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

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

[aepervius]

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.

Accounting error

[DougJohnson]

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"

Frauds

[bytesmythe]

one might think the physics community was full of frauds.

• Einstein knew that god DOES play dice (and always rolls boxcars)...
• Richard Feynman's degree was from the Cordon Bleu.
• Heisenberg was really certain, but wanted to cover his tracks about his research.
• Bohr's model of the atom was originally developed by playing with Tinker Toys.
• Planck's Constant is actually a variable. Shhh!
• E = mcHawking

On All things considered last week as well

[Dr.Seuss]

Obligatory link to NPR stream of same.

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.

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.

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).

Absolutely!

[Snarfvs Maximvs]

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!

118 - not a big deal

[vlad_petric]

What's so difficult to believe about 118 ? I mean, we know from Star Trek that much heavier elments exist, like the Ilium 629.

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.