As you might have noticed, I blog (and tweet and comment) under a pseudonym. Recently, I defended the use of pseudonymity and anonymity in science in a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal - published under my pseudonym. So I was, at first, alarmed to see that Italian physicist Lorenzo Iorio has just published a Letter on A New Type of Misconduct in the Field of the Physical Sciences: The Case of the Pseudonyms Used by I. Ciufolini..."He's saying that scientists using pseudonyms is a form of misconduct!" I thought to myself.
It turns out that the story is rather more complicated - and very bizarre. The background here is that many astrophysicists are trying to measure the gravitomagnetic frame-dragging effect, one of the most interesting predictions of Einstein's general theory of relativity. The predicted effect is tiny, so it's very difficult to measure. One experiment that has tried to ...
