He Submitted His Paper to a Journal… Are You Happy?

The significance of this should win him both a Nobel Prize and a Templeton! If the light can actually move faster than 300,000 kps, then obviously time travel into the past is possible.
I’m not a scientist either, but I saw the first Superman movie, so I understand this stuff.

Even if the work were plausible, I don’t think Physicists would be “shaking in their boots”. If he were correct, he would almost certainly win a Nobel Prize. Physicists would certainly argue with their last breath, but they wouldn’t mourn.

I love that they don’t allow comments on their site, I fail even to see a way to contact the author about the things they post. But that is how they want it to be, right?

I also hardly see how getting a paper posted on your own network means anything. Why can’t he submit it to a real journal?

Man! I’m really looking forward to this paper! This is gonna be goooood!

Jason isn’t submitting his paper to a prestigious science journal, the editors of which will send it out to be reviewed by experts of their own choosing

Another fail. When you submit a paper to a peer reviewed journal, you include a list of recommended reviewers (and can also include a list of reviewers to exclude).

Generally, editors will follow those lists.

I wrote a psychological thesis and submitted it to a peer-reviewed journal, The Journal of Richard Wade’s Bestest Best Friends. (Wade Press, Volume 1, Number 1, Chapter 1, Page 1)

They don’t have any qualifications in psychology, but I consider them my “peers” because we all have one important thing in common: We all think that Richard Wade is an Incredible Genius Beyond Human Comprehension. They must be very smart if they agree with me about that.

Well, after a thorough and judicious review, they gave me two thumbs up, five stars, ten out of ten points, a Boyscout merit badge, an old Medal of Valor found at a garage sale, a plastic Oscar, and a World’s Greatest Counselor greeting card where they crossed out “Dad” and wrote in “Counselor.” They wrote rave reviews like “Brilliant!” “Groundbreaking!” and “A must-read!”

So I think I have very solid evidence that my thesis is not just valid, but will utterly revolutionize the field, change the course of human history, and get me a lifetime fifty cents off discount at Starbucks.

Well it is easy to joke about it but I think this is actually a growing and serious problem because to a lot of people out there they are not going to know the difference between that creationist rag and a legitimate scientific journal. The creationists know that they don’t have to win over scientists, they just have to win over the public.

This is why they do stuff like this. People object to them saying they are not scientists. So they build evangelical universities and hand out bogus degrees. People say their work is not published or peer reviewed, so they just start up their own magazines and journals. All this because then they know they can go up to a lay person and say “Dr. Bigshot with a Ph.D said in Answers Research Journal that the earth is really flat.” And to someone that is just busy living life rather then researching all this nonsense it will seem just as valid as “Stephan Hawking says black holes work like this.”

It is a growing attempt to undermine science that will need to be dealt with because while it is easy for people ‘in the know’ to make fun of it, we aren’t the target audience.

Physicists would be happy to not having to deal with it at all. Creationists trying to flood arxiv was bad enough. Better this stuff isn’t published at all.

I love how this guy almost certainly is seeking to replace a theory that works over all time and space and that is based on Maxwell’s equations with one that defines the nature of light based on it’s origin and it’s age, and that is not at all rooted in theory.

I also loved how he thinks it’s okay to have other people with “a correct biblical worldview” perform peer review, instead of people who actually know what science is. But hey, he’s a creationist.

Yeah! Take that, you godless critic! He’s sending it to a journal run by Creationists.

Not just by creationists, but by the same company Lisle works for.

As has been pointed out already, “Dr.” Lisle and his ilk are not concerned with convincing anyone beyond their “peers,” most of whom need little evidence to be convinced.

The thing is, all they need is a handful of like-minded “scientists” and fundie politicians at the national and local level to push through “teach the controversy” text books into the public schools. This kind of non-sense is a lot more serious and a great deal more damaging than most people understand.

Fritzy, sadly Lisle is a Dr from an accredited school, University of Colorado. He knows how science works and chooses instead to lie for Jebus. No need to quote his Doctorate like you have to with “Dr” Kent Hovind.

