Our immediate reaction to the comments of Pence was one of amazement that such a supposedly prestigious journal would consider it appropriate to devote valuable space to what, we feel, should be obvious to a reasonably well-informed reader who has delved into the related literature.
In his first paragraph, Pence appears to review a few random elements of the very well-known basics of classical elasticity theory (even to the extent of giving the absolutely fundamental relationships between the displacement and strain components). Several of these were, in fact, willingly deleted from our original manuscript, upon receiving the observation of a reviewer that, “It is not necessary to remind readers of Journal of Applied Mechanics … for a linear elastic model.”
He then, seemingly unnecessarily, simply reproduces a few of our expressions, before making the observation that the equilibrium equation in the direction is not satisfied. Actually this would clearly...
