Monday, March 2, 2009

Dark Matter?

Every time I read back over my list of publications, I am struck by how most of the good ones seem to have sunk without a trace. Most of the ones where I thought I had discovered something interesting and novel about the universe, or had hit upon an interesting and novel way of looking at something we already knew about, have very few citations, or none at all. Perhaps I should do a series of posts on my top five papers with no non-author citations? Hmm, I have been neglecting this blog lately, and a theme like that might help.

Anyway, a few years ago a colleague gave me a weighty chapter he had written, entitled A Quantum Approach to Dark Matter, which I was slack (It is 63 pages long) and never got around to reading (It *is* 63 pages long). Remembering it today, I thought I would first check to see what other people thought of it- I am a mere chemist, and can only identify very dubious theoretical physics as dubious at a glance. I found my colleague had four published articles in the area over the past half-decade, and none of them had been cited at all. This is a tragedy. It is dreadful to spend years wrestling with an idea, to hone and shape it into a form you think is fit to present to the world, expound it with all the energy and clarity at your command, shepherd it into print, and then see it be ignored completely. Hence, I thought I would put a link to the chapter here. And I really will read it myself, I promise. And put an ignorant chemist's critique here on the web, at the very least, so Google can find it.