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Ununoctium Wrapup
rkowen writes "Finding superheavy element 118 would have been a giant step in the quest for the conjectured island of nuclear stability. But now the claimed discovery is thought to have been part of a pattern of deception by one physicist that goes back to 1994." We've done several previous stories: the discovery, hints of trouble, possible fraud. Between this and the Schon case one might think the physics community was full of frauds.
Between this and the Schon case one might think the physics community was full of frauds.
Yes because of these TWO examples, the whole body of work from the physics community is a total and complete farce.
Michael, why don't you keep your inane banter to yourself?
--- I do not moderate.
... one might think the physics community was full of frauds ...
I'm still trying to get over that world isn't flat thing, 'kay. Let alone this element 118 stuff 'kay.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Is that sooner or later as prooved there somebody will want to check your result. And if they fail they will try to find explanation. And when they fail to find explanation, they will call for verification and review and finally when all else fail, cast doubt on the theory/experiement. Ask for a redo.
So fraud are rarer and rarer. Comapre the number of fraud in science, with (haha) economical fraud, political fraud (corruption), religious fraud (sect, breaking your own vow like abusing children and so forth).
CAll this a flamebait, but in comparison to many of the other mentionend system, science has a remarkable low rate of fraud.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Well, it must be. Look what all of those fraudulant physicists did to suppress cold fusion. And they still haven't looked into the anti-gravity system and the infinite movement devices I've developed. And they're secretly loosening the straps that hold on my tin foil hat, too.
Physicists... Bah!
That is all.
rkowen writes...
For those playing at home, rkowen didn't write shit. That is, unless rkowen is Bertram Schwarzschild (or an editor) over at Physics Today who wrote the abstract in the friggin' article linked to in the /. summary.
One might think the /. community is full of frauds...
This kind of simple accounting error could be corrected by requiring the CEO's to sign off on all newly found elements. "I was told by our accounting department that we had 118 protons, it seems that we counted 3 of those protons twice, as we sold them to einsteinium and bought them back at a reduced rate"
I think the statement that 2 examples makes the whole profession look like frauds is unwarranted.
That's similar to "1 knowledgable bad guy with a computer and modem who stole money/goods/hijacked phone lines, therefore all knowlegable guys with computers and modems are evil".
the quest for the conjectured island of nuclear stability
Isn't that the fabled island where Amelia Earhart's plane crashed into?
*rimshot*
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
Sounds like Kenny Lay and the Enron boys found new jobs!
I can't help but think of LEXX when I hear about scientest's attempts to find heavier and heavier atoms. Does anyone think we could eventually have a disaster on our hands? The amount of energy it takes to create these particles is astounding. Just a thought, besides it's always nice to think of the late LEXX. :-)
Where the Music Matters
Obligatory link to NPR stream of same.
Taken fromn t_news/chance_news_11.02.html#item11
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/chance_news/rece
The third example is Robert Millikan. Here we read about the experience of Gerald Holton studying Millikan's notebooks related to his famous oil droplets experiment to measure the charge e on a single electron. He found some variability in his estimate for e in difference sets of observations. Millikan gave a personal quality-of-measurment rating to each of the sets of observations in his original 1910 experiment. He then used these to obtain a weighted average of the values obtained from his sets of observation which gave him the estimate for e of 4.85*10^(-10) electrostatic units. The simple average would have given him 4.70*10^(-10) which would have been closer to the currently accepted value of 4.77*10^(-10). Holton also found that, referring to specific sets of observations, Milliken wrote: "publish this", "beauty", and "error high, will not use."
Milliken guessed or decided beforehand what he wanted the electrostatic constant to be and kept fudging his results until he got the one he wanted.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-55/iss-9/p55.html
Not to mention the sort of perpetual game of "who's the smartest" that takes the place of constructive dialog at all levels of physics discourse. Nobody at physics seminars actually understands more than about the first 20% of a talk, but no one will speak up for fear of looking like an idiot. Some physicists are very adept at putting together a few keywords from a talk that they didn't understand and asking a question that makes them look smart. The presenter, if he's "good", will repond with some more key words that the questioner will pretend to understand. But if the presenter doesn't have an answer, or hasn't heard of some theory or thought about how it would apply to his work, then he's the one that's stupid.
