Lequeux Astronomy and Astrophysics
Chronicle of my exchanges with Astronomy and Astrophysics. 1997-1998
In October 1996, we sent to the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, edited by James Lequeux, a manuscript of about twenty pages. Immediate return with the simple sentence:
- Sorry, we do not publish speculative works
I then called James Lequeux, the editor of the journal.
-
I don't understand. Your journal has published papers on dark matter.
-
Yes, but for dark matter we have observational evidence: the strong gravitational lensing effects.
-
Our model also produces such effects, attributing them to a different cause. It is neither more nor less speculative. I would like to insist that this work be submitted to an expert. If this expert finds conceptual errors, we will not insist. Otherwise, you will publish the work. Okay?
-
Okay.
James Lequeux therefore submitted the article to an anonymous referee and in February 1997, he responded immediately, finding the work
provocating and interesting
estimating that the implications of such a model must be explored. A first series of questions followed. The discussion then began. The initial article mainly dealt with galaxy confinement. The referee then asked that this work be integrated into a complete cosmological model, that is, addressing the question of cosmic evolution. In eleven months, he asked sixty questions. The answers led to an expansion of the article. But the tone was very friendly and the questions were very relevant. We thanked the referee in one of the letters accompanying our successive submissions (seven versions of the article). And he replied:
- I appreciate the kind remark about my work. I appreciate the patience of the authors.
As the referee wanted us to make a link with other works, which he cited (those of Foot, Volkas, Berezhiani and Mohapatra, Physical Review 1995, which refer to the solar neutrino defect and suggest the existence of a "mirror universe"), this led to further developments.
As the paper had become too long, we split it into two parts, the second dealing with the radiative phase and other topics. Suddenly, we received, dated December 1, 1997, a letter from James Lequeux
J. Lequeux
Observatoire de Paris
61, avenue de l'observatoire
75014 Paris, France
Mr. J.P. Petit
xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Ref: MS 5945
1st December 1997
Dear Mr. Petit,
I have just received the referee's response on the 7th version of your paper "Matter-ghost matter astrophysics". I have the impression that the process will not converge and that it is necessary to stop here. I personally doubt that it is possible to arrive at a paper whose form and content are acceptable for publication in A&A. It is not possible for the referee and the editors to spend so much time on an article with finally few results.
I have therefore decided to stop here, and to not accept your paper for publication. You must consider that my decision is irrevocable and final. It also concerns paper number 2 "Matter-ghost -matter astrophysics. The radiative era..." which depends on the first.
Sincerely,
signed: J. Lequeux.
J. Lequeux
Observatoire de Paris
61, avenue de l'observatoire
75014 Paris, France
Mr. J.P. Petit
xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Ref: MS 5945
1st December 1997
J. Lequeux
Observatoire de Paris
61, avenue de l'observatoire
75014 Paris, France
Mr. J.P. Petit
xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Ref: MS 5945
1st December 1997
This letter was accompanied by the referee's last comment, which in no way constitutes a rejection, since he specifies, as he always did, "I think the basic idea is interesting" (I think the basic idea is interesting). He only asked for more details on the technique used for the numerical simulations, which we were ready to send him.
James Lequeux's reaction of annoyance is understandable, as well as, to a certain extent, those of other journals. These are flooded with articles. Nature receives a hundred papers a day. After reflection, we decided to shorten this first article, limiting it to sections that, in principle, had already been thoroughly examined by the referee of A & A and which seemed to have received his approval. Therefore, we sent the following article to James Lequeux, accompanied by the attached letter:
Jean Pierre Petit
Research Director
at CNRS
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Aix on 12 January 1998
Dear Lequeux,
I have received your letter of 1st December 1997. I understand very well your editor's irritation, facing an issue that has been dragging on for more than ten months and which has already resulted in seven successive versions. I imagine that journals like yours must be overwhelmed with articles. If all your author-referee pairs were to engage in such a ping-pong game, your situation would become unmanageable.
But I am only partially responsible for this situation. I recall that the initial article was only twenty-two pages long. Your referee, through successive exchanges, asked... sixty questions, which only concerned twenty percent of the text!
He wanted a complete cosmological model. It was provided. Then he wanted details on its radiative phase. There, the paper exceeded ninety pages. It was split into two. But the referee wanted us to establish a link with other works of people who also considered two-population structures (Foot, Volkas, Mohapatra and Berezhiani, "mirror universe" model, Physical Review 1995). This work therefore went in all directions, and in the end I expected to receive questions like "and the quarks, what do you think?"
