Perimeter Institute says good-bye to Joy Christian

In the final paragraph of a March 2012 blog entry, I encouraged the Perimeter Institute and Oxford University to cut their ties with an anti-Bell-theorem activist and the author of repetitive and smug, yet almost uncited (if you remove self-citations) and nonsensical papers irrationally assaulting this important theorem in particular and quantum mechanics in general, namely with Joy Christian.

They have listened – either to me or someone else who gave an equivalent recommendation.




In his new comment at Science2.0, Joy Christian wrote:

Richard Gill, you finally got what you wanted. I got fired by Perimeter Institute, and now Oxford has also started its proceedings against me. But my work transcends these institutes and it will go on. I long resolved to accept judgement from no man but Nature.

These are the words from a giant of physics who has been 800 years ahead of his contemporaries but who will only be celebrated by the future generations – assuming that people will have forgotten all mathematics and physics before the year 2812.

I think that Richard Gill is getting too much credit here but otherwise OK. The comment above is authentic. You may Google search for Joy Christian's personal page at the institute and the newest version of it will tell you Person not found.

It's plausible – and Joy Christian's message suggests – that Oxford University will follow.

This is the right approach. There are thousands of self-described revolutionary thinkers of the same kind who don't get any support from these leading centers of theoretical physics (neither financial support nor moral support or affiliation) so it is not clear why Joy Christian should have been an exception for too long. According to any objective or semi-objective criteria, he hasn't produced almost any valuable work in decades that were given to him as a testing period. For years, he's been stuck with a wrong idea that prevents him from doing further progress in science and these facts should arguably have consequences if there is at least some meritocracy in the hiring processes of the institutions.

I wish him good luck. He will need lots of it, especially because the primary judge he cares about is Nature who told him good-bye many years before the Perimeter Institute did. If you want to support Joy Christian, you may buy lots of copies of his book, Disproof of Bell's Theorem, at the top. But don't forget that there may be a billion of other folks in India and elsewhere (maybe even in Central Europe) who may be hungry and millions of them also believe that they have found the Universe's ultimate secret.

It's not clear whether the delisting alters anything about Joy Christian's finances i.e. whether he's been getting any money in recent years from the PI.

Joy Christian plans to supersede Niels Bohr as well as baseball champions and military pilots: he has already hired a coach and been accepted to the Air Force – and I haven't even mentioned that the high school is named after him, too. ;-)