Archive for Etienne Klein

The Dark Side of ChorizoGate

Posted in Astrohype with tags , , on August 6, 2022 by telescoper

So ChorizoGate continues…

The story has now made it into numerous newspapers, from the Daily Star to The Times, and even got coverage on CNN News and the RTÉ website. More exciting still, it’s in Physics World!

In every single one of the stories I’ve seen, the image, together with the JWST connection, is attributed to Étienne Klein who is apparently very well known in France as a popularizer of science in the French language. Because he writes and broadcasts in French he is not so well known outside France. Until recently that is!

To be honest I’m quite relieved to have avoided the media notoriety surrounding ChorizoGate, especially as it means I’ve avoided being on the front page of the Daily Star! Dr Klein is welcome to the publicity, though perhaps it might backfire on him…

Since Thursday, when I posted my piece on the background to ChorizoGate, I’ve been contacted by a significant number of people (some in private and some in public, on social media) with stories about the “French scientist” who spread the above image on Twitter. Some of these are rather worrying.

In particular, in 2016, Étienne Klein was involved in a scandal in which he was shown to have plagiarized some of the material in one of his popular books. This is mentioned only briefly on his wikipedia page, but there are articles about his plagiarism here and here (in French). This story accords with many of the public and private comments I’ve seen about his habitual plagiarism. In other words, he has form. A lot of it, even if only a fraction of what I’ve been told is true.

Étienne Klein’s appropriation of a silly joke is of no consequence, but I couldn’t help wondering how someone who would do that might behave with things that actually matter. Now I think I know the answer, and it’s worrying.

Update:

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ChorizoGate: an Accidental Hoax

Posted in Biographical, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on August 3, 2022 by telescoper

My Twitter account is usually a quiet backwater of social media, and that’s the way I like it, but there was an unexpected burst of activity and interest in it over the weekend. To amuse myself on Saturday morning I decided to post this on Twitter:

I thought a few people might find it funny, but it took off beyond my expectations. By my standards over 5000 likes counts as “going viral” (as you young people say). Most people saw the joke immediately – if you don’t get it, the image is of a slice of chorizo not an astronomical object – and some even joined in with puns and other jokes. Even funnier, some respondents earnestly shared their devastating insight that it was chorizo (or some variant thereof). I honestly didn’t think anyone would think that I was seriously trying to pass it off as a JWST picture; it was just meant to be silly. But there you go. That’s Twitter. I should also report that some people looked at the rainbow flags in my profile and proceeded to indulge in some casual homophobia. That’s Twitter too. Those people all got blocked.

Anyway, the day after I posted the image it seems a prominent French physicist called Etienne Klein who has many times more Twitter followers than I do, posted this embellished version. TRIGGER WARNING – it’s in FRENCH:

Notice the picture is exactly the same. What a coincidence! You might consider this plagiarism; I couldn’t possibly comment. I always regard anything I put on social media as being in the public domain so I’m not really bothered if other people “borrow” it. There’s quite a lot of plagiarism of stuff I’ve written on this blog out there, but life’s too short to get upset about it. Credit would be courteous, but one one learns that it isn’t generally to be expected.

As a matter of fact it’s not a new joke anyway. I didn’t make the picture and don’t remember where I got it from, though it was probably here.

Anyway, the funny thing is that this then got picked up by various other people:

and organisations:

There are others, e.g. here, here, here and here. Also here.

ChorizoGate all took off in a very surprising way. I’m not sure what the moral of this story is, other than if you make a joke no matter how obvious it is there will always be people who take it seriously…

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