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Bell Labs fires Hendrik Schon for Data Falsification
Raiford writes "Bell Labs has fired physicist Hendrik Schon for falsifying scientific data. Schon was thought to be a likely candidate for the Nobel prize based on the promise his reported research findings had for the advancement of molecular scale computing. In a Reuters report the dismissal was described as the only conclusive case of scientific misconduct ever identified in the history of the prestigious laboratory."
I think because that type of forgery has a huge impact on their bottom line. I mean they were spending millions on what this guys claimed, and would have spent millions more.
It's fairly big news. Fraud of this scale is reprehensible. Plus I'm sure they want to make sure he never works again.
The "rest of the company" is Lucent, not AT&T or AT&T Wireless which would be the division you're bitching about.
Lucent was spun off in 1996, thus Bell Labs wasn't part of your incidents in 1998.
BTW -- There are claims of Verizon, Qwest and others doing exactly the same thing today. Sad.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
3 page executive summary 127 page Committee's Report (Appendix F lists the papers in question; Appendix H gives Schon's response)
Quite a lot of stuff of questionable quality is published, in my experience, and you don't have to go very far to find it. A lot of the time, it's a rather honest 'mistake' (in the sense that a sloppy or incorrect methodology is a mistake). After all, few have the time to check through every step of a paper, and that generally occurs only when you're working in the same field.
However, the 'hot' or 'important' topics tend to get more review than most, and out-and-out fabrication of results is rare (not too rare, unfortunately; this is the second case in research physics I've heard of in my short life; the other was that mess in the lab at Berkeley).
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.