Authors question book reviewer’s fairness

We read with the keenest interest Steve Lamoreaux’s critical review (Physics Today, August 2010, page 50 ) of our book, Advances in the Casimir Effect. It was a great surprise for one of us (Mostepanenko), after many years of work at the D. I. Mendeleev Institute for Metrology in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and numerous articles in Measurement Techniques and other metrological publications, to read that none of the authors “have a serious background in precision measurement techniques.” That statement is used as proof that our book’s discussion on how to compare theory and experiment is “useless and logorrheic.” From our perspective, credit for scientific truth should not automatically be either given to an expert with long professional experience or refused to a beginner. In science, it is not important who said something but only what is being said.

Unfortunately, the reviewer repeatedly makes claims that appear baseless. Such statements as “poorly edited book,” “the authors’ analysis of the controversies is incomplete and often inaccurate,” and “a weak subject index” are not supported with examples or references. In fact, the book’s subject index contains 306 entries, supplementary to 273 titles of sections and subsections in the contents, and could hardly be called “weak.”

Even a cursory scan of the review shows that it directly contradicts the facts. According to Lamoreaux, the book “largely focuses on the authors’ own papers; rare acknowledgments of others are often just to point out that they are wrong.” Although our reference list contains 175 citations to the papers of the 4 authors with 48 co-authors, it has 551 references to papers in which none of the book authors participated. Of the 551, only 31—including several papers by Lamoreaux—are criticized for specific mistakes or inconsistencies.

According to the review, our book claims a 1% level of agreement between theory and experiment. That is not so. As written in chapter 19, the best measure of agreement between the experimentally consistent theories and the experimental data by one of us (Mohideen) and Ricardo Decca is 5.4% and 1.4% at separations around 80 nm and 300 nm, respectively. The reviewer mentions recent background-effects studies that led to a conclusion that better than 10-20% accuracy is impossible. He does not say, however, that those studies, including his own, were made with centimeter-size test bodies, whereas experiments by Mohideen and Decca used spheres of about 100-µm radius. That point is specifically discussed in the book, and additional problems arising for centimeter-size test bodies are elucidated.

Lamoreaux’s statement that the violation we described of the third law of thermodynamics in Böstrom and Sernelius’s approach can be resolved when the complete system is considered is also incorrect. As we explained, consideration of any complete system is not helpful, because the violating term depends on separation, whereas any additional terms are separation independent. The reviewer simply ignored 96% of the book and devoted his review to only two controversial problems discussed in 27 pages. Claims that the book is generally incomplete and that “much recent progress is missing,” supported with a mention of a single numerical method suggested in 2007 and not sufficiently tested, are unjustified. On a positive note, the reviewer’s suggestion to add an author index in later editions looks like a reasonable, albeit minor, point.