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.

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).