Bogdanov Affair Totally Explained

Everything about The Bogdanov Affair totally explained

The Bogdanov Affair is an academic dispute regarding the legitimacy of a series of theoretical physics papers written by French twins Igor and Grichka Bogdanov (alternately spelt Bogdanoff). These papers were published in reputable scientific journals, and were alleged by their authors to culminate in a proposed theory for describing what occurred at the Big Bang. The controversy started in 2002 when rumors spread on Usenet newsgroups that the work was a deliberate hoax intended to target weaknesses in the peer review system employed by the physics community to select papers for publication in academic journals. While the Bogdanov brothers continue to defend the veracity of their work, many physicists have alleged that the papers are nonsense, considering this evidence of the fallibility inherent within the peer review system. The debate over whether the work represented a contribution to physics, or instead was meaningless, spread from Usenet to many other Internet forums, including the blogs of notable physicists and both the French and English Wikipedia encyclopedia projects. The ensuing dispute received considerable coverage in the mainstream media.
The authors' credentials to write on cosmology are based on Ph.D. degrees they obtained from the University of Burgundy; Grichka Bogdanov received his degree in mathematics, and Igor Bogdanov received his in theoretical physics (in 1999 and 2002 respectively). Both were given the low, but passing, grade of "honorable"; in Igor's case, this was given only after the work was accepted for publication in respected physics journals, to establish merit of his work. When later challenges to the legitimacy of the papers submitted by the Bogdanov brothers arose, the debate spread to the question of whether the substitution of a "publication requirement" by university professors when they don't understand students' work is a valid means of determining the veracity of a paper. However, the intrinsic complexity of topics like quantum groups and topological field theory—in addition to the excessive use of jargon by those who study these areas—makes it difficult to avoid such delegation, since often specific expertise is necessary in order to fully understand and evaluate the claims made in papers within these topics.
Since the early 1980s, Igor and Grichka Bogdanov have been widely known in France as television-show hosts. Their shows like Temps X (and more recently Rayons X) deal with topics in popular science and science fiction, and have attracted a large number of viewers. The celebrity status of the Bogdanov brothers in their home country may have helped spread this controversy from the scientific community to mainstream media and online forums.

Origin of the affair

The Bogdanov twin brothers were born to a Russian father Yuri Mikhailovich Bogdanov (b. Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), 28 January 1928) and an Czech-Austrian mother of African descent Maria Dolores "Maya" Kolowrat (b. Basle, 28 February 1926), both of whom came from aristocratic families that fled their homelands to settle in France, on August 29, 1949, in the commune of Saint-Lary dans le Gers, which is part of the Gascony region of southern France. They both studied applied mathematics in Paris, but then in the early 1980s began a career in television, producing a show entitled Temps X (Time X). This programme, which covered topics in popularized science and science fiction, earned them a considerable amount of celebrity. Temps X continued for ten years and was followed by other shows in the same genre. on the condition that he considerably rewrite his thesis, emphasizing the mathematical portions over the physics content. On the same day, Igor Bogdanov failed the defense of his thesis Topological Origin of Inertia. His advisor subsequently agreed to allow him to obtain a doctorate if Igor could publish three peer-reviewed journal articles. After publishing the requisite articles, Igor successfully defended his thesis three years later on a different topic under the direction of two advisors. His new thesis, Topological State of Spacetime at the Planck Scale, also received the same low passing grade of "honorable", one that's seldom given, as Daniel Sternheimer told New York Times science reporter Dennis Overbye. In justifying the conferring of doctoral degrees to the Bogdanovs, Sternheimer told the Times, "These guys worked for 10 years without pay. They have the right to have their work recognized with a diploma, which is nothing much these days." which quickly grew to hundreds of posts in length.
This verbal wrangle soon attracted worldwide attention, both in the physics community and in the international popular press. Following Niedermaier, the majority of the participants in the Usenet discussion thread created by Baez also voiced the assumption that the work was a deliberate hoax, which the Bogdanov brothers have continued to deny. After hearing that the Bogdanovs disputed that their work was a hoax, Niedermaier issued a private and public apology to the Bogdanov brothers on 24 October 2002 for having so assumed from the outset. However, this proved to be Niedermaier's last public comment on the affair: he's endorsed neither the validity nor the merit of the work in question.

