Death by Peer-Review: Analysis of the 1938 Ives-Stilwell Experiment as a sociological test of the legitimacy of so-called peer-review

The following dossier documents the vagaries of the peer-review process, to which we submitted our paper [ 1] on a novel analytical treatment of the 1938 Ives and Stilwell experiment. The reader may judge for him/herself what has happened to science in the so-called "open societies": the journals' first and foremost concern is bureaucratic procedures (such as getting copyright transfer before the paper is even reviewed!), while their editors and reviewers sound much like parrots with a very restricted vocabulary and an overt incapacity to read, let alone think, compute or analyze. The national and global societies are reaping the fruits of an ever-spreading collective dearth of intelligence, which is effectively also the slow death of science.

Technological development may well continue to appear as if unfolding an infinite phylum, dazzling consumers with ever more sophistication - the perpetual re-invention of the nail and the screw; micro-electronic imprinting of behavior; secret X-rays at airport terminals to deter a mad horde of bombists; marginally more efficient ways of burning oil and coal; cars and airplanes that no one can control if their computer systems shut down; ever greener plastics that decompose faster, pollute drinking water, rupture at the drop of a hat to spill one's groceries or leak one's garbage everywhere; better chemotherapeutic cocktails that kill more slowly and serve to moderate iatrogenic murder; and an unending array of other such technological feats that exhibit and explore the entire mediocrity of the endeavours of human beings. But science, or novel understanding, shall be no more. It will fade into the growingly imaginary nonsense of separate specialties. Only fads have now the right of access to the mainstream, so-called "peer-reviewed", publications.

One might feel revulsion with this state of affairs, but it is not worth the revulsion. It is only worth a good laugh, like that which one can extract from the pages of the present text. For it is that laugh which contemplates the immensity of the human disaster, confronted - as it is - with the challenge posed by the potentialities of actual science and what could have been possible but was arbitrarily ruled out, without so much as a chance to be heard.

When it comes to physics, the present text adds a few more lessons. Above all, it demonstrates that belief in the supremacy of Special Relativity (SR) is an arbitrary, religious and irrational belief. Concerning its science-fictioneering of a "time-dilation", all it has to vouch for it is the phenomenological coincidence of the so-called "ether-independent relativistic Doppler formula" with the result that can be independently arrived at solely on the basis of the geometric law of the composition of velocities. But this happy coincidence only applies - insofar as SR is unwittingly concerned - if no electric or plasma collisions are involved, and if collisions with the rest gas are minimized.

Precisely, our paper [ 1] demonstrates how application of the relativistic formula, such as it has always been practiced, fails when plasma collisions occur - and, all the more so, when the collisional vectors coincide, in parallel or antiparallel directions, with the vectors, forward and backward, of the observed Doppler-shifted light. That is what happened in that Ives and Stilwell experiment back in 1938, and that is why it matters to resurrect the full breadth of the unresolved scientific problems regarding the correct determination of particle velocities and plasma interactions. This failure of SR - and also LLR - is not due to some invalidity of the second-order effect, but to its inconsistent application due to absence of a collisional treatment. That is what our paper proposes - to treat the second-order effect, in the absence of any invocation of LF transforms, consistently with the geometric law of composition of velocities, and apply it to both particles of a simple collision that results in photon emission. The aetherometric results should have spoken for themselves. It was incumbent upon any physicist worth his or her salt who reviewed the submission to have figured that out.

It is interesting to correlate the sociology of the unethical, illegitimate and a-scientific practices of mainstream science publications exemplified in the events detailed below, with the aetherometric physics of the linear, transverse Doppler shift of light. For, all the referees and editors drew a fairly rigid and intractable line - something like this: "only the increased resolution of the measurement of the second-order effect matters, and this, lo and behold, is the great achievement of the past five decades, from masers to heavy ion storage rings". Any thought of novel and more accurate explanations has no place here. When our referees invoke "new results", they intend this to mean measurement improvements of the 'same results'. To none of them has it occurred that, for results to be the same, the physics of the apparatus must be the same. And that is just where the problem lies - modern measurements are just measurements of linearly moving particles under conditions that minimize plasma collision, whereas the Ives and Stilwell experiment unwittingly measured emission that resulted from plasma collisions. They are not the same experiment! That is why our paper submitted that no application of a more exactly measured second-order effect for a single particle could yield a prediction closer to the results observed by Ives and Stilwell than the aetherometric treatment of this experiment. This is a simple and logical consequence of the facts presented in our paper, and thus also the proof that the reviewers of these mainstream publications acted illogically, arbitrarily and irrationally, to defend the status-quo doctrine of official science.

