The road to publication of the paper ''Cosmological blueshifting may explain gamma ray bursts''

The Lemaitre -- Tolman (LT) model is known to have a peculiar property: the rays emitted at the Big Bang (BB) at points where the BB function $t_B(r)$ is not constant reach all observers with infinite blueshift: if we could observe the BB, the rays emitted at those points would reach us having infinite frequency (zero wavelength). At least this was the folklore knowledge.

In 2014, while doing calculations with the LT model, I (re-)discovered the fact that the infinite blueshift is generated only when those rays are radially directed. Nonradial rays, wherever emitted at the BB, reach all observers with infinite redshift. (The first to prove this were C. Hellaby and K. Lake, Astrophys. J. 282, 1 (1984) + erratum Astrophys. J. 294, 702 (1985)).

My idea was: if the infinitely blueshifted rays are so rare, perhaps their blueshifts could be related to the gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) observed by astronomers.

In the real Universe, light received by present observers is emitted at the last-scattering hypersurface (LSH), somewhat later than the BB. Consequently, any blueshift seen by observers now must be finite. Moreover, blueshift is generated only along a short initial segment of a ray; later the ray acquires redshifts that reduce the blueshift and can overcompensate it. The first question to answer was: is it possible to arrange the BB profile so that the blueshift is still visible to the observer 13 x 10^9 years later, and is of sufficient magnitude to account for the frequencies of the gamma rays in the GRBs?

I managed to construct a BB profile that did have such an effect. My first model was rather imperfect: the hump on the BB had its top at approximately 1/5 of the present age of the Universe. Still, I thought the basic idea was so brilliant that I decided to send the account of it to Physical Review Letters. That text may be viewed here .

The reply was as quick as the journal is famous for being. I received it on February 5, 2015, two days after submitting the paper, and it read as follows:



Od: prl@aps.org Do: akr@camk.edu.pl Temat: Your_manuscript LB14421 Krasinski Data: 5 lutego 2015 21:36 Re: LB14421 Gamma ray bursts may be blueshifted bundles of the relic radiation by Andrzej Krasi\'nski Dear Professor Krasinski, We have considered your manuscript and conclude that it is not suited for Physical Review Letters. The paper is very speculative, with unusual assumptions that are not fully explained, and does not examine consequences of the assumed cosmology for phenomena other than gamma ray bursts. Much more is needed to warrant publication of such a theory in Physical Review Letters. Yours sincerely, Stanley G. Brown Consulting Editor Physical Review Letters Email: prl@aps.org http://journals.aps.org/prl/




In brief, the editor refused to publish the paper because he did not understand it. Editors usually do not understand the papers they receive, this is what referees are for. But rejecting a paper without consulting any referees only because the subject was unfamiliar to the editor seemed unbelievably arrogant. My reply to the editor, sent on February 6, 2015, was this:



Od: "Andrzej Krasinski" Do: prl@aps.org DW: akr@camk.edu.pl Temat: Re: Your_manuscript LB14421 Krasinski Data: 6 lutego 2015 01:31 Dear Professor Brown, From your letter I conclude that my paper was rejected out of hand, without being sent to referees, on the basis of the fact that your background knowledge and mine do not intersect. I know that the current policy of PRL is to pre-screen the submitted papers before they are sent to referees. In my case, a fair pre-screening can be done only by someone who is well-versed in the general relativity theory. I see two such persons among the current associate editors of PRL: Matt Visser and Eric Poisson. If any of them finds my paper unworthy of bothering the referees, then I will have no grounds for further discussion. Please give me that chance. Here is the justification of my request, which is also a reply to your letter. The only speculative part of my paper (which I prefer to call hypothesis to be tested) is relating the long-known and thoroughly investigated Lemaitre - Tolman (LT) cosmological model (see below) to the also long-known gamma ray bursts. Everything else in it is well-established solid knowledge. I do not see which assumptions you consider "unusual" and not "fully explained". The paper is aimed at readers who are well-versed in relativity, and none of them would need any more explanation than is already given. As concerns the "consequences of the assumed cosmology for phenomena other than gamma ray bursts", the LT model is known since 1933 and has been the subject of at least 100+ papers, plus a few books. All that literature (a sample of which is cited in my present paper) contains more than enough information on the "other phenomena". Indeed, this model is quite well-known in the relativity community, and my target readers would not need or expect the examination you said is lacking. In view of the above, please let Professor Visser or Professor Poisson have a look at my paper. Yours sincerely Andrzej Krasinski




The editor fulfilled my request and sent the paper for evaluation to Eric Poisson. The reply was even more arrogant. The second rejection letter read like this:



