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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"."
Is it possible for elements to be "missing" actually. Like gaps in the chart? Do there have to be continuous numbers? Or can you count them ... 114, 115, 117, 119???
I am not a really big physics person, but I thought that there would be a way to put the extra proton in there and throw in an electron to make a heavier one...
Also, how did they mess it up in "Thinking" that they had found them, when they really hadn't? Again I am not a subatomic physicist, so this could be a stupid question..
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Maybe they announced their 'discovery' because they thought they were close to really producing the element, but did not want to let some other country (probably Russia or England) discovering it first and thus getting naming rights. There have historically been fights about who discovered what element first because everyone wants to get a chance to name an element in the periodic table.
Preachers arnt the only ones that can be caught with their pants down.
.. somebody finds out, and he's gone, right? Nope. How do you think a university feels about having to answer to the fact that nobody actually _checked_ his PHD with the university he got it from? Pretty badly. So when my mother reported him, the university told her to shut up or find another job.
.. ie, lots of money and reputations).
Case in point: My mother worked for a university (I'll save them face, because I'm sure it happens at every university) where her co-worker had faked his PHD, and was working on bogus research. All results faked. He didn't have a clue what he was doing.
Okay, no problem, you say
A few years later, they found a way of quietly dismissing him on legit grounds. Its all about vested interest - it makes these schools look stupid to admit that they dont have the time/money (nevermind that trust is still important, IMHO) to cross-check every single research project and prof they hire.
It's an unfortunate consequence of life - some people scam, and sometimes the scammed party wants to keep the details silent (having been sexually abused, its the same deal - you feel (wrongly) stupid for being the victim, although with the university, alot more than my pride is involved
Anyhow, dont think this is an isolated case. Take everything with a grain of salt, considering the money and prestige involved in the stakes of science, until its powering your coffee-maker.
"Old man yells at systemd"
According to this site, element 112, Ununbium, was also discovered by this guy, V. Ninov, who forged the results of the discovery of 116 and 118.
:)
It begs the question -- is 112 bogus as well? If not, it makes you wonder why he did this, after previously discovering a new element already. One was not enough?
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
I'd also say that it was probably just one scientist. Say he's expected to do some work and collect some data, gets bored, screws it up, and then fabricates it. Lucky he now looks like he did it right and is ok. Plus, if you work a place like Lawrence, it's expected of you to be a top notch scientist. Which is quite likely why no one thought to check his results.
--Keeping the flame wars alive, one post at a time
Man. This hit a little close to home. I was on the team that helped "discover" those elements. I want to explain a couple of items about elemental discovery and answer some questions I saw repeated many times on this thread. Superheavy elements haven't been dug out of the ground and looked at in about 60 years. They are made either by atomic explosions in salt caves (which the CTBT forbids now), or by beam on target collisions using a cyclotron. Accelerate some particles (we used Kr), slam them into a target (we used Pb) and you get a little bit of fusion, resulting in a new element with 82+36 protons: 118. Robert Smolanczuk predicted this would be a good reaction for "cold fusion" (not the kind you are thinking of), and we could expect to see ~1 to ~10 nuclei if our detector efficiencies were high enough, with about a week of beam. (That's constant beam-- I had three midnight to 8 AM shifts on this run). We used the Berkeley Gas-Filled Separator, which is basically two 30-ton magnets and some time-sensitive avalanche and PIIPS detectors. We were looking for a characteristic decay chain. We can get the material from the target area to the detector in microseconds, sweep it onto a detector surface, "listen" for a decay on the order of 10 MeV alpha, then wait for the the element-116 left afterwards to decay with another characteristic alpha energy in a characteristic time, and so on. During the week, we had no cherry responses. The data was mined and we thought we had three promising chains. I guess now they weren't so promising. Of course, I've been kept up to date on the retraction and so forth, but I just thought the data was reanalyzed and the chains were no good or outside of statistical significance. I had no idea of this possibility until reading it here. Victor's work in Germany for 110, 111, and 112 is unbesmirchable. Those elements have been confirmed (i.e., made in another lab using the same reaction). They aren't named because the German group just hasn't named them. We bothered them for years, and I'm sure they still get requests. I know they wanted to name one for the valley the lab was in: Hassium or Lassium or something. Still hasn't happened. I'm a little embarrassed. I've lost one of my best conversation pieces--and a resume entry for that matter.
More info on the naming issue, and here.
Context: I'm from the Australian National University Nuclear Physics department; and this is a topic for discussion this morning :-)
It has been suggested here that Victor Ninov is being made into a scapegoat.
Facts that you might be able to confirm or deny:
The Physical Review Letter was submitted when Victor Ninov was away for a few weeks.
He was furious because he didn't think the data was ready yet. (Implication from my colleague; not all the checks had been performed yet; if they had been the original announcement might never have been made. Colleague saw him at a conference not long after the paper submission.)
The paper was published based on the earliest analysis of the data. (I guess you've already half-confirmed this one.)
People here have said that although it's clear some data was faked, it is *not* clear why or when. They see no motive for faking the original data, prior to the first publication. (We're talking about a field where the truth will out, sooner or later; one success should be followed within a year or two by someone else's confirmation. Even if that weren't the case, sooner or later false results get detected and replaced. It takes a lot of time, discussion, work, etc, to determine a) that something is wrong, b) which something is wrong, and c) why, but it happens. (I've recently been involved in exposing the limitations of a particular experimental method.)) It is suggested that the false data may have been inserted after the appearance of the PRL paper, when re-examination of the original data failed to return the 118 decay chains.
And if *that* is the case, then it could all be a terrible mistake. Because I *can* imagine inserting a few events into a copy of the run data, just to make sure that the data mining was working as it should. Indeed, if results were disappearing on me, I probably *would* make such a set of test data. Would I label it t for test, f for fake, a for artificial? Actually, I personally tend to long filenames, but that's because I've learned from experienced programmers and I've seen the confusion that can arise when single letter codes are used.
My point is that although one individual would know a set of data was faked, they might not realise that others in their group were doing datamining on the wrong files. Was data faked to test the analysis procedures? Or to cover someone's tails after the PRL publication came out? I'd suggest 'go over the logbooks' but combining computer analysis and handwritten logbooks requires a certain discipline that is rarely rewarded. Experiments are recorded in exhaustive detail - analysis often is recorded in patches. Why write down new filenames every half hour? And even if you think you've recorded what you've done, why, and where you plan on going next, you can find your own logbooks uninformative. So there's only a moderate chance that they'll reveal the whole story (I expect people have already reviewed them anyway.)
I don't know. Ninov might be the one copping the flak because someone didn't like him. I met him at a conference in Australia about 18 months ago. He listened to my presentation, then asked why I didn't talk about some things and tried to explain to me that there was something wrong with my research. Being a student listening to a bigwig, I tried to get what he was on about. When we started the third round of the conversational loop, I gave up. He did the same thing to my supervisors - they had to tell him "shut up and let us finish explaining" three times before he *did* listen, and then admitted they were right. Being swift to imagine flaws in data or method is a good trait in a scientist. Combining that with being slow to listen probably *would* make you enemies.
Rachel
"In this era of corporate misbehavior and overstatement of results who can you trust? Scientific sources, of course."
Seeing most universities are businesses these days
why should we expect the to behave any differently
to any other business? Money and emphasis on growth is the all important thing that every entity must strive for. Lying and misrepresentation are something that a business does every day in order to attract investors, students, customers and employees. Why not lie about your research prowess too?
In my next incarnation, I hope to come back as a code monkey.