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Theoretical Physics Breakthrough or Hoax?
Brooklyn Bob writes "Ever get the feeling that some theoretical physics papers just don't make sense? According to this New York Times article, you may be right. Genius or gibberish? Who knows?" This belongs on your virtual refrigerator with nice big virtual magnet.
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Did you read the article? It clear that these guys have a shady past at best, previously guilty of plagiarism. Also, a few other noted scientists stated that these guys 'do not know how to do physics' based on their conversations with them. Most of physics does make sense because it is basic laws of motion and gravity. The stuff that is hard for most people to understand are things like quantum physics and theoretical physics.
What?
Besides, the article focuses more on the integrity of articles printed in scientific journals, and how it is hard to figure out if something is worthwhile or if it is crap when they're so hard to understand.
What?
For a collection of stuff on this subject, search google groups on ``reverse sokal hoax''. Then read the (long) thread in sci.physics.research.
I'm not a string theorist so I can't be 100% sure, but this stuff sure sounds like nonsense. The part about the Foucault pendulum aligning with the initial singularity sounds really silly. To quote John Baez, a mathmatical physicist (see below for a link)
It [one of the papers in question] goes on to discuss the supposed connection between N = 2 supergravity, Donaldson theory, KMS states and the Foucault pendulum experiment, which he claims "cannot be explained satisfactorily in either classical or relativistic mechanics". If you know some physics you'll find this statement slightly odd.
As I said, I'm not a string theorist, so I don't know for sure, but some very sharp people seem to support the contention that this is nonsense. John Baez has compiled some of the relvent stuff on his webapge, here. Jacques Distler's blog also contains some good analysis.
The other highly suspcious aspect of this whole affair is that the work was never published online prior to being submitted to a journal.
Some background for non-physicists: thesedays the primary venue for publishing new works is the arXiv. Several hundred papers per day are uploaded here in various categories, and it is the de facto standard library of modern research in physics.
After publishing your work on the arXiv, physicists around the work can and will read your paper and submit feedback. Typically, after publication on the arXiv you might submit your work to a paper-based journal, but this is only a secondary procedure, and the only real point is to give you bonus points for your resume.
Here is the main point:
No-one reads paper journals any more!
The fact that the Bogdanov papers were never uploaded to the arxiv meant that apart from the 2 referees (who basically seem to have abdicated responsibility), no-one had, or ever would have read their work!.
If the authors were serious researchers, they would have submitted their work to the arxiv so it could be read and critiqued by their peers.
Mr. Erikson couldn't be more wrong. Cosmology is swimming in experimental data right now, and there's orders-of-magnitude more on the horizon. In fact we have so much data it's a challenge to analyze it all in a computationally reasonable amount of time.
> Thus, the debate of good/bad art can rage forever
> without settlement, and that's fine; however,
> sooner or later, many scientific theories are
> demonstrated to be false
You don't know nuclear physics then. There are several theories that, we won't be able to for hundreds if years, if we're lucky, and never, otherwise.
Things get murkier when we start dealing with cosmology.
When you're dealing with the physical states at be beginning of the universe (nuclear physics+cosmology) things get really out of whack. We don't know what 90% of the missing matter is out there, we've investigated only a small portion of the universe, we don't know if we know all the fundamental forces in the universe (so far, we've counted 4) and we only know how those forces work in relatively mild (comparing to the big bang) conditions, yet we have the audacity to believe that any theory about the start of the universe is more than speculation.
Estethics plays a bigger role in the acceptance of theory in some scientific areas, than you might otherwise believe.
I hope you aren't saying that being falsifiable is the same as being demonstrated to be false; because that isn't true. Falsifiable is a concept coined by Karl Popper and it doesn't mean that a statement is false. It means that a statement has to "expose itself to disproof." Only if a hypothesis or theory is falsifiable can it be considered truly scientific.
