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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.'"
... If you tie funding into results the way that it is in universities at the moment (OK, the guy worked at Bell Labs) then people are forced to chase and publish results. In some more theoretical fields it may be less of a problem, where there is more room for disagreement and differing opinions. In this case though, when you are publishing experimental results, then they either work or they don't. If you have people who spend their careers chasing money then temptation to take shortcuts is going to catch up with them, maybe thats why the guy published so much; perhaps he wanted to get caught out and pushing into the most prostigious journals and flooding the system will get you noticed.
Question for the physists though, the article was a bit scant on details, what did the guy claim he could do? How was he claiming to turn materials into semi-conductors?
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
And as we all know, there's no such thing as scruples and honesty when "Big" is involved.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
"think of the untested O-rings on the space shuttle Challenger that froze stiff in the upper atmosphere"
The O-rings weren't frozen stiff in the atmosphere. Ice worked into a joint while the launcher was on the pad. The rupture happened even before the thing left the ground.
I think the Salon author was confused - what the group at Bell labs was working on (that I'm aware of anyway, though I'm not working in the field myself) were organic superconductors. Taking organic molecules, crystallizing them, and measuring their properties basically. What the Bell Labs group has a history of is being very good at crystallizations - Bertram Batlogg, who hired and supposedly supervised this guy, got some extremely impressive results from the crystals they made of the High Temperature superconductors in the early 1990's.
Energy: time to change the picture.
This is actually usually called "small" or "benchtop" physics, as opposed to the real "big physics" that goes on at accelerator labs etc. with hundreds of physicists working together. Making this worse is the coincidence with the bogus element-118 discovery at Berkeley, which was also revealed over the last few months. The APS, where I work, has some rules people are supposed to follow: the 1991 Guidelines for Professional Conduct - but investigation and resolution of problems (which happen more often in lower profile cases such as contested authorship of papers) are left to the institutions where the people involved work; it's starting to seem that perhaps more is needed.
Energy: time to change the picture.
It is a reasonable criticism directed at Science and Nature that they seem to compete with each other to publish attention-getting results (the recent bubble fusion experiment comes to mind), but what it comes down to is that a reviewer of a paper has no way to validate experimental data given to him. You have to take the research group at its word that the data are not fabricated. You can question their data reduction and analysis methods, but if they said they did this measurement and these are the resulting data then you have to take them at their word.
One of the ways science operates is that results like these are presented, and if the results are interesting enough (i.e., unexpected or never seen before) then other labs repeat and verify the experiment. When the results are confirmed, then great. If not, then the results (or at least the conclusions drawn from them) become suspect. This happened with cold fusion and it looks like bubble fusion is heading down the same road. This has happened in the past (N-rays are another example), and it will happen in many other instances that don't draw the big press stories. That is how it should work. The Salon article seems to suggest (among some valid points) that the paper reviewers should have had some all-knowing wisdom and immediately questioned the data.
I also doubt, as the article suggests, that the reputation of physicists has been harmed and that all over the world school children are crying "Say it ain't so Jan Hendrik." The biosciences have many many scandals related to data forging, or at least questionable massaging or analysis of data, because the stakes ($$) are much higher for a new drug to come to market as well as the difficulty in collecting consistent data. The biosciences continue to draw huge numbers of people into the field and it enjoys (deservedly) a positive reputation.
I also thought the article was way over the top with regard about the government funding aspect of this. It made it sound like that all the government money spent on R&D is a waste as it obviouly is going to charlatans and rouges. The author should have looked up the research dollar amounts in relation to the total government budget (such as its percentage of the GNP) as well as in relation to the total non-DoD R&D budget and see how well the NSF or the DOE compare to, say, NIH (I'll give you a hint, they are quite neglected). This isn't "Big Science" by any stretch of the imagination.
Undergraduate science students, in particular physicists are taught that to report results of experiments that don't work is just as important as the reporting of positive results. While this may be true for the pursuit of knowledge, it doesn't really fit with human nature. Since when have money, reputation and Nobel prizes been the reward for the scientist who proves nothing. Is there any other way to reward these people or should we just rely on their own sense of scientific truth to continue this work anonymously and relatively poorly rewarded.
It is sad when these things happen. A lot of people have put their careers in jeopardy by trying to keep up with these exciting "results".
Unfortunately, science is only a human activity so it is subject to all of the faults of people. The way the career and funding system works puts significant pressure on the shoulders of aspiring scientists and things like this will continue to happen. Fortunately, the peer review system managed to stop him in the end though it would have been a lot better if it had happened on day one.
The big dilemma is that science both has to be open to new (surprising?) results and extremely critical at the same time. Redoing an experiment can be incredibly hard and is always time consuming and expensive. A negative result is much too often no result at all.
virve
--
Science is an impartial search for knowledge and understanding. Falsifying the results of experiments is most definitely not science.
There's no place I can be, since I found Serenity.
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.
Basically, until a scientific paper produces strongly reproducible results, results in practical applications, or has been looked over for 50 years or so, trust only that which you have reviewed yourself. Science is a political process, not an abstract search for the truth. Peer review and reproducible results are the checks that make sure that, on the whole, science tends closer to the truth. But like the second law of thermodynamics, it's a general process that overall is true: it's easy to find local examples that appear to violate it.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
The only believable explanation for this episode is one buried in the middle of the story: Schön has mental health issues. He's not just a con artist, he's a compulsive con artist, the kind that lies even when he doesn't need to, or is likely to come back and bite him. How else to explain his behavior? He must have known that nobody would be able to reproduce his results. It's a pretty common syndrome.
Of course, if you focus on Schön's mental state instead of on the "failure" of the peer review system you don't have a story!
I miss the good ol' days when scientists gone bad had an evil, ear-peircing cackle.
Now they just blend in like regular scientists.
Sigh
Table-ized A.I.
[inspecting scientist] found many duplicate graphs in different papers on different subjects. Schön was apparently using the same sets of pictures to tell lots of different stories.
He would have got away with it if he simply had a Mac.
Seriously, though, why leave behind such obvious clues? It is not that hard to generate new phoney diagrams. I am glad evil people are often just as stupid as the non-evil people.
How many are *not* caught because they don't leave behind such silly clues?
Table-ized A.I.
That seems to me to be overstating things quite a lot. In addition to the new branches and disciplines you mention, small labs without monster budgets will also benefit from their own improvements in technology. Just because budgets remain relatively small doesn't mean that technological capability needs to remain stagnant; as an obvious example, processor speed seems to be a lot cheaper now than it was fifteen years ago.
But even more than the new scientific avenues that cheaper technology opens up for small labs, how can anyone say that all that's going to be discovered (without an enormous budget) has been?? It seeems to me to be very unlikely that more discoveries, even significant discoveries, are not just around the corner for small labs. It may not be as drastic as faster-than-light with household products, but surely there are implications even of what we already know that have yet to be fleshed out. We don't know what is going to be discovered, but that doesn't mean nothing can be--and besides, people have been saying that everything's been discovered already since ancient Greece, and probably even before then.
"Someone somewhere had to wear pants for the first time. The meek and indecisive do not change our world." -Montville