A once in a lifetime event
Imagine that you have just published a paper with
a damning criticism of the work of a number of fellow scientists.
You have shown that a technique "believed"
[sic!] since 2002 to always yield correct and unique abundance
maps of Ap stars is quite unreliable. You have given 10 test
examples with output maps that do not resemble the input maps, you
have demonstrated that published results are in contradiction with
basic astrophysics, you have clearly stated that the primitive
regularisation functions in the inversions employed up to the
present day do not reflect the physical reality of the atmosphere
of magnetic stars.
Would you not expect the people concerned to try to defend their
work over the last 14 years and their profitable business model by
exposing the fallacy of your arguments? Would these people not
take one or more of your test examples and with the help of their
allegedly vastly superior codes derive convincing maps that
faithfully recover the input data? Would they not attempt
everything to ridicule every single point of your criticism?
Well, for the first time in my scientific life (I finished my
thesis in 1971 and retired in 2013) this did not happen. Oleg
Kochukhov who stands behind all Zeeman Doppler mapping of Ap stars
with his INVERS family of codes (extensively used, among others,
by Th. Lueftinger) is actually unreservedly validating my results
by not attacking even a single claim I make in my papers published
by the MNRAS and by the ApJ.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.05473
In my papers, I discuss the difficulties arising from single-line
inversions, O.K. "counters" with 7 lines. I show that asymmetric
spots with complex internal structure cannot be recovered, O.K.
again "counters" with perfectly symmetric spots. I show that it is
not easy to discover warped rings arising from diffusion in
non-axisymmetric magnetic fields, O.K. "counters" with a ring
following strictly a meridian of the star. I point out that the
insanely high abundances derived for HD3980 by Nesvacil,
Lueftinger et al. (2012) are incompatible with physics, O.K.
"counters" by not entering this argument. To put it succinctly,
not with a single word does he deal with my results.
In other words, not only does O.K. not refer to my paper put on
ArXiv.org in April 2017,
https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.06960
nor does he cite the papers published by MNRAS and by ApJ (I had
provided preprints for the entire ZDM community), but he leaves
all of my 10 examples where ZDM fails untouched and undisputed.
Could there ever be a more complete
vindication of my results when it is the critisised person
himself who accepts my findings in their entirety? My
heartfelt thanks go to Oleg Kochukhov for his admission that
my assessment of ZDM is realistic, that a lot of his claims
in the past were premature and that his "belief" in the
powers of his INVERS codes professed in 2002 was misplaced.
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