In other words when a knowledgeable reader sees a hypothesis or theory he must be able to envision evidence that would disprove said theory - otherwise the theory is not scientific. For example if my theory is "all foo's are bar" a knowledgeable reader can realized all she needs to find is a single foo that isn't bar. So that statement is falsifiable. But if my theory states "all people are controlled by little green men (LGMs) that live inside their heads and the LGMs disappear the moment they could be observed" then it is not falsifiable. No matter what evidence a reader envisions (ie. I cut open a head and find no LGM) I can always show that this evidence doesn't out right contradict my theory (ie Well the LGM disappeared moments before you cut open the head).
Maybe I'm being naive and everybody is already clear on what falsifiable actually means. It should be understood that falsifiable statements can be true. And non-falsifiable statements can be false.
Some of us access the internet on public computers. Some of us block any and all cookies (whether through paranoia or because we're required to). Some of us will undoubtedly have other good reasons I can't think of.
:)
The forced registration from the NYT and far too many other sites is absolute bollocks. Even if you're willing to register, continuously needing to log in (or even worse, reregistering if once more you've forgotten yet another semi-strong password from your list of thousands) gets extremely annoying, extremely fast.
So please, karma whores and just plain friendly people alike, just continue posting these links so the multitudes like me can go and read the article directly - not even needing to bother with looking up the link in Google News.
Besides, if the NYT doesn't do anything wrong with your data, then it's beneficial to them if people who'd only be filling in junk data anyway don't register at all, isn't it? (Actually, it'd be even more beneficial if they would use the data for bad purposes, but whatever...)
This was on http://www.incunabula.org/blog a while back
l
o retta.h tml
Links of interest are:
usenet post, along with abstracts from the theses:
http://makeashorterlink.com/?R35126F52
Also here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/27894.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/28/27963.htm
Very detailed info here and in linked pages:
http://cass.eahosting.com/cass/bogdanov2.htm
And here:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/bogdanov.html
In particular the link
http://cass.eahosting.com/cass/bogdanov2.htm
is invaluable as it has an email dialogue with the brothers about their
research, and is a work in progress
you can read about sokal here:
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/n
French Physicists' Cosmic Theory Creates a Big Bang of Its Own
.htm, said it was now his "working hypothesis" that the Bogdanovs had done something interesting.
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Everyone who ever wondered whether physicists were just making it all up when they talked about extra dimensions, dark matter and even multiple universes might take comfort in hearing that scientists themselves don't always seem to know.
Consider Drs. Igor and Grichka Bogdanov, French mathematical physicists and twins, who have recently been burning up the physics world with a novel and highly speculative theory about what happened before the Big Bang. Scientists have been debating whether the Bogdanov brothers are really geniuses with a new view of the moment before the universe began or simply earnest scientists who are in over their heads and spouting nonsense.
The uproar began late last month when rumors, denied by the brothers, began ricocheting around the Internet that they had constructed an elaborate hoax à la that of Dr. Alan Sokal, the New York University physicist who published a nonsense article about quantum gravity in the cultural journal Social Text in 1994. The story was that the pair, who are 53 and better known as the writers and producers of a popular television show in the 1970's and 80's in which they appeared as what might be called science clowns, had posed as string theorists to obtain fraudulent doctorates.
Until then, few physicists had noticed the brothers' theses or their journal articles, which purport to exploit something called the Kubo-Schwinger-Martin condition. It implies a mathematical connection between infinite temperature and imaginary time (don't ask) to probe the state of the universe at its very beginning. Suddenly physicists were trying to figure out what sentences like this meant, if anything: "Then we suggest that the (pre-)spacetime is in thermodynamic equilibrium at the Planck-scale and is therefore subject to the KMS condition."
Dr. Roman W. Jackiw, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who read and approved Igor Bogdanov's Ph.D. thesis, said he found it speculative but "intriguing."
But Dr. John Baez, a physicist and quantum gravity theorist at the University of California at Riverside, who has conducted a dialogue with the Bogdanov brothers on the Web site math.ucr.edu/home/baez/bogdanov, said, "One thing that seems pretty clear to me is that the Bogdanovs don't know how to do physics."
Dr. Peter Woit, a mathematician and physicist at Columbia University, said of the brothers' work, "Scientifically, it's clearly more or less complete nonsense, but these days that doesn't much distinguish it from a lot of the rest of the literature."