Many people don't have a lot of faith in science. Which is why we have those who doubt the moon landing and believe in alien abductions.
A steaming cup of soykaf would be real wiz right now.
Yeah, that's it, element 119. But it's so small you can't see it. Oh, yes, and it only exists for a fraction of a second inside a nuclear explosion. That's the ticket!
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
While scientists only recently started promising getting bigger penises in a serious way, they have been announcing get rich quick schemes and a cure for cancer for a century, and people keep falling for it. Science even has its tabloid press, of which The New Scientist and certain section of Nature are a good example (but Nature at least also contains a lot of good science).
Scientist who engage in exaggeration and fraud to pad their lifestyles with funding?! That couldn't possibly extend to OTHER AREAS of the scientific community, now (cough; deforestation, global warming) now could it? And the most amazing thing is this story actually saw the light of day with the science-can-do-no-wrong crowd here on Slash...
Flaaaaaaaame!!!!
You need a FREE iPod Nano
one might think the physics community was full of frauds.
Of course it is; all of my physics professors claimed to be able to teach!
-----------------------
To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion.
Where are Ponds and Fliechman now those 2 model physicists who discovered cold fusion..
On the plus side the system seems to work. Those that fake it are found out
It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical ``reality'', no less than social ``reality'', is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific ``knowledge", far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities. -- Alan D. Sokal Department of Physics
New York University
Researcher 1:Man, I'm tired!
... I put up 120 today! Don't my arms look bigger?
.... I'm too tired right now ... mabye later ...
...
... I'm too tired, maybe later ...
...
... I knew it! You can't prove it!
Researcher 2:Been working all day?
Researcher 1:No, I was working out
Researcher 2:120??? No way! Researcher 1:Yes way, dude! And a really hot chick was checking me out while I was doing that, so I have proof!
Researcher 2:Prove it!
Researcher 1:Uhhh
Researcher 2:Yea, just like when you were going to prove that you made superheavy element 118
Researcher 1:Hey! I did do that! I did! I did! I did!
Researcher 2:Prove it! Researcher 1:Uhh
Researcher 2:Dude, you're so full of shit!
Researcher 1:Am not! Are you calling me a liar?
Researcher 2:Then prove it
Researcher 1:You're such a jerk!
Researcher 2:Heh
Researcher 1: *sniffle* I'm moving to a different town! *stomps off crying with hot blonde on his arm*
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
What's so difficult to believe about 118 ? I mean, we know from Star Trek that much heavier elments exist, like the Ilium 629.
The Raven
Also look at today's article on salon for more physics trouble:
here
Any good logical linguist knows:
Un-Un-octium = not( not( octium ) ) = Octium (a spoof on the P4 chip from "back in the day").
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
It seems to me that a big problem regarding objectivity in science (which, let's face it, is a fundamental aspect of science), is the source of funding. Scientists are much more likely to attempt fraudulent activity, or cling to theories based around results which fit their model, conveniently suppresing those that do not, if they stand to lose their funding if they do "the right thing".
Not sure that there's an obvious solution here, although peer review works well a lot of the time, but it seems to me that this is becoming more of an issue.
Between this and the Schon case one might think the physics community was full of frauds.
Is it any wonder that people whos lives depend on the research funds don't fudge the numbers sometimes? I mean, we have Enron, MCI Worldcom, and god knows how many other HUGE corporations doing the *exact same thing*. If any one of those corporations donate to research, they'd probably be wanting status reports...and if the researcher doesn't deliver, whoops! No more money.
In the end though, we're all human, and humans make mistakes. Some more than others, though.
GIR: I'm going to sing the Doom song now. Doom doom doom doom doom doom de-doom doom doom doom doom doom doom...
Science has never guaranteed 100% infallibility. What it guarantees is an unrelentless pursuit of the truth, even if takes decades to discover the answer to a problem or uncover a mistake, as the case might be. It also promises a ready acceptance of the new evidence, at least as compared to the readiness of all other human endeavours to accept fault.
