Science is said to be moving faster than ever before. In fact, the pace is usually limited by the flow of information—I can’t respond to your results until I know about them, and journals are notoriously slow. The arXiv, which hosts manuscripts that may be submitted for peer review, is not. Put your preprint in today, watch it go public tomorrow... and see it get slapped down three weeks later.
This has all played out before our eyes with an extraordinary claim for room-temperature superconductivity, which is marred by some suspicious data.
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