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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.
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
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"
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.
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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.
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
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.