In this context, we will quote from a letter written by Dr. P. Correa to his co-authors, since it already presents the full breadth of the paralogical assertion that only Special Relativity can predict the linear transverse Doppler, and that its monopoly is now secure irrespective of whatever happened in that (ill-fated) Ives and Stilwell experiment:

'All reviewers so far seem to have missed the central point of the paper: that the paper does not quibble with the so-called second-order transverse Doppler shift of light, and that it is the correct application of that shift in a collision scenario that yields a better prediction of the results actually observed by Ives and Stilwell. All reviewers have commented (or argued) that more recent experiments with far better accuracies than the Ives and Stilwell 1938 experiment prove that the second-order shift is very nearly indeed the result that is obtained with linearly-accelerated ion beams. But this is not an argument either with our paper, or with Aetherometry.

Indeed, the attitude of all reviewers is superficial bunk, and on two counts:

First, the submission they rejected - and Aetherometry - do not question the correctness of the second-order shift. On the contrary, Aetherometry fully agrees that the observed shift complies with the second-order approach (and that the result of the Michelson-Morley experiment is and should be null). In fact, we have formally shown [ 2] that the second-order shift is a necessary corollary of the law of the geometric composition of velocities - a fact that has always been recognized by relativists, even if today it has receded into some unconscious, amnesiac reaction that acts as if only Special Relativity could have predicted that the outcome of the "time-dilation hypothesis" and of the law of velocity composition were the same. That is, of course, simple bunk - sand in the eyes. For, indeed, if the second-order effect can be arrived at with no invocation of time-dilation, and just on the basis of a geometric law of velocity composition, then, logically, its verification cannot be invoked as proof of SR, no matter how accurately we measure this second-order effect. Thus, the posture of all reviewers has been a para-logical one, and therefore a-scientific. That alone is worrisome - and proof that orthodoxies do not so much spring from conspiracies as from dullness of mind caused by laziness of spirit.

An aside, of course, is that LLR's formula for "time-dilation" does not yield a result identical to the law of composition of velocities. Thus, in all reason, all that one can say is that, among relativistic theories, only SR has a theory of time-dilation compatible with the law of the geometric composition of velocities. But the reverse is not true: thus, the law of composition of velocities is not a proof of Special Relativity, nor can it be construed as such a proof, given that other theories - Aetherometry, for instance - require such a law without any recourse, physical or mathematical, to the phenomenologically coincident results of SR's theory of "time-dilation".

Because the journal reviewers all failed to read the paper, they missed this fact - that Aetherometry is entirely consistent with the law of the geometric composition of velocities, even and above all when electrical collisions are involved. That alone explains why some treated the paper as if it were suggesting the existence of a preferred frame, when it wasn't (it is the very same prejudice that names the SR formula by coupling its designation to the prejudicial qualifier "aether-independent") . As soon as they heard the word Aether-ometry, the so-called referees assumed implicitly that the authors were defending the existence of a preferred frame, as all Aether theories of the past have tried to do - yet this is precisely what Aetherometry does not defend! Obviously, these referees did not actually read or follow the submitted paper. And that is a major unethical negligence of their minimal duties.

Secondly, the invocation of more recent experiments is a spurious one - and again the result of not even bothering with the actual paper. For, what do the more recent experiments teach? They only teach that the shift is effectively second-order for beam particles in systems (such as masers, ring accelerators or ring lasers) where collisions have been minimized and only occur with respect to the "rest gas" (inertial collisions, not electrically-directed collisions) . The accuracy of this measurement has steadily increased over the past fifty years [ 3-4], and that is hardly new news. Spectroscopy and beam-generation may well have advanced ages over the Ives and Stilwell experiment, but to this day there is no more accurate reproduction of the experiment than the experiment itself. Moreover, the accuracy of the wavelength measurements in that experiment is perfectly sufficient to test SR versus Aetherometry.

Such advances might have been all that mattered if - as Ives and Stilwell were themselves inclined to think, but without any proof - there was no plasma collision (ie collision of an electrical nature) at work in their experiment. Precisely, our paper proves that such directed collisions were at work in that still standing, un-re-produced experiment, and that understanding its physics properly should have taught us a few things about particle velocities and photon emission that SR, and the multimillion research programs of the Max Planck Institute and its competitors, to this day manage to gloss over. Those "little details" are what dissociates the time-dilation model of SR from the actual results that one arrives at through the consistent application of the law of the composition of velocities in the determination of the so-called second-order Doppler shift. Perhaps, and ironically so, the Ives and Stilwell experiment is still teaching us that one needs better peers who actually have teeth to dig into the material, rather than glib artistry that cons one into thinking that paralogical dogma is science, and its application some kind of a review by one's peers.'

