Who or what is George Rajna?

Question

I don't know maybe this question seems off topic but anybody get the chance to look at vixra.org archive?

It seems it is blown up by some manuscripts from a guy, which is called "George Rajna", and more interestingly all of them are about some ridiculously (excuse me I didn't find another appropriate word!) hot topics in quantum physics or general relativity. Sometimes in my spare time I just look for crazy things for fun in internet that seems really funny to me. I can't believe "George Rajna" is a real guy (I mean someone really exists with his name or identity!) but it seems it's a just article posting robot, which blow up vixra.org?!

Again, I know maybe it sounds completely off topic but I appreciate if someone has any idea about people post their article (If you could call it a real article, which I'm not sure really?!!!) in vixra.org? People do it just for fun or really they have some serious intention?!

I do not have any real info about this, but it seems to me very much on-topic, since we certainly have concerns about publication... whether "peer-reviewed" [sic] or less... and denial-of-service attacks, or denial-of-credibility attacks, are genuine problems. — paul garrett, Aug 29 '18 at 22:29
@paulgarrett - well, if it were on arxiv I'd be concerned, but vixra is a much lower level of concern (if any). — Jon Custer, Aug 29 '18 at 22:30
I just wasted some time to read about vixra.org history and it seems really crazy to me! I mean it's like a sci-fi writings! They just completely distorted pretty much everything about arxiv.org! — , Aug 29 '18 at 22:31
I have no idea who it is supposed to be, but I went into two of his vixra submissions, and googled random paragraphs. 100% of the ones I've tried are copied verbatim from different science news outlets. Go figure. More likely to be a news aggregating bot than a real person IMO. — Anyon, Aug 29 '18 at 23:22
Currently there are 2940 submissions by George Rajna, and on average during the last week or so there have been 2 to 3 papers are submitted per day. The few I clicked on and glanced at do not even try to pretend to be research papers, so I agree with @Anyon's guess. — Dave L Renfro, Aug 29 '18 at 23:34
@Anyon So what's the point of doing something like this? I mean some people are pursuing some benefits from these kind of activities (e.g. citation count) but it seems he does not have anything in google scholar, researchgate, etc. — , Aug 30 '18 at 00:10
@DaveLRenfro It sounds like the question should be "What is George Ranja?" rather than "Who". — Thomas, Aug 30 '18 at 00:18
Also. Should vixra do something about this? If so, where should they draw the line? — GEdgar, Aug 30 '18 at 00:42
@GEdgar It seems vixra's administration team does not care about papers' content and as long as it is not something vulgar or violate they will publish it. But I think the most important question is: no matter this guy is real or fake or even he's just a programmed bot but what's the benefit behind these kind of activities? It looks like a mystery to me! — , Aug 30 '18 at 01:08
Why is this question out of scope? Ok, vixra is not exactly a trustworthy source, but it somehow exists in the scope of academia. I don't see why we close this question, and questions about ResearchGate (which, to me, is a dumpster fire of similar dimensions) happily get to live. I voted to re-open. — xLeitix, Aug 30 '18 at 09:32
I would be concerned about questions about specific contributors. I would try to reframe the question more generically. — aeismail, Aug 30 '18 at 16:06
There are thousands if not tens of thousands of physics crackpots out there. People who think they’ve figured out quantum gravity far outnumber the people who are actually working on it. Why is another one of these people worth discussing? — knzhou, Aug 30 '18 at 17:12
@knzhou This guy seems more mysterious, because he does not claim that he figured out quantum gravity or found elementary proof for Fermat's last theorem, but he's just posting some nonsense materials by compiling even yellow scientific news together and upload them in vixra.org everyday! More interestingly is that despite of some known cranks out there, which are trying to get benefits from these kind of activities (e.g. citation count or being chief-in-editor of predatory journals), this guy "George Rajna" even does not have google scholar to count his citations! — , Aug 30 '18 at 17:53
As for viXra itself, I would encourage you to give due consideration to its founder's arguments for why it was designed the way it was before dismissing it completely. — E.P., Aug 30 '18 at 18:11
@E.P. Arguments of viXra's founder is not satisfactory in my opinion at least. Because, of course if you open something to public as a whole general humanity in the world it is possible by chance some of them create good research materials but nowadays science as a general is a profession and people with years and years experience are trying to develop science systematically not just by shooting randomly in the dark?! By this method I believe we just waste time and money for 90% nothing to gain 10% credible research which may help science community as a general. Please correct me if I'm wrong. — , Aug 30 '18 at 19:11
I don't think you've really understood Philip Gibbs's arguments. I'm not here to argue in favour of viXra, though. It bothers me that people dismiss it without due consideration (as you're doing now), because it weakens our collective understanding of the problems that viXra sets out to solve; those are real problems and few institutions are doing anything to solve them (and, if anything, academia is moving in a direction to make them worse). I disagree with viXra's solution, but I also find your criticism above to be misguided. — E.P., Aug 30 '18 at 19:26
@E.P. I agree that viXra's founder intention was maybe to create a truly open access preprint repository but I believe just having a good intention does not guarantee a good result. Also, viXra is close to its decade anniversary and I think its founder should reconsider his policies. I mean probably Philip Gibbs didn't want to create a place for scientific abuse but the problem is: always there are some people out there, which use good things for bad intentions, and that's the reason why a secured policy is needed to protect the profits of all members of a community. — , Aug 30 '18 at 19:32
@E.P. I did not argue at you. Where in my last comment you find a sentence which I pointed to you particularly? You said your opinion and I appreciate that and I said my own. That's it. — , Aug 30 '18 at 22:32
re DLR comments, if its a bot, what is its "motive"? some bots tend to have motives or agendas. eg increasing publicity for [x]. but looking at a paper it looks semi random. it does have a lot of citations. could it be trying to manipulate citation counting systems? — vzn, Aug 31 '18 at 04:53
When I googled some of his paragraphs, I didn't get an exact match, so it seems like a deep learning magic bot. — 123movies, Jun 16 '19 at 04:46

