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.

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.

Would-be Steve K.

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