2. THE "PEER-REVIEW" EXPERIMENT

2.1. Submission to Physical Review A owned by the APS

PRA submitted manuscript

2.1.1. Record of Submission to Physical Review A

Date: Sun, 6 Apr 2008 02:20:38 UT

From: esub-adm@aps.org

To: pratex@ridge.aps.org

Subject: Manuscript es2008apr05_045 has been submitted to Physical Review A

Cc: pcorrea@aetherenergy.com

JNL: pra

TEMPID: es2008apr05_045

RECVD: Sat Apr 5 22:20:38 2008

TITLE: A test of Aetherometry vs Relativity, Special and Larmor-Lorentz: the 1938 Ives-Stilwell experiment

FIRSTA_LAST: Correa

FIRSTA_FIRST: Paulo

FIRSTA_MIDDLE: N.

FIRSTA_OTHER: PhD MSc

AUTHORS: Correa, Paulo N./Correa, Alexandra N./Askanas, Malgosia/Gryziecki, Gene/Sola-Soler, Jordi/

CORRA_LAST: Correa

CORRA_FIRST: Paulo

CORRA_MIDDLE: N.

CORRA_OTHER: MSc, PhD

EMAIL: pcorrea@aetherenergy.com

ADDRESS: Dr. Paulo N. Correa

R&D Director, ABRI (Aurora Biophysics Research Institute)

ART_TYPE: Regular Article

TYPE: TH

PACS1: 52.20.Hv

PACS2: 52.27.Ny

PACS3: 03.30.+p

PACS4: 31.15.A-

NFIGS: 2

COLORFIGS: no,

EFIG: Complete electronic figures

NTABLES: 12

LENGTHCHECK:

REFCHECK:

REFEREES: Freeman J. Dyson, Institute for Advanced Study, might be interested

NOTES: An entirely novel approach to the Ives and Stilwell experiment that is compatible with the null result of the Michelson-Morley 1887 experiment, and yields better predictions of the light Doppler than either Special or Larmor-Lorentz Relativity theories.

2.1.2. Scurrying for copyrights

As a reflex reaction, a flag goes up because the authors did not sign the copyright transfer form prior to review and acceptance...

Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2008 18:33:15 -0400 (EDT)

From: pra@aps.org

To: pcorrea@aetherenergy.com

Subject: Editorial Acknowledgment AR10228 Correa

Dear Dr. Correa,

The editors acknowledge receipt of this manuscript on 5 April 2008 and are considering it as a Regular Article in Physical Review A. When sending correspondence regarding this manuscript please refer to the code number AR10228.

Please check the attached information and send us any corrections. The title, section, or PACS categories may have been changed from those provided by you on submission for editorial reasons. Please supply any missing information, and note any special reminders or requests below or enclosed.

The following forms also need to be completed and returned to this office:

Yours sincerely,

Joyce Masterson

Assistant Editor

Physical Review A

This is promptly followed by the response of the Corresponding Author to the Assistant Editor:

Date: Tue, 08 Apr 2008 11:54:03 -0400

From: correa@aetherenergy.com

To: pra@aps.org

Subject: Re: Editorial Acknowledgment AR10228 Correa

Dear J. Masterson,

Thank you for the notification. I understood that a signed copyright transfer form was not necessary for purposes of submitting the paper for review, only for publication if it is accepted. Please let me know if it is necessary right away.

Dr. P. Correa

In turn, a still-lower rank bureaucrat (so low that the rank is unknown), probably an Assistant to the Assistant Editor, responds to Dr. Correa:

From: Joann Hernandez <joann@ridge.aps.org>

Subject: AR10228

Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2008 11:31:29 -0400

To: pcorrea@aetherenergy.com

Dear Dr. Correa,

It is true that the copyright transfer is not needed until the manuscript is Deadlined, however we do ask for the copyright ahead of time in order not to hold up production. It is up to you if you would like to sign and fax it now or you can wait until the manuscript is approved.

If you have other questions, please feel free to ask.

