Joy Christian wrote:I haven't heard from Sir Michel Atiyah lately, but I did hear back from Professor Karl Hess, confirming my opinion about you and about your blunders in mathematics and statistics. He told me some very unflattering things about you, citing the late Joseph Doob, that I cannot really repeat here without breaking the forum rules.
I bump into Roger Penrose from time to time, so I'll ask his opinion. Could email Michael too. Interesting.
Now the Karl Hess story is very interesting, and sheds most of all light on his and Walter Phillips (RIP) characters. Both at Illinois, both Austrians. They published a disproof of Bell in PNAS (as academicians they have a fast track to publication in their own journal - no troublesome referees). It turned out to contain a fatal error. The "local" hidden variable was so complex one needed a lot of notation and at one point three "hidden" indices to describe it. One of the indices got forgotten, leading to a normalization error. They didn't divide by the right "constant". With Zeilinger, Weihs and Zukowski, and later help from Larsson, we identified the error. Hess and Phillip were furious. After about just one polite email we were getting angry, abusive mails back. Phillips soon after died of a stroke. He had actually been acting strange the previous few years, brain tumour; before that he had been a highly respected very abstract pure probabilist. Hess is an electronic engineer. Phillips did the math, Hess did the physics. Now Joe Doob is a wonderful probabilist, one of the greatest of the last century, and he certainly never knew any of my work nor would have the slightest interest in it. I used some elementary martingale theory to study the memory loophole. Simple stuff. So to Doob, I am/was quite simply completely unknown, off the radar. The remark "third rate statistician" is not Doob's, but Hess or Phillip's. Notice Christian's also "not even a mathematician, you are just a statistician" remark. This is quite extraordinary arrogance and not only that, stupidity, if we look at the enormous importance of statistics today and the incredible strides which have been taken in the field in such a short time.
So the Hess-Phillip model was dead, but because of the renormalization, it could be resurrected as a detection loophole model. And nowadays, indeed, Hess works with de Raedt. Unfortunately, Hess will not be at Vaxjo this year. I'll ask Hans if he can ask Karl to confirm or deny the Doob story. The remark seems completely out of character, in Doob's mouth. I know many people who knew him well. But it fits very well to both Hess and Phillips' characters. Rather sad. Ego's getting in the way of science.