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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.
I also modified the first sentence of the article to make it less provoking to similar speculations.
How did the Bogdanov spelling come about? Don't they themselves always spell their name as Bogdanoff?
I guess they must be descendants of the post-revolution wave of Russian emigrants. At the time it was common to transliterate the -ov ending of Russian names as -off, which is how it is pronounced in Russian. Nowadays this way of transliterating is not common anymore. But spelling their name as Bogdanov now would be similar to spelling Smirnoff vodka as "Smirnov". I am sure they themselves would object.
Hi Lubos,
Your comment that "the question whether papers like that should be published is dividing the community of mathematical and theoretical physics" is as much nonsense as the papers themselves. I believe that the editorial board of the journal that published the paper you are referring to issued a statement saying that the paper did not meet their standards and should not have been published. The consensus of the community about this is clear.
By the way, I feel highly constrained about commenting in detail on the Bogdanovs, given that someone I know has been threatened with a lawsuit by them for publicly making what seemed to me to be accurate statements about them and their work.
Peter:
With due respect I think your comments above is totally unwarranted. Not only is Lubos's commentary not nonsense at all. It is one of the best blog entry I find on his blog: Very knowledgeable with pretty deep analysis, and is completely fair and balanced in expressing opinion.
And it is even odd for an anti-string guy like you to comment on a paper like that. Do you, Peter, necessarily believe that the paper by this brother, is invalid, incorrect, total nonsense comparing with other papers published by mainstream string theoretists, which are valid, correct, not nonsense? What would you say when doing the comparison? Would you then become a defendender of legitimate string theory research in face of the "nonsense" of this brother's work?
I am not going to comment on this brother's work directly. But it seems Peter is being hypocritical if he is beginning to believe that some string theory research is more valid and more correct than other.
You almost sound like an atheist trying to support defend one religion against another, Peter.
Quantoken
Yes, I think the brothers asked some reasonable and interesting questions and may have had the seeds of a couple of good ideas but their underlying agenda and attitude--esp to those who criticise them--was dodgy and suspect. Criticism, even severe criticism, is at the heart of science after all. Also, they fail to properly explore and present their approach to these questions in a reasonable or coherent way. This is crucial.
I have worked as an editor on highly technical manuscripts in physics and biology but their "Chinese Journal of Physics" paper (strange choice of journal?)is the most confusing and messiest thing I have ever seen, and I bet unreadable to anyone. Even the notation is strange. Sure, they took various ingredients like Donaldson invariants, N=2 supergravity, KMS states, topological field theory and quantum groups but then put them all in a blender.
I bet no-one in the Harvard physics or maths depts could understand their CJP paper--not because they are not smart enough obviously--but because the paper is just simply unreadable. So if you write stuff that even top people can't understand then you are wasting your time. There is a myth that no-one understood Einstein's work on relativity back in 1905 or 1915. On the contrary anyone with the technical background understood it and its significance right away.
A Bogdanov 'sock puppet' also appeared about a year ago on some blogs in the guise of a 'Chinese Professor' who praised the brothers work highly, although the isp came out of France I believe. The whole thing was kind of bizarre really.
Good/correct papers in mathematics and
theoretical/mathematical physics usually have a 'flow' and beauty to them; you can see this even if you don't fully understand the paper. For example, even if you don't understand what Ed Witten is saying in one of his papers you can see right away that that they have a beauty and elegance that stands out and the arguments just flow along smoothly--they are as much works of art as science. And this is true of just about any famous paper or any good paper; people with the technical background can see it right away or at least see if their is real substance or potential there.
Good post indeed Lubos, but scary as heck. It would seem to indicate that physics is in danger of becoming science fiction. What I don't see is how a reviewer (or editor) could accept a paper she didn't understand. The reviewer who doesn't understand should either pass it on to somebody who can understand or ask the editor to send it back for a rewrite. What use is a paper nobody can understand, even if it should turn out to be correct?
Hi CIP,
don't dramatize it so much. It's been always the case in the history of science that there were papers that (almost) no one could understand. Some people were ahead of their time; there have been some geniuses. Physics is a creative subject, not quite a mechanistic one - especially physics that makes big leaps to the future.
