Physics bitten by reverse Alan Sokal hoax?
John Baez
We all laughed when Alan Sokal wrote a deliberately silly
paper entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a
Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", and managed
to get it accepted by a refereed journal of social and cultural
studies, Social Text.
But now I hear that two brothers have managed to publish 3
meaningless papers in physics journals as a hoax - and even
get Ph.D. degrees in physics from Bourgogne University in
the process! The theses are available in PDF format online,
at least for now:
Igor Bogdanov
ETAT TOPOLOGIQUE DE L'ESPACE TEMPS A ECHELLE 0
http://tel.ccsd.cnrs.fr/documents/archives0/00/00/15/03/index_fr.html
Grichka Bogdanov
FLUCTUATIONS QUANTIQUES DE LA SIGNATURE DE LA METRIQUE A L'ECHELLE DE PLANCK
(Quantum fluctuations of the signature of the metric at the Planck scale)
http://tel.ccsd.cnrs.fr/documents/archives0/00/00/15/02/index_fr.html
They have also published at least four papers based on their
theses:
Grichka Bogdanov and Igor Bogdanov,
Topological field theory of the initial singularity of spacetime,
Classical and Quantum Gravity 18 (2001), 4341-4372.
Grichka Bogdanov and Igor Bogdanov,
Spacetime Metric and the KMS Condition at the Planck Scale,
Annals of Physics, 295 (2002), 90-97.
Grichka Bogdanov and Igor Bogdanov,
KMS space-time at the Planck scale,
Nuovo Cimento, 117B (2002) 417-424.
Igor Bogdanov,
Topological origin of inertia,
Czechoslovak Journal of Physics, 51 (2001), 1153-1236.
Here's the abstract of Igor Bogdanov's thesis:
We propose in this research a new solution regarding the existence
and the content of the initial spacetime singularity. In the context
of topological field theory we consider that the initial singularity
of space-time corresponds to a zero size singular gravitational instanton
characterized by a Riemannian metric configuration (++++) in dimension
D = 4. Connected with some unexpected topological data corresponding
to the zero scale of space-time, the initial singularity is thus not
considered in terms of divergences of physical fields but can be resolved
in the frame of topological field theory. We get this result from the
physical observation that the pre-spacetime is in a thermal equilibrium
at the Planck scale. Therefore it should be subject to the KMS condition.
We consequently consider that this KMS state might correspond to a
unification between "physical state" (Planck scale) and "topological
state" (zero scale). Then it is suggested that the "zero scale singularity"
can be understood in terms of topological invariants, in particular the
first Donaldson invariant. Therefore, we here introduce a new topological
index, connected with 0 scale, of the form Z_{beta = 0} = Tr (-1)^s,
which we call the "singularity invariant". Interestingly, this invariant
corresponds also to the invariant topological current yielded by the
hyperfinite II* von Neumann algebra describing the zero scale of space-time.
In such a context we conjecture that the problem of inertial interaction
might be explained in terms of topological amplitude connected with the
singular zero size gravitational instanton corresponding to the initial
singularity of spacetime.
His thesis director was Daniel Sternheimer, and the "rapporteuers"
were Roman Jackiw of MIT, and Jack Morava of John Hopkins.
Here's the abstract of Grichka Bogdanov's thesis:
We propose hereafter that the signature of the Space-Time metric
(+++-) is not anymore frozen at the Planck scale and presents quantum
fluctuations (++++/-) until 0 scale where it becomes Euclidean (++++).
(i) At the albraic level we suggest an oscillation path (3,1) (4,0)
excluding (2,2). We built the quotient topological space describing
the superposition of the Lorentzian and the Riemanian metrics. In
terms of quantum groups we evidence a relation between q-deformation
and deformation of the signature. We have obtained a new algebraic
construction (a new cocycle bicrossproducts by twisting) which allowed
us to unify the Lorentzian and the Euclidean signatures within a
unique quantum group structure. Moreover the q-deformation of space-time
shows that the natural structures of q-Minkowski and q-Riemanian spaces
are linked by semiduality. (ii) Regarding the physical motivations we
suggest that at the Planck Scale the Space-Time is in KMS state. Within
the limits of the KMS holomorph strip, the beta timelike parameter is
complex. We propose an extension of relativistic gravity which begins
at the Planck Scale with the Lagrangian R + R2 + RR*. Then, the infrared
limit of the theory is given at the Planck Scale by the Einstein term
in R and corresponds to the Lorentzian metric while the ultraviolet
limit is given at beta=0 scale by the topological term RR* and corresponds
to the Euclidean metric ( topological sector). We propose a duality
between instantons and monopoles in 4 dimensions giving a representation
of the superposition of the metrics. (iii) On the cosmological plan
we suggest to describe the Initial Singularity of Space Time by a
topological invariant I(S) = Tr(-1)^S which is analog to the first
Donaldson invariant. The initial singularity must be considered as
a singular 0-size gravitational instanton. The physical observables
are therefore replaced by cycles of homology in the moduli space of
gravitational Instantons. We propose a conjecture regarding the
existence of a topological amplitude associated to a "topological
expansion phase" which preceeds the classical cosmological
expansion. This topological phase is also able to be described
by the flow of weights of the II* hyperfinite factor type
corresponding to the beta=0 initial singularity.
His thesis director was Daniel Sternheimer, and the "rapporteuers"
were Shahn Majid of Cambridge University, Costas Kounnas of the Ecole
Normale Superieure, and Dmitiri Gurevitch of Valenciennes University.
Can anyone confirm or disconfirm the rumors I've heard about this?
I hear that Igor and Grichka Bogdanov, journalists and science
fiction writers, both in their late 40's, began by interviewing
a number of prominent French string theorists to master the jargon.
After writing these papers, to prepare the ground for their thesis
defense they spread rumors that they were geniuses and their theses
were a milestone in theoretical physics. For their thesis defense
they rented a hall in the prestigeous Ecole Polytechnique, arranged
a big dinner with the president, invited the TV, ... and passed.
I don't know if these rumors are true. I can however assure you
that the abstracts seem like gibberish to me, even though I know
what most of the buzzwords mean. The journal articles make for
rather strange reading (you can easily get ahold of them, because
they are appended to the PDF files containing the theses). Some
parts almost seem to make sense, but the more carefully you read
them, the less sense they make. Here's the beginning of their
paper "Topological Origin of Inertia":
The phenomenon of inertia - or "pseudo-force" according to E. Mach
[1] - has recently been presented by J. P. Vigier as one of the
"unsolved mysteries of modern physics". Indeed our point of view
is that this important question, which is well formulated in the
context of Mach's principle, cannot be resolved or even understood
in the framework of conventional field theory.
Here we suggest a novel approach, a direct outcome of the topological
field theory proposed by Edward Witten in 1988 [3]. According to
this approach, beyond the interpretation propoosed by Mach, we consider
inertia as a *topological field*, linked to the topological charge
Q = 1 of the "singular zero size gravitational instanton" [4] which,
according to [5], can be identified with the initial singularity of
space-time in the standard model.
It goes on to discuss the relation between N = 2 supergravity,
Donaldson theory, KMS states and the Foucault pendulum experiment,
which "cannot be explained satisfactorily in either classical or
relativistic mechanics". Eventually it concludes that "whatever
the orientation, the plane of oscillation of Foucault's pendulum
is necessarily aligned with the initial singularity marking the
origin of physical space S^3, that of Euclidean space E^4 (described
by the family of instants I_beta of whatever radius beta), and,
finally, that of Lorentzian space-time M^4."
Zounds! =8-0
John Baez
wrote:
>But now I hear that two brothers have managed to publish 3
>meaningless papers in physics journals as a hoax [...]
Sorry - at first I heard about three, but by the time I
finished writing this article I knew about at least four:
Grichka Bogdanov and Igor Bogdanov,
Topological field theory of the initial singularity of spacetime,
Classical and Quantum Gravity 18 (2001), 4341-4372.
Grichka Bogdanov and Igor Bogdanov,
Spacetime Metric and the KMS Condition at the Planck Scale,
Annals of Physics, 295 (2002), 90-97.
Grichka Bogdanov and Igor Bogdanov,
KMS space-time at the Planck scale,
Nuovo Cimento, 117B (2002) 417-424.
Igor Bogdanov,
Topological origin of inertia,
Czechoslovak Journal of Physics, 51 (2001), 1153-1236.
and now I see there is possibly one more:
Igor Bogdanov,
KMS state of the spacetime at the Planck scale,
Chinese J. of Phys. (2002).
Boris
John Baez <ba...@galaxy.ucr.edu> a écrit dans le message : ap7tq6$eme$1...@glue.ucr.edu...
>
> We all laughed when Alan Sokal wrote a deliberately silly
> paper entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a
> Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", and managed
> to get it accepted by a refereed journal of social and cultural
> studies, Social Text.
Imo the precise name for Sokal's device is "trojan horse".
Proper denomination is important to perspective, since classical
litterature contains a few failed trojans, the least of which not
being the story of the original sin.
> But now I hear that two brothers have managed to publish 3
> meaningless papers in physics journals as a hoax - and even
> get Ph.D. degrees in physics from Bourgogne University in
> the process!
(1) Igor and Grishka Bogdanov are long-time TV stars on
french TV, with an act between science-fiction and scientific
popularisation. I am a bit surprised that a faculty failed to
*know* them as experts in mystifications.
(2) I hope this will be an occasion to reopen discussion on eg
Sokal-motivated conclusions. I would in particular love to see
pointed out, that the form of irony inherent to Trojan Horses
is equivalent to the assertion by (the school of) the author, of
understanding oneself perfectly the issues. Cloaks or irony,
making one impervious to corrections. In particular, writing the
paper Sokal did under the title listed above, is really no proof
that a much more reasonable paper couldn't fit about exactly
the same title, while the effect of Sokal's paper is naturally that
any title approximating the latter, will appear as a prototypical
hoax. In many ways, physics could be *defined* as a science
that chose both object and methods *not* to have to contemplate
mystifications... (eg Newton's motto) and reversing such an
organisation isn't as simple and risk-free that Sokal would have us
think.
Regards, Boris Borcic
--
A naïf, naïf et demi
Edward Green
> In article <ap7tq6$eme$1...@glue.ucr.edu>, John Baez <ba...@galaxy.ucr.edu>
> wrote:
>
> >But now I hear that two brothers have managed to publish 3
> >meaningless papers in physics journals as a hoax [...]
>
> Sorry - at first I heard about three, but by the time I
> finished writing this article I knew about at least four:
I've snipped "research", so you probably won't see this, but thanks
for posting that. The common denominator which leaps right out from
the two incidents is "quantum gravity".
Hmm.
So it seems like the "I don't understand this, but I don't want to
seem like a dummy by asking" can be extended to the very highest
levels.
Richard Feynman would have questioned their asses, hired lecture hall,
rumors of their brilliance, and all.
John Baez
Edward Green <null...@aol.com> wrote:
>ba...@galaxy.ucr.edu (John Baez) wrote in message
>news:<ap7udq$eo7$1...@glue.ucr.edu>...
>> In article <ap7tq6$eme$1...@glue.ucr.edu>, John Baez <ba...@galaxy.ucr.edu>
>> wrote:
>> >But now I hear that two brothers have managed to publish [4]
>> >meaningless papers in physics journals as a hoax [...]
>I've snipped "research", so you probably won't see this, but thanks
>for posting that.
You're welcome.
>The common denominator which leaps right out from
>the two incidents is "quantum gravity".
>
>Hmm.
>
>So it seems like the "I don't understand this, but I don't want to
>seem like a dummy by asking" can be extended to the very highest
>levels.
I don't actually know the facts of this case, so I don't
want to speculate on the details of what happened. However,
I know that lots of physicists get so busy that they look
through papers in a very cursory way when refereeing them.
These Bogdanov papers actually seem reasonable if you skim them
without trying to see if they make sense - they have the right
buzzwords in more or less the right order.
And don't forget the famous joke about putting a note on page
93 of your Ph.D. thesis saying "IF YOU READ THIS I WILL GIVE
YOU A BOTTLE OF WINE!" - with no takers.
So, it's possible that instead of being scared to look foolish,
the people who got duped were simply too busy to actually read
what they were supposed to be reading.
>Richard Feynman would have questioned their asses, hired lecture hall,
>rumors of their brilliance, and all.
He might even have managed to one-up their hoax by having
a load of horse manure drop down on them just as they were
reaching for their diplomas!
Best,
jb
me...@cars3.uchicago.edu
>ba...@galaxy.ucr.edu (John Baez) wrote in message news:<ap7udq$eo7$1...@glue.ucr.edu>...
>
>> In article <ap7tq6$eme$1...@glue.ucr.edu>, John Baez <ba...@galaxy.ucr.edu>
>> wrote:
>>
>> >But now I hear that two brothers have managed to publish 3
>> >meaningless papers in physics journals as a hoax [...]
>>
>> Sorry - at first I heard about three, but by the time I
>> finished writing this article I knew about at least four:
>
>I've snipped "research", so you probably won't see this, but thanks
>for posting that. The common denominator which leaps right out from
>the two incidents is "quantum gravity".
>
>Hmm.
>
>So it seems like the "I don't understand this, but I don't want to
>seem like a dummy by asking" can be extended to the very highest
>levels.
>
Mati Meron | "When you argue with a fool,
me...@cars.uchicago.edu | chances are he is doing just the same"
Ken Muldrew
>Edward Green <null...@aol.com> wrote:
>>ba...@galaxy.ucr.edu (John Baez) wrote in message
>>> In article John Baez <ba...@galaxy.ucr.edu> wrote:
>>> >But now I hear that two brothers have managed to publish [4]
>>> >meaningless papers in physics journals as a hoax [...]
>>The common denominator which leaps right out from
>>the two incidents is "quantum gravity".
>>So it seems like the "I don't understand this, but I don't want to
>>seem like a dummy by asking" can be extended to the very highest
>>levels.
>I don't actually know the facts of this case, so I don't
>want to speculate on the details of what happened.
Have you actually confirmed that these papers appeared in print? Many
physicists have become so used to dealing with preprints and
electronic reprints that they could easily be fooled by a lesser hoax:
namely one where the perfectly formatted reprints are circulated but
have never appeared in print.
>However,
>I know that lots of physicists get so busy that they look
>through papers in a very cursory way when refereeing them.
That's not good but in an era when people are being judged by
paper-counters I guess we have to expect it.
>These Bogdanov papers actually seem reasonable if you skim them
>without trying to see if they make sense - they have the right
>buzzwords in more or less the right order.
Just like Sokal, but all the scientists found his use of buzzwords
hilarious. I'm having a hard time believing that this really occurred.
>So, it's possible that instead of being scared to look foolish,
>the people who got duped were simply too busy to actually read
>what they were supposed to be reading.
If true, some anonymous reviewers will certainly look terribly
foolish. I suppose the whole field will look foolish.
Ken Muldrew
kmul...@ucalgary.ca
Dirk Van de moortel
"John Baez" <ba...@galaxy.ucr.edu> wrote in message news:ap7tq6$eme$1...@glue.ucr.edu...
>
> We all laughed when Alan Sokal wrote a deliberately silly
> paper entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a
> Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", and managed
> to get it accepted by a refereed journal of social and cultural
> studies, Social Text.
