THE IDEA

A cynical colleague of mine once said that it does not matter how much
you work, you will either get a good idea one day or you will
not. This ran completely against my ethics of hard daily toil:
reading, writing, begging the government for money, trying to squeeze
whatever possible out of grad students, rejecting papers of fellow
scientists and padding my publication record.

The kind of research we do is understood by a rather small insular
community of about forty-odd people around the world. Whether our
research will ever be relevant to practice was a favorite topic of
bar-room arguments among us. I used to argue too. I wanted to think
that what I do will be useful to people some day. I do not anymore. I
just want to do decent quality research.

The Idea came when my co-author posed a problem that bothered him for
some time. One odd-ball strand of research in our area did not quite
fit. A few persistent people kept generating ever growing collection
of quaint examples. Most others just dismissed the whole thing as
irrelevant. I tried to generalize the examples, approach them
formally, observe the generalities. And then the idea hit. If looked
from a slightly different angle, this strange subfield offered a
totally original view of our whole area. The quaint examples, together
with our field's classic cases, quickly fell into a simple elegant
taxonomy.

My co-author, usually unemotional, was visibly excited. I was
thrilled. We knew we struck something truly important.  The rest was a
matter of skill and technique.  We had them both.  The deadline for
paper submission to the conference in our field was three weeks away.
We put a paper together quickly. Everything fell in its place. The
paper looked impressive, polished and inspired. But most importantly
it carried the Idea.

We got the reviews back in a month. Our fellow researchers soundly
rejected the paper. They either did not get the Idea, did not care to
get it or, if they got it, did not care about it. You are supposed to
be humble about the reviewers' comments. In research, this is the only
feedback you ever get. I was not humble. I was livid. I have been in
the field long enough to recognize the importance of the
Idea. However, the field did not give a rat's arse.

We fixed the typos and minor stuff in the paper and sent the Idea to
another conference in a related area. It was rejected. People outside
our field failed to recognize its importance. I kept re-submitting the
paper hitting the conferences further and further afield. The paper
kept getting rejected.  The feedback got progressively stupider. I was
just going through the motions of paper submission: finding the
conference with a close deadline, formatting for conference
requirements, cheating the size and format limitations so that the
message of the paper was not compromised. Meanwhile, I moved on to
other studies and projects. I forgot about the Idea.

Just recently the paper was finally accepted to some random
conference. Most reviewers did not care about it but did not care to
shoot it down either. One reviewer knew something about our field and
found the paper curious. It was enough for acceptance. The co-author
was happy to be done with the paper. It did not make a difference to
me. However, as I was re-reading the paper in preparation of the
camera-ready-copy, I was struck by the power of the Idea and the
quality of the paper. I got flashbacks of the initial excitement of
discovery and the feverish work of putting together the paper to let
the world know about the Idea. I connected with the Idea again.
It felt odd.

I submitted the camera-ready-copy of the paper. The co-author is going
to go present it at the conference. Somebody somewhere might still
care about the Idea.