Bogdanov affair: Difference between revisions

The Bogdanov Affair is an academic controversy regarding the merit of a series of papers on physics written by Igor and Grichka Bogdanov, some of which were published in reputable scholarly journals, and the academic credentials awarded based on the content of those publications. The affair broke on October 22, 2002 and received widespread media attention outside of academic physics, where commentators questioned the strength of the peer-review system that the scientific community and academia use to determine the merit of work.

Another notable aspect of the affair is that the subjects, Igor and Grichka Bogdanov have been widely known in France for decades as TV-show hosts, with programs about popular science and science fiction, including "Temps X" and, more recently "Rayons X." These shows have been highly successful in France and have attracted a large audience. When the affair broke, the status of the Bogdanovs as television personalities helped to fan the flames in France and spread news of the affair from specialized scientists to the popular press and to online forums.

During 1999–2002, popular French TV presenters Grichka and Igor Bogdanov obtained Ph.D. degrees on the basis of two theses (one in mathematics, one in theoretical physics) from the University of Burgundy. In 1999 Grichka Bogdanov received the very rare, lowest-possible passing grade of "honorable," while Igor Bogdanov failed to successfully defend his thesis at the same time. After Igor's failed thesis defense, his advisor agreed to allow him to obtain his doctorate if Igor could publish three peer-reviewed journal articles. After publishing the requisite articles, Igor successfully defended his thesis three years later, also receiving the same rare lowest-possible passing grade of "honorable" as his brother. Consequently, they published six papers in refereed physics and mathematics journals, including Annals of Physics and Classical and Quantum Gravity.

After reading the abstracts of both theses, a resident French physicist Max Niedermaier considered them to be pseudoscience, consisting entirely of dense technical jargon in a manner similar to the Sokal Affair. On 22 October 2002, Niedermaier subsequently distributed an email to this effect to various physicists. An eventual recipient of this email, the American mathematical physicist John Baez, created a discussion on the Usenet newsgroup sci.physics.research entitled, "Physics bitten by reverse Alan Sokal hoax? "

This question immediately attracted worldwide attention, both in the physics community and in the international popular press. Following Niedermaier, most of the participants in the Usenet discussion thread created by Baez made the assumption that the work was a deliberate hoax in the style of Sokal, which the Bogdanov brothers have continued to vehemently deny. Consequently, Niedermaier issued a private and public apology to the Bogdanovs on 24 October 2002 for having assumed that their work was a deliberate hoax (he has not endorsed the validity or merit of the work in question).

In response to contacts from a number of the journal's readers, the Editorial Board of the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity (CQG) issued a statement reading in part:

Regrettably, despite the best efforts, the refereeing process cannot be 100% effective. Thus the paper "Topological theory of the initial singularity of spacetime" by G Bogdanov and I Bogdanov, Classical and Quantum Gravity 18 4341-4372 (2001) made it through the review process even though, in retrospect, it does not meet the standards expected of articles in this journal.

The journal's Editorial Board became aware of this situation already in April 2002. The paper was discussed extensively at the annual Editorial Board meeting in September 2002, and there was general agreement that it should not have been published. Since then several steps have been taken to further improve the peer review process in order to improve the quality assessment of articles submitted to the journal and reduce the likelihood that this could happen again. However, there are at this time no plans to withdraw the article. Rather, the journal publishes refereed Comments and Replies by readers and authors as a means to comment on and correct mistakes in published material.

The Bogdanovs point to the support of referees appointed by Classical & Quantum Gravity who concluded in May 2001 (before Niedermaier sent his mail):

Sound, original and of interest. With revisions I expect the paper to be suitable for publication.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. (...) I can accept that in the limit of infinite temperature, contact can be made with a topological phase of some field theory (the type of field theory needs to be elaborated on however). The crucial question, however, is how does the initial topological phase break down to a universe we see today.

Referees do not necessarily express the same opinion on the same paper. For instance, the report to The Journal of Physics A (June 2000) [1] about the paper "KMS State of Spacetime at the Planck Scale" was highly critical:

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 is not done in this paper.

