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Mohamed El Naschie

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Mohamed El Naschie is an Egyptian mathematician, physicist and engineer. He served as editor-in-chief of the journal Chaos, Solitons & Fractals and has held positions at a number of universities in Europe and Egypt. He has been characterized by some as a crank.[1][2][3]

His research centers on a theory of everything called "E-infinity theory",[4] a "fractal cosmology model" which he developed in 1994. El Naschie characterizes his theory as follows: "This models a harmonic production of quarks and elementary particles through a golden section centered Cantorian fractal spacetime".[5] El Naschie's theories are regarded as not even wrong by most mathematicians, though a handful of researchers around the world continue to pursue his ideas. E-infinity theory also appears to enjoy a strong online following, though some have accused its defenders of sockpuppetry.[6]

Contents

[edit] Research and career

El Naschie is a prolific author of mathematical and scientific papers. A quick bibliographic search reveals that he has published well over 300 papers over the course of several decades, primarily centered on E-infinity theory, though he has also dabbled in related areas of quantum mechanics and non-linear dynamics. In a typical work, El Naschie observes, among other things, that:

The tying of a knot in the rope shortens the end to end length. This reduction can be used to measure the so called open thickness energy of knots. There is an incredible correlation between this energy and particle physics.[7]

El Naschie's papers are typically full of numerology and observations of approximate numerical coincidences: in the above-cited work, he notes:

The value of 78.541020 is quite close to 8π2 = 78.956835 and could be regarded as the dimension of a fuzzy E6 exceptional Lie group while the crisp value is |E6| = 78, as is well known."[7]

Of A note on quantum gravity and Cantorian spacetime, a MathSciNet reviewer concludes that "This paper seems to the reviewer to contain no mathematics."[8]

El Naschie received his PhD in mechanical engineering from the University of London. He claims to be a Distinguished Fellow of the Institute of Physics of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University,[5] though this is denied by officials at the institute.[1] El Naschie also claims to be the principal advisor to the Ministry of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, though Nature could not confirm this assertion.[1] It should be noted that a current lawsuit filed by El Naschie against Nature challenges some of these findings. As of June 2011, two law firms had abondoned the case, much of El Naschie's evidence had been excluded, and the trial was scheduled for October.[9]

Though generally considered a crank, El Naschie has been praised by some physicists. Ji-Huan He, a professor at Donghua University who has repeatedly cited El Naschie's work, wrote that "Men of genius like Einstein and Elnaschie very often ask some straightforward and seemingly innocent questions, which may turn out to have undreamed of answers".[1] El Naschie's supporters have claimed that his work is worthy of the Nobel Prize,[10] and that the work of Gerard 't Hooft (an actual Nobel winner) is derivative of his own.[11]

[edit] Chaos, Solitons & Fractals

Given the "long tail" of poor journals which has been observed throughout academic publishing, many non-mainstream mathematicians have found journals willing to carry their articles. El Naschie is distinguished among these in that he not only found avenues for publication, but that he became the chief editor of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, a mathematical journal published by Elsevier, a leading scientific publishing house.

Having established himself in this position, El Naschie continued to publish at a prodigious rate, almost entirely in the journal of which he was chief editor. Volume 38, Issue 5 of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals contained no less than five articles by El Naschie himself, and he managed to publish several hundred of his own articles during his tenure, seemingly without satisfactory peer review. Due to El Naschie's habit of citing his own past articles (a probable necessity given the lack of related work by other authors), Chaos, Solitons and Fractals soon rose to have a higher impact factor than any legitimate applied mathematics journal.[12] El Naschie's editorial conduct was harshly criticized by Douglas Arnold, the president of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.[13]

Morever, due to Elsevier's practice of "bundling" journals, so that universities receive substantial cost breaks for purchasing subscriptions to pre-determined sets of Elsevier journals, many university libraries were all but forced to shell out thousands of dollars for subscriptions to the dubious journal of which El Naschie was editor. An (unbundled) yearly subscription to Chaos, Solitons and Fractals costs in excess of $4,500.[14]

The CSF debacle underscored the inherent difficulty of ranking universities and journals based on citation counts. In addition to the unreasonably high impact factor that El Naschie's self-citation garnered CSF, he also single-handedly made a mockery[15] of the Times Higher Education rankings of world universities: in the category of citations, The University of Alexandria (where El Naschie holds a visiting professorship) finished no less than 4th place worldwide,[16] ahead of Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, and a host of other major research institutions.

[edit] Aftermath

After the nature of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals became apparent, it set off a storm among mathematical bloggers, who blamed Elsevier for shoddy editorial standards and objected to the pricing of their journals, and the practice of journal bundling in particular. The story was soon carried by more widely-read sources including Slashdot[2] and was the subject of an article in Nature[1] In face of this opposition, after some foot-dragging Elsevier obtained El Naschie's resignation as editor of the journal.[1]

The episode was further noteworthy in that it came not long after the entire editorial board of Topology, another Elsevier journal, resigned in protest over Elsevier's pricing policies. Both of these incidents have led to increased calls for open access in mathematical publishing.

Many major mathematical blogs (most notably John Baez's n-Category Cafe) carried analyses of the El Naschie saga. Several commenters stepped forward to defend El Naschie's work. Several bloggers removed their posts about El Naschie and Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, apparently in the face of legal threats from the El Naschie's representatives.[3] Much of the deleted material is now hosted on the blog El Naschie Watch. In addition to feuding with bloggers, El Naschie's representatives sued Nature for libel over its article chronicling the episode.[17][18]

[edit] The so-called Rashenal wiki

He also dislikes RationalWiki in particular, although the translation is so ropey it's not entirely clear why.[19]

[edit] Political career

El Naschie is a candidate in the 2012 Egyptian presidential elections.[20]

[edit] Further reading

The El Naschie saga is chronicled in considerably more detail at El Naschie Watch, which also hosts some material removed from other sites after legal threats from El Naschie. See in particular Introduction to Mohamed El Naschie for an overview of El Naschie's career.

[edit] Footnotes

  1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 Schiermeier, Q. Self-publishing editor set to retire Nature 456(7221):432, 2008. (story unavailable pending lawsuit; mirrored here)
  2. 2.0 2.1 Slashdot: Crackpot Scandal in Mathematics
  3. 3.0 3.1 Emails exchange with Baez
  4. The theory appears to have nothing to do with the legitimate mathematical concepts of E-operads and related structures.
  5. 5.0 5.1 Mohammed El Naschie Official site
  6. Sock puppet writing style
  7. 7.0 7.1 M.S. El Naschie, "Fuzzy multi-instanton knots in the fabric of space–time and Dirac’s vacuum fluctuation", Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Volume 38, Issue 5, December 2008, Pages 1260-1268.
  8. MathSciNet MR1428296
  9. Court decision (hat tip to El Naschie Watch, as usual)
  10. Physicsforums thread
  11. Physicsforums thread
  12. L'Affaire El Naschie
  13. SIAM: Integrity Under Attack: The State of Scholarly Publishing
  14. Elsevier: Chaos, Solitons and Fractals
  15. NYTimes: Questionable Science Behind Academic Rankings
  16. El Naschie Watch on rankings
  17. PressGazette story
  18. BBC News story
  19. http://www.rosaonline.net/Daily/News.asp?id=68961 and translation
  20. The original article appeared on Nature blogs but was later removed. Fortunately, El Naschie Watch has mirrored it.
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