Did twins doctor up doctorates with physics buzzwords?

Is it a scientific hoax on a grand scale through the most subtle of leg-pullings? Is it important work with a deep significance? Or is it just jargon-filled research by aspirant PhDs that pressed enough buttons to be published in some scientific journals, although neither the authors or the reviewers knew what it actually meant?

That's the burning question in the world of physics, where there are angry claims that Igor and Grichka Bogdanoff – 53-year-old French twins who starred in a popular science TV programme in the 1980s – won their PhDs with "spoofed" theses, full of meaningless gobbledegook about the origins of the universe, superstring theory and space-time.

The twins angrily deny the accusations, though one would never say "bluntly". They rebut one complaint about a paper written by Igor, called Topological Origin of Inertia, by saying "it is a 'conjectural paper' written as a heuristic exercise to understand a plausible (and unexpected) application of our 'topological approach of initial singularity'".

Many scientists recall laughing when in 1996 the physicist Alan Sokal wrote a deliberately silly paper called Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, and managed to get it accepted by a journal of social and cultural studies, Social Text. But now some worry that the joke is on them.

The brothers gained separate PhDs from the University of Bourgogne in 2000 and 2002, both on the mathematical physics used to study the origin of the Universe. Several of their papers appeared in peer-reviewed journals. But in October, Max Niedermaier, a physicist at the University of Pittsburgh, e-mailed a colleague at Pittsburgh suggesting the theses and four of the published papers were "delightfully meaningless combinations of buzzwords".

The topic was taken up by internet physics discussion groups. "The Bogdanov's theses seem like gibberish to me, though I work on topological quantum field theory," John Baez, of the University of California, Riverside, said. "The more carefully I read them, the less sense they make. Eventually I either start laughing or get a headache."

John Barrow, professor of mathematical sciences at the University of Cambridge, has offered an explanation. A book the twins published, and for which they were sued (unsuccessfully) for plagiarism in the mid-Nineties, claimed falsely that they were PhDs. Professor Barrow said they approached him "anxious to obtain PhDs very quickly". He turned them away, calling the work they submitted "laughable compendiums".