My First Paper, 40 Years On…

Today is the 40th anniversary of the publication of my first ever scientific paper! Here is the front page: This was before the days of arXiv so there isn’t a copy on the preprint server, but you can access the whole article here on NASA/ADS. All right. I know it’s a shitty little paper. But you have to start somewhere! I’m particularly sad that, looking back, it reads as if I meant to be very critical of the Kaiser (1984) paper that inspired it. I still think that was a brilliant paper because it was based on a very original idea that proved to be enormously influential. The only point I was really making was that a full calculation of the size of the effect Nick Kaiser had correctly identified was actually quite hard, and his simple approximation was of limited quantitative usefulness. The idea was most definitely right, however. I was just a year into my PhD DPhil when this paper came out, and it wasn’t actually on what was meant to be the subject of my thesis work (which was the…