gill1109 wrote: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.
And here is their side of the story:
Dear Joy,
I am sorry to hear about your plight with Gill. He is a third rate mind and I had the following experience with him. After Walter and I wrote the PNAS paper about the role of time, Gill wrote a number of counter-papers with Zeilinger and others stating repeatedly that time was irrelevant and that our papers were non-local because our probability density depended on the settings of both sides but was not a product density. Then after three years of harassing us (I had to block his e-mails), he had turned himself into a complete pretzel and had to admit that time plaid a role after all. By choosing suitable delay times between the experiments with different settings one can easily get a violation. He wrote a paper with Larsson that repeated that our work was still non-local, because we had a setting dependent probability density. They did not need it because their parameters $\Lambda_{A, C}$ depended on the settings of both stations. They ignored that this were, of course, exactly our time and setting dependent equipment parameters that did the job, and stated after their equation 6 that their dependence was permitted because of the involvement of time delays, and one just needed to remember were their dependence on both settings came from. This is in the literature and can be read by anyone and I would say that most serious people who understand the text would conclude that Gill showed definitely dishonest behavior and just adopted our (more general ) idea, and made it their own and stated that we were wrong.
Gill also e-mailed Walter that he should not work with me, because I was just an ignorant engineer (I am actually a member of both the National Academy of Science and Engineering and Walter knew that, of course).
It is terrible that a third rater like Gill can do so much damage. Mermin wrote an e-mail to Walter saying in essence that Gill is a card holding probabilist and must therefore know what he says.
This whole story reminds me of Goethe's word:
Those who exclusively for truth have yearned
and then discovered it
Have been since ages crucified and burned.
One might like to add that there always were those like Gill that tried to make innocence and honesty suffer.
Best wishes,
Karl
There are other comments and details by Karl that are far more damaging for Gill. I will publish them here if Gill continues his unhealthy ad hominem attacks on me.
Dear Joy,
I fully agree with what you said below. Please also feel free to let anyone know what I think of Gill.
Best wishes, stay in touch,
Karl