How did crackpot Electric Universe papers get published in a peer-reviewed journal?

[pjvanerp]

Stein Erik Johansen and Erik Trell 'published' an alternative proof for Fermats Last Theorem in 2003. This led to a small affair in 2003 in Norway, when Trell presented this utterly flawed proof to some mathematicians of the university of Trondheim (NTNU) and then he and Johansen tried to defend their ideas.

Google for "Harald Hanche-Olsen's blog: Trell and FLT"

Johansen is still an associate professor in social anthropology at the NTNU, but doesn't seem to publish anything other than pseudoscientific stuff since 2000.

 

[ben m]

There's another one! Bargain-basement open-access publishers in the head office, Christian Corda at the wheel, and crackpots in the table of contents:

Open Journal of Microphysics
http://www.scirp.org/journal/Home.aspx?JournalID=588

Here's the usual crowd of Beckwith, El-Naschie, Baurov, Subrata Bhattacharyya (all Hadronic Journal regulars) among other papers, many sketchy-looking.

They have this down to an art, don't they?

 

[pjvanerp]

Christian Corda has left a few comments on my blog in recent months. Today he writes that he has cut his ties with Santilli. Apparently he has had enough of the bizarre claims of Santilli on gravitation and cosmology. Instead of contributing to a 'Special Issue' (this time from the American Journal of Modern Physics) he announces a refutation of the ideas of Santilli in a serious journal. Interesting developments!

See w_w_w.pepijnvanerp.nl/articles/finding-jerdsey-v-kadeisvili-or-mailing-with-ruggero-m-santilli/comment-page-1/#comment-20103

[ sorry, should post more often on this forum, still not allowed to post correct hyperlinks ]

 

[ctamblyn]

Fixified link:

http://www.pepijnvanerp.nl/articles...gero-m-santilli/comment-page-1/#comment-20103

 

[ben m]

Thanks pjvanerp,

I've been fascinated by Santilli's bizarre little walled garden for years. Interesting to hear Corda is bailing out. Particularly interesting is the knowledge that he was getting paid in his Telesio Whatever "faculty" position. Where is Santilli getting the money for this sort of thing? Any guesses? From magnecule investors/dupes, or from some sort of rich would-be physics benefactors?

Might Corda know, and would you be interested in following up?

 

[Reality Check]

The comment on Christian Corda includes a broken link to the web site of Waldyr A. Rodrigues Jr. The link is to an errata for This is A Sad Story. A document explaining why I wrote the paper on Freud's identity (ref. 23 below) and which denounces the obscurantist conduct and lies of Mr. Rugerro M. Santilli (PDF).

Waldyr A. Rodrigues Jr was invited to become an editor of the Hadronic Journal (HJ) or Algebras Groups and Geometries.(AGG) by Santilli and became an editor of AGG in 2007.
The first hint of trouble was in the acceptance letter where Santilli seemed to want to publish papers that he had been told were already published elsewhere. Then Rodrigues reviewed and accepted some papers for publication in AGG but two of then were published in HJ instead without the authors’ authorizations. The authors were annoyed enough to threaten a lawsuit. Rodrigues persuaded them not to.

Rodrigues commented on a book by Santilli, pointing out a misconception he had about the use of Freud’s identity.

Things came to a head in 2007 with the appointment of Myron Evans (an author of several bad papers) to Chairman of two organizations, including the Santilli-Galilei Association (SGA):

One of the objectives of SGA is to nominate Mr. Santilli for the Nobel Prizes of Physics, Chemistry and (sic)Mathematics. At this instant, I started having a very bad felling, which materialized soon than I expected. For indeed, in a few days after I learned about the existence of those associations I learned also that Mr. Evans has been made Chairman of them. Worse, yet was the fact that the SGA at the same time announced that Mr. Evans won a "Santilli-Galilei gold medal” for his fight against obscurantism in Science.

Rodrigues criticized Myron Evans in a letter to Santilli, which resulted in an quite civil exchange with a Mr. Fucilla. In December 2007, Rodrigues replied to a comment in the news section of SGA with his paper on Santilli's misconception and a another paper listing the mistakes of Evans. Santilli got furious, made some later retracted menaces, and Rodrigues decided to polish his original notes and publish them. Then

On 01/16/08 I informed Mr. Santilli about those papers, and informed him that I decided to not continue as a member of the editorial board of AGG.

Santilli's rely to his resignation letter is ... interesting !

 

[pjvanerp]

I don't know if a lot of money is involved in this scientific charade of Santilli, he was taking rather a good salary from Magnegas, first as CEO and later as Chief Scientific Officer, but now he seems not to have an official function in the family business any more. But he has started a new business for himself (Thunder Energies Corporation), don't know if he's making money with this.

On the forum of the Skeptics Society there is a long thread also with discussions on whether Magnegas was set up as a 'pump and dump' to lure in investors or whether even more sinister financial schemes are behind this. I just see they are running on investors money and there are constant new promising press releases which almost never are followed up by real news.

 

[Slings and Arrows]

Things came to a head in 2007 with the appointment of Myron Evans (an author of several bad papers) to Chairman of two organizations, including the Santilli-Galilei Association (SGA):

Rodrigues criticized Myron Evans in a letter to Santilli, which resulted in an quite civil exchange with a Mr. Fucilla. In December 2007, Rodrigues replied to a comment in the news section of SGA with his paper on Santilli's misconception and a another paper listing the mistakes of Evans. Santilli got furious, made some later retracted menaces, and Rodrigues decided to polish his original notes and publish them.

