Politics fucks science once again:
In normal times, the four large physics experiments using proton collisions at Cern’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland publish numerous scientific articles a year. But in March 2022, the number of new research papers by the LHC experiments fell to zero. The reason: a lack of agreement on how to list Russian and Belarusian scientists and institutes, if at all. The temporary compromise, in place up to now, is not to publish.
I assume, but don’t know, that this means formal publication. Archiv or whatever it’s called, preprint servers, are still active? That being where the actual science is done these days anyway?
Funny society we live in now. I’ve suffered from a crap disease for 33 years that was discovered by a German. A couple of years ago, the NHS stopped calling it after the bloke, cos he was a member of the Nazi party.
I feel so much better now…
Nota Benny – Ukie physicists, guys whose country is being invaded, are more grown up than the perpetual undergrads of Western European academia:
We have Ukrainian collaborators for whom this question is naturally extremely painful. [But] most of my Ukrainian colleagues do not extend responsibility for the invasion to their colleagues from Russian institutes. I would say that some of my EU colleagues are much more radical.”
Shouldn’t really surprise, since a major preoccupation of British and EU universities now is writing reports accusing themselves of being institutionally racist.
The scientists and their institutions have not changed their names or their nationality. The work they did has not ceased to exist, and its value (or lack of) has not changed. Listing them in publications is simply acknowledging the objective reality of who did what.
If scientists or administrators at CERN want to punish Russian and Belarusian scientists for the actions of their governments then they should say so openly. If they think that’s wrong, they should also say so openly. This refusal to take any clear position is pure cowardice.
Reminds me of that Welsh orchestra that refused to play Tchaikovsky.
Really we should be hanging these bastards on eugenic grounds.
They should publish a book. They could call it “100 authors against Russian Physics”.
Yup, Arxiv keeps on publishing the Science. Latest article is from three days ago. Scientists are simply put up as “Collaborative Entity”.