I have reworked the entire work and retained parts that had been thoroughly analyzed by your referee and had received his approval. From there, I recomposed the attached article. I therefore retained three themes: the confinement of galaxies and the problem of their rotation curve, the description of the "matter" phase of the twin model and the question of negative gravitational lensing effects (already mentioned in a previous publication), the whole forming a whole with a minimum of scientific coherence.
I have removed the parts referring
-
to group theory.
-
to the joint solutions of the two field equations "posi-Schwarzschild-Néga-Schwarzschild" that we had developed.
-
to our new spiral structure model, based on 2D simulations.
-
to a galaxy formation model.
-
to a theory of joint gravitational instabilities (conjugated Jeans equations)
-
to the reconstruction of Newton's and Poisson's equations in this twin context.
-
to the works of Foot, Volkas, Berezihani and Mohapatra, where our response had been a geometric description of "mirror neutrinos", in terms of group.
since your referee had made no comments on these sections.
I also removed the part devoted to the Very Large Structure, since the referee was still asking for clarifications on the techniques of our 2D simulations, although they were conducted in a perfectly classical way.
We have renamed this second matter "repulsive dark matter". The existence of an unobserved component in the universe has indeed become essential to account for numerous phenomena in astrophysics. Since no candidate (MACHOs or massive neutrinos) has been able to impose itself in a credible way and since our model also accounts for the strong gravitational lensing effects, related to galaxies and clusters, why not consider a repulsive dark matter, an idea that seemed to have immediately seduced your referee, who recalled his overall impression in his last report: "I like the basic idea".
F. Landsheat has disappeared as a co-author since the part he was responsible for, related to the spiral structure, does not appear in this new text.
I hope that the article I am sending you can be published in Astronomy and Astrophysics.
I take this opportunity to send you our best wishes for 1998.
signed: J.P.Petit
Jean Pierre Petit
Research Director
at CNRS
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Aix on 12 January 1998
Dear Lequeux,
I have received your letter of 1st December 1997. I understand very well your editor's irritation, facing an issue that has been dragging on for more than ten months and which has already resulted in seven successive versions. I imagine that journals like yours must be overwhelmed with articles. If all your author-referee pairs were to engage in such a ping-pong game, your situation would become unmanageable.
But I am only partially responsible for this situation. I recall that the initial article was only twenty-two pages long. Your referee, through successive exchanges, asked... sixty questions, which only concerned twenty percent of the text!
He wanted a complete cosmological model. It was provided. Then he wanted details on its radiative phase. There, the paper exceeded ninety pages. It was split into two. But the referee wanted us to establish a link with other works of people who also considered two-population structures (Foot, Volkas, Mohapatra and Berezhiani, "mirror universe" model, Physical Review 1995). This work therefore went in all directions, and in the end I expected to receive questions like "and the quarks, what do you think?"
I have reworked the entire work and retained parts that had been thoroughly analyzed by your referee and had received his approval. From there, I recomposed the attached article. I therefore retained three themes: the confinement of galaxies and the problem of their rotation curve, the description of the "matter" phase of the twin model and the question of negative gravitational lensing effects (already mentioned in a previous publication), the whole forming a whole with a minimum of scientific coherence.
I have removed the parts referring
-
to group theory.
-
to the joint solutions of the two field equations "posi-Schwarzschild-Néga-Schwarzschild" that we had developed.
-
to our new spiral structure model, based on 2D simulations.
-
to a galaxy formation model.
-
to a theory of joint gravitational instabilities (conjugated Jeans equations)
-
to the reconstruction of Newton's and Poisson's equations in this twin context.
-
to the works of Foot, Volkas, Berezihani and Mohapatra, where our response had been a geometric description of "mirror neutrinos", in terms of group.
since your referee had made no comments on these sections.
I also removed the part devoted to the Very Large Structure, since the referee was still asking for clarifications on the techniques of our 2D simulations, although they were conducted in a perfectly classical way.
We have renamed this second matter "repulsive dark matter". The existence of an unobserved component in the universe has indeed become essential to account for numerous phenomena in astrophysics. Since no candidate (MACHOs or massive neutrinos) has been able to impose itself in a credible way and since our model also accounts for the strong gravitational lensing effects, related to galaxies and clusters, why not consider a repulsive dark matter, an idea that seemed to have immediately seduced your referee, who recalled his overall impression in his last report: "I like the basic idea".
