I am writing a paper with a colleague of mine, about a new formula we have found recently. Creating a formula is a kind of "dream work" for any theoreticians. So, I am very happy that I have achieved that dream finally.
Interestingly, once you find a new formula, then the threshold for a next formula is lower than the first one. Actually, it happened to me.
I had been struggling for a certain physics problem for years, and in the beginning of the last year, I managed to find a numerical solution for that. I decided to make a presentation in a workshop in Japan, and gave a talk in the workshop in the mid September.
At the evening when I finished the presentation, I had a dinner with a collaborator to celebrate the success of our presentation. After I came back to my hotel, I opened my MacBook Air to check the e-mail box, together with a brief checking of new preprints posted in the arXiv.org. I normally don't check frequently other people's work because I believed that my work was quite unique and that nobody could follow easily.
To my surprise, though, there were two new papers posted last two weeks, and they claimed that they have found a new formula. One was from Europe, and the other was from the US.
In fact, I did some pre-analysis for brushing up my numerical solution, and noticed that my result can lead to a possible new formula, of my own... When I noticed this possibility several months ago, I was so excited. I thought I was finally given a chance from the heaven that I could make a new formula. But due to busy everyday life, such as giving lectures, attending long-hour academic meetings, etc, I left the work unfinished. But I was not so irritated at this slow progress, because I thought I was the only one in the world to have noticed this possibility so far, and that everybody else was so far away from my level. My optimism is totally against the reality, in fact. Two groups in the world seemed to have noticed "my" finding almost simultaneously.
I was so shocked at these two preprints. It seemed my life as a researcher was completely finished by these two papers. But I noticed that these papers were interested in slightly different things. At least, the ansatz they employed were different from mine. I thought that if I summarize what I had in my mind, the final formula I would derive should be different from theirs. So since that night, I started to engage myself to derive a new formula in my own fashion. After a month, I submitted the manuscript to arXiv and a publisher of a physics journal.
During a waiting period for referees' comments, there was no news about the other two papers. It seemed that they were struggling to publish in a journal. Comments from the referees returned to me very soon, and my paper was accepted for publication earlier than the others! My formula was admitted as a "new formula" that nobody else have found before. Soon after our publication, the formula found by the other two groups were also published in different journals. Luckily, we have submitted to different publishers, so that the reviewing was done independently.
My first formula was obtained more than 15 years since I took a Ph.D. But the second one came only six months after the first formula! And the third one was only a month later after the second!! The first two fomulae were already published. The paper I am writing at the moment is actually for the third one. I am sure that the latest one will be also published soon.
