1.3.10  Publish or Perish

Although I realized the importance of publishing at early stages of my work on the subject of time, even before I started the Ph.D. at Exeter University, when I published my first book in 1999, but the nature of this interdisciplinary subject was really a big obstacle that prevented adequate publishing in scientific journals. Publishing public books should normally come after the accumulation of important scientific results which should have been published in specialized journals where they may be appreciated and evaluated by other interested scholars, and then may subsequently cause the desired discussion and interaction. The problem in my case was the complete absence of any serious specialized journals which may be interested in such unprecedented mixture between physics and Islamic philosophy.

In fact, right after I published “Ibn Arabi - Time and Cosmology”, I prepared an article dedicated on Zeno’s paradoxes of motion, but I could not find any journal to publish it. They mostly tend to send a quick rejection right after reading the title, claiming that they are looking for articles on contemporary philosophical problems rather than those historical issues of ancient philosophy that have been already superseded by modern physics! After receiving several such rejections, I started to doubt my findings, and I even stopped working on the subject for several years as I mentioned above.

However, after I obtained more significant and vibrant results with further rigorous mathematical formulation, I decided that I am now ready to publish in physics journals, at least those which are focused on the fundamental or theoretical aspects of gravity and quantum physics. Nevertheless, all specialized journals kept rejecting my articles even after I did several tough revisions and rectifications which removed all the supposedly heuristic arguments.

Unfortunately, it was very clear that some reviewers wrote their quick comments without even reading the article at all. Maybe because most important journals usually receive much more articles than they could publish or even review, but some of these comments were unjustifiably very harsh and even cruel in their criticism. The problem is that most journals take several weeks to reply without giving any useful critical comments, and they request that authors should not send the article to any other journals while they are reviewing it. For example, one of the famous journals, which is specialized in classical and quantum gravity, took two weeks to send the article out for review and then more than six weeks during which the statues was showing “awaiting referee reports”, and then after that replied with the following comment: The paper is not based on a reliable mathematical foundation. The “split-imaginary”, or “hyperbolic” numbers introduced by the author do not have any rigorous mathematical sense. From the physical point of view, the paper does not contain any new and correct theoretical results and formulas, too. How can such journals specialized in quantum gravity send their manuscripts to reviewers who have not heard of hyperbolic geometry and split-imaginary numbers! They also tend to appoint managing editors who may not be physicists at all, while the chief editor, usually one of the famous physicists in the field, never looks at most manuscripts, at least in the early stages of the peer review process.

Another journal which is specialized in relativity and gravitation replied: I find that the conceptual and technical level of the present submission is substantially below the papers that are accepted for publication in leading international journals in theoretical physics. So it is very clear from these comments that the reviewers are not ready to look beyond the classical ideas tackled by the current trending research and its treatment of contemporary theories. For example, once they see the word: “monad”, they reach a final decision without reading the article, although I gave the sufficient analysis of its physical and philosophical meaning and how it can be compared to black holes or space-time singularities which have absolutely zero volume. I went even further and removed some of the main key concepts because they could not be written in the language physicists can usually understand, but I always get the rejection, even by journals that specialize in the foundations of physics where I got replies such as: The author of this manuscript fails to make clear how his/her work relates to current discussions in the foundations of physics. So if we refuse to seriously discuss any research outside the current discussions in the foundations of physics, how can we ever break out of the current closed loops!

Nevertheless, I decided to go back to the philosophy of physics/science journals, just in case my article is not suitable for any physics journals, but again the article was rejected for other reasons, with polite comments such as: While this paper has a number of significant virtues, I am sorry to report that it is not well suited for publication in philosophy of science. ... the project presented here falls outside the scope of what the journal typically publishes and would be better placed in a journal that publishes theoretical physics.

Along that, of course, there were many such polite apologies and useful comments which helped me cultivate the article, but I reached the conclusion that scientific journals are not prepared to review innovative ideas, because they have to go through the reviewers who are mostly specialized in some current narrow fields of modern theories, and they are necessarily not familiar with the alleged new conceptions and their profound philosophical background. At the same time, there are very few serious reviewers who are ready to spend enough time on revolutionary articles in order to realize their strong points, so they tend to search for the weak points and amplify them to justify their decisions, when they do, and of course the new revolutionary theories are not born mature. Yet if these new concepts were already part of modern theories, they would have been discovered long ago, and the same if they were pretty straightforward.

Although their decision was the same typical quick rejection, one of the best comments that I received from one of the first class journals in theoretical physics says: The author has introduced a new concept: “duality of time”, using a complex time number plane, and has made effort to resolve many physics problems including: derivation of Lorentz symmetry, the equivalence principle, and a solution of the cosmological constant problem. Though new principles and ideas have been introduced, the essential number of problems solved by doing that does not decrease at all. ... and this just transforms the question into another question without decreasing the number of questions to be resolved.

Well this seems to be encouraging, but is it not enough that there is a new concept, and that this concept does solve many persisting problems? The reviewer did not refute the new solutions, which requires more serious reviewing to tell if it is faulty or flawed, and even if it is correct that the essential number of problems does not decrease, it means that this new idea provides an alternative way of thinking that solves some old persisting problems, and now we have to think of others even if they are new problems caused by this same innovative idea.

Nevertheless, rather than discouraging me, these negative and disappointing comments gave me more reasons to write this book, which was already planned, but now, in the process of this writing, even more important results started to develop very quickly, which may not have been possible if publishing was any smooth process.