Igor and Grichka Bogdanoff

Igor Youriévitch Bogdanoff (French pronunciation: [iɡɔʁ juʁi.evitʃ bɔɡdanɔf]; 29 August 1949 – 3 January 2022) and Grégoire "Grichka" Youriévitch Bogdanoff (French: [ɡʁeɡwaʁ ɡʁiʃka]; 29 August 1949 – 28 December 2021), alternatively spelled Bogdanov, were French television presenters, producers, and essayists who presented a variety of programmes in science fiction, popular science, and cosmology. The brothers – identical twins – were involved in a number of controversies, the most notable being the Bogdanov affair. It brought to light how they received Ph.D. degrees based on largely nonsensical physics papers that were nonetheless peer-reviewed and published in reputable scientific journals. In their later years, they were also the subject of numerous internet memes, particularly in the cryptocurrency community.

Early life and disputed claims about ancestry

The identical twin brothers Igor and Grichka Bogdanoff were born to Maria "Maya" Dolores Franzyska Kolowrat-Krakowská (1926–1982), of Bohemian and Polish descent, and Yuri "Youri" Mikhaïlovitch Bogdanoff (1928–2012), an itinerant Russian emigré farm worker and later painter; Igor was born 40 minutes before Grichka. The twins' parents divorced shortly after their birth, and they were mainly raised by their maternal grandmother Bertha Kolowrat-Krakowská at her castle in Saint-Lary. Their mother was born from an extramarital affair between Bertha (at the time married to Count Hieronymus Colloredo-Mannsfeld) and African-American tenor Roland Hayes; their affair caused a major scandal and cost Bertha her title, access to her four elder children, palatial homes in Berlin and Prague, as well as her status in European high society. Bertha tried to sustain her relationship with Hayes after her divorce and his return to the United States, but declined his offer to legally adopt and raise their daughter.

The Bogdanoff twins made many grandiose and unsubstantiated claims about their early lives and ancestry: they claimed to have received IQ scores above 190 as children, and that their father was "the descendant of a prince, the right arm of Tsar Peter the Great" with ancestral links to a noble Muslim Tatar Mirza from Penza that converted to Orthodox Christianity in exchange for a royal title from Tsar Feodor III. Genealogist William Addams Reitwiesner found little evidence for this, noting that "Other than a statement by Dr. Stanislaus Dumin (included in a message posted by the twins on 7 January 2005 to the alt.talk.royalty Usenet newsgroup) there isn't much evidence to support this claim."

They made similarly grandiose claims about how their parents met, claiming that Yuri was "a young artist (...) (who) followed 'a solid training as a painter as a free auditor at the Beaux-Arts'", and that "a 'famous writer' (...) introduced Yuri to their grandmother." These claims were the subject of extensive research by journalist Maud Guillaumin for the novel Le mystère Bogdanoff (L'Archipel, 2019), who concluded that the claims were rife with "approximations and historical inaccuracies": in reality, Guillaumin found out that Yuri Bogdanoff, in his teenage years, had first travelled to Spain from the Soviet Union and found himself unable to return on account of being declared a spy and imprisoned. Contrary to the twins' claims, their father had instead begun "a life of wandering from farm to Pyrenean farm" as a labourer after arriving in France before eventually finding employment at Bertha's castle residence in 1948, which is where he met Maya. In an interview with the twins' godmother, Monique David, it was further established by Guillaumin that the twins' mother was already pregnant at the time of her marriage to Yuri, and that Bertha considered them an unworthy match. She "chased him away", leading to their subsequent divorce and his absence from the twins' lives until they were ten years old.

Television shows

The brothers began careers in television, hosting several popular programs on science and science fiction. The first of these, Temps X (Time X), ran from 1979 to 1989 and introduced several British and American science-fiction series to the French public, including The Prisoner, Star Trek, and Doctor Who, in addition to featuring musical guests such as Jean-Michel Jarre.

