Cambridge University is renowned as one of the leading academic researchers; in fact, it’s the third best in the world, according to the latest rankings. Its website says the university’s global position reflects, above all, the quality of its research. It adds that it supports international researchers, working at the forefront of their disciplines, who continually strive to extend the boundaries of knowledge.
Just as you might expect.
But what you don’t expect is another group of respected academics rubbishing some work done at Cambridge. That work, published in April 2015, claimed to have found a ‘missing link’ in electromagnetic theory and suggested it might enable the creation of antennas small enough to be integrated into a chip.
With the politeness associated with the academic world, the critics say the work was based on ‘an erroneous interpretation of experiments and a surprising lack of understanding of theory’. ‘All these conclusions are absolutely incorrect’, they say, ‘and can mislead an inexperienced reader’.
The group is also concerned about the quality of peer review. “At the present time, scientists that review papers in scientific journals are picked up from the scientific community,” says Pavel Belov, head of the Department of Nanophotonics and Metamaterials at ITMO University in St Petersburg. “However, their qualifications are not always enough to reasonably evaluate studies that are to be published.”
Publication encourages discussion; academics look for the ‘holes’ in an argument. Perhaps, as part of this discussion, the critics – from universities in Russia, Finland and Australia – might join with the Cambridge team to move the science forward.