Reports and comments from scientists

Thesis reports

The brothers' thesis reports, of which there were seven in total, contain generally positive remarks. The following are excerpts from the reports which the Bogdanovs have themselves quoted as evidence of their bona fides:

Roman Jackiw, from MIT: "The author proposes a novel, speculative solution to the problem of the pre-Big-Bang initial singularity ... the thesis and the published papers provide an excellent introduction to these ideas, and can serve as a useful springboard for further research in this area".

Costas Kounnas, from ENS Paris: "I found this work very interesting, with many new ideas about quantum gravity ... the author proposes an original and interesting cosmological scenario."

Jack Morava, from the Johns Hopkins University: "the thesis work of Igor Bogdanov is of great interest, dominated by new ideas with fundamental physical implications in cosmology and in many other fields connected with gravitation." Igniatios Antoniadis (of the École Polytechnique) later reversed his judgment of Grichka Bogdanov's thesis. Antoniadis told Le Monde,

J'avais donné un avis favorable pour la soutenance de Grichka, basé sur une lecture rapide et indulgente du texte de la thèse. Hélas, je me suis complètement trompé. Le langage scientifique était juste une apparence derrière laquelle se cachaient une incompétence et une ignorance de la physique, même de base. The paper was accepted by the journal seven months later.
   However, after the publication of the article and the publicity surrounding the controversy, mathematician Greg Kuperberg posted to Usenet a statement written by Andrew Wray and Hermann Nicolai of the CQG editorial board. Originally sent via e-mail, the statement read, in part,
Regrettably, despite the best efforts, the refereeing process can't be 100% effective. Thus the paper ... made it through the review process even though, in retrospect, it doesn't meet the standards expected of articles in this journal. The paper was discussed extensively at the annual Editorial Board meeting ... and there was general agreement that it shouldn't have been published. Since then several steps have been taken to further improve the peer review process in order to improve the quality assessment on articles submitted to the journal and reduce the likelihood that this could happen again.
The paper in question has, however, not been withdrawn by the journal. Later, the editor-in-chief of the journal issued a slightly different statement on behalf of the Institute of Physics, which owns the journal, in which he insisted on the fact that their usual peer-review procedures had been followed, but no longer commented on the value of the paper. In particular the sentences "...it doesn't meet the standards expected of articles in this journal" and "The paper was discussed extensively at the annual Editorial Board meeting ... and there was general agreement that it shouldn't have been published" were removed. The former phrase was, however, quoted in the New York Times, Moreover, Die Zeit quoted the journal's co-editor Hermann Nicolai as saying that had the paper reached his desk, he'd have immediately rejected it. In 2001, the Czechoslovak Journal of Physics accepted an article written by Igor Bogdanov, entitled "Topological Origin of Inertia". The referee's report concluded: "In my opinion the results of the paper can be considered as original ones. I recommend the paper for publication but in a revised form." The following year, the Chinese Journal of Physics published Igor Bogdanov's "The KMS state of spacetime at the Planck scale". The report stated that "the viewpoint presented in this paper can be interesting as a possible approach of the Planck scale physics." Some corrections were requested.
   Not all review evaluations were positive. Eli Hawkins, acting as a referee on behalf of the Journal of Physics A, suggested rejecting one of the Bogdanovs' papers: "It would take up too much space to enumerate all the mistakes: indeed it's difficult to say where one error ends and the next begins. In conclusion, I wouldn't recommend that this paper be published in this, or any, journal."
   Several of the published papers are nearly identical, differing only in minor respects. The CQG paper summarizes most of Grichka's thesis, but the paragraph order is almost entirely reversed. The Chinese Journal of Physics, Nuovo Cimento and Annals of Physics papers are essentially identical except for their titles and abstracts; typographical errors are also repeated across these versions.
