In March, Thomas Harvey sat in on a talk at the American Physical Society’s summit in Denver on a new model of the universe that claimed to eliminate the need for dark matter and dark energy. William George, a fluid dynamicist who spent his career studying turbulence and an emeritus professor at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, gave the presentation.
“It was very rambling,” said Harvey, a postdoc working in high energy theory at MIT, “and it was very clearly wrong.”
After the talk, Harvey found George’s paper on the topic in Physics of Fluids. He decided to flag the problems he saw on PubPeer under a pseudonym, including errors in the math and misapplied principles of general relativity, and then sent a “polite email” to the editors.
“That’s where it went very wrong,” Harvey said.
Harvey’s email about the paper went to Savvas Hatzikiriakos, one of the journal’s two co-editors in chief, expecting it would remain confidential. “I just kind of assumed that surely any sensible journal would operate that way,” he told Retraction Watch. AIP Publishing, which publishes the journal, has guidelines for editors that make it their responsibility to “protect the anonymity of individuals raising concerns.”
Instead, the editors shared Harvey’s concerns with the authors — as well as his name, his institution and that he was a postdoc. In their reply, George and coauthor Thomas Johansson, also retired from Chalmers, acknowledged the paper contained a math error but insisted the conclusions were correct. The authors also suggested Harvey be “encouraged to withdraw” his criticisms, and wrote if the criticisms were published, “we will surely do our best to make them public and take our chances in the public arena.”
The authors’ response also recounted a “similarly aggressive young post-doc” who had criticized an earlier paper, resulting in it not being published in Physics of Fluids. They made it a point to present the postdoc’s comments “in every forum for several years,” and the postdoc “never managed to live down the stupidity and arrogance of his stupid remarks.”
George told Retraction Watch he wrote this example to again make the point that what goes in print stays there. “Harvey was correct in recognizing we had made an error. And that was useful. But he handled it stupidly,” George told us in an email. “If our theory proves to be correct, he (and many others) will look rather stupid.”
Harvey said he isn’t worried, since the authors are retired and work in a different field. But added “it felt a bit like a threat” to his career.
George rejected that interpretation in an email to Retraction Watch. “Certainly not a threat. But an attempt to make him aware that things you say in print last forever,” he wrote. “And when you say dumb things and especially say them maliciously (which he did in the original comment), they tend to live for a very long time.”
Harvey learned his identity had been shared when Hatzikiriakos sent him the authors’ reply. Harvey wrote back to him and his co-editor Gerald Fuller, concerned that his identity had been shared without his consent. “A researcher should be able to flag a mathematical error to a journal without having their identity disclosed and without receiving threats in return,” he wrote. In a call with Retraction Watch, he described the situation as “basically editorial malpractice.”
Hatzikiriakos apologized to Harvey for disclosing his identity, calling it an “oversight,” and said Harvey’s original email didn’t indicate his comment was submitted in confidence. Hatzikiriakos suggested he submit a formal comment to the journal, which would be reviewed alongside a response from the authors.
“This is the only formal process available to address and potentially correct fundamentally flawed published work, thereby preventing the dissemination of incorrect conclusions,” Hatzikiriakos wrote.
“I didn’t really want to do this,” Harvey told Retraction Watch, “but as they had already leaked my identity, I felt I had little to lose.”
AIP Publishing said it is aware of concerns about the paper and about how the criticisms were handled, and is reviewing the case. “We are unable to comment further while the review is underway,” said media relations specialist Hannah Daniel.
There are “many things wrong” with the paper itself, according to Harvey. One is an algebraic error in one of the paper’s central equations. “They’re trying to do cosmology, and they’re left with the universe that is empty,” Harvey said. With their equation, “there’s nothing in the universe.” He called this error, and others he pointed out, “elementary.”
George acknowledged the math error. “Obviously we screwed up,” he wrote on PubPeer, and promised to issue an erratum, but maintains the rest of the analysis is still valid. In the original response to Harvey’s criticisms, the authors argued that physicists are “hopelessly biased against our findings,” calling their critics “apostles of the status quo” which is “precisely WHY our results are published in a fluids journal.”
According to George, arXiv told him and his coauthor they were not qualified to submit a paper on cosmology or astrophysics. (Disclosure: Retraction Watch cofounder Ivan Oransky is chair of arXiv’s board of directors but is not involved in day-to-day management or editorial decisions.) He said he pitched the paper to the Physics of Fluids editor-in-chief instead, and supplied a list of potential referees. Physics of Fluids has been his go-to journal for controversial ideas since his first paper there in 1973, George said.
“We are surely not withdrawing the original paper,” he told Retraction Watch.
Harvey is now waiting on the journal to publish his comment, as well as the authors’ response. Eight referees reviewed his comment, and none of them defended the original paper, according to the documents seen by Retraction Watch. Several recommended the article be retracted, and some stated that the authors’ response did not resolve the issues.
Hatzikiriakos, the journal’s editor, told Harvey that publishing a comment and response would be of greater benefit to the scientific community, per the referees’ suggestions — though this suggestion did not appear in the referee comments seen by Retraction Watch. Hatzikiriakos did not respond to our requests for comment.
In George and Johansson’s draft formal response, shared with Retraction Watch, they stand by their results, with the “single exception” of correcting the equation, “however upsetting they may be to the [General Relativity] and Astronomy communities.”
Another paper rejected from arXiv is now in edits at Physical Review Fluids, an APS journal, according to George. “It will probably cause similar outrage, since it too shows Dark Matter is not necessary,” he said.
After Retraction Watch wrote to AIP, its research integrity and ethics manager emailed Harvey promising a “thorough review.”
“If I see something that is clearly incorrect, it’s published in a prestigious, apparently well-established journal … and is out of scope,” Harvey said, “probably, I have some kind of moral obligation to try and point this out.”
The next time he finds a problem with a paper, he will make it clear he expects anonymity, Harvey told Retraction Watch. “I thought I was doing them a favor,” he said, “but it didn’t seem to be viewed that way.”
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That’s what a journal gets when it publishes out of scope. Physics of Fluids most likely had no idea who competent referees on the topic of the manuscript might be, and none of the options in such a situation (AI, suggestions by the authors, random pick,…) is a good one.