This is a letter to the physics community to solicit suggestions for addressing a serious problem: the disruption of meeting sessions by speakers who fail to show up as scheduled and who do not notify meeting organizers or session chairs in advance of their absence.
Generally, if a speaker fails to show, the chair will adjourn the session for an appropriate amount of time so that succeeding talks can proceed as scheduled. In that way, meeting participants who would like to hear a particular talk, but not necessarily sit through the entire session, will know when to arrive. That, after all, is the principal purpose of publishing a roster of talks in advance.
But what is a chair to do when faced with multiple absences?
As a speaker at a recent meeting, I arrived about 40 minutes in advance of my scheduled time to find that, following conclusion of the talk in progress, the chair terminated the session. Faced with no-shows, the chair, rather than risk losing the audience by temporarily adjourning the session, had called the names of speakers in order. Anyone not then present was deemed a “missing speaker,” even though his or her name may have been called far in advance of the published time. Fortunately, the session was called to order again before attendees left, and I presented my talk, but those who came to hear the talk at the scheduled time found the session closed.
Sessions that involve speculative aspects of quantum theory, relativity, and cosmology are especially susceptible to this kind of disruption. Such sessions seem to attract contributions that many physicists might consider “not even wrong,” to use Wolfgang Pauli’s critical remark. The authors, who have no intention of actually presenting their work, submit abstracts that serve as self-promotion, rather than as a statement of recent work to be presented at the meeting. By submitting abstracts of talks that they do not intend to give and defend publicly, such authors manifest a lack of integrity, thwart the purpose of the meeting as a venue for the free exchange of ideas, and disrupt sessions for serious scientists who have come to speak and to listen.
One way to discourage such submissions is for meeting organizers to do what hotels routinely do: require a credit card number at the time of abstract submission. Authors who then do not show up at their sessions and have not notified the appropriate official prior to publication of the program would be charged a certain amount—for example, the registration fee plus a penalty. When it becomes costly to be the author of an abstract for a “fake” presentation, fewer such abstracts will be published and fewer sessions disrupted.