It is difficult to describe what is wrong in Section 4, since almost nothing is right. The author seems to believe that just because and analytic continuation of a function exists, the argument "must" be considered a complex number. He also makes the rather obvious claims in eq's 6 and 7 that complex numbers should be the sums of real and imaginary parts. The remainder of the paper is a jumble of misquoted results from math and physics. It would take up too much space to enumerate all the mistakes: indeed it is difficult to say where one error ends and the next begins.

In conclusion, I would not recommend that this paper be published in this, or any, journal.

Nevertheless, after profound revision, the same paper was a year later published in the Chinese Journal of Physics, n°40, 2002: pp.149-158. Here is an extract of one of the referee's reports:

'Motivated by string theory results, in this paper the author discussed the space-time below Planck scale as a thermodynamic system subject to KMS condition. Since the physics at the Planck scale has been largely unexplored, the viewpoint presented in this paper can be interesting as a possible approach of the Planck scale physics. Thus it will be reasonable to consider the publication of this paper in Chinese Journal of Physics. Before publication, however, the author should correct the followings. If these corrections are made, it can be published in the journal wihout further reviewing.

Mathematical physicist John Baez notes:

I assure you that the Bogdanoff's theses are gibberish to me - even though I work on topological quantum field theory, and know the meaning of almost all the buzzwords they use. Their journal articles make the problem even clearer. ... 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.

I'm quite sure there is nothing of merit in the papers. 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. They're sort of stringing together plausible-sounding sentences that add up to nothing.

One thing that seems pretty clear to me is that the Bogdanovs don't know how to do physics.

But John Baez comment was contradicted by Massimo Porrati, professor of Physics in New York University who commented on October 30, 2002 :

"The comment of that John Baez (about the Bogdanoff Lagrangian) is also pretty lousy. He seems to find particularly funny the statement (of the Bogdanoffs) that a topological theory does not depend on L. Well, unfortunately, that is what happens in Witten's theory of Donaldson Polynomials (topological N=2 or N=4 SYM). That theory can be though of as the gauge-fixed version of L=0. All its nontrivial features come from the Gribov ambiguity of the gauge fixing."

Physicist Peter Woit notes:

...the Bogdanov theses, especially Igor’s, were so full of egregious nonsense, in particular with respect to topological quantum field theory, that they should have been beyond the pale.

The Bogdanoffs' work is significantly more incoherent than just about anything else being published. 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.

Here too Peter Woit comment appears to be in full contradiction with, for instance, this report written by Roman Jackiw, professor at MIT, whose conclusion dated Apr 11,2002 was sent to the University of Bourgogne :

The author proposes a novel, speculative solution to the problem of the pre-Big-Bang initial singularity, which cannot be analyzed within conventional field theory. His suggestion is that this (inaccessible) epoch is governed by a topological, thermal field theory, satisfying a KMS-periodicity condition. In order to make his ideas concrete, the author makes various startling, but technical proposals, which reflect vividly the originality of his thinking : the field theoretical context is N=2 super gravity. At a pre-Planckian level space-time has a Lorentzian and a Minkowskian component in a quantum entangled state, the Riemanian component is dominant in early times, a singular Euclidean instanton governs the initial singularity. This (Bogdanoff) paper entails the following fascinating phenomenon. In conventional approaches, many people believe that at high temperatures a dynamical theory (e.g. field theory) loses one time-like dimension. Thus physical Yang-Mills theory becomes three-dimensional gauge theory and the Chern-Simons term (introduced by Deser, Templeton and me for that purpose) becomes relevant. On the other hand, the author's unconventional idea is that at high temperatures the Yang Mills system fluctuates into the suppressed forth dimension taking on time like and/or space like values.

The cosmologist Alain Riazuelo notes that :

Stating that the Bogdanoff work has to do with (scientific) cosmology is a bit like stating that the Bible also has. The Bogdanovs do talk about the early universe, but lack more or less all the basis that should be required for their "work" to be considered in the field of science.

Here again, some experts in the field are of another opinion. Here is the report before defense written by the theoretical physisicist Jac Verbaarchot, professor at Stony Brook University  :

The main results of the thesis are in CJP paper where the author establishes the concept of topological inertia. An important role is played by the first Donaldson invariant which, according to a theorem by the author, is equal to the high temperature limit of a topological partition function. Still another interpretation of this index given by the author is as the difference of the number of gravitational instantons and gravitational monopoles.