>
> But now I hear that two brothers have managed to publish 3
> meaningless papers in physics journals as a hoax - and even
> get Ph.D. degrees in physics from Bourgogne University in
> the process! The theses are available in PDF format online,
> at least for now:
[snip]
In his reply Boris Borcic just reminded me that I know these
Bogdanov guys from TV too. Before French TV was taken
completely over by The Advertisers I used to watch some of
their "scientific" programs. The Bogdanovs were stars indeed
and they acted like geniuses. I didn't like their programs
because of more style than content. Too flashy.
It doesn't surprise me that they pulled this off. If they are still
connected to French TV, I wouldn't be surprised that they
were heavily supported by it. After all, it's a selling story, right?
Any idea who pulled the plug?
Dirk Vdm
Dirk Bruere
"Dirk Van de moortel" <dirkvand...@ThankS-NO-SperM.hotmail.com> wrote
in message news:mXYt9.177127$8o4....@afrodite.telenet-ops.be...
A jealous rival who was worried that the Nobel comittee was taking too close
an interest?
Dirk
Aaron Bergman
kmul...@ucalgary.ca (Ken Muldrew) wrote:
> Have you actually confirmed that these papers appeared in print? Many
> physicists have become so used to dealing with preprints and
> electronic reprints that they could easily be fooled by a lesser hoax:
> namely one where the perfectly formatted reprints are circulated but
> have never appeared in print.
Interestingly enough, as was pointed out to me by a postdoc here, these
papers never appeared as preprints. Since preprints are essentially the
sole waynew papers are distributed these days, I doubt anyone in the
community even knew that these papers existed.
Aaron
--
Aaron Bergman
<http://www.princeton.edu/~abergman/>
puppe...@hotmail.com
> But now I hear that two brothers have managed to publish 3
> meaningless papers in physics journals as a hoax - and even
> get Ph.D. degrees in physics from Bourgogne University in
> the process!
Hmmm. It seems a little extreme to me that a professor would
be willing to go along with the gag as far as a PhD thesis,
never mind two. If it comes out that this is a hoax, it seems
to me that it could be big trouble for the supervisor of
the thesis. Getting a deliberate hoax paper published is
one thing. Getting a university to grant a degree on false
pretext is quite another.
Even if the university did nothing official, the prof's
career is very likely to take a major hit. Would you be
on the PhD oral committee of any of his/her students?
Would you collaborate with this prof? What do grants
boards think about it the next time this prof wants money?
Socks
Peter Woit
>Can anyone confirm or disconfirm the rumors I've heard about this?
>I hear that Igor and Grichka Bogdanov, journalists and science
>fiction writers, both in their late 40's, began by interviewing
>a number of prominent French string theorists to master the jargon.
>After writing these papers, to prepare the ground for their thesis
>defense they spread rumors that they were geniuses and their theses
>were a milestone in theoretical physics. For their thesis defense
>they rented a hall in the prestigeous Ecole Polytechnique, arranged
>a big dinner with the president, invited the TV, ... and passed.
>
>I don't know if these rumors are true. I can however assure you
>that the abstracts seem like gibberish to me, even though I know
>what most of the buzzwords mean.
I just heard from a physicist at NYU, who heard about this from
a colleague who was in contact with a New York Times reporter
who is looking into this. The "Bogdanoff" brothers have degrees
in semiology, their names and most else about them seems to be
a put-on (they are French, not Russian). For a recent profile of them
(in French) see
http://www.liberation.com/page.php?Article=58973
and for something about their TV show, see
http://www.france2.fr/semiStatic/61-NIL-NIL-173054.html
Their theses and papers are clearly nonsense and the fact that they've
managed to get these things published and get doctoral degrees should
lead to a scandal of some sort. Whether they think of what they do
as real science or are doing this as a complete fraud a la Sokal is
certainly an interesting question.
I've off and on thought about trying to publish a hoax paper on string
theory, but gave up on the idea, partly because while it seemed
eminently doable to make up some nonsense about string theory
and get it past a referee, it's not clear what the distinguishing
characteristic of my nonsense would be. Would it be that
I didn't believe it (this probably is not unheard of among people
who write string theory papers)? Would it be that the paper was
inconsistent and had nothing to do with the real world (that
characterizes most of hep-th)?.
Refereeing in this field has clearly become a complete joke,
largely because there is no way to consistently impose standards
given what has happened in particle theory over the last twenty
years. The Sokal hoax had a very salutary effect on the
"science studies" people, perhaps this one will have a similar
effect here.
Jim Moskowitz
> Richard Feynman would have questioned their asses, hired lecture hall,
> rumors of their brilliance, and all.
Or cursed himself for not having thought of it first...
Jim
E. Winkler
"John Baez" <ba...@galaxy.ucr.edu>
> KMS space-time at the Planck scale,
There are too many second level constructions around that can be randomly
combined. The Planck scale is the perfect playground.
Back to pure and first level math and many possibilities are ruled out.
jmfb...@aol.com
In article <ap92to$1hb$1...@newsmaster.cc.columbia.edu>,
Peter Woit <wo...@cpw.math.columbia.edu> wrote:
<snip>
>I just heard from a physicist at NYU, who heard about this from
>a colleague who was in contact with a New York Times reporter
>who is looking into this. The "Bogdanoff" brothers have degrees
>in semiology,
They studied sperm?
<snip>
/BAH
Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail.
Dirk Bruere
"E. Winkler" <sobeb...@compuserve.de> wrote in message
news:apb5pm$iai$1...@nntp-m01.news.aol.com...
are too dumb to understand it.
Dirk
RM Mentock
> >I just heard from a physicist at NYU, who heard about this from
> >a colleague who was in contact with a New York Times reporter
> >who is looking into this. The "Bogdanoff" brothers have degrees
> >in semiology,
>
> They studied sperm?
Naw. But did they study sign language, or symptomatology?
--
RM Mentock
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistant one -- A.E.
jmfb...@aol.com
Not necessarily. It always means "more work needed".
Boris
Aaron Bergman
>
> preprints are essentially the sole way new papers are distributed these days
Call them tachyons. Do we have a model ? :)
bb
puppe...@hotmail.com
> >The "Bogdanoff" brothers have degrees
> >in semiology,
>
> They studied sperm?
se·mi·ol·o·gy also se·mei·ol·o·gy
1a) The science that deals with signs or sign language.
1b) The use of signs in signaling, as with a semaphore.
Socks
Aaron Bergman
wrote:
> Grichka Bogdanov and Igor Bogdanov,
> Topological field theory of the initial singularity of spacetime,
> Classical and Quantum Gravity 18 (2001), 4341-4372.
I took a look at this one:
<http://www.iop.org/EJ/S/3/492/abstract/0264-9381/18/21/301/>
and the referee clearly didn't even glance at it. I particularly like:
> Definition 1.2: A theory if topological if (the Lagrangian L being
> non-trivial) it does not depend on L.
I also like the part where they put a Tr(-1)^n in the path integral.
Given that a number of terms are used incorrectly on the first few
pages, this seems to be quite an indictment of the refereeing process.
I can't say I'm completely surprised that something like this could
happen. I'm surprised that they got CQG, though.
John Baez
Ken Muldrew <kmul...@ucalgary.ca> wrote:
>Have you actually confirmed that these papers appeared in print? Many
>physicists have become so used to dealing with preprints and
>electronic reprints that they could easily be fooled by a lesser hoax:
>namely one where the perfectly formatted reprints are circulated but
>have never appeared in print.
Being a highly suspicious sort, I have made sure that all these
papers are indeed available in electronic form from the journals
they are supposed to be published in. Not "in print", but equally
good - or bad, in this case.
>>These Bogdanov papers actually seem reasonable if you skim them
>>without trying to see if they make sense - they have the right
>>buzzwords in more or less the right order.
>Just like Sokal, but all the scientists found his use of buzzwords
>hilarious. I'm having a hard time believing that this really occurred.
A New York Times reporter was planning to do a story on this,
but he spoke with one of the Bogdanovs, who huffily denied that
it was a hoax. Apparently the reporter decided to drop it. He
said he could write a story about a hoax, but not about some papers
that are so silly people *think* they are hoax. :-)
Of course, not everyone committing a hoax instantly admits
to committing a hoax when you ask them!
Also, the Bogdanovs are not only science fiction writers, but
TV personalities (or ex-TV personalities?) in France. It
seems a bit odd to me that two such people would suddenly
take time off from their careers to get physics PhDs and
publish a bunch of laughably incoherent physics papers
unless they were "up to something". Am I being too suspicious?
Could they be merely incompetent? I was hoping for something a
bit more original.
>>So, it's possible that instead of being scared to look foolish,
>>the people who got duped were simply too busy to actually read
>>what they were supposed to be reading.
>If true, some anonymous reviewers will certainly look terribly
>foolish. I suppose the whole field will look foolish.
They (or we? - but it's not *my* fault) should feel foolish
regardless of whether it's a hoax or not, because the papers
are a bunch of baloney.
It's also amusing that their Annals of Physics paper is almost
identical to their Nuovo Cimento paper. Of course, this cheap
way of padding one's resume is nothing new. As someone once put
it: "It'd be plagiarism if it wasn't me who wrote it in the first
place".
Fans of topological field theory will like this line in their
paper "Topological Field Theory of the Initial Singularity":
Now, the topological field theory (for D = 4) is established when the
Hamiltonian (or the Lagrangian) of the system is H = 0, such as the
theory is independent of the underlying metric. We propose to extend
this definition, stating that a theory can also be topological if
it does not depend on the Hamiltonian H (or the Lagrangian L) of the system.
Of course, this is like saying the theory doesn't depend on
the theory! They then give this as an official numbered "Definition"
in their paper, in solemn mathematical style.
Peter Woit
>Sorry - at first I heard about three, but by the time I
>finished writing this article I knew about at least four:
>
>Grichka Bogdanov and Igor Bogdanov,
>Topological field theory of the initial singularity of spacetime,
>Classical and Quantum Gravity 18 (2001), 4341-4372.
>
>Grichka Bogdanov and Igor Bogdanov,
>Spacetime Metric and the KMS Condition at the Planck Scale,
>Annals of Physics, 295 (2002), 90-97.
>
>Grichka Bogdanov and Igor Bogdanov,
>KMS space-time at the Planck scale,
>Nuovo Cimento, 117B (2002) 417-424.
>
>Igor Bogdanov,
>Topological origin of inertia,
>Czechoslovak Journal of Physics, 51 (2001), 1153-1236.
>
>and now I see there is possibly one more:
>
>Igor Bogdanov,
>KMS state of the spacetime at the Planck scale,
>Chinese J. of Phys. (2002).
>
>
>
Looking at these papers more carefully, three of them are nearly identical
and all three are more or less an extract of the first one (the Classical
and Quantum Gravity article).
You may be able to convince yourself that "spacetime must be considered
as being subject to the KMS condition at the Planck scale" is an
intelligible
scientific idea worthy of publication, but the editors and referees at
Nuovo Cimento, Annals of Physics and the Chinese Journal of Physics have
a lot of explaining to do. Similarly for Igor Bogdanoff's thesis
examiners, who don't seem to have noticed that much of his thesis was
several
identical articles stapled together.
Mike Varney
>
> In article <ap92to$1hb$1...@newsmaster.cc.columbia.edu>,
> Peter Woit <wo...@cpw.math.columbia.edu> wrote:
> <snip>
>
> >I just heard from a physicist at NYU, who heard about this from
> >a colleague who was in contact with a New York Times reporter
> >who is looking into this. The "Bogdanoff" brothers have degrees
> >in semiology,
>
> They studied sperm?
I seem to recall once you said that I had my mind in the gutter. :-)
Astor Tockvic
> But now I hear that two brothers have managed to publish 3
> meaningless papers in physics journals as a hoax - and even
> get Ph.D. degrees in physics from Bourgogne University in
> the process! The theses are available in PDF format online,
> at least for now:
I am unable to confirm or infirm this rumour.
However, I know a few things for sure: the Gevrey mathematics
laboratory in University of Bourgogne in Dijon is a respectable place.
They are specialised in the study of deformation quantization,
deformation of Lie algebra, quantum groups, etc and their work usually
would score very low on your crackpot index. On the other hand, the
Bogdanov brothers are extremeley well known in France by people old
enough to remember their popular weekly sci-fi broadcast on the french
TV during the eighties. They then disappeared for ten years from the
show business scene to reappear recently, claiming they had a PHD in
maths... and that they had a very high IQ when they were kids! Knowing
the two brothers and their way to talk about science, I found this
funny, but I did not try to read their work. If this is a hoax, then I
guess the members of the jury must have been accomplice. But that's
just a guess, I have no more information.
Dirk Bruere
"Peter Woit" <wo...@cpw.math.columbia.edu> wrote in message
news:apboi9$q2i$1...@newsmaster.cc.columbia.edu...
> Looking at these papers more carefully, three of them are nearly identical
> and all three are more or less an extract of the first one (the Classical
> and Quantum Gravity article).
Is that really unusual with the 'publish or perish' ethos? Doesn't everyone
try to milk as many papers as possible from a good idea by dribbling it out?
Two papers and two Nobel prizes as a career total would probably be
thrown out by 'Human Resources' if the sucker went looking for a real
job i.e. "only ever had two ideas huh? - look at our other applicant
Joe Blow, he's published hundreds of papers and got an MBA".
Dirk
Dirk Bruere
> They (or we? - but it's not *my* fault) should feel foolish
> regardless of whether it's a hoax or not, because the papers
> are a bunch of baloney.
The physics 'community' should feel no more foolish than the sociology
community who were taken in by Sokal.
No doubt Uncle Al will be sneering at physicists just as he does the
sociologists when he quotes Sokal to the 'soft' cranks.
Dirk
Mark Fergerson
<snip>
> Also, the Bogdanovs are not only science fiction writers, but [...]
Mystery solved. They merely wished to
cite the papers in their next novel's
appendix.
Mark L. Fergerson
Thomas Larsson
news:<c7976c46.02102...@posting.google.com>...
I seriously doubt that Daniel Sternheimer went along on purpose any
more than Shahn Majid, Roman Jackiw or Jack Morava did. Sternheimer is
one of the founding fathers of deformation quantization, and wrote the
celebrated Annals of Physics paper on this in 1973 together with
Bayen, Flato, Lichnerowitz and Fronsdal. What I don't understand is
why he has supervised theses that clearly are outside his field of
expertise.
Sternheimer will hardly suffer materially from this debacle since he
must be past retirement age by now. Nevertheless, I feel sorry for
him, since he is such a nice and timid person. If Moshe Flato had
still been around, this would never had happened. Or so I believe.
Those who are more inclined to suspect a conspiracy may of course
speculate that Sternheimer considered a lost reputation to be a small
price to pay for saving theoretical physics from becoming a
pseudoscience. What speaks against such a heroic interpretation is
that the people on the dissertation committees are still young enough
to have a career to lose, except maybe for Jackiw. You are supposed to
read at least the thesis abstract if you sit on a committee, right?
For a review of deformation quantization from Sternheimer's point of
view you may take a look at
Deformation Quantization: Genesis, Developments and Metamorphoses
Authors: Giuseppe Dito, Daniel Sternheimer
http://xxx.sissa.it/abs/math.QA/0201168
Peter Woit
Now I hear that the Bogdanoff brothers are claiming this is not a hoax, that
they are serious scientific researchers. It certainly is true that
their writings
make no less sense than a lot of other things in the literature.
jmfb...@aol.com
puppe...@hotmail.com wrote:
>jmfb...@aol.com wrote in message
news:<apb81p$ogs$1...@bob.news.rcn.net>...
