Slashdot Mirror
Ununoctium Discovery a Mistake
Lars Mooseantlers writes: "The New York Times reports, "Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California yesterday retracted a 1999 claim that they had created a new, superheavy element." Hmmm... first the Higgs Boson doesn't exist, now Element 118 turns out to be a myth too. Or is it all just part of some wider, cosmic conspiracy? ;)" Mmmmm, ununoctium. Well, I guess this story's out of date, and so is this paper.
~~~
> The problem that I have with this is the following. If I were going to make a claim of this magnitude I would make sure that there is repeatability of the
> results before I opened my mouth about it.
That cant be done and isnt the way it is done. First of all, a research scientist only has to find the discovery once. After that it has to be reproduced by a totaly seperate lab to verify it.
If your right, then you have your own chapter in history. If your wrong, then your the boy that cryed wolf. Either way the stakes are high, but if you sit on it, then someone else just may step up and steal your limelite. There goes all your grants to the other guy.
That is the problem with subsidized research. Every now and then, findings are relesed befor they are mature, just to stablize their funding....
I agree that Christians who accept some of the more obvious facts that contradict the tenants of their religion can often be a little more pleasant to be around BUT... then why do they continue to believe the rest of their religion? Christianity only makes sense (sort of) in the context that the Bible is a holy book and anything that contradicts it is simply not true. So if some of the Bible is false, why continue to believe the rest. I actually can tolerate hardcore Christians a little more because at least their logic isn't quite as screwy.
Would that make it Un-Ununoctium? =)
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
I am a Bible-believing Christian, although I haven't been going to church regularly lately.
The key difference between religion and science is right here, from the article: "As scientists, we have a responsibility when a mistake like that is made to fess up."
I believe the Bible to be the inspired Word of God, and I believe God to be infallible. Of course, fallible humans often make some pretty imaginitive interpretations of what the Bible says, and when someone does make an erroneous interpretation or judgement, I expect them to own up to their mistake. You're not helping anyone by living a lie.
I visited the Institute for Creation Research a few years ago. These fools try to make the claim that belief in evolution is as much a matter of faith as belief in God -- and one counter to the Bible.
The study of origins is essentially nothing more than a feasibility study: could this have happened? We cannot scientifically prove what we cannot observe - we can only make an educated guess about what really happened, and then compare our model with obervable evidence to see whether our model is consistent with the facts. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to recall reading that the existence of black holes (singularities) has not actually been proven - we can observe what appear to be the effects of a black hole, and our observations have been consistent with the black hole theory, so it's a pretty good bet that that's what's going on, but it's always possible that there could be something else happening that we haven't thought of. We don't know, because we can't (currently) observe it.
The theory of evolution (macroevolution, species evolving into other species over millions of years) is clearly inconsistent with the Bible, which says that the Earth and everything on it was divinely created within six days, and there is no indication anywhere in the Bible that this was not intended to be taken literally. As I have stated, I personally believe the Bible to be infallible, but that's just me. It certainly cannot be proven scientifically that the Biblical account of creation actually happened as described - we can only compare that model with observable facts.
But this is patently false. The difference is, when scientists learn something new, they -usually- (but there are exceptions) give up on the old theories and make new ones.
When religious scholars learn something new, they usually give up on their old interpretations or assumptions. This seems to vary greatly between religions, and some religious groups have become so set in their traditions that they've begun to ignore the foundation upon which their faith is based. I personally base my faith on the Bible, and have yet to see anyone point out a valid contradiction between the Bible and scientific fact.
Compare with religion: Once something becomes part of religious doctrine, it can take CENTURIES before someone convinces people that it was a mistake. And the folks at the ICR are like this: You cannot convince them, even with scriptures that plainly contradict their beliefs, that they're wrong. The human doctrine has become their God.
Please, show me where the scriptures contradicts ICR's beliefs. If you can find a good example, I'll write to them myself; I'd really like to hear their response for myself. What you describe is certainly a real danger.
The relevant point I'm trying to make here is this: Don't poke fun at the scientists for making a mistake; give them credit for admitting it. It's what they ought to be doing. It's how science advances, and how we learn. This is, in the end, a very good thing.
I agree completely.
By the way, I'm not a huge fan of ICR; my biggest problem is that they have almost no materials presenting evidence for Creation that can be used in a secular context; they constantly make religious references in all of their scientific discussions.
I highly recommend the book In Six Days, edited by John F. Ashton, PhD. It's a collection of essays by 50 scientists in a variety of disciplines, each with a PhD, explaining why they believe in the six-day creation described in the Bible, and giving scientific evidence to support their belief. If you don't read the book, at least read the reviews at amazon.com.
