Elsevier’s Chaos, Solitons, and Fractals
November 11th, 2008 by WaltIn the comments at n-category cafe, Zoran Skoda presents evidence that the journal Chaos, Solitons, and Fractals, a peer-reviewed journal published by Elsevier, is publishing pseudo-science. John Baez collects more evidence here. The journal is included in some of Elsevier’s journal bundles, so if you are at a school with a big library, you probably have access to the journal in electronic form, and can check it out yourself.
November 12th, 2008 at 11:10 pm
When most people’s houses are made of glass, people forget not to throw stones.
November 17th, 2008 at 10:02 pm
Incidentally, a couple of comments on that post claim that El Naschie is retiring from his editorship as of this Monday. However, they could well be lies (a lot of garbage appeared in the comments, apparently from El Naschie’s supporter(s?)). Any idea what happened? The original post seems to be closed to new comments.
November 18th, 2008 at 7:46 am
The web site of “Chaos, Solitons and Fractals” at Elseevier as of Tuesday still mentions El Naschie as a chief editor.
The comment you mentioned does not look very reliable to me.
November 20th, 2008 at 8:35 am
People who have talked to folks at Elsevier do not believe El Naschie plans to retire on November 17th, as that comment by “D. Holmes” claimed.
Another interesting thing about El Naschie is that nobody can find an email address for him - just a postal address at a residence in England. Most journals accept submissions electronically, but for Chaos, Solitons and Fractals you have to send your manuscript by post to Amsterdam. So, it’s a bit hard to get his side of the story.
November 20th, 2008 at 10:19 am
There also appears to be no record of El Naschie’s PhD in the library catalog of the University of London, the University he claims to have received it from. Strange!
November 24th, 2008 at 11:11 am
The case of John Baez n-Category Cafe
I warn everybody from this shadowy cafe. Fraud and forgery are the means. Comments are blocked for anyone who is not a member of the gang. Names and addresses are false and the allegations are too idiotic to have a trace of any truth in them. How could UC Riverside allow such garbage to be connected with their name?
R. Meyer
November 24th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
R. Meyer, you’re another El Naschie sockpuppet, just like those who have been posting at the Café. They block comments from people who post multiple comments with different names all coming from the same IP address. As to your assertion that there are falsified names and addresses… show us one.
November 24th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Names and addresses are false and the allegations are too idiotic to have a trace of any truth in them.
Pot, kettle …?
Well, according to an amusingly bumptious/foot-stamping comment which cropped up in my RSS feed but which has since been deleted from the Cafe, I am in fact a nom de plume of John Baez. This of course means that JB has been writing obscure papers on Banach algebra cohomology under the name “Yemon Choi”, presumably so he doesn’t have to admit to the Cafe that sometimes he does things that might be (mis)construed as analysis…
To clarify: the comment actually accused me of saying that the authors of some paper were being cretinous, in their implication that there were eight exceptional Lie groups of the form E_1, E_2, up to E_8. While I’d like to have taken credit for pointing this out as pigswill, I think it was JB who actually noted this.
November 25th, 2008 at 8:04 am
John Baez has a book published in World Scientific called Gauge Field, Knots and Gravity. The picture on the front page shows a rope made to a knot connected by Feynmans’s gauge graphs and under it Einstein’s equation of general relativity. J. Baez accused El Naschie of mixing too many things together. I find it really a case of the oven calling the pot black. I read also the book from beginning to end and I see why Baez is jealous. He was never able to break free from the standard knowledge of the field. He did not even discuss wild knots and wild topology. That is why he cannot reach the sweeping generalization which Mohamed El Naschie was able to reach by including wild topology. The editor of the series, Louis Kauffman, will understand what I am saying here. Kauffman is an excellent man and he is the one who stimulated Mohamed El Naschie work on wild topology in high energy physics. Baez did not understand the meaning of 8 multiplied by Pi square although he writes it everywhere in his book. If he wants to understand it, he better stop slandering Mohamed El Naschie and instead of trying to find his telephone number and home address, he should read his work attentively
November 25th, 2008 at 8:22 am
Baez hasn’t accused El Naschie of “mixing too many things together” so far as I’ve been able to tell. He’s accused the man of writing nonsense and calling it math/physics. Here’s a question for you, sockpuppet, what IS the meaning of $latex 8\pi^2$ that we’ve all missed? Please, don’t be afraid to use technical terms, but be complete and link to the definitions you use.
