The Bogdanoffs and Chants family should have a picnic.

These are their faces.

I wish it was a photoshop. Saw one of them IRL. Kind of scary (especially since I almost bumped into it).

Yet they are "Geniuses".

They're like drama magnets.

They both have master's degrees from very good schools (think local equivalent on the Ivy League) in math and/or physics (the level in those fields, at least on the theoretical side, is quite high in France so they're not jokes). And speak like 10 languages.

Had a TV show about popularizing science for years (decades?). Think Neil Degrasse Tyson or Bill Nye. They got famous for that, and writing a few books around the same line (pop-science, but usually a notch above since they have actual advanced science degrees). Problem was they also mixed a bunch of pseudo science in their books (more like their personal unsustained opinions) which irked a few scientist.

There was controversies because later in life they both got "real" (not honorary) PhDs (one in math the other got it in astrophysics IIRC) but some researchers said their theses were not good enough, and they only were allowed to defend them for publicity.

A physicist got a copy of an early draft of one of their theses, put a discussion of it online (where he pointed mistakes and things he thought made it unsuitable to be considered PhD level). But since the version of the thesis he found was a draft (and not the publicly available final version), he got sued for plagiarism (since this document was supposed to be private property).

You can run into them around Paris if you go to scientific conferences, especially when there it's about astrophysics.

They should be made mods on /r/drama

True. And outside of court, they seem to have a good sense of humor, even about themselves (they participated in videos mocking them and such).

Well shit. I'm actually starting to like their attitudes, but I still hate them because they are French, so there is that.

I ran into one of them in a place that was anything but well lit (not a dungeon but between two hallways in a university). It takes a few moments for you brain to recognize them as a person.

Of all the places to run into people with those faces, that's about as bad as it gets.

Why are all the shitty attention-whoring pop scientists into astrophysics? Is it because it makes you seem the smartest?

Makes you sound smart, plus you can spout a lot of bullshit that is hard to disprove (and the general public doesn't care that you can't prove it either). Plus you can speak about time, space, the Big Bang, whatever... (one of their books is about that). It just has to sound cryptic and kind of make intuitive sense to someone who doesn't know shit about science.

that's plastic surgery, right?

There's speculation. It's either bad plastic surgery, or something like human growth hormone. But it could also be a disease (some disorders make your body produce things like growth hormone). Since they're identifcal twins, the disease theory could actually make sense (since they also look alike now, and it would be hard to identicaly botch two plastic surgeries, plus they're rich and in a country with free healthcare so they could get it fixed).

Should we tell them about the phone call that saved Europe?