xLeitix · Accepted Answer · 2018-08-30T16:14:47.627

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I don't think this is a bot. It looks more like a (somewhat misguided) real human, who may or may not be operating under a pseudonym. Based on what I think is their LinkedIn profile they seem to be a reasonably well-educated person with extensive experience working for IBM (or so they claim), so not your average crank. That said, their contributions to vixra seem fairly cranky to me, especially since said contributions mostly consist of extensive compilations of existing material, without a lot in terms of attribution.

Note that there is also a website apparently written by a "Rich Norman" praising George as "a mouthpiece of the possible". Rich Norman claims to be an "artist" of some sort, who has also written some books published by "Standing Dead Publications" (owned by Rich Norman). The over-the-top praise, strangely flowery language, and the unstructured list of what appears to be pretty much the entirety of Georges work makes me think that there is a connection of some sort between George and Rich. Maybe they are the same person, but it may also be a case of a fringe artist being intellectually attracted to a fringe scientist.

edited Aug 30 '18 at 16:14

answered Aug 30 '18 at 14:21

xLeitix

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It's quite interesting itself that someone without any scientific background praises "George Rajna" because of his brilliant contributions to the physics community but he (Rich Norman) is not quite sure that George Rajna's works are correct or not?! It sounds contradictory to me! Rich Norman: "Are these ideas true? I do not know. However, I have studied them, and I am entirely sure they are sensible, possible, and brilliant." – Aug 30 '18 at 14:40
@MehrdadYousefi I don't see this as "contradictory". Ideas can definitely be beautiful and inspiring, even if I can't check the depths of their truth. A person who is not physicist maybe can't check any specific result in experimental physics, but they may still find the ideas fascinating. – xLeitix Aug 30 '18 at 14:45
@MehrdadYousefi That said, the "Rich Norman" persona also appears to have gone off the deep end a little, so I am not claiming that this is a line of reasoning that an average person would take. – xLeitix Aug 30 '18 at 14:47
I agree to some extent. It's like someone see the "Interstellar" movie, which shows some "fascinating" ideas about black holes, but he/she may not be quite sure about validity of concept. – Aug 30 '18 at 14:50

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 30 '18 at 00:52

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I wonder if there is some connection with this guy ...

George Rajna, a Hungarian-Israeli physicist, computer scientist, and Chess International Master, in 1987 among the Top 100 Players of the World .

Or this guy

George Rajna, Co-founder of WeSaidGoTravel.com, M.B.A., Masters of Science in Communications Disorders, is a bilingual speech therapist who has traveled to over one hundred countries across six continents.

answered Aug 30 '18 at 00:52

GEdgar

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The first guy's bio sounds more relevant to our George Rajna! Look at this profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgeraina/ – Aug 30 '18 at 00:58
Also this profile: https://physics.stackexchange.com/users/31188/george-rajna – Aug 30 '18 at 01:12

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 10 '18 at 09:34

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Considering other answers, there could very well be a possibility that these profiles are created to mock Vixra.org. viXra was created as an alternative to arXiv.

