Physics bitten by reverse Alan Sokal hoax?

“We all laughed when Alan Sokal wrote a deliberately silly paper entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, and managed to get it accepted by a refereed journal of social and cultural studies, Social Text. But now I hear that two brothers have managed to publish 3 meaningless papers in physics journals as a hoax – and even get Ph.D. degrees in physics from Bourgogne University in the process!” John Baez

—Physics bitten by reverse Alan Sokal hoax? Google News)

I don’t know whether this is yet another hoax. Baez is the author of the column, “This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics.” From the most recent column (25 Sep 2002) — “Here comes the climax of our story linking q-mathematics, Dynkin diagrams, incidence geometry and categorification!” (By the way, I had to hack the URL to find the link.)