Such a misunderstanding by the majority is usually a problem, but it may occassionally be a good thing, too.
For example, today it is easy for me to say that I think that Susskind's paper explaining the Veneziano formula using rubber bands and harmonic oscillators should have been accepted almost immediately. I would say the same thing about all papers by Duff and others who were anticipating the duality of 11D and 10D string vacua, and about tens of similar contexts.
A referee is a person who should be chosen in such a way that she or he has a big chance to understand the paper. On the other hand, it just cannot be true that it is the person who is the *best in the world* in understanding a given paper. If this were the case, Witten and a few others would be reviewing several papers a day. A referee must be careful not to kill a paper that other colleagues, who may understand things better, will view as a bombshell.
I would like to emphasize one thing: in my opinion, one should not *reject* a paper just because he or she does not understand it. It is not a sufficient reason. In the same paragraph, I must also say that it is impossible to *accept* a paper just because the referee doesn't understand it, of course. 
It's likely that one can't extract a working rational novel framework from Bogdanovs' papers. But I believe that the certainty of the community that the paper is rubbish is heavily overblown - it is an example of groupthink. And yes, it is easy to imagine that some future meaningful papers will bear a resemblance to some aspects of the Bogdanovs' work.
The brothers are more original than many of us in many contexts. One of the reasons why most people doing similar things would reject it is that the paper is not really string theory, and therefore it cannot be based on a reliable framework to study the initial singularity.
The impact of this argument on me is limited. It's very conceivable that we will have to find very new tools to study the initial singularity - and they may become a completely new part of string theory. It's possible that some of these new ideas will look almost independent of the usual stringy cannon. And it's also a possibility (a long shot) that Bogdanovs' paper is in principle valuable and will be derived from string theory.
Best
Lubos
Peter:
"I believe that the editorial board of the journal that published the paper you are referring to issued a statement saying that the paper did not meet their standards and should not have been published. The consensus of the community about this is clear."
This is a completely ridiculous argument. There is absolutely no consensus, and even if there were one, it is irrelevant. Roman Jackiw, who is something like the second or third most cited physicist, liked the paper and recommended it, much like C. Kounnas, Majid, and others.
I say that it is comparable to other papers proposing new ideas about the initial singularity - which is simply a difficult subject.
I am shocked that the same Peter Woit who opposes the consensus of the high energy theoretical community that string theory is the only framework with a chance to become an underlying structure of physics beyond the Standard Model suddenly derives his conclusions from a "consensus" that is moreover only supported by a statement of an editorial board of one particular journal - a statement that was only released because of immense pressure from a small group of physicists whose reason for the pressure was not quite scientific - but rather a fear that their work could look comparable to the work of postmodernists.
Please be more specific when you criticize the paper. A "consensus of an editorial board" certainly does not count as an argument at this Reference Frame.
Best
Lubos
Lubos,
I have no opinion on the paper in question, but I have always applied a three part standard to my own reviews: 1) Is it free from logical and mathematical error, 2)Is it original, and 3) Is it understandable to its intended audience.
I don't think I've ever rejected a paper outright just because I couldn't understand it, but I've sent plenty back for clarification and further explanation. I have also asked editors to send papers to other reviewers. I've also had papers sent back because the reviewers couldn't understand them
Nothing I've said means a reviewer is entitled to reject a paper because he doesn't like the new ideas introduced, or finds them counterintuitive.
I also find it appalling that a scientific author would threaten to sue a critic. That's a good way to kill science completely.
Dear CIP,
your rules of acceptance are of course OK, nevertheless:
"Is it free from logical and mathematical error"
I doubt that you have checked every single factor in every single equation in every paper you have reviewed, assuming that you have reviewed at least 20 papers.
"It is original"
I doubt you've only accepted original papers.
"Understandable..."
I doubt that everything has been understandable in them. My policy followed your points, but not dogmatically, but the ratio of the papers I reject is still around 50 percent.
I also agree that suing about the validity of papers has no place in science.
