"It's an interesting case study in how stuff that is basically nonsense is easily gotten past referees these days," says Peter G. Woit, a theoretical physicist who directs instruction in the mathematics department at Columbia University. "There really was a serious failure of the refereeing here."
It sure seems to have the same end effect....
Of course, they apparently weren't trying to prove a point, but trying to get a doctorate by publishing peer-reviewed articles, which seems a bit backwards.
Like Mr. Sternheimer, he did not follow all parts of Igor's work. "This was not our specialty," Mr. Verbaarschot says, referring to the dissertation committee. "Nobody on the committee had any deep understanding of the ideas." They relied on the journal referees who had accepted Igor's papers for publication in order to judge the finer points of the work.
"In hindsight, the weakness is that there were no real experts" on the committee, says Mr. Verbaarschot. "Maybe there are no real experts in what they are doing. What they are doing is so far out of the mainstream."
But scientists who say that they do understand the Bogdanovs' papers deem them worthless. "I'm quite sure there is nothing of merit in the papers," says Mr. Baez. "The papers are extremely eclectic in the math and physics terminology they use. Some people who read these and may not be knowledgeable on the terminology may give them the benefit of the doubt.
"I can tell that they're not really doing anything with the terms," he continues. "They're sort of stringing together plausible-sounding sentences that add up to nothing."
It's pretty funny, actually. There are fields and specializations out there about which everyone else knows nothing. |
