Though scientific knowledge has increased by leaps and bounds throughout the course of human history, human nature itself hasn’t changed very much! Looking through the old scientific journals, one can find arguments and conflicts that are still in some form still playing out today. A few months ago, I described an 1804 paper titled, “On the decline of mathematical studies, and the sciences dependent upon them,” which laments England’s loss of competitiveness due to lack of comprehensive mathematics education; the arguments in the paper might have been written today.
A week ago, I was browsing the archives of Physical Review Letters, which is in essence the most prestigious physics-only journal in existence. (Papers in Nature and Science are considered more prestigious, but those journals cover all scientific topics.) Getting a paper into PRL is considered a great achievement — it supposedly indicates that your research is a significant scientific advance of very broad importance that should be published rapidly. The prestige is so great, in fact, that it is very tempting for researchers to submit work that is not quite appropriate for PRL, on the off-chance that it can be “snuck in”. This results in an excessive amount of papers being submitted to the journal, overwhelming its editors and its peer-reviewers, and can be a real hassle.
I suspect the top journals in every field see this sort of problem, but surely this wasn’t a problem for PRL in the heyday of physics, when the journal was first initiated, right?
Volume 1, issue 1 of Physical Review Letters came out on July 1st, 1958; in the February 1st, 1959 issue of PRL (vol. 2, p. 80), an editorial appeared with the very ominous title, “A WARNING”. The text of this editorial is presented in its entirety below.