This is exactly what we saw in these few sad cases of fraud. There was no coverup, no meetings in the middle of the night, no deep throat.
(* I'm still trying to get over that world isn't flat thing *)
Well, I say the Earth is a hexatrapazoidalgram. Now prove me wrong!
All you have to do is look at all the conjecture that flies as truth to know this.
People are more interested in getting published than actually finding out somthing new. My sister even ran into this in her masters studies. The doctor she was working on research with flat out told her to massage the data to look more like what they wanted, ignoring experimental data that didn't fit, and worse.
Not explain it, mind you, not try to figure out whether the experimentor made a mistake, or if the expectations were incorrect. Just ignore the data we don't want to pay attention to.
Maybe it will come out in the wash, maybe not. If they are just papers to get published to keep your professorship and the like, then you can find a journal obscure enough where no one will care enough to double check your findings, especially if the research is obscure enough.
Professors have been known to:
In my oppinion, a very similar thing happens at corporate research labs with patents.
Also,
Damn those lying physics frauds. Everything we know is wrong!
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
118 is a fraud!
Noooooooooooooo!!
It was a key component in the plans for my new Heisenberg Compensator. It's unique properties were going to make the Heisenberg Compensator dependent technologies feasible at last. Now it's back to square 1. 5 years of research down the drain.
(sob)
(choke)
Must Control Fist of Death
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
I agree. But doesn't it seem like we're seeing a lot more fraud in all areas of late?
Corruption destroyed the Roman Empire and it will destroy western civilization in the same way that it destroyed the Soviet Union.
They thought it might revolutionize their efforts in their nuclear program. However, when the suitcase was much lighter than expected, fraud was immediately suspected.
Skepticism is the main impediment to the progress of science; that and jealousy in the profession, where there are a dozen naysayers to everyone who'd discover something obvious (like: after 117 the elements should just stop - of course there's a 118, so let's let someone have the fun of declaring it discovered). Compare computer science, where Windows is a great OS simply because so many people believe in it. Science should sometimes humble itself before the example of technology.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Yeah, but 3 is hard to work with, so we use 2 instead. I shit you not, a Math Prof. Actually said that in lecture, it went like this...
3.14...well, let round to 3, but 3 is so hard to do calc with so let's use 2 for our purposes here.
Meanwhile, Schrodinger's cat is neither dead nor alive, but rather stalking birds in an Asian jungle because of some damn PETA protestors.
I got questions every few weeks before and I had answers like "It's the missing element, they found 118 and 116 so 117 must exist. My company provides the missing element in non-profit technology."
Maybe now I'll just say I was drunk when I formed the company.
==Tom==This link is already in the original Slashdot story!
To clarify, I posted that comment before I realized I was walking into a mod-war. Can you children please mod each other down and leave me out of it ? And I'd like to encourage the annonymous poster to leave more details. You don't have to reveal yourself of course, or post information that could be used to track you down, but with the little you posted I can't even start a good rumour ! Throw me a bone here ! Was the data known bad at time of publication ? Maybe it was discovered bad later and the retraction is just slow in coming out ? Or was is purposely faked ?
Between this and the Schon case one might think the physics community was full of frauds.
:o)
WHAT?
Someone calling me a fraud?
And without the guts to say it to my face!
Oh.. umm, never mind
Science has never guaranteed 100% infallibility. What it guarantees is an unrelentless pursuit of the truth, even if takes decades to discover the answer to a problem or uncover a mistake, as the case might be. It also promises a ready acceptance of the new evidence, at least as compared to the readiness of all other human endeavours to accept fault.
