Comment by crdrost

It's worth pointing out that his M.O. was apparently to sometimes tweak the beginning of a sentence and then word-for-word copy some chunk from this source, some from that source, maybe tweak the ending to create a lead-in to the following sentence... but this is not just "oh some figures of speech lodged in my subconscious" -- this is like "whole sentences were mashed up together."

Just some Google Translate of some of the plagiarized paragraphs, the thesis "The Unity of Physics" has:

> The idea that the diversity of reality is underpinned by a deeper unity is as old as thought itself. Great mythologies recount it, early philosophers affirm it, and modern science has taken up the same agenda by first unifying concepts of motion, matter, and space. Indeed, the desire for intelligibility can arguably not do without the idea of the One. However, simply attributing such a tendency to human nature does not validate its realizations. The proclaimed unity may well prove false—stemming merely from incantation, decree, or fantasy—while exerting a purely dogmatic fascination. Yet, if thought were to discover—amidst the shifting mirrors of phenomena—eternal relationships capable of encapsulating them, one could certainly speak of a joy of the mind. While not necessarily an essential framework of thought, the desire for unity corresponds to a nostalgia, a craving for the absolute, an ontological impatience. Yet, the moment it is expressed, it clashes with the irreducible dispersion of things. From this arises a rift between the desiring mind and the disappointing world. At the close of the century, the increasingly assertive power of physical theories—with their all-encompassing nature and unifying aim—prompts us to examine the foundations of the physicists' quest for unity, to define its limits, and to consider its current prospects.

This is claimed to be a mashup of paragraphs from three different sources, first, the sentence starting "However..." is said to hail from Jean-Michel Besnier's "Theories of Knowledge",

> Could the "monist" tendency inherent in the act of knowing be suggested any more clearly? Yet, simply positing such a tendency within human nature is obviously not enough to validate its realizations. Indeed, that unity may well prove illusory, stemming from sheer fantasy while exerting a purely dogmatic fascination. That is precisely why critical philosophy sets out to distinguish between the scientific and...

Followed by a bit of Camus' "Myth of Sisyphus,"

> If man were to recognize that the universe, too, can love and suffer, he would be reconciled. If thought were to discover, within the shifting mirrors of phenomena, eternal relationships capable of summarizing them—and of summarizing themselves in a single principle—one could speak of a happiness of the spirit of which the myth of the blessed would be but a ludicrous counterfeit. This longing for unity, this craving for the absolute, illustrates the essential movement of the human drama. Yet the fact that this longing exists does not imply that it must be immediately appeased.

The last sentence of Sisyphus was changed except for the "Yet" to what appeared to be an original sentence or two in the thesis, "Yet ... irreducible dispersion of things. From this arises a rift between the desiring mind and the disappointing world" -- but only to immediately jump into a third line from Parrochia's "Grand Revolutions of the 20th Century,"

> The increasingly assertive power of modern physical theories—along with their all-encompassing nature and unifying aim—now enables the scientist to occupy, to some extent, the role held by the philosopher from antiquity through the classical age. This is by no means the least significant consequence of the revolution we have experienced...

My very very initial read of this style, I would almost guess that he paid someone else -- someone who did not have a science education -- to write his thesis for him. And probably if that were true, then he had to provide the sources, "I like this sentence from here, that one from there, you see I highlighted this paragraph of this paper -- I'll highlight and you just paste everything together into one big whole and I'll look through the word processor and tweak a couple of sentence beginnings and endings to make everything look nice for the committee and probably only one person on the committee really reads a bit of it but let's be honest that they're all busy with their own research." With that sort of origin, that's how you get the "blind copying without rephrasing" type of thing (The person who's copying doesn't trust their technical chops to rephrase anything! "What if I choose the wrong word and it has another meaning in science and I embarrass myself?" -- so they go verbatim, "this made sense to someone who was well educated in the sciences, it can't be too embarrassing") with a little bit of tweaks between the chunks.

The really incredible thing about the plagiarism report is the 16 copié-collé/copy-paste sections AFTER this one, where it's just like "Yep, he stole whole pages at a time from his sources in just this way."