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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."
This guy pulled a fast one but when nobody could replicate Bell Labs investigated further. So I think that is a good thing. Checks. Balances.
Its odd that they make a big thing out of finding the forgery though. What does that buy them? Why not say "Ouch!" fire him and move on?
feel bad?
he brought it on completely himself.
people like this should burn. he took it as far as he could. he's little more than a pyramid con-artist.
hope he enjoys working as a tomato picker the rest of his life.
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The more science gets commercialized the more there will be people who are willing to "stretch" their imagination just a bit to get that fame and fortune, and the less there is public sharing of scientific findings in the name of intellectual property, the harder it will be to weed out these liberal interpretations of the scientific method. I am a scientist for the love of knowledge, my computer is analysing real data at the very moment and it is cool to be the first person in the world to see something come out of that. To be paid for the work is just an added bonus. The open/proprietary debate has been going on in the scientific community far longer than there have been modern IT.
Existence usually comes as a surprise (Idem)
No, I agree with him. Note that he said *real* scientists, not *most* scientists.
Plato once divided the ambitions of people into three categories: Reason (intellect, the need to seek knowledge), spirit (the need for recognition, honor), and appetite (the need for personal gain, such as wealth).
Real scientists are largely reason, usually with a bit of spirit thrown in. If you ever meet a greedy scientist, s/he isn't a real scientist--just like if you ever meet a hacker that can't code and uses l33t speak in his AOL chat window, he isn't a real hacker.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Now you can see why the scientific community insists on reproducible experiments. If you can't reproduce it, you can't trust the data. That's how Cold Fusion was debunked. Now only some of the garbage that gets reported as "news" in our mainstream media was half as well checked out.
It is the hunch that usually leads scientists to study the phenomena/theories in question in the first place. The hard part is devising an experiment to prove/disprove what you're looking for without too many intervening factors that can get in the way. In fact, sometimes just coming up with the experiment itself is worthy of a Nobel Prize.
But scientists should NEVER EVER fake data, no matter HOW STRONGLY they believe they are right. If they're that sure, then they can publish all the theoretical articles they want. But NEVER publish fraudulent data as true. Science is about truth, truth is about absolute, not about hunches. That's why scientists do (or should, if they don't shy away from it) report estimated uncertainties for all experimentally-determined values and data points. If scientists didn't adhere to these lofty expectations, one wouldn't be able to believe any of the journals, which would be a major setback for all fields of science. If you had inherent mistrust of scientists, then science would become just like politics.
I dont know what he was working on, but I would like to give the guy the benifit of the doubt until I can read the report and experimental data.
Sorry, this guy WAS given the benefit of the doubt for many years. His results were irreproducible, which as you know, is one of the main characteristics of science. Everything must be reproducible. He claimed to grow Aluminum Oxide films that could withstand far greater electric fields before breaking down than anyone else on the planet, which is odd considering people mimicked his exact sputtering/growth techniques. For years nobody could reproduce any of his experiments. Much of the discord boiled down to a specific sputtering chamber Schon had back in Germany, where he claimed he was able to grow his thin films. Eventually Schon tried to regrow some films again in this chamber, and said he was unable to repeat his earlier work.
I worked in a physics lab this past summer where nearly every day at lunchtime the professor (Dr. Michael Tinkham, who's rather reknowned in superconductivity circles) would hold up a copy of Physics Today with a picture of Schon and warn us of the consequences of abandoning truth in favor of increased publications.
What Prof. Tinkham pointed out to us is that Schon became something of a minor deity in the realm of experimental physics, getting significant publications, usually quite often in the top physics journals such as Nature, Science, Physical Review, etc. The problem was that he soon had a reputation of greatness to maintain, so he may have gotten a little clumsy regarding data acquisition and analysis, in favor of keeping his astonishing rate of publications steady.
Eventually, things caught up to him. I'm not sure how much of his questionable work was little details that slipped though his fingers, how much was semi-conscious oversight, and how much was flat-out fabrication and fraud. But after he was caught then all his work became suspect.
The worst thing he did was re-use a dataset entirely, claiming it was a plot of something else, and left the exact same noise spurs and other anomalies.
Usually it's rare to find such blatant scientific fraud, but there was another recent fraud.
At least he's not moving the Lab's money into offshore shell companies to show earnings.
Sure, and at least he's also not killing people. But in the realm of science, what he's done is destroy the credibility that scientists strive for, and even NEED to be respected for. It's great that he's been caught, and hopefully it'll be a lesson to any up-and-coming experimentalists that no matter how much you believe in your theories, you have a committment to truth.
Maybe there should be some kind of hippocratic oath for scientists, that would be cool.
make world, not war
Scientists at rival laboratories, however, had difficulty reproducing the results of Schon's work, thwarting a checks-and-balances process integral to the scientific method.
Um, no. If the "checks-and-balances process" were being thwarted, then it would have been circumvented or avoided somehow. This is an example of the process working as it's supposed to. You don't need a checks-and-balances system if everyone in the field is always going to be a good boy at all times. What happened here is that someone wasn't, and the scientific process caught him at it.
I would love it if these wire services would assign beats to reporters by taking into consideration what subjects they actually understand. They should also be fluent in the language in which they are writing, and display some comprehension of the words they're using.
And the brethren went away edified.
I mean, after all, the need to produce is becoming more important than the need to produce quality. Sure, it is like cheating at solitaire, but what are the incentives NOT to cheat?
I have a feeling that sometimes scientists just have a 6th sense that lead them to correct hypothesises even when data does not back them up
Police and prosecutors may just have a 6th sense that can lead them to correct hypotheses about the identity of the guilty party even when evidence does not back them up, but few would want to give them the benefit of the doubt and base the criminal justice system upon their conjectures.
~Phillip
I too have scientific training (astronomy) although I'm no longer active in science.
I agree with all of this - falsification of data is the ultimate scientific crime. The analogy with recent accounting fraud is quite a good one - not only will nobody hire this guy as a scientist again (as nobody would hire some ex-CEO/CFOs from fraudulant companies) but he has destroyed much that was good (as many employees and shareholders of the bad companies had their livelyhoods destroyed) - any work based on what he did is now worthless, and old and possibly correct work he did is worthless, because nobody knows what they can trust.
For the scientist, this is like a child-molestation conviction for a teacher - it makes him completely unhirable. I think that because of the seriousness of fraud charges, scientists are very unwilling to bring them. I suspect that, like child-molestation a generation or two ago, that it very often gets swept under the carpet.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.