Indeed, the problem of distinguishing sense from nonsense goes beyond the Bogdanovs, say some physicists, who worry that far too much junk goes past the referees who vet articles for the scientific journals and the examiners who approve Ph.D's.
"The bigger issue is about scientific integrity, and how theoretical physics gets judged," said Dr. Frank Wilczek, another M.I.T. physicist and editor of Annals of Physics, where one of the Bogdanov papers appeared. "Do people really have a mastery of the field as a whole?"
How the Bogdanovs came to this pass is perhaps a cautionary tale about the way physics is done today. Born in 1949 in a castle in Gascogne, they described themselves as descendants of Russian and Austrian nobility. After studying applied mathematics at the Institute of Political Science and the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, the brothers carved out careers for themselves as writers and producers of their science television show, "Temps X" ("Time X").
A particularly murky episode in their careers began in 1991, when they published "God and Science," a book based on conversations with the French philosopher Dr. Jean Guitton. The book was a best seller in France, but the authors were sued for plagiarism by Dr. Trinh Xuan Thuan, an astronomer at the University of Virginia, who claimed they had copied passages from his 1988 book, "The Secret Melody, and Man Created the Universe." The brothers countersued, arguing that Dr. Thuan had borrowed from their earlier writings and Dr. Guitton's.
The case was eventually settled out of court in 1995, according to a settlement document provided by the brothers, with both sides renouncing any damages and paying their own court costs. Dr. Thuan, whose book is being reissued in the United States this winter, failed to respond to requests for an interview.
It was during the writing of the book, the brothers say, that they had a brainstorm for a theory of the so-called initial singularity, the infinitely dense, infinitely hot point into which all space and time were squeezed when the universe began, where normal physics breaks down. They returned to college to pursue Ph.D.'s, something they say they had always intended to do, but had been delayed by the unexpected success of their television show.
After two years at the University of Bordeaux, they moved to the University of Bourgogne and apprenticed themselves to Dr. Moshe Flato, founder of the journal Letters in Mathematical Physics and a prominent theorist known for his unconventional ways. When Dr. Flato died in 1998, a longtime associate, Dr. Daniel Sternheimer, a mathematician at C.N.R.S., the French center for scientific research, took over as the twins' adviser.
For the most part, however, the brothers were left to work on their own without much supervision, "pursuing ideas that are quite a bit out of the mainstream," said Dr. Jacobus Verbaarschot, a physicist now at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and one of the examiners for Grichka Bogdanov's doctoral thesis in 1999.
Dr. Sternheimer described the twins as stubborn "wunderkids" with very high I.Q.'s, who have a hard time understanding that they are not "the Einstein brothers" and prone to shooting themselves in the foot with vague statements and an "impressionistic" style. He called teaching them "like teaching My Fair Lady to speak with an Oxford accent."
Certainly they did not come off as the Einstein brothers in their dissertations. In June 1999, Grichka was granted a Ph.D. in mathematics by the École Polytechnique in Paris but with an "honorable," the lowest passing grade.
Igor, however, failed. The examining committee agreed that he could try again if he had three papers published in peer-reviewed journals, a common litmus test of legitimacy, Dr. Jackiw said.
"One has to have trust in the community," he explained. Igor's thesis had many things Dr. Jackiw didn't understand, but he found it intriguing. "All these were ideas that could possibly make sense," he said. "It showed some originality and some familiarity with the jargon. That's all I ask."
Igor got his degree in theoretical physics from the University of Bourgogne in July, also with the lowest possible grade, one that is seldom given, Dr. Sternheimer said.
"These guys worked for 10 years without pay," he said. "They have the right to have their work recognized with a diploma, which is nothing much these days."
The brothers have since returned to television, producing two-minute spots for a French series called "Rayons-X" ("X-Rays"). That would have been the end of it, except for the hoax rumors.
Dr. Sternheimer called the dispute "a storm in a teacup."
"They don't deserve so much interest, they don't deserve so much hatred," he said.
