Slashdot Mirror
One Find, Two Astronomers
Malacon writes "The New York Times is running a story about
Debate Between Astronomers who both claim to have discovered the same object beyond Pluto, and almost the same size. Apparantly the US Astronomers had been tracking it for quite some time, but chose to not report it yet. They also claim the Spanish Astronomers stole data to make the find."
Richard Pogge, an Ohio State astronomer who uncovered the apparent breach, said that scientists had long lived mostly successfully by a kind of honor system. Astronomers, he said, routinely serve on time allocation committees for telescopes and peer review panels without stealing one another's ideas. "It allows us to have an open, collaborative community,"
So why can't Dr Brown (the USian) publish his discovery immediately and let the community to chip in and further investigate the finding?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
I admit that I've never seen two astronomers fight each other. But, I imagine it would be like watching two european Tour de France cyclists going at it, and we all know that aint pretty!
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
How the hell does some one steal data from you if they are halfway around the world. If they posted their data on a website then it wasnt really stolen.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
Shouldn't Dr. Brown have some documentation of his find other than the direction his telescope was pointed in, or at least witnesses to back him up?
Obviously these astronomers don't read slashdot otherwise they would tried for first post !!
That is all.
They found the planet where the Loyal Officers are holding Xenu captive?
Trolling is a art,
Can't we work together? If we would work together, we (well, they) would have found that planet twice as fast. If the world could unite together, we could probably send a man to Mars soon. Sometimes competition isn't a good thing.
I thought that I was the first astronaut to discover the object.
First its the fish, now its planets. Watch out Gibraltar!
This is exactly the same type of scenario when Rosalind Franklin made her discoveries regarding DNA.
Obviously, threaten to divide the object in half to give each team one piece. Whichever team prefers to give up their claim and keep the object intact, is the true discoverer.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
It SEEMS like this shouldn't be too difficult to prove. One of the groups must have some verifiable method of demonstrating that they got there first.
Of course prior art doesn't seem to matter these days... at least with respect to patents. So who knows.
Ignore Alien Orders
Thankfully, Science is objective, non-biased, ego-free, and concerned only with finding The Truth.
Unlike politics and religion...
Mike Brown has placed a rather detailed timeline of events (from his perspective) on his webpage:
i z/
http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/planetlila/ort
IMHO the ball is in Ortiz' court now...
Great, just Great! Now I have to move it again. I takes forever to get a saucer out to my command ship. Damn nosy humans. Do they realize how much of a pain hiding a forward base like that is on a moments notice.
Good thing We keep an eye on postings on slashdot otherwise somebody significant might take notice. I have at least three or four reposts of this story to move it before it hits a site like Vampire Weekly or Britney Talk and the world takes notice.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
We had it first and just didn't tell anyone... and...
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
Noone expects the spanish astronomer inquisition
What if they actually found two seperate objects? Stranger things have happend.
"It's not kosher to point your telescope at somebody else's object, unless you ask."
;) BwaaaHaaaaHaaaa
Yes, it's wrong, just wrong to sneakily look at somebody else's object
Orationem pulchram non habens, scribo ista linea in lingua Latina
Today, we rely on facts and figures to establish credibility. What have we become???
I suggest you read Slashdot
Dupe-tastic
From the blurb:
However, even more interesting is the intrigue behind the press conferences revealing Xena earlier this year. It seems that, using the astronomers' own observation logs (publicly available over the Web) and some key details inadvertently revealed in earlier announcements, someone was planning on 'discovering' the objects first and claiming credit. This was why the scientists 'pre-announced' the existence of Xena back in July, to establish priority.
At least Zonk didn't do it (for once).
Dah dah dah dah dah dahdahdahdah.
That would be totally cool, especially if they were both dressed up in Star Trek outfits (I believe that science geeks wore blue tunics), and no one, but no one, would fuck with the winner.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
whatever happened to doing research for the sake of research and gaining knowledge. scientists used to share info just so others could use that same info to base future studies on. does it really matter who discovered it first?
Why is the word "astronomers" capitalized in the top blurb? I Suppose The Person Thinks That Astronomers Are More Important Than The Rest Of us...
and the proposed changes of "first submitter" instead of "original inventor" were accepted, then Brown would probably lose.
Donkey: "Oh, I see it now. The big, shiny one." Shrek: "That would be the moon." Donkey: "Oh."
