Instead they take the subset of lines that have ended up in one (out of several) databases on spectral lines and, without any real motivation, declare this to be a complete sample.
Finally, putting the main result (Figure 2) before the section on data collection ("Experimental Section") is just rude.
Clearly, this is a product of the cultural, societal and economic pressure to "get published" often, quality or value be damned. My cousin who knows a little about science or academia once told me scientist should publish at least once a month, otherwise they do too little work. Obviously, the academia agrees.
On its face, there's zero reason why these plots line up as well as they do, this goes beyond conincidence.
They are plots against wavelength axis, yes, but the "things" plotted on y-axis are completely different concepts.
I welcome the fresh view of the team. A genuinely new observation brought to paper instead of dead-chewing (albeit rigorously citing) papers of academic brethrens.
> An entirely different yet equally fascinating possibility would be that, in an abstract sense, the scientific community itself can be interpreted as a thermodynamic ensemble. In this line of thinking, the individual members would be subject to a Boltzmann distribution in “curiosity” associated with a “temperature” determining how likely each researcher is to carry out research more or less closely tethered to a specific area of interest.
It's a cute idea, and maybe something I'd enjoy arguing over a drink. But the obvious problem with such a model is that there is no theoretical basis to argue it from -- if only because Boltzmann distributions (as with most thermodynamic effects) only start to apply when you have so many indistinguishable particles and thus so many microstates that multiplicative factors on the scale of Avogadro's number become trivial. Scientists are neither indistinguishable, nor are they this numerous.
To be fair, the effect described here is something that I wouldn't expect a-priori. I'm just disappointed the paper doesn't really offer much of a conclusion (or even hints at a decent argument).
True, but I'm not that convinced the Boltzmann really is the most natural distribution to claim fits. Especially on the blue side it looks like the residuals could be pretty atrocious. Why didn't they try to some other right-skewed distributions? You could try a log-normal for instance, that would have a much simpler interpretation.
I think this crazy thermodynamic idea is really the entire motivation for the paper, and explains why they didn't really spend any effort exploring it.
One possible explanation I thought of (which I'm surprised the paper doesn't consider) is whether this is just showing the distribution of wavelength ranges of spectrometers that researchers are using. I tried to find some examples online, but I guess you'd need to be involved in the field to know what exactly to search for.
Me neither, but admittedly mainly because I've never even considered the question.
Some reflection gives me the expectation that there should be fewer high frequency lines due to conservation of energy, and very many low frequency lines.
Then I imagine experimental limitations mean it's very hard to see all the low frequency transitions, but honestly I have no idea how the cross sections of the transitions go with energy so I should stop speculating.
Then the data is at least normalized with respect to NIST.
I fully understand "let's just use NIST because that's easiest", but that's not a serious attitude if you want to claim something about reality rather than the NIST database itself.
But they apparently did not do their job. Instead, they indulge in speculations about even crazier connections with a past state of the universe or with behaviour and biases of scientific community.
This kind of half-baked observation and speculation is an interesting discussion topic for a lunchtime that can potentially lead to something substantial, but really should not be published as scientific paper.
Also this paper is a good example of what is wrong with physics academia (and perhaps other academic workers as well). 4 authors, 18 references to other people work, and a statement of conflict of interest.
Sad state of physics, year 2020.