the main criteria for a paper to be published in PRA is that it contains "new results in physics."
In the light of the above remarks, regretfully, I cannot recommend this paper for publication in the Physical Review.
__________________________________________________________________
Report of the Second Referee on MS AC7179 by C. H. Thomson
In this paper the author questions the validity of the procedure consisting in substracting accidental coincidences in experimental tests of Bell's inequalities performed by A. Aspect and collaborators.
As far as I know, this question was previously raised by T.W. Marshall and coll. (ref [3] of the present paper), and it was answered by Aspect and coll. in ref. [6], by doing an experiment where a clear violation of Bell's inequalities was obtained without any substraction of accidentals. This confirmed a previous experiment done in 1972 by Freedman, who used another source and different polarizers.
However, the author simply discards the experiment of ref. [6], just because it is done with two-channel rather than one-channel polarizers. This argument appears to me to be very unphysical. It seems that when getting the answer to one question, the author refuses to hear it by shifting to another question. It is not so clear why Freedman's experiment is also discarded, except again if the author does not want to hear the answer.
I have a few more technical remarks : * the tests of IB done with one-channel polarizers must use the so-called "no enhancement" hypothesis, while the tests done with two-channel polarizers may use either the "no enhancement" hypothesis (if the normalization is done by withdrawing the polarizer), or the "fair sampling" hypothesis (if the normalization is done by the sum of the + and - channel). For standard two-channel multidielectric polarizers, it is quite obvious that the two normalization will give very similar results. Actually, the total number of pairs entering the polarizer (which is used for normalization purpose) does not involve the polarization properties of the pairs, but only the properties of the source and the overall collection efficiency : unless many things are wrong with physics, the different possible ways to measure this number should give the same result.
* from what is written in the text it appears that the author does not have a very clear idea about what is "correlated" or "uncorrelated" emission by the source. In the present context "uncorrelated" means that the photon scattering events of the laser light by the different atoms are independant. The fact that photons are scattered independantly, despite the fact that all atoms are irradiated by the same lasers, is a basic property of spontaneous emission. But maybe the author does not admit that either.
* the main goal of the author seems to advocate that more tests, and better ones, are carried out. Since 1981 this occurred anyway, and all tests, including the recent "time varying" ones, agreed with QM. This is maybe an indication that the world IS quantum mechanical. In case the author still disagrees, I would recommend to concentrate criticisms on the most recent experiments, which are usually also the most advanced technically.
As a conclusion, I do not recommend this paper for publication. __________________________________________________________________
rvw_stndrds_au_pra.asc, 6/95
PHYSICAL REVIEW A
To our Authors:
In light of the critical rate at which Physical Review A is growing, we are sending the following note to referees. Because the message affects authors equally, we enclose this copy for your information.
The Editors
Notice to Referees
Editorial procedures of the Physical Review are being adjusted to face problems caused by the journals' relentless growth, as described by Editor-in-Chief B. Bederson in his 1 July 1995 editorial. We intend to follow the recommendations of the APS Task Force on Journal Growth (see the article on page 1 of APS News, May 1995) to enforce acceptance criteria stringently and to ``act more promptly and resolutely in making decisions to accept or reject manuscripts, on the basis of one referee report whenever possible.''
The central role of referees in the editorial process is reemphasized in this approach. We appeal to you to provide an incisive, well-justified report as promptly as feasible, indicating explicitly whether in your judgment the manuscript qualifies under each of the following primary criteria:
* Does the paper contain new results in physics that significantly advance the field?
* Is the paper of high quality and scientific interest?
* Does the subject of the paper fall within the purview of Physical Review A, or would it be better placed in another journal?
* Is the manuscript in satisfactory form?
We thank you in advance for your help.
The Editors