I’ve just surprised myself. I decided to submit the Theory of Everything -manuscript! Today I came to the conclusion that there was no point in trying to postpone the obvious. If I was to seek perfection, I could continue to fine-tune the manuscript forever. But I had reached a point where there was nothing that yelled too loud “I need to be changed!”.
So today I gathered up courage and made sure all the figures were uniformly formatted and that the manuscript fit the Nature editorial guidelines. And then I uploaded all the relevant files and filled all of the necessary boxes in the submission system and clicked submit.
Into the cover letter I added the image below. It contains an electron microscope image that I might not have shown you before. It’s an image of a whole bunch of spherical lignin particles. These were my starting point. I knew I could make gazillions of them by self-assembly, but I didn’t have a good idea of what was happening in this process. Next to that image, I included the electron microscope image that I’ve shared with you in plenty of posts with the odd hexagonal shape. And finally, I have the scheme of the formation of a Waterman polyhedron of crystallized nanotubules that I offers as an explanation of this self-assembly.
But I didn’t put these into the actual manuscript. You see, they are good enough to allow me to introduce the concept of the supramolecular shell, but not good enough for me to say much anything. You see, in science we are perfectionists. We can’t say anything unless we’re confident.
I’m still afraid that my case isn’t strong enough for the manuscript to be accepted for peer review. I can only hope that the editor sees the potential in the manuscript and accepts the general logic. Somehow, I feel that getting past the editor is even more tricky than getting though peer review.
I’m hoping that the manuscript will be reviewed by one of the big names in string theory. In this case the regular criticisms of "Your work is solely speculative, with no evidence-based scientific results presented, nor is it an in-depth review of recent scientific results. As such, it does not meet the requirements for posting on xxx." should not be as much of a problem. If a person, who claims that for their theory to be true extra dimensions are required, would say “your work is solely speculative”, this would a case of the mote and the beam argument.
Now I just must keep a level head. Anticipating rejection is something we as scientists learn from very early on. And if the rejection seems ungrounded, there’s oftentimes nothing one can do. Perhaps in the case where Nature outright rejects the manuscript, I’ll try another journal. However, if they reject it but suggest it to be reviewed by one of their sister journals, I’m okay with that. But I’ll keep you updated as soon as I hear from them.
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