Prelude

Welcome to Dice With the Universe!

Generally, I am going to put some thoughts from my life here. They will usually have to do with my translation work or with my writing. Your comments are welcome.

Thanks.

The title of the blog, for those interested, is a part of a paraphrase of Albert Einstein's words -- "God doesn't play dice with the universe." The words originally meant Einstein's scepticism about Quantum Physics (that gives a statistical chance of an event occurring), but I use this phrase as a general guideline to life. Things don't happen randomly. If we want to succeed we need to make it happen ourselves.

Welcome again. Enjoy your stay.

Monday, August 6, 2012

Updates

Well, as expected our submission to Science was rejected (not really surprising, given that it is Science and given the format that we tried to publish. Since then we've reworked the paper a bit (I went through something like thirty versions of figures in addition to the previous ones) and it is now out to another journal. Overall the paper is solid and I expect it to be published. In addition, our paper with collaboration from Northwestern University was rejected from Nature Communications (you can't say that my boss doesn't have ambition :-) ), and resubmitted to ACS Nano. Chances are it will be accepted this time. The biggest issue with the paper (in my view) is it's length (about forty pages of text with several more of references). This is due to the fact that it combines work from three groups. All in all, the paper is nice and shows some interesting and cool results. The third paper (again, in collaboration with Northwestern) is finally out (in an updated form) to our collaborators. My boss is extremely proud of the way it is written despite the fact that he originally almost discarded it to low level journals, and now wants to push it to higher impact. Frankly, in the earlier version, despite some pretty solid writing, I thought the paper was weak (it still had enough to be published, but not on the high level). Now, after I've added some new results, there is "meat" to the paper, and I think we will have no trouble in publishing it. So, all in all, things are moving, albeit slowly, on this front. Not so much on other issues, but this is a topic for another time :-).