Luboš Motl discovers the wheel…
On June 16, 2005, Luboš Motl discovered the wheel and has been termed a crackpot by Peter Woit. In his blog, Luboš Motl’s reference frame, Luboš Motl added an entry ” The Bogdanoff papers”. He makes several not quite correct statements there. He writes:
“.. two French scientific comedians with Russian names, namely Gritchka Bogdanoff and Igor Bogdanoff (whom the French TV audience knows as geniuses from a certain TV show), published something in “Classical and Quantum Gravity” that the journalists promoted as the ‘reverse Sokal hoax’.”
That is incorrect. It was John Baez, not some “journalists”, that promoted the term “reverse Sokal Hoax” Journalists joined later on. Then Luboš writes:
“A very detailed summary of the affair was written by
* John Baez
but others have written comments about it, too - for example Peter Woit or Jacques Distler. “
Here Luboš forgets that the most detailed commentary has appeared from the very beginning of the whole affair on the site of Arkadiusz jadczyk. Luboš thinks that his blog article is one of the first ones that suggests that Bogdanov’s paper may look as good as papers of many experts. In this respect he is not well informed. He should read the comments by Daniel Strenheimer and Robert Coquereaux on Jadczyk’s site.
Peter Woit writes in his blog:
[…] Maybe the only scandal here was the laziness of referees, not the infection of the whole subject by nonsense to the point where lots of people can’t tell the difference.[…]
It is not just the laziness. It is their lack of responsibility, on top of laziness. It is also a serious error of the thesis’ director. And, it is also a general degradation of values within the community of theoretical physicists. “Impressionism” became a new style, and “impressionists” deserve specialized journals, where “the correct jargon” and “new ways of putting the stuff together” will be enough to get published. No rigour or understanding of the terms used will be needed there. Then the editors and referees of the old-fashioned, “realistic”, journals will simply reject “impressionistic” papers and suggest sending it out elsewhere, without judging their content. I will be sending most of my papers to the old fashioned journals, but once in a while I may write something in an impressionistic (or even surrealistic) style as well.
I draw attention to how it was acomplished in terms of the article written….what more can be said from that point?
Comment by plato — 19 June, 2005 @ 3:39 pm
Please visit the blog at
http://npginfo.blogspot.com/
to know more about Lubos Motl knowledge physics.
Comment by Anonymous — 22 July, 2005 @ 1:14 pm
I have had similar thoughts about the Lubos, who likened me to the pope (http://motls.blogspot.com/2005/12/temperatures-autocorrelation.html). He has teamed up with climate-sceptic Steve McIntyre and is apparently not very impressed by the RealClimate.org blog (http://motls.blogspot.com/2005_10_01_motls_archive.html), and one of my posts on this blog prompted his response on autocorrelation. His response shows that he mixes up uncertainties associated with quantum states and non-linear chaos. He also is not able to see why using the very same data for creating models to derive a null-distribution and then use this null-distribution to test a hypothesis easily can involve circulat reasoning.I’m not impressed by this Lubos guy!
Comment by rasmus — 28 December, 2005 @ 10:48 pm
It would be a stretch to call Lubos Motl a genius - a nut case would be closer to the point. Just look at his review of Lee Smolins book ” The Trouble With Physics” posted on his blog. His review states that it is a weird book, full of non-sense that made him very angry. And now Lubos Motl and his motley crew of cohorts will have to find a new theory of nothing, that is mathematically elegant.
Comment by Kerri — 3 September, 2006 @ 1:31 am