Physicists fear fraud in the thermodynamic equilibrium on the Planck scale * Has postmodernism penetrated the academy?
Mathematical physicists Igor and Grishka Bogdanov, twin brothers, excite their fellow physicists with a new book that raises far-reaching hypotheses about the world before the Big Bang. The scientists are divided on whether the Bogdanov brothers are geniuses with a new approach to the matter, or pretenders who make up meaningless nonsense.
The uproar began last month, after a rumor spread on the Internet that the twins had repeated the prank of the American physicist Alan Sockel, who had published a parodic and meaningless article about quantum gravity in a scientific journal. According to their detractors, the two 53-year-old brothers, known for their sci-fi television show from the XNUMXs and XNUMXs, pretended to be string theorists in order to gain an illegal doctorate.
So far, only a few physicists have been interested in the brothers' thesis, which is based on something called the Kubo-Schwinger-Martin condition. Their thesis is based on the mathematical relationship between infinite temperature and imaginary time (another nebulous concept) to investigate the state of the world at its beginning. However, scientists have recently begun to try and understand what sentences like this even mean: "We therefore believe that the early space-time is in thermodynamic equilibrium on the Planck scale, and is therefore subject to the Kubo-Schwinger-Martin situation."
Dr. Roman Jacky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology read the article and found it speculative, but intriguing. Dr. John Baaz, on the other hand, published a concerned article, in which he wrote "one thing seems quite clear to me: the Bogdanov brothers do not know how to do physics".
In the physics community, some believe that the difficulty in distinguishing nonsense from serious physics is not a problem that concerns only the Bogdanov brothers' doctoral thesis, but scientific fields in general. According to Dr. Peter Witt, a mathematician and physicist from Columbia University, there is no doubt that from a scientific point of view the research of the Bogdanov brothers is "more or less complete nonsense. But nowadays there is no big difference between their research and a large part of the scientific literature."
This is not the first time that the Bogdanov brothers have gained publicity. The two studied applied mathematics, and used their education for the French television program "Time." In 1991, they were accused of plagiarism, when they published the book "God and Science", based on conversations with the French philosopher Jean Guiton. The book was a bestseller in France, but an astronomer from the University of Virginia, Trinh Chuan Tuan, claimed that the brothers copied passages from his book "The Secret Music, and Man Made the World." The brothers claimed that Tuan used their drafts.
When they finally decided to get a doctorate, they studied under the guidance of Dr. Daniel Sternheimer at the French Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). Sternheimer says that the two were brilliant and arrogant "prodigies" who thought they would be the next Einsteins. But Grishka Bogdanov managed to get a doctorate with the lowest possible grade. Igor failed, and the examination committee determined that he could try again to get a doctor's degree if he met the standard test of publishing three articles in scientific journals. "The scientist must win the faith of the scientific community," Dr. Witt explained. In the end, Igor also received a doctorate with the lowest grade. After that, he returned to produce a scientific TV program, called "X Rays." Dr. Sternheimer commented that the diploma is not very important anyway, and there is no reason that after studying for so long they should not receive a certificate. "They don't deserve to win so much interest, nor so much hatred."
The Bogdanov brothers expressed hope that their ideas would be recognized and be useful for research: "nonsense things in the morning may be the things of taste in the evening or the next day."
New York Times, Haaretz. The knowledge site was at that time part of the IOL portal of the Haaretz group
To the concerned article of John Baaz coming out against the Bogdanov brothers
