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With cheekbones “so high and bulbous as to appear to threaten their owners’ vision,” as an Australian newspaper described them a decade in the past, the Bogdanoff twins drew consideration wherever they went.

The controversial celeb scientists, who each obtained doctorates after penning a sequence of impenetrable and allegedly meaningless physics papers, had been descendants of the Aristocracy and, later, a meme beloved on social media platforms like Reddit and 4chan.

But their voyage via the celebrities ended lately in a Parisian hospital, the place each Grichka and Igor Bogdanoff had been admitted on the identical day final month after contracting COVID-19. Grichka, the youthful twin, died within the intensive care unit on Dec. 28. Igor adopted him on Monday. Both had been 72.

A supply near the brothers advised French outlet Le Monde that neither had been vaccinated in opposition to the virus.

The socialite scientists made headlines virtually precisely a yr in the past for allegedly “swindling” a millionaire, a 53-year-old man recognized solely as “Cyrille P.” within the subsequent lawsuit, convincing him to speculate tons of of 1000’s of euros in numerous initiatives, together with an try and revive Temps X, the pop science present that first skyrocketed the brothers to fame in 1979.

Decades earlier than they beamed themselves, decked out in futuristic spacesuits, into the houses of households throughout France, the twins had been born in a fort in Gascogne in 1949. Descended from German and Austrian the Aristocracy, Igor and Grichka had been raised by their grandmother, Countess Bertha Kolowrat-Krakowská, whose scandalous affair with Roland Hayes, the primary Black American to achieve worldwide fame as a classical musician, produced the twins’ mom.

The brothers went on to review utilized arithmetic on the Institute of Political Science and the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. They then discovered a distinct segment for themselves as writers, producers, and presenters of Temps X, which ran from 1979 into the mid-eighties.

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Igor and Grichka first invited controversy with the 1991 publication of a e-book, Dieu et la Science (God and Science), which went on to grow to be a French bestseller. Its debut, nevertheless, roiled teachers after a University of Virginia astronomy professor filed a plagiarism lawsuit over the manuscript.

Settling out of courtroom, the Bogdanoffs started work in direction of their doctorates in 1993. After defending their theses and publishing 5 articles in a number of peer-reviewed physics journals, each brothers handed with the bottom attainable grade.

Tracing their story in 2002, a New York Times reporter wrote that one in all their advisers described the twins as “wunderkids” who had issue understanding they weren’t “the Einstein brothers.” The adviser, Dr. Daniel Sternheimer, advised the Times that educating the brother was like “teaching My Fair Lady to speak with an Oxford accent.”

Their papers, printed in journals like Annals of Physics, claimed, amongst different ideas, to establish what occurred each earlier than and throughout the Big Bang. The Bogdanoffs’ work was first disputed in 2002, after a University of Tours physicist raised considerations in an e mail to a different tutorial. The scientist, Max Niedermaier, referred to as the twins’ writing “delightfully meaningless combinations of buzzwords,” fretting that their proof had nonetheless “been taken seriously.”

Asked why the brothers had been conferred their levels, Dr. Sternheimer mentioned, “These guys worked for 10 years without pay. They have the right to have their work recognized with a diploma, which is nothing much these days.”

He referred to as the following scandal, nicknamed “the Bogdanoff affair,” a “storm in a teacup.” The dispute resulted in a report that discovered the twins’ theses held no scientific worth, however Classical and Quantum Gravity, one other peer-reviewed journal that printed a Bogdanoff paper, finally declined to print a retraction.

Social media customers would ultimately come upon the brothers, who by the flip of the century had apparently found cosmetic surgery. (Both would repeatedly deny that they’d ever had in depth beauty surgical procedures carried out.)

Beginning on Reddit in 2015, customers ran wild with conspiracy theories concerning the brothers, claiming, amongst different issues, that the Bogdanoffs had “psychic powers” and will management the cryptocurrency markets.

This final declare stemmed from a tv look in June final yr, when Grichka remarked on French present Non-Stop People that he and his brother helped develop the supply code for Bitcoin. Both additionally claimed that Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous identify for the determine presupposed to have invented Bitcoin, had given them two “ancient” Bitcoin in “physical form.”

“In terms of credibility,” a French editor advised information web site Decrypt on the time, Igor and Grichka “are equivalent to a scientific version of the Kardashian family.”

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