F. Landsheat has disappeared as a co-author since the part he was responsible for, related to the spiral structure, does not appear in this new text.
I hope that the article I am sending you can be published in Astronomy and Astrophysics.
I take this opportunity to send you our best wishes for 1998.
signed: J.P.Petit
J. Lequeux
Observatoire de Paris
61, avenue de l'observatoire
75014 Paris, France
Mr. J.P. Petit
xxxxxxxxxxxx
16 January 1998
Dear Sir,
I am sorry, but as I told you in my letter of 1st December, my decision to reject your papers "Matter ghost matter astrophysics" is final. You can submit this paper to other journals, for example:
Gravitation, Astrophysics and Cosmology Ed. in Chief: Fang Li Zhi Dept of Physics and Steward Observatory University of Arizona Tucson, AZ 85721 USA
(4 copies).
Sincerely,
Signed: J. Lequeux.
J. Lequeux
Observatoire de Paris
61, avenue de l'observatoire
75014 Paris, France
Mr. J.P. Petit
xxxxxxxxxxxx
16 January 1998
J. Lequeux
Observatoire de Paris
61, avenue de l'observatoire
75014 Paris, France
Mr. J.P. Petit
xxxxxxxxxxxx
16 January 1998
Immediate response from Lequeux, who sends back the article without sending it to the referee :
It should be noted that the journal he cited had, a year earlier, sent back the standard response, probably without real reading:
Sorry, we don't publish speculative works.
without submission to an expert.
Two years later, back to square one ---
**A few years earlier, **towards the end of the 1980s, I was stationed at the Marseille Observatory. I had spent a few years, with the oral blessing of Papon (then Director General of CNRS) and Combarnous (Director of the Physics and Engineering Sciences Sector), to do some MHD, which had ended in the lamentable Rouen affair. See my book "Investigation of UFOs". In 1986, there was nothing left but to abandon MHD and find a way out. At that time I told my student, Bertrand Lebrun: "finish writing your thesis, the boat is sinking, it's all over". I then threw myself into the excellent book by Adler Schiffer and Bazin "Introduction to General Relativity", Mac Graw Hill Editions, as I had thrown myself into the Chapman and Cowling (the mathematical study of non-uniform gases, Princeton University Press) in 1972. A year later I had publishable theoretical cosmology works, having quickly absorbed the rather unpleasant (tensorial) formalism of General Relativity. I hurried to send two articles to the journal Modern Physics Letters A. Meanwhile, the director of the Observatory, the upright Yvon Georgelin, had been replaced by James Lequeux. I unfortunately had not asked Papon, nor Combarnous, to officially endorse the fact that being stationed in an astronomy observatory I had engaged in MHD work (Combarnous had said to me "where is the problem?"). I knew that Lequeux did not see it that way. The exclusion of the observatory from the saucer that I had become seemed to him to be a prophylactic measure that was necessary. Suspecting something, I made an appointment with him and explained for two hours my work on "a cosmology with variable constants", which he did not believe for a single moment.
Meanwhile, the direction of CNRS had changed, following the change of government. Papon and Combarnous had been replaced respectively by Feneuille (a man that the cement company Lafarge had given us) and by a certain Charpentier. The army was not happy. I had to abandon the Rouennais to their fate. Despite the enlightened advice of the polytechnician Gilbert Payan, the whole project failed after my departure. They therefore asked CNRS to hand me over "hands and feet tied". But first, I had to be extracted from my bunker, the Observatory of Marseille where I had lived, entrenched for 14 years. They asked Lequeux to provide the pretext, which he did through the following letter:
Charpentier took up the ball and sent me a very brief letter
I put an end to your assignment at the Observatory of Marseille. You will now be managed as an independent researcher
Fortunately, two days after receiving Charpentier's letter, I obtained the acceptance of two theoretical cosmology papers by the journal Modern Physics Letters A. Everything then turned into confusion. Charpentier called Lequeux and said "But, you told me he was doing nothing. With these two cosmology papers published in an excellent journal, I look good. Especially since I had pronounced his exclusion while the observatory does not fall under my jurisdiction".
That day, the Army saw its prey escape.
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