Science questions not worth a thread I: I'm a moron!

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Is the sun's core hotter than hell?
Considering even the surface of the Sun is hotter than just about any fire on Earth, including Earth's core (but just barely) at 5778 K (slightly less than 10,000 F), and since Hell is inside the Earth, and the Sun's core is about 15.7 million degrees K (28.26 F), I'm fairly sure the Sun's guts are hotter than Hell.

I'm tempted to say that more massive stars may have even hotter cores (with O stars, being the most massive, having the hottest cores; already having the hottest "surface" temperatures available for stars), but I don't know about that. Regardless, I'm guessing they do.
So, is my assumption correct?

(Ignore the Hell debate, I'm speaking strictly about stellar cores. :) )
 
Who tends to write literature reviews? Would scientists in government institutions be the most likely to do so?
 
Who tends to write literature reviews? Would scientists in government institutions be the most likely to do so?

Most of the authors (in physics) are among the prominent people in the field they write about and whose names you instantly recognize if you know ho is important in that field. Then there are usually one or two postdocs subordinate to the big names who probably did most of the actual work.

Because of their name recognition, people writing reviews will be in either a government institution or prestigious research university anyway but their writing those reviews because of their distinguished career and not their current institution. The amount of available time might also an issue, but I don't think that is linked to a type of institution.
 
I guess the stars of the field would be trusted to know their field very well. My reasoning for government institutions doing it was that it would be important for advisory bodies to tell policymakers what the current consensus on scientific issues are.
 
I would say that most of the time the current scientific consensus is not of much interest to policy makers. For example, even revolutionizing advances in fundamental physics have no immediate impact on current policies. There are a few exceptions like climate science, but most of the time no immediate action is required.

And then, a literature review is written for scientists with already some training in the field and not for an outsider. So if a policymaker requires scientific advice, there is no use in handing him a review paper. He wouldn't have the training or the time to really understand it. So the advisory body would have to hand him a report that he is able to understand, which is quite a different type of work than a review. So it is not like they would have to write the review anyway and it would be as much extra work as for anybody else.
 
I would say that most of the time the current scientific consensus is not of much interest to policy makers. For example, even revolutionizing advances in fundamental physics have no immediate impact on current policies. There are a few exceptions like climate science, but most of the time no immediate action is required.

And then, a literature review is written for scientists with already some training in the field and not for an outsider. So if a policymaker requires scientific advice, there is no use in handing him a review paper. He wouldn't have the training or the time to really understand it. So the advisory body would have to hand him a report that he is able to understand, which is quite a different type of work than a review. So it is not like they would have to write the review anyway and it would be as much extra work as for anybody else.
What about agencies that allocate research funding? Surely those papers would be useful to them.
 
duplicate
 
Who tends to write literature reviews? Would scientists in government institutions be the most likely to do so?

I don't think so, unless it's covering topics of Congressional / CFR mandate. E.g. Federal scientists will write reviews and recommendation of protocols/techniques/validation methods when it pertains to testing covered by law, or testing directly relevant to the mission of an agency.

In my experience as someone who's written large reports that reference 'annual reviews' type literature, the people who write reviews are people who have decade(s) of experiment time on the topic, and are annually motivated in keeping the profession interested in their topic. Those people might also be chairpersons of professional societies focused on the topic as well, so they give their society some credibility by being prolific. Two topics that come to mind are the state of the art in analytical x-ray technology and progress in understanding ATPase cellular machinery. Both have been discovered decades ago, but there's still regular improvement and refinements on the topic. Those topics are also pretty multi-faceted in themselves, so there's a lot of ground to cover with incremental improvements, making an annual review paper meaningful.
 
What about agencies that allocate research funding? Surely those papers would be useful to them.

One does not read scientific papers, one deciphers them.
Maybe this is specific to (theoretical) physics, but most of the time, even if you are somewhat in the field, reading an article takes quite a bit of effort, and real understanding usually only follows after several readings (if ever :mischief:). Now review articles tend to be somewhat less condensed and more readable, but they still require you to be an actual scientist to read them and understand more than the introduction.
 
What about agencies that allocate research funding? Surely those papers would be useful to them.

The evaluation whether a grant application is worth funding or not is outsourced to independent scientists in the field anyway. Broad strategic decisions require insight beyond the scope of individual review papers, so they need special reports anyway.

One does not read scientific papers, one deciphers them.
Maybe this is specific to (theoretical) physics, but most of the time, even if you are somewhat in the field, reading an article takes quite a bit of effort, and real understanding usually only follows after several readings (if ever :mischief:). Now review articles tend to be somewhat less condensed and more readable, but they still require you to be an actual scientist to read them and understand more than the introduction.