This year I had two graduate students who successfully completed their thesis. In addition to that I have been on numerous Ph.D. exams. The present thesis ranks among the best I have seen during the past few years. I am particularly impressed by the scientific maturity of the author and by his courage to pursue a single great idea to great depth.

At the University of Stony Brook, he would pass the Ph.D. exam without the slightest difficulty.

The Bogdanovs' work purports to encompass quantum groups, KMS theory, and topological field theory, culminating in a proposition of a theory for describing what occurred before the Big Bang. Whilst the general public cannot be expected to have the expertise to evaluate the specialised technical claims of either side in this dispute, virtually all physicists who have published on web forums and sci.physics.research newsgroups are of the opinion that the Bogdanovs' papers constitute a hoax, "gibberish," or, at best, sloppy work plagued by errors, while relatively few theoretical physicists continue to defend the Bogdanovs' theory.

Before the widespread hoax discussion, the reports on Bogdanovs' theses and most of the journal referees' reports spoke favorably of their work, describing it as original and containing interesting ideas. This is at the root of the questions raised regarding the efficacy of the peer-review system that the scientific community and academia use to determine the merit of submitted manuscripts for publication. Regarding the Bogdanov publications, physicist Steve Carlip remarks:

The referees made a mistake. Well, accidents happen. Referees are volunteers, and get very little reward for their service to the community. Sometimes they get overwhelmed ... and get careless. Sometimes they don't want to admit that they don't understand a paper. Sometimes they read their own ideas into a paper. Two referees are better than one, but once in a while they'll both make mistakes.

Whereas theoretical physicist Lubos Motl comments:

...it does not surprise me much that [one of the referees of the thesis and for "Annals of Physics"] 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.)

Motl also notes that:

All physicists seem to agree that:

• The detailed structure of the paper (and very similar papers published elsewhere) probably makes no sense - at least no one has been able to understand the content of the paper in detail; I am not a new Planck who has been able to identify new Einsteins either.
• Isolated pieces of the paper are more or less true - and they were probably copied from other papers.
• The brothers have had a financial interest to promote themselves as geniuses because it helps their books (and other things) to be sold well in France and elsewhere - which is at least one of the reasons why they would continue to say that the papers were serious even if they were not.

An indication of the impact that these theories may have on theoretical physics can be inferred by the references made to them in subsequent papers by other theoretical physicists (3 citations on SPIRES database for a total of 6 published papers and one unpublished preprint). As a possible baseline comparison, the publications of cosmologist Alain Riazuelo were cited on SPIRES over 500 times.

Meanwhile, the Bogdanovs continue to vigorously defend their work as genuine and to stand behind their original claims. The general topic of "before the Big Bang" is a complicated and technical field, and their work purports to present forward-looking theories.

In 2004, the Bogdanovs published a highly successful popular-science French-language book, Avant Le Big-Bang ("Before the Big Bang"), based on a simplified version of their theses, where they presented their own approach amongst other cosmological models. In the framework of a short weekly television program, created by the Bogdanovs in 2002, a 90-minute special cosmology broadcast went on the air on the French channel France 2 in August 2004. Both the book and television show have been criticized for scientific inaccuracies, while others admire the Bogdanovs' ability to bring the subjects of cosmology and relativity to a wider audience.

• Scientific consensus
• Consensus science
• Pseudoscience
• Protoscience
• Junk science
• Fringe science
• Hoaxes

• A discussion of the controversy.
• Additional discussion with various people related to the brothers.
• «Pot-Pourri» from Igor & Grichka Bogdanov's Before the Big Bang.
• Theses and scientific publicationsby Igor and Grichka Bogdanov.
• J. Giorgis article in The Economist.
• Physics hoaxers discover Quantum Bogosity in The Register.
• Urs Schreiber blog.
• Jacques Distler (1, 2) blog entries
• Peter Woit (1, 2, 3) blog entries
• A small journey in the Bogdanoff universe by the cosmologist Alain Riazuelo
• The Bogdanovs' personal web sites:
  • Mathematical Center of Riemannian Cosmology
  • International Institute of Mathematical Physics