history: Kubo, 1957, Martin & Schwinger, 1959
arena of play: quantum field theory + quantum statistical mechanics
crude description: conditions on quantum fields (QFs) for the case of thermodynamic equilibrium and definition of chemical potential for QFs. Les
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Thanks. Horror is right. I took a look at the papers on lanl and gsi for curiousity. I understood the page numbers and the sequence: 1 then 2 then 3 ... But that was about it. I think I could tell that the gsi paper was better written. But then again, maybe that was because it was formated with TeX and looked nice on my ghostscript reader.
Thermodynamic equilibrium? You mean, when everything is dead and there are no interactions?
One thing that was interesting on the Cassiopeia site I posted, was Ark (some wild unpronouncable Polish named physicist) asked a bunch of questions and one of the Bogdanov brothers politely answered everyone one of them in detail. By the end of the exchange, Ark believed they were for real. It was interesting to see that change.
By accident I ran into a UCB math PhD drop-out in the climbing gym who I occasionally climbed with and I asked him if he had heard of this controversy. He (Patrice) had and he had been trying to follow it. He is French-Algerian so he could read the original works. But Patrice wasn't very helpful on KMS.
So the bottom line is this doesn't sound like a hoax. Or at least not any more than any other very fancy description for quantum realities at t < 0.
Anyway, thanks for answering.
Chuck Grimes