[jeroenhd]

Perhaps, but blindly accepting a paper because you don't understand what it's saying is a sign of loose standards.

The editors don't need to be experts in every field, but they need to be able to admit that they lack the required experience and understanding to verify a paper's legitimacy. They could've reached out to a physicist before publication, but decided not to because the author was a big name in his field.

This raises the question of what other nonsense papers the journal has published that made it into publication simply because the editors didn't understand what the paper was saying.

In the context of the "science wars", this isn't saying much, because many publications of exact sciences have fallen for hoax papers before. SCIgen has been used to generate over 120 published papers (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2014.14763), since retracted; 16 of those were published by Springer, and the rest by the IEEE. This could just be a computer science issue, but I have no doubt that other exact sciences could fall for the same computer-generated nonsense had SCIgen supported generating papers about physics, chemistry, or maths (even before the age of ChatGPT).

The unfortunate reality is that many major fields and publications are susceptible to this nonsense. This is no doubt a result of the profit-oriented scientific publication industry, which prioritizes making money over finding scientific truth, with many publishers relying on volunteers to check the accuracy of papers published.

[eigenket]

They didn't blindly accept it. They originally rejected it, and eventually published it in a special issue called "science wars", the purpose of which was to have as many different points of view as possible. This special issue was not peer-reviewed at all, so saying they decided not to reach out to a physicist because he was a big name is inaccurate, they didn't peer review anyone.

I think this comment also slightly misinterprets the purpose of peer review. Peer review (despite being a rather broken system) is pretty good at finding honest mistakes. It can sometimes discover fraudulent stuff when the people committing the fraud are particularly bad at it, but peer review isn't supposed to be the sole line of defence against fraudulent behaviour.

I'm not an experimentalist but if someone claims to have done some experiments in a paper and reports some results, it isn't realistic for peer reviewers to repeat those experiments themselves and see if the results are genuine. That happens later after the paper is published and other people try to build on the work.

The system is "working as intended" if fraudulent papers get published occasionally, but are later discovered and retracted.