The latter two reports mainly confine themselves to summarizing the paper and correcting spelling errors, typos, and stylistic mistakes. The Classical and Quantum Gravity referee's report also demands many clarifications, which presumably the Bogdanovs provided.
Eli Hawkins also refereed a paper by the Bogdanoffs, for
Journal of Physics A. He recommended rejection:
From: Eli Hawkins
Date: May 13, 2003 1:54:12 PM EDT
To: John Baez
Subject: Old Controversy
John,
Journal of Physics A finally sent me a copy of the referee report I
wrote for "THE KMS STATE OF SPACE-TIME AT THE PLANCK SCALE". It is
definitely in contrast to the other referee reports you show on your
web page. Feel free to distribute this if you want to.
- Eli
This paper is built around the idea that "at the Planck scale, the
"space-time system" is in a themodynamical equilibrium state". It is
not quite clear what the author means by this, but on page 4 he seems
to be referring to a Friedman model of a homogeneous universe with
thermal matter. He may mean that when the matter is at the Planck
temperature, it is in thermodymanic equilibrium with the geometry. He
does not explain why there should not be thermal equilibrium at all
temperatures. It may be simply that the author does not know what he
is talking about.
The main result of this paper is that this thermodynamic equilibrium
should be a KMS state. This almost goes without saying; for a quantum
system, the KMS condition is just the concrete definition of
thermodynamic equilibrium. The hard part is identifying the quantum
system to which the condition should be applied, which is not done in
this paper.
It is difficult to describe what is wrong in Section 4, since almost
nothing is right. The author seems to believe that just because an
analytic continuation of a function exists, the argument "must" be
considered a complex number. He also makes the rather obvious claims
in eq's 6 and 7 that complex numbers should be the sums of real and
imaginary parts. The remainder of the paper is a jumble of misquoted
results from math and physics. It would take up too much space to
enumerate all the mistakes: indeed it is difficult to say where one
error ends and the next begins.
In conclusion, I would not recommend that this paper be published in
this, or any, journal.
© 2004 John Baez
baez@math.removethis.ucr.andthis.edu
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