In 2002, the Bogdanoffs launched a new weekly television show, Rayons X (X Rays), on the French public channel France 2. In August 2004, they presented a 90-minute special cosmology program.

Academic careers

Grichka Bogdanoff received a Ph.D. degree in mathematics from the University of Burgundy (Dijon) in 1999. In 2002, Igor Bogdanoff received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Burgundy. Both brothers received the lowest passing grade of "honorable" rather than the more usual "très honorable".

Bogdanov affair

In 2001 and 2002, the brothers published five papers (including "Topological field theory of the initial singularity of spacetime") in peer-reviewed physics journals. Controversy over the Bogdanoffs' work began on 22 October 2002, with an email sent by University of Tours physicist Max Niedermaier to University of Pittsburgh physicist Ezra T. Newman. Niedermaier suggested that the Bogdanoffs' Ph.D. theses and papers were "spoof[s]", created by throwing together instances of theoretical-physics jargon, including terminology from string theory: "The abstracts are delightfully meaningless combinations of buzzwords ... which apparently have been taken seriously."

Copies of the email reached American mathematical physicist John C. Baez, and on 23 October he created a discussion thread about the Bogdanoffs' work on the Usenet newsgroup sci.physics.research, titled "Physics bitten by reverse Alan Sokal hoax?" Baez was comparing the Bogdanoffs' publications to the 1996 Sokal affair, in which physicist Alan Sokal successfully submitted an intentionally nonsensical paper to a cultural studies journal in order to criticize that field's lax standards for discussing science. The Bogdanoffs quickly became a popular discussion topic, with most respondents agreeing that the papers were flawed.

The story spread in public media, prompting Niedermaier to apologize to the Bogdanoffs, admitting that he had not read the papers himself. The Bogdanoffs' background in entertainment lent some plausibility to the idea that they were attempting a deliberate hoax, but Igor Bogdanoff quickly denied the accusation.

In October 2002, the Bogdanoffs released an email containing apparently supportive statements by Laurent Freidel, then a visiting professor at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Soon after, Freidel denied writing any such remarks, telling the press that he had forwarded a message containing that text to a friend.

The online discussion was quickly followed by media attention. The Register reported on the dispute on 1 November 2002, and stories in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nature, The New York Times, and other publications appeared soon after. These news stories included commentary by physicists.

One of the scientists who approved Igor Bogdanoff's thesis, Roman Jackiw of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spoke to The New York Times reporter Dennis Overbye. Overbye wrote that Jackiw was intrigued by the thesis, although it contained many points he did not understand. Jackiw defended the thesis. In contrast, Ignatios Antoniadis (of the École Polytechnique), who approved Grichka Bogdanoff's thesis, later reversed his judgment of it. Antoniadis told Le Monde:

I had given a favorable opinion for Grichka's defense, based on a rapid and indulgent reading of the thesis text. Alas, I was completely mistaken. The scientific language was just an appearance behind which hid incompetence and ignorance of even basic physics.

The journal Classical and Quantum Gravity (CQG) published one of the Bogdanoffs' papers, titled "Topological field theory of the initial singularity of spacetime"; Ian Russell, assistant director of its journals division, later issued a statement that "we deployed our standard peer-review process on that paper." After the article's publication and the publicity surrounding the controversy, mathematician Greg Kuperberg posted to Usenet a statement written by the journal's senior publisher, Andrew Wray, and its co-editor, Hermann Nicolai. The statement read, in part:

Regrettably, despite the best efforts, the refereeing process cannot be 100% effective. Thus the paper ... made it through the review process even though, in retrospect, it does not meet the standards expected of articles in this journal... The paper was discussed extensively at the annual Editorial Board meeting ... and there was general agreement that it should not have been published. Since then several steps have been taken to further improve the peer review process in order to improve the quality assessment on articles submitted to the journal and reduce the likelihood that this could happen again.

The statement was quoted in The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Nature. Moreover, Die Zeit quoted Nicolai as saying that had the paper reached his desk, he would have immediately rejected it.