[Discussion] French TV Stars Rock the World of Theoretical Physics

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French TV Stars Rock the World of Theoretical Physics

 <<...OLE_Obj...>>  Tuesday, November 5, 2002  	

 <<...OLE_Obj...>> 	French TV Stars Rock the World of Theoretical
Physics By RICHARD MONASTERSKY <mailto:rich.monastersky@chronicle.com>  It
didn't move at quite the speed of light, but the rumor last month circled
the globe within minutes and roiled the ranks of theoretical physicists. It
seemed that a pair of French twin brothers who were national television
personalities had duped several physics journals by tying together a
nonsensical string of trendy terms and mathematical equations in papers that
slipped through the peer-review process.  "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!"
wrote John C. Baez, a professor of mathematical physics at the University of
California at Riverside, on an online physics discussion group that he helps
moderate.  Over the next week, more rumors, facts, and accusations spread
through e-mail messages and telephone calls as physicists engaged in a round
of finger-pointing, with many Americans lining up to chastise their
Continental counterparts. In the end, the case turned out to be far more
complex than a hoax, and it exposed potentially wide cracks in how
theoretical physicists judge one another's work.  "It's an interesting case
study in how stuff that is basically nonsense is easily gotten past referees
these days," says Peter G. Woit, a theoretical physicist who directs
instruction in the mathematics department at Columbia University. "There
really was a serious failure of the refereeing here."  However, the
brothers, Igor and Grichka Bogdanov, maintain that they are doing serious
work that seeks to answer one of the most fundamental questions of all: What
was the universe like at the moment of the Big Bang? At that instant, all
space and time were squeezed into a point without any width or duration --
an infinitesimal space called a singularity.  "For the first time, we have a
description of the content of this initial singularity. That's quite
valuable and important," says Grichka, who blames the current controversy on
longstanding grudges held by French scientists and members of the French
publishing industry.  The Bogdanov affair has attracted so much interest
among physicists because it seemed at first to be a case of just deserts.
Several scientists said that the physics world had fallen victim to the same
sort of hoax that Alan D. Sokal had played on the cultural-studies field in
1996. Mr. Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, spoofed the
relativism fashionable in the humanities by writing a satirical paper called
"Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of
Quantum Gravity," which argued, among other points, that there is no
external reality and that the theory of quantum gravity has important
political implications. He submitted it to the journal Social Text, which
published it in a special issue on the "Science Wars." (See an article from
The Chronicle,
</che-data/articles.dir/articles-42.dir/issue-37.dir/37a01201.htm> May 24,
1996.)  Mr. Baez wrote in his initial message about the Bogdanov brothers to
his newsgroup, sci.physics.research, that while physicists had all laughed
about Mr. Sokal's paper in 1996, it now appeared that they had been bitten
by a "reverse Alan Sokal hoax."  Adding to the insult was the identity of
the supposed hoaxers: Two self-described geniuses -- they say they both have
IQ's above 200 -- who have written science-fiction novels and been the hosts
of several television programs on science, including one that started this
fall.  The 49-year-old Bogdanov brothers have an unusual and eclectic past.
In an interview, the two say their parents both came from aristocratic
families -- Russian on their father's side, Austrian on their mother's --
that fled their homelands to settle in France. Their mother's father, they
say, was Roland Hayes, one of the first successful black concert singers in
the United States.  Always good in science, the brothers intended to pursue
doctorates in physics but got sidetracked when they started a television
show, in 1980, that ran for 10 years. Other shows followed, and they
collaborated with Jean Guitton, the French philosopher, in writing a best
seller, God and Science (Grasset, 1991).  The two say they started serious
work on their dissertations in 1993. They studied under Moshé Flato, a
mathematical physicist at Bourgogne. When Mr. Flato died, in 1998, they
continued with his colleague Daniel Sternheimer, who teaches at the
university and is also a research professor with the National Center for
Scientific Research, in Dijon.  In their work, the Bogdanovs have explored
the early universe, when the entire cosmos is thought to have spanned an
infinitesimally small fraction (10 to the minus-33rd power) of a centimeter.
