The Bogdanov Affair

(update, June 1, 2004 here )

November 2002: The story is that there are two brothers - twins, apparently - who are very popular on French television. Not only are they popular, they are working diligently to popularize Science. Their point of view is that people should be better educated in science, that science is fantastic, that the study of mathematics enables a person to frame their ideas with precision. The Bogdanov Brothers - for so they are called - are advocates of bridging science and mysticism. Like the work on this website, they are promoting the idea that science can be very mystical indeed, and without science, mysticism is merely superstition.

We couldn't agree more.

The Bogdanov Affaire started with a rumor that two brothers published at least 4 bogus papers in physics journals as a hoax. On or around October 22nd, a physicist named Max Niedermaier - previously affiliated with the Max Planck Institute For Gravitational Physics, Potsdam, Germany - sent an email around to a number of people - including another physicist named Ted Newman. Ted Newman - Ezra T. Newman - professor of physics and astronomy, has been awarded the distinction of fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Newman, whose research area is Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, is known for his New Solutions to the Einstein Equations and the theoretical discovery of what is now known as the "Kerr-Newman Black Hole."

In any event, Ezra "Ted" Newman apparently fowarded the email to many individuals including - it seems - John Baez.

John Baez - of the University of California at Riverside - who says he received many copies of this email from numerous individuals - was naturally puzzled by this and apparently wanted to get the issue out in the open. As a leader in the internet physics community, John seems to have felt that if the Bogdanov's were innocent of the rumors, the best way to deal with it would be to publicize the matter by bringing it up on an internet newsgroup frequented by physicists and mathematicians.

Within a day or two, a science journalist Dennis Overbye, with the New York Times, was said to have heard the rumor and was looking for a big story. He apparently phoned the Bogdanovs to ask if their work was a hoax. Their denial has been described variously as "huffy" and "indignant."

Not a surprise.

Max Niedermaier then emailed the Bogdanovs an apology, which he urged them to distribute.

Here is an important point: Several of Niedermaier's statements are provably false, about which I will suggest nothing, leaving it to the reader to draw conclusions. According to Niedermaier, both Bogdanovs defended their theses on the same day. His version of the story is that this took place in a rented hall with TV camera crews and plenty of feminine pulchritude in evidence.

That's what Niedermaier said.

The facts seem to be that the Bogdanovs got their PhDs at different times. Grichka received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the Universite de Bourgogne on June 26 1999. He barely passed. On the same day, Igor failed his, though he later achieved a successful defense on July 8, 2002 - three years later.

John Baez says:

I assure you that the Bogdanov's theses seem like gibberish to me, at least from their abstracts - even though I work on topological quantum field theory, and know the meaning of almost all the buzzwords they use. [...] Some parts almost seem to make sense, but the more carefully I read them, the less sense they make... and eventually I either start laughing or get a headache.

The story is best revealed in the series of email discussions that have taken place on the internet over the past week or so. The first public post on the subject is by John Baez of the University of California at Riverside. John seems to be about the busiest mathematical physicist on the internet.

From: John Baez
Message 1 in thread
Subject: Physics bitten by reverse Alan Sokal hoax?
Newsgroups: sci.physics.research, sci.physics

Date: 2002-10-23 22:09:55 PST

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.

(....)

Other participants of the discussion wrote a number of comments that are an interesting example of "winding up" the subject, as well as expressions of frustration from those in the profession.

>Grichka Bogdanov and Igor Bogdanov,
>Spacetime Metric and the KMS Condition at the Planck Scale,
>Annals of Physics, 295 (2002), 90-97.

This should be 296 (2002), no. 1, 90-97. But yes, the paper is bullshit.

[Moderator's note: Let's try to keep things polite. -TB]

I hope to see one major difference between the aftermath of this case and Sokal. No one should criticize the Bogdanovs for doing this. This is a bitter pill that these journals and this university must richly deserve.

(...)

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.

(...)

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".

(...)

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.

(...)

They have degrees in physics now... maybe they're aiming for a full set?

(...)

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.

(...)

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.

(...)

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.

(...)

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.

(...)

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".

(...)

The physics 'community' should feel no more foolish than the sociology community who were taken in by Sokal.

