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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.
... 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.
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"
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
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.
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).
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!
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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
They say there's no danger... ;-)
[Actually there really is no danger- the energy from cosmic rays is so stupendously more than we can make in the lab- if making a dangerous blackhole were that easy- we'd be dead years ago. It turns out that microscopic blackholes are unstable due to hawking radiation, so that they never can grow big enough to swallow more than an atom or too, and that won't keep a hungry blackhole happy for long enough to avoid starvation!]
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"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.
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.
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
watch this
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".
Yeah, that seems to be the argument, doesn't it?
Its certainly not true, but there are plenty of examples where media and polititans have attempted to make that VERY point. After Columbine, 3D FPS made you evil. After Enron, all corporations are fraudulant, and therefore evil. Don't even consider trying to circumvent copyright protection. Evil is the only way to go there.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Actually there are some physicists currently trying to build microscopic black holes.
They say there's no danger
That reminds me of the time we all played around with little balls of mercury in chemistry class.
"Hey look, Meckel is asleep at his desk; let's put one of these hole puppies in his ear!"
Table-ized A.I.
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
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
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
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?
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
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.
...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
There is fraud and there is data massaging. Forgetting a few rogue results is taught from an early stage in the science classroom. Regrettably it continues through to original research. This is a pity because sometimes those rogue results can open up a completely new area.
but I don't see how that invalidates the theory of relativity.
As I write on my site, relativity is mathematically correct. My message is that one cannot use relativity to talk about time travel through wormholes and the like or, as Paul Davies recently claims in Scientific American, that "time dilation" is a form of time travel. Time dilation is an unfortunate misnomer for the simple reason that time cannot change. All "time dilation" means is that one clock runs slower than another clock. Nothing more.
Anyway, it's good to ask questions, but it's unhealthy to heap such vitriol upon people because you disagree with (or don't understand) what they're saying.
Spoken like a true apologist for crackpottery. IOW, we can come with all sorts of cokamamie bullshit, and you think it's crackpottery, it's only because we do not understand them. Yeah, right.
Never mind that Hawking and Thorne are talking about visiting their great, great-grandparents in the past through wormholes. Never mind that Feynman wrote about particles moving in time toward the past. Those guys deserve more than vitriol because they should know better. That's what they are paid for. It's our money and we deserve to get good science for our money, not a bunch of nonsense. And tough cookie if my calling them crackpots offends your sensibilities. That's what they are.
What he is an apologist for is not "crackpot" science. It's basically applied mathematics. Even if one accepts your idea that "spacetime is fixed," which is only a classical concept, particles' "lifelines" are paths through that spacetime geometry.
Just like in geometry, we can imagine what possible shapes those paths can take. I can imagine, for instance, what sort of "straight" lines I can draw on the surface of a sphere. For the usual definitions of "straight," on a sphere, those lines are arcs about the center of the sphere, leading to spherical trigonometry, great circles, etc.
When the geometry is that of spacetime in the presence of gravity, the definition of "straight" lines in spacetime gets a lot more complicated. What sort of lines can be drawn in spacetime?
The basic question that the physicists you mention are trying to answer is whether it is possible for spacetime to be so twisted up that a line drawn in spacetime can form a closed path. It's simply a problem of geometry. They aren't suggesting that spacetime ever is that twisted, or that you could do anything like construct a spacetime that twisted, just whether it is mathematically possible as a geometry problem.
Another apologist for crackpot science heard from.
The basic question that the physicists you mention are trying to answer is whether it is possible for spacetime to be so twisted up that a line drawn in spacetime can form a closed path.
It is a stupid question because there are no paths in spacetime. Heck, spacetime does not even exist. It's an abstract mathematical construct. It has never been physically observed. Whatever happened to the sacrosanct rule of science regarding the primacy of observation?
Besides, for there to be a path, there has to be the possibility of motion. Nothing can move in spacetime, by definition!
When I say spacetime, what I mean is simply "solutions to Einstein's equations describing general relativity."
If Einstein's equations describe the physical universe, as far as we can determine, then it is physics. If not, then it is simply mathematics. If there is some astronomical observation tomorrow that shows that Einstein's equations' do not describe gravity, then the physics is wrong, but the mathematics is still correct.
I am simply taking the position of an apologist for mathematicians. Not an apologist for physicists.
Correct. You should never use a preposition to end a sentence with.
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
[moderator warning: anatomical pun ahead]
You just pulled that number out of your ass.
--
E_NOSIG
Interestingly enough with the Internet and the availability of space to store large quantities of data, it becomes easier to store and share original data. This allows others to make the same judgement calls about which data to exclude and then whether it is reasonable.