All the best
Lubos
"Roman Jackiw, who is something like the second or third most cited physicist, liked the paper and recommended it, much like C. Kounnas, Majid, and others"
Hmm Jackiw liked the idea of fluctiations into the metric in I. PhD thesis and recommended to publish this idea. The others, afaik, reviewed parts of the thesis, not the paper
Lubos,
All your points are valid, but if I can't understand the key ideas, I don't consider that I can review the paper adequately.
Im sorry, the Bogdanov paper does not satisfy any respectable physics publication criteria.
It is completley incoherent, many of the actual equations are correct, but taken out of context. Moreover there are mathematical leaps and jargon used that make no sense whatsoever. All of this was debated at length on SPR several years ago. It doesn't matter that they have noe or two ideas that may make sense. I mean should we listen to science fiction writers? Many of them have had original ideas that predate discoveries in physics. Yet that is not how physics is done.
You know, you can complain all you want about speculative science, like say LQG. And I might agree there is a lot of assumptions that make it rather sketchy. However, even in the most precarious paper, the logical thread (at least in the limited scope they are considering) follows and flows. One equation goes to the next, and thats fine given the axioms they are considering.
This is not the case here, and the reason why almost everyone agrees its rubbish.
I will agree there is a bit of a problem in physics. Certain papers are extremely hard to read and often filled with little errors (often that don't actually destroy the argument). Contrast that with mathematicians papers which are nearly always (ironically) more readable and logical, even to a physicist audience. The cadence can be slow and painful in rigor-mortis at times, but at least you know you are getting results you can trust.
Of course then you have wonderful writers like Witten or Dirac, where everything is made so clear and eloquent its like reading a novel, and even the most sloppy reviewer can follow everything. And often the material covered in just a few pages is enormous.
But putting the Bogdanovs... work at the same level as other science papers on arxiv, well I just can't agree with that.
Sorry but I disagree that the logical flow of LQG papers is significantly better. It is the same type of impressionistic writing where many gaps are waiting to be filled in, and where the most important questions - like whether the theory is capable to describe anything that at least remotely looks like any physics in space we know - are unanswered.
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.
Like the elephant and the tail LQG holds, it may only be part of the larger perspective of developement of the Quantum gravity model?
Cubists are impressionists and all they have to do is change their perspectve a bit, on how they observe Mona LIsa's Smile
What historical data would have been place before introspective artists and we reconcile that the cubists have found some satisfaction in the monte carlo explanation of membranes shown in the developing work of John Baez?
In regards to quantum gravity I would say that there is a nice picture of dynamical triangulations evident in the monte carlo method, but as "soccerballs" this is not the way Tegmark and others see the universe?
Igor Bogdanov is using your relative support by linking to your article in the Wikipedia page about "Bogdanov Affair" (where he is hystericaly removing any kind of critic) and pretend that he got some support from "Harvard".
The funniest thing about it, is that, the Bogdabov consider-at the very beginning-their works as a proper alternative to the "failure" of string theory, and attack it roughly (in their last book,on internet).
That it came only to a string theorist to defend a paper that even the editorial board of the journal which have initially accepted as finally reject (after all, there was nobody at CQG smart enough to bring out your points ?)is the best "disowning" that no one "anti-stringist" have ever dreamed about.
best regards.
The above comment is meaningless. In my opinion, the editorial board of CQG issued his comment only to relax the discussion. The truth is that Bogdanoff work could have highlighted something meaningfull about early cosmology.
Igor is trying to make this paper the basis for this assertion :
"many physicists seem to regard Bogdanoff work as difficult to understand though the veracity of their model regarding what one should expect "before the big bang" seems to have recently gained new supporters among certain researchers in theoretical physics"
You should definitely intervene in the discussion :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Tal...Bogdanov_Affair
"Walford"
The above comment is meaningless. In my opinion, the editorial board of CQG issued his comment only to relax the discussion. The truth is that Bogdanoff work could have highlighted something meaningfull about early cosmology.
mm...sounds just like one of the numerous sock puppets used by the Zweinstein.
I really love the kind of expressions like "the truth is...".
Of course "the truth is " that the Bogdanov brothers are indeed geniuses who can take a walk under the Planck scale.
regards.
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