Sheesh! Flip a coin, or do rock-scissors-paper or something. Winner's name goes before the hyphen, loser's name goes after it. Problem solved.
~Philly
If it gets political, that would be an explanation why Intelligent Design is gaining so much press--science is getting to subjective. Human ego always diverts one from the truth.
Mike Brown's Data Security Guy: Nobody Detects The Spanish Astronomition!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Given recent studies that say scientific reports are often only 50% correct, we can give each side 50% and be fairly certain that the object exists. On the other hand, this is the New York Times; which lately is on par with the National Inquirer. Which means this could mean simply that two guys found the shiny, cold, and moist black button on the end of a Disney character's snout!
Troll, OT, or Flaimbait....which will it be!?
Well of course the data got stolen! Nobody expects the Spanish Astronomers!
EvilCON - Made Famous by
That will of course confuse most people... but sci fi readers should be in the know.
...so who cares about a slap-fight over a dumb asteroid!?!?
"...the same object ..., and almost the same size."
If it's the same object, then it is the same size.
Oh, wait, it's been done. It's called the Patent Office, and it sucks because nobody does any of the above anyway, people get sued to oblivion and those with the money abuse the hell out of it.
Besides which, if anyone DID devise a system that properly credited discoveries, Crick and Watson would be all but written out of the DNA story and Rosalind Franklin (the least-talked-about person) would be an instant megastar.
Now, Crick and Watson actually did the Right Thing in many ways - they brought to light a finding that would otherwise never have been published, AND gave quite considerable credit (albeit credit the media and history books have largely ignored) to Ms. Franklin for her work.
The "correct" thing would be for the American and Spanish astronomers to cut the same sort of deal - the Americans admit that they fell asleep at the wheel, but the Spanish admit that they couldn't have done it without the American work, so jointly crediting both teams for each other's contribution.
It won't happen, of course. Egos have become involved. When that happens, any kind of mutual respect is out the window. (Newton and Descartes had feuds over who discovered the Laws of Motion, entirely because of ego. Neither was willing to give due credit - it was all or nothing, gunfight at the OK Corral.)
It is feuds like this that give the impression to a lot of people that scientists are all megalomaniacs (where do you think sci-fi's Mad Scientist idea comes from?) and utterly divorced from reality. Mind you, the average person is no better, ego-wise, they just don't start international incidents over them.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Unlike the rest of the world, we don't plan our every step based on what someone else is doing. It's one of the joys of being on the winning team.
GO USA!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The New York Times is running a story about Debate Between Astronomers who both claim to have discovered the same object beyond Pluto, and almost the same size.
Nuh-uh, mine's bigger than yours!
you are an idiot as when germany was formed it was not a colony in the 'europes' as the usa was a colony in the 'americas'. india was not a colony in the 'asias'. it's not shortsighted it showed the unity of these small colonies in this place that had no nations yet. (and no little groups of american indians running around doesn't count as a nation)
Dr. Ortiz,
Please take your discovery and stick it up Uranus.
Sincerely,
Dr. Brown
Grazias!
Un Astrónomo Español.
We get Marty McFly to go back in time in Doc Brown's Delorian........oh crap......wrong Doc!
...that even the editors at /. have given up attemping to spell correctly? "Apparantly" ?!?!
Inigo Montoya: I hate waiting. I could give you my word as a Spaniard.
Man in Black: No good. I've known too many Spaniards.
Credit is over-rated. Who cares who spotted something first? It's not like they made it or invented it. That object has been found. In the long run it matters not who saw it first.
What is this? Add-Random-Caps-To-Phrases Day?
Telltale Games: Bone, Sam and Max
...which would take away some of the cool factor. Well, if they lean Castillian, anyway.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Have you ever considered the possibility that one word can have multiple meanings given different contexts? And quite often are spelled the same. This phenomenom is called a homonym. I SAW the SAW. He ACTS irresponsibly with the AX. The ALE he drank made him AIL. She is an AMERICAN from the North AMERICAN continent.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Dupe.
my blog
First, there was "They Live", then there was "Cripple Fight"... But I really want to see two astronomers go at it in a head-to-head battle royal!
BBH
No, they only lisp the "C"s.
Denham's Dentrifice, Denham's Dentrifice, Denham's Dandy Dental Dentrifice, Denham's Dentrifice Dentrifice Dentrifice.
