Tag Archives: England

Scientific spat and libel case in UK has Canadian connection

Neil Turok, Director of the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics located in Waterloo, Canada, has been described as being insufficiently qualified to assess a fellow scientist’s work. Alok Jha, science correspondent for the UK’s Guardian newspaper, writes about the situation which includes a libel suit against Nature magazine in his Nov. 18, 2011 article,

A scientist who is suing one of the world’s most prominent scientific journals for libel compared himself to Albert Einstein in the high court on Friday [Nov. 18, 2011] as part of his evidence against the journal. Professor Mohamed El Naschie, also claimed that an eminent physicist brought in by the journal as an expert witness to analyse the value of his work was not sufficiently qualified to do so.

El Naschie is suing Nature as a result of a news article published in 2008, after the scientist’s retirement as editor-in-chief of the journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals. The article alleged that El Naschie had self-published several research papers, some of which did not seem to have been peer reviewed to an expected standard and also said that El Naschie claimed affiliations and honorary professorships with international institutions that could not be confirmed by Nature. El Naschie claims the allegations in the article were false and had damaged his reputation.

On Friday, Nature called Professor Neil Turok, a cosmologist and director of the Perimeter Institute in Canada, as an expert witness to assess some of the work published by El Naschie.

In his evidence, Turok said he found it difficult to understand the logic in some of El Naschie’s papers. The clear presentation of scientific ideas was an important step in getting an idea accepted, he said. “There are two questions – one is whether the work is clearly presented and readers would be able to understand it. It would be difficult for a trained theoretical physicist to understand [some of El Naschie’s papers]. …  The second question is about the correctness of the theory and that will be decided by whether it agrees with experiments. Most theories in theoretical physics are speculative – we form a logical set of rules and deductions and we try, ultimately, to test the deductions in experiments.

There’s more at stake here than whether or not Turok is qualified or El Naschie’s work is up to the standards in his field, this is also about libel and libel laws in England. There have been some intended consequences from the current set of laws. Here’s an excerpt from the Wikipedia essay,

Libel tourism is a term first coined by Geoffrey Robertson to describe forum shopping for libel suits. It particularly refers to the practice of pursuing a case in England and Wales, in preference to other jurisdictions, such as the United States, which provide more extensive defences for those accused of making derogatory statements. According to the English publishing house Sweet & Maxwell, the number of libel cases brought by people alleged to be involved with terrorism almost tripled in England between 2006 and 2007.

Jha goes on to finish his first article on El Naschie’s libel case with this,

Sile Lane, a spokesperson for the Libel Reform campaign said: “Scientists expect publications like Nature to investigate and write about controversies within the scientific community. The threat of libel action is preventing scientific journals from discussing what is good and bad science. This case is another example of why we need libel law that has a clear strong public interest defence and a high threshold for bringing a case. The government has promised to reform the libel laws and this can’t come soon enough.”

I last wrote about the libel situation in the UK in my Nov. 12, 2010 posting, International call to action on libel laws in the UK.