The Bogdanoffs: The Trolls who shook Physics

RIP Grichka and Igor Bogdanoff

0:00 Chapter 1
4:16 Chapter 2
11:03 Chapter 3
18:03 Chapter 4
25:53 Chapter 5

I'm on sites! :

All songs used are listed chronologically at the end of the video.

Bogdanoff affair

[LynxSolstice]

They asked me if I had a degree in theoretical physics, I said I had a theoretical degree in physics, they said welcome aboard.

[SlashCampable]

The twins dying a week apart is the final cherry on top of this weird story. Truly a pair for the history books. Not because of their significance, but just for how notably strange they were.

[marsantos]

"this email spread like wildfire in the academic community" i love how a love for gossip is a pillar of all human interactions

[Tictacpanter]

The Sokal paper is used in my university intro to writing papers as a demonstration of how an article can meet all the formatting and structural requirements for a publication- and mean nothing at all. It’s used as a bit of a warning to not be too wordy and have a real argument.

[teeks]

Seeing the result of that plastic surgery just makes me sad. I’m glad you covered that the way you did, acknowledging it without making fun of it. Body dysmorphia is a horrible thing

[ethanomcbride]

10/10 would’ve read the nonsense papers and pretended to understand everything out of sheer imposter anxiety

[inkkilpatrick]

i absolutely love the way you handled the topic of their plastic surgeries. Simultaneously treating someone's decisions about their body with the seriousness and respect expected of a biopic like this, and dismissing the issue of their bodies and choices about it as irrelevant to the story.
I dont think it could have conceivably be handled any better, seriously respect that.

[somecallmetim]

“The author should correct several typos in the paper. As an examle…” well done.

[nyanbinary]

As someone with an advanced degree in cultural studies, I can confirm that Sokal's troll paper would have fit right in to a journal like that. He even wrote an absolute meme of a title. I love it.

[stevemrayz]

The funny yet sad thing is that in the same 10 years, they could have gained their Bachelor's, Master's then PhDs legitimately

[musikSkool]

This isn't a physics failure, it is a publication failure. It only becomes a physics failure if people start citing them as credit for some of their new physics discoveries.

[jenniferkeates]

Alan Sokal was a TA for one of my computer science courses in UCL in 2010 (don't quite remember which course it was, it was either Hardware II or Theory II). We didn't really knew he was at first, just that he was an excellent teacher, much better than our original course lecturer. He always explained concepts with alot of humour and boiled things down enough that undergrads could understand. I was so impressed by his teaching that I looked him up and discovered that he had a wiki article; after that, we asked him to tell us about the Sokal Affair in one class and he gladly sat us down and talked about academic honesty.

In the end, we as a class literally begged him to teach the course instead of our original lecturer but alas, he said it's not something he can do. A huge shame.

BTW, anyone who is thinking of studying at UCL: this is a common story in the entire university. Great connections to great professors, but absolutely terrible teaching faculty.

[jamesflames]

The problem is that being granted a PhD or being published in a journal doesn't mean anyone "agrees" with what you wrote or thinks it is correct, just that it meets basic standards for publication. If reviewers had to judge if a theory was actually "right" it would be impossible to have any debate in science.

[sammy_]

Hey, I know this is such a minor correction and doesn't affect the story at all, but I have to correct, Roland Hayes was a classical singer, not a jazz musician. It explains why Bertha would've been more drawn to him as he often sang songs in French, German, and Italian, and would go on tours in Germany and Austria. Jazz wasn't very popular among white audiences at the time and definitely hadn't made it's way over to Europe at the time so she probably wouldn't have been attracted to a jazz musician. Again, small correction in an otherwise well researched video!

[delphinidin]

"What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander" actually means that everybody gets paid back the same way. Sokal, a physicist, had made sociology look silly by publishing a bad sociology paper, and now physics looked silly because the Bogdanoffs had published a bad physics paper. It's like saying, "What goes around comes around."

[JohnSmith-zvkm]

Surgeons who are willing to do what was done to them should be subject to legal sanctions.

[jesserjzz]

7:07 - "They exist as a pair, a unit that does not make sense unless treated as a whole." - And they died from COVID 19, Grichka first and 6 days later his brother Igor. R.I.P... 😣 😖 😫 😩 🥺 😢 😭

[Kevin-cydr]

Man the drama in the physics community sounds much more interesting than the TV ones.

[antonioberandas]

I don't know if it was unusual back then, but nowadays it's pretty standard to obain a PhD by publishing papers in journals. It's called "cumulative dissertation" and a lot of PhDs are obtained that way. You publish ~three papers as first author, write a few pages connecting those papers, defend it, and you may be awarded your PhD.

[zamor_da]

You are really inspiring me to write a hoax paper.