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.'"

Comments

Re:Big Science == Big Business

[Daniel Dvorkin]

I'm afraid that's probably the best explanation. This guy is the equivalent of the crooked CFO who gives artificially inflated results to drive up his company's stock price. Bell Labs, like the article says, is (or at least was until very recently) an absolute dream job for a scientist. That attracts the best and the brightest, but unfortunately it also gives them the incentive to cheat.

The problem is, I don't see a way around "big science" any time in the near future, in most fields. Let's face it, the easy stuff in physics has been done; small labs don't have the resources to do ground-breaking research any more, and they probably never will again. New sciences, or new branches of existing disciplines, occasionally pop up that allow the little guys to make serious contributions -- right now, bioinformatics is an example of this -- but research inevitably gets big and expensive as all the cheap discoveries are made and duly noted. There may be a solution to this problem, but damned if I know what it is.