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October 29, 2002

The Bogdanov’s Have Spoken

The Bogdanov brothers insist that they are not committing a hoax. They’ve written to Aaron Bergman, insisting that they are on the up & up.

I’ve read their Annals of Physics paper, and am convinced that it is well-executed nonsense.

The editors of Social Text claimed that they were taken in by Sokal’s phony article because they thought that he was sincere. Sokal’s rejoinder was that his sincerity was irrelevant to whether the contents of his paper were sense or nonsense.

Here, too, the “sincerity” of the Bogdanov brothers is surely a non-issue.

Posted by distler at October 29, 2002 4:09 PM

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It’s hard to imagine the Bogdanov brothers without smiles on their faces as they insist that their work is legit. It seems like a ham-handed setup for “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

The one post I saw on s.p.r. claiming that this is real, meaningful work was by an “A.Lebourgeois”, sent from a french ISP. That can’t possibly be for real

Posted by: Bob McNees on October 30, 2002 2:39 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

It might not be for real, but that doesn’t mean the gist of the argument is (necessarily) wrong.

(Many a true word spoken in jest.)

Posted by: ian glendinning on November 3, 2002 4:55 AM | Permalink | Reply to this

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