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
(Me, I'm just minutes after seeing Dr. Strangelove...)
"Ten years from now, they could do it in a few seconds." -- The Racketeer of the Hellfire Club, 1993, Phrack 42
Last time I checked, science distinguishes itself from any other field of human endeavor by its ability for self-correction. Science is littered with the corpses of discarded theories. How are we to understand the world around us if scientists don't make mistakes?
The public needs to understand that most scientific research is going to end up a failure, but the rewards for success make it worthwhile. And it's hard to predict when or where the next breakthrough will come. We get a skewed view of scientific progress because we only see the breakthroughs (e.g. Galileo's telescope, Maxwell's equations, Darwin's natural selection, Crick & Watson's DNA).
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Kuhn plotted out the social and psychological patterns of scientific revolutions, from rejection to doubt to acceptance of new theories. This book is a must-read for those interested in the social progress of scientific endeavor.
On the other side of the coin, various authors (both psychologists and theologians) have theories of stages of psychological progress. One of these stages is inevitably a dogmatic phase, in which the dogmatic individual actively needs (in a psychological sense) a strictly disciplined environment/worldview. For a person in this phase, the flexibility to toss out an old worldview for a new one, to shift the entire ruleset, simply isn't possible. Scott Peck's Further Along The Road Less Travelled discusses one perspective on this sort of developmental theory.
Please...half a millisecond is an eternity in modern measurement technology.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
Remember if you will that "element" as it applies to chemistry came into being at a time when its chemical definition was NOT in conflict with your second definition of an "irreducible constituent of a composite entity." Elements and the periodic table were scientifically established quite some time before we found out that our irreducible constituents were in fact quite reducible, to smaller bits-n-pieces that are themselves reducible. Democritus' "atom" has the same story.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
maggard writes:
Please don't editorialize innacurately.
Please do not criticize the editor innacurately. All the words you quote are from the original news sender, Lars Mooseantlers. michael is probably far from flawless, but you are completely wrong here.
Thank you for the link, troll, for now I am enlightened.
(Sometimes you need to be offtopic and indignant to get a message out...)
-Tom
Yes, mc. Should have previewed my post, but the message still holds true. Religion is fed to alot of people since birth (even more true 300+ years ago when the catholic church had much more influence).
In early times it went something like this:
You are born, your whole life everyone tells you the world in flat, everything revolves around the earth, some big bad ass mean man from the sky created us all, you die, and go to heaven if you're good, hell if you're bad. This was not taught as 'we believe that...', it was taught as fact. If someone came along and told you the world was round, you'd pick up your nearest clue stick and smack him upside the head.
The longer a belief is believed, the harder it will be, even with irrefutable proof to back yourself up, to convince people you're right, and their father, mother, teachers, and leaders were wrong.
Element 118 did not have 2000+ years of being 'fact'. It's easy for us to dismiss it as a mistake. Proof of the existance of a god (or proof there is no god) would never be swallowed that quick. The older the belief, the larger the truth pill becomes. The bigger the pill, the harder it is to swallow, and some people are going to choke and spit it back up.
This is why religious beliefs are hard to shake, and most scientific proofs are easy to forget if it is shown to be flawed or flat out wrong. They haven't been around long enough to carry the same weight.
For a good time call www.sawkie.com
Don't forget that Aristotol's theories were taken to be unbreakable laws and thus no one wanted to around proving that they were wrong for fear of death. I think that this prevented science from advancing for over 4 centuries.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Three cheers from the Amen Corner, brother.
mefus
In Open Society, GPL Software frees YOU!
That's a very interesting question. According to Webelements Ununhexium (element 116) only existed as a shortlived decay product of 118.
The WebElements page for 118 has information about, and a link to, the retraction (the 116 page doens't) But reading the retraction, though it mentions 116, doesn't retract any claim regarding the existence of 116. So its possible that when the krypton collided with the Lead, an alpha particle was thrown off in the creation of Ununhexium, rather than during the decay of Ununoctium.
However, IANANP (I am not a nuclear physicist), so what do I know?
Work for Change & GET PAID!
The scientists claimed that 118 was seen which decayed into the "never before seen" 116. Does the invalidation of 118 also mean that 116 also didn't exist? Does anyone have any further information? Thanks.
I dont place much faith in what comes out of accelerator collisions. When slamming 2 energy streams together at very close to C, guess what, we CREATE matter. It isnt matter that can occur naturally, and decays in nano-seconds, but who cares right. We got the big grant money to study it and produce reams of paper to prove we are doing something. Bah, I say. The information from this research hasnt provided the answers we seek about sub-atomic structure. It has IMO produced some wild theories with little merit and helps to obscure the true path that we seek.
