French physicist and media star loses doctorate after plagiarism investigation

> Plagiarizing from people on your own thesis committee is a wild move.

Fun fact: he's using this to prove he didn't do anything wrong, as in "see? the people on my thesis committee didn't care I copied their own work, why should anyone else?"

The truth is, people on "thesis committee" don't read thesis. Some do. The director usually does, if he has the time. But many don't; they glance at the intro and conclusion and call it a day.

> He wrote the thesis at a time when it was impossible to identify lightly rephrased statements across a wide body of works. Now we can dump all of these documents into an LLM and have similar sentences surfaced for human review very quickly

He also uses this to say it's unfair to punish him now with tools that didn't exist when he did the crime, which I find quite rich. If you murdered someone before DNA testing was available, that doesn't exonerate you in any way.

Personally I think writing with an LLM is at least as bad as stitching together phrases from others.

The article doesn’t really expand upon what having fragments copied from others means. Even if it fits the letter of the definition, on a phd thesis that may or may not be a big deal. If he’s passing off the ideas of others as his, or faking his research by using the results of others or making them up, then that’s really bad. If he’s just using phrases / wording from others to get his original points across, it looks bad but I don’t see it as a huge deal, especially 30 years out from the phd.

A PhD is supposed to be original research, if the originality or integrity is in question that’s one thing, the rest is much more pedantic, even if technically wrong.

Is it confirmed, that it was intentional?

That is his defence:

"Having read many books throughout his career, he may have “assimilated” them and “not always consciously” used them in his own writing, he said."

I have never published anything in academic context, but I did write a lot and I often found that phrases of the same topic I read before creep into my own writing, so I could see this happening to me without intention.

"the plagiarism report shows that he was rephrasing all of the sentences rather than copying verbatim"

On the other hand, this is in fact the standard defence when someone is accused of plagiarism. But sometimes it might actually be correct? (No idea here, my french ain't good enough either)

In general the reaction seems out of proportion to me, I much rather would like to have focus on actual fraud in science.

I sometimes read this blog for example and there seem to be other things going on with less attention.

https://forbetterscience.com/

I don't understand who would plagiarize for their PhD thesis. In a PhD thesis one of the main things you want is to "blame it" on others so that you don't have to "justify" the text. The more references you have, the better, and the less questioning you have (those are peer reviewed published references after all).

No no he was copy pasting! In the Arret sur image article you can read a whole sentences plagiarized where the author just changed "En effet" to "Toutefois" (for example) at the begining of the quote.

Rephrasing is worse than literal copying from a procedural point of view because it demonstrates intent and obviates a defense of mere incompetence.

Honestly, (not knowing about this case specifics) I don't think even copying Camus or de Broglie passages (not an entire text of course) is much of a problem to be honest. At one point some things become more or less common sense or public domain. I think this would be rather than plagiarism "citation misbehavior" -- i.e. failing to cite or mention previous work. Like, not every math geometry paper needs to cite Euclid, you can just talk about triangles; or even copying passages from say the parallel postulate or whatnot, when actually delivering something novel, should not count as fraud or plagiarism, simply failing to cite a historical source, in my opinion.

Also, I believe citation is usually limited to prior written work. I don't think citing personal communications is mandatory, but at least for me lots of ideas come up in personal communications, random discussions, etc.. I think actually we should give more credit in this case, but it shows that attributing fraud for failing to cite may be a little too harsh. Again, I don't know if that's the case here, or if his thesis is just some pastiche or prior work without any significant or original contribution.

You are committing plagiarism any time you express anyone else's idea without proper attribution in an academic paper. This is, or was, drilled into the head of every college freshman in America. Such instances should be relatively straightforward to identify regardless of closeness of phrasing.

It was a philosophy thesis, what's new in philosophy the past century

Hopefully someone will eventually run plagiarism detection tools on every single doctoral and master's degree thesis ever submitted at every university worldwide. We need to make an example of those who committed academic fraud by ruining their careers.

TBH this sounds harder to parse than I expected as there are various situations where rephrasing things is acceptable. I think historically allusion and rephrase, particularly of common and well known things, without citation I think was much more common, but now academics often err in the direction of finding citations for the sky being blue or water wet. And I do trust that it very much went beyond the pale given the university revoking a degree.