Best regards,

JoAnn Hernandez

2.1.3. The "peer-reviewed" rejections

The next communication received by the corresponding author was the First Rejection by the Phys Rev A Editor, Dr. W.F. Drake. The reader should note that it took a grand total of 8 days to reject the paper WITHOUT peer-review! This is probably a record of sorts... Apparently it sufficed to look at the references and their dates...

Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2008 09:01:48 -0400 (EDT)

From: pra@aps.org

To: pcorrea@aetherenergy.com

Re: AR10228

Test of aetherometry versus relativity, special and

Larmor-Lorentz: The 1938 Ives-Stilwell experiment

by Paulo N. Correa, Alexandra N. Correa, et al.

Dear Dr. Correa,

We regret to inform you that the above referenced manuscript is not considered suitable for publication in the Physical Review.

As a family of research journals, the Physical Review publishes articles in which significant advances in physics are reported. Such advances must be placed in the context of recent developments in research. There is no discussion in your manuscript of how this work relates to other current physics research and adequate references to the recent research literature are lacking.

Your manuscript therefore is too pedagogical for the Physical Review. We must suggest that you submit it to another, more suitable journal.

Yours sincerely,

Gordon W.F. Drake

Editor

Physical Review A

PRL Celebrates 50 Years: http://prl.aps.org/50years/

The Corresponding Author then responded to to the Phys Rev A Editor:

Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2008 14:10:38 -0400

From: "Dr. P. Correa" <pcorrea@aetherenergy.com>

To: pra@aps.org

Subject: Re: To_author AR10228 Correa

Dear Dr. G. W.F. Drake,

I assume this rejection was an editorial decision, rather than one based on the opinion of (a) reviewer(s) (?) who read the paper carefully.

Either way, what you wrote appears to me and my co-authors to be rather erroneous in its articulation.

First, this paper is a significant and recent development, but not one that abides by the currently accepted view of the Ives & Stilwell experiment. Simply because the Ives&Stilwell paper dates back to 1938, is hardly a reason to reject a novel explanation of it, especially when the proposed model appears to be more accurate than any other model has been up until now.

Secondly, as far as I know, the experiment has never been replicated. It is, in fact, considered to be a masterly experiment to this day, even if it is one that [special] relativists were never too fond of. This means that there are no references on the subject of its experimental reproduction that my co-authors and I could quote. Please correct us if we're wrong on this.

Thirdly, I must conclude that neither you nor anyone else has actually bothered to read the submission. If it were otherwise, the reader/reviewer would have realized that quoting more recent work with maser and laser spectroscopy would hardly be of relevance, since the subject-matter of these publications does not comprise plasma collisions, and we are not disputing the correctness of the measured second-order effect in such experiments where no ion collisions are involved. In fact, those experiments can be quoted to prove that SR, LLR or our model are all correct indistinctly! You will note that our paper does not argue there is no second-order Doppler effect, nor does it propose a different expression for the effect itself. We only propose a different collision-based model to explain the observed results - which were obtained, after all, for non-relativistic speeds (and this is stated in the paper itself). In other words, the essential contributions of the paper lie in the novel expressions proposed for the determination of the velocities of the particles involved, and in the collisional model put forth. Since our approach entirely changes the conventional view of the physics involved in the experiment, it is a novel contribution that should not be rejected off hand.

Maybe you could kindly quote me a reference that you deem relevant to the present work and that fits the applicable criteria, as I just enunciated them.

Lastly, I'm deeply dismayed by your criticism that

"Your manuscript therefore is too pedagogical for the Physical Review."

The "therefore" would seem to be predicated on the supposed lack of references to more recent and relevant work. If this objection were valid, that would hardly make the paper "too pedagogical" or, in common parlance, 'too teachy'. Moreover, if such references existed, it would be a simple matter for a reviewer to make that suggestion and for the authors to add the material and references in the course of a normal review or resubmission process. Clearly, that route was not even open to us.

So, I am at a total loss to understand what you mean by "too pedagogical", unless you mean that the mission of APS/Phys Rev does not include the teaching of physics, the "too" simply meaning that if the teaching is novel, then the exclusion is absolute.

I'd appreciate your clarifications re the above.

Sincerely,

Paulo N. Correa, MSc, PhD

We should note that NO such references would be forthcoming from the Editor or the surmised reviewer. Dr. Drake would also not respond to Dr. Correa's letter, not at least for another 2 months. Thus, Dr. Correa sought to remove the manuscript from the PRA archive of submissions. Unable to trace the submitted manuscript ("no current submission found"), he wrote to the Assistant to the Assistant:

Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2008 12:54:52 -0400

From: "Dr. P. Correa" <pcorrea@aetherenergy.com>

To: Joann Hernandez <joann@ridge.aps.org>

Subject: Re: AR10228

Dear JoAnn,

Maybe you could tell me how to retrieve the manuscript from your archive, given the rejection notice I received.