>> >The "Bogdanoff" brothers have degrees
>> >in semiology,
>>
>> They studied sperm?
>
>1a) The science that deals with signs or sign language.
>1b) The use of signs in signaling, as with a semaphore.
Aw, shit. I could have sworn there was an 'n' in that
word yesterday.
jmfb...@aol.com
<GRIN> I don't recall that. Would you believe I had a headache
yesterday? (A result of trying to climb into my car at the
car doctor's without checking to see if a short-legged critter
had moved the seat.)
Dirk Bruere
<jmfb...@aol.com> wrote in message news:apdv5e$mqp$7...@bob.news.rcn.net...
You were probably thinking about Xian priests in training.
Dirk
jmfb...@aol.com
Nope. I took the day off from worrying about mass destruction.
Boris Borcic
> A New York Times reporter was planning to do a story on this,
> but he spoke with one of the Bogdanovs, who huffily denied that
> it was a hoax. Apparently the reporter decided to drop it. He
> said he could write a story about a hoax, but not about some papers
> that are so silly people *think* they are hoax. :-)
So, unless acknowledged experts do something like Sokal and
Bricmont's book explaining the sillyness in appropriately clear
details to the masses, nothing real is going to happen. This all
reminds me of my comment on the cartoon you evoked a couple
years ago on spr (slightly edited).
> > [The professor before a blackboard filled with caballistics] is
> > turning towards us, smiling, and saying: "At this point we notice
> > that this equation is beautifully simplified if we assume that
> > space-time has 92 dimensions".
>
> And at this point we notice that when we substitute N=26 or N=10
> to N=92 as the dimensions of space-time in the cartoon, it acquires
> additional ironical interpretations, that the professor may be unwittingly
> referring to the expression of his theory in common language prose and
> alphabet, or respectively, to its supplementation with hard figures
> expressed in arabic numerals.
BTW, is this cartoon available anywhere on the web ?
Boris Borcic
--
What are F(Archimedes' bath) and F(Syracuse) if F(Eureka) is
the = in E=mc^2 ?
Martin Einhorn
Can someone tell me what article this comment refers to?
-Martin
Richard Tobin
In article <ap92to$1hb$1...@newsmaster.cc.columbia.edu>,
Peter Woit <wo...@cpw.math.columbia.edu> wrote:
>in semiology
They have degrees in physics now... maybe they're aiming for a full set?
-- Richard
--
Spam filter: to mail me from a .com/.net site, put my surname in the headers.
FreeBSD rules!
Danny Ross Lunsford
Peter Woit <wo...@cpw.math.columbia.edu> wrote
> Refereeing in this field has clearly become a complete joke,
> largely because there is no way to consistently impose standards
> given what has happened in particle theory over the last twenty
> years. The Sokal hoax had a very salutary effect on the
> "science studies" people, perhaps this one will have a similar
> effect here.
I just cannot decide what to think about all this. Can you?
Dirk Bruere
"Danny Ross Lunsford" <antima...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:2b93dd16.02102...@posting.google.com...
> Peter Woit <wo...@cpw.math.columbia.edu> wrote
Knowledge is expanding faster than the quality control.
Electronic pre-prints are one attempt to alleviate the problem.
A kind of refereeing by mob.
Dirk
Boris Borcic
Dirk Bruere <di...@neopax.com> a écrit dans le message : apegu2$r5jo$1...@ID-120108.news.dfncis.de...
>
> > I just cannot decide what to think about all this. Can you?
>
> Knowledge is expanding faster than the quality control.
> Electronic pre-prints are one attempt to alleviate the problem.
> A kind of refereeing by mob.
And the equivalence has come to a test. Mmmm...
I witness for the
statement of *unhidden subjectivity* but elegantly
symmetric abstraction, that the kind of edge our striped
boson has over eg peace-governance feels a lot like the
kind of edge those twins have over the matter of the
victim chapter of physics !
I would even go as far as saying that the latter might
be positively regarded as punishment for not properly
countering the former, if things should continue on
apparent paths until judgment day :(
Since it's Sunday [by now], and the times are grave, I'll add
my vision of a mass.
I. Newton I found cited saying : "physics, beware metaphysics".
For purpose of interpretation, the trisection Beauty, Good, Truth is
portrait enough of metaphysics...
Either to say that this is exactly enough
what Newton was aiming at, or to say that this is exactly enough
*the contrary* of what he meant ! Bind good symmetries with
antipodes, control a sphere while holding only the poles,
that's how to educate nature to behave like a globe :)
II. Newton was a quite unique genious.
Newton was incredibly jealous, intellectually speaking.
And thus comes a sign that Newton might
have to be regarded as having *hit* Einstein with the eg transtemporal
*shadow* of the hate he showed for his contemporary competitor
Leibniz.
III. A shadow that's twice a metaphorical shadow, because
it's again independently a shadow as...
A transposed mimic of the Hiroshima man shadow on the
wall. As if signs had a life of their own, a life of souls
distantly mimicking the life of bodies... and then as if
some component of Einstein's *soul* had been wasted,
disintegrated by the same Hiroshima blast that disintegrated
the japanese (wo)man while printing hir shadow on the
wall.
But Einstein's soul then left a characteristic shadow,
not on a materiel wall, but... in signs.
IV
While Metaphysics perhaps equates to
the division between Truth, Good, and Beauty
And while Newton apparently said :
"Physics, beware of metaphysics".
At best,
Cosmetic is rarely equivalent to Beautiful,
Cosmic rarely equivalent to True,
Comic rarely equivalent to Good
While
"Cosmetic, cosmic, comic, cmc, mcc, mc^2, E = Albert"
*paints* Einstein...on some well-known banner
That some
well-known people teach their children in school,
Who
won a war with Hiroshima and Nagasaki
And
share Newton's tongue
To which
the words "cosmetic", "cosmic" and "comic" belong
That
display a rare form of redundancy
V. Paints Einstein :
In the sense that this gives a *miraculously accurate* portrait of the
feelings of the typical member of that nation when confronted
with properly selected details of the *real* Einstein, taken outside
of the standard three details best known to that nation's eg "illiterate
common sense", ie
(a) that the genius of Einstein had been necessary for the nuclear bomb
to come about
(b) that in particular Hiroshima and Nagasaki vividly illustraded
Einstein's E=mc^2
(c) that Einstein was and has been a good fellow American citizen.
---
Warning : this becomes very preachy
Claim : this *miraculous accuracy* is an objective fact; it is both
an objective fact that this gives an accurate portrait of what it says,
and true that the fact is miraculous in a perhaps scientifically
justifiable sense.
Like saying thinking that some events reveal an unexpected
facet of Nature and so justify to the scientific mind, to keep
thinking about them until some solution is found to their
mystery. Like saying this scientific attitude towards events
is functionally similar enough, with the attitude of a believer
towards a miracle, that for some *interesting purposes* we
can confuse the two attitudes.
Indeed, there should exist no best translation of "miraculous"
borrowed from the language of people of faith, to the language
of people not believing in supernatural events, than saying
that there's like a subjective blinking light saying the event deserves
to be kept to memory as representative of a rare sort of events
deserving further inquisition like it's the case for any first-hand
event flying in the face of current [established scientific] wisdom.
I read what I've written, and I see again a portrait of Newton's
attitude ridiculously close to clichés I've had occasion to read
about him.
And OK, I guess that's enough preaching for a single sunday.
Rev. Boris Borchess
Ken Muldrew
ba...@galaxy.ucr.edu (John Baez) wrote:
>Ken Muldrew <kmul...@ucalgary.ca> wrote:
>>>So, it's possible that instead of being scared to look foolish,
>>>the people who got duped were simply too busy to actually read
>>>what they were supposed to be reading.
>
>>If true, some anonymous reviewers will certainly look terribly
>>foolish. I suppose the whole field will look foolish.
>
>They (or we? - but it's not *my* fault) should feel foolish
>regardless of whether it's a hoax or not, because the papers
>are a bunch of baloney.
Well I think that if any of us (scientists, not just qg enthusiasts)
actually know anyone who is too busy to read papers that they are
supposed to review then we should suggest that they send the papers
back and tell the editors to find someone else. The "too busy to read"
excuse is appalling, IMO.
Ken Muldrew
kmul...@ucalgary.ca
Edward Green
There is a letter from Feynman to one of his female friends describing
a conference he had attended and describing the "work" in about those
terms. Coincidentally, I think the topic was quantum gravity ...
A.Lebourgeois
> John Baez wrote:
>
> >Can anyone confirm or disconfirm the rumors I've heard about this?
> >I hear that Igor and Grichka Bogdanov, journalists and science
> >fiction writers, For their thesis defense
> >they rented a hall in the prestigeous Ecole Polytechnique, arranged
> >a big dinner with the president, invited the TV, ... and passed.
> >
> >I don't know if these rumors are true. I can however assure you
> >that the abstracts seem like gibberish to me, even though I know
> >what most of the buzzwords mean.
>
All that does not make any sense. The Bogdanoff passed their thesis
after years of hard work. I have read their thesis and I have no
doubt concerning the originality of their ideas in the field of TFT
(which is not that familiar to most of strings specialists).
Concerning the published papers (specially the CQG paper) you should
all make the effort to read them carefully. You would then realize
that there is something quite new regarding the description of
(pre)spacetime around the Planck scale. The mathematics behind are
very sophisticated and it is the first time that I see a clear
connexion between quantum groups th. as applied to physics at the
planck scale. So before speaking about the "hoax" of Bogdanoff
brothers one should first read (and try to understand) the work.
Louis M. Pecora
> Even if the university did nothing official, the prof's
> career is very likely to take a major hit. Would you be
> on the PhD oral committee of any of his/her students?
> Would you collaborate with this prof? What do grants
> boards think about it the next time this prof wants money?
Well, if the student were duped, too, then I suspect this would lead to
a lawsuit which would include the university. Misrepresentation comes
to mind, although I am not an attorney. I'm sure university legal
people are already checking it out to see what their exposure is.
Truly, the student would be the victim if he/she is not in on the hoax.
--
Lou Pecora
- My views are my own.
Harry Collins
Peter Woit <wo...@cpw.math.columbia.edu> wrote in message news:<ap9f1d$a1b$1...@newsmaster.cc.columbia.edu>...
THE VIEW FROM SOCIOLOGY
Last time I heard a figure quoted it was that about 90% of published
papers are never cited by anyone except the author and it is probable
that 50% of published papers are never read by anyone. Most published
science (or social science) is simply not important. Thus, that a
hoax paper can get through the refereeing system, while an indictment
of the referees, is not of any great concern as far as scientific
understanding is concerned.
What physical scientists need to worry about is the way they handled
the Sokal hoax. Though I am someone who was vilified from
time-to-time during the `science wars' I had never read Social Text
(the journal which Sokal fooled) until the incident. I am not even
sure that I had even heard of it. Most of us thought the hoax was
very well crafted and very funny and that the editors of Social Text
(it does not have independent referees so far as I know), should
simply have taken their medicine. The real trouble began when Alan
Sokal, Jean Bricmont, and an unfortunately large number of natural
scientists began to treat the hoax as demonstrating that the social
sciences, or some subset of them, were fatally flawed, rubbish,
nonsense, etc. Some subset may be fatally flawed, rubbish, nonsense,
etc but the hoax did not demonstrate it. Science is harder work than
that. The gloating and weak logic of a subset of the natural science
community ought to be what is worrying scientists now; the reverse
hoax makes it easier to understand just how weak those inferences
were.
Relax, the hoax itself (and I assume it was a hoax), doesn't matter
much except for CQG and a few referees/examiners. It's just funny and
a useful astringent. But from the two hoaxes taken together we may
learn something.
Harry Collins
Dirk Bruere
"Harry Collins" <Coll...@cf.ac.uk> wrote in message
news:125a38d0.02102...@posting.google.com...
>
> Relax, the hoax itself (and I assume it was a hoax), doesn't matter
> much except for CQG and a few referees/examiners. It's just funny and
> a useful astringent. But from the two hoaxes taken together we may
> learn something.
I assume a number of people here have received email from Drs Bogdanov
claiming this is no hoax, so I will not quote it in full.
However, there is a very interesting and telling comment:
"This morning told that they were frauds everyone was
laughing at how obvious it is. This afternoon, told they are real
professors and that this is not a fraud, everyone here says, well, maybe
it is real stuff".
Is it really the case that the CQG world is such that only a few people can
distinguish between legitimate theory and blatant bullshit? And the rest
have to depend on being informed of whether what they are reading is one or
the other?
Dirk
Eugen Winkler
news:apkcej$2auv3$1...@ID-120108.news.dfncis.de...
> "Harry Collins" <Coll...@cf.ac.uk> wrote in message
> "This morning told that they were frauds everyone was
> laughing at how obvious it is. This afternoon, told they are real
> professors and that this is not a fraud, everyone here says, well, maybe
> it is real stuff".
>
> Is it really the case that the CQG world is such that only a few people
can
> distinguish between legitimate theory and blatant bullshit? And the rest
> have to depend on being informed of whether what they are reading is one
or
> the other?
Good question.
In some parts of physics there are too many second level constructions
around that
(1) can be randomly combined i.e. by weak symmetry arguments,
(2) can't be ruled out due to a lack of experimental accessibility,
(3) are presented highly obfuscated.
Bogdanov has to show that he can escape this mid age scenario, otherwise he
belongs to it and benefits or suffers from it.
Eugen Winkler
Arkadiusz Jadczyk
My recent (October 28, 2002) exchange with Bogdanovs is documented at
the following URL
http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/bogdanovs.htm
ark
--
Arkadiusz Jadczyk
http://www.cassiopaea.org/quantum_future/homepage.htm
--
igor.bogdanov
As everybody probably knows by now, since Oct. 22 we received many emails
coming from the whole planet about a rumor of "hoax" based on reverse
"Sokal's model".
We were very astonished, my brother and myself, to discover that there
is a powerful stream of opinions whose action is to present our works
as a deliberate hoax.
It is pure non sense.
Initiated from France, this campain coincides with the creation of our
new scientific TV program on France 2 and could be originated by a very
ancient editorial conflict that had nothing to do with science.
We have now identified the main source of this hoax rumor and we send
you here after the disclaimer of his author.
___
Dear Dr Bogdanov,
please find below a disclaimer that I distributed this
morning.
Best regards,
M.N.
**********************************************************************
Dear friends,
apparently a private e-mail of mine to two persons was inadvertedly
widely distributed far beyond my 1-step consent. As the message
triggered a flurry of activity I feel obliged to add some disclaimers
to whatever `audience' it meanwhile reached.
In addition to some by-and-large factual information the e-mail
described a possible scenario (`hoax') underlying the former.
Neither of them was based on first hand information as I
immediately stressed in a follow-up message to the two intended
recipients. Meanwhile Dr I. and Dr G. Bogdanov informed me that
the `hoax premise' is incorrect. I expressed my sincere apologies
to them which they accepted. I join them hereby in the attempt
to confine the uncontrolled multiplication of this incorrect premise
and the secondary rumors that followed.
Everybody is invited to judge the scientific merits of the Bogdanov's
published work independent of their intentions on his own. Please make
an effort to distribute this message as widely as the first one ...
Thank you. Best regards,
Max Niedermaier
-----
As we wrote him, we were quite impressed by Dr Niedermaier's honesty.
His attitude reflects a perfect integrity and a rather rare capacity to
recognize that he may have been mistaken.
Here is the whole story. But the main problem is the following :
apparently no one has really read nor understood our papers.
No one in the string group at harvard can tell if these papers are
real or fraudulent. This morning told that they were frauds everyone was
laughing at how obvious it is. This afternoon, told they are real
professors and that this is not a fraud, everyone here says, well, maybe
it is real stuff.
______
In fact this affair reveals something extremely preoccupying. It simply
means that when a paper may be different from most of the standard
litterature (which precisely is the case with our publications) it
might fall into the category of "hoax papers".
Therefore we invite everybody in mathematical physics and theoretical
physics community to read carefully the referenced papers and discuss
them on scientific basis. Most of our contradictors are string
specialists. But we beleive that there is room in topological field
theory for new ideas regarding a possible solution of the spacetime
initial singularity pb.
For instance : one of the referee for Classical & Quantum Gravity paper
wrote : "The author's make the interesting observation that, in the
limit of infinite temperature, a field theory is reduced to a topological
field theory which may be a suitable description of the initial phase
of the universe".
So what are your (s) opinion (s) about this question?
On the other hand, this idea to describe initial singularity in the
framework of topological field theory is based on another new idea of
our own subject to be discussed : the possible quantum "fluctuation" of the
signature of the metric at the planck scale. The algebraic context of
such a fluctuation involves quantum groups theory as far as -at the
Planck scale- the metric itself must be quantized and consequently the
signature should be viewed as q-deformed.
So the question is : what do you think about this idea of quantum
fluctuations of the signature at the Planck scale?
On slightly more physical basis we also would be very happy to discuss
the possible KMS state of spacetime at the planck scale. We consider
that the expected thermal equilibrium of spacetime at such a scale is a
good ground for applying the KMS condition to it.
Is it silly or does it make any sense (as seem to think the referees of
the different published papers ? )
In that case, the context in terms of von Neumann algebras are type II
and III factors whose properties are quite interesting and can lead to a
better comprehension of the possible fluctuation of the spacetime
signature of the metric at the planck scale.
Onece more, we would be very happy to exchange views, critics,
contradictions, suggestions, etc. about those new ideas.
Thank you for your help and attention,
With our best regards,
Igor Bogdanoff Grichka Bogdanoff
Jeremy Henty
Collins wrote:
> ... The real trouble began when Alan Sokal, Jean Bricmont, and an
> unfortunately large number of natural scientists began to treat the
> hoax as demonstrating that the social sciences, or some subset of
> them, were fatally flawed, rubbish, nonsense, etc.
Sokal and Bricmont do *not* claim this.
> ... Some subset may be fatally flawed, rubbish, nonsense, etc but
> the hoax did not demonstrate it.
Which Sokal and Bricmont *concede*. They wrote "Intellectual
Impostures" precisely because they knew that the Sokal hoax was not
enough to support the critique they wanted to make. And they do not
claim that the social sciences (or any sizeable part of then) are
rubbish. What they claim is that many notable figures in the social
sciences are in the habit of peppering their dialogue with
pseudoscience.
Regards,
Jeremy Henty
John Baez
Ken Muldrew <kmul...@ucalgary.ca> wrote:
>Well I think that if any of us (scientists, not just qg enthusiasts)
>actually know anyone who is too busy to read papers that they are
>supposed to review then we should suggest that they send the papers
>back and tell the editors to find someone else. The "too busy to read"
>excuse is appalling, IMO.
You may be pleased to know that Classical and Quantum Gravity
has decided to stop using the 2 referees who accepted the
Bogdanov's paper. I don't know about the other journals who
accepted papers of theirs... but of these journals, Classical
and Quantum Gravity is supposedly the most prestigious, with
therefore the most to lose.
James Dolan
in article <apkcej$2auv3$1...@id-120108.news.dfncis.de>,
dirk bruere <di...@neopax.com> wrote:
it's really the case that in any worthwhile field of study it's
impossible for anyone no matter how familiar with the current state of
the art to always reliably distinguish between crap and non-crap by
means of a casual first reading. both crap and non-crap can pretty
easily be disguised in a way that takes a lot of hard work to detect,
although in general it's much easier to be really sure that something
isn't crap than to be sure that there's absolutely nothing of value in
it. the only people who assume that it ought to be possible to make
reliable snap judgements about whether some work is total crap or not
are incompetents.
--
[e-mail address jdo...@math.ucr.edu]
[Moderator's note: I am generously assuming that James Dolan does not
mean in the final sentence to call anyone in this discussion
an incompetent. However, I urge everyone to consider their wording
carefully in this emotionally charged discussion. -- KS]
Ralph E. Frost
Harry Collins <Coll...@cf.ac.uk> wrote in message
news:125a38d0.02102...@posting.google.com...
>
> Peter Woit <wo...@cpw.math.columbia.edu> wrote in message
news:<ap9f1d$a1b$1...@newsmaster.cc.columbia.edu>...
> > Now I hear that the Bogdanoff brothers are claiming this is not a hoax,
that
> > they are serious scientific researchers. It certainly is true that
> > their writings
> > make no less sense than a lot of other things in the literature.
>
> THE VIEW FROM SOCIOLOGY
....
> Relax, the hoax itself (and I assume it was a hoax), doesn't matter
> much except for CQG and a few referees/examiners. It's just funny and
> a useful astringent. But from the two hoaxes taken together we may
> learn something.
If you've ever been involved in a court case opposing someone who lies
outright, making up a defense on the spur of the moment -- I mean, really
lies, and builds their case purposefully on lies -- you will undoubtedly
know that dishonesty may have a powerful short-term gain.
Both hoaxes together don't change that fact. The fact is, if you set out
with the objective to cheat, steal, and lie, and bamboozle, that is what
you will likely succeed at.
Like Boris said, it's an old and persistent temptation. Some people
succumb to it.
--
Ralph Frost
Looking for a desktop model to help you ponder this topic?
http://flep.refrost.com
Use more robust symbols
Seek a thought worthy of speech.
Eugen Winkler
he
> belongs to it and benefits or suffers from it.
Typical mid age scenario:
http://es.rice.edu/ES/humsoc/Galileo/Things/inquisition.html
"Those whose beliefs or practices deviated sufficiently from the orthodoxy
of the councils now became the objects of efforts to bring them into the
fold. Resistance often led to persecution." ...
This type of synchronization effort as a time-limited process simply
indicates a stage of confusion often initiated by new media. In the first
stage new media provide for confusion, in the second stage orthodoxy uses
the new media for inquisition, in the third stage reformation is driven by
new media.
Probably the most intelligent version of an inquisition index ever written
is the crackpot index http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
It's just a game, the role you play has no correlation to your abilities and
goodness. But beware! Retrospectively, even computers will be able to find
the proper category of your work.
Eugen Winkler
jmfb...@aol.com
In article <3db9a5b8....@news.ucalgary.ca>,
kmul...@ucalgary.ca (Ken Muldrew) wrote:
>ba...@galaxy.ucr.edu (John Baez) wrote:
>>Ken Muldrew <kmul...@ucalgary.ca> wrote:
It doesn't matter if the papers are a hoax. The exercise
has pointed out a bug(s) in the procedure. And _that_ is
what needs to be thought about.
Putting in more rules and regulations may restrict the 98%
production and (I don't think) will stop the 2% fucking around.
Steve Carlip
> Last time I heard a figure quoted it was that about 90% of published
> papers are never cited by anyone except the author and it is probable
> that 50% of published papers are never read by anyone.
This is a bit of an urban myth -- it's based, I think, on a misunderstanding
of a study of papers in the Science Citation Index. The original article is
available at
http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/papers/hamilton1.html
but it's important to read the follow-up letter by David Pendlebury.
The original figure includes editorials, letters, obituaries, and the
like as articles. If one restricts oneself to actual research articles,
only about 22% are uncited. (I don't know the figure if self-citations
ar excluded). Still...
> Most published science (or social science) is simply not important.
> Thus, that a hoax paper can get through the refereeing system,
> while an indictment of the referees, is not of any great concern as
> far as scientific understanding is concerned.
I agree. Remember, in quantum gravity no one really knows what
they're doing. There are plenty of wrong papers published, including
a fair number that, in hindsight, are ``obviously'' wrong. If it weren't
for the hoax claims (which the Bogdanovs deny, by the way), these
papers would have quietly sunk into oblivion.
There's one big difference with the Sokal paper. No one who knows
anything about the subject could read Sokal's paper without laughing
out loud; the Bogdanov papers are unlikely to provoke much more than
a wince.
Steve Carlip
Louis M. Pecora
<di...@neopax.com> wrote:
> Knowledge is expanding faster than the quality control.
> Electronic pre-prints are one attempt to alleviate the problem.
> A kind of refereeing by mob.
>
> Dirk
Well, as an associate editor on two journals (one of which is an AIP
journal) I can tell you that finding quality referees has become very
difficult. People are simply too busy raising money and trying to
publish as much as possible to do the job. Maybe there are other
reasons, but the referee quality in some physics fields has gone down.
I wonder if this is true in all physics fields and in science overall.
Ned Wright
news:<281020021453302039%pec...@anvil.nrl.navy.mil>...
> Well, as an associate editor on two journals (one of which is an AIP
> journal) I can tell you that finding quality referees has become very
> difficult. People are simply too busy raising money and trying to
> publish as much as possible to do the job. Maybe there are other
> reasons, but the referee quality in some physics fields has gone down.
> I wonder if this is true in all physics fields and in science overall.
Obviously the reason it is hard to get referees is that the pay is
zero dollars and zero prestige per hour, and there is nothing one
can point to in a promotion case. I generally list "referee for
PRL" once per year in my outside professional activities, but that
means I get no credit whatsoever for the second PRL referee request.
When I was a Science Editor for the ApJ, I thought that the ApJ should
publish a request that whenever a department had a promotion or
appointment case, the relevant ApJ Science Editors should always
be asked for letters of recommendation.
This would spike the careers of people who wouldn't do referee reports
because they weren't tenured, or the tenured professors who just ignored
requests completely.
--Edward L. (Ned) Wright, UCLA Professor of Physics and Astronomy
See http:www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmolog.htm
Edward Green
Coll...@cf.ac.uk (Harry Collins) wrote in message news:<125a38d0.02102...@posting.google.com>...
> What physical scientists need to worry about is the way they handled
> the Sokal hoax. Though I am someone who was vilified from
> time-to-time during the `science wars' I had never read Social Text
> (the journal which Sokal fooled) until the incident. I am not even
> sure that I had even heard of it. Most of us thought the hoax was
> very well crafted and very funny and that the editors of Social Text
> (it does not have independent referees so far as I know), should
> simply have taken their medicine. The real trouble began when Alan
> Sokal, Jean Bricmont, and an unfortunately large number of natural
> scientists began to treat the hoax as demonstrating that the social
> sciences, or some subset of them, were fatally flawed, rubbish,
> nonsense, etc. Some subset may be fatally flawed, rubbish, nonsense,
> etc but the hoax did not demonstrate it. Science is harder work than
> that. The gloating and weak logic of a subset of the natural science
> community ought to be what is worrying scientists now; the reverse
> hoax makes it easier to understand just how weak those inferences
> were.
I said the same thing. By extrapolating a statistical result from a
single data point some were showing themselves to be as good at
scientific inference as the editors were at screening papers.
> Relax, the hoax itself (and I assume it was a hoax), doesn't matter
> much except for CQG and a few referees/examiners. It's just funny and
> a useful astringent. But from the two hoaxes taken together we may
> learn something.
I, and presumably everyone else who has contributed to this thread,
have been honored by an actual email from the perpetrators! As was
said, they continued to protest their innocense. As was also said,
this would seem similar to the legal strategy of, having started with
a lie, never backtracking or admiting anything, but continue to lie,
lie, lie. This will always maintain a germ of doubt in at least a
portion of the audience.
Something can probably be gleaned from their taking the time to write
to random commentators on Usenet. Also, utility of posting from a
filter free account -- sure I have to delete a lot of spam, but if I
had some puzzle to get my real address, I never would have received
this important document!
Edward Green
"Dirk Bruere" <di...@neopax.com> wrote in message news:<apkcej$2auv3$1...@ID-120108.news.dfncis.de>...
Apparently, the emperor is really scantily clad. Maybe a jock strap.
Except for a few confident souls, the goal of much of the population
seems to be not to be found out.
By continuing to deny this was a fraud, the perps are really holding
people's feet to the fire: a comforting admission would make all
clear; a continued insistence puts each person desiring to have an
opinion on the spot.
Lewis Mammel
Dirk Van de moortel wrote:
> In his reply Boris Borcic just reminded me that I know these
> Bogdanov guys from TV too. Before French TV was taken
> completely over by The Advertisers I used to watch some of
> their "scientific" programs. The Bogdanovs were stars indeed
> and they acted like geniuses. I didn't like their programs
> because of more style than content. Too flashy.
What sort of a show was it? My curiosity about
these guys is at fever pitch.
Lew Mammel, Jr.
J. J. Lodder
igor.bogdanov <igor.b...@free.fr> wrote:
^ ^
> From: "igor.bogdanov" <igor.b...@free.fr>
> Newsgroups: sci.physics.research,sci.physics
snip
> With our best regards,
>
> Igor Bogdanoff Grichka Bogdanoff
^^ ^^
Is this authentic, and do the Bogdano[v,ff]s
use two different spellings of their own names?
Or is it a hoax in a hoax?
Whatever I think of it,
I would at least prefer to refer to it correctly,
Jan
Dirk Van de moortel
"Lewis Mammel" <l.ma...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message news:3DC0B757...@worldnet.att.net...
Phew.... It's 10, 15, 20 years ago? Can't recall precisely...
They used to walk around in a huge studio, showing pieces
of film of spectacular stuff on astronomy, physics, chemistry,
whatever...
Lots of electronics. Extremely enthusiastic presentation.
Sometimes confusing, raising questions like who's who, or
are they really twins, or are they using camera tricks?
Dirk Vdm
puppe...@hotmail.com
>
> > Looking at these papers more carefully, three of them are nearly identical
> > and all three are more or less an extract of the first one (the Classical
> > and Quantum Gravity article).
>
> Is that really unusual with the 'publish or perish' ethos? Doesn't everyone
> try to milk as many papers as possible from a good idea by dribbling it out?
[snip]
There's a really old and cynical joke about that and "citations."
The idea is, you want to publish articles that get cited a lot.
So what you do is, you deliberately get a paper published that
has a fairly obvious, easily corrected error in it. Especially
one that makes some minor correction to the result, but that
does not change the overall conclusion. Then, everybody in the
field will write a short article showing the error and the
correction, because they are publication hungry as well. And you
wind up with paper that is cited by just about everybody else
in your area of work. In departments that look at the citations
index as part of performance review, this has been done.
On the other hand, I once knew a guy who was clearly doing the
milk-it routine. He was being just a bit overly obvious about
it though. To create paper B from paper A, for example, he had
the department secretary change all occurences of "Kaluza-Klein"
to "Jordan-Thiery" and sent it off to another journal. Both
papers got published. But the secretary told everybody in the
department. Sort of cost him a lot on personal interactions with
the staff and students. Eventually, this guy was simply not
offered a job and went away to I-know-not-where.
Socks
Uncle Al
>
> As everybody probably knows by now, since Oct. 22 we received many emails
> coming from the whole planet about a rumor of "hoax" based on reverse
> "Sokal's model".
>
> We were very astonished, my brother and myself, to discover that there
> is a powerful stream of opinions whose action is to present our works
> as a deliberate hoax.
>
> It is pure non sense.
John Baez read your texts and he concluded that they didn't hang
together. If you can convince Baez that your hat is on straight, so
be it. Until that time, I regard your work as a well deserved wake up
call to a hard science that has significantly abandoned its empirical
roots and now wallows in floods of untestable and often unfathomable
theory - bushwa bullwarked by complexity and promulgated by publicity.
Physics deserves to be something better than economics.
Public entreaties are meaningless. The average person doesn't
understand an incandescent lightbulb. Reality is not decided by
majority vote.
--
Uncle Al
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/eotvos.htm
(Do something naughty to physics)
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/eotvos.pdf
(The short form)
Kevin A. Scaldeferri
Dirk Bruere <di...@neopax.com> wrote:
[quoting someone else]
>
>"This morning told that they were frauds everyone was
>laughing at how obvious it is. This afternoon, told they are real
>professors and that this is not a fraud, everyone here says, well, maybe
>it is real stuff".
Yes, this seems like the truly damning thing to me. It seems nearly
as bad (or perhaps even equally, but orthogonally bad) to the reaction
of some to the Sokal hoax, who claimed that event though Sokal
intended the paper as a hoax, it was actually completely valid
independent of his intent.
Does no one have the courage of his convictions to stand up and
declare an opinion one way or the other, or is it simply that no one
has bothered to actually spend the time to acquire an informed opinion
(i.e. more than just skimming the papers for a few choice sentences)?
--
======================================================================
Kevin Scaldeferri Calif. Institute of Technology
The INTJ's Prayer:
Lord keep me open to others' ideas, WRONG though they may be.
ark
> "John Baez" <ba...@galaxy.ucr.edu> wrote in message
> news:apajo0$mqe$1...@glue.ucr.edu...
>
> > They (or we? - but it's not *my* fault) should feel foolish
> > regardless of whether it's a hoax or not, because the papers
> > are a bunch of baloney.
I am trying to analyze the papers. The documentation of my exchange
with Bogdanovs is available at
http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/bogdanovs.htm
and more technical discussion starting at
http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/bogdanov2.htm
and will continue. Hopefully someone will benefit from this exchange.
As I wrote to Igor Bogdanov there are no easy ways in physics.
"Life is not easy. But it was never intended to be easy in the first
place."
To decide what is the value of each particular paper one needs to
invest time
and effort - like with everything in this world.
ark
John Baez
Arkadiusz Jadczyk <a...@cassiopaea.org> wrote:
>My recent (October 28, 2002) exchange with Bogdanovs is documented at
>the following URL
>
>http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/bogdanovs.htm
Did you write this? It says:
"The first post on the subject is by John Baez. John seems to be
about the busiest mathematical physicist on the internet. He is
employed by Cornell University, which has recently taken over the
management of the Los Alamos National Laboratory pre-print archive
of physics paper."
The first two sentences are true. But the third one is
false. I am employed by the University of California at
Riverside, and I have no connection with the physics arXiv
(besides submitting papers there like so many other physicists do).
Could you please correct this?
Your subsequent comparison of Cornell University with the
Ku Klux Klan is probably, umm, a slight exaggeration, but never mind.
I agree with you completely that Daniel Sternheimer and
Moshe Flato are (or in the latter case, were) good mathematical
physicists and nice people.
jmf...@aol.com
You guys have gone on-line. This speeds up the process. If
you keep the personnel doing the review work constant, you're going
to have "sloppier" work (where "sloppy" is a perceived entity based
on count of things-not-done and has nothing to do with a realistic
evaluation). We had the same thing happen in our biz.
It's a difficult problem to solve. The only way we "solved" ours
was to go out of business. Somehow I don't think that's an option
in your biz ;-).
alejandro.rivero
> described a possible scenario (`hoax') underlying the former.
> Max Niedermaier
Any idea about which, or what kind, factual information was involved?
Alejandro
Toby Bartels
Dirk Bruere wrote in part:
>I assume a number of people here have received email from Drs Bogdanov
>claiming this is no hoax, so I will not quote it in full.
Dear Drs Bogdanov:
I did not receive a copy of this letter.
Will you please send me one?
Thank you very much.
-- Toby Bartels
<toby+b...@math.ucr.edu>
Louis M. Pecora
In article <6e1d56f9.02103...@posting.google.com>, Ned
Wright <mapp...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Obviously the reason it is hard to get referees is that the pay is
> zero dollars and zero prestige per hour,
> and there is nothing one
> can point to in a promotion case.
Exactly. With economic pressure on scientists to bring in money to
cover academic and laboratory overheads plus some of their own pay and,
of course, to make tenure it's obvious where they will focus their
attention even if reading more of the literature through refereeing is
something they would like to do.
Alan Sokal
> What physical scientists need to worry about is the way they handled
> the Sokal hoax. [...] The real trouble began when Alan
> Sokal, Jean Bricmont, and an unfortunately large number of natural
> scientists began to treat the hoax as demonstrating that the social
> sciences, or some subset of them, were fatally flawed, rubbish,
> nonsense, etc. Some subset may be fatally flawed, rubbish, nonsense,
> etc but the hoax did not demonstrate it.
Just a clarification: Neither Bricmont nor I have ever "treat[ed] the
hoax as demonstrating that the social sciences were fatally flawed
etc". Quite the contrary: in my article "What the Social Text Affair
Does and Does Not Prove" [published in _A House Built on Sand:
Exposing Postmodernist Myths About Science_, edited by Noretta
Koertge, Oxford University Press, 1998], I said explicitly:
From the mere fact of publication of my parody I think that not
much can be deduced. It doesn't prove that the whole field of cultural
studies, or cultural studies of science -- much less sociology of
science -- is nonsense. Nor does it prove that the intellectual
standards in these fields are generally lax. (This might be the case,
but it would have to be established on other grounds.) It proves only
that the editors of _one_ rather marginal journal were derelict in
their intellectual duty, by publishing an article on quantum physics
that they admit they could not understand, without bothering to get an
opinion from anyone knowledgeable in quantum physics, solely because
it came from a "conveniently credentialed ally" (as Social Text
co-editor Bruce Robbins later candidly admitted), flattered the
editors' ideological preconceptions, and attacked their "enemies".
(I then add:
To which, one might justifiably respond: So what?
and proceed to answer that question.)
The whole article can be found at
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/noretta.html
Bricmont and I have taken the same approach in all our subsequent
writings on this subject.
-- Alan Sokal
Arkadiusz Jadczyk
On 30 Oct 2002 08:00:16 GMT, jmfb...@aol.com wrote:
>It doesn't matter if the papers are a hoax. The exercise
>has pointed out a bug(s) in the procedure. And _that_ is
>what needs to be thought about.
The good thing is: the best investiganitave journalists of Chronicle of
Higher Education in Washington D.C, and of Nature (France) are looking
into the 'affaire". It can only lead to a progress!
But still, physicists have to decide about the status of
complexification, KMS, zero mode, characteristic classes as Lagrngians
ans ALL THAT. Not to mention dieu&science, which even Grothendieck
may be in trouble to categorize :_
ark
--
Arkadiusz Jadczyk
http://www.cassiopaea.org/quantum_future/homepage.htm
--
John Baez
In article <447053fe.0210...@posting.google.com>,
A.Lebourgeois <ASTREE...@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
>> John Baez wrote:
>> >I can however assure you
>> >that the abstracts seem like gibberish to me, even though I know
>> >what most of the buzzwords mean.
>All that does not make any sense. The Bogdanoff passed their thesis
>after years of hard work. I have read their thesis and I have no
>doubt concerning the originality of their ideas in the field of TFT
>(which is not that familiar to most of strings specialists).
Please explain to me what their new ideas in this subject are.
I'm reasonably expert in topological field theory, so feel free
to be highly specific.
>Concerning the published papers (specially the CQG paper) you should
>all make the effort to read them carefully.
I did.
>You would then realize
>that there is something quite new regarding the description of
>(pre)spacetime around the Planck scale.
What is it, exactly?
>The mathematics behind are
>very sophisticated and it is the first time that I see a clear
>connexion between quantum groups th. as applied to physics at the
>planck scale.
I'm quite comfortable with quantum groups, and it's
not the first time I've seen people try to make a connection
between them and Planck-scale physics. In fact, I've written
a few papers on precisely this subject! So, please tell me
what this "clear connection" is supposed to be - in enough
detail so I can see if there really is anything substantial
here or not. Merely speaking of a "clear connection", without
saying what it is, is not very convincing.
>So before speaking about the "hoax" of Bogdanoff
>brothers one should first read (and try to understand) the work.
I would never suggest that a paper might be a hoax without
reading it first! That would be silly.
By the way, I no longer think the Bogdanoff's papers are
part of a Sokal-style hoax designed to poke fun at physics.
I think something else is going on here. Rich Monastersky
is doing a story on this subject for the Chronicle of Higher
Education, and with any luck it will contain some information
that will shed a new light on the case.
(I'm sorry to be so mysterious, but I'd rather wait and let
a professional reporter sort this stuff out. I know physics,
so I don't mind talking about *that*, but some other things
are best left to reporters.)
Eugen Winkler
>
> In some parts of physics there are too many second level constructions
> around that
>
> (1) can be randomly combined i.e. by weak symmetry arguments,
> (2) can't be ruled out due to a lack of experimental accessibility,
> (3) are presented highly obfuscated.
>
> Bogdanov has to show that he can escape this mid age scenario, otherwise
he
> belongs to it and benefits or suffers from it.
>
Hamiltoniana and Lagrangians are one of those second level constructions I
mentioned. Those integrals that can be found for any needs. I would call
them highly suspect in many cases approaching a "fundamental" theory,
especially in the context of topological field theory.
So here is probably the main cause of confusion:
(Bogdanov response, today sci.physics.research)
==========================================
Now, the topological field theory (for D = 4) is established when the
Hamiltonian (or the Lagrangian) of the system is H = 0, such as the
theory is independent of the underlying metric. We propose to extend
this definition, stating that a theory can also be topological if it
does not depend on the Hamiltonian H (or the Lagrangian L) of the
system.
Ha-ha-ha! Sidesplittingly funny, eh?
What - you don't get the joke? Hmm, it would take a while to explain,
but it basically amounts to saying that they want to call a theory
"topological" if it doesn't depend on what the theory is - since the
Hamiltonian or Lagrangian is what you use to specify a theory of physics
these days. A theory that doesn't depend on what it is! It almost sounds
like an inside joke about the nature of the Bogdanov's work!
=======================================
I would say, thats the point that started inquisition. The Bogdanov's
(obviously not perfectly skilled in math) touched holy ground by declaring
both Hamiltonian and Lagrangian to be redundant. This combination scores
very high on the crank index. The crank index of course does not subtract
points for good ideas born out of imperfection. A good inquisition index
serves to stabilize the current state of confusion by supporting ignorance,
more confusion would simply destabilize the present system of honorship and
would make a lot of copyrights redundant.
Eugen Winkler
Mark Fergerson
> I, and presumably everyone else who has contributed to this thread,
> have been honored by an actual email from the perpetrators! As was
> said, they continued to protest their innocense.
I got one of those from the authors
too, and sorta assumed all contributors
to this thread did as well. But get
this; I also got an e-mail from a
reporter from _Nature_ who wants my
input on whether it's a hoax and the
state of peer-review!
Now before anyone imagines I'll let
dreams of power go to my head and tell
this reporter something as if I actually
qualified as a "peer" in this context,
let me assure all I have no such
intentions. However, he did ask me to
refer him to others "competent" to make
comments. Any takers? Replies public or
private gleefully accepted and forwarded
without prejudice; he can take his
chances.
> ... As was also said,
> this would seem similar to the legal strategy of, having started with
> a lie, never backtracking or admiting anything, but continue to lie,
> lie, lie. This will always maintain a germ of doubt in at least a
> portion of the audience.
Eventually somebody with a couple of
clues will read the material critically.
Either it's bogus or it isn't. Either
way, "peers" will be more carefully
selected, and reporters will have fewer
silly mistakes to pass on to the public.
Mark L. Fergerson
Mark Fergerson
The Cyrillic character usually
transliterated as "v" is pronounced "f".
Some Russian immigrants to
English-speaking countries will alter
the spelling to keep others from
mispronouncing their names; I assume the
Bogdanovs did the same.
Mark L. Fergerson
Louis M. Pecora
> >Well, as an associate editor on two journals (one of which is an AIP
> >journal) I can tell you that finding quality referees has become very
> >difficult. People are simply too busy raising money and trying to
> >publish as much as possible to do the job. Maybe there are other
> >reasons, but the referee quality in some physics fields has gone down.
> >I wonder if this is true in all physics fields and in science overall.
>
> You guys have gone on-line. This speeds up the process. If
> you keep the personnel doing the review work constant, you're going
> to have "sloppier" work (where "sloppy" is a perceived entity based
> on count of things-not-done and has nothing to do with a realistic
> evaluation). We had the same thing happen in our biz.
You lost me. Can you explain this?
--
Lou Pecora
- My views are my own.
[Moderator's note: If "this" means what happened in your business, and
your business isn't physics, please take it to e-mail. -TB]
ark
> In article <josrrucb3a4omtec0...@4ax.com>,
> Arkadiusz Jadczyk <a...@cassiopaea.org> wrote:
>
> >My recent (October 28, 2002) exchange with Bogdanovs is documented at
> >the following URL
> >
> >http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/bogdanovs.htm
>
> Did you write this? It says:
>
> "The first post on the subject is by John Baez. John seems to be
> about the busiest mathematical physicist on the internet. He is
> employed by Cornell University, which has recently taken over the
> management of the Los Alamos National Laboratory pre-print archive
> of physics paper."
>
> The first two sentences are true. But the third one is
> false. I am employed by the University of California at
> Riverside, and I have no connection with the physics arXiv
> (besides submitting papers there like so many other physicists do).
>
> Could you please correct this?
Sorry. Fixed.
In the meantime the web page grew and now I am trying to figure out
the KMS affaire in Igor's paper.
There are some new comments from Igor and Grichka - and couple of more
journalists got interested. Updated daily:
http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/bogdanovs.htm
http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/bogdanov2.htm
ark
Aaron Bergman
Arkadiusz Jadczyk <a...@cassiopaea.org> wrote:
> But still, physicists have to decide about the status of
> complexification, KMS, zero mode, characteristic classes as Lagrngians
> ans ALL THAT.
Well, characteristic classes being used as lagrangians aren't
particularly new. Tr[F /\ F] isn't particularly interesting, IIRC, but
entire careers hav been made on Tr[A /\ dA + (2/3) A /\ A /\ A]. The
major problem is that the Bogdanov's seem to consider Tr[F /\ *F] as a
characteristic class. It isn't. It's the kinetic term for the gauge
field. It depends on the metric through the Hodge star.
Aaron
--
Aaron Bergman
<http://www.princeton.edu/~abergman/>
John Baez
> Obviously the reason it is hard to get referees is that the pay is
> zero dollars and zero prestige per hour, and there is nothing one
> can point to in a promotion case.
The payoff for refereeing is that one can influence the
field - at least within ones specialty. For example, you can
put an end to certain annoying mistakes that get repeated over
and over in the literature, try to make sure people write more
clearly, or - more venally - make sure that everyone cites you!
I'm asked to referee lots of papers on spin foams, so I try to
do the first two things and try to resist doing the third.
jmf...@aol.com
>
>>It doesn't matter if the papers are a hoax. The exercise
>>has pointed out a bug(s) in the procedure. And _that_ is
>>what needs to be thought about.
>
>The good thing is: the best investiganitave journalists of Chronicle of
>Higher Education in Washington D.C, and of Nature (France) are looking
>into the 'affaire". It can only lead to a progress!
>
>But still, physicists have to decide about the status of
>complexification, KMS, zero mode, characteristic classes as Lagrngians
>ans ALL THAT. Not to mention dieu&science, which even Grothendieck
>may be in trouble to categorize :_
Caveat: I am not a physicist nor knowledgable in the biz.
The purpose of publishing is to explore new and old knowledge.
This does not, in any way, imply that the contents of the paper
has to be about facts (I can't think of a better word). Papers
can be about how to make mistakes (so that other people won't).
That being said...the kink in the process appears to be too
much work with too few people to do it. The point made here
was that the people who had the knowledge to do the review
work had to spend their time attracting funding, etc. for
their departments. What seems to be getting overlooked, by
this administrative part of the biz, is that the review
process is a key step in getting papers published that generate
that generate the justification for the funding. Allocating
review time in work plans cannot be ignored.
In my biz, reviewing documentation was viewed as a royal pain
in the ass by all developers (the equivalent to you scientists).
The only way we managed to get everything reviewed was to
assign responsibility. We tried to make one person responsible
for all the docs that went with one software ship. Burnout
and strike threats happened within three months. The next
we did was assign one document to one person. That worked
better. If I was assigned a doc that I didn't know anything
about, it was my responsibility to get it reviewed by people
who did know about it. The methods of getting the work done
was left up to the "owner" of the manual.
Now, this isn't going to work in physics because your publishing
processes are very different and there isn't One Boss reigning
over all of it. The physical printing process has been
almost automated; the human pieces of the process haven't.
/BAH
Thomas Larsson
>
> But now I hear that two brothers have managed to publish 3
> meaningless papers in physics journals as a hoax - and even
> get Ph.D. degrees in physics from Bourgogne University in
> the process! The theses are available in PDF format online,
> at least for now:
>
When I first looked at the Bogdanovs' abstracts, I thought that this
may very well be a hoax, since they didn't really make sense to
me. However, when it is now clear that it was not meant as a hoax, I
don't think it is fair to keep mobbing the Bogdanovs. That some
graduate students published some silly papers (and judging from the
abstracts, I still think they are silly) is hardly a scandal that
deserves attention from Nature. Besides, if I were to commit a hoax
(like Peter Woit, I would probably fail unless I used a pseudonym), I
would use a really silly title like "A Brane New World". Alas, I
believe that a serious paper with that title has already been
published...
The real scandal is that 20,000 man-years have been spent on a
research programme which does not care about experimental evidence,
e.g. that spacetime seems to have four dimensions and that no susy
particles have ever been seen. However, it is much safer to attack the
Bodganov's, since unlike string theorists they will not appear on any
grant evaluation or tenure review committee.
It might be entertaining to know that Swedish IT/internet/telecom
company (I don't really know which) A Brave New World went bankrupt
last week after spending more venture capital than Boo.com. In the New
Economy, companies did not need to make a profit. In the New Physics,
theories do not need to agree with experiments. Bubbles burst.
[Moderator's note: While disparaging parts of contemporary physics for
being disconnected with experiments can be great fun -- I've done it
myself from time to time -- I would like to remind everyone that (a)
we've done that plenty in this newsgroup recently, and (b) people
tend to take things personally and get insulted. Either way, the
discussion of such topics often leads to violations of the
sci.physics.research charter (specifically the "overly repetitive"
clause and the "personal attacks" clause). If you have something new
to say, and if you can say it while being scrupulously careful to
focus only on the physics and not say anything that could be
construed as personally insulting, go ahead. Otherwise, let's not go
any further down this road this time. -TB]
I/G.Bogdanoff
Mark L. Ferguson wrote:
> Eventually somebody with a couple of
> clues will read the material critically.
> Either it's bogus or it isn't. Either
> way, "peers" will be more carefully
> selected, and reporters will have fewer
> silly mistakes to pass on to the public.
Indeed we do hope that there will be a reviewer to help the community
to see clearer in that work. If it is a hoax, the reviewer would
defenitly have to prove it on the basis of a scientific demonstration.
If the same work does not make any sense, then the reviewer would also
have to prove it in details. Because as Ark says : "The devil is into
the details". We have spend many years to go through these ideas and
to test their validity. It might happen in our papers (as it happens
in every paper) that certain technical details (ie formulations,
expressions, etc.) could be discussed or improved. We are open to any
kind of suggestions. But we fermely challenge anybody to demonstrate
that our ideas do nos make sense. What is important in theoretical
physics? (as in any conceptual activity)? Essentially to propose and
produce new ideas. And to make them appear as an element coherent with
the existing corpus. From this point of view, we do assume that our
work meet those standards.
The pity is that up to now (apart from Arks work), nobody has been
able to do a detailed and grounded critic of the papers. That's mainly
the cause of such a crises that looks like "Un procčs en sorcellerie".
I/G.Bogdanoff
news:<4b8cc0a6.02110...@posting.google.com>...
> ba...@galaxy.ucr.edu (John Baez) wrote in message
news:<ap7tq6$eme$1...@glue.ucr.edu>...
> > But now I hear that two brothers have managed to publish 3
> > meaningless papers in physics journals as a hoax - and even
> > get Ph.D. degrees in physics from Bourgogne University in
> > the process! The theses are available in PDF format online,
> > at least for now:
> When I first looked at the Bogdanovs' abstracts, I thought that this
> may very well be a hoax, since they didn't really make sense to
> me. However, when it is now clear that it was not meant as a hoax, I
> don't think it is fair to keep mobbing the Bogdanovs. That some
> graduate students published some silly papers (and judging from the
> abstracts, I still think they are silly) is hardly a scandal that
> deserves attention from Nature.
Thank you to consider that the Bogdanoff should not be mobbed by the
entire community.
We would like though to discuss your comment (which incidently
reflects the dominant noise) about our papers being "silly". Here are
the basics ideas as presented in the CQG paper.
" In section 1 we define the topological field theory and suggest that
there exists at the scale limit ß --> 0 a non-trivial topological
limit of quantum field theory, dual to the topological limit
associated with ß --> *."
Comment : This idea does not seem to be that "silly".
" In section 2 we evidence that the ß --> 0 limit of some standard
theories is topological. We give several examples of such a
topological limit. "
Comment : Is this proposal so meaningless? If it is the case, prove
us.
" In section 3, we show that the high temperature limit of quantum
field theory corresponding to ß --> 0 should give the first Donaldson
invariant."
Comment : If one reads the paper (section 3) one will also find the
connexion between high temperature limit and first Donaldson
invariant.
" The signature of the metric of the underlying 4-dimensional manifold
is therefore expected to be Euclidean (++++) at the scale zero."
Comment : This original idea of an euclidean metric at 0 scale after a
"fluctuation phase" between Lorentzian and Euclidean situations does
not appear that ridiculous to the people who understood our papers.
" In section 4, we emphasize, in the quantum groups context, the
existence of a symmetry of duality between the Planck scale (physical
sector of the theory) and zero scale (topological sector)."
Comment : Any quantum group theory specialist should read section 4 of
the paper and chap. 3 of Grichka's thesis. This work has been
reviewed many times in details. And the idea that there existe a
natural path of deformation between SO(3,1) and SO(4) (excluding
SO(2,2) has been clearly established.
" In section 5, we discuss in the framework of KMS state and von
Neumann C*- algebras a way to understand the transition from the
topological (ultraviolet) phase of space-time to the standard
physical (infrared) phase."
Comment : Here also, the idea to consider the spacetime in thermal
equilibrium at the Planck scale does make sense in our view (as it
does with lots of physicists). And in this case our idea to consider
that it might be subject to the KMS condition might also be relevant.
If it is meaningless, everyone is welcome to bring a fair
demonstration of his own views.
jmf...@aol.com
"Louis M. Pecora" <pec...@anvil.nrl.navy.mil> wrote:
Are you reading this in sci.physics newsgroup? If so, I'll
stop x-posting to s.p.r.
>In article <apoh3i$rtc$6...@bob.news.rcn.net>, <jmf...@aol.com> wrote:
>> >Well, as an associate editor on two journals (one of which is an AIP
>> >journal) I can tell you that finding quality referees has become very
>> >difficult. People are simply too busy raising money and trying to
>> >publish as much as possible to do the job. Maybe there are other
>> >reasons, but the referee quality in some physics fields has gone down.
>> >I wonder if this is true in all physics fields and in science overall.
>> You guys have gone on-line. This speeds up the process. If
>> you keep the personnel doing the review work constant, you're going
>> to have "sloppier" work (where "sloppy" is a perceived entity based
>> on count of things-not-done and has nothing to do with a realistic
>> evaluation). We had the same thing happen in our biz.
>You lost me. Can you explain this?
OK, I'll try. I'll warn you that I'm not very good explaining
this based on my attempts in the past. It has to do with [what
I think of as] the work flow procesess.
In the past, before computers, the process of producing a paper
involved a lot more informal reviews. For instance, a prof would
do a writeup on paper, hand the sheaf to the secretary, get it
back; mark it up; hand it to the secretary; get it .....
Every edit cycle involved at least two people reading it--the
secretary and the author. I'll bet the secretary had
others reading bits and pieces of the handwritten parts.
This part of paper-writing could take anywhere
from a few weeks to many months with a lot of discussions about
content. These discussions were all informal reviews of content
and context. (Nobody worth his PhD would dare be foolish in front
of the secretary.) We all know that explaining something out
loud to somebody who doesn't have a clue, is the best way to
understand the material.
Today, with the advent of laptops and terminals, this review cycle
is gone. The Token Dummy never reads the papers before submission
because the author is usually the one who does the text preparation.
Not only are a series of reviews gone from the work process, the
elapsed time in the text prep is shortened before submission. This
can only increase the number of papers submitted/time-period. IOW, a
guy in the olden days might submit 2 papers/year. Now, he can churn
out 4 or 5 papers/year because the document preparation steps have
been eliminated. It is also "easier" to submit papers because nobody
has to wait for the secretary to do the doc preparation; her in-basket
was a natural dam to the work flow. In addition to this, silly things
can get through because the secretarial review doesn't happen. I've
seen mighty PhD tenured profs quake at a secretary's snort.
The official review work also gets affected by computerizing the
flow. The rate of papers coming in increases. When a reviewer
objects to the backlog, two things can be done. 1. Get more
reviewers for all papers or 2. break up the category into smaller
categories and get reveiwers for each of those new categories.
The side effect of the latter is that less papers get reviewed
by more people. This means that Reviewer A will never see
a larger set of submissions. Cross pollination won't happen
until after publication. This lessens the probability that
Reviewer A will ever read the paper with the same care he
would when reviewing. This implies that more illogic and/or
errors will be missed by the informal and formal reviewing
processes.
I'll stop here now because I'm getting tongue-tied and I forgot
I was posting to s.p.res. I don't know how to rework what I
just wrote down to the bit necessities ;-).
/BAH
Charles Nadeau
news:<apkl9n$ie7$1...@woodrow.ucdavis.edu>...
> In sci.physics.research Harry Collins <Coll...@cf.ac.uk> wrote:
The "Bogdanov's controversy" prompted quite a number of questions and
comments in my mind.
> > Last time I heard a figure quoted it was that about 90% of published
> > papers are never cited by anyone except the author and it is probable
> > that 50% of published papers are never read by anyone.
> This is a bit of an urban myth -- it's based, I think, on a
> misunderstanding of a study of papers in the Science Citation Index.
> The original article is available at
>
> http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/papers/hamilton1.html
>
> but it's important to read the follow-up letter by David Pendlebury.
> The original figure includes editorials, letters, obituaries, and the
> like as articles. If one restricts oneself to actual research articles,
> only about 22% are uncited. (I don't know the figure if self-citations
> ar excluded). Still...
These are interesting and sad statistics. They confirmed what I had
thought for a long time: A lot of people publish not for Science's
sake but for their career, their survival. It is a strong argument
against the "publish or perish system". How can we find a system that
will push Science without weakening its foundations where today's
science is based yesterday's proven and true results?
These stats are a bit dated (11 years old) now. Are there any more
recent studies available? Did the situation changed?
One study I would be glad to see should attempt to show "structure" in
the citation's data:
*Is there such a thing as a "half-life" for the number of citations a
paper gets in function of time? Is the number of citations low right
after publication, raise a few months/years after publication then
decay until oblivion?
* Does a typical paper "gets better" with time? Does the number of
citations a paper gets increase slowly with time, reach a plateau,
then decay as Science advances and current research is based on
younger papers?
* Does a "good" paper's number of citations remains constant in
function of time?
* Does the number of citations/year oscillate in function of what's
fashionable/not fashionable at a given time?
Is there any good freely available database of citations from which
answers to these aforementioned questions could be extracted?
If the "citation's network" could be represented as a graph, what kind
of structure would it exhibits?
Would the structure inform us about the "publish and perish"
structural problem?
Could it help us unveils more hoaxes?
To cite one-self, friends and colleagues is easy. It is easy to
succumb to this temptation. After all, we are all humans and Science
being done by human, it is imperfect.
This leads to other questions:
*How can we value the reviewing process for the reviewer? I read in
several posts of this thread that the reviewer's work, although
critical, isn't valued by the promotion/grant attribution process.
*How can we avoid a "close group" syndrome? I mean a group of
scientists expert in a narrow field reviewing and quoting each other
work with little interaction (they don't review/quote much paper
authored outside their group) with scientists outside the group. Here
is a troubling example: When I was a Ph.D. student in the late 90's, I
tried to have a paper published in a renowned journal. The paper was
refused but we were asked to make modifications and re-submit it,
which we did. It was refused again and we were politely asked to
submit it somewhere else. We did and the letter we received from the
reviewer of this second journal was almost exactly the same as the one
we received from the first journal. It was clear the reviewer was the
same and he knew how to do "copy & paste" in his word processing
program. Out of curiosity, we submit it to a third journal only to
receive once again the almost same letter. Further investigation and
discussions with peers showed us that members from a group of
professors from a European university were sitting on the reviewing
committees of all the major journals of the field and were
systematically blocking any papers contradicting their theories. This
was one major reason why I am not working in Physics anymore. And I
know a lot of ex-colleagues who are in the same situation.
The cost of this "close group" situation is enormous: It blocks
research challenging their ideas thus impairing the growth of
knowledge in a given field and it restricts the said field to those
who accept to comply with the establishment, discouraging those with
creative ideas but without the patience to endlessly push them.
This is without counting the cost of the money going into unpublished
research. If an idea, a result, isn't made public/published,
contributed to our Intellectual Commons, it is wasted.
However the availability and popularity of on-line safe harbour for
these ideas/results gives them a chance to blossom.
I think that the "Bogdanov's controversy" in itself isn't big enough
to make the situation changes, but it should be a strong wake-up call
to the community. If the "authorities" (funding bodies and publishing
companies) do not get the message it is up to the scientists "in the
trenches" to start shaking the tree and to strive toward finding a
better system to promote and facilitate the circulation of good
constructive ideas.
As an aside, I must say that I've known the Bogdanov's brothers work
for a long time, being a native French speaker. When I first heard of
this "Bogdanov's controversy", I couldn't help but start to laugh:
when I was an undergraduate student we used to make fun of the
transcripts of their books and TV shows in our faculty's newspaper
(http://www.aesgul.ulaval.ca/defiscience/) more than 10 years ago. I
never thought they would resurface again...
Charles
Charles Nadeau
http://radio.weblogs.com/0111823/
>
> > Most published science (or social science) is simply not important.
> > Thus, that a hoax paper can get through the refereeing system,
> > while an indictment of the referees, is not of any great concern as
> > far as scientific understanding is concerned.
>
> I agree. Remember, in quantum gravity no one really knows what
> they're doing. There are plenty of wrong papers published, including
> a fair number that, in hindsight, are ``obviously'' wrong. If it weren't
> for the hoax claims (which the Bogdanovs deny, by the way), these
> papers would have quietly sunk into oblivion.
>
> There's one big difference with the Sokal paper. No one who knows
> anything about the subject could read Sokal's paper without laughing
> out loud; the Bogdanov papers are unlikely to provoke much more than
> a wince.
>
> Steve Carlip
Harry Collins
news:<5b66478c.0210...@posting.google.com>...
> Coll...@cf.ac.uk (Harry Collins) wrote in message
>news:<125a38d0.02102...@posting.google.com>...
> > What physical scientists need to worry about is the way they handled
> > the Sokal hoax. [...] The real trouble began when Alan
> > Sokal, Jean Bricmont, and an unfortunately large number of natural
> > scientists began to treat the hoax as demonstrating that the social
> > sciences, or some subset of them, were fatally flawed, rubbish,
> > nonsense, etc. Some subset may be fatally flawed, rubbish, nonsense,
> > etc but the hoax did not demonstrate it.
> Just a clarification: Neither Bricmont nor I have ever "treat[ed] the
> hoax as demonstrating that the social sciences were fatally flawed
> etc".
Alan,
I am sure you are technically correct and I apologize for my
clumsiness. Nevertheless:
1) Many natural scientists took the implication of your hoax to be far
greater than your disclaimer would suggest. I and many others
witnessed this when, for example, you gave talks to audiences largely
composed of natural scientists.
2) It must have occured to you that the salience of your subsequent
writings on these matters, coming from someone with no established
track record in history, philosophy, or sociology of science, had
something to do with the hoax. Therefore the relationship of the hoax
to your broader claims is complex to say the least.
One of the earlier contributors to this thread claimed that your sole
aim was to expose the use of pseudo-scientific language. This,
however, is incorrect. For example, in `The One Culture' (edited by
Labinger and Collins), you extend your critique well beyond the use of
pseudo-scientific terms and into methodological relativism where there
is no question of the use of pseudo-scientific language. Again, it
seems to me that the generally perceived warrant that you had for your
moving into these areas, even though the hoax did not touch upon them
directly, was the hoax. I think, then, that in spite of any
disclaimers, the hoax had implications well beyond the rap on the
knuckles for the editors of social text.
One of your hoax's unfortunate spin-offs is this very web-page. Had
the Bogdanov's done their work in a less feverish environment we would
probably have heard nothing about it. Breaching the web of trust
which, in the last resort, supports all science, is a dangerous game.
Harry Collins
[Moderator's note: let's stick to physics, leaving a discussion
of Sokal's ideas on the social sciences to a more appropriate
newsgroup. - jb]
John Baez
Boris Borcic <bor...@removethis.infomaniak.andthis.ch> wrote:
>John Baez:
>> A New York Times reporter was planning to do a story on this,
>> but he spoke with one of the Bogdanovs, who huffily denied that
>> it was a hoax. Apparently the reporter decided to drop it. He
>> said he could write a story about a hoax, but not about some papers
>> that are so silly people *think* they are hoax. :-)
> So, unless acknowledged experts do something like Sokal and
> Bricmont's book explaining the silliness in appropriately clear
> details to the masses, nothing real is going to happen.
Something is happening: the journal Classical and Quantum
Gravity has issued a statement about the Bogdanov's paper,
and at least 3 reporters are writing stories about the affair:
Declan Butler of "Nature", Rich Monastersky of "The Chronicle
of Higher Education", and Ben Greenman of the "New Yorker".
I believe some of these articles will discuss the strange
prehistory of the case, which sheds an entirely differently
light on everything.
>This all
>reminds me of my comment on the cartoon you evoked a couple
>years ago on spr:
>>> It has a picture of a balding fellow
>>> writing an enormously complicated equation and some Feynman diagrams
>>> on the blackboard, with his coat draped on a nearby chair.
>>> turning towards us, smiling, and saying: "At this point we notice
>>> that this equation is beautifully simplified if we assume that
>>> space-time has 92 dimensions".
>BTW, is this cartoon available anywhere on the web ?
Yes:
http://www.physik.uni-frankfurt.de/~jr/gif/cartoon/cart0785.gif
John Baez
In article <aptbm5$rp6$1...@panther.uwo.ca>,
igor.bogdanov <igor.b...@free.fr> wrote:
>On his webpage, Dr John Baez relates some aspects of the "Bogdanov
>affair". We are very greatful regarding his effort to keep his page up
>to date.
You're welcome!
In what follows I will focus on the physics of your papers.
The other issues surrounding this case are also fascinating,
but I'd like to treat them separately, and perhaps in some
other forum, since sci.physics.research is mainly about physics.
>John Baez's text:
>>For example, here's the beginning of their paper "Topological Origin
>>of Inertia:
>>>We draw from the above that whatever the orientation, the plane of
>>>oscillation of Foucault's pendulum is necessarily aligned with the
>>>initial singularity marking the origin of physical space S^3,
>>>that of Euclidean space E^4 (described by the family of instantons
>>>I_beta of whatever radius beta), and, finally, that of Lorentzian
>>>space-time M^4.
>Comment : It is not "their" paper but Igor's paper.
Thanks; I've fixed this on my webpage:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/bogdanov.html
>We simply suggest that at 0 scale, the
>observables must be replaced by the homology cycles in the moduli space
>of gravitational instantons. We then get a deep correspondence -a
>symmetry of duality- between physical theory and topological field
>theory.
Yes, you say this in your paper. However, you need to be
much more specific for there to be any substance to such a claim.
Now is a good chance for you to do this. For example:
1) Could you please define "at 0 scale"?
2) You mention "the observables". Observables in which
theory?
3) You say "must be replaced". Why must they be replaced?
And how?
Presumably you are hinting at some correspondence between
observables in some theory and homology cycles in the moduli
space of gravitational instantons. Please describe this
correspondence as precisely as possible. Merely stating
that it exists is not enough to convince us that it does.
4) You speak of a "deep correspondence" between some
unspecified physical theory and some unspecified topological
field theory. Which theories are you talking about here?
How does the correspondence go?
5) What does any of this have to do with Foucault's
pendulum or the origin of inertia? Again, please describe
the connection as precisely as possible.
>>I appreciate the fact that to someone not expert in physics,
>>this stuff may seem no weirder than any other paper in a physics
>>journal. They are indeed using actual physics jargon - but I assure
>>you, it makes no sense.
>Comment : OK. However, we would prefer "not clearly understandable."
>Perhaps for two reasons : 1) first it is a secondary paper written long
>time after the "key paper" (Classical&Quantum Grav.) where all our
>ideas are exposed and developed in more details. 2) second : once more
>it is conjectural paper.
Regarding these points:
1) I was not able to find explanations of any of the relevant
concepts in your Classical and Quantum Gravity paper, either.
2) It's okay to make conjectures, but there is little point
in publishing conjectures that cannot be understood.
>John Baez text : How in the world could the plane of oscillation of a
>pendulum be "aligned with the initial singularity", i.e. the big bang?
>The big bang did not occur anywhere in particular; it happened
>everywhere.
>Comment : Well, it is exactly what we wrote : of course, there is no
>"priviledged" point and the initial singularity is -as you said-
>everywhere.
Given this, what does it mean to say a given plane in
space is "aligned with the initial singularity"? At best
it is a vacuous statement.
>It is precisely our view : in conjecture 4.9 (nothing more
>that an conjecture, by the way) we have considered that the
>2-dimensional plane of oscillation of the pendulum conserves the initial
>singularity S for inertial reference, whatever the orientation of this
>plane in physical space R3."
I don't what it means for a plane to "conserve the initial
singularity S for inertial reference". You are using words
in a rather strange way!
I know what it means for a process to conserve some quantity,
e.g.: "nuclear fusion conserves charge". It means that the
quantity doesn't change as the process happens. I don't
know what it means for a plane to conserve something. And
I don't know what it means for something to conserve the
initial singularity. I also don't know what the extra
phrase "for inertial reference" is supposed to modify, and
how it could modify anything in this sentence in a sensible
way.
So, could you please explain much more clearly what you mean
here?
>It is explicitly written in conjecture 4.9
>John Baez text : Indeed, nothing in the paper suggests that they really
>understand N = 2 supergravity, Donaldson theory, or KMS states. For all
>I can tell, they merely stuck together a patchwork of plausible-sounding
>sentences on these subjects.
>Comment : One more, one should refer to the PRINTED VERSION (not the
>PDF's) of CQG paper (and also to the 2 thesis) to get a clearer view of
>what we say (and know) about N = 2 supergravity, Donaldson theory, KMS
>states, etc.We have passed many years working on these topics and became
>rather familiar with all these subjects.
Okay, I'll look at the printed version. Exactly how does this
differ from the version in the PDF file of your thesis?
Anyway, it would be very reassuring to hear you say something
that demonstrates understanding of N = 2 supergravity, Donaldson
theory, KMS states, von Neumann algebras, or the other subjects
on which you write.
>In our view, the fact to
>consider a topological field theory independent of the Hamiltonian is
>just equivalent to consider the same theory as independent of the
>metric.
This is clearly false, as explained below.
>A theory independent of H is topological because it is - by
>construction - independent of any physical field.
A theory with zero Lagrangian is independent of the fields
appearing in that theory. Such a theory has zero Hamiltonian:
H = 0. This is completely different from being "independent of H".
If something is "independent of H", it doesn't matter what H
is. Here it matters a lot that H = 0.
>Comment : We indeed would be very happy to discuss our work, thesis and
>papers (prefer the printed versions to the PDF ones because of the
>misprints) on scientific basis.
Good! Let's start!
me...@cars3.uchicago.edu
In article <aq0kbn$2c7$1...@bob.news.rcn.net>, jmf...@aol.com writes:
>In article <311020021615175997%pec...@anvil.nrl.navy.mil>,
>
>this based on my attempts in the past. It has to do with [what
>I think of as] the work flow procesess.
>
>In the past, before computers, the process of producing a paper
>involved a lot more informal reviews. For instance, a prof would
>do a writeup on paper, hand the sheaf to the secretary, get it
>back; mark it up; hand it to the secretary; get it .....
>
>Every edit cycle involved at least two people reading it--the
>secretary and the author. I'll bet the secretary had
>others reading bits and pieces of the handwritten parts.
And you would lose your bet. The secretary would type the paper *as*
written. That's all. It would've been totally out of line for the
secretary to discuss the contents of the paper with others.
>This part of paper-writing could take anywhere
>from a few weeks to many months with a lot of discussions about
>content. These discussions were all informal reviews of content
>and context. (Nobody worth his PhD would dare be foolish in front
>of the secretary.) We all know that explaining something out
>loud to somebody who doesn't have a clue, is the best way to
>understand the material.
But it wasn't the secretary's business to understand the paper. Only
to type it.
>
>Today, with the advent of laptops and terminals, this review cycle
>is gone. The Token Dummy never reads the papers before submission
>because the author is usually the one who does the text preparation.
>
The discussions that take place during the writing process are between
the author and his collegues. These take place now to the same extent
they did in the past.
>In addition to this, silly things can get through because the secretarial
>review doesn't happen.
There never was any secretarial review, other than for typos. Even
this was quite limited since the assumption, on part of the secretary,
was that any unfamiliar word was some hifallutin scientific term.
Lots of typos got through this way.
Sorry, you got this one quite wrong. There are all sorts of reasons
for low quality papers but this is not one of them.
Mati Meron | "When you argue with a fool,
me...@cars.uchicago.edu | chances are he is doing just the same"
me...@cars3.uchicago.edu
In article <125a38d0.02110...@posting.google.com>, Coll...@cf.ac.uk (Harry Collins) writes:
>so...@nyu.edu (Alan Sokal) wrote in message
>news:<5b66478c.0210...@posting.google.com>...
>
>the Bogdanov's done their work in a less feverish environment we would
>probably have heard nothing about it.
I fail to see how is this an "unfortunate spin-off. On the contrary.
> Breaching the web of trust which, in the last resort, supports all
>science, is a dangerous game.
The "web of trust" is not a rug to sweep dirty laundry under
(apologies for the very mixed metaphors).
John Baez
In article <apmcgc$m3l$1...@blinky.its.caltech.edu>,
Kevin A. Scaldeferri <ke...@its.caltech.edu> wrote:
>In article <apkcej$2auv3$1...@ID-120108.news.dfncis.de>,
>Dirk Bruere <di...@neopax.com> wrote:
>[quoting someone else]
>>"This morning told that they were frauds everyone was
>>laughing at how obvious it is. This afternoon, told they are real
>>professors and that this is not a fraud, everyone here says, well, maybe
>>it is real stuff".
>Yes, this seems like the truly damning thing to me.
The problem is, I believe the "someone else" who wrote this was
none other than Igor Bogdanov. The full quotation from his post
to sci.physics.research was:
"No one in the string group at harvard can tell if these papers are
real or fraudulent. This morning told that they were frauds everyone was
laughing at how obvious it is. This afternoon, told they are real
professors and that this is not a fraud, everyone here says, well, maybe
it is real stuff."
But does anyone have any evidence, other than what Igor Bogdanov
says, that this actually occurred? Until we do, it scarcely seems
worth getting worked up about.
[Moderator's note: It was not at all obvious to me who actually
originally wrote this comment based on the formatting of Bogdanov's
post.
-- KS]
A.Lebourgeois
> In article <447053fe.0210...@posting.google.com>,
> A.Lebourgeois <ASTREE...@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> >> John Baez wrote:
> >> >I can however assure you
> >> >that the abstracts seem like gibberish to me, even though I know
> >> >what most of the buzzwords mean.
> >All that does not make any sense. The Bogdanoff passed their thesis
> >after years of hard work. I have read their thesis and I have no
> >doubt concerning the originality of their ideas in the field of TFT
> >(which is not that familiar to most of strings specialists).
> Please explain to me what their new ideas in this subject are.
> I'm reasonably expert in topological field theory, so feel free
> to be highly specific.
I will try (this week was vacation time in my univ. and I was quite
far from physics). But back to the subject. Contrarely to most of the
members of this newsgroup (including you, I presume?) French is my
native language and I could carefully decipher the 2 theses. In fact I
did read them some time ago, long before this whole affair blew up. I
never met the Bogdanoffs directly, but I was a "fan" of their TV
scientific show and - as a young maths. student - was present for the
defense of Gricha's thesis in Ecole Polytechnique.
To my knowledge, being mathematician (postdoc) interested by hep
physics and also familiar with topological field theory, my opinion is
that their thesis + the group of papers (and more specifically the CQG
one) contains at least 5 originals (some of them being important)
ideas. I will expose the first one in details and discuss the other
ones tomorrow or later (otherwise it would make my mail much too
long).
1. The idea that the signature of the metric should be considered as
fluctuating at the planck scale is novative and of great interest.
Grichka Bogdanoff has demonstrated that the fluctuation of the
signature of the metric might occur between the lorentzian (3,1) and
the euclidean (4,0) forms at the planck scale. Starting from relevant
analysis in terms of pi_1 (fundamental group) and universal cover,
G.Bogdanoff convincingly showed that the Kleinian (ultra hyperbolic)
form (2,2) is excluded from the simply connected path of universal cover
of order 2 : SL(2,C) x SU(2).
This work was never done before. But this approach in terms of Lie
algebras could probably be considered as insufficiant if Bogdanoff
would not have extended his demonstrations deep into q-deformations
(ie Hopf algebras and quantum groups). Again for the first time,
Bogdanoff showed in the chapter 3 of his thesis that the algebraic
structures of q-euclidean and the q-lorentzian groups can be built on
the same algebra with 2 possible coproducts related by twisting (in
Drinfeld sense) and corresponding to the euclidean and the lorentzian
signatures.
Bogdanoff has also constructed a quite general cocycle bicrossproduct
of his own (one can read it in the thesis) from which he could extract
as an application the cocycle bicrossproduct between lorentzian and
euclidean Hopf algebras. Everyone who is interested in rigorous maths
(and not vague assumptions) can go to the theorem 3.3.2 that Bogdanoff
has demonstrated in his thesis. It is amazing that nobody (up to now)
- considering the amount of meaningless comments and buzwords created
these last days - has even notice the existence of those important new
results. Can you still maintain -on convincing mathematical basis-
that those results are not new and relevant?
It is one thing to claim with words that Bogdanoffs wrote meaningless
papers, have no ideas, bla bla bla, etc., but it is totally different
when you have to prove it. And it is exactly what I am trying to do.
So tomorrow I will continue this analysis with my view of Bogdanoff's
interpretation of topological quantum field theory as a possible
framework likely to explain their idea of initial singularity of
spacetime.
I have to run. I would be curious to get some technical and precise
comment on those lines.
Astor Tockvic
which he does not understand, or even thinks it may be nonsense, he
should first ask questions to the author(s) to try to make sense of
it. He should not unilaterally make a web page, a modern version of
the pillory, where he tries to ridicule this author or the institution
where he works. This is just a matter of courteous behaviour, which
unfortunately seem to be something quite forgotten since the advent of
the news groups.
John Baez
In article <447053fe.02110...@posting.google.com>,
A.Lebourgeois <ASTREE...@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
>Contrarely to most of the
>members of this newsgroup (including you, I presume?) French is my
>native language and I could carefully decipher the 2 theses.
Great! I can read French only with the utmost of difficulty,
so I have based my impressions of the Bogdanov's work on their
5 published papers in English. (Someone recently mentioned a
paper of theirs in a conference proceedings, but I don't know
anything about that.)
>In fact I
>did read them some time ago, long before this whole affair blew up. I
>never met the Bogdanoffs directly, but I was a "fan" of their TV
>scientific show and - as a young maths. student - was present for the
>defense of Gricha's thesis in Ecole Polytechnique.
Cool. An eye-witness! :-)
>To my knowledge, being mathematician (postdoc) interested by hep
>physics and also familiar with topological field theory, my opinion is
>that their thesis + the group of papers (and more specifically the CQG
>one) contains at least 5 originals (some of them being important)
>ideas.
Interesting.
>I will expose the first one in details and discuss the other
>ones tomorrow or later (otherwise it would make my mail much too
>long).
Great!
>1. The idea that the signature of the metric should be considered as
>fluctuating at the planck scale is novative and of great interest.
>Grichka Bogdanoff has demonstrated that the fluctuation of the
>signature of the metric might occur between the lorentzian (3,1) and
>the euclidean (4,0) forms at the planck scale. Starting from relevant
>analysis in terms of pi_1 (fundamental group) and universal cover,
>G.Bogdanoff convincingly showed that the Kleinian (ultra hyperbolic)
>form (2,2) is excluded from the simply connected path of universal cover
>of order 2 : SL(2,C) x SU(2).
Wonderful! We're finally getting down to specifics. However,
could you please explain what you mean a bit more clearly? It's
probably best to start by examining one of his ideas in great
detail before going on to others. I don't understand what
you've said so far, but maybe I will if you answer some questions.
It sounds like you are saying the group SO(2,2) does not
appear in the group SL(2,C) x SU(2) in the same way that
the groups SO(3,1) and SO(4) do. But I don't know what
"the simply connected path of universal cover of order 2"
means", or what "excluded" means. Perhaps the latter
is your way of saying "not a subgroup". (I realize that
there are language issues here and I'm not trying to give
you a hard time; I'm just trying to understand you.)
Here's my best guess:
The group SO(3,1) has SL(2,C) as its universal cover.
The group SO(4) has SU(2) x SU(2) as its universal cover.
Since SU(2) is a subgroup of SL(2,C), this means that
the universal covers of both SO(3,1) and SO(4) are *subgroups*
of SL(2,C) x SU(2).
So, perhaps you are saying that SO(2,2) is different because
its universal cover is *not* a subgroup of SL(2,C) x SU(2).
That sounds plausible; I think I see how to prove it.
Is this what you were saying? If so, I'd be curious to hear
why it's interesting. So far it sounds just like we've found
a group that contains the universal covers of SO(3,1) and SO(4)
but not SO(2,2). If we worked with SL(2,C) x SL(2,C), on the
other hand, we'd have a group that contained the universal covers
of SO(3,1), SO(4) and also SO(2,2).
At least this is real mathematics, though!
>This work was never done before. But this approach in terms of Lie
>algebras could probably be considered as insufficiant if Bogdanoff
>would not have extended his demonstrations deep into q-deformations
>(ie Hopf algebras and quantum groups). Again for the first time,
>Bogdanoff showed in the chapter 3 of his thesis that the algebraic
>structures of q-euclidean and the q-lorentzian groups can be built on
>the same algebra with 2 possible coproducts related by twisting (in
>Drinfeld sense) and corresponding to the euclidean and the lorentzian
>signatures.
Here are you saying that U_q(so(3,1)) and U_q(so(4)) are
isomorphic as algebras but different as coalgebras? I
assume you're treating them as *real* algebras? They're
obviously the same when you complexify them; the only
difference *then* lies in the fact that they have different
*-structures. One reason I was so unhappy with the published
papers is that they did not explain this issue.
>Bogdanoff has also constructed a quite general cocycle bicrossproduct
>of his own (one can read it in the thesis) from which he could extract
>as an application the cocycle bicrossproduct between lorentzian and
>euclidean Hopf algebras. Everyone who is interested in rigorous maths
>(and not vague assumptions) can go to the theorem 3.3.2 that Bogdanoff
>has demonstrated in his thesis.
I suppose I can struggle through the French now that you've
told me exactly where to look, and see what I think.
>It is amazing that nobody (up to now)
>- considering the amount of meaningless comments and buzwords created
>these last days - has even notice the existence of those important new
>results.
It's not amazing if these results are only available in Grichka
Bogdanoff's thesis in French, not in his published papers in
English. Sadly, many of us have difficulty with French! I
thank you for offering to help us out.
>Can you still maintain -on convincing mathematical basis-
>that those results are not new and relevant?
I can't tell for sure yet. If you answer my questions above,
I'll be in a much better position to know what's really going
on in this thesis.
Eugen Winkler
"Astor Tockvic" <astor_...@hotmail.com> wrote
news:8403c20a.02110...@posting.google.com...
I would say courteous is not to ignore the work. Author(s) should be
happy that their work is discussed and reviewed in public. I prefer
work where errors have been found, discussed, and posted
somewhere. This simply indicates that there was a kind of interest.
I personally hope someday someone will make a web page regarding the
errors in my work. Pointing out one error in public immediately could
be more efficient for the community and for the author than writing a
new paper with months of delay.
Authors should also comment retrospectively the errors they have found
in their own work. Where is the well-structured and well-moderated
archive of critical comments or public defense?
Making a good critics and archived comments in public should also push a
career.
Eugen Winkler
jmfb...@aol.com
In article <bv1x9.104$95.2...@news.uchicago.edu>,
me...@cars3.uchicago.edu wrote:
>
>In article <aq0kbn$2c7$1...@bob.news.rcn.net>, jmf...@aol.com writes:
>>In article <311020021615175997%pec...@anvil.nrl.navy.mil>,
>> "Louis M. Pecora" <pec...@anvil.nrl.navy.mil> wrote:
>>
>>>You lost me. Can you explain this?
>>
>>OK, I'll try. I'll warn you that I'm not very good explaining
>>this based on my attempts in the past. It has to do with [what
>>I think of as] the work flow procesess.
>>
>>In the past, before computers, the process of producing a paper
>>involved a lot more informal reviews. For instance, a prof would
>>do a writeup on paper, hand the sheaf to the secretary, get it
>>back; mark it up; hand it to the secretary; get it .....
>>
>>Every edit cycle involved at least two people reading it--the
>>secretary and the author. I'll bet the secretary had
>>others reading bits and pieces of the handwritten parts.
>
>And you would lose your bet. The secretary would type the paper *as*
>written. That's all. It would've been totally out of line for the
>secretary to discuss the contents of the paper with others.
[emoticon soothing ruffled feathers] I'm not talking about discussion
at that level. I'm talking about handwritten papers that are
indecypherable. I'm also talking about 2-minute discussions
about what the author meant to be typed. In these cases, the
author (who has insisted that the paper has to be typed yesterday)
isn't available to ask. I'm restricting my piece of this
discussion to the data entry part of the task.
>>This part of paper-writing could take anywhere
>>from a few weeks to many months with a lot of discussions about
>>content. These discussions were all informal reviews of content
>>and context. (Nobody worth his PhD would dare be foolish in front
>>of the secretary.) We all know that explaining something out
>>loud to somebody who doesn't have a clue, is the best way to
>>understand the material.
>
>But it wasn't the secretary's business to understand the paper. Only
>to type it.
If a secretary has been working within a department for n years,
she had an eclectic smattering of knowledge which was used to
read handwriting and figure out typos, oversights, etc. Most
of the time, the author was not around to answer these niggling
questions _at the time a sheet of paper was wrapped around the
platen_. If a paper submitted for typing was so bad that the
gal had a question for every line, she would quit and go over the
handwritten paper at a time when she corralled the author.
This corralling was not a trivial task, either.
There were days when Author X might not show his/her face in
the office. If there was a deadline, the secretary had no
choice but to make a best guess. If she was experienced, she
would know who to ask about "this word" and "did he really mean
this?" and "could this be a misspelling" and "how the hell
do I lay this out" questions. Remember, this was ONLY when the
author wasn't around to answer those questions.
>>
>>Today, with the advent of laptops and terminals, this review cycle
>>is gone. The Token Dummy never reads the papers before submission
>>because the author is usually the one who does the text preparation.
>>
>The discussions that take place during the writing process are between
>the author and his collegues. These take place now to the same extent
>they did in the past.
No. Not the data entry level. Questions at the data entry level
is a review of the layout of the information. IME, many errors
were caught at that time. I've seen a paper pulled because a
layout question by a secretary caused the writer to notice a
an real error.
>
>>In addition to this, silly things can get through because the secretarial
>>review doesn't happen.
>
>There never was any secretarial review, other than for typos. Even
>this was quite limited since the assumption, on part of the secretary,
>was that any unfamiliar word was some hifallutin scientific term.
>Lots of typos got through this way.
If that assumption was made by the data enterer, it got highlighted
for verification when the author stopped by. It can't be possible
that the college I attended was also a rare group.
>
>Sorry, you got this one quite wrong. There are all sorts of reasons
>for low quality papers but this is not one of them.
Granted I could be very wrong since my observations were based
on my experience which involved only one university and two
years' doing something similar for a bunch of engineers. It
couldn't have been me teaching those secretaries because they're
the ones who taught me (or, at least I thought they were training
me). Laying out a drum card to do enter a prof's collection of
data required similar discussions. A couple of secretaries
took me under their wing (when I was trying to find a guy
to ask) and gave me hints about what they do.
/BAH
Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail.
me...@cars3.uchicago.edu
>[spit-time to avoid the spamfest]
>
>In article <bv1x9.104$95.2...@news.uchicago.edu>,
> me...@cars3.uchicago.edu wrote:
>>
>>>In article <311020021615175997%pec...@anvil.nrl.navy.mil>,
>>> "Louis M. Pecora" <pec...@anvil.nrl.navy.mil> wrote:
>>>
>>>>You lost me. Can you explain this?
>>>
>>>OK, I'll try. I'll warn you that I'm not very good explaining
>>>this based on my attempts in the past. It has to do with [what
>>>I think of as] the work flow procesess.
>>>
>>>In the past, before computers, the process of producing a paper
>>>involved a lot more informal reviews. For instance, a prof would
>>>do a writeup on paper, hand the sheaf to the secretary, get it
>>>back; mark it up; hand it to the secretary; get it .....
>>>
>>>Every edit cycle involved at least two people reading it--the
>>>secretary and the author. I'll bet the secretary had
>>>others reading bits and pieces of the handwritten parts.
>>
>>And you would lose your bet. The secretary would type the paper *as*
>>written. That's all. It would've been totally out of line for the
>>secretary to discuss the contents of the paper with others.
>
>at that level. I'm talking about handwritten papers that are
>indecypherable.
But that's a non-issue, really. The problems are not with badly
written papers but with bad papers. No secretarial review does
anything to help this.
>
...
>>>This part of paper-writing could take anywhere
>>>from a few weeks to many months with a lot of discussions about
>>>content. These discussions were all informal reviews of content
>>>and context. (Nobody worth his PhD would dare be foolish in front
>>>of the secretary.) We all know that explaining something out
>>>loud to somebody who doesn't have a clue, is the best way to
>>>understand the material.
>>
>>But it wasn't the secretary's business to understand the paper. Only
>>to type it.
>
>If a secretary has been working within a department for n years,
>she had an eclectic smattering of knowledge which was used to
>read handwriting and figure out typos, oversights, etc.
Other than really obvious typos (which, as mentioned above, are not a
problem), this is rather a total no-no on scientific paper. The last
thing you needed was a secretary who would say "oh, I'm sure he meant
to say this here" then add "this". The potential for damage was much
bigger than otherwise.
>
...
>There were days when Author X might not show his/her face in
>the office. If there was a deadline, the secretary had no
>choice but to make a best guess. If she was experienced, she
>would know who to ask about "this word" and "did he really mean
>this?" and "could this be a misspelling" and "how the hell
>do I lay this out" questions. Remember, this was ONLY when the
>author wasn't around to answer those questions.
>
The first thing most authors would tell the secretary was "if you're
not sure, do not try to guess. Ask me, if I'm not around ask X, if
he's not around leave a blank". If you're typing a scientific paper,
without being involved in the actual work that lead to it, and try to
guess the meaning of some unclear phrase, the chances of getting it
wrong heavily outweight the chances of getting it right.
The point is, again, that when we're talking about "bad papers" the
problems are not language problems. For these, there are sufficient
layers of checking on the editorial level to minimize them. The
problems are with content. And for these, there is no other mechanism
than careful and conscientous refereeing (and even this is not
always enough).
There was a big scandal, recently, with a guy from Bell Labs who
submitted, over a period of two years, a whole series of "spectacular"
(as they were considered) experimental papers which, eventually,
turned out to be fake. The language was impeccable, the contents were
imaginary.