Chad at Uncertain Principles has a series of three posts; first one explains the physics behind the paper; the second explains the circumstances under which the experiments were carried out; the third one about the paper writing and review process; all three are worth reading; to give a flavour, here are a couple of extracts from the second and third posts that bring out the experience of doing science in a nice fashion:
As I said, this was probably my favorite of the experiments that I did at NIST, because it was mine from start to finish. It was my off-hand idea to do the experiment in the first place, I made the decisions about what to measure, and I did almost all of the analysis myself.
This was also one of the first times I felt like a Real Physicist, because the analysis I was doing wasn’t trivial. I needed to figure out what the various bits of the signal meant before I could extract information from them, and while there weren’t any real “eureka!” moments, there were a lot of small epiphanies where things just clicked into place, and I realized what something meant, and how to use it to measure something interesting.
As I said, the whole thing was a blast, and is one of my fondest memories of grad school.
…
Standard practice at PRL– thanks to Dan Kleppner, as I found out at DAMOP– is to send submitted articles out to two referees, and ask for feedback within two weeks. I checked the status of the article somewhat obsessively, of course, and saw that Referee A returned their report very quickly, while Referee B didn’t do anything until the two-week limit. A discreet day or so after the two-week deadline, I sent an email to the editors asking what was up, and the next day saw a status update saying that a reminder had been sent. A day or so after that, I saw the dreaded “Non-report communication received from Referee B.”
This generally means that a paper has been returned by the referee, saying that they were too busy to review it. That sends it back to the editors to choose another referee, and the two-week window resets.
So I was rather surprised to receive a notice from the editors the next day, saying that the article had been accepted on the strength of Referee A’s report only.
The report was included, but I’ve since lost the exact text. It was almost absurdly good, though– the referee, whoever it was, absolutely gushed about the paper, saying that it was “sure to be a seminal work” in the field.
My favorite line of the whole thing was a bit that went something like “The only thing I take issue with is the authors’ claim that many interesting issues remain to be resolved. It seems to me that this paper has completely covered everything.”
I have no idea who refereed it– the reports are anonymous, and they didn’t leave any obvious terminological clues (there’s some variance in the names of relevant quantities among research groups). As a couple of people observed at the time, I’d really like to be able to request that person as a referee for all my subsequent work.
Sadly, this didn’t really turn out to be a frequently-cited paper– the Abstract Data Service puts it at 16 citations, which sounds about right. The field as a whole really shifted away from cold collisions around that time, and there hasn’t been much done that would follow up on it. Still, having someone speak that highly of your work is just amazing. It was a great boost to my confidence heading into thesis writing and my trip to Japan in late ‘98.
This was the part of my graduate career where I really got on a roll. Between July of 1997 to May of 1999, I was an author on two PRL’s and a Phys. Rev. A article, gave invited talks at a conference in Austria and the APS Centennial Meeting, spent three months in Japan, and completed my thesis. I also started dating Kate during that span (she was in DC working on Capitol Hill).
Really, it doesn’t get much better than that.
Take a look!
Tags: experimental science
