Drago Radev mentions “a discussion from a few years ago between a group of physicists in Italy (Benedetto et al.) and Joshua Goodman (a computer scientist at Microsoft Research)”:

Benedetto et al. had published a paper (”Language Trees and Zipping“) in a good Physics journal (Physical Review Letters) in which they showed a compression-based method for identifying patterns in text and other sequences.

According to Goodman

“I first point out the inappropriateness of publishing a Letter
unrelated to physics. Next, I give experimental results showing that
the technique used in the Letter is 3 times worse and 17 times
slower than a simple baseline, Naive Bayes. And finally, I review
the literature, showing that the ideas of the Letter are not
novel. I conclude by suggesting that Physical Review Letters should
not publish Letters unrelated to physics.”

Benedetto et al’s rebuttal appeared in Arxiv.org

P.S. I think it’s ok for me to make fun of physicists since I majored in physics in college and switched to statistics because physics was too hard for me.