``Short-lived flashes of gamma radiation in a quasi-spherical Szekeres metric''
To make the long story short, I am tired of trying to explain my paper to the referees who refuse to consider my arguments. At 72, what little life I still have left to live, I would rather do more pleasant things than trying in vain to make my critics read and understand what I write to them. This paper will remain unpublished, and accessible only via the ArXiv (unless it is kicked out also from there).
The paper (hereafter called Paper 4) is a continuation of A. Krasinski, Cosmological blueshifting may explain the gamma ray bursts. Phys. Rev. D93 , 043525 (2016) (hereafter Paper 1). That one was based on the finding that radial light rays emitted at the end of the last scattering epoch in a Lemaitre - Tolman model might reach the present observers with z close to -1. I proposed that those blueshifted rays might be seen among the gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). I managed to account for several observed properties of the GRBs. One of the unsolved problems was that my sources of gamma radiation would have a too large angular diameter in the sky (2 degrees in my model vs. 1 degree, which is the current resolution of the detectors). Another problem was that the sources were emitting the gamma rays isotropically, while the observed GRBs are believed to be collimated into narrow jets.
In the next paper (A. Krasinski, Existence of blueshifts in quasi-spherical Szekeres spacetimes. Phys. Rev. D94 , 023515 (2016), hereafter Paper 2) I showed that a quasi-spherical Szekeres (QSS) deformation superimposed on an L--T background would make the blueshifting more efficient, i.e. the same BB profile would result in z being closer to -1. Consequently, the blueshift required to account for a GRB source could be achieved with a lower "hump" on the Big Bang profile, and the hump would be further away from the observer, resulting in a smaller angular diameter. Also, the QSS models accounted for the collimation: the high-frequency flashes proceeded only in two opposite directions. However, the particular models used in Paper 2 were only geometric examples, unrelated to cosmological reality.
Paper 3 (A. Krasinski, Properties of blueshifted light rays in quasi-spherical Szekeres
metrics. Phys. Rev. D97 , 064047 (2018)) was meant to be an improvement over Paper 1 using the idea of Paper 2. The L--T background was the same as in Paper 1, and the QSS deformation of it was adjusted by trial and error so as to produce the largest reduction in z. (Before it was published, it went through a torturous process of refereeing that is described in another section of this web page.) One of the last remaining problems was that the flashes of gamma radiation implied by this model were too long-lasting compared to the observed durations of the GRBs.
This is the problem that Paper 4 was meant to solve. The idea was that when the ray emitted by the source goes through another QSS region on its way to the observer, it is deflected. The mechanism of deflection is the same as in ordinary lensing, but the angle of deflection changes with time in consequence of the cosmic drift effect (which is absent in static lenses). Because of that, each high-frequency ray is aimed at any given observer only instantaneously. The paper presented numerical calculation which showed that the observer would no longer see the gamma ray 10 minutes after registering it. Instead, she would see lower-frequency radiation, analogous to a GRB afterglow, coming from the same direction. The analysis of geometric optics in the Szekeres models done in the paper is new and important for its own sake, independently of its possible astrophysical implications.
The first referee report reached me on May 9, 2018 and read as follows:
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I copy my reply to this report below. If anybody is reading this, then I wish to turn his/her attention to the fact that the bits of Paper 4 that were copied from Paper 3, for which the referee criticised me so strongly, were contained in 4 out of 18 pages, and in 3 out of 9 sections + 6 appendices. Obviously, they were meant to make the paper easier to read, and I had myself written in the introduction ``Sections II -- IV are partly repeated after Ref. [3]''. So, there was a malicious intention in Referee A's critique. Although he did not say this openly, anybody reading his remarks would get the impression that I am self-plagiarising to inflate the volume of the paper and my number of publications.
The reply copied below was received at the editorial office of PRD on May 14, 2018.
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The second report of referee A came to me together with a report of a new referee B on June 18, 2018. This is what they said:
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My replies are contained in the file copied below. But I wish to emphasise that what referee A said this time (apart from meaningless anecdotes) were false assertions about the contents of my paper. Either he did not read the paper and based his ``report'' on what he guessed by means of his genius, or he was deliberately telling untruth. As will be seen from the further correspondence, his probable motive was to take revenge for my rejecting his paper on another occasion. He is sooooo easy to recognise... It is regrettable that one member of our community puts private revenge ahead of search for scientific truth.
