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

Reproducible.

[Alranor]

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)

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.