I really don’t understand why they need to use science to “prove” how the light got to the earth and creationism is right. I mean… they’ve been on a role with the whole “god did it” shtick. Why can’t they just use that tired cliche again? It’s not like it’s any worse than the 10000 other times it’s been used.

Q: How did the starlight from distant galaxies reach earth in such a relatively short time?

A: God.

I think it’s time to Sokalize this “journal”. Write a “Biblical science” paper and submit it to them. Make up an institution or creationist group or church if that’s what you need to convince them it can be trusted. Put a lot of fun stuff in there, maybe even in code. Then when they publish it, the fun begins.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

I am not a scientist. I am willing to stand corrected if my understanding of the peer review process is wrong. It is my understanding that journals are places where folks can submit research papers and have other scientists look over their work, compare it to other papers, established facts, available evidence, etc, and evaluate it based on a well-founded criteria (ie: as little human judgement or error as possible).

At least this is the impression I get from folks who speak about scientific journals, on the basis of never having read one myself, or having seen the process at large.

I think the best approach to illustrating how wrong a theory can be is precisely this process: have it submitted on the same grounds as ALL OTHER papers and be subjected to the review process. It stands exactly the same chance as all the other papers and is judged on the same merit as all other papers.

This way, it can be dissected and thoroughly pulled apart just like every other paper is. This will immediately eliminate the playing of the persecution card, which they so love to play. Its flaws can be illustrated on the solid grounds of peer review.

Personally, I find it sad that Lisle is attempting to find an independent line of reasoning to back up Bishop Ussher’s calculations of the age of the Universe based on adding up the ages of the characters in Genesis, when dendrochronology already disproves it by over 20,000 years, and that’s a calculation that doesn’t even require special relativity!

PS: Apologies for the wikipedia links. If anyone knows a good peer-review journal to which I can link to the above, I’d be happy to read it. 🙂

Oh, I just can’t wait to see this “solution!” I’m like a kid waiting for Christmas. This is going to be so deliciously ridiculous.

arxiv used to be an open submission system where scientists could upload their papers before it went through peer review. Because science communication goes so quickly often work put there would already enter the scientific discussion and the publication became a formality to make it archival.

However when creationists started flooding the site they had to introduce a minimal peer review system to keep complete drivel out of it. It’s really sad.

Peer review usually implies that people who look at your paper are established experts in the field in which it was written. That is what “peer” means. That is if you write a paper on a very specific topic of microbiology, some established researchers that is on or very close to the topic will look at it and judge if it merits publication.

Number of peer reviews vary but I would say 3 is typical.

Typical review criteria are, is the paper sound/correct, does it contribute something new to the field, but also stuff like is it well-written (to scholarly standards) and does it fairly and sensibly discuss prior and related work.

A real peer-reviewed paper can be considered vetted by expert on multiple key dimensions. The paper may still be flawed, contain mistakes, or promote a theory that later proves to not be the right direction, but the standard of that paper is much higher than something that has not gone through the process. It defines a base-line of quality. Papers that do not make it through peer-review have been found not publishable in its current form by expert peers.

So to have a historian look at a physics paper would not constitute peer review. Or if a general editor reads a paper, that is not peer review.

Within creationism that’s of course a perverted. Notion, sure you can find other creationists who will review a paper positively, but the flaw is that they themselves never have been established as credible authorities and good judges of the material.

The reason why creationists create phony peer-review journal is because they have learned in debate that they get trumped by the claim that their work doesn’t even appear in peer-reviewed journals. It’s a shell-game for status.

Unfortunately people who do not understand how to establish and review evidence and scientific merit can indeed be confused by this because peer-reviewed is peer-reviewed, right?

@ Citizen Z: “My understanding of the peer review process is that they are simply looking for mistakes in methodology, either experimental or analytical.”

That should be enough to get it dismissed! lol.

Reading the further comments, I have a better understanding of what peer review entails. I think this is what should be made clearer to laypeople such as myself. It’s invaluable info.