November 25th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Why the foul language. If you are really a scientist, you will abstain from such foul language. Your equation is meaningless for El Naschie, Witten and even for you. Your symbols are wrong. So do not expect an explanation. You need to check the mathematics and equations you and all those in cahoots with Baez have used to undermine El Naschie’s work on your n-Category cafe blog. You dont even know the difference between technical terms and nontechnical terms.
November 25th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
I am seriously thinking of getting John Baez to do my publicity for me. What a service! Plus totally free of charge. I do not know whether this guy El Naschie deserves all this fuss or not but he must be over the moon with the amount of coverage he is getting and should sincerely thank you all. Will soon reach martyr status.
November 25th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
Who used foul language? And frankly, it doesn’t help your case that you’re doing science or math if you’re unwilling to explain it to others…
November 25th, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Jonathan Vos Post Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
November 25th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
I’d love to see more on wild knots. I am confident that John Baez has what it takes to handle them. El Naschie seems more intent on tying the Gordian knot, and the thrust of enlightening Elsevier is to cut that Gordian knot.
As I submitted to Peter Woit’s blog, “Not Even Wrong”, on July 24th, 2008 at 11:51 am:
Several of the colloquia that I’ve attended at Caltech on Geometric
Langlands relate to attempts to provide a good foundation for Feynman
diagrams, and deformations in QFT, which is rather important to Physicists, I shoud think.
Feynman and I once discussed “wild knots” and joked about String
Theorists being tied into them.
As Bryson R. Payne at “Knot Theory Online” says from North Georgia
College and State University:
“An interesting area of theoretical knots in math opens up when we
consider knots that are not tame. What might happen if we started
connecting knots infinitely? What if we added two trefoil knots
together in a connected sum, then joined one trefoil to each of those,
then one to each of those, and so on. When we start crossing over to
infinity, we enter the realm of wild knots. A wild knot is any knot
that is not tame - that is, that cannot be represented as a polygonal
path in 3-dimensional space.”
“One interesting wild knot to consider begins with the unknot. What if
we make loops in the unknot that cross one another? With a tame
unknot, we can untangle the loops using the Reidemeister moves. What
if we take an infinitely long unknot and continue to make crossing
loops an infinite number of times. Will we eventually have something
other than the unknot? As the number of loops goes to infinity, will
we be able to untangle them all using the Reidemeister moves?”
“Very little is known about wild knots so far, making this an
interesting topic for aspiring knot theorists to study. What might
some of the properties of wild knots be? Are there any real-world
applications of wild knots? These questions and many more remain to be
answered.”
“Wild” has other meanings in Math, such as:
Wild Point (Wolfram MathWorld)
For any point P on the boundary of an ordinary ball, find a
neighborhood of P in which the intersection with the ball’s boundary
cuts the neighborhood into two parts, each …
Wild Knot (Wolfram MathWorld)
A knot which is not a tame knot.
Tame Knot (Wolfram MathWorld)
A knot equivalent to a polygonal knot. Knots which are not tame are
called wild knots.
Paquerette de Mélibée (Wolfram MathWorld)
Another name of the three-petalled rose. Paquerette is the French word
for wild daisy.
Alexander’s Horned Sphere (Wolfram MathWorld)
The above topological structure, composed of a countable union of
compact sets, is called Alexander’s horned sphere. It is homeomorphic
with the ball B^3, and its boundary is …
Scrawny Cantor Set (Wolfram MathWorld)
A Cantor set C in R^3 is said to be scrawny if for each neighborhood U
of an arbitrary point p in C, there is a neighborhood V of p such that
every map f:S^1->V subset C
November 26th, 2008 at 6:45 am
The reasons for this infamous slander campaign against El Naschie are many. Research money, Editorial money and silence money. Publish or perish is nothing compared to how much you bring in for the University of Institution you are working for. Holland is no exception. You should read the comments in Scientific American about the article of Loll, Ambjorn and their Polish partner, Jerzy Jurkiewicz (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-self-organizing-quantum-universe). Dr. Skoda was hired to write intimidating letters to all scientists working with Prof. El Naschie telling them to stop working with him or else. He wrote such shameless letters to Prof. Iovane of University of Salerno and so on. At a certain point they hired the Rambo of mathematical physics, John Baez and the result is the shameless circus you are now witnessing.
