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

Physics has always been ethically compromised

[Bonker]

Taken from
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/chance_news/recen t_news/chance_news_11.02.html#item11


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.

We are in trouble.

[Anonymous Coward]

The physics community is in trouble... read another article in the latest Physics Today:

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.

culture of celebrity

[g4dget]

Mistakes and fraud will happen, and they will slip through peer review--that's inevitable. The problem is not that this happens, but that science, and physics in particular, have a celebrity culture kind of like Hollywood does so that these things end up hurting other people--a popular fraud can attract more funding and attention than a dozen people coming up with less glamorous results. And many of the most hyped results turn out to be more good PR than breakthroughs when things have calmed down.

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).

Pure science and funding.

[tjrw]

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.

Re:The proof that physic isn't full of fraud...

[Deskpoet]

I'm a bit surprised this was modded up, considering the muddy thinking it voices (championed by myopic pocket-protector types, mayhap?)

The title of the message, as mispelled as it is, refers to physics, a discipline that is inherently resistent to fakery. But the poster doesn't stop there; he then includes *all* of science:

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).

This is clearly an error in reasoning, an over-inclusive generalization (the exact fallacy type I leave to the forensic amongst you.) Physics is a *branch* of science, not Science Itself, which, incidentally, appears here to take on a quasi-religious reverence.

And that is the whole point. Science with a capital S is little more than religion with a little r these days: it is a hierarchal functioning body where the folks with the ideas that sell best define the environment where their ideas are "accepted" by their peers. In this particular case, some guys needed to justify their funding, and they got caught. However, as only nominal research into any "science" where dollars are at stake will show (think AIDS research, tabacco "science", or even the bet-the-farm ideologies of the nuclear power industry), it's the money that often decides who speaks first and loudest. I'm sure there *are* legitimate scientists out there, but to unequivocally state that your fellow humans are incapable of being human--and therefore are "better"--just because they wear a lab coat is silly. Further, to equate all scientists with physicists is, as noted, simply a fallacious grouping.

Which leads me to my final point: if you're talking about REAL physics, then you might have to consider the Catastrophe of the Infinite Regress and whether or not Shroedinger's Cat has eigenstate(s), and place that at the base of your reasoning. In that context, how much of science (or any faculty, for that matter) is anything more than the imaginings of hairless primates attempting to understand the hologram they find themselves trapped in?

What's causing the delay?

[hoytt]

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.