    [ THESIS ]                                  [SOURCE]
    les équations de la physique engendrent,    les équations de la physique engendrent,
    en plus des solutions correspondant aux     en plus des solutions correspondant aux 
    phénomènes, des solutions sans aucune       phénomènes, des solutions sans aucune
    signification physique directe.             signification physique directe (certaines 
                                                solutions sont rejetées, par exemple,
                                                parce qu'elles violent la causalité 
                                                usuelle). La correspondance entre les 
                                                mathématiques et la physique n'est donc
                                                pas biunivoque et naturelle. Ceci laisse
                                                donc planer un doute sur une sorte
                                Un doute
    très sérieux plane donc sur l'idee d'un
    isomorphisme entre le language mathé-       d'isomorphisme entre le langage (mathé-
    matique et la nature. Quant                 matique) et la nature. [...]
    à l'explication platonicienne de la         L'explication platonicienne de la 
    réussite des mathématiques                  réussite des mathématiques peut être
                                                divisée en deux thèses. La première
                                                pourrait être qualifiée de « platonisme 
                                                faible » (celui qui peut être trouvé dans
                                                des dialogues tels que la République).
    elle consiste à admettre que 
                        les mathématiques       Selon cette conception, les mathématiques
    constituent un langage intermédiaire qui    constituent un langage intermédiaire qui
    permet de passer du monde sensible au monde permet de passer du sensible aux monde
    des Idées, qui forme la réalité profonde    des Idées qui constitue la réalité profonde
    des choses. Si les mathématiques sont       des choses. Les mathématiques sont
    efficaces, dira un platonicien, c'est       efficaces ici 
    parce qu'elles permettent de viser les      parce qu'elles offrent unmoyen de viser les
    structures profondes du monde.              véritables structures du monde.

It's worth pointing out that his M.O. was apparently to sometimes tweak the beginning of a sentence and then word-for-word copy some chunk from this source, some from that source, maybe tweak the ending to create a lead-in to the following sentence... but this is not just "oh some figures of speech lodged in my subconscious" -- this is like "whole sentences were mashed up together."

Just some Google Translate of some of the plagiarized paragraphs, the thesis "The Unity of Physics" has:

> The idea that the diversity of reality is underpinned by a deeper unity is as old as thought itself. Great mythologies recount it, early philosophers affirm it, and modern science has taken up the same agenda by first unifying concepts of motion, matter, and space. Indeed, the desire for intelligibility can arguably not do without the idea of the One. However, simply attributing such a tendency to human nature does not validate its realizations. The proclaimed unity may well prove false—stemming merely from incantation, decree, or fantasy—while exerting a purely dogmatic fascination. Yet, if thought were to discover—amidst the shifting mirrors of phenomena—eternal relationships capable of encapsulating them, one could certainly speak of a joy of the mind. While not necessarily an essential framework of thought, the desire for unity corresponds to a nostalgia, a craving for the absolute, an ontological impatience. Yet, the moment it is expressed, it clashes with the irreducible dispersion of things. From this arises a rift between the desiring mind and the disappointing world. At the close of the century, the increasingly assertive power of physical theories—with their all-encompassing nature and unifying aim—prompts us to examine the foundations of the physicists' quest for unity, to define its limits, and to consider its current prospects.

This is claimed to be a mashup of paragraphs from three different sources, first, the sentence starting "However..." is said to hail from Jean-Michel Besnier's "Theories of Knowledge",

> Could the "monist" tendency inherent in the act of knowing be suggested any more clearly? Yet, simply positing such a tendency within human nature is obviously not enough to validate its realizations. Indeed, that unity may well prove illusory, stemming from sheer fantasy while exerting a purely dogmatic fascination. That is precisely why critical philosophy sets out to distinguish between the scientific and...

Followed by a bit of Camus' "Myth of Sisyphus,"

> If man were to recognize that the universe, too, can love and suffer, he would be reconciled. If thought were to discover, within the shifting mirrors of phenomena, eternal relationships capable of summarizing them—and of summarizing themselves in a single principle—one could speak of a happiness of the spirit of which the myth of the blessed would be but a ludicrous counterfeit. This longing for unity, this craving for the absolute, illustrates the essential movement of the human drama. Yet the fact that this longing exists does not imply that it must be immediately appeased.

The last sentence of Sisyphus was changed except for the "Yet" to what appeared to be an original sentence or two in the thesis, "Yet ... irreducible dispersion of things. From this arises a rift between the desiring mind and the disappointing world" -- but only to immediately jump into a third line from Parrochia's "Grand Revolutions of the 20th Century,"

> The increasingly assertive power of modern physical theories—along with their all-encompassing nature and unifying aim—now enables the scientist to occupy, to some extent, the role held by the philosopher from antiquity through the classical age. This is by no means the least significant consequence of the revolution we have experienced...