At such a scale, the brothers say, the normal ways to measure space and time
fail. The fabric of distance and duration starts to fragment and fluctuate,
and physicists must use new mathematical tools to deal with such problems,
they propose.  According to Mr. Sternheimer, Grichka Bogdanov applied for
his Ph.D. in physics in 1999 but was granted one in mathematics instead, on
the condition that he rework his thesis. Mr. Sternheimer says he is not an
expert in all points of Grichka's work and so did not follow his every
point. But some of the dissertation was in Mr. Sternheimer's field, and, he
says, "I made sure that that part deserved a Ph.D. in mathematics." Still,
he thinks the brothers' strength is in popularizing science, not doing it.
Igor Bogdanov sought his doctorate at the same time but was rejected. He
later contacted Jacobus J. Verbaarschot, a professor of physics at the State
University of New York at Stony Brook, to be an adviser on his physics
thesis. According to Mr. Verbaarschot, he and Mr. Sternheimer agreed that
Igor could get his degree if he published three or four papers in
peer-reviewed journals, which he did by the end of 2001. Igor earned his
doctorate in physics from the French university in July.  Both brothers
received passing marks of honorable, unusual in a system that almost always
awards très honorable to successful candidates. The passing mark "only
happens to the worst students -- the students you only want to get out of
the system," says Mr. Verbaarschot.  Like Mr. Sternheimer, he did not follow
all parts of Igor's work. "This was not our specialty," Mr. Verbaarschot
says, referring to the dissertation committee. "Nobody on the committee had
any deep understanding of the ideas." They relied on the journal referees
who had accepted Igor's papers for publication in order to judge the finer
points of the work.  "In hindsight, the weakness is that there were no real
experts" on the committee, says Mr. Verbaarschot. "Maybe there are no real
experts in what they are doing. What they are doing is so far out of the
mainstream."  But scientists who say that they do understand the Bogdanovs'
papers deem them worthless. "I'm quite sure there is nothing of merit in the
papers," says Mr. Baez. "The papers are extremely eclectic in the math and
physics terminology they use. Some people who read these and may not be
knowledgeable on the terminology may give them the benefit of the doubt.  "I
can tell that they're not really doing anything with the terms," he
continues. "They're sort of stringing together plausible-sounding sentences
that add up to nothing."  The agreement to use publications as the critical
benchmark for granting a degree is "ass backwards," says Frank A. Wilczek, a
professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It's a
real cop-out by the committee and totally unacceptable."  Mr. Wilczek is
editor in chief of Annals of Physics, which published one of the Bogdanov
brothers' papers in February. But he and all of the current members of the
journal's editorial board had recently joined the Annals and did not handle
papers in that issue. He says that standards at the journal had slipped in
recent years because of the illness and death of a previous editor in chief.