Wow! Is this the reason that more than four hundred years after Newton and close to a century after the publication of Einstein's relativity, physicists (Hawking, Thorne, Feynman, and the rest) are still talking about time travel as if it were a physicial possibility? Even kids can understand that time cannot change if you explain it to them. The late science critic Paul Feyrabend said it best:
And a more detailed analysis of successful moves in the game of science ('successful' from the point of view of the scientists themselves) shows indeed that there is a wide range of freedom that demands a multiplicity of ideas and permits the application of democratic procedures (ballot-discussion-vote) but that is actually closed by power politics and propaganda. This is where the fairy-tale of a special method assumes its decisive function. It conceals the freedom of decision which creative scientists and the general public have even inside the most rigid and the most advanced parts of science by a recitation of 'objective' criteria and it thus protects the big-shots (Nobel Prize winners; heads of laboratories, of organizations such as the AMA, of special schools; 'educators'; etc.) from the masses (laymen; experts in non-scientific fields; experts in other fields of science): only those citizens count who were subjected to the pressures of scientific institutions (they have undergone a long process of education), who succumbed to these pressures (they have passed their examinations), and who are now firmly convinced of the truth of the fairy-tale. This is how scientists have deceived themselves and everyone else about their business, but without any real disadvantage: they have more money, more authority, more sex appeal than they deserve, and the most stupid procedures and the most laughable results in their domain are surrounded with an aura of excellence. It is time to cut them down in size, and to give them a more modest position in society.
From Against Method by Paul Feyerabend
If you are sincere about discovering the crackpottery and outright deception that is endemic in the pysics community check out this site: Nasty Little Truth About Spacetime Physics
Isn't that CowboyNeal's One super-weakness?
-Ed
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Three Words
Michael. Sims. Bitchslap.
can someone please tell me who a post warning others that the above link goes to the goatsex guy is offtopic? it's precisely ontopic. it's a friendly warning. it's downright courteous.
michael sucks nuts!
I used to work at one of the national labs on the civilian research side. Funding sources are scarce and cutbacks are common. Funding for particle research is particularly difficult to obtain. Almost everyone at the national labs wishes that the cold war was still going on. Right now the strategy of the labs is to prove that they still have a purpose. There's a lot at stake: "laboratory reputation", "project manager repuation", "theorist reputation", and most of all $$$ to get successful results.
Once a project ends, you don't automatically get to work on another one. You usually don't have the luxury of lots of time to refine your experiment either. People DO fear for their jobs.
At the lab, I did observe some instances of "padding" experimental results although I am experienced enough to know that it goes on in most experimental research endeavors (public and private).
The motto at the national labs is "Publish or Perish". In practice, What percent of journal articles describe unsucessful experiments? Not many.
Often in particle physics you are merely validating what is strongly expected from theory so he probably felt he had a good chance to "get away with it" without having to invent physical constants. He went too far though. Honesty does matter in the end.
Michael,
Rather more likely is that members of the slashdot community would think that the slashdot editorial staff is full of incompetent idiots -- if we were unable to see that the stupidity of one doesn't necessarily reflect on the intelligence of the rest.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
versus creation.
They were/are chemists, and there are some subtle differences in the way that chemists and physicists conduct experiments. That's why many physicists initially jumped on them ("bad procedure") and why the results haven't been confirmed elsewhere (it really was bogus data due to bad procedure).
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
hope this isn't a reapeat, but this also just on the heels of that oak ridge fusion thing. you'd think people would have learned to be a bit more careful about announcing table-top fusion these days ...
Ain't an exact science. They can't even tell you if the speed of light is constant!
more than four hundred years after Newton and close to a century after the publication of Einstein's relativity, physicists (Hawking, Thorne, Feynman, and the rest) are still talking about time travel as if it were a physicial possibility?
Someone writing in the 1600s could have written: "two millenia after Aristotle explained why evidence is unimportant to scientific method, and nearly that long after Ptolemy formulated his model of the cosmos, we have these upstarts Newton and Copernicus, inspired no doubt by that buffoon Galileo, spouting about an invisible force and the earth not being the center of creation!" Science makes progress. Knowledge may not increase monotonically, but it does increase. Your appeal to the authority of Newton and Einstein probably wouldn't impress this Feyerabend fellow.
Even kids can understand that time cannot change if you explain it to them.
What does this even mean? Kids "understand" anything that is explained to them by an adult who wants them to. This is why we have som 8-year-olds knee-bobbing in madrassas and others repeating verbatim the racist jokes that they heard from their fathers. I've heard more ridiculous theological postulation from children than from the parents they were parroting.
