There is a lot of material found in the published record that would count as senseless, meaningless, or simply does not add anything significant to the literature

suggests that my previous comment may not have been explicit enough with its strained analogy. I was trying to make a serious illustration that whatever one’s views on, say, the number of occurrences of the word “which” in a Shakespeare play about witches, one must surely acknowledge that any argument based on the occurence of the English singular pronoun in the French word for team is irretrievably risible.

The three terms you list are regions on a spectrum of “worth”, whatever “worth” means, and indeed some of my own work would be regarded as “not very significant” by les plus hautes. I’m afraid you may have to take it on trust that mathematicians like me find the CSF material in question so far beyond the pale as to be in Cork.

Perhaps there is nothing that can be “clearly labelled” as scientific misconduct, but the tone of the responses, together with the quantity of dreck that has gone unchecked, suggests scientific misconduct — because the work is pretending to standards of verification and review that it manifestly has not passed.

And yet scientific communities do not collectively rise to sanction an author.

Turned on its head, one could argue that if the community can put asides its differences — JB and I probably don’t agree on the finer details of “what is good math(s)” — to speak out against something collectively, then either we are all in our different fields, races, ages and nationalities made simultaneously insecure by said author, or he is so egregiously deserving of censure that the smoke must have a fire somewhere at its root…

(Sorry for the verbosity of these comments.)

I think (though JB is welcome to correct me if I have misinterpreted or misunderstood), that what gets our collective goat up, is the realization that we have marginalized them into a post of nominal prestige (editor-in-chief) of a journal which is esteemed by modern rankings that are favoured by those who judge us (impact factor). When I first came across this material in 2000-2001 I put it aside after mild swearing and chuckling. It is fair to say I did not anticipate that this would be allowed to metastasise so far…

There is a lot of material found in the published record that would count as senseless, meaningless, or simply does not add anything significant to the literature. And yet scientific communities do not collectively rise to sanction an author. Instead, these individuals are ignored and marginalized where they cease to cause damage to the rest of the community.

To an outsider, there is something else going on in this controversy that is not explicitly stated. You describe in your own posts that several issues come together to form “the perfect storm.” This is really saying that there is nothing he did that can be clearly labeled as scientific misconduct (such as plagiarizing the work of others), but should be described more accurately as unacceptable behavior and thus open to community sanctions. This is precisely my argument.

As I wrote in my post entitled, “Elsevier Math Controversy,” it wasn’t completely clear why Mohamed El Naschie was being sanctioned by the math and theoretical physics community (as viewed on the n-Category Café), although several issues (self-publishing, self-citation, and academic credentials) appear to be working in concert.

Is there some reason you aren’t mentioning the most striking fact of all, namely that most mathematicians and physicists realize El Naschie’s work makes no sense? That seems a very strange omission.

While I appreciate the care with which you’ve chosen your words in this post and its prequel, I’d like to add one more factor to your list of possible proximate causes for the brouhaha: namely, the perception of a variety of “mathematically or physically literate” readers that the material in papers by el Naschie and several other authors is garbage.

Of course, “mathematically or physically literate” is something of a social construct; but it is one that can reach across other traditional dividing lines which one might suspect of providing bias, such as gender, ethnicity or class. (Nationality is a bit trickier, I suspect.) You may have noticed that it was the defences of el Naschie which seemed keenest to refer to such potential sources of bias. [Disclaimer: I was one of the restrained critics on that thread]

There is a perception that El Naschie shortcut the process, and this alone is a valid concern for the integrity of the journal.

Agreed; but while this is in itself a cause for concern, it is not the only cause for concern. The content, or lack thereof, really matters in this case; and while I agree that the story thus far needs some sociological component to any analysis of it, I don’t think that suffices. We are not talking about disputes analogous to “did the Treaty of Versailles make the Second World War inevitable”, but something more like “there’s no `i’ in `team’, but there is an `i’ in `equipe’, so francophones will always lack solidarity compared to anglophones”.

In the earlier post, you also said:

What is interesting about the discussion is that El Naschie hasn’t done anything explicitly wrong.

Again, I wouldn’t disagree with your choice of words, at least for certain definitions of “explicitly”. However, what has resulted from this torrent of pseudo-mathematics is “wrong” by the standards of the scientific community, which inasmuch as it works has to work by opportunity to critique and a reflection of said critique. The content of the articles in question is of such dubious value (or in some cases provenance) that it suggests that the journal was pretending to certain credentials within the scientific community (peer-review etc) which it didn’t in fact have.

In case it sounds like I’m cavilling, I agree with the broader point you finish on, although I personally find your closing paragraph a touch too aphoristic and simplistic.