rainbow
A once in a lifetime event

rainbow


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 anything 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) -- has actually unreservedly validated my results by not attacking even a single claim I make in my papers published by the MNRAS and by the ApJ. Just look at his paper

       https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.05473

Let me recall some salient arguments in my papers
In other words, O.K. neither refers 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 (yet I had sent preprints to virtually the entire ZDM community). All my 10 examples where ZDM fails are left untouched and undisputed by Oleg Kochukhov!!

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 therefore go to Oleg Kochukhov for his admission that my assessment of ZDM is realistic, that a large part of his claims in the past have been premature at best and that his "belief" in the powers of his INVERS codes professed in 2002 has been entirely misplaced.

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