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Elements 116 and 118 are Bogus?
prostoalex writes "In this era of corporate misbehavior and overstatement of results who can you trust? Scientific sources, of course. Well, turns out people at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory lied about their discovery of elements 116 and 118. Associated Press has the story, quoting the lab officials charging the researchers with "scientific misconduct"."
This is not new news at all, in fact Berkeley scientists retracted their paper back in 2001. Here is a link: http://enews.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/118- retraction.html.
Well considering that much of the problem is not just the one physicists bogus claims, but the fact that the rest of the people involved at the laboratory obviously neglected to verify his claims...
i'd say it's pretty safe to use the plural version
These elements are extremely short lived. You can't keep them around and poke at them until you're sure of what they are. You can just look at the tracks in the bubble chamber and see if you can construct what that lead nucleus used to be a microsecond ago.
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E_NOSIG
Which article did you read? There are two articles linked in the Slashdot blurb. The first article links to the original announcement of the discovery dated June 7, 1999. In that article, there's a link to the retraction, dated July 27, 2001. Today, July 15, 2002, there's an article reporting that the original discovery wasn't a discovery at all. It was fabricated data and the announcement was intentionally done based on fake information. That is fraud. That's a trust issue.
Had the original announcement was a discovery that they believed was based on real, bona fide data, that would be different -- just part of the normal scientific discovery process.
I'm not saying that they didn't eventually catch it, because the article points out that they certainly did. But also taken from the article...
Shank admitted that basic verifications necessary for such lofty scientific proclamations were not followed.
"In this case, the most elementary checks and data archiving were not done," Shanks said.
When the lab's director says that "basic verifications"..."were not followed", i feel pretty safe in saying they "obviously neglected to verify his claims" (at least for a good while)
What it tells us is that no scientific result is credible until it has been independently replicated by others.
What is so depressing about these cases of fraud is that they discourage the replication of interesting but implausible results: if fraud is common, people aren't going to spend time and money on things that may be fraudulent. That is why this kind of thing really hurts science.
Francium (#88) was discovered in 1939. It has a very minute half-life, and is nearly (let's not start a flame war here...) useless. As the physicists kept digging for larger elements, they got Americium (#95) in 1944. It's used in ionizing smoke detectors, one of the most sensitive types.
If we had stopped looking after Francium, the ionizing smoke detector would never had been built.
-twb