John Baez has a definition, which, if used without a double standard, implies that his own thesis advisor Irving Segal at MIT was/is a crackpot. Baez’s criteria are perhaps too strong. A distinction must be made between amateurs who clearly have no idea what they are talking about and those with serious credentials in the field they are writing about who are expressing deviant, unpopular, strange (because they are so far ahead of the pack perhaps like Feynman was with his diagrams, or Bohm was with his quantum potential) or perhaps they are wrong, and even “not even wrong” on some particular hobby horse. In any case “crackpot” is a “smear” word like Joe McCarthy’s use of “Red” etc, which should be avoided. By all means correct technical errors but best to avoid charged personal terms. Is Lenny Susskind, for example, a “crackpot.”? By Baez’s criterion he would have to be. I don’t think he is. I worked with Lenny at Cornell in 1963-64.

Where and when ? I can’t remember it!

Good morning,

We would like to react to Peter Woit comment on our thesis and reports.

Woit wrote : “I wouldn’t be surprised if some reports were missing.”

IGB : There are no reports missing. These are the “official reports” that everyone has the possibility to check with University of Bourgogne. This makes a total of 15 reports (which is quite unusual in itself since normally a thesis only requires 2 reports). This answers clearly the question : there is no “hidden report”.

Woit wrote : “I’ve always had some sympathy for the people who ended up on the Bogdanov’s thesis committees. It’s a difficult position to be in when you have to decide what to do with students who seem to be enthusiastic and have worked hard, but are very weak and have completed not very good theses.

IGB : How do you know that we have completed not very thesis? We are mathematicians, you are physicist. In a sympathetic letter, you wrote us that you do not know quantum groups theory ; “A large part of your work has to do with quantum groups and I’m not an expert in this field.”

Question : why don’t you trust Majid when he says “Bogdanov’s ideas about signature fluctuations are to my mind about the more original and interesting that I have come across?”

Why do you refuse to admit that we have build a bicrossproduct “of a type not seen before” (theorem 3.3.2) The basic theme is tomix algebraic structures associated to the Euclidean and the Lorentzian signatures intosingle algebraic constructions. Bogdanov identifies this as constructing certain cocycle Hopf algebras ot a type not seen before : ” These cocycle bicrossproduct results, in section3.3, from a body of original work which could certainly be the basis of a published researchpaper. ”

We have spent many, many years working with Majid. He knows our ideas from A to Z. Do you think that he would have allowed the work to contain “some mistakes” or nonsensical parts?

The answer is NO.

Woit wrote : ” A not unreasonable thing to do under the circumstances is to do one’s best to find something of value in their work, ”

IGB Yes. That would be a good thing to do.

Woit wrote : But the Bogdanov theses, especially Igor’s, were so full of egregious nonsense, in particular with respect to topological quantum field theory, that they should have been beyond the pale.

IGB : It is rather bizarre that you insist so much on the “nonsense” of our work. After all you wrote that you are not an expert in quantum groups. This theory is the mathematical basis of our signature fluctuations model. If you do not understand quantum groups, you do not understand our model. Nothing wrong about it. But then, stop saying “it’s nonsense”.

Woit wrote : While some of these reviewers were string theorists, others weren’t, so the whole mess can’t be blamed on string theory.

IGB : Do you seriously think that a scientist of the magnitude of Jackiw signed his report without filtering every idea, sentence, proposition, of the thesis? We worked extensively before he would agree with the quality of the work. Jackiw would never have approved “nonsensical” work just because he found us “enthousiastic” (by the way, we never met him before he wrote his report : all the work was based on reading the thesis and exchanging informations or arguments by mail).

We can accept that you disagree, as a physicist, with our signature fluctuations model. But again we are mathematicians. And we developped our work on mathematical basis. Therefore the only thing that matters is : is our major theorem (a cocycle bicrossproduct of new type) valid or not?

The answer given by experts is YES, without any doubt.

If you disagree with this yoy know will have to prove it.

Thank you for your attention,

Igor Boganoff Grichka Bogdanoff
Posted by Bogdanoff at June 12, 2004 09:42 AM

I have always felt that the American system, where you kick out weak students after two years if they donīt pass their qualifying exams, is better for everybody than the European system, where the only real checkpoint is the dissertation, and people can linger forever. It is not really fair to let people work for a decade and then deny them a Ph. D.

I am not sure how consistently the American system is implemented in the US, however. It is probably not so easy to keep people out if they don’t require funding.

Posted by Thomas Larsson at June 12, 2004 02:14 AM

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Speaking of the parallels between postmodernism and string theory becoming dominant, one can see a similar parallel in the “neoconservatives” becoming dominant in conservative thinking which first started in academia and eventually made it’s way into official political policy in the Dubya administration.

Many of the ideas which eventually came to fruition in the Bush administration’s policy in pre-emptive wars in invading and taking over Iraq, were ideas cooked up by folks like political philosopher Leo Strauss and eventually taken up by guys in Dubya’s administration like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, etc … who started to spread their ideas of pre-emptive wars and an American empire all the way back to the days when they were in the Reagan administration. With the present disaster in Iraq with oil pipelines being blown up every few weeks, American soldiers being killed every other day by insurgents, etc … despite Saddam being caputured and out of the picture, the “neoconservatives” have been slowly falling out of favor and being blamed for everything that is going wrong in Iraq.

It seems like the easiest way “unpopular” and/or “unrealistic” ideas can become dominant is attributed to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, (paraphrased as) “If you tell a big lie and keep on repeating it often enough, people will eventually perceive it as the truth.”

It would be interesting to see if the popularity of ideas such as postmodernism, string theory, neoconservativism, etc … came about by hype and propaganda being repeated over and over again for many years.

On the surface it appears things that are “propped up” mainly by propaganda and hype, seem to follow speculative “bubble” type of patterns in their rise and downfalls. During the upward rise of the bubble, many people are willing to “suspend disbelief” in the promises made. Eventually a “bubble” bursts when the hype can no longer fool anyone and “reality” starts to set in. After the point of the bubble bursting, it seems to be only the diehard fanatics who still believe in the hype and propaganda while everybody else has moved on.
In the end, making too many unrealistic promises and repeatedly proclaiming triumphalism in an idea, seems to doom it when the promises are unfulfilled and “reality” takes over.

The report of Majid is certainly supportive. It is perhaps on his nature. It should be remarked we are speaking of a couple of PhD thesis, no less but no more. As Majid says, it is the *basis* for future work.

Note that for the first time since the beginning of this affair in 2002, all the 15 reports concerning the thesis of Bogdanoffs are available on the CERN document server :

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/search.py?recid=740747&ln=en