5.3 KiB
| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bogdanov affair | 6/7 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T09:29:43.001702+00:00 | kb-cron |
Alain Riazuelo, an astrophysicist at the Institut d'astrophysique de Paris, participated in many of the online discussions of the Bogdanovs' work. He posted an unpublished version of Grichka Bogdanov's PhD thesis on his personal website, along with his critical analysis. Bogdanov subsequently described this version as "dating from 1991 and too unfinished to be made public". Rather than suing Riazuelo for defamation, Bogdanov filed a criminal complaint of copyright (droit d'auteur) violation against him in May 2011. The police detained and interrogated Riazuelo. He came to trial and was convicted in March 2012. A fine of 2,000 euros the court imposed was suspended, and only one euro of damages was awarded. But in passing judgement the court stated that the scientist had "lacked prudence", given "the fame of the plaintiff". The verdict outraged many scientists, who felt that the police and courts should have no say in a discussion of the scientific merits of a piece of work. In April 2012, a group of 170 scientists published an open letter titled L'affaire Bogdanoff: Liberté, Science et Justice, Des scientifiques revendiquent leur droit au blâme (The Bogdanov Affair: Liberty, Science and Justice, scientists claim their right of critique). In 2014, the Bogdanovs sued the weekly magazine Marianne for defamation, on account of reporting the magazine had published in 2010 which had brought the CNRS report to light. The weekly was eventually ordered to pay 64,000 euros in damages, a quantity less than the Bogdanovs had originally demanded (in excess of 800,000 euros each). The Bogdanovs also sued the CNRS for 1.2 million euros in damages, claiming that the CNRS report had "porté atteinte à leur honneur, à leur réputation et à leur crédit" ("undermined their honor, reputation and credit") and calling the report committee a "Stasi scientifique", but a tribunal ruled against them in 2015 and ordered them to pay 2,000 euros.
=== Megatrend University === In 2005, the Bogdanovs became professors at Megatrend University in Belgrade where they were appointed Chairs of Cosmology and said to direct the Megatrend Laboratory of Cosmology. Mića Jovanović, the rector and owner of Megatrend University, wrote a preface for the Serbian edition of Avant le Big Bang. Jovanović later became embroiled in controversy and resigned his post when it was revealed that he had not obtained a PhD at the London School of Economics as he had claimed. This scandal, combined with the presence of the Bogdanovs, contributed to an atmosphere of controversy surrounding Megatrend.
=== L'équation Bogdanov === In 2008, Presses de la Renaissance published L'équation Bogdanov: le secret de l'origine de l'univers? (The Bogdanov Equation: The Secret of the Origin of the Universe?), officially written in English by Luboš Motl and translated into French. A review in Science et Vie found that the book was light on detail and never actually said what the "Bogdanov equation" is: "Et arrivé à la conclusion, on n'est même plus très certain qu'elle existe réellement" ("Arriving at the conclusion, one is no longer even very certain that it really exists").
== 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, for example, as did Declan Butler's piece in Nature. Posters on blogs and Usenet used the affair to criticize the present status of string theory; for the same reason, Peter Woit devoted a chapter of Not Even Wrong, a book emphatically critical of string theory, to the affair. On the other hand, George Johnson's report in The New York Times concludes that physicists have generally decided the papers are "probably just the result of fuzzy thinking, bad writing and journal referees more comfortable with correcting typos than challenging thoughts." String theorist Aaron Bergman riposted in a review of Not Even Wrong that Woit's conclusion
is undermined by a number of important elisions in the telling of the story, the most important of which is that the writings of the Bogdanovs, to the extent that one can make sense of them, have almost nothing to do with string theory. ... I first learned of the relevant papers in a posting on the internet by Dr. John Baez. Having found a copy of one of the relevant papers available online, I posted that "the referee clearly didn't even glance at it." While the papers were full of rather abstruse prose about a wide variety of technical areas, it was easy to identify outright nonsense in the areas about which I had some expertise. ... A pair of non-string theorists were able to get nonsensical papers generally not about string theory published in journals not generally used by string theorists. This is surely an indictment of something, but its relevance to string theory is marginal at best. Jacques Distler argued that the tone of the media coverage had more to do with journalistic practices than with physics.