Chuck> I think I could tell that the gsi paper was better
Chuck> written. But then again, maybe that was because it was
Chuck> formated with TeX and looked nice on my ghostscript reader.
at this level, some of the B-s papers are quite ugly looking, weird fonts and such.
Chuck> Thermodynamic equilibrium? You mean, when everything is
Chuck> dead and there are no interactions?
au contraire...
thermodynamic equilibrium (TE) implies a state with vigourous interactions between the system components, with continual exchange of momentum and energy during each interaction. its just that in TE, the gross macroscopic state does not change (temperature, pressure, etc). the bell-shaped curve for distributions of molecule velocity, say in air, stays fixed, while individual molecules random walk around in their positions on the velocity axis of the curve.
maybe you are thinking of the heat-death thing: since entropy must always increase, eventually everything fased away into uniform blandness. and even this projection is now of unsure status within general relativity and cosmology.
Chuck> One thing that was interesting on the Cassiopeia site I
Chuck> posted, was Ark (some wild unpronouncable Polish named
Chuck> physicist) asked a bunch of questions and one of the
Chuck> Bogdanov brothers politely answered everyone one of them in
Chuck> detail. By the end of the exchange, Ark believed they were
Chuck> for real. It was interesting to see that change.
check out the discussions on news://sci.physics.research or on google news:
especially posts by John Baez and Peter Woit (also Aaron Bergman, Toby Bartels, Steve Carlip), all mathematicians/physicists working directly in the area of the B-s research. they've made a good faith attempt to roll up their sleeves and get down and dirty with the B-s. and the B-s just float buzzwords around in response.
Chuck> By accident I ran into a UCB math PhD drop-out in the
Chuck> climbing gym who I occasionally climbed with and I asked
Chuck> him if he had heard of this controversy. He (Patrice) had
Chuck> and he had been trying to follow it. He is French-Algerian
Chuck> so he could read the original works. But Patrice wasn't
Chuck> very helpful on KMS.
none of the main quantum field theory texts mention it explicitly, to my surprise, tho maybe it shows up in newer editions.
Chuck> So the bottom line is this doesn't sound like a hoax. Or at
Chuck> least not any more than any other very fancy description
Chuck> for quantum realities at t < 0.
i had clung to the idea for a while that it was an extended hoax, in that the 2 bros were trying to string (ahem) people along for as long as possible.
but as i follow the extended discussions with the B-s on the newsgroup, the B-s remind me more and more of smart people i have met in academia who sit around and just fantasize about ideas all day, never really bringing themselves down to reality long enough to determine whether they are doing something serious or just day-dreaming.
the experimentally-minded among you might wonder how one can "test" these kinds of ideas. to get a good idea of how people working in the field do such a thing, see Baez's posts in the sci.physics.research newsgroup at google links above.
les schaffer