Od: prl@aps.org Do: akr@camk.edu.pl Temat: Your_manuscript LB14421 Krasinski Data: 12 lutego 2015 02:45 Re: LB14421 Gamma ray bursts may be blueshifted bundles of the relic radiation by Andrzej Krasi\'nski Dear Professor Krasinski, The complete file concerning the above manuscript has been reviewed by a Divisional Associate Editor. The appended comments advise against publication in Physical Review Letters. The Editors accept this advice. Your appeal has been considered, and our decision to reject is maintained. Yours sincerely, Stanley G. Brown Consulting Editor Physical Review Letters ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Report of the Divisional Associate Editor -- LB14421/Krasinski ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The editorial decision to reject the paper without external review was appealed by the author. After reading the paper and the correspondence between the author and Consulting Editor, my recommendation is to deny the appeal and reject the paper. In his letter, the Consulting Editor stated that "the paper is very speculative, with unusual assumptions that are not fully explained, and does not examine consequences of the assumed cosmology for phenomena other than gamma ray bursts. Much more is needed to warrant publication of such a theory in Physical Review Letters.'' I agree with every single point. The paper aims to explain at least the qualitative features of gamma-ray bursts by designing a fine-tuned cosmological model to produce highly blueshifted radiation. This is a widely speculative scenario, and the evidence provided in the paper doesn't convince. Some of the assumptions are indeed not clear. For example, why are hydrogen lines the only radiation allowed to be blueshifted? Why, in particular, is the thermal background radiation forbidden to undergo the blueshift? I expect that in this model, ALL forms of radiation must be blueshifted. As another example, it is implausible that the short lifetime of gamma-ray bursts can be explained by the observer's shifting line of sight: the model is isotropic, and blueshifted radiation must be emitted from all directions. I could keep going. Another point made by the Consulting Editor is that the consequences of the cosmological model were not worked out for other phenomena. The author counters that the LT models have been well studied in the literature. Indeed, but the specific model considered by the author has not been, and since it appears to be a radical departure from the standard cosmological model, the onus is on the author to demonstrate that his cosmology passes all the required tests (for example, that it produces the correct spectrum of inhomogeneities of the cosmic microwave background). Eric Poisson Divisional Associate Editor Physical Review Letters




I hoped my fellow relativist would be able to at least superficially understand the paper and would know whom to ask to review it (of course, I suggested a few possible referee names). But Mr. Poisson failed that expectation and was wrong in every point of his criticism. Therefore, I decided to appeal again, although this was in contradiction to my earlier statement that "If any of them finds my paper unworthy of bothering the referees, then I will have no grounds for further discussion". I hoped reason would prevail over stiff rules. Here is the copy of the email that I sent on February 16, 2015:



