Bogdanov affair

The Bogdanoff twins in 2016

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“”“They were at best wrong, and most likely just throwing around words with no calculations or proofs to back them up.”

—Lee Smolin

“”Nonsense in the morning may make sense in the evening or the following day.

—The Bogdanovs writing in their defense that they didn't write bullshit

The Bogdanov affair (alternatively spelled as Bogdanoff) was a controversy in academia centered around the physics papers written by the Bogdanoff twins, two French TV personalities. The papers, which claimed to explain what happened before the Big Bang, had earlier passed peer review and been published in reputable journals, but upon receiving further scrutiny were accused of being nonsensical by many academics, and people began to question whether the entire thing was a deliberate hoax. The twins maintained their seriousness.

The Bogdanoff twins

Identical twins Igor and Grichka Bogdanoff, (1949–2021/2022) were French TV personalities known for presenting science-themed programs. Academically, they studied applied mathematics in the 1970s. Grichka received a doctorate in mathematics in 1999 and Igor recieved one in theoretical physics in 2002. They were also known for their extreme physical appearance later in life, with extremely heightened cheekbones and botox injections. The twins also had a history of grand, unsupported claims about themselves, including scoring a supposed 190 IQ in childhood testing, and royal ancestry. Online legend also has it that they've contacted aliens, and that the Rothschilds used to bow to them.^{[citation NOT needed]}

Prior to the eponymous affair, the Bogdanoff twins had been accused of plagiarism by physicist Trinh Xuan Thuan. The twins' book, Dieu et la Science, was a bestseller, and attempted to blend physics and Catholicism. Thuan said they had plagiarized his work La Mélodie secrète, and the twins claimed in turn that he had plagiarized someone else; the case was settled out of court. This did, however, bring attention to the twins, since the book claimed they had physics doctorates when they did not yet have PhDs.

In 2005 the twins became professors at Megatrend University, a Serbian private university surrounded by scandals and accused of being a diploma mill. Indeed, the presence of the twins became one of the scandals bringing the institution its negative reputation.

They openly opposed vaccination during the COVID-19 pandemic, and they both died of COVID around the New Years Day of 2022.

The affair

In 2002, gossip began to spread, and scrutinizing eyes looked more carefully at the twins' work. It became clear that most physicists who tried to read their papers walked away utterly baffled. The topics included topological field theory, quantum fluctuations, and the Big Bang. The papers were loaded with both errors and constant buzzwords and did not seem to coalesce into any coherent theory. The papers that the physicists brought into question had titles such as Topological field theory of the initial singularity of spacetime and Spacetime Metric and the KMS Condition at the Planck Scale. Perhaps needless to say, this is pretty complicated theoretical research that most people won't be able to make heads or tails of; but the problem was that their peers often couldn't either. For example, a particularly excessive section from Igor's paper reads:

We draw from the above that whatever the orientation, the plane of oscillation of Foucault's pendulum is necessarily aligned with the initial singularity marking the origin of physical space S³, that of Euclidean space E⁴ (described by the family of instantons I^beta of whatever radius beta), and, finally, that of Lorentzian space-time M₄.

Physicists started to question whether the papers were intentionally incoherent, and was compared to the Sokal Affair. The twins fervently denied any of this being a hoax, and their advisor seconded this denial. They claimed their mathematics were merely "unconventional". Depends on who you ask if that speaks worse to their character.

In the aftermath, the twins published a pseudoscientific popular science book titled Avant Le Big Bang (Before the Big Bang) based on the same ideas, which sold well, though was criticized for having elementary mathematical and other scientific inaccuracies. The twins quote-mined and mistranslated critical feedback and presented critics as supporting their work in the book.

The affair caused some reflection concerning the peer review process, the nature of celebrity in academia, and the overall legibility of quantum physics as a field of research.

This article requires expansion. Please help. Though not a stub by pure word count, this article lacks depth of content.

See also

• Fun:Quantum bogodynamics – Also quantum, also bogus; not named after the Bogdanoffs, but possibly explaining something about their success.
• Sokal affair – Famous physics-related scandal that brought scrutiny on academic philosophy journals and debate about postmodernism.
• Style over substance
• Arkadiusz Jadczyk – Physicist who supported the Bogdanoffs, but also helped expose their lack of understanding in conversing with them.