Apparently this isn't the first time international competition has resulted in dubious claims of "discovery". The most interesting part, IMHO, is:
Emphasis mine. Interesting words in the era of "intellectual property".
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I've gotta admit that I don't subscribe to New York Times and so haven't read the article, but didn't we cover the "theft" of the "Xena", "Santa" and "Easterbunny" Kuiper objects nearly two weeks ago?:
If they were tracking it for quite some time then why didn't they announce it? Sounds to me more like the Americans didn't have enough data to conclusively say that the object exhisted. If they did have enough data then it seems pretty childish to not announce and then get pissed off when someone else does. But hey these *are* Americans. Can't handle anybody doing anything before them. America has claimed credit for a lot of things which it didn't do first or didn't even do at all. So even if they did find it first, for once they might understand how it feels.
...who both claim to have discovered the same object beyond Pluto, and almost the same size.
Except for it being another coincidence. What does the fact that these two guys share the same height, width and depth have to do with this discovery?
from my Astronomy professor, who met recently with the chair of the IAU, is that they are going to declare a "historical" definition of the term planet, which includes Pluto but does not include objects like Sedna or UB313. Thus, it becomes the perogative of the discoverer to name UB313 whatever they so desire (which is why who discovered it first is then an important issue.)
Estimado Dr. Brown,
Toda su base es pertenece a nosotros!
Un abrazo,
Dr. Ortiz
Samzenpus doesn't have access to a dictionary... can anyone correct that?
So now that it's found, we're gonna piss n moan over who did the finding? Yeah if they stole data, shame on them, but in the end what does it matter?
Jocks with small wangs buy Porsches, nerds with small wangs argue over who discovered what first?
No sig for you!!
I thought Steve Jobs was the first one to find it?
If you use some elses data, then you are suppossed to at least acknowledge that you used it, and better yet you should get their permission.
Ortiz et al did neither, and I think they should be fired for doing so. What they did was underhanded and it destroys the trust so vital to academic collaboration.
I think the evidence is pretty strong that Ortiz found out Brown's preliminary designation from an abstract for a conference paper and then looked up the object in google to find the telescope logs. This then enabled Ortiz to calculate an orbit which he used to find the object in his own old data.
Without Brown's abstract, and observing logs he would have had bupkiss.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
the old article didn't mention the Ortiz connection...
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Whoever lands on it first wins.
There's nothing wrong with telling people "hey, I think there's something here". The only thing it will do is let other people corroborate your observations faster. That's a -good- thing. It also has the side-effect of getting proper attribution.
What's the rush of announcing a new KBO? This is a once in a lifetime discovery, they should get a chance to do a thorough job, write a paper, and have a big surprise at the conference.
They did the work and they should get a chance to enjoy it without someone stelaing their data and using it to claim the discovery as their own.
Ortiz has no credibility left since he hid the fact that he used Brown's telescope logs before making his announcement. The logs most likely helped him calculate an orbit and find the object in his own old data.
Ortiz and his group should be fired. This is just as bad as the cold fusion people faking data.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
There's only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures and the Dutch
Can someone explain why It took so little time (only one day) to report on an astronomical object? As far as I know, telescope time is not that easy to get, you have to book weeks or months in advance. Also, observations reported where over images taken in 2003. I gess it's hard to, given an small set of coordinates and so little time, deduce where the object was *two years* before.
My own theory is that Dr. Ortiz's group did they own discovery, and just seached over the net to ensure It wasn't already reported. When they saw that there was another group tracking his object he rushed to publish.
DISCLAIMER: I'm spanish.
Has Richard Pogge called Ortiz a "butthead astronomer" yet?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
i reakon there is a larson comic in this one...
Morpheus is fighting Neo!
Perhaps the answer to the problem of teenagers dropping bricks from motorway and railway bridges is to sue Tetris.
If you're not part of an academic scientific community, this may not be obvious, but Dr. Ortiz's professional reputation, which is easily the most important asset of a scientist, is permanently ruined. That's career-ending.
If you were standing on the distended equator, would you be flung off?
I'm familiar with tholins from the book Titan (Stephen Baxter I believe) which is as interminable but interesting and dangerous as a trip to Titan. But considering the cigar shape and satellite, what is the density of this thing, and would the extreme distance from the sun make this methane ice as hard as rock? Is it just that tholins (hydrocarbons I take it) are just not strong enough to hold up against that rotational speed, and so the cigar shape?