My very very initial read of this style, I would almost guess that he paid someone else -- someone who did not have a science education -- to write his thesis for him. And probably if that were true, then he had to provide the sources, "I like this sentence from here, that one from there, you see I highlighted this paragraph of this paper -- I'll highlight and you just paste everything together into one big whole and I'll look through the word processor and tweak a couple of sentence beginnings and endings to make everything look nice for the committee and probably only one person on the committee really reads a bit of it but let's be honest that they're all busy with their own research." With that sort of origin, that's how you get the "blind copying without rephrasing" type of thing (The person who's copying doesn't trust their technical chops to rephrase anything! "What if I choose the wrong word and it has another meaning in science and I embarrass myself?" -- so they go verbatim, "this made sense to someone who was well educated in the sciences, it can't be too embarrassing") with a little bit of tweaks between the chunks.

The really incredible thing about the plagiarism report is the 16 copié-collé/copy-paste sections AFTER this one, where it's just like "Yep, he stole whole pages at a time from his sources in just this way."

It's been a while so I may be misremembering, but my memory was that the Claudine Gay case was one I looked at expecting a nothingburger and instead found "Oh, this is actually meaningfully beyond-the-pale plagiarism".

But yes, in general, I do think a LOT of academics could be accused of the milder forms of plagiarism if you scrutinized all of them.

It's not his physic thesis, it's his philosophy thesis. I think i will make a comment or ask dang to change the title to make it clear

Plagiarism was always a stupidity/laziness charge though. People too lazy to reword the thing they’re copying and too dumb to realize they’d get caught.

If anything, the charge has even more gravity now since now you were too lazy to use an LLM. Kinda like when you see bad English in an Amazon product listing and wonder if you even want to buy from a company who was too lazy to use a free LLM to fix up the copy.

If the ecosystem required copy and paste to discover copied ideas, then it was doomed long ago and it’s a good thing that the AI era finally forces real process change.

Apparently anti-vaxxers who both died of "fake news" COVID.

Bit of a hard one as the limit is 80 chars.

Is he actually a physicist, as the article says? If so, I don't see that the title is misleading.

I suppose it could say "French physicist loses philosophy doctorate after plagiarism investigation" but it would probably lead to a different sort of confusion.

I assume you're seing hints of antisemitism here (which is a real topic for French far left, don't get me wrong.)

That being said, I suspect people in ASI can read Liberation, so they would know that Etienne Klein comes from a Catholic family [1].

Names can be tricky : the founder of the site is called Schneidermann... and yet he had troubles with Israel nationals... [2]

[1] https://www.liberation.fr/futurs/2016/10/23/etienne-klein-il...

[2] https://www.franceinfo.fr/faits-divers/police/la-police-appe...

It's literally the norm.

¡Borges!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Q...

He's quite popular in France in particular thanks to https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/la-convers...

Can you elaborate ?

Recently a Harvard president, Claudine Gay was sacked.

Also Francesca Gino was also punished for her (alleged still ? ) fabrication of data.

So what's the problem ?

France is bacon but Francis is english

   These kind of people are just deluded manchilds which can't accept how the universe works at all. They thing everything orbits

Correct. French people are universalist, egalitarian, utopian, theory building lover, often refusing facing reality, however those traits are exactly what helped them build among the best products and theories in STEM

It’s like this everywhere all at once. The bullshitters have won at natural selection.

Literally, but of course when there is a news about it, suddenly it's "surprising", it's like when people find out about the Olympic games that their favorite athlete is leveraging steroids, hormones, drugs and so-on and act surprised (sure, even a 16-year old at the gym is using steroids but the one that is "at the top" doesn't? Absurdity), it's tiring to see, obviously virtually everyone is using PEDs there, the same way as virtually every student cheat to an extent.

Cheating in life isn't necessarily that bad, if you are at the end of your studies and it's either you pass by cheating, either you don't, then the only logical thing to do is to cheat, who would go in more debt and potentially ruin their live doing otherwise, and WHY?

1. The committee that examined his work in depth didn't reach the same conclusion as you

2. If you need to use the exact same phrase as someone else, then you should cite them

He doesn't have a PhD in physics but in philosophy of Sciences. So he didn't plagiarize physics but philosophy.