Criticism of the papers
After the start of the Usenet discussion, most comments were critical of the Bogdanovs' work. For example, John Baez stated that the Bogdanov papers are "a mishmash of superficially plausible sentences containing the right buzzwords in approximately the right order. There is no logic or cohesion in what they write." Jacques Distler voiced a similar opinion, proclaiming "The Bogdanov's [sic] papers consist of buzzwords from various fields of mathematical physics, string theory and quantum gravity, strung together into syntactically correct, but semantically meaningless prose."
   Others compared the quality of the Bogdanov papers with that seen over a wider arena. "The Bogdanoffs' work is significantly more incoherent than just about anything else being published," wrote Peter Woit. He continued, "But the increasingly low standard of coherence in the whole field is what allowed them to think they were doing something sensible and to get it published."
   The most positive comments about the papers themselves came from string theorist Luboš Motl. Writing in his blog almost three years after the heyday of the controversy, Motl stated, "[T]he Bogdanoff brothers are proposing something that has, speculatively, the potential to be an alternative story about quantum gravity ... What they're proposing is a potential new calculational framework for gravity. I find it unlikely that these things will work but it's probably more likely than loop quantum gravity and other discrete approaches whose lethal problems have already been identified in detail". This comparison is perhaps less than completely illuminating, since theoretical physicists are still debating exactly how useful an approach loop quantum gravity truly is. (Like string theory and all other attempts to quantize gravity, loop quantum gravity, or "LQG", remains—at least for the moment—beyond the reach of experimental proof or disproof. Debate over LQG is intimately associated with that about string theory's own problems, an often-heated discussion which is beyond the scope of this article.)
Internet discussions
In addition to a few articles in print media, the Bogdanov Affair has been discussed extensively in various newsgroups, webpages and blogs; the Bogdanov brothers have often participated in the discussions, both under their real names, and under several pseudonyms. but when asked precise questions from physicists Steve Carlip and John Baez regarding mathematical details in the papers, failed to convince any other participants that these papers had any real scientific value. New York Times reporter George Johnson described reading through the debate as "like watching someone trying to nail Jell-O to a wall", for the Bogdanovs had "developed their own private language, one that impinges on the vocabulary of science only at the edges."
Scientific content
Participants in the discussions were particularly unconvinced by the affirmation in the "Topological origin of inertia" paper that "whatever the orientation, the plane of oscillation of Foucault's pendulum is necessarily aligned with the initial singularity marking the origin of physical space." In addition, the paper claimed, the Foucault pendulum experiment "cannot be explained satisfactorily in either classical or relativistic mechanics". since the trajectory of a Foucault pendulum—a standard museum piece—is accurately predicted by classical mechanics. (Corrections from later theories such as relativity are so small as to be irrelevant.) The Bogdanovs explained that these claims would only be clear in the context of topological field theory. Baez and Russell Blackadar attempted to determine the meaning of the "plane of oscillation" statement; after the Bogdanovs issued some elaborations, Baez concluded that it was a complicated way of rephrasing the following:

Since the big bang happened everywhere, no matter which way a pendulum swings, the plane in which it swings can be said to "intersect the big bang".
However, Baez pointed out, this statement doesn't in fact concern the Big Bang, and is entirely equivalent to the following:

No matter which way a pendulum swings, there's some point on the plane in which it swings.
Yet this rephrasing is itself equivalent to the statement "Any plane contains a point." If this was the essence of the statement, Baez noted, it can't be very useful in "explaining the origin of inertia".

Eli Hawkins of Pennsylvania State University voiced a similar concern about "The KMS state of spacetime at the Planck scale".

