actually, having gotten a phd and attended many journal clubs, "seen his papers roundly critiqued on the merits at too many journal clubs to count" is as strong a point as anybody can make.
Journal clubs are vicious. Everybody's got their brains and knives out to find any and all flaws in a paper to demolish it (typically once you have found 2-3 major flaws, it's fine to just assume the paper is wrong, or got the right answer by chance).
I remember the day we had a journal club on Bell's Theorem papers. We went through the EPR paper and the Bell papers. I argued and argued and argued for a deterministic universe and then somebody asked me if I had heard of the Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser experiment (I hadn't; it was published in a Phys Rev Lett a year before, which the physics people read but the biologists didn't). Once I finished up reading that I realized that I had to let go every assumption I had about locality and entanglement and relearn how the universe works through the lens of QM. I am heartened to see that people are still trying out ideas like superdeterminism, but I have to admit, all the data supports the basic QM model of the universe.
Journal clubs are vicious. Everybody's got their brains and knives out to find any and all flaws in a paper to demolish it (typically once you have found 2-3 major flaws, it's fine to just assume the paper is wrong, or got the right answer by chance).
I remember the day we had a journal club on Bell's Theorem papers. We went through the EPR paper and the Bell papers. I argued and argued and argued for a deterministic universe and then somebody asked me if I had heard of the Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser experiment (I hadn't; it was published in a Phys Rev Lett a year before, which the physics people read but the biologists didn't). Once I finished up reading that I realized that I had to let go every assumption I had about locality and entanglement and relearn how the universe works through the lens of QM. I am heartened to see that people are still trying out ideas like superdeterminism, but I have to admit, all the data supports the basic QM model of the universe.