If you want to understand the paper in detail, it does take effort. But most of the time you want to know just two or three things: What is this all about? Why do they think this is interesting? Where did they hide the one number/formula I need? And as an experimentalist reading a theory paper: Is there any chance that I can measure this? (usually not)
How exactly they get from formula 3 to formula 4 is usually not that important.
But that is only possible with some experience in the field. If I open a copy of Nature and try to read the biology articles, I get lost before the introduction ends, because I have no idea what the words mean that they are using. And those articles are supposed to be accessible to a general scientific audience. But I do suspect that biologists will feel the same way about our articles.
 
Thanks for the answers guys. I feel fully informed on that matter now.

If you want to understand the paper in detail, it does take effort. But most of the time you want to know just two or three things: What is this all about? Why do they think this is interesting? Where did they hide the one number/formula I need? And as an experimentalist reading a theory paper: Is there any chance that I can measure this? (usually not).
Do physicists often find themselves reading other papers for their methodology section? Or is that more of a biology thing (e.g. "hey they did immunoprecipitation of this protein in that cell type with this antibody, maybe we can use it for ours")?
 
Do physicists often find themselves reading other papers for their methodology section?

For me at least it was certainly helpful to look up how other guys went about growing material X on substrate Y before trying to get material not-quite-X to behave as desired on substrates Y and Z :D

I would imagine most experimentalists starting from scratch would look for clues in other peoples papers.
 
Do physicists often find themselves reading other papers for their methodology section? Or is that more of a biology thing (e.g. "hey they did immunoprecipitation of this protein in that cell type with this antibody, maybe we can use it for ours")?

That might depend on the field. We tend to view the methods section (if there is one) as a place to dump numbers that would be needed to reproduce the experiment, but unless you want to do that, there is little point in reading it. But in solid state physics it is usually the place where they describe how they fabricated the sample. And as the difficult part in solid state physics is to be able to fabricate the sample you want to measure, I can imagine that they will read it to get new ideas.
 
If I open a copy of Nature and try to read the biology articles, I get lost before the introduction ends, because I have no idea what the words mean that they are using. And those articles are supposed to be accessible to a general scientific audience. But I do suspect that biologists will feel the same way about our articles.

Actually, in my experience, Nature (and Science) papers tend to be the hardest to decipher, unless the author is a gifted writer. They are usually forced to compress their material to take just 1/3 of the printed area that would have been ideal, so the papers are often dense and incomprehensible (and then complemented by 100 pages of supp info). It's just the news&views and the perspectives sections that are accessible to a scientifically educated layman, not the actual research articles.
 
They are usually forced to compress their material to take just 1/3 of the printed area that would have been ideal, so the papers are often dense and incomprehensible (and then complemented by 100 pages of supp info).

I was wondering why Nature papers often had so many supplemental pages.
 
Actually, in my experience, Nature (and Science) papers tend to be the hardest to decipher, unless the author is a gifted writer. They are usually forced to compress their material to take just 1/3 of the printed area that would have been ideal, so the papers are often dense and incomprehensible (and then complemented by 100 pages of supp info). It's just the news&views and the perspectives sections that are accessible to a scientifically educated layman, not the actual research articles.

I would say PRL is even harder, because it has the same size restrictions but the papers are usually more focused on substance than on selling. And the papers in the journals with no size restrictions might be easier to read, but usually not that interesting unless they cover a topic closely related to your own research. If online only journals like NJP gain more prominence this could change in the future, but for the moment if you want to write a high-impact publication in physics you are stuck with the 4 page and 4 figures letter format. (Unless you think your research is ground breaking enough to deserve a 6 page article)

I agree that the research articles are not accessible to the educated layman, but in principle they're supposed to be. And during the editing process you have to define every single symbol, even if an expert would instantly know what it means and any non-expert would have no chance to understand it anyway. But within the page limit general accessibility is next to impossible.

I was wondering why Nature papers often had so many supplemental pages.

That is usually a sign of an overzealous referee, who either didn't believe the claim (in that case you dump all supporting evidence you have in the supplementary information), or who just wanted more information on some detail and there is no way to fit it in the (probably already slightly to long) main paper.
 
I would say PRL is even harder, because it has the same size restrictions but the papers are usually more focused on substance than on selling.

That's a fair point. ;)

And the papers in the journals with no size restrictions might be easier to read, but usually not that interesting unless they cover a topic closely related to your own research. If online only journals like NJP gain more prominence this could change in the future, but for the moment if you want to write a high-impact publication in physics you are stuck with the 4 page and 4 figures letter format. (Unless you think your research is ground breaking enough to deserve a 6 page article)

This, I think, might be a specificity of Physics. I don't feel such a big restriction and/or lack of options in my field.
 
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