The Myth of the Fiber-Optic Polar Bear

One usually assesses the success of a scholarly article by how many other authors have cited it. But that's not always the best gauge. My first article in Applied Optics was one of my most successful, but it will probably only ever receive a handful of citations—and that's a good thing. It was about ursine fiber optics—an area of study that no longer exists—and the article itself is part of the reason why the field has gone the way of the dodo bird. Sometimes it's better to reduce the store of human knowledge rather than to increase it.