/sci/ - Science & Math

>>9007233
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair
tldr: they got PhDs by publishing some weird new-agey stuff about the Big Bang and it's an open question as to whether there's any scientific merit to their work or whether it was a scam to fool people into giving them PhDs for work that almost nobody could make sense of.

>Participants in the discussions were particularly unconvinced by a statement in the "Topological origin of inertia" paper 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." In addition, the paper claimed, the Foucault pendulum experiment "cannot be explained satisfactorily in either classical or relativistic mechanics". The physicists commenting on Usenet found these claims and subsequent attempts at their explanation peculiar, since the trajectory of a Foucault pendulum—a standard museum piece—is accurately predicted by classical mechanics. The Bogdanovs explained that these claims would only be clear in the context of topological field theory. Baez and Russell Blackadar attempted to determine the meaning of the "plane of oscillation" statement; after the Bogdanovs issued some elaborations, Baez concluded that it was a complicated way of rephrasing the following:

>Since the big bang happened everywhere, no matter which way a pendulum swings, the plane in which it swings can be said to "intersect the big bang".

>However, Baez pointed out, this statement does not in fact concern the Big Bang, and is entirely equivalent to the following:

>No matter which way a pendulum swings, there is some point on the plane in which it swings.

>Yet this rephrasing is itself equivalent to the statement

>Any plane contains a point.

>If this was the essence of the statement, Baez noted, it cannot be very useful in "explaining the origin of inertia".

Kinda like Mochizuki but with less scientific rigor and with more plastic surgery.