In future, you would be wise to make your entire post a quote.
later,
Jess
I am programmed for etiquette, not destruction!
omg I just about died laughing
its all the funnier because I know it's true (there are alot of example problems that getting the real answer numerically is about worthless)
Did a CEO sign off on element 119 ?
Sigs are bad for your health.
It's not that "the physics community (is) full of frauds," rather it's the fraud community that is full of physicists.
If you have read any papers from around 1910, you quickly figure out that scientists did things differently. They had to do things differently. The field of statistics was very young.
Even in the journals (such as The Annals of Eugenics, although that started after 1910) where statistical techniques and practices were developed by the likes of R. A. Fisher, error analysis was based mostly on guessing, and curve fitting was usually done by sketching a line or a mostly smooth curve through experimental data points.
So although Millikan's analysis would not be considered acceptable today, back then it was perfectly fine. If he were publishing today, he would have been taught decent techniques for assessing and propagating measurement errors.
In any case, it is pretty clear that Millikan was not guilty of fraud.
There are a wide variety of people discussing the idea that "constants" (such as Planck's as mentioned) may indeed be variable. Although I'm not sufficiently nerdy to vouch for this, it is certainly something interesting. Discusses some of the possible instances of observed variance as well as some of the larger implications to theory that would result if the observations are correct.
Yeah, and how convenient that the theory of relativity is confirmed by ATOMIC clocks, clocks that would not exist if it hadn't been for Einstein's theory. Can you say tautology? As Kramer would say, Yeeeeaaaahhh!
C'mon people. This news has been out ages. It not new news if Physics Today prints an article about it. Nature had an article about 3-4 weeks ago about the element-118 case. The article on element-118 was published and had to be retrackted, but the publishers wouldn't post a correction if not all 15 autographs were under the letter. In the end a correction was print, even though only 14 people had signed the letter asking the editor to do it. One person still claims his data was correct. And this person also worked on the discovery of element-112.
Physics is completely self correcting. If you claim to get cold fusion at 295K it isn't worth a thing till someone else has repeated it. If it can't be repeated and you don't have a decent excuse you can kiss your career good bye.
that line belongs in a movie or song!
Offtopic=1, Flamebait=7, Troll=1, Insightful=6, Interesting=3, Funny=1, Overrated=3, Underrated=2, Total=24
Are there any categories that someone *hasn't* dropped this into?
May we never see th
...by its very method, the field of physics will always lead toward truth...
:-)
And the philosophers cry out that we have no grounds for believing that pragmatic methods like Ockham's Razor and the scientific method lead toward truth.
May we never see th
Come to think about it, my sig is kind of ironic when making posts like this.
May we never see th
As long as "publish or perish" attitude prevails
in the community, there will be a case like this.
And as long as a number of publication which one
publishes in a refereed journal is used to gauge
the ability of scientists, there will be a problem
like this. Though fraud would be still rare.
The most common problem -- annonying at that -- is
that the professional journals are now full of
crappy articles that no one would give a damn in
one year. Especially many junior scientists are
now focusing on how to gain fame by publishing a
large quantities of paper, rather than good
quality of careful scientific investigation.
Ealar mourns for juuri's karma
I live in a giant bucket.
I'm not disputing that conspiracy in science is vastly harder to do and hold down for periods of time compared to virtually any other activity, but I think it's a mistake to think that this is a fluke.
Take Walter Stewart as an example; first investigating the David Baltimore case and then measuring scientific misconduct as a whole, he found that "two thirds of a group of forty seven scientists had done something [...] either careless or irresponsible during a three year period." (Hindsights, ISBN 0446671150). His activities have caused him censure, reassignment, threats and worse.
It would be interesting to see how much science gets by on the assumption that the scientific process has been followed. I suspect that a bunch of science papers are written like journalists write articles; written to the deadline, with only as much work as is barely necessary.
Can we do Cold Fusion with Ununoctium?
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Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
[moderator warning: anatomical pun ahead]
You just pulled that number out of your ass.
--
E_NOSIG