Rumours abounded that it was a hoax, intended to illustrate that the peer review system is a sham. This is the last thing the physics community needed, after the recent scandals, in which the peer review system took a while to finally catch several physicists who were falsifying their data.
Thus this latest incident has caused quite an uproar among physicists. But the brothers have indignantly denied that their work is a hoax. On November 7, an article appeared in Nature, which claims that there is no clear consensus among theoretical physicists as to whether the papers are good science or not–which greatly damages the credibility of the peer review system. Mainstream media has picked up on the story and has had a field day with the idea that even physicists cannot understand each other’s technobabble, and cannot tell good work from bad. Ouch.