November 26th, 2008 at 8:26 am
You are talking about Wild Knots. Thank God for that. Maybe we can now get some scientific debate going instead of this sham. Knots and Feynman diagrams were discussed by Mohamed El Naschie following Dirk Kreimer. But the important thing is the Cantor set limit. Sorry, but it was El Naschie who cut the set out. This was an ingenious method. You came to rescue the ego of John Baez. Fine! In principle he can understand Wild Knots but he has no time. He needs his time to slander Witten, Smolin, Penrose and lately ‘tHooft and El Naschie. For more on Wild Topology in high energy physics, see the papers by El Naschie with the same title.Your joke about the Gordian knot is nice but Baez’ real intentions are different. They are not honorable.
Would-be Steve K.
November 26th, 2008 at 9:05 am
Disclaimer: IANAL [I Am Not A Lawyer]
Disclaimer: TINLA [This Is Not Legal Advice]
I keep seeing the word “slander” in this thread, in the related thread on the n-Category Theory Cafe. Speaking merely as someone who had to sue for defamation in the largest judicial district in the world (Los Angeles County), and who has worked as a paralegal for 3 law firms, and as a $100.00/hour consultant to patent law firms, that word is being used incorrectly here.
A technical point: slander is basically spoken defamation, libel is basically written defamation.
There is also slander per se, where one does not have to prove as much in court, such as when someone is falsely claimed to have “a laothesome disease.”
This is all complicated (in US law) by whether the statements are false “or with a reckless disregard for the truth”, whether there is or is not republication, when the defamation started and/or stopped, whether it
was taken as fact or as opinion, whether the target was or was not a public figure, whether the words were spoken/written with Malice, whether there was actual financial damage, and other factors.
The laws in the UK are strikingly different, as many newspapers have learned to their peril when writing stories about celebrities and/or politicians.
In any case, I approve of debate about trhe merits of a theory, and consider ad hominem attacks worse than useless. A stupid attack
actually strengthens credibility of the target.
I am not discussing the underlying Mathematics, but merely the legal requirements for libel and/or slander.
To win a defamation suit, 3 things must be proved:
(1) The publication is false, or made with a reckless disregard for the truth;
(2) The false or reckless statements are taken as fact, not mere opinion, by at least one member of the audience;
(3) Actual damages have taken place as a result.
November 26th, 2008 at 9:20 am
Dear Jonathan,
I am not sure whether this is your real name but if it is, please forgive my ignorance. Sometimes there are people which Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde inside them so I thought maybe Jonathan is the nicer alter ego of John. Anyway we all thank you for bringing a civilized tone to the discussion and clarifying the business of libel. I was a friend of the late George Carman and I know all about libel even in Malaysia. If you know John Baez personally, please warn him from what he has been doing on his Café. He has committed a gross error which is actionable according to libel law in England. Switzerland is really a place where everybody can slander everyone with very little consequence. To say that Mohamed El Naschie is a fraud and does not have a Ph.D. is a ludicrous proposition and you can bet your bottom dollar that he will take Baez to court in all the countries where this appeared. Calling El Naschie a crackpot in his particular case and in the way it was done is also actionable. This site hired by Nature is making Nature liable for damage and aggravated damage in six digit figures. Baez would be well advised to close down his Café and remove all traces of everything on it, including this site.
As for the scientific content of your letter, they are a breath of fresh air in a stuffy room.
November 26th, 2008 at 9:25 am
Why now this intense smear campaign? Mohamed El Naschie is the Editor-in-Chief of Chaos, Solitons & Fractals for almost 20 years. There are several reasons, but two are the most important and do not need a Sherlock Holmes to solve. First, the article in Scientific American by Dr. Renate Loll and her colleagues from Utrecht University which have allegedly hijacked all of El Naschie’s ideas about fractal spacetime, Cantor sets as well as Causal and partially ordered sets. Second the vendetta of Said Salah El Din Hamed, Chemical Engineering Dept @ Penn State University against his half brother. The wife of Said, Dr. Shadia Al Shishini was sentenced by an Egyptian Criminal court to 2 years hard labor for stealing more than ten million pounds from the mother of Mohamed and Amr. Mohamed’s brother, Amr Elnashai is the Director of the Earthquake Center at University of Illinois, Urbana “http://cee.uiuc.edu/research/faculty/aelnash/index.htm” . Said knows Dr. Skoda and Dr. Skoda was in touch with Renate Loll and she worked with John Baez. This is how the circle closes. To steal Mohamed’s work, you need to discredit him. Many have vested and monetary interests in his downfall; that plus the stupidity and greed of some Elsevier employees brought about this unholy alliance against Mohamed. Elementary Dear Watson!
A. Christiansen
November 26th, 2008 at 10:05 am
Okay, this is getting out of hand. I’m closing this thread.