Dont get me wrong. I too want to understand the structure of the universe. But we have been spinning our wheels with this research for some time now.
Flame away if you must, I have metaphasic shielding.
--Scott 8-}
It should be noted that all of your arguments are perfectly sound when applied to euclidean geometry as well, just so long as you include time as part of your position marker - and there's no reason that you shouldn't. I'm somewhat confused by this whole thing: what part of relativity are you complaining about?
I have nothing against relativity. My problem is with famous sicentists who make all sorts of cockamamie claims (like wormhole, time travel, etc...) on the basis of relativity's success.
Well, we change relative to time, yeah?
No, we just change. Static time intervals is derived abstractly from change.
you say time is static... because'changing time' is self-referential Well, if it's static, then it doesn't change over time, which, according to you, causes the same problem.
There is no such thing as "changing over time" because it implies an independent time coordinate t that changes. A changing time coordinate is illogical, by definition. Why is that so hard for you to understand? You must be a physicist or maybe you aspire to be one.
I use the word 'static' for want of a better term. 'Unchanging' may be more appropriate. In a model where there is no change, even the concept of 'no change' is meaningless. However, an outside observer can come to the conclusion that there is no change.
you know worm holes and time travel aren't really accepted as such outside the minds of Jack Sarfatti, Rudy Rucker, bored middleschool kids and science fiction writers.
You're kidding me. A simple search on Google for either wormhole or time travel contradicts your statement. Stephen Hawking claims that time travel is a serious scientific pursuit. See the references on my site.
Quantum computation, on the other hand, has something behind it
Quantum computing is just as much snake oil and crackpottery as time travel, if not more so. In fact, Dr. David Deutsch of Oxford, who has set himself up as the quantum computing pope, also believes in time travel (I quote him on my site). It's just snake oil on top of snake oil. I am preparing a page on my site to unmask the crackpottery of quantum computing. Stay tuned.
Years ago the soviets and the americans and any other two-bit chemist would get into fights over who found the heavier element first, and correspondingly each give their own name.
Consequently, IUPAC (busybodies that they are) set out to define the uniform naming nomenclature for heavier elements. There's a summary here: http://www.resource-world.net/IUPACnam.htm . Which more or less says "latin for each digit in the atomic number"
What it really comes down to is there won't be any new cool element names from this point.
Tully and co-workers have combined the data from the four experiments at LEP and found evidence that the Higgs boson has a mass of 114.9 GeV c-2. 'It is a 2.6 sigma effect,' he told PhysicsWeb, 'so there's still a 6 in 1000 chance that what we are seeing are background events, rather than the Higgs.'
The international physics community gives its golden stamp of approval for the existence of a particle is, I believe, 1 in 10 000, and the LEP at CERN would probably have been able to get that accuracy within a year or two had it not been dismantled for something even bigger.
I agree... I've never understood modern Christianity's ability to take some parts of the Bible at face value while acknowledging and accepting the fact that other parts are just so much made-up nonsense.
As an agnostic, I actually have more respect for the faith of the hardcore fundamentalist types than I do for the more "progressive" denominations. At least the fundies stick to their guns (sometimes a little too literally).
People can rationalize their beliefs to a truly amazing extent, and religion is by no means unique in that respect. Much of the ideological backlash Copernicus had to put up with didn't even come from the Church, for instance. It's easy to blame all irrational human behavior on our atavistic God/alpha leader-seeking genes, but it's also very wrong.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Am I the only person who has a problem with the concept of artificial elements?
I think defining an element as something that "cannot be reduced to simpler substances by normal chemical means," is awfully convenient and runs contrary to a more simple definition: "A fundamental, essential, or irreducible constituent of a composite entity."
I think that cramming more protons into a nucleus and calling it a new "element" (yes I know this is over-simplified) is a bit of a logical stretch. No wonder people who were not brought up speaking English have such a problem learning it when we have contradictory definitions for the same word based on context.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
Well, you can have a look at a Neutron Star. That's one very big atom!
(Disclaimer : strictly speaking a Neutron Star is not an atom, but it is a very big ball of neutrons and protons in a bound state.)
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
Disclaimer: I am a church-going Christian, and have been for many years.
The key difference between religion and science is right here, from the article: "As scientists, we have a responsibility when a mistake like that is made to fess up."
I visited the Institute for Creation Research a few years ago. These fools try to make the claim that belief in evolution is as much a matter of faith as belief in God -- and one counter to the Bible.
But this is patently false. The difference is, when scientists learn something new, they -usually- (but there are exceptions) give up on the old theories and make new ones.
