Is theoretical and/or computational work actually physics?

\begin{rant}

This is going to be a rant because I just saw something that (as a matter of principle) really pisses me off.

The American Physical Society (APS) recently sent an e-mail to all its members asking for nice physics images to put on its website. I, in fact, have quite a few of those from my research (including two items that have been selected as winners in the APS March Meeting's Gallery of Nonlinear Images), so I figured I would submit some of my stuff and see if the relevant people were interested in any of them. It turns out that they weren't. That's fine, because people can choose whatever images they want and whether they like or dislike something is essentially arbitrary. What really chaps my hide is the grounds on which I was rejected. Namely, no graphs, diagrams, models, or animations are permitted. In other words, to even be eligible in the first place, apparently the work has to be experiment. That is (a) extremely myopic and (b) horseshit. The e-mail I received included the following message:


"Home page images are selected because they are:
Beautiful, striking, or interesting
Current (January 2007 - Present)
Not animations
Not graphs or diagrams
Not models
Photographs of phenomena not people
Owned by the submitter
At least 500 pixels wide x 225 pixels high in good resolution"


I was then told that my stuff had to be rejected because they were graphs, animations, etc. So unless I am completely missing something, it really does seem like all theoretical and computational pictures are rejected a priori. That is utter tripe.

What this reminds me of (because it reflects the same attitude) is one of the referee reports I once received on a (theoretical and computational) paper that I submitted to Physical Review Letters. The referee said that the work was very nice but that it shouldn't be published in PRL because there weren't any experiments in it. I think perhaps the best response I can give here is to quote what George Takei said to William Shatner in a recent roast: "Fuck you, and the horse you rode in on!"

\end{rant}