On 8/27/07, ken hanly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > This is from a Canadian version of Pen-l at: > http://www.progressive-economics.ca/2007/08/26/oxoby-levitt-scheiber/ > It seems that economics and post-modernism share a > common feature: many find it impossible to distinguish > a joke or satire from a legitimate paper.
Economics, Post-Modernism and ... Theoretical Physics. http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/bogdanoff/ -------------------------------snip I assure you that the Bogdanoff's theses are gibberish to me - even though I work on topological quantum field theory, and know the meaning of almost all the buzzwords they use. Their journal articles make the problem even clearer. You can easily get ahold of these, because they are appended to the PDF files containing their theses. Some parts almost seem to make sense, but the more carefully I read them, the less sense they make... and eventually I either start laughing or get a headache. For example, here's the beginning of Igor Bogdanoff's paper "Topological Origin of Inertia": The phenomenon of inertia - or "pseudo-force" according to E. Mach [1] - has recently been presented by J. P. Vigier as one of the "unsolved mysteries of modern physics". Indeed our point of view is that this important question, which is well formulated in the context of Mach's principle, cannot be resolved or even understood in the framework of conventional field theory. Here we suggest a novel approach, a direct outcome of the topological field theory proposed by Edward Witten in 1988 [3]. According to this approach, beyond the interpretation proposed by Mach, we consider inertia as a topological field, linked to the topological charge Q = 1 of the "singular zero size gravitational instanton" [4] which, according to [5], can be identified with the initial singularity of space-time in the standard model. -raghu.
