Connectionists: Best practices in model publication

[John Collins]

As a physics colleague of Brad's, I'll take his hint to give a 
perspective on his questions.  Of course, current practice at one period 
in one area of science may be totally inappropriate in another 
situation.  I'll refer primarily to elementary particle physics.

Some differences between what Brad describes and what I see in physics 
are:  1. In physics, theorists are notably self-consciously interested 
in ideas that are general rather than just the modeling of a particular 
phenomenon.  Good ideas can relate many experimental situations, and the 
predictivity of a theoretical idea may greatly exceed the initial 
expectations of its author.  Some of these (e.g., the Standard "Model") 
are amazingly successful. 2. Both theory and experiment are so difficult 
that specialization is inevitable.  3. Some of the time scales for 
making experimental measurements are long: well over a decade.  4. In 
many modern physics theories, a lot hangs on self-consistency of the 
theoretical framework.  Given an initial idea (induced from data) much 
work is sometimes needed to convert it to an implementable theory or 
method.   This can proceed almost autonomously from day-to-day contact 
with real data.  (String theory is a well-known extreme example of this.)

(N.B. Interesting gaps can remain in well-established theoretical work 
and can be unperceived by many practitioners, as Randy found.)

Another tendency is for theorists to provide software for simulations 
rather than simply computing predictions.  Then experimentalists apply 
these to make theoretical predictions to compare with their own actual 
data.  This is in addition to the simulations the experimental groups 
themselves construct to model their complicated detectors.  For a recent 
example, see the article at http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.5353, and search 
in the pdf file for "simulation".  (It's a long paper, I'm afraid.)

John Collins



On 01/28/2014 08:25 AM, Brad Wyble wrote:
> Thanks Randal, that's a great suggestion.  I'll ask my colleagues in
> physics for their perspective as well.
>
> -Brad
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 27, 2014 at 11:54 PM, Randal Koene <randal.a.koene at gmail.com
> <mailto:randal.a.koene at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Hi Brad,
>     This reminds me of theoretical physics, where proposed models are
>     expounded in papers, often without the ability to immediately carry
>     out empirical tests of all the predictions. Subsequently,
>     experiments are often designed to compare and contrast different models.
>     Perhaps a way to advance this is indeed to make the analogy with
>     physics?