The American Physical Society says you can\u0027t refute the existence of white privilege in physics using science
A month later, the original authors had not yet responded, which is somewhat unusual. The Comment was then sent by the journal to two referees, both of whom wrote reports, one of which was longer than the Comment itself. In response to these reports, the editor rejected the Comment on the grounds that it was “framed from the perspective of a research paradigm that is different from the one of the research being critiqued.
The authors of the Comment were undaunted, however. They contacted the authors of the APSNews Back Page article, including the APS president, complaining that despite the fact that the PRPER editorial, the Back Page article, and the APS president all indicated that the appropriate forum for discussion was through Comments, this forum was not being made available by PRPER.
Finally, as a last-ditch effort, they appealed the rejection to the editor-in-chief of all of Physical Review. He, too, rejected their appeal with the statement “the role of Comments in the Physical Review is to refute or correct specific results in the articles upon which they are focused. In this case, your Comment was a broader commentary on the nature of all studies conducted like those in the original article.
In their appeal, the Comment’s authors had tried to circumvent this ridiculous inversion of logic by arguing that even if the original paper did not use scientific paradigms, there was significant value in using a scientific paradigm to critique it in order to highlight possible weaknesses or problems with the original argument. Even that didn’t fly.