Do you have any information on when, and why, Myron Evans was ousted from Telesio Galilei?

Myron Evans has never given a full explanation, but his attitude and opinion of Telesia Galilei has completely soured:

The self styled professor Dunning-Davies, recently terminated from all chairmanships and directorships and so on of Steriwave etc… His book “Exploding a Myth” is the most recent publication on Google Scholar, cited ten times to date. The article cited 35 times is with Landsberg, and publshed in 1965, almost fifty years ago. This is an example of why I advise no scientist to be involved with Telesio Galilei, in which Dunning-Davies describes himself as a professor.

Excerpt from the Myron Evans blog (Sept 2012)

 

[Reality Check]

Do you have any information on when, and why, Myron Evans was ousted from Telesio Galilei?

I did not know that Myron Evans was part of Telesio Galilei.
A little Googling gives a rather extreme satire web site and this Wikipedia article about Evans theory: Einstein–Cartan–Evans theory

The sequence of events seems to have been
2008: Francesco Fucilla (the founder of Telesio Galilei) started off as a supporter of Evans and his theory.
2009: Fucilla learns the details of the theory and just how bad it is.
Francesco Fucilla proposed an author of one of the debunking papers, Waldyr A Rodrigues, as Chairman of Telesio Galilei.
2010: Fucilla appointed Rodrigues to be Chairman.
Evans goes off the deep end and is dismissed.

 

[ben m]

For added Myron Evans hilarity: Evans' personal blog has posted his letters to various Welsh cultural institutions, trying to convince them of the great value of his personal archive.

I have offered first refusal of my potentially valuable collection of autograph manuscript papers to the National Library of Wales for safe keeping and accessibility. If for some reason the NLW cannot take the collection I could offer it to Newton House provided it is conserved safely for posterity and never sold, and made accessible to responsible scholars and members of the general public.

He emphasizes that the papers of other Civil List scientists are valuable:

a) One page handwritten letter by Alexander Graham Bell sold for $2,250.
b) Ditto Nikola Tesla sold for $2,250.
c) Ditto Michael Faraday sold at $1,700.
d) Short scribbled note by Sir Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington at $200.
10) A recently discovered seventeeth century handwritten MS by the scientist Robert Hooke valued at a million pounds. He was a friend of my ancestral cousin John Aubrey at Oxford.

Dude, those are valuable because they come from famous and successful people, not because their authors are recipients of a famous nonscientist's secret noncompetitive honorarium.

I estimate that the collection of one hundred or so A4 folders of autograph manuscripts that I have here could well be worth in the region of a million pounds because it has already been read about fifty to a hundred million times in the past decade or so. This is unprecedented for a theory of physics

Fifty to a hundred million reads, really? Your obscure relativity-denial is somewhere between "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" and "The Hobbit"? Well, maybe every living physics bachelors-degree holder worldwide---and, to be honest, that's about as large as the pool of interested parties could possibly be---has read it 100 times. That is, um, unprecedented. 100 million readers and not one of them has reviewed any of his books on Amazon. 100 million readers and his Wikipedia page was deleted for lack of evidence of notability. But who am I to question the Web download statistics of the great man Myron Evans?

 

[Slings and Arrows]

The sequence of events seems to have been
2008: Francesco Fucilla (the founder of Telesio Galilei) started off as a supporter of Evans and his theory.
2009: Fucilla learns the details of the theory and just how bad it is.
Francesco Fucilla proposed an author of one of the debunking papers, Waldyr A Rodrigues, as Chairman of Telesio Galilei.
2010: Fucilla appointed Rodrigues to be Chairman.
Evans goes off the deep end and is dismissed.

Thank you for the information. By following the links you provided, I discovered this web posting that explains when and why Myron Evans was given the heave-ho.

I appointed Prof Rodrigues to replace Mr Evans, when in 2010 I personally got to realise that Mr Evans and the Alpha Institute of Kindergarten Studies were all incompetent physicists and mathematicians, exactly as stated by Prof Rodrigues Mignani, and many other leading scientists, that laugh at the nonsense he [Myron Evans] and his AIAS members publish daily.

The idea was to remove Mr Evans slowly, to finally demote him to just Full Member status.

Mr Evans responded violently to my proposal…

"The Reasons For The Attacks By Mr Myron Evans Against Prof Francesco Fucilla"

w_w_w.francesco-fucilla-satires.com/ffsatires_05-08-12/Statement_By_Prof_of_Profs/THE%20REASONS%20FOR%20THE%20ATTACKS%20BY%20MR%20MYRON%20EVANS%20AGAINST%20PROF%20FRANCESCO%20FUCILLA.pdf

[Sorry, still can't post proper links]

 

[Slings and Arrows]

Fifty to a hundred million reads, really? Your obscure relativity-denial is somewhere between "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" and "The Hobbit"? Well, maybe every living physics bachelors-degree holder worldwide---and, to be honest, that's about as large as the pool of interested parties could possibly be---has read it 100 times. That is, um, unprecedented. 100 million readers and not one of them has reviewed any of his books on Amazon. 100 million readers and his Wikipedia page was deleted for lack of evidence of notability. But who am I to question the Web download statistics of the great man Myron Evans?

Myron Evans does have at least a few regular readers. I regularly read his blog. But not because I subscribe to any of his "torsion" nonsense. I read his blog because it's always good for a laugh. If it weren't for myself and a few others, Evans wouldn't have any readers at all.