Reduciblity, Arrhenius plots and the Uroboros Dragon, a reply to the preprint "Correlations in Nuclear Arrhenius-Type Plots" by M.B. Tsang and P. Danielewicz

In a recent preprint by Tsang and Danielewicz, the authors attempt to give alternative or trivial explanations for the reducible and “thermal” nature of the intermediate mass fragment excitation functions reported previously (Phys. Rev. Lett. 74, 1530 (1995), Phys. Lett B 361, 25 (1995), Phys. Rep. 287, 249 (1997)). We demonstrate that their proposed “self-correlation” explanation for linear Arrhenius plots is based upon a flawed autocorrelation analysis involving circular reasoning.