Cabbolet has been working on his thesis for the past ten years, he graduated from TU/e’s department of Chemical Engineering in 1991 but has been working at Tilburg University since. He cooperated closely with the Ukrainian physicist Sergey Sannikov, who died last year. Since 2005, his primary supervisor has been Harrie de Swart who is a professor of Logic at Tilburg University. On the advice of internal and external experts, the Doctorate Board has now judged Cabbolet’s thesis to be of insufficient quality to satisfy the demands of TU/e. Physicist and Nobel prize winner Gerard ‘t Hooft (Utrecht University) examined the thesis and told university newspaper Cursor that he could not make anything of the physics in the thesis.

In 2007, Cabbolet’s thesis was scheduled for defense at the Tilburg Religious Studies and Theology department, where De Swart is professor. Cabbolet withdrew the thesis after criticism from the Doctorate Committee. In a letter to the editor of Cursor, the University of Tilburg’s president Frank van der Duyn Schouten criticized primary supervisor De Swart for not making this known to the Doctorate Committee in Eindhoven.

Because of this incident, TU/e will be more on the alert in the case of doctoral defenses where both the PhD candidate and the primary supervisor are from outside this university. This will probably not have any effect on international PhD candidates as they are usually quite intensively supervised and are part of a department at TU/e.

Cabbolet is currently working on a trade edition of his dissertation which will include an extra chapter refuting the criticism he has come up against./.