Engage!

If you show any interest in popular science, Google or another spy you allow to watch over your shoulder while you are browsing will have recommended an article in some pop-sci news aggregator about the new work by a German gentleman Erik W. Lentz about a novel way to break the lightspeed barrier which, while for the time requires energy equivalent to the mass of dozens of Jupiters, does not ask for humongous amounts of something we don't know how to make, namely negative energy (or mass - same thing). As you might remember, this is not the case with Alcubierre drive. 

In the case you are intrigued but havent received any such recommendation, here is one of many similar articles.

But this is not the (mail) topic of this post. I wanted to read the original paper (I might be a lapsed physicist, but I still can find my way around an equation or two if pressed hard enough.) I folloed the link to it in Classical and Quantum Gravity, a journal published by IOP Publishing, one of the smaller robber barrons scientific publishing houses. Naturally, the page offers the abstract and several ways to buy or rent (!) the full article from a number of middlemen. Copyright? Why, IOP Publishing Ltd, naturally!

But not all is lost. Lentz published the article on good old "pre-print" site arXiv.org from where you can download it for free. Now, that is not the "official version", that is, that's the paper's draft before it has passed peer review, such as it is these days. But I will bet you a six-pack of good Belgian abbey beer that no signifficant differences exist between the two versions.

Pre-print sites like arXiv are more or less the only alternative to "pirate" sites such as Sci-Hub if you don't happen to work for a well-heeled university or other similar employer. Science journals are increasingly fragmented by sub-sub-specialities and subscription fees are astronomical. There are so-called "open access" journals, but they charge authors thousands of dollars per paper. In any case, peer reviewers don't get a beer.

Like real scientists ranting about this problem, I don't know the solution. Perhaps this is the best we will get. This reminds me of a scene in a novel by Ken MacLeod (Cosmonaut Keep, I think) where two of the main characters coming from different societies, over beer or something, start the well known phrase, a proverb almost, "Information wants to be..." which they finish in unison, one with "free!" and the other with "paid!". 😠

You might be interested in this video on the topic by one of my favorite YouTubers, Dr Rohin Francis of Medlife Crisis.