Dr. Paulo N. Correa

Again we should note that NO response would be forthcoming from "the Assistant to the Assistant to the Editor"...

Two months later, a second and totally unexpected rejection from Dr. Drake, this time seconded by a 4-line response from a parroting referee.

Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 09:13:57 -0400 (EDT)

From: pra@aps.org

To: pcorrea@aetherenergy.com

Subject: To_author AR10228 Correa

Re: AR10228

Test of aetherometry versus relativity, special and

Larmor-Lorentz: The 1938 Ives-Stilwell experiment

by Paulo N. Correa, Alexandra N. Correa, et al.

Dear Dr. Correa,

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.

Yours sincerely,

Gordon W.F. Drake

Editor

Physical Review A

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Report of the Referee -- AR10228/Correa

----------------------------------------------------------------------

This paper ignores all Ives-Stilwell experiments performed after the initial experiment. The authors need to explain the null results in all these experiments.

Since the earlier experiments were performed more accurately I doubt this alternative theory can explain these results.

===============================================

This pseudo-review by a pseudo-referee who could not be bothered to review the submission! apparently managed to discharge the conscience of Dr. Drake. Somewhat amused, Dr. Correa responded to Dr. Drake (and the moron referee):

Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2008 00:21:28 -0400

From: "Dr. P. Correa" <pcorrea@aetherenergy.com>

To: pra@aps.org

Subject: Re: To_author AR10228 Correa

Dear Dr. Drake,

I was pleasantly surprised to hear from you. I had erroneously concluded that you would not respond to my April 16 reply. Also, since about that time, I have no longer been able to access our manuscript online at the PRA site - which led me to conclude that it was no longer under active consideration. In fact, this led my co-authors and me to submit the paper to another journal. So, in a sense, I am relieved that PRA has rejected the paper.

I am, however, on a matter of principle, bound to make a short comment on this rejection. Without wanting to repeat myself, our paper does not contradict the more recent laser and ring storage experiments that confirm the second-order nature of the light Doppler shift (see for yourself, our text is quite clear about this), or what the reviewer calls the null results. We do not dispute this nor enter into any contradiction with it! Even if we should, perhaps, have included a sentence or two on this peripheral matter, these experiments do not prove or disprove the Ives & Stilwell experiment, which de facto involved plasma collisions, ordinary light emission, and a recourse to an axiomatic set of propositions about particle velocity and field acceleration (which our paper questions). So it is somewhat dismaying to read the second sentence of the reviewer's two-sentence review:

"Since the earlier experiments were performed more accurately I doubt this alternative theory can explain these results."

Well, the earlier experiments are those of Ives and Stilwell, and it is those which our paper addresses. But maybe there was some distraction, and the reviewer meant, not the 'earlier' but the 'later' experiments. Yet these are the ones that are irrelevant, exactly because they look at conditions where collisions are either absent or minimized. Moreover, as we show in our paper, there is no contradiction between our methodology and the existence of a second-order effect absolutely identical to that postulated by SR for light emission in the absence of collision - nor is there a contradiction with the null result to the Michelson-Morley experiment, which our approach also predicts. That's just the point.

Since these points were entirely missed by your reviewer, I submit that he/she failed to understand the paper (I am, of course, assuming that he/she read it).

Anyway, I hope you appreciate my comment simply from a scientific stance. I request no reply, but welcome one if you feel so inclined.

Again, thank you for your persistence and effort to get this paper reviewed.

Best regards,

Paulo Correa, MSc, PhD

R&D Director

Aurora Biophysics Research Institute

2.2. Submission to Physical Letters A owned by Elsevier Co.

Cover letter from Dr. Correa re first submission to PLA (PDF)

PLA first submitted manuscript (long version) (FDF)

Cover letter from Dr. Correa re second submission to PLA (PDF)

PLA second submitted manuscript (short version) (FDF)

2.2.1. Record of Submission of the long-version to Physical Letters A

from: "Physics Letters A" <pla@elsevier.com>

to: pcorrea@aetherenergy.com

date: 21 Apr 2008 16:36:34 +0100

subject: A manuscript number has been assigned: PLA-D-08-01129

Ms. Ref. No.: PLA-D-08-01129

Title: A test of Aetherometry vs Relativity, Special and Larmor-Lorentz: the 1938 Ives-Stilwell experiment

Dear Dr. Correa,

Your submission entitled "A test of Aetherometry vs Relativity, Special and Larmor-Lorentz: the 1938 Ives-Stilwell experiment" has been assigned the following manuscript number: PLA-D-08-01129.