Another curious point to observe is that the two referees claim opposite things. What for one of them is not a ``very strong" inhomogeneity, for the other is ``extremely inhomogeneous"; see point [R11] in my replies. Referee A asks why I consider ``only one" intermediate Szekeres region, for referee B even one region is too many because it is ``implausible extra tuning"; see point [R4]. Such style of discussion is not science but rhetoric.
This is my reply to the second report that the editors of PRD received on July 2, 2018:
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Together with the above quoted reply I sent the following letter to the knowledge of editors only. I hoped it would straighten out the further proceedings, but the result was that referee A probably never saw my second reply. This is the letter:
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This time the editors employed a third referee, C, and his report reached me on July 9, 2018. One curious detail is not visible in the texts below, so I note it separately. In his first words the referee says that he read all four of my papers. But the history of my submissions recorded in the PRD web page showed that he responded on the same day on which he was contacted by the editors. A remarkable speed -- and it must be connected to the total lack of understanding of my papers displayed in his ``report'', which ran like this:
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For the readers of this note (if there are any) I will answer some of referee C's comments further down below. But as far as Phys. Rev. D is concerned, I've had it. Not only was the report rude and insulting (and wrong) - the editors seemed to be glad to get rid of me in this way. I decided to break off my relation with this journal, in particular to go on strike as a referee for them. By the next opportunity when they asked me to review a paper I sent the following reply:
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This was a painful goodbye for me. Beginning in 2002, I published 20 papers in PRD and wrote more than 60 referee reports for them. For my services, I was rewarded with the title of ``outstanding referee" at the end of 2017. But there are limits to what one can tolerate. Trampling over someone's dignity by an outpouring of ignorance and arrogance is not acceptable in a civilised world -- but it was OK for the editors of PRD.
Of the avalanche of questions asked by referee C nearly all were answered in my previous papers, so it would not be useful to repeat the answers here. But for casual readers of this text, some may require an extra answer. Here are two:
`` It is not clear what the author means when he claims that the redshifts of the
afterglows would be affected by the strange metric in his model and would not indicate
the true distance".
This means exactly what I said: when blueshifts are present, z is not a monotonous function of position along a ray. And this is not something that ``I mean" - it is a result of calculation. Consequently, the Hubble law does not apply. This law is a peculiarity of the Friedmann-class models, and does not hold in inhomogeneous ones. In general, the observed redshift does not give information about the distance to the light source. The ``strange metric" is strange only to those who do not understand it. Georges Lemaitre understood it already in 1933.
``In his previous papers he just jumps directly into a bunch of equations
of Lemaitre-Tolman models and Szekeres regions, but why this has any relation to predictions for GRBs with the observed properties is nowhere justified and demonstrated."
The ``bunch of equations" served to define the models that I was using, so that the reader could understand what is happening. This is a basic principle in research: explain your tools before you use them. But the referee must have attended a very different school than I did. The relation to my results is clear to every reader who cares to continue reading my papers beyond the ``bunch".
The penultimate paragraph of the report looks nonsense to me. After the ray is redirected by the time-dependent deflection, it no longer passes through the position of the observer, so the observer no longer sees it.
My next move was to submit the paper to General Relativity and Gravitation , on July 16. I hoped it would get a more professional treatment there, but this did not happen. The result was much the same as at PRD, except that this time the exchanges were kept polite. The referees evaluated my paper as if it were nothing more than an unsuccessful model of a GRB source and ignored its implications for relativity. The first referee report came back to me on October 19, 2018, together with a comment from an Associate Editor, and here is what it said:
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My reply to the referee was sent to GRG together with a message for the editor only, on October 25, 2018. Here is a copy:
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At the beginning of his second reply, the first referee said that he ``carefully read'' my arguments, but in fact he ignored them and mostly just repeated his. Two of his comments will be answered separately below. The report of the second referee was just as one-sided: he saw only a GRB model in my paper. None of the referees paid attention to what my paper said about relativity and the Szekeres models. Strangely, the Associate Editor in his accompanying letter said that he was glad that the referees did not discuss my paper from the point of view of relativity. I do not understand his thinking, but copy his letter below for completeness. This is the final rejection letter that I received on November 28, 2018:
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That's when I thought: enough of this! I said what needed to be said, but the referees preferred to gag me, with approval from the editors. So be it. Somebody else will rediscover all my results when time comes for it in the future. Meanwhile, I will take a break.
The remarks below are meant for those who kept reading up to this point and would like to see answers to the last new comments of the referees.
