The case below is reminiscent of the Bogdanov affair, discussed in this Forum in the following threads: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2365.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2370.html
I would say there is no particular lesson to be learnt from such cases, precisely because they are rare, and no one cares. Qualified experts discount quackery; others know that they should not trust results until they are peer-reviewed, except if they are from known experts, and even that, only tentatively. The bottom line is that you cannot build on a fraudulent or quackish or otherwise erroneous finding: It soon collapses under its own weight. (In the Bogdanovs' case, since that made it through peer review, it would still collapse at the next step -- if it had enough substance to even inspire an attempt to build on it; but apparently in that case it did not even have that.) Stevan On Tue, 4 Mar 2003, Arthur P. Smith wrote: > http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/03/1224243&mode=thread&tid=93&tid=134&tid=146 > > http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/hep-th/0208221 > > Is it right or wrong... Nobody seems sure. > Has it been submitted to a peer-reviewed > journal? It seems not to have been published in one. If citations of > this paper appear later, will they provide any evidence of its > correctness or otherwise? If the arguments are refuted as a proof, will > there be any link or indication of this on arXiv.org? How would a future > "innocent" third party know what to do when coming upon a paper like > this in the arXiv, if there is no follow-up (as there currently is none)? > > Normally, when a breakthrough of this magnitude (similar to the proof of > Fermat's Last Theorem) occurs, there is considerable publicity. In this > case there seems to have been almost none since last August, until now. > Is that because the authors are unsure themselves? Because the authors > are unknown? Because nobody reads what's on the arXiv if they don't know > the authors? Or because no peer-reviewed publication has been involved yet? > > Incorrect articles certainly get published in peer-reviewed journals as > well, although at least in mathematics peer review tends to be quite > rigorous. But there seems to be some rather serious distinction being > made in this case - what is it, and what lessons should we draw?
