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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"."
Why does the story submitter say "people" and "the researchers" when the AP story clearly states that the fabrication was done by one person?
I have this sinking feeling prior earnings may have been overstated...
Beta only seems to work for Google. Such a shame.
And in related news... Element 142 nicknamed CowboyNealium has been discovered by a crack team of wallruses in antarctica.
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
From a quick read of the article it doesn't like there's any big trust issue here...
The scientists rechecked there data and retracted there claims... where's the cover up? Isn't that pretty much normal in the scientific community?
(Ok... maybe they should have check their results before announcing anything, but its not like they denied anything or blatantly lied!)
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.
Here is the /. story.
Stock in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory plummeted in afternoon trading, while the head researcher vigorously denied rumors that Arthur Andersen had provided proofreading services for the paper in question...
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute chat with the average voter."
--Winston Churchill
Very silly to pin the blame on one individual in the research group. Don't these guys read? Don't they know disgruntled physicists, especially when they're disgraced atomic/nuclear scientists, always come back as super-villains to wreak their vengeance on their enemies and an unsuspecting world?
How long before their suspect builds himself an atomic-powered titanium alloy suit with miniature particle accelerator blasters?
So they said they'd found something, but the confirming experiments didn't come through. They've retracted their claim. That's pretty much how it works. Seems like you can still trust science, precisely because of stories like this. Right?
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
So when should I expect to see the girls of Lawrence Berkley issue of Playboy?
Erm... Maybe I'm daft, but I can't tell if you're kidding here. The strength of science is that it does not require faith. It actually becomes more reliable when faced with scrutiny.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
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.
I think that this story PROVES the credibility of science.
:)
In June 1999, scientists at Berkeley discovered 2 new elements.
The scientists and other members of the scientific community attempted to reproduce these elements.
They couldn't.
In July 2001, Berkeley's claims were retracted.
So what if it turns out that one scientist or a group of scientists did something wrong? The point here is that they didn't get away with it. The scientific process is WORKING.
IMHO, of course.
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"
Fortunately, science already has systems in place to handle conditions like this. The same mechanism, science's dependency on reputation, which sometimes temporary mislabels new research as a crackpot idea, does an excellent job of protecting the integrity of science as a whole. Since he has been shown guilty by his peers, if Victor Ninov can't find a way to clear his name, he will have a hard time ever publishing work again. And no work he does publish will ever be taken for granted.
Science requires trust to operate, he broke it, and science kicked him out of the game.
As for the title "Elements 116 and 118 are bogus", the elements aren't bogus, this just means they weren't seen that time. It would be extremely surprising if 116 and 118 didn't exist, since very well supported theories show they are there and predict some of their properties.
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.
Slashdotium is a compound, formed in the reaction of a troll dipped in flamebait, while compressed under the tremendous pressure of 250,000 mice all clicking on the same phrase in a story, thereby destroying the site thus linked.
The compound is usually responsible for melting down servers (unless they're powered by Linux running on a Game Boy or C64!)
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
This page explains why all of the new elements have this strange Unun-something names, and how they are determined.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
In this particular case, one person lied. Not people, one person, and there was no coverup. Quite the contrary. Despite the fact that some basic check-and-balance procedures were not followed (designed to avoid emberrassment, as there will always be external peer review on this sort of thing as a matter of course), the standard peer review uncovered the fraud when other scientists couldn't duplicate the findings. It is all about checks and balances, whether you are talking about science, politics, engineering, or jurisprudence. Take away your checks and balances and things will go awry
I only wish more people in our society were aware of this basic and very important fact. It is what allows science to function and progress, and it is what allows our democracy to function despite personal corruption. Anytime anyone suggests a "reform" or change, in policy or procedure, that in some way diminishes the checks and balances that are in place *cough* ceeding unprecendented powers to the FBI *cough*, like not doing "the most elemenary checks and data archiving" suspicions should be raised, significantly.
However, in this case peer review and the usual checks and balances did in fact ferret out the fraud and make it known rather quickly. I think this demonstrates that, while individual scientists are certainly capable of misconduct, the scientific method and peer review regime we have works pretty well, and is quite trustworthy.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
If you read even the summary of the slashdot article you mentioned, you'd see that, "It looks like he has left a few spots for new elements, and it is nicely modular, in the event an element is found not to exist."
"And like that
The new names for these elements will be
"Fibbium" and "Bogusium"
Table-ized A.I.
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.
...Arthur Anderson was supposed to audit the research, right?
"Lord, grant that I may always be right, for Thou knowest that I am hard to turn" -- A Scots-Irish prayer
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.