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Physicist Reputations Tarnished

Posted by michael on from the irrational-exuberance dept.

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."

4 of 32 comments (clear)

  1. Same in Chemistry by lovebyte · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Many chemists will say that they have tried to reproduce experiments from scientific articles and have sometimes failed. They will argue that some PhD students and postdocs (in particular) are put under so much pressure to "publish or perish" that some results are sometime fabricated. It's been happening for a very long time in science and it will happen in the future. End of story.

    --

    I'll do it for cheesy poofs.

  2. Pressure for results and funding by twem2 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The pressure to get results, so you can get funding for research is huge, its not surprising that results get falsified.
    Very little research is done with no vested interest now, companies want to make money from it, so they'll only put money into research which is going how they want it, or is worth gambling on as the gains would be so enormous if they were to come to fruition.

  3. Reproducible. by Alranor · · Score: 4, Interesting

    And this is why one of the fundamental rules of science is that your results have to be reproducible by someone working independently.

    I can't see this being a major problem over here (UK) because

    a) Scientists understand that results need to be reproducible, and thus won't be hugely thrown by a single lab producing something like this

    b) The general public don't really know much about science anyway, and they mistrust it already for a completely separate reason, namely the way the government presents any scientific research as supporting whatever policy they've already decided on (see BSE / foot & mouth / GM food / etc)

  4. Tests of confidence... by Vrallis · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This reminds me a bit of a story told by an old science teacher I had. They told us about their final exam in a college chemistry class. The procedure they had to carry out was simple: mix HCl (hydrochloric acid, a very powerful acid) and NaOH (sodium hydroxide, a very powerful base) to produce NaCl (sodium chloride, ordinary table salt) and H2O (erm...duh...).

    The test didn't end there though. The professor required the students to *drink* some of the solution in order to prove they were confident in their own ability to carry out the procedure properly.

    Now, would you drink something that could potentially kill you if you weren't truly confident you know what you were doing?