(...)

Mystery solved. They merely wished to cite the papers in their next novel's appendix.

(...)

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.

At this point, one of the posters wrote a bit about the PhD supervisor under whom the Bogdanov brothers worked on their PhD's: Moshe Flato and Daniel Sternheimer. As it happens, they were/are good friends of Ark's. It is at such moments that one is allowed to get a glimpse of the dynamic, and what we seem to be seeing is a bit of the "scandal" principle in operation here - where something gets a start, and dozens of people grab onto it, blow it out of proportion, and it runs away like a train with a fire box about to go nuclear. (no pun intended.) In any event, noting the names of Moshe and Daniel, Ark's interest was piqued:

From: Arkadiusz Jadczyk (ark@cassiopaea.org)
Message 13 in thread
Subject: Re: Physics bitten by reverse Alan Sokal hoax?

On 25 Oct 2002 21:34:51 GMT, thomas.larsson@hdd.se (Thomas Larsson)
wrote:

>Some poor uncited soul wrote:
>> 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?
>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.

Ark here: Although I agree with all the above, I am not sure about the last sentence. A dedicated and smart hoaxer can find out about the weak points of any person and even a group persons. Physicists are generally naive and not suspecting. They are busy. If they have reasons to believe, for one reason or another, that a given student is a really bright one, working hard, and quoting all the right papers, then there is a tendency to let the student be even responsible for his/her work and papers.

So, the responsibility here is falling not so much on Daniel, but on the referees of the papers and the rapporteuers. The PhD would probably not have been granted if the papers were not accepted for publication in good journals.

Let me add that sometimes it happens, for various reasons, that the supervisor's field of expertise is far from the subject of the thesis - and yet the result is highly positive. In such cases special (extraordinary) attention should be paid to the choice of the "rapporteuers."

ark
--

Arkadiusz Jadczyk
http://quantumfuture.net/quantum_future/homepage.htm

Ark was not merely defending his friends, Daniel Sternheimer and the late Moshe Flato, he was stating something he knows intimately from his own 30 years of experience in physics, mathematics, education, and serving as a referee for several journals. Like many of his colleagues, he has never taken this responsibility lightly, and has labored many days - sometimes weeks - over papers that are sent to him for review. His attempt to find a fair way to review the matter - to take the paper seriously and given it a reasonable review - resulted in contact from the Bogdanov brothers. Remember, these are the guys that it was claimed that were contacted by a New York Times reporter with designs on a story about a "hoax" and who "huffily denied" an interview.

Well, we don't know that it was a "huffy" refusal - but you see how these things can grow with the re-telling. What is curious is that it was said that "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." He really missed a remarkable story about the way science works nowadays. Fact is, if the Bogdanov's work is silly, so are a lot of other scientific papers.

What is obvious is that nobody seems to be able to exactly describe why they think the Bogdanov brothers' papers are a hoax. In point of fact, as Ark has many times suggested: a LOT of physics papers could be described by those who do not understand them as a "hoax."

But, back to the word from the "horse's mouth," so to say:

From: "igor.bogdanov" <igor.bogdanov@...>
To: ark@cassiopaea.org
Subject: Bogdanov
Date sent: Mon, 28 Oct 2002 22:30:22 +0100

Dear Dr Jadczyk,

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 as shown by this email from Harvard that was fwd to us :

______

Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2002 10:10:29 -0400
From: L.F
To: L.F.
M.M
P.R.
L.G, JMM
KGr, FDE
PV
Subject: RE: Hoax: Alan Sokol phenomenon reversed
(fwd)

" What is going on??? guys?? the claim is now that the Bogdanoff brothers are not a fraud and that they not only won Phd's with these papers that no one can understand, that yesterday everyone was convinced were fraudulent, they won appointment as professors to a french university, Bourgogne!!!

______

So 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 believe 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 referees 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.

Once 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,

Ark responded:

On 28 Oct 2002 at 22:30, igor.bogdanov wrote:
> 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.

________________________

Perhaps it is not so pure and it is not all nonsense. The fact is that Daniel Sternheimer had no qualifications and/or expertise to supervise your thesis.There are other facts as well.

Best wishes,

ark