The aftermath has been bruising for both the Bogdanovs and for physics. Dr. Arkadiusz Jadczyk, a Polish theoretical physicist who has been conducting a dialogue with the brothers and other physicists on his Web site, cassiopaea.org/cass/bog-sternheimer
But the editors of Classical and Quantum Gravity repudiated their publication of a Bogdanov paper, saying it "does not meet the standards expected of articles in this journal," although they declined to retract it, inviting readers to send comments to the journal instead.
Dr. Wilczek stressed that the publication of a paper by the Bogdanovs in Annals of Physics had occurred before his tenure and that he had been raising standards. Describing it as a deeply theoretical work, he said that while it was "not a stellar addition to the physics literature," it was not at first glance clearly nonsensical.
"It's a difficult subject," he said. "The paper has a lot of the right buzz words. Referees rely on the good will of the authors." The paper is essentially impossible to read, like "Finnegans Wake," he added.
His colleague Dr. Jackiw compared modern physics to modern art: "One person looks at a piece of art and says it is gibberish; another person looks and says it's wonderful."
When physics talks about the universe before the Big Bang, it is completely speculative, he said, adding, "I would be very careful before calling something nonsense, especially if I didn't understand it."
Physicists were no more unanimous on the greater lesson of the whole affair. "This says something profound about what happens to theoretical physics in the absence of the discipline of experiment," Dr. Wilczek said.
Dr. Baez and others have suggested that the system administering the brothers' degrees and publishing their papers was lax. "I do think that the examiners, referees and editors do have something to answer for in this case," said Dr. Lee Smolin, a theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, in Waterloo, Ontario, citing what he said were obvious errors in the referees' reports for the brothers' papers.
But others, especially in France, disagree. "What they did or what they have written seems to show that they are not better (but not worse) than several theoretical physicists friends of ours who often use some mathematical terminology that they do not master well enough," said Dr. Robert Coquereaux, director of research at C.N.R.S., in a statement posted on Dr. Jackiw's Web site.
But Dr. David Gross, director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif., took issue with this view. "It is easy to judge, even from the abstract alone, that these papers are nutty," he said, noting that the physics community had ignored them until the hoax brouhaha.
Dr. Coquereaux and others said that the "publish or perish" ethos of academic research in the United States had contributed to the spread of unintelligible papers.
"There is a tradition of formally obscure but extremely serious and competent theoretical work in Europe," said Dr. Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist and gravitational theorist at the University of Marseille and the University of Pittsburgh. But there was a tradition of letting every wild idea go in the United States, he added. He described the brothers' papers as "really empty."
The Bogdanovs said they were still hopeful that their ideas would be recognized and useful in physics. As they said in an e-mail message: "Nonsense in the morning may make sense in the evening or the following day."
for every action a,
there exists an reaction b,
such that b is equal and opposite to a.
You're not actually formulating one of Newton's laws, you're just saying that an equal and opposite reaction exists... not making the implication that the reaction that will be observed will be the equal and opposite one.
What would work:
Let X,Y be actions.
For all X, there exists a (unique) Y such that X is equal and opposite to Y and that X occuring implies that Y will also occur.
I'm going to ignore the "unique existential quantifier" on Y (leave it as an existential) since the only thing it says is that "only one equal and opposite reaction exists".
To negate my proposition (sans uniqueness), we have (using parentheses for grouping):
There exists a X such that for all Y, ((X is not equal and opposite to Y) or ((X occurs) and (Y does not occur))).
So, all you have to do is find one instance where X occurs and Y (the equal and opposite) does not occur, and you're done. You can also find an instance where a reaction occurs, but it is not equal and opposite.
Okay, if you really want the uniqueness:
There exists a X such that for all Y, ((X is not equal and opposite to Y) or ((X occurs) and (Y does not occur))) or (there exists a Z such that (Z is equal and opposite to X) and (Z is not equal to Y))
So therefore, if you can find two reactions that are equal and opposite, but aren't the same, you've also found a counterexample... I'm not counting on that being very useful.
--
Apologies for any errors... I'm easily distracted by shiny objects.
Rethinking Everything. The above quote is on page 4.
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