The three stages of reaction to a new scientific result:
1. It's wrong
2. It's trivial
3. I did it first
I made this up myself while still a grad student, after a particularly exasperating interaction with a referee. However, I was amused recently to find that a similar quote is attributed to Szilard in this book (see list of quotations at the end; unfortunately not available in the Google Books preview I link to).
In my case, the referee 1. claimed the paper was wrong, then, after processing a detailed reply, 2. admitted the result was correct, but then claimed it was trivial (not worth publishing; lots of things are difficult to understand at first but when clearly explained suddenly become "trivial"). A second referee agreed the result was correct and nontrivial, but of course 3. demanded we cite his earlier related work 8-)
I absolutely agree. A senior colleague from Russia said this is an old, well-known pattern. Funny all of us discovered that independently.
ReplyDeleteThis post is deeply flawed.
ReplyDeleteThis post says nothing new or interesting.
ReplyDeleteHey, I thought of this before you were even in high school.
ReplyDeleteI knew it was only a matter of time... :-)
ReplyDeleteI came across this too - for example in the autobiography of Fred Hoyle - and wrote a piece about it:
ReplyDeletehttp://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2008/06/false-trivial-obvious-new-theories.html
Odd - I've always seen this attributed to Haldane. Here it is as presented on some blog I googled.
ReplyDelete"There are four stages of acceptance: 1) this is worthless nonsense; 2) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view; 3) this is true, but quite unimportant; 4) I've always said so."