I thought comets and such were borne out there in the oort cloud, which I am not sure but guess is beyond the Kuiper belt. Well, if a water ice comet hit a tholin planet with lots of methane, you would have a lot of oxygen and other explosive compounds in the same place. Wouldn't you get a totally massive explosion?
Can current surveys detect lacunae in the kuiper belt that could have been caused by such explosions?
Sorry for my horribly amateur questions. It is pretty exciting and I hope that Ortiz jerk gets what's coming to him.
Just how long would it take an ion drive spacecraft to reach the kuiper belt, assuming there is one of Martin Lo's interplanetary superhighways out to it?
How far is it compared to Voyager's distance?
Oh, the suspense of it all. Americans vs Spanish. Sweat on the brows night after night.
Plus, then I won't have to RTFA thoroughly.
Maybe you keep it for yourself for a few day, enough time to doublecheck all observations to make sure you dont report a false alarm.
But monopolizing an object for half a year or longer is just bad style and when somebody discovers it, too, then losing the fame is your own fault.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
So, the guys looked at where the telescope was pointed. So, they guessed web pages to get that information. Big deal.
That is just as easily explained by assuming that they were curious whether their competitors had discovered the same object.
Looking at web pages on a public server is not evidence of wrongdoing. And if it suggests anything, it suggests that they already had pretty much found the same object; otherwise, how would they have known what to search for and where to look in the first place?
When such a discovery is made, one does not immediately announce it, partially (although it is not the only reason) in case one turns out to have made a mistake in one's observations.
But Brown did just that: they announced the name of the object in an abstract but didn't supply the orbital data or evidence. And now, they want to claim credit for the discovery of the object because, essentially, they were the first ones to publish the existence but not the data for the new object. If Brown had waited with his announcement, then Ortiz couldn't have searched for the images on the web.
I don't know whether Ortiz committed scientific misconduct, but there is obviously something wrong with what Brown did: his abstract shouldn't have contained identifiable information, and/or he should have asked to be kept private. Brown's behavior itself may have been an innocent mistake, or it may also have been scientific misconduct. In particular, if he submitted the abstract announcing the find without actually having all the data ready, that would constitute scientific misconduct.
To me, it looks like both Brown and Ortiz made serious mistakes. So far, however, I haven't seen any concrete evidence for misconduct in this story.
I could think of it otherwise, let's say it happens this way:
The Spaniards really find the object, carry out a study, etc. Then someone points out to them that another team is also making the same observations and gives them the site to check. The read the americans' logs to see if it is actually the same object they have been observing, several times, and upon seeing that it is actually the same object, they hastly declare the discovery to prevent being late.
That makes more sense to me anyway...
WASHINGTON, Sept. 15 - In another news story, scientists are researching where the editors of the popular news-zine Slashdot are capable of learning how to use spellcheckers.
Citing their most recent evidence is this gem plucked from today's headlines:
"Apparantly the US Astronomers..."
Slashdot editors were unavailble for comment.
and almost the same size
I think the writer meant to say "at almost the same time" ??
5. profit!
However, that is what computers are for - exhaustive searches of large numbers of combinations - and many astronomical images are held in FITS format on computers. Since the laws of physics work perfectly well forwards or backwards, "new" observations can include those made in the past, so are perfectly good for verifying an orbit. So long as there was a telescope pointing in the right direction.
How large a database would you need for a comprehensive search? Probably a big one, but since everyone knew large Kuipier belt objects existed, the American astronomers could have been expected to build such a database for precisely such searches, making any queries for old data unnecessary.
There are plenty of other things they could have done - both in the present and in the past - but did not. Tough luck - either you work together or you fall apart alone. There really aren't many options in there.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
QED.
Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
And now, they want to claim credit for the discovery of the object because, essentially, they were the first ones to publish the existence but not the data for the new object
Brown had no problem with Ortiz beating him on the announcement and gave Ortiz full credit for the discovery... until he found out Ortiz used his data... then he had a problem.
If Brown had waited with his announcement, then Ortiz couldn't have searched for the images on the web.
But he wanted to present it at a conference, which meant he had to submit an abstract.
