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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."
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.
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)
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.
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.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
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
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
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?