Open Letters
October 12, 2006
On October 10th, I posted on my website two open letters concerning two young researchers, addressed to the directors of their respective research institutions. These letters have now become obsolete. Indeed:
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The first letter referred to criticisms of my work, which were accessible via a link located at the bottom of my biography page. That text was hosted on the official website of the Institute of Astrophysics of Paris and gave the impression that this laboratory endorsed the "very severe" opinion expressed by Alain Riazuelo, a 33-year-old Polytechnician, regarding my work, questioning my qualifications as a researcher. That link has disappeared in the updated version of my biography, which has become more factual.
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The archives of the discussions, which had featured an impressive number of contributions, were completely restructured by the Wikipedia administrators and no longer contain the vulgar, insulting, and defamatory passages that had prompted my initial action. Those who followed these discussions will have noticed the remarkable and sudden shortening of the volume of these "archives with variable geometry."
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I still maintain my proposal to the directors of the two laboratories in question to deliver a seminar within their premises. My request included two points:
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Mr. Alain Riazuelo, a 33-year-old Polytechnician and CNRS research scientist based at the Institute of Astrophysics of Paris, had previously written in the Wikipedia discussion pages:
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Regarding the scientific work of Jean-Pierre Petit, the scientific community has long since rendered its verdict.
He then added a critique to the discussion page, prefaced with the heading:
An astrophysicist, Alain Riazuelo, based at the Institute of Astrophysics of Paris, judges Jean-Pierre Petit's twin universe theory.
At the moment I write these lines, this text remains accessible on the official website of the Institute of Astrophysics of Paris at:
http://www2.iap.fr/users/riazuelo/cosmo/jpp/p2.html
I considered that a Wikipedia discussion page was hardly an appropriate venue to respond to a pseudo-scientific argument revealing its shortcomings on the subject and its misunderstanding of my work. Therefore, after pointing out a mistake he made regarding the determination of Einstein's constant, I asked him to provide me with the opportunity to respond to his criticisms in front of his colleagues during a seminar at the IAP (where I had previously given a lecture on the same topic six years earlier, without provoking any criticism). His response was that my work was too mediocre to merit discussion in such a setting, where only serious people are invited.
These remarks, as well as those of a second researcher of the same age, working in the field of superstrings and stationed at another laboratory but operating under a pseudonym, revealed a profound ignorance of General Relativity (to the point that I initially mistook the latter for a young student). I formally sent a seminar proposal to the directors of their respective research institutions, as is customary, to clarify these scientific issues and, incidentally, help correct the deficiencies of these two researchers.
Whether or not these directors choose to respond to this seminar proposal remains to be seen. If they do, I will keep my readers informed.
- I also requested that the director of the Institute of Astrophysics of Paris remove the critique posted by Alain Riazuelo, a CNRS research scientist, from the institute's official website.
Whether or not this official chooses to keep or remove the text is his concern. But since the hyperlink no longer appears in my Wikipedia biography, this issue is no longer particularly relevant—this page was not heavily visited anyway.
As an epilogue to this unfortunate affair
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