Tuesday, July 15, 2014

The Gettysburg Address

Dear Diary,

This is the year of 2014 which is exactly 88 years after Schrodinger published his famous equation for quantum mechanics.  Kieron approached me and Lucas last year about commemorating the event by sneaking in some snippets from Abraham Lincoln's infamous Four Score and Severn (87) years ago speech.

But we didn't publish last year.

Luckily, Thomas-Fermi theory, a commonly used approximation for the kinetic energy that matches up with a uniform gas was published in 1927.  That's exactly 87 years ago from this year!  So, we thought, why not just honor this other paper?

We did!  But the editor's caught us.  Kieron was a little disappointed that the reviewers didn't mention it in their reviews, but during the proofing stage, a savvy literature guru at Physical Review noticed it and the Dante's inferno reference placed there by Lucas.  So, they would change the wording.

But the joke was still on!  They didn't remove enough from the paper to take out the intention!  It's still there!  Kieron did fess up to the editor's, but one should note that the Physical Review Letter from last year referenced a Tale of Two Cities in the first line.

While the original wording was changed, the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

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