Space Forum / Astronomy / July 2008

When will Martin Nicholson realise that no matter whether other people
may or may not have done the things he alleges, and no matter how
guilty they may or may not be, the fact remains that this in no way
excuses, qualifies, or makes acceptable instances where Martin
Nicholson has either used made up full identities or pretended to be
those people, such as Ian Hill Smith, in order to give backing to his
own wishes, on mailling lists and in blogs, and that Martin Nicholson
has at times actively taken steps to deceive and to make others' work
appear his own.

When will he realise that no matter how much he complains the point is
that John Greaves has liased, dialogued and at times has been involved
in peer reviewed publications with academics and representatives of
organisations, without Greaves feeling the need to broadcast details
of such all over the websphere, whilst Martin Nicholson's record
consists of publishing only a handful of OEJV articles containing
predominantly constant stars wrongly called variable, with most the
remainder being known stars and not new discoveries as claimed, has
single handedly directed web campaigns against officials and journal
editors because they would not take his "double star" work on board.

Despite being pretty much withdrawn from astronomy, John Greaves still
finds no difficulty in publishing when needs be, is offered
coauthorship on an intermittent basis but not infrequently, and has
been seen to generally try to help people seriously progress in their
endeavours on scientific levels, whilst Martin Nicholson recourses to
begging AAVSO every few months to publish his at times ill categorized
red variables for him, because he has no way of getting them published
anywhere in a serious form otherwise.  Yet his webpages will proclaims
how his many variables have been "refereed" by VSX, which is not a
publication, and does not referee but "moderate", akin to forum
moderation, submissions, with the only academic astronomer being
involved being Dr Henden as best as can be seen.

The greatest depth of irony is a strong one.  Nicholson states that he
found his many hundreds of new red variables using a methodology
outlined, and made freely public for anyone to use, by John Greaves.
Prior to this Nicholson had few real variables to his merit.  Now he
has many hundreds of irregular red variables, semiregular red
variables and Miras that he has found using that method so freely
given, as he admits (but did not properly reference for a long time),
and despite some of Nicholson's early OEJV being spurious or already
known, a great many of these new ones are real as the VSX staff kindly
helped him clean up his submissions so that on the whole only the new
and real objects got by them (even if the categorisation of these
stars is poor to meaningless the vast majority of the time, they are
in fact red variables), and yet he makes grandiose claims that Greaves
is jealous of him for having achieved this, when until Greaves showed
him how, Nicholson failed to achieve barely a hundredth of what he now
has.

A qualifier to this irony is that Nicholson attacked the Russian
author of this paper

http://var.astro.cz/oejv/issues/oejv0025.pdf

for doing meaningless work, in the strange belief that said author was
connected with Greaves, no doubt, as there is little reason to attack
it otherwise.  The comments were later withdrawn from the OEJV pages,
as they were personal opinion, not technical details, so there is no
record.  Possibly some dialogue on the matter exists in the VSX
Discussion archives.

Later, in this paper of Nicholson's own

http://var.astro.cz/oejv/issues/oejv0038.pdf

Nicholson outlines an abstract and introduction wherein he uses the
self same methodology as the Russian author, again the one outlined
freely to all by Greaves on AAVSO Discussion, but Nicholson uses
terminology that make it sound as though it was actually being tested
to show it did not work.  Difficult to be sure of such things, let the
reader decide.

However, that paper then goes on to show delight in finding new
variables in this way, in tones of credit to the author (and co-
author, if said person is actually real and was truly involved, as the
supposed Australian Eric Whiting, amongst other individuals, has been
known to use the same modem as the Englishman Martin Nicholson when
posting to Binary Stars Uncensored group, within the same week).

This OEJV is presumably a scientific paper.  The abstract and
introduction both outline the fact that the point of the paper is to
test whether the methodology of Greaves has any merit for finding
readily identified red variables from amongst many, many 2MASS stars,
using colour information (although Greaves' initial method was
targeted towards Miras, as it is easy to find irregular red variables
amongst very red stars without doing much at all).

Yet within the conclusion of the Nicholson's paper no comment is made
with respect to the quality of the methodology being tested, and it is
certainly not stated anywhere directly that the method has been shown
to work.  Instead the paper more concludes by concentrating upon the
success of the author(s) in finding these variables, crediting them
for being clever enough to find new variables.

Accusations of jealousy and spite are strange things when they have no
meaning, but it is interesting to see them when they are evident in
published papers on science.

When there is much creation of blogs on many servers detailing all the
evils done to Nicholson, every now and again a bit of evidence is
interesting.  The above two papers are still available free online,
Greaves' original methodology is still archived

http://mira.aavso.org/pipermail/aavso-discussion/2005-November/009100.html

and anyone is free to use it.  The three Miras noted are likely not
published, as the exercise was a pedagogic one, and likely the yahoo
group VSX Discussion still carries comments made about the time of the
Russian paper.

But the task is easier still.  Always, but always, people should read
this

http://stupendous.rit.edu/tass/mailarchive/2003-06/msg00147.html

and note that to this day it seems that there is not a single double
or binary star credited to Nicholson in the official International
Astronomical Union listing of such objects.  How can anyone be jealous
of such a lack of success, such a lack of success from someone making
such arrogant claims.  And the spite involved is listed for all to see
in Nicholson's numerous webpages and blogs where he repeatedly attacks
double star groups for not giving him his due adulation in accordance
with the press release email linked above that he wrote his very self.

What can you do when someone continually spouts and splutters all over
the web, in cowardly attacks, in dishonest representation, in
accusations which in no way condone their own actions, nor excuse
them, nor justify them?

Well, we put some little stuff on record, trying not to be quite as
boring and widespread as Nicholson, but no doubt most people don't
read it anyway, and for those who are willing to believe and
sympathise with such people, what can be done?  Nothing.

There are groups and organisations and lists who know and admit they
know what Nicholson is like privately, who admit that the evidence
shown that he has deliberately used fully false identities to post to
lists from the same modem is undeniable, but his use of blogs and
bully boy tactics to spread condemnation, as he has done against
American double star academics, scares them.  Ignore it, it might go
away, is the approach.

They also note that his variable star observational record has
improved of late, with his reported magnitudes being more in agreement
with others a lot of the time.  The standard response to that is that
as he pays enough per hour for the rentascopes to do it all for him,
and uses proprietary software that cannot fail if the image is good
enough to reduce said rentascope images usefully, it should be hoped
he gets it right, else he would have to ask for a credit note.