BobbyBroccoli (real name: Kevan MacKay) is an online critic, video essayist, and documentary maker.
He got his start primarily releasing video game based content including reviews, but gradually switched his focus to covering major scientific controversies and fraud, detailing the culture, politics, and personalities that led up to the incident each video or series covers. As of 2023, he has entirely moved to science based documentaries (which he terms "broccumentaries"), and has made it his full time job.
His YouTube account is here
, and his Nebula account is here.
His work provides examples of:
- Awesome, but Impractical: The SSC. It was theoretically capable on operating at a higher voltage than any current or planned collider, as well as outright being larger, but Bobby reveals that combo of voltage and size would greatly hamper its luminosity. So it probably wouldn't have been much more effective than its competitors, which were much cheaper to build.
- Bait-and-Switch: Bobby pulls this when talking about the competition for the SSC location, making it look like all the factors lined up in Chicago's favor...before revealing that it was going to be located in Texas, and then showing the one factor that made Texas's proposal superior.
- Fake Interactivity: The so-called audience participation round in "The man who almost faked his way to a Nobel Prize", in which Bobby asks and immediately answers a pair of questions in order to draw attention to the historical bigotry of the Nobel awards.
- High Turnover Rate: Highlighted as a major problem that plagued the leadership of the SSC, as people kept quitting those positions due to the stress of being caught between the rapidly inflating cost of the project, the demands of the government officials above them, and the stubborn independence of the scientists working under them.
- Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Parodied with the "Four Horsemen of the Bogpocalypse", a label Bobby applies to four academic writers and professors who directly supported the Bogdanov twins and their work.
- Implausible Deniability: Jan Hendrik Schön is noted as habitually having this problem with his scientific work, dating back to his time in school. Whenever an experiment produced results he didn't like, he would fudge the data to line up with what he wanted. Even after he was caught and admitted to altering the data, he still continued to claim his results on organic transistors were valid and could be proven by further experiments.
- Lensman Arms Race: Multiple examples get detailed, albeit being played out between rival nations' scientific research groups instead of military forces.
- In "Ronald Reagan & the Biggest Failure in Physics", it's outlined how Reagan's support for the SSC program was based heavily on a desire to continue outdoing the efforts of CERN in Europe in term of discovering new subatomic particles. The nationalism associated with the project caused issues with raising international support and funding further down the line.
- In "The man who tried to fake an element", leftover rivalries from the Cold War with the Dubna Russian research lab are part of what caused Berkeley to go out of their way to hire Victor Ninov and overlook the issues with his supposed discovery of new elements. The ending reveals that although Berkeley and Dubna started working together, they now had a new rival research group based in Japan.
- In "The man who faked human cloning", South Korea's economic struggles led them to try to stake a claim in the field of stem cell research in a time frame where the U.S. under George W. Bush was balking at such research due to moral objections, leading to the enormous political and media support Hwang Woo-suk benefited from.
- Memetic Badass: Gets discussed. When 4chan took interest in the Bogdanovs, they quickly were turned into this, being depicted as immortal beings who had full control of the world financial markets and could crash peoples' investments on a whim. However, this came with a number of racist traits (particularly antisemitism) also being applied to the twins, leading Bobby to warn against these memes.
- Non Sequitur: A lampshaded example in "The Bogdanoffs: The Trolls who shook Physics"."Also, there's nowhere else to fit this into the script, but Alan Sokal's profile picture is of Breath of the Wild and I just really wanted to include that."
- Precision F-Strike: This was the normally calm Bobby's response to finding out Jan Hendrik Schön did not keep any written records of his research."He claimed it was standard practice not to keep written logs - which is not true, first of all - who the fuck is this man, not keeping logs of his once in a generation breakthroughs?"
- Revealing Cover-Up: It's pointed out that the entire reason the Bogdanov scandal has a detailed Wikipedia article is because the twins attempted to vandalize their existing page in order to make themselves look better.
- Sock Puppet: As the title suggests, "The Twins who Terrorized Physicists with a Sock Puppet Army" takes account of the Bogdanovs using an array of them to make them seem like they had far more support than they did. Most of them were clumsy and could easily be traced back to the twins.
- Techno Babble: The breakdown of the Bogdanovs' papers revealed they indulged heavily in this to hide that their papers were mostly nonsense. As Bobby puts it:"The conclusion that most seemed to draw, even if they weren't 100% experts in the subject matter, was that all the vocabulary and buzzwords were real, but arranged in such a way that had little to no meaning."
- Unwitting Pawn: In the conclusion of "The Twins who Terrorized Physicists with a Sock Puppet Army", it's revealed that the Bogdanov twins themselves were the pawns of Moshé Flato's plan to get revenge against French academia by letting them get doctorates, a plan which was carried out posthumously by his partner Daniel Sternheimer. Being outsiders to the scientific community, the twins had no clue that this was going on.