Thank you for submitting your work to this journal.

Kind regards,

Mick van Gijlswijk

Journal Manager

Physics Letters A

2.2.2. The first rejection by PLA

As before with PRA, the rejection was nearly a reflex response: seven days after submission, the first rejection from PLA Editor Dr. Agranovich:

from: vladimir.agranovich@utdallas.edu

to: pcorrea@aetherenergy.com

date: 25 Apr 2008 16:41:42 +0100

subject: Your Submission

Ms. Ref. No.: PLA-D-08-01129

Title: A test of Aetherometry vs Relativity, Special and Larmor-Lorentz: the 1938 Ives-Stilwell experiment

Physics Letters A

Dear Dr. Correa,

Unfortunately, I reject your paper. For your guidance, I append the reviewers' and my comments below.

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider your work.

Yours sincerely,

Vladimir M. Agranovich, Dr.

Editor

Physics Letters A

Reviewers' comments:

Dear Dr. Correa,

Unfortunately, I have to reject your paper. I agree with referee that the paper is too long to be published in Journal of Letters. I agree that the paper as regular submission has to be sent to another journal (J. Opt. Soc. or similar). The objective of Physics Letters A is to publish short articles containing NEW PHYSICAL RESULTS, which could be interesting for a wide audience of readers. The manuscript does not satisfy this condition.

Sincerely,

Vladimir Agranovich

The reviewer's comments either did not exist or the reviewer was Agranovich himself... This "impulsive" rejection was immediately followed by a response from the Corresponding Author (Dr. Correa) to the Phys Let A Editor, Dr. Agranovitch:

Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:41:59 -0400

From: "Dr. P. Correa" <pcorrea@aetherenergy.com>

To: vladimir.agranovich@utdallas.edu

Subject: Re: Your Submission

Dear Dr. V.M. Agranovich,

Thank you for your letter. I regret your decision since, though not presenting a new experimental result, our paper does offer a new theoretical or descriptive result. It is also one of critical importance to the validity of relativity, given that our paper appears to be a far more accurate account of what happened in the Ives & Stilwell experiment.

Anyway, I did not receive the reviewer's comments, only yours. Would you be so kind as to forward me the comments of the reviewer(s)?

Sincerely,

Paulo N. Correa, MSc, PhD

Dr. Agranovich was gracious enough to forward the (so-called) reviewer's comments in his response to the Corresponding Author's request:

From: "Vladimir Agranovich" <vladimir.agranovich@utdallas.edu>

To: "Dr. P. Correa" <pcorrea@aetherenergy.com>

Subject: Re: Your Submission

Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:48:04 -0500

His comments was very short:

paper is too long to be accepted for pla.

It can be considered again if the number of pages will be 10-14 and if this version, nevertheless, will have a clear presentation of new results which can interesting for reader of PLA,

Regards,

Vladimir Agranovich

Dr. Correa commented on the first rejection by PLA in a letter to co-Authors, which we excerpt below:

Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:27:58 -0400

From: "Dr. P. Correa" <pcorrea@aetherenergy.com>

Subject: [Fwd: Re: Your Submission]

Dear Friends -

We just got the rejection from Phys Lett A today. It is sort of amateurish and wishy-washy. In the last response, Agranovich does not seem to be saying that our results are not new, despite the statement in capitals ["NEW PHYSICAL RESULTS..."] that he used on what might have been a form letter. One gets the distinct feeling that since the paper was 21 pages long, that was all that maybe was necessary to reject it without carefully looking into the content. (...)

As a next step, all the authors decided to shorten the paper to 14 pages and re-submit it to PLA, just in case Dr. Correa's above surmise was right. But, as we found out, the envelope could not be stretched at all.

2.2.3. Record of Submission of the short version to Physical Letters A

from: "Physics Letters A" <pla@elsevier.com>

to: pcorrea@aetherenergy.com

date: 5 Jun 2008 09:26:08 +0100

subject: A manuscript number has been assigned: PLA-D-08-01620

Ms. Ref. No.: PLA-D-08-01620

Title: A test of Aetherometry vs Relativity, Special and Larmor-Lorentz:the 1938 Ives-Stilwell experiment

Physics Letters A

Dear Dr. Correa,

Your submission entitled "A test of Aetherometry vs Relativity, Special and Larmor-Lorentz:the 1938 Ives-Stilwell experiment" has been assigned the following manuscript number: PLA-D-08-01620.

