Once upon a time – in the summer of 2022 – I posted a silly little joke on Twitter (before I left there, obviously):
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 choriz,o 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 homophobic abuse. That’s Twitter too.
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 ever did, posted an embellished version of the same joke.
To cut a long story short that led to ChorizoGate, a story which 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 and even Physics World! In nearly all 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.
In a post on this affair at the time, I said
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…
And backfire it has.
Étienne Klein’s appropriation of a silly joke was of no consequence, but at the time I couldn’t help wondering how someone who would do that might behave with things that actually matter. Now I know the answer, and it’s more than worrying. An investigation into the PhD thesis of Etienne Klein by Paris Cité University has concluded that there is extensive evidence of plagiarism in it. Who needs AI when you have Etienne Klein? The University has now decided to rescind Klein’s doctorate, which was awarded in 1999.
What’s the French for Schadenfreude?
In the Dark 