The first referee seems to have offered a way for me to re-edit the paper so as to make it acceptable. But I doubt the offer was sincere. His final comment in the first report was intended to seal off any crack leading to publication. The second referee also formulated conditions under which my paper could become acceptable to him. The things he said need to be done are indeed worth doing. But to do it all I would have to keep working for about 10 years. If I were not retired already, I would be fired before completing that research - for not having produced any publishable results. So that offer is unrealistic. How long did it take to work out, in small steps, all the consequences of the Friedmann - Lemaitre models?
To answer the specific comments of the first referee:
Re point (ii) of referee 1: The remark about focussing was answered in my letter to the editors. There is no need of any focussing because the maximally blueshifted rays proceed within a 2-dimensional sheet of spacetime. This means, their projections on a hypersurface of constant time are single curves, not bundles of curves.
Re point (iii) of referee 1: I commented on the non-Planckian spectrum in my Paper 1. The blueshifted rays are those that escaped from the last scattering process at the end of it, having been emitted in the preferred direction of the Szekeres region. I have nowhere said that they are "frequency-shifted CMB". All I said was that they were emitted in the same epoch as CMB and as a by-product of the same process.
Re point (iv) of referee 1: What he says here is a misunderstanding. While the gamma-ray flash is on, the CMB rays cannot keep coming from the same direction because some of them hit the GRB source ``from behind'' and do not continue toward the observer. This is an obvious geometrical fact that does not even require verification. But if it were possible to register the CMB rays coming from directions close to that of the GRB while the latter is still on, the CMB detectors might put more precise limits on the angular diameter of the GRB sources. Evidently, nobody did this so far. The problem with my currently best model is that it implies this diameter to be nearly 2 degrees, while the current detectors localise the GRBs up to 1 degree. The referee contradicts himself where he says in one sentence that "Nobody has ever seen that part of the CMB is blacked out during a gamma-ray burst" and in another that "the CMB and a gamma ray burst cannot be observed simultaneously".
Re the penultimate paragraph of referee 2: The mechanism of recombination in an inhomogeneous universe cannot be any different than in a homogeneous one. Recombination is a local process that is insensitive to large-scale geometry. The recombination stops when the local temperature drops below the temperature of ionisation. The latter is determined by the density of the primaeval plasma and is also local. Plus, this mechanism has nothing to do with the models I considered: all my calculations (done backward in time along null rays) stop after the mass density along the ray becomes equal to the ionisation density -- the same as in the LCDM model.
I repeat here, with slight modification, what I said in my comments to the publication story of another paper of mine. This whole story highlights a problem, which is pervasive in the astrophysical community: people with superficial knowledge gleaned from accidental sources pose to be experts and are taken seriously. With no common basis of knowledge between the author and the referees, discussions are concluded by means of rhetoric: the winner is not the one who is more knowledgeable, but the one who is more talkative, like in a souk or bazaar. This is not how science was supposed operate. An honest referee, if he/she does not understand the paper being evaluated, must refuse to give an opinion instead of pretending to be an expert. A particularly despicable example of breaking this rule is referee C from PRD in the history reported above.
To end on an optimistic note, I conclude with the quotation of the referee report that opened the way to publication of my Paper 1:
``This paper provides a 'proof of concept', and more, for the idea that GRBs may have their origin in pockets of imhomogeneity in an otherwise homogeneous and isotropic universe. The paper expands on previous work of the author (and others) on the frequency shift of radiation in LT spacetimes, which are spherically symmetric spacetimes generalising the isotropic Friedmann model. In previous work, it was shown that the familiar red-shift of an expanding isotropic universe can be replaced by a blue-shift. This occurs for radial null geodesics emerging from a delayed big bang region of the LT spacetime - the big bang is generally not simultaneous in the LT model. The purpose of the paper is to construct model LT spacetimes, which depend on two free functions, with parametric forms of the free functions (in particular the bang time function) chosen to match with various observations. It is shown that these parameters may indeed be chosen to provide models that match with a wide variety of such observations and/or known features of GRBs. Some features are not fully explained or fully explored, e.g. collimation and questions relating to intensity, but there is certainly sufficient to warrant further exploration of this model. The analysis is clear and, as far as I can tell, correct, and that paper makes an interesting contribution to the literature on astrophysical cosmology. I recommend publication without further changes, but the author may wish to consider the following: the title of the paper is likely to attract readers outside the GR community. Such readers may not be familiar with the LT models mentioned in the abstract, and so it may be worth giving a very brief characterisation of these in the abstract, or referring to 'inhomogeneous regions' either in the abstract, the title or both.''
So, there exist open-minded people.