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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bogdanov affair | 7/7 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T09:29:43.001702+00:00 | kb-cron |
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..." Distler also suggested that the fact that the Bogdanovs had not uploaded their papers to the arXiv prior to publication, as was standard practice by that time, meant that the physics community must have paid vanishingly little attention to those papers before the hoax rumors broke. The affair prompted many comments about the possible shortcomings of the referral system for published articles, and also on the criteria for acceptance of a PhD thesis. Frank Wilczek, who edited Annals of Physics (and who would later share the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics), 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. Prior to the controversy, the reports on the Bogdanov theses and most of the journal referees' reports spoke favorably of their work, describing it as original and containing interesting ideas. This has been the basis of concerns raised about the efficacy of the peer-review system that the scientific community and academia use to determine the merit of submitted manuscripts for publication; one concern is that over-worked and unpaid referees may not be able to thoroughly judge the value of a paper in the little time they can afford to spend on it. Regarding the Bogdanov publications, physicist Steve Carlip remarked:
Referees are volunteers, who as a whole put in a great deal of work for no credit, no money, and little or no recognition, for the good of the community. Sometimes a referee makes a mistake. Sometimes two referees make mistakes at the same time. I'm a little surprised that anyone is surprised at this. Surely you've seen bad papers published in good journals before this! ... referees give opinions; the real peer review begins after a paper is published. Similarly, Richard Monastersky, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, observed, "There is one way...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." Before the controversy over their work arose, the scientific community had shown practically no interest in the Bogdanovs' papers; indeed, according to Stony Brook physics professor Jacobus Verbaarschot, who served on Igor Bogdanov's dissertation committee, without the hoax rumors "probably no one would have ever known about their articles." As of October 2018, the Bogdanovs' most recent paper was "Thermal Equilibrium and KMS Condition at the Planck Scale", which was submitted to the Chinese Annals of Mathematics in 2001 and appeared in 2003. That journal ceased publication in 2005. One retrospective commented,
Up to 2007 the databanks mention a total of six citations for the Bogdanovs' publications. Four of them are citations among themselves and only two are by other physicists.
== Sokal affair comparison == 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 what he considered a "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. The physicist John Baez compared the two events in his October 2002 post to the sci.physics.research newsgroup. Sociologist of science Harry Collins noted that all of the early reports of the incident made reference to the Sokal affair, and he speculated that without Sokal's precedent bringing the idea of hoax publications to mind, the Bogdanov papers would have sunk into the general obscurity of non-influential scientific writing. Igor and Grichka Bogdanov have and had vigorously insisted upon the validity of their work, while in contrast, Sokal was an outsider to the field in which he was publishing—a physicist, publishing in a humanities journal—and promptly issued a statement himself that his paper was a deliberate hoax. Replying on sci.physics.research, Sokal referred readers to his follow-up essay, in which he notes "the mere fact of publication of my parody" only proved that the editors of one particular journal—and a "rather marginal" one at that—had applied a lax intellectual standard. (According to The New York Times, Sokal was "almost disappointed" that the Bogdanovs had not attempted a hoax after his own style. "What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander", he said.) Baez, who made a comparison between the two affairs, later retracted, saying that the brothers "have lost too much face for [withdrawing the work as a hoax] to be a plausible course of action". In a letter to The New York Times, Cornell physics professor Paul Ginsparg wrote that the contrast between the cases was plainly evident: "here, the authors were evidently aiming to be credentialed by the intellectual prestige of the discipline rather than trying to puncture any intellectual pretension." He added that the fact some journals and scientific institutions have low or variable standards is "hardly a revelation". The observation was later confirmed by studies showing that high-prestige journals struggle to reach average reliability.
== See also == List of topics characterized as pseudoscience
== Notes ==
== References ==
== External links == Mathematical Center of Riemannian Cosmology – Igor Bogdanov's website Initial discussion Physics bitten by reverse Alan Sokal hoax? Theses and papers Scientific publications by Igor and Grichka Bogdanov (in French) Grichka Bogdanov's PhD thesis (in French) Igor Bogdanov's PhD thesis Critical websites John Baez's discussion of the Bogdanov affair Rapport des Sections 01 et 02 du Comité du CNRS sur Deux Thèses de Doctorat Archived 2019-07-23 at the Wayback Machine archived by Libération «Pot-Pourri» from Igor & Grichka Bogdanov's Before the Big Bang Archived 2005-11-25 at the Wayback Machine by Jean-Pierre Messager A small journey in the Bogdanoff universe Archived 2016-04-10 at the Wayback Machine by Alain Riazuelo