From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Fri Nov 01 2002 - 11:38:54 MST
Recently two Frenchmen managed to get hoax papers accepted as PhD theses
and published in a number of respected physics journals. Read more
at http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&safe=off&threadm=ap7tq6%24eme%241%40glue.ucr.edu&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fhl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26safe%3Doff%26selm%3Dap7tq6%2524eme%25241%2540glue.ucr.edu
John Baez, respected sci.physics commentator, writes:
"We all laughed when Alan Sokal wrote a deliberately silly paper entitled
"Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of
Quantum Gravity", and managed to get it accepted by a refereed journal
of social and cultural studies, Social Text.
"But now I hear that two brothers have managed to publish 3 meaningless
papers in physics journals as a hoax - and even get Ph.D. degrees in
physics from Bourgogne University in the process!"
The expert commentary in the thread seems to make it clear that the
papers are in fact gibberish. They were published in Classical and
Quantum Gravity, as well as Annals of Physics, among others.
It's disturbing to see that a hard science like physics is apparently
as vulnerable to accepting well-crafted hoaxes which string together the
correct buzzwords, even in meaningless combinations.
Hal
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