I feel that these profiles may be created to ridicule viXra, because it tries to provide a platform for anyone (even someone completely misguided) to publish in their journal. Their policy is of least censorship, and someone may want to ridicule them by filling their repositories by such articles.

I would like to elaborate over here:

I had a bad experience once when submitting an article to arXiv.org. I had submitted an article without any affiliation and before getting into a Ph.D program, with me being the only author.

I can understand that they receive a lot of "not even wrong" articles but sometimes they are too stringent with their rules, that they prefer to ignore some potential articles. The rules are so stringent on arXiv that a person without affiliation and a popular name cannot publish. I had to gain support from someone in the field to get my paper on arXiv. Also, even after applying for quant-ph it was put into gen-ph category.

I thought that I may be the only person who faced such a problem, but recently I found that a well known name like Nicolas Gisin also experienced a similar thing happen to his PhD students. You may want to read the story here link

answered Dec 10 '18 at 09:34

Chetan Waghela

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The story that you linked about Nicolas Gisin's students is not convincing in my opinion due to Nicolas Gisin's himself: "I am not an expert in this field and, frankly, have the feeling I never truly understood general relativity. I believe the paper is wrong, but I appreciated my students’ eagerness to transgress barriers established between different subfields of physics." A wrong well written paper does not have to be on preprint servers and it's even more dangerous cause may some people think it is really scientifically correct and may build their research plan on a wrong basis. – Mithridates the Great Dec 10 '18 at 15:22
BTW the linked story is written in a language which I don't think a well established professor use this language to describe a problem such as: "During my carrier I posted more than 300 preprints on the arXiv, all in quant-ph. Actually, I might possibly be the most prolific contributor to the quant-ph section. You may consider this as positive or negative, but for sure I feel that the arXiv belongs also a little bit to me. Note that almost all my papers ended up in respectable scientific journals. I am a kind of respectable physicist." So what?! – Mithridates the Great Dec 10 '18 at 15:26
@Alone Programmer But isn't peer review built for that, to judge if they are deemed fit to be taken seriously. Why are we so afraid of ideas? According to the scientific process they will eventually be ruled out. I have always been a supporter of a comment and discussion section in these journals, I know there could be some technical difficulties but there needs to be some way to make scientific progress efficient. – Chetan Waghela Dec 17 '18 at 09:21
Many academics don't understand the purpose of a pre-print repository and hence get agitated when they see fringe-science or blue-sky ideas uploaded. ArXiv could've accepted any paper without moderation, and it'd have fulfilled the purpose of being a pre-print repository. Thankfully, viXra is now doing what arXiv failed to do. – Julia Sep 05 '20 at 11:57
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@Julia There is a huge difference between allowing fringe-science and allowing papers without moderation. And no, accepting any crap would not fulfill its purpose as PRE-PRINT repository. While I agree that the line between what it should and should not accept is thin, and probably some papers fall through the cracks, arXiv would have been useless without moderation. One of the best things about Arxiv for academics is the fact that one can look for new papers on a topic knowing that the complete non-sense papers... – Nick S Feb 17 '21 at 07:11
...( for examples the ones where the authors don't even know what the zeta function is but they prove the Riemann Hypothesis and generalizations which are clearly wrong- and no this is not fringe-science or blue-sky ideas, this is just garbage) have been weeded out. Yes, there are still junk papers on Arxiv, but their percentage is very small. Without moderation, in many hot areas there would be probably tens or hundreds of junk papers for each serious one.... Just check for example how many proofs and disproof of the Riemann Hypothesis are posted on Vixra. – Nick S Feb 17 '21 at 07:14
@Nick: All that people need to know is that they shouldn't look for knowledge on any pre-print repo. They should look for peer reviewed papers. The pre-print repository serves just the purpose of giving a timestamp. A proof of precedence. It's not meant to filter out mistakes. Why do people get so worked-up about papers in pre-print repos? Couldn't you channel all that emotion into making peer-reviewed papers more accessible to the scientific community? If Arxiv gives u peace of mind, then good for u. Use it. – Julia Feb 18 '21 at 11:05

Who or what is George Rajna?

3 Answers3