In Theory, It's True (or Not) nytimes.com
[ Elsewhere on the French front, this may be amusing, or not, it's somewhat obscure at any rate. ]
On the surface, the Bogdanovs' papers appear to be little different from what trickles daily into the electronic archives physicists use to exchange ideas. Last week, to pick a couple of titles at random, the fare included "Rotating Black Holes, Closed Time-Like Curves, Thermodynamics, and the Enhancon Mechanism" and "Superspace Formulation of 4D Higher Spin Gauge Theory."
When Igor Bogdanov writes, "We consider inertia as a topological field, linked to the topological charge Q = 1 of the singular zero size gravitational instanton," is that so different from Edward Witten, a premier string theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study, proposing, as he did in a recent paper, "that multi-trace interactions in quantum field theory on the boundary of AdS space can be incorporated in the AdS/CFT correspondence by using a more general boundary condition for the bulk fields than has been considered hitherto"?
Either passage, it seems, could have been generated by a computer programmed with a list of buzzwords and some basic rules of syntax. That, of course, is just the point the deconstructionists tirelessly belabor: All is surface without depth. And that is just the view Dr. Sokal took on with his lampoon in Social Text. Physicists, who pretty much have to believe in the existence of an objective reality, insist that sense can be separated from nonsense, even in a field so abstract that laboratory experiments remain but a dream. |
