Physicist Reputations Tarnished

ruszka writes "An article at PhysicsWeb goes over a growing concern in the physics community: their reliable image. This isn't a case of jumping the gun, as seen with cold fusion, but over fabrication in data results. Bell Labs and Berkeley are both recovering from cases where their own employees falsified data."

Comments

Re:Same in all fields

[nucal]

What amazes me about this is that these people either:

• think they won't get caught.
• know that other researchers won't be able to reproduce their data and are hoping to get caught.
• are delusional and actually believe their data is valid.
• are betting that their theories are right and are making up data in the hopes that they will be first to publish and that others will validate the results.

Yes, the pressure to produce can be overwhelming, but there are other ways to survive in academia. I find that a lot of researchers fall into a trap of only wanting to publish in the absolute best journals - and then either don't publish or get pressured into cutting corners. In the meantime, they could have chipped away at a project and over time make substantial progress publishing in second tier (but still well regarded) journals, to then gradually work their way up to the more "key" findings. In my opinion, this approach generally leads to more innovative research.

Re:Corrupted Science

[lovebyte]

This is just a tiny part of science. I have been a scientist for the last 12 years and the people that hope to make money from science are a very small minority. Most scientists do research because they like it. And that's all.
Now it is true that there is more and more interest from business and that applied science is growing much faster than fundamental research. But still, most scientists will have nothing more than a barely confortable pay check at the end of the month.

When it comes to reputation, well, yes that's the only thing scientists have! They don't measure their worth through their bank balance. So what. It's the same with OSS.

Falsified Results

[stinkydog]

I think we need to look at how we educate as a cause for false results. My two cents:

High School Chemistry Experiments
Expected results are known
A if you get expected results F if you don't
Crappy equipment and sad lab partners

Do you:

1>Turn in the results you got even though they are wrong and take the F.
2>Doctor the results and get an A.

Most 'college prep' students choose #2. What have we preped them for?

SD

Re:Same in all fields

[cp99]

I'm currently doing a PhD in chemistry, and personally I feel that it would be very easy to make up results. This is especially true if the research is giving unsurprising results.

It is actually quite differcult to reproduce many chemical reactions which have been published in the science lit. So when you can't repeat someone's work, do you raise a stink (only to find out that everybody but you can reproduce it), or do you find another workaround to the problem that you are trying to solve?