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.

Comments

Critical Scientists

[Saxerman]

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.

Re:Physics has always been ethically compromised

[glenmark]

Having performed the oil drop experiment in an undergraduate lab (and getting REALLY bad data), I can understand why Millikan would have added a subjective quality weighting to his data. Squinting through a little eyepiece and measuring how long it takes for a microscopic drop of oil to drift between two points is tedious work, with a lot of room for error to creep in. He wasn't aiming for a certain pre-determined value. He was merely uncertain as to how accurately some of his measurements were made. ("I blinked. Is that the same drop I was watching a second ago? Damn, drifted out of the focal plane...")

Of course, the correct way to compensate for this is to collect more data points to get a better statistical sampling, and outright von Neuman rejection of data points which were clearly erroneous, not weighting the values. Nevertheless, there is no denying Millikan's cunning as an experimentalist (on a par with J.J. Thompson). The experiment is simple and elegant, and works quite well given enough care and patience.

Misunderstood science....

[Alomex]

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.

Re:Shut it Michael.

[GuyMannDude]

Yes because of these TWO examples, the whole body of work from the physics community is a total and complete farce.

Well, this emphasis by the media on fraudulent cases really is a big problem. I would wager that a lot of John and/or Jane Does out there are probably thinking the same thing. You are correct that it's only two high-profile cases but you rarely hear about the successes that physics has. In fact, I bet if you say the words "Hubble Telescope" to most people, they'll respond with something along the lines of "Isn't that the orbital telescope that doesn't work because NASA didn't check the mirrors?" The fact that Hubble has given us incredible images never got the press that the original blunder did.

This can become a real problem if people start lobbying their representative and senators to stop funding science. Rather than screaming at Michael, why don't we all take time to reflect on how unfortunate it is that science fraud makes news while science successes never get more than a brief mention.

GMD