>>10999635>Can I get a quick rundown on what was wrong with their thesis? Specifics would be appreciated.Their thesis is better than an average thesis is. It is speculative, but then we are talking about Planck scale physics here. Read this for details:
https://motls.blogspot.com/2005/06/bogdanoff-papers.html They want to resolve the initial singularity of the Universe - a very difficult question
They open a good question whether the signature of spacetime is allowed to fluctuate
They conclude that it can
Near the origin of time, they know that they are in the Planckian regime
They propose a new relation between this Planckian regime and the "zero scale" regime
The zero scale regime is described by a topological field theory
They even define what the right observables should be - and in my opinion, this is one of the punch lines that shows that they're either pretty smart or someone helped them: the observables are replaced by homology cycles on the moduli space of gravitational instantons; are you sure that this won't be the ingenious final explanation of the origin time in the geometric language that we will understand in 2030? I am not sure - it could well be an extension of the ideas of quantum foam from topological string theory
They show a lot of formulae - many of them apparently being correct basic formulae copied from elsewhere - involving quantum groups, Lagrangians of N=2 supergravity, Donaldson theory, KMS states, topological field theory, various index-like invariants etc.
They thank the right people, including C. Kounnas and S. Majid (a co-father of quantum groups). One of the acknowledgements that could have determined the fate of the paper was thanking to Edward Witten for "some determinant conversations" and it appears in the last sentence; otherwise the paper can't be classified as a string theory paper