Although he declines to comment on the Bogdanovs' paper, Mr. Wilczek says he
intends to raise the journal's standards. As part of that drive, members of
the editorial board now do most of the reviewing. "I'm trying to get much
tighter control, just because of things like this," he says, referring to
the Bogdanov case.  Another of the brothers' papers appeared in Quantum and
Classical Gravity, published by the Institute of Physics, a British learned
society. Ian Russell, assistant direct of the institute's journals division,
says that "we deployed our standard peer-review process on that paper,"
which involved two independent external reviewers.  Messages on the physics
newsgroup say that the journal has decided to stop using the two reviewers
who assessed the paper, but Mr. Russell says, "We wouldn't make a
carte-blanche decision not to use referees unless we had evidence that there
was some wrongdoing. No evidence has come to light, that I'm aware of."  The
Bogdanovs say that people have rejected their work because it is so
unconventional. They also charge that past enemies spread the hoax rumor to
harm their careers. They decline, however, to name the enemies.  It is true
that the two seem to attract critics easily. They sent out an e-mail message
last month that excerpted apparently supportive statements by Laurent
Freidel, but he denies making those remarks. Mr. Freidel, a visiting
professor of theoretical physics at the Perimeter Institute, in Waterloo,
Ontario, had merely forwarded an e-mail message containing the passage to a
friend, and the Bogdanov brothers attributed it to Mr. Freidel. "I'm very
upset about that because I have received e-mail from people in the community
asking me why I've defended the Bogdanov brothers," he says. "When your name
is used without your consent, it's a violation."  The French stars have left
others feeling violated as well. Trinh X. Thuan, a professor of astronomy at
the University of Virginia, sued the Bogdanovs in France a decade ago,
charging that, in God and Science, they had plagiarized his book The Secret
Melody: And Man Created the Universe (published in English by Oxford
University Press in 1995). In the end, he says, the judge found in his
favor, and the brothers, along with their publisher, had to pay 80,000
francs to Mr. Thuan>. The brothers say that they did not commit plagiarism
and that Mr. Thuan had copied earlier work of their own, so they never paid
him any money.  The plagiarism lawsuit may explain why the twins were so
eager to get doctorates, says Mr. Thuan. The back cover of their book
claimed that they held doctorates when they did not, and they hurriedly
tried to get degrees as the court case played out in the early 1990s, he
says.  John D. Barrow, a professor of mathematical sciences at the
University of Cambridge, says the brothers contacted him at that time with
an odd request. "They were very anxious to obtain Ph.D.'s very quickly, and
they tried to con me into becoming an examiner," he says. "There were two
theses that they had submitted. They were laughable compendiums."  As for
the brothers, he says, "I regard them as sinister people, not as hoaxers."
The Bogdanovs say that the statement on the back cover of the book was the
fault of a "clumsy" editor who wrote that they had degrees when they were
actually in the process of earning them. They also deny trying to get
doctorates quickly and say that they had contacted Mr. Barrow about
long-term plans.  Such arguments between the Bogdanovs and others do not
surprise Jean Staune, general secretary of the Interdisciplinary University
of Paris, who helped Mr. Thuan with the plagiarism case against the
brothers. "They are like water," he says. "You can never catch them."
Whatever the truth about the two Frenchmen, their case raises questions
about quality control in theoretical physics. Many papers in the field are
so arcane that only a few people can comprehend them, say some researchers.
"It has become acceptable to publish things that are not understandable to a
sufficiently wide audience," says Mr. Verbaarschot, of Stony Brook.  The
problem reaches deeper than just publishing, says Mr. Wilczek, of MIT. It
affects the granting of degrees and promotions as well. "Faculties in
physics departments all around have to make judgments on people whose work
is understood by very few if any."  The scientists who sit in judgment often
will not acknowledge that they cannot assess the work of their peers. "It's
a very human thing," he says. "Nobody likes to admit that they don't
understand something, especially if it's very fashionable."  Making matters
worse, theoretical physics is straying so far from anything measurable that
it has become difficult to hold it up to any yardstick. "Parts of
theoretical physics have become dangerously complicated and divorced from
empirical roots," says Mr. Wilczek. "I think it's a very dangerous trend."
If the theoretical work explained some phenomenon, then physicists would
know that the research was well done even if they could not understand its
nuances, says Mr. Wilczek. "But if you don't understand it, and it doesn't
apply to anything, then it's really tough to judge."  There is one way,
though, for physicists to measure the importance of the Bogdanovs' work. If
researchers find merit in the twins' ideas, those thoughts will echo in the
references of scientific papers for years to come.  Currently, a leading
database of scholarly work in high-energy physics shows that the Bogdanov
brothers have earned only one citation, in an unpublished manuscript written
by a nonacademic. Had it not been for the rumor of a hoax, says Mr.
Verbaarschot, "probably no one would have ever known about their articles."