It brought to light how they received Ph.D. degrees[2] based on largely nonsensical physics papers that were nonetheless peer-reviewed and published in reputable scientific journals.

Their mother was born from an extramarital affair between Bertha (at the time married to Count Hieronymus Colloredo-Mannsfeld[4][5]) and African-American tenor Roland Hayes; their affair caused a major scandal and cost Bertha her title, access to her four elder children, palatial homes in Berlin and Prague, as well as her status in European high society.

Bertha tried to sustain her relationship with Hayes after her divorce and his return to the United States, but declined his offer to legally adopt and raise their daughter.

[5] The Bogdanoff twins made many grandiose and unsubstantiated claims about their early lives and ancestry: they claimed to have received IQ scores above 190 as children,[6] and that their father was "the descendant of a prince, the right arm of Tsar Peter the Great"[7] with ancestral links to a noble Muslim Tatar Mirza from Penza that converted to Orthodox Christianity in exchange for a royal title from Tsar Feodor III.

These claims were the subject of extensive research by journalist Maud Guillaumin for the novel Le mystère Bogdanoff (L'Archipel, 2019), who concluded that the claims were rife with "approximations and historical inaccuracies": in reality, Guillaumin found out that Yuri Bogdanoff, in his teenage years, had first travelled to Spain from the Soviet Union and found himself unable to return on pain of being declared a spy and imprisoned.

[2][12][13] The first of these, Temps X (Time X), ran from 1979 to 1989[12][14] and introduced several British and American science-fiction series to the French public, including The Prisoner, Star Trek, and Doctor Who, in addition to featuring musical guests such as Jean-Michel Jarre.

[2] In 2001 and 2002, the brothers published five papers (including "Topological field theory of the initial singularity of spacetime") in peer-reviewed physics journals.

[20] Niedermaier suggested that the Bogdanoffs' Ph.D. theses and papers were "spoof[s]", created by throwing together instances of theoretical-physics jargon, including terminology from string theory: "The abstracts are delightfully meaningless combinations of buzzwords ... which apparently have been taken seriously.

"[20][21] Copies of the email reached American mathematical physicist John C. Baez, and on 23 October he created a discussion thread about the Bogdanoffs' work on the Usenet newsgroup sci.physics.research, titled "Physics bitten by reverse Alan Sokal hoax?

[2][19] In October 2002, the Bogdanoffs released an email containing apparently supportive statements by Laurent Freidel, then a visiting professor at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

The Register reported on the dispute on 1 November 2002,[23] and stories in The Chronicle of Higher Education,[12] Nature,[20] The New York Times,[2] and other publications appeared soon after.

One of the scientists who approved Igor Bogdanoff's thesis, Roman Jackiw of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spoke to The New York Times reporter Dennis Overbye.

Antoniadis told Le Monde: I had given a favorable opinion for Grichka's defense, based on a rapid and indulgent reading of the thesis text.

According to physicist Arun Bala, all of these papers "involved purported applications of quantum theory to understand processes at the dawn of the universe", but ultimately turned out to be a "hoax perpetrated on the physics community.

Eli Hawkins, acting as a referee on behalf of the Journal of Physics A, suggested rejecting one of the Bogdanoffs' papers: "It would take up too much space to enumerate all the mistakes: indeed it is difficult to say where one error ends and the next begins.

"[24] The New York Times reported that the physicists David Gross, Carlo Rovelli, and Lee Smolin considered the Bogdanoff papers nonsensical.

[2] Nobel laureate Georges Charpak later stated on a French talk show that the Bogdanoffs' presence in the scientific community was "nonexistent".

[29][30] Robert Oeckl's official MathSciNet review of "Topological field theory of the initial singularity of spacetime" states that the paper is "rife with nonsensical or meaningless statements and suffers from a serious lack of coherence", follows up with several examples to illustrate his point, and concludes that the paper "falls short of scientific standards and appears to have no meaningful content.

[36] In September 2006, the case was dismissed after the Bogdanoffs missed court deadlines; they were ordered to pay €2,500 to the magazine's publisher to cover its legal costs.

[44][45] Mića Jovanović, the rector and owner of Megatrend University, wrote a preface for the Serbian edition of Avant le Big Bang.