French Physicists' Cosmic Theory Creates a Big Bang of Its Own

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
Saturday, November 9th, 2002
French Physicists' Cosmic Theory Creates a Big Bang of
Its Own
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
http://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. 

[...]

How the Bogdanovs came to this pass is perhaps a
cautionary tale about the way physics is done
today.... 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 ...

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....

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 ....

[...]

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" ...

[...]

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."

[...]

... 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." 

[...]

"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 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,
http://cassiopaea.org/cass/bog-sternheimer.htm, said
it was now his "working hypothesis" that the Bogdanovs
had done something interesting.

[...]

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."

[...]

"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....

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."

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/09/arts/09PHYS.html

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