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Nobel Laureate Hannes Alfven did not mince words in describing the foibles of modern theoretical physics and the peer review system today.

Excerpt from Memoirs Of A Dissident Scientist:

Half a century ago I started—like many other young physicists—in nuclear physics. As I was more interested in experiments than theory, my first work in this field was concentrated on electrical methods to detect nuclear radiations. That led me to work on Geiger-Muller tubes and I constructed giant tubes which were suited for measuring cosmic rays. I found this field of investigation to be a fascinating field because cosmic rays had energies far larger than the radiations from radioactive substances, indeed up to 10 10 or perhaps even 10 11 eV! I began to speculate about their origin and made an ingenious theory which in reality was so silly that I do not even mention it here. For unknown reasons Nature agreed to publish a letter about it, but as soon as it was published I found that the idea was completely unreasonable.

This must have been around 1933, because I remember very well that it was before the first international conference I ever attended which was in London 1934. At that conference I met A. H. Compton, who immediately mentioned that he had read my letter and thought it interesting. I said that I was ashamed of having published something so completely silly to which he answered: "Don't give it up too easily." As he was one of the great authorities on cosmic radiation this was an enormous encouragement to me. In retrospect this may have been the trigger which brought me into astrophysics. It happened at a time when almost everybody was running toward nuclear physics. It saved me from the guilt associated with atomic bombs and nuclear energy which every nuclear physicist of today must feel at the bottom of his heart.

Next episode is dated 1948. In the meantime, there had been a war, the atomic bombs had been exploded and hence, science had changed its character forever. My scientific work in astrophysics had continued. I had presented a theory of cosmic ray acceleration by electromagnetic effects around double stars. With the exception of Swarm's famous but unrealistic "cygnotron" (as Vallarta called it) I think this was the first attempt to explain the high energies as due to electromagnetic effects. However, processes of this kind could not supply enough intensity if cosmic radiation filled the whole universe, as was the generally accepted view. I then pointed out that this dilemma could be solved if cosmic radiation was confined to our galaxy. This required a galactic magnetic field of at least 10'° gauss. (It should be remembered that the highest cosmic radiation energies known at that time were only 10" eV.)

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