Ah, once again I am at the conclusion that yes, in fact, science is difficult and hard.

It’s a double dose of reality today. We’re starting our next batch of experiments and the first day is never easy. I expect that I will be here through most of the night as we struggle to set things up and start doing science.

But we also got back a set of comments on a paper we recently submitted. The editor seemed ok with it, but one of the referees was quite unhappy. And that is just part of it. I can complain and be upset that one of my favorite papers did not meet with rapt approval. But that is just part of science, and despite my moaning, if we can answer the questions of the referee it will probably make for a better paper. That said, even a perfect paper that is sound can still face rejection. Peer review does not always work. But it’s better than anything else we’ve tried so far (and wading through the arXiv servers for a few hours every day where many of the papers contain gross errors is not a better alternative).

Some of the referee questions are benign and easily answered. Those are easy as we can make small clarifications or corrections to the text. Some of the questions reflect more of a misunderstanding on the part of the referee. Those are also good things to fix because it’s not just a little textual offense, but rather indicates a genuine lack of communication on our part. Lastly there are the questions raised that are tough. These are things that perhaps we ourselves did not fully appreciate. They are things that we must first make certain we understand and then likely include in the paper.

I suppose the main point of this is to say that it does not matter how much I like the paper, or how clever I think our experiment, what matters is how well it can hold up under scrutiny. Or in other words, it must be science.