I don't know whether Ortiz committed scientific misconduct
well he did. He used Brown's data without attribution.
but there is obviously something wrong with what Brown did: his abstract shouldn't have contained identifiable information, and/or he should have asked to be kept private.
ok Brown made a mistake, but that doesn't mean its ok to steal his data. That's like saying it's ok to rob a house that left its door open... or to steal a print out of his data that he left lying on his desk. It's misconduct to take someone else's work and pass it off as your own.
Brown's behavior itself may have been an innocent mistake, or it may also have been scientific misconduct. In particular, if he submitted the abstract announcing the find without actually having all the data ready, that would constitute scientific misconduct.
That's bullshit. 1) An abstract isn't the whole paper, and you don't put data or results in an abstract 2) he had the data when he wrote the abstract 3) it is perfectly reasonable (and common practice) to submit an abstract before all of the work is done, its just an abstract not a whole paper.
in no way is what Brown did misconduct. What Ortiz et al did is some of the worst kind of misconduct. He stole Brown's work and passed it off as his own. Ortiz and his whole group should be fired and should never work as astronomers again. If his institution doesn't fire him they will lose all credibility.
To me, it looks like both Brown and Ortiz made serious mistakes. So far, however, I haven't seen any concrete evidence for misconduct in this story.
Brown made a dumb mistake of not protecting his data. Ortiz made an ethical mistake of stealing that data. I cannot understand why you don't think what Ortiz et al did was not misconduct.
I don't understand why so many slashdotters are defending Ortiz. It's just like someone taking GPL code from a CVS server and passing it off as thier own without mentioning where they got the code and after they're caught, saying its ok because the project was taking forever to make an official release.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Surely the poster means astrologists, as I seriously doubt that predicting the future based on phenomenon in the sky is very helpful in the discovery of planets
How do you know? Ortiz's site (you can find it on Google) claims that they were using their own observations.
There's even an animated GIF showing their images, which look different from those used by Brown's group. That's also why the designation of the object is 2003EL61 rather than 2004something.
I don't understand why so many slashdotters are defending Ortiz.
If what you say were clearly true, then people wouldn't defend Ortiz. But it is far from obvious based on what Brown himself put on his webpage.
Based on what I've seen, Ortiz's story is just as plausible as Brown's. If you had discovered a new object and you read an abstract about another such discovery, wouldn't you also try hard to determine whether the other object was the same as yours? A priori, I see nothing at all suspicious about Ortiz's behavior, even as described by Brown.
I think what Slashdotters find annoying is that people leave their data unprotected and then try to blame others for the mere possibility of having misused the data.
Generally, in science, if you don't protect your experimental results or if you carelessly talk about new ideas to other people, don't complain if people scoop you. I have gotten scooped that way, and the best thing to do is not to throw around accusations, but to shut up about it, congratulate the other guy, and be more careful again next time.
In any case, let's keep this in perspective: the discovery of a new planet, at this point, is not a crowning intellectual achievement, it is simply sweat and a lot of luck.
We were just discussing in our lab, yesterday, how a scientist at a conference in Florence (Firenze) had forgotten to acknowledge work a number of other scientists had done before that led to a discovery "he" made, which noone called him on, but that was being talked about afterwards, since some of the people who did the original work were in the same room as the presenter, and most attending knew it.
The astronomers should have claimed the discovery and given credit for the US observations to the US team. Or written the paper and offered a co-authorship. Going for the full credit just blows up in your face. Even the discovers of DNA have a cloudy history, since they didn't include a competing colleague who was the source of their data and kept them from incorrect conclusions.
But that's just my opinion.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
here
Man, man. Starting your argument with "you are an idiot" really demerits whatever else you say. It automatically gets you filed as a bigot who can't sustain a civilized argument.
Anyway, you are wrong about India. India was a British colony in Asia until 1947-1950 when it gained independence. But don't worry, you are not an idiot, you are just ignorant and that can be fixed. But the point is not if the US territory was or not a colony. Instead it's about the absurd choice for the name.
At the time of the US independence war, there was no such thing as "The Americas". There was only one America, which was the official name for the New World. The divisions into North, South and sometime Central America came later, when newer criteria for the meaning of "continent" was defined. The name The Americas was adopted rather recently to differentiate the American "continent" from the ill-called country.
Calling the new country United States of America was shortsighted because the colonies involved were just a small part of America. Heck, they were a small part of the modern USA! Not realizing that other regions of America would eventually gain independence, and that most of those other regions would most likely never be part of the recently founded country was, indeed, very shortