Musings

Revenge of the French Intellectuals

Stung by the Sokal Hoax, two French brothers, Igor and Grichka Bogdanov, have made a stab at righting the scales. They managed to obtain PhDs from the Université de Bourgogne in Dijon and publish 4 papers filled with nonsense:

KMS Space-Time at the Planck Scale, G. Bogdanov, I. Bogdanov , Nuovo Cim. 117B (2002) 417-424.
The KMS State of Space-Time at the Planck Scale, I. Bogdanov , Chin.J.Phys. 40 (2002) 149-158.
Space-Time Metric and the KMS Condition at the Planck Scale, G. Bogdanov, I. Bogdanov, Annals Phys.296 (2002) 90-97.
Topological Field Theory of the Initial Singularity of Space-Time, G. Bogdanov, I. Bogdanov, Class.Quant.Grav. 18 (2001) 4341-4372.

What this says about the French PhD system or refereeing in the journals (and some journals they chose! Nuovo Cimento? The Chinese Journal of Physics? Gimme a break!) is anyone’s guess. But the most curious aspect of the affair was that they never even bothered to submit their masterpieces to the eprint archives. Which is to say that no one (and I do mean not a single person) actually read this stuff before the story broke…

For those unfamiliar with the field, let me explain what that means. The abstracts of new papers submitted to hep-th are read daily by thousands of physicists. If the abstract sounds interesting, hundreds will download and read it. Feedback (positive or negative) comes swiftly and copiously. If (like 99.9% of all scientists), you want to get your work noticed and read, you send it to the archives.

If, on the other hand, you want your work to “fly under the radar” and make it into a journal, having been read only by one other person (the overworked referee, and, in this case, perhaps not even by him), then you studiously avoid sending your work to the archives. Since no one in our field reads the journals anymore (why bother, when the archives are so much more convenient?), no one will be the wiser.

For more discussion of the unfolding “scandal”, see this Usenet thread.

The plot thickens: The Bogdanov brothers are not listed among the current or recent PhD students of the Lab. Have their names been pulled from the website, or is this all a put-up job?

Apparently, the Bogdanov brothers have been at this game for a while. I’ve been pulling up reviews on the web of their 1991 book, “Dieu et la Science” (God and Science), written with Jean Guitton of the Académie Française. From the excerpts, it appears to be written as an extended “interview”, with Guitton as the interviewer, and the Bogdanov brothers responding (with what sounds to me to be mostly bullshit). But … and here’s the interesting bit … all the reviews I pulled up from Google credit the Bogdanov brothers as having PhDs in theoretical physics and astrophysics (when they wrote the book, in 1991!).