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.

A little over the top

[hubie]

That article was a bit sensationalist. To read it, it sounds like the peer review system completely failed and the whole foundation of physics is crashing down. There certainly appear to be problems within that research group in that so many coauthors seemed to have been happy to attach their names to the papers without scrutinizing the results, but once the papers were published the scientific system worked.

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.

This is a Lesson in Good Science

[CheshireCatCO]

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.