APS Openness

Posted by jns on 9 March 2007

Today in Bob Park’s What’s New (9 March 2007 edition) was this tidbit:

OPENNESS: THE MARCH MEETING OF THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY.

The commitment of physicists to the principle of openness was tested this very morning in Denver at the APS March meeting, as it has been every year for 108 years. Roy Masters, author of “God Science and Free Energy from Gravity,” was to deliver “Electricity from Gravity” at 9:36 a.m. Anyone can deliver a paper at the March Meeting. What if Masters actually succeeded in using up our gravity to keep the lights on? Not to worry.

I think all physics graduate students, sometime during their years’ long hazing, have noticed this phenomenon. It’s always good for a few giggles. But what Park says is true: any member of the APS may submit an abstract and deliver a 10-minute paper at general meetings of the society. Especially in the days when programs of abstracts were printed and distributed on paper, it was common for a few abstracts to appear for which no speaker materialized at the appointed time.

In my day there was someone who submitted an abstract at every opportunity, but who never appeared at the meetings; I don’t remember his name or where he was from. In those days one had a piece of paper on which a rectangle was inscribed; one’s abstract would be photographically reproduced and everything that was to be printed must appear withing the bounds. Said person always included a photograph of some geological feature, around which he typed his abstract, and then he filled the remaining bits of space with arrows to bits of the photo and handwritten notes. In the physics world I suppose it’s what passes for conceptual art.

Similarly, for years while I was in graduate school, there was every month, without fail, a small advertisement in the back of Physics Today from a person whose name now escapes me, who was searching for his “gamma-gamma correlations”. None of us knew what “gamma-gamma correlations” were — mostly because there is no such thing — but the advertiser never gave up hope.

Then, when I was nearing the end of graduate school, the advertisements disappeared. We were all a bit bereft at the loss of this institution. Then, after a couple of months another advertisement appeared in which the previous advertiser now promised to sell, for a small fee, something like all the secrets of the universe based on his theory about “gamma-gamma correlations”, or something like that. He had apparently found them and we could all rest again, knowing that the integrity of fringe science was safe again.