Compare with religion: Once something becomes part of religious doctrine, it can take CENTURIES before someone convinces people that it was a mistake. And the folks at the ICR are like this: You cannot convince them, even with scriptures that plainly contradict their beliefs, that they're wrong. The human doctrine has become their God.
The relevant point I'm trying to make here is this: Don't poke fun at the scientists for making a mistake; give them credit for admitting it. It's what they ought to be doing. It's how science advances, and how we learn. This is, in the end, a very good thing.
The creation of new heavy elements through heavy element fusion in particle accelerators is real. It is how: seaborgium: 1974, bohrium: 1981, meitnerium: 1982, hassium: 1984, ununnilium: 1994(and others I believe), were all created. The researchers in this case thought they were reaching a so called sea of stability(and had good reason to believe this) where nuclear stability would slightly increase with mass again enough to allow the production of atoms with neasureably long half lives before falling off with increased nuclear mass again.
Why would they have come out retracting thier previous claim 3 years after the fact at a time when no one was questioning thier results if they had falsified data? They went over thier data again and realized something was wrong, they retracted an honest but mistaken claim, this is how science works at it's best. When an astronomer a few years ago at the yearly American Astrophysical meeting found out (WHILE HE WAS AT THE ACTUAL MEETING NO LESS) that he had made a mistake in his calculations and the stars he had been studying were not orbited by any extrasolar planets, he got up in front of the entire congregation of scientists at the meeting and confessed he had made a mistake. He recieved a standing ovation. That is exactly what should happen here.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
You mean Lars Mooseantlers writes:
Remember, the stuff in italics and quoted up there is written by the submitter. The only thing michael added was:
--
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
I shouldn't have bought all those Ununoctium and Higgs boson futures! First pets.com, now this! I guess I'll just invest in record companies and Microsoft.
Scientists have announced that Schrodinger's cat is dead. Oh wait, he's fine. No, he's not; he's dead. Er, now he's alive again...
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
It'll be nice when they can build an atom so big the human eye can see it but until then we need to forget building big atoms and spend more time learning about the small ones.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
This may not be the best time to reveal the new element I've discovered, unobtainium. It has no mass, infinite strength, and a firewire port.
Oh dear, I can feel a troll feeding frenzy coming on...
Because they retracted it twice before. This is the third time. ;)
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
It's great to see physicists with integrity rather the embarasment to the field perpetrated by Drs. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons in March 1989 when they claimed to have devised a process to produce cold fusion.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
If I were going to make a claim of this magnitude I would make sure that there is repeatability of the results before I opened my mouth about it.
Firstly, this discovery isn't anything that will result in fundamental shifts in scientific knowledge, nor is it anything that will affect the daily lives of individuals (in the same way as, say, nuclear fission). So I'm not sure why you would consider this a discovery of great magnitude, aside from the fact that an average person could probably understand the nature of the discovery. Furthermore, repeatability is the work of other researchers, so in this case the system worked as intended.
I believe that this research is much needed and I detest the fact that this type of bogus science really hurts the rest of the legitimate scientific community by making funds that much harder to come by.
Again, I disagree. The research in question was neither "bogus", nor did it hurt the reputation of the rest of the scientific community. There was some evidence from an experiment that could have been a legitimate discovery, and it was published as such, then withdrawn when the evidence was reviewed. In fact, as many posters have pointed out, the forthrightness of the scientists in pointing out their own mistakes can only help their reputations. The research funding agencies understand how science works, and won't likely turn off the money taps because of one failed experiment.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
It's common knowledge that the superheavy elements, particularly Ununpentium (115), are what power the alien spacecraft the United States has secretly captured and reverse engineered. It works by amplifying the so-called "Gravity A-waves" that extend from these strange atoms, to compress and expand the surrounding space. This is the stuff Star Trek is make of, and it's being kept from us hippies by power freaks for no good reason!
Bob Lazar was right after all! Spread the word! The truth is out there! Fight the spooks! Keep watching the sky! Don't let THEM get you! And always remember to keep your tinfoil beanies crisp!
Power to the Peaceful
As a graduate student in physics at Berkeley, I take great offence at some of the comments here. What bothers me is that some people make comments as if they knew what they are talking about. Nothing annoys physicists more then idiots who make half-baked comments without even knowing what they are talking about. The fact that these particles live for a fraction of a second does not mean that the proof of their existence is flimsy. They are detected by looking for a series of reactions (decays) that occur once the particle has been created. It is not easy but at least physicists are honest enough to make their errors public. It is a shame the general public is too stupid to understand this or the work that is carried out.