The main result of this paper is that this thermodynamic equilibrium should be a KMS state. This almost goes without saying; for a quantum system, the KMS condition is just the concrete definition of thermodynamic equilibrium. The hard part is identifying the quantum system to which the condition should be applied, which isn't done in this paper. the latter being a type of mathematical object which must satisfy additional conditions.
   As mentioned above, among the most positive comments on the papers came from physicist Luboš Motl:
...Some of the papers of the Bogdanoff brothers are really painful and clearly silly ... But the most famous paper about the solution of the initial singularity is a bit different; it's more sophisticated.
   ...it doesn't surprise me much that Roman Jackiw said that the paper satisfied everything he expects from an acceptable paper—the knowledge of the jargon and some degree of original ideas. (And be sure that Jackiw, Kounnas, and Majid were not the only ones with this kind of a conclusion.)
   ...Technically, their paper connects too many things. It would be too good if all these ideas and (correct) formulae were necessary for a justification of a working solution to the initial singularity problem. But if one accepts that the papers about these difficult questions don't have to be just a well-defined science but maybe also a bit of inspiring art, the brothers have done a pretty good job, I think. And I want to know the answers to many questions that are opened in their paper.
Motl's measured support for Topological field theory of the initial singularity of spacetime, however, stands in contrast to Robert Oeckl's official MathSciNet review, which states that the paper is "rife with nonsensical or meaningless statements and suffers from a serious lack of coherence," follows up with several examples to illustrate his point, and concludes that the paper "falls short of scientific standards and appears to have no meaningful content."
The HKU and HKUST confusion
For months, the domain name of the "International Institute of Mathematical Physics" created by the Bogdanovs, th-phys.edu.hk, created erroneous suggestions amongst forum participants as to a possible link with The University of Hong Kong or the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
   The participation of an unidentified "Professor Yang" provoked additional confusion. This wasn't confirmed officially by HKU and no Prof. Yang existed on the roster of the HKU physics department. Confusingly, the DNS record of th-phys.edu.hk listed the street address of HKUST (in Clear Water Bay), not HKU. Moreover, the domain had been registered by Igor Bogdanov, and e-mail messages from Professor L. Yang originated from a dial-up IP address in Paris, France. The registration of th-phys.edu.hk hasn't been renewed.
   Suspicions were consequently raised that Professor L. Yang was actually a pseudonym of the Bogdanovs. When asked why the Center's website had a Latvian top-level domain, Igor claimed that it had been established and hosted by the University of Riga, after the brothers had attended a conference there in either 2001 or 2002. This claim was greeted with skepticism and was never confirmed by the University.
Spread of the dispute
At the beginning of 2004, Igor Bogdanov began to post on French Usenet physics groups and Internet forums, continuing the pattern of behavior seen on sci.physics.research. A controversy began on the French Wikipedia when Igor Bogdanov and his supporters began to edit that encyclopedia's, prompting the creation of a new article dedicated to the debate (—"Polemic surrounding the work of the Bogdanov brothers"). However, the dispute merely spread to the English-language Wikipedia. Eventually, this led the Arbitration Committee—the English Wikipedia's highest decision-making body short of project leader Jimmy Wales—to ban everyone determined to be a participant in the external dispute from editing material concerning it. This decision, which excluded the Bogdanovs themselves along with several supporters and a few vocal opponents, went into effect on 11 November, 2005.
   In 2006, Baez observed on his website how for some time, the Bogdanov brothers and a "large crowd of sock puppets" had been attempting to rewrite the English Wikipedia article on the controversy. "Nobody seems to be fooled," he added. Acrimed, In 2004, the Bogdanovs published a commercially successful popular science book, Avant Le Big Bang (Before the Big Bang), based on a simplified version of their theses, where they also presented their point of view about the affair. Both the book and the Bogdanovs' television shows have been criticized for elementary scientific inaccuracies. Critics cite examples from Avant Le Big Bang including a statement that the "golden number" φ (Phi) is transcendental, which the Bogdanovs allege to be an editorial misprint; an assumption that the limit of a decreasing sequence is always zero; and that the expansion of the Universe implies that the planets of the Solar System have grown farther apart. that, in an addendum to Avant Le Big Bang, Grichka intentionally misquoted Majid's opinion on the way this interview had been transcribed. Majid wrote that the French version of his report on Grichka's thesis is "an unauthorized translation partially invented by the Bogdanovs". In one sentence, the English word "interesting" was translated as the French "important". A "draft [mathematical] construction" becomes "la première construction [mathematique]" ("'the first [mathematical] construction'"). Elsewhere, an added word demonstrates that "Bogdanov doesn't understand his own draft results", notes Majid, who also describes more than ten other modifications of meaning, each one biased towards "surestimation outrancière"—"outrageous over-estimation". Majid's original report describes, he says, a "very weak" student who nevertheless demonstrated "an impressive amount of determination to obtain a doctorate".
Reflections upon the peer-review system
During the heyday of this Affair, some media coverage cast a negative light on theoretical physics, stating or at least strongly implying that it has become impossible to distinguish a valid paper from a hoax. Overbye's article in the New York Times voiced this opinion,

