@steve
I missed this when you responded, but that's a useful distinction. The monopole experiment was before my time, and all I know is that people joked about it afterwards. Maybe "famously irreproducible" would be a better term for this sort of thing. The Fairbanks free quark experiment also […]

@steve
No slight to Cabrera’s overall contributions, but on the irreproducible monopole paper, don’t you mean “infamous?”

@vicgrinberg
Time to get back to that unpublished paper from my postdoc in the late 90s

@brembs

Sorry to butt in, but your summary completely misrepresents what @hweimer said. He explicitly noted that most APS articles cost the taxpayer nothing to publish and that the peer review process typically improves the submitted version, and I agree. He also didn’t say that he didn’t know […]

@johncarlosbaez
I’m guessing that this is best understood as a dynamical instability, not as a phase transition? Superficially, it looks like a first-order transition, but the system is out of equilibrium, it’s not clear how luminosity would map onto a state variable, and there’s no obvious […]

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