Thank you for submitting your work to this journal.

Kind regards,

Mick van Gijlswijk

Journal Manager

Physics Letters A

The re-submission of the manuscript in a shortened version was accompanied by a letter of the Corresponding Author to the Phys Lett A Editor, Dr. Agranovich:

Date: Sun, 01 Jun 2008 20:57:33 -0400

From: "Dr. P. Correa" <pcorrea@aetherenergy.com>

To: Vladimir Agranovich <vladimir.agranovich@utdallas.edu>

Subject: Re: Your Submission

Dear Dr. Vladimir Agranovich,

Following your valuable advice below, we submitted today a 6-page reduced, 14 page manuscript with a cover letter addressed to you. I hope that you will agree that the results are original and sufficiently important that the paper should be considered for publication in your journal. Thank you!

Best regards,

Paulo Correa, MSc, PhD

2.2.4. Second and final rejection by Phys Lett A Editor, Dr. Agranovich

from: vladimir.agranovich@utdallas.edu

to: pcorrea@aetherenergy.com

date: 20 Jun 2008 14:27:49 +0100

subject: Your Submission

Ms. Ref. No.: PLA-D-08-01620

Title: A test of Aetherometry vs Relativity, Special and Larmor-Lorentz:the 1938 Ives-Stilwell experiment

Physics Letters A

Dear Dr. Correa,

Reviewers' comments on your work have now been received. You will see that they are advising against publication of your work. Therefore I must reject it.

For your guidance, I append the reviewers' comments below.

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider your work.

Yours sincerely,

Vladimir M. Agranovich, Dr.

Editor

Physics Letters A

Reviewers' comments:

The referee report:

This rather long paper does not contain the physical results which need an urgent publication in Physical Journal of Letters. The paper as regular submission has to be sent to another journal (J. Opt. Soc. Am. or similar). As I know the objective of Physics Letters A is to publish articles containing NEW PHYSICAL RESULTS, which could be interesting for a wide audience of readers. The manuscript does not satisfy this condition.

There you have it!, the new results are not physical, meaning, done by measuring the latest-fad ring storage emission (it is amusing to note that by this criterion Einstein - and countless other so-called giants of physics - would never have gotten their papers published). Therefore they (the new results that are not physical...) are of no interest to a wide audience of physicists.

Incidentally, that is likely true, but it is still a manufactured truth! And also a truth that is policially and rabidly enforced by the sterile administration and refereeing of these mainstream journals. And to make sure that it is enforced ("manufacture of consensus by those in power"), one must always make it sound like there is a multitude standing behind one's actions and words. Thus, the one reviewer, who may well have been Agranovich himself, becomes in the latter's words, "they", the reviewers, plural. "They" got us there!

2.3. Private Review by a well-known but anonymous referee

Our extensive response to an extensive review by Prof. X (PDF)

3. CONCLUSIONS

"Scientific discovery is often carelessly looked upon as the creation of some new knowledge which can be added to the great body of old knowledge. This is true of the strictly trivial discoveries. It is not true of the fundamental discoveries (...) on which scientific advance ultimately depends. These always entail the destruction of or disintegration of old knowledge before the new can be created"

C. D. Darlington, Conway Memorial Lecture on The Conflict of Society and Science, 1948

In this story about science there is a lesson - not a moral lesson for sure, but an un-ethical one: that there is no intrinsic worth to being published in any mainstream, so-called "peer-reviewed", publications owned by powerful publishing companies and/or by professional societies, because the lack of integrity in mainstream publication compromises the integrity of the scientific research process.

Moreover, there are other lessons contained in this record. For, to put it simply, to suggest that these mainstream publications have in their mandate the conducting of reviews, and even more, that the submissions they receive are reviewed by peers, is wholesale fraud. Yet, this fraud can go on coexisting with the publication of papers that have some science in them and occasionally even have good science that was produced with some integrity. The paradox of the fraudulent coexisting with, and even selecting some of, the "truthful" should not astonish anyone. Nothing dies of contradictions, and much thrives on them. One can go as far as justifying the fraud by the bits of 'good stuff' that it contains. Yet, if one eats a poisoned meal, the presence in it of bits of real food is mostly irrelevant to the effect of the poison, which still takes its course irrespective of those good bits. And this is the situation of science vis-a-vis the poisonous meals that it keeps on ingesting with greater and greater frequency, particularly in the domain of physics. Eventually the poison will rot the entire edifices of current science and physics, and the issue, rather than being the rescue of science, will more likely be the further debasement of its value.

