Editor, Physics Today
335 East 45 Street
New York, NY 10017
U.S.A.

Toruń, Dec. 1st, 1993
 
Dear Sir,
 
I am deeply worried with the way science in general and physics in
particular, is developing.  I will mention only two reasons in this
letter, refering to cases based on my personal experience.

For a few years I have worked on the foundations of physics.  This field
has been very active in the past decade and I enjoyed going to
conferences and thinking about quantum paradoxes.  In 1989 I wrote a
paper "Complementarity, Superluminal Telegraph and the
Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox".  In this paper I have proposed to
measure correlations between pairs of particles in a double Mach-Zehnder
experiment.  Unfortunately I had not time or energy to push the paper
through the refereeing procedure.  I did send it to two journals and
then gave up.  Referees found it "seriously flawed" and "completely
wrong".

I have found that philosophical preferences are sufficient to stop a
publication of papers in foundation of physics.  Since it is hard to
find two people with the same philosophical preferences chances of
publication of new ideas are slim.  I kept the paper on my list of
references as "to be published" and decided to work on other problems.
In the September issue of Scientific American the paper "Faster than
Light" by R.Y.  Chiao, P.G.  Kwiat and A.M.Steinberg describes exactly
the experiment I proposed much earlier, even the figure with the
experimental setup differs very little.  Well, the truth finally wins,
especially when it is supported by experiment, not just theorizing.

Is life easier for people working in applied quantum mechanics?
Recently I was surprised to see that the editor of a major scientific
journal treated seriously a two-sentence referee report about 40-pages
long paper, report containing a general remark that there were too many
tables and figures.  I could quote many more problems related to the
refereing system but we all know them only too well.

The second reason that makes me worrried about the development of
science is the incredible inertia that most scientist show.  We are too
busy working to find the time for thinking.  We learn at the
universities standard methods of physics and we teach these methods to
our students.  We improve the methods and apply them to new phenomena
but who tries to question and develop fundamentally new approaches in
science?  Some years ago I have tried to understand whether the picture
of the vacuum filled with virtual particles, the picture creating
well-known problems with the density of energy of the vacuum, is just an
artefact of the perturbative description or whether it has some deeper
foundations.  I have found three thick volumes written at the end of
60-ties by Julian Schwinger, called "The source theory", treating the
vacuum as empty.  In vain have I tried to find an QED expert that
read it.  Asking about it provoked remarks like "Oh, you are interested
in non-standard approaches".  If Schwinger, after creating QED, was not
succesful to influence the course of its further development, who will?

This year I had the pleasure to hear a seminar by Sir F. Hoyle on the
new cosmological model that he and his collaborators propose.  As for all
scientific models it should be judged on the basis of its merit,
potential for falsification and its predictive power.  The reaction of
some young astronomers I have talked to was quite negative ("we don't
believe him", said one of them).  They are too busy counting their radio
sources to have the time for thinking. 

Is the creative thinking about fundamental models in physics reserved
only for retired physicists?  Those that were heretic all their life
stay heretic, but are we educating heretics, are we encouraging our
students to explore not only the mainstream theories but also
alternatives?  Or maybe physics is already too sophisticated for the human
mind and we have reached the end of our abilities to comprehend the
world, each individual being able to learn only limited number of
theories?

Sincerely yours,
Wlodzislaw  Duch

I've got a reply, something like "True, but what can we do about it ... ".