As mentioned here, I wrote a paper “rubbishing” another paper. We had sent its authors a couple of detailed emails about what we thought were problematic statements in their paper regarding the way they refer to our earlier (and related) papers. They seemed to agree with most of our objections and told us that they would fix them in version 2 of their paper. So far so good. We wait for nearly half a year and see no new version! Now, as Bill Bailey says: Contentment is knowing you are right but Happiness is knowing someone else is wrong!😊 So I decided to be both content and happy. I had already figured out something new about $\widehat{E}$ quivers which in itself wasn’t worth posting to arXiv. But with the “new” quivers in that paper whose twisted index hadn’t been calculated, I had something non-trivial to add to the literature. I did just that and evaluated twisted indices explicitly for some of those quivers because why not? After all, our claim was that the algorithm we use is exact & complete along with being simpler, faster, and easier to implement than theirs! Also, these new results confirmed the thing I had figured out about $\widehat{E}$ quivers too, so included the $\widehat{E}$ quivers in the appendix and called it a day after posting this paper on arXiv. After a few weeks of this submission, they updated their paper without correcting any of the problematic statements. What a bunch of %^&*! They even ignored this new paper of mine (which must have jolted them to action) because then they wouldn’t be able to write statements like “interesting possibility consists in ⋯ computing their topologically twisted index”, for their future directions.😁
Anyway, the title of this post is not regarding this paper but its predecessor. In it, we generalize the “well-known” toric relation (misleadingly called index theorem here) to a non-toric relation and give explicit examples in the form of $\widehat{D}$ quivers. The explicit computation requires additional new steps in the algorithm that had not appeared before in the literature because nobody had cared to look at the non-toric examples. Even after we had done so in a related context ages ago! People don’t even look at $\widehat{A}$ quivers (toric example) in general, they just keep repeating one ABJM calculation in different guises. And when something more than ABJM is done, these people go through all the emotional stages of being rejected. Basically, people are averse to the idea that their (or their colleagues’) ideas can be extended or improved. I have known this for quite some time but I witnessed this again in the referee reports and the few papers that didn’t cite this(these) paper(s) despite being aware of it(them)! This is like Yang & Mills generalizing Maxwell theory (non-abelian generalization of abelian gauge theory) but people deciding not to give any credit to YM because hey, $F_{μν}$ still looks like $F_{μν}$.
For all those people (presumably none) wondering why this physics-heavy post is posted on this blog and not in the physics blog instead: That Blog is for Physics not
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