Jacques Distler mused that the tone of the media coverage had more to do with journalistic practices than with physics.

The much-anticipated New York Times article on the Bogdanov scandal has appeared. Alas, it suffers from the usual journalistic conceit that a proper newspaper article must cover a "controversy". There must be two sides to the controversy, and the reporter's job is to elicit quotes from both parties and present them side-by-side. Almost inevitably, this "balanced" approach sheds no light on the matter, and leaves the reader shaking his head, "There they go again..."

Many comments have been made on the possible shortcomings of the referral system for published articles, and also on the criteria for acceptance of a thesis and subsequent delivery of a Doctorate of Philosophy. Frank Wilczek, who edits Annals of Physics (and is now a Nobel laureate), told the press that the scandal motivated him to correct the journal's slipping standards, partly by assigning more reviewing duties to the editorial board. Following Carlip's logic, one can infer a measure of the influence the Bogdanov papers have had upon the community by studying the references made to them in physicists' subsequent journal articles. The Bogdanov papers are cited a total of three times on the SPIRES database, for six published papers and one unpublished preprint. For comparison, a recent detailed analysis of citation statistics reveals that between 1000 and 2000 citations are expected from someone who advances to a full professor position or a fellowship in the American Physical Society, and around 8000 citations are expected for members of the United States National Academy of Sciences. To focus on cosmological scenarios, a recent and somewhat controversial cosmological model known as the "ekpyrotic universe" was published in 2001 and has already been cited more than 440 times. Before the controversy arose, the scientific community had shown practically no interest in the Bogdanov papers; indeed, according to Stony Brook physics professor Jacobus Verbaarschot, without the hoax rumors "probably no one would have ever known about their articles." Despite the similarity of name, this is unaffiliated with the reputable Erwin Schrödinger International Institute for Mathematical Physics in Vienna, Austria. Jadczyk has published two papers in peer-reviewed journals claiming this institute as his affiliation. These two papers are not closely related to the issues addressed in the Bogdanovs' previous publications.

Comparisons with the Sokal Affair

Several sources have referred to the Bogdanov Affair as a "reverse Sokal" hoax, drawing a comparison with the Sokal Affair, where the physicist Alan Sokal published a deliberately fraudulent and indeed nonsensical article in the humanities journal Social Text. Sokal's original aim had been to test the effects of the intellectual trend he called, "for want of a better term, postmodernism". Worried by this "more-or-less explicit rejection of the rationalist tradition of the Enlightenment," Sokal decided to perform an experiment which he later cheerfully admitted was both unorthodox and uncontrolled, provoking a maelstrom of reactions which, to his surprise, received coverage in Le Monde and even the front page of the New York Times. One of the earliest to draw a comparison between the two events was physicist John Baez, in the seminal post of October 2002 to the sci.physics.research newsgroup. Sokal referred readers to his follow-up essay, in which he notes "the mere fact of publication of my parody" only proved that one particular journal's editors were "derelict in their intellectual duty". (According to the New York Times, Sokal was "almost disappointed" that the Bogdanovs hadn't attempted a hoax after his own style. "What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander," he said. Both matters have, however, provoked discussion of peer-review reliability, value of academic papers published under credentials alone, and adequate evaluation of scholarly work by academia at large.

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