Od: "Andrzej Krasinski" Do: prl@aps.org DW: akr@camk.edu.pl Temat: Re: Your_manuscript LB14421 Krasinski Data: 16 lutego 2015 12:59 Dear Professor Brown, Thank you for giving me a second chance. I hoped my paper would receive a fair treatment at the hands of an expert in relativity. Unfortunately, this did not happen. He complains that I did not answer several questions - but all of them except one are answered in the paper (see further below for the one exception). 1. Re blueshifting the hydrogen emission frequencies: I have nowhere said what Prof. Poisson claims I did. Of course, EVERY emitted frequency can be blueshifted individually, independently of other frequencies, provided the light ray is radial with respect to the LT region (see below for more on this). I demonstrated that, in the model I consider, each line in the whole emission frequency range of hydrogen atoms can be blueshifted to the gamma-ray range. Prof. Poisson's question "Why, in particular, is the thermal background radiation forbidden to undergo the blueshift?" is baseless. Each frequency of this radiation IS blueshifted (by the way, the bulk of the black-body spectrum is, at the hydrogen recombination temperature of approx. 3000K, within the hydrogen emission range - which can be verified by an elementary calculation). What I did imply in the paper is: The spectra of the gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are not those of black-bodies, so obviously the GRBs cannot arise by blueshifting the thermal radiation with the spectrum preserved. 2. Re the short lifetime of the GRBs: my model is not isotropic around the observer. (To pre-empt another attack on my paper: a small anisotropy is allowed by the CMB observations, and is in fact necessary to account for the formation of structures). The observer resides in a Friedmann region, and the emitter is within a spherical LT perturbation embedded in a Friedmann background. Only those rays acquire blueshift that are emitted from within the LT region, radially with respect to its center and sufficiently close to the big bang. For the blueshift to be visible to the observer, this radial ray must be aimed exactly at the observer's world line. For any given LT region, this is a SINGLE direction at every emission instant. Rays emitted in the LT region non-radially (thus necessarily from off-center sources), if they hit the observer, are REDshifted, not blueshifted. Thus, an arbitrarily small mis-alignment between the observer's line of sight and the direction toward the central point of the LT region causes disappearance of the blueshift. This is explicitly written in my paper. 3. The model I considered is not any "radical departure from the standard cosmological model". This is a small perturbation superimposed on the standard Friedmann background. All cosmologists agree that such perturbations must exist to account for the structure formation and for the fluctuations in the CMB temperature. The only way in which my model differs from the standard approach is that the perturbation is an exact solution of the full Einstein equations, and not an approximate solution of the linearized Einstein equations, as is usually done. I considered a single perturbation in order to provide a proof of existence of the blueshift mechanism, but an arbitrary number of such perturbations can be inserted in the Friedmann background, each one with a different profile. This is allowed by the Einstein equations and by the matching conditions. 4. In view of the above, the model I used does not require any new set of tests. All that has to be done is to verify that the amplitude and the angular size of the CMB temperature fluctuation caused by the LT perturbation stay within the observational limits. This was indeed not done in my paper because the model anyway requires further refining to quantitatively account for any actually observed GRB. The test against the CMB data will have to be done at the next stage, but it will not instantly lead to a simple yes-or-no answer. The bang-time profile in a general LT model is an arbitrary function of the radial coordinate (the model obeys the Einstein equations with every profile!), and so can be flexed in an infinite number of ways to accommodate observational data. The profile given in my paper is a single example, preliminarily adapted to the GRB data. Even more flexibility will appear when the LT patch is replaced by a Szekeres patch - see the final paragraphs of my sec. V. The process of adap ting the bang-time function to the CMB data will be an extended numerical procedure resulting in consecutive limitations imposed on the height of the hump in the bang time, on its profile, and on the profile of the energy function E(r) (in my paper the E(r) was assumed to be Friedmannian). I already have some preliminary results on this. My paper was intended to introduce a new method of interpreting the GRBs. I think this method is sufficiently promising to be made public. Of course, it will require much follow-up research. By submitting my paper to PRL I hoped to take advantage of your fast publication procedure before somebody else arrives at the same idea. I am sure this will happen, since a few other authors are currently investigating other aspects of blueshifts in the LT models. I also hoped that the paper would be evaluated by referees having the necessary background knowledge so that I would not have to explain results published years ago. Instead, as you can see from the above, the pre-evaluator dismissed my paper out of hand, not having read it with sufficient attention to detail, and interpreted every gap in his understanding as a proof of my ignorance. I think it would only be fair to send my paper for external review now. Six names of suggested referees are contained in my submission file. I am aware that the idea I present is outside the mainstream and may turn out in the end to be a false lead. But before it turns out to be wrong or fruitful, it must be tested in as many ways as possible. This will not happen if I am not allowed to go public with it. Is it not true that the Physical Review journals were created for the purpose of publishing new ideas? Yours sincerely Andrzej Krasinski




But Dr. Brown chose the easy formal excuse. This is what he wrote to me on February 19, 2015:



Od: prl@aps.org Do: akr@camk.edu.pl Temat: Your_manuscript LB14421 Krasinski Data: 19 lutego 2015 17:21 Re: LB14421 Gamma ray bursts may be blueshifted bundles of the relic radiation by Andrzej Krasi\'nski Dear Professor Krasinski, We have received your resubmittal. However, our consideration of your manuscript resulted in a decision against publication, and this decision was reaffirmed after appeal to a member of the Editorial Board. According to the appeal procedure, further scientific review is not appropriate. We also note that in your message of 5 February, you indicated that if Dr. Poisson "finds my paper unworthy of bothering the referees, then I will have no grounds for further discussion." Of course, such a statement from an author does not determine editorial procedure, but it does point to inconsistency in your viewpoint. Yours sincerely, Stanley G. Brown Consulting Editor Physical Review Letters




At this point, I had no further arguments. I had anyway intended to publish an extended and improved version that would contain detailed derivations of all my results. The PRL note was meant only to announce the idea. Preparing the longer paper, published in Physical Review D, took 7 months; it involved numerous and laborious numerical experiments. The refereeing process at PRD added nearly 4 months to that. The referee who recommended to accept my paper was the fifth one employed; the other four were unable to report. (To be sure: I do not complain about that. The process was fair, the referee understood the paper and asked for only minor changes to make it more accessible to readers with particle-physics background, which was reasonable.)

My adventure shows that the refereeing system at PRL is too easy to misuse. The borderline between papers sent to referees and those instantly rejected is determined by the level of knowledge and honesty of the editorial board members. This is not a sufficient safeguard. The origin of the overflow of submissions to PRL (which was the reason of introducing this peculiar system) is the current mania of rankings and impact factors -- and this is the problem to be solved (see Nature 464, March 4, 2010). I no longer hold PRL in such a high regard as I had before this unpleasant interaction.