Luboš Motl vs LQG
In a comment to his blog Luboš Motl reveals his agenda. He writes there:
[…] I believe that this is one of the main reasons why the LQG people are the loudest critics of Bogdanoffs. The LQG people simply do not like the idea of a mirror that shows their work to be more or less equivalent to something that two French science-fiction writers can compose within a year. But it more or less is, and as far as I am concerned, the speculation that the initial singularity should be described by a phase rooted in topological QFT is a much deeper idea than the idea that the spacetime should be made of links and vertices.
Whether the initial singularity (if there were such singularities at all) is better described by topological QFT or by the idea that the spacetime should be made of links and vertices - is yet to be seen. Perhaps both ideas are utterly wrong. Future development of physics will show (or not). Notice that Luboš has started his blog on “Bogdanoff paper” by stating that Bogdanovs are ” two French journalists and scientific comedians”. This is evidently derogatory. Technically Bogdanovs are as much “scientists” as Luboš Motl - they have legitimate PhD’s and publications in scientific journals. Luboš Motl, on the other hand, can be described as “scientific comedian” - see his web page “Home page of Abbe Hyupsing Qong”at http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~motl/. Yet he is not talking about himself as a “comedian”. This is unfair. Similarly unfair is the following comment by Lubos:
[…] I apologize but I had to erase two comments - a speculative thread started by an anonymous author - because it was too sensitive. Please don’t be afraid do reveal your identity. It may be unpleasant if someone (scientists in this case) is kind of attacked by a writer whose identity is unknown.
Yet when Bogdanovs, who are also scientists, just somewhat different, were wildly attacked by writers whose identity is unknown - Luboš did not protest!
Back to the comparison between Bogdanovs papers and LQG. There is, I think, an essential difference here. LQG papers, like many papers in theoretical physics, may have pieces of some healthy mathematics - except that it is useless for physics. And the authors, very often, have very shallow, wrong, or not at all understanding of physics. Yet they use physics terms - because in this way their papers get published and they think that they are doing “physics”. Bogdanovs papers, on the other hand, seem to have interesting ideas and healthy sense of what may be relevant for physics, yet they have severe holes in their mathematical education. I have good reasons to beleieve that they do not know what is a tensor product of two vector spaces, what is a contravariant tensor and how it differs from a covariant one, what is a fibre bundle (apart of the fact that it has a base space and fibres ), etc. They certainly do not know the definition of a von Neumann algebra and they probably think that they do not need to know - you can speak of KMS states without really knowing what they are. So we have two different categories of a “boundary science”. We have papers like the one by Connes and Rovelli, presenting correct though trivial mathematics and showing complete shallowness concerning physics, and we have Bogdanos who are shallow or even wrong in their mathematics, but who may have a good sense as to which areas of physics may need more attention. One should not discard these boundary papers. The paper by Connes and Rovelli, even though shallow and sometimes even wrong, may be very useful for someone to produce something better. And the same for the papers by Igor and Grichka Bogdanovs (or Bogdanoffs - if you wish) . The same with Cramer’s TI of quantum mechanics. Often wrong - yet by simply understanding what is wrong there , one can learn a lot! What is important is an open discussion and open, healthy, criticism. But criticism of details. Not putting labels on people or their work.