The fate of science and the fraudulent mockery of true peer-review in mainstream publications are not separable from systems of power that market and enforce specific lines of thought as much within the scientific community as in the larger community of the public. The first responsibility of every scientist should be to resist the path charted by power systems, begining with their professional associations and funding agencies. If there is an ethical lesson from the above record of a peer-review experiment is that a more discerning and open system of publication and review is necessary if science is to avoid its total debasement.

Einstein used to quip that "some physicists, among them myself, cannot believe that we must accept the view that events in nature are analogous to a game of chance" [ 5]. Aetherometry echoes this position of Einstein, and the above record of peer-review suggests that, in this domain too, one would be hard pressed to take the view that the rejections, in particular of reports of novel and original findings, can be attributed to sheer chance. Rather, just as the errors in existing physics are systematic, so are the rejections of pioneering science a systemic consequence of the existing "peer-review" system, a symptom of a systemic closure or sickness to which science has succumbed. The systemic nature of these rejections then illustrates the fact that science, in its present social setting, is at the mercy of extra-scientific social and psychological factors (historical, political, economic, aesthetic and above all, libidinal) that hinder its free development. A science enslaved in this manner can never be at the service of life or the living, nor be the source of discovery and joy in discovery.

We have now entered a period of sterility in thought and science, and physics in particular. A period when scientists like Paul Dirac can get away with perfectly metaphysical views that entirely renounce the fidelity of science to the datum, and regard the problems of method as irrelevant. Commenting on Schrödinger's equation(s), Dirac wrote: "I think there is a moral to this story, namely, that it is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment"[ 6]. It is only from such an arbitrary viewpoint that a theory or a system of equations (eg Aetherometry) is of no interest even if it fits the experiment better than any other theory, in particular, than the theory which, by some irrational post-factum justification (aesthetic, political, military, etc, etc), is enforced as dominant by the contemporaneous social mechanisms of power.

As a sociological test of peer-review, the above record suggests that if a scientist or group of scientists have made original (nontrivial) discoveries that do not fit the established or dominant system of Official Science, but desires to safeguard the integrity of the findings and publish them with a matching integrity that refuses their distortion, submission to a mainstream peer-reviewed journal will never succeed, nor suffice, for those purposes; period. "Peer-review", such as it is now practiced in mainstream publications, only exists to the detriment of science. Instead of a source of creation or invention, it is a source of conformity. Little wonder that C.D. Darlington, like a veritable Prof. Challenger, quipped during the Conway Memorial Lecture, that in science "we need a regulated source of annoyance, a destroyer of routine, an underminer of complacency". That was before the mediocre took over, which was before the triumph of the epsilon-minus automata. What Asger Jorn once wrote of a "future government" (and has now come to pass) could also be said of present-day science: "we can already envisage a [science] where decisions are taken by robots, on the basis of an immediate control of public opinion and made solely according to the rule of large numbers"[ 7]. Science by automated consensus of the mediocre and ill-informed will surely deaden all inquiry.

4. REFERENCES

1. Correa, PN, Correa, AN, Askanas, M, Gryziecki, G, Sola-Soler, J (2008) "A test of Aetherometry vs Relativity, Special and Larmor-Lorentz: the 1938 Ives-Stilwell experiment", Aetherom Theor of Synchron, Vol. I, 4:1.

2. Correa, PN & Correa, AN (2007) "Linear and angular Doppler shifts and the Sagnac experiment", Aetherom Theor of Synchron, Vol. I, 3:1.

3. Jaseja TS et al (1964) "Test of Special Relativity or of the isotropy of space by use of Infrared Masers", Phys Rev, 133:A1221.

4. Saathof G (2002) "Experimental test of relativistic time dilation by laser spectroscopy of fast ions", Dissertation Ruperto-Carola University of Heidelberg, Germany.

5. Einstein to Max Born, 18 March 1948, cited in Isaacson, W (2007) "Einstein - his life and universe", Simon & Schuster, NY, p. 461.

6. Dirac, PAM (1963) "The evolution of the Physicist's picture of nature", Scientific Am, 208:45.

7. Jorn, A (1957) "Pour la forme", Internationale Situationniste, p. 113 of Ed. Allia, 2001.