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Big trouble In The World Of "Big Physics"
klevin writes "Hey, scientists are human too, who woulda thunk it? Nice bedtime reading for anyone who thinks science is an impartial search for knowledge and understanding. `Six months ago, Jan Hendrik Schön seemed like a slam dunk nominee for a Nobel prize. Then some of his colleagues started to take a closer look at his research.'"
No, I don't mean that researchers who falsify data are doing good science. But you'll notice that the falsification was caught. And it wasn't just the revelation that they included an incorrect figure and some of their plots had identical noise. Collegues have been growing suspecious of the results for over a year now because they've been unable to reproduce them.
This is good science. Scientists individually screw up all the time. I certainly have. Usually, we make honest mistakes. Sometimes, we make dishonest ones. But science is not and has never been about any one person or group. Science is a collective effort. It's not just the group doing the experiment, it's the other groups that try to reproduce it, the reviewers who look at it critically and the opponents who try their hardest to tear it apart. If you want to consider "good science", you need to add all of these into the picture. One of these segments clearly failed in this case (the original researchers) and another didn't catch it (the reviewers), the others did their job.
So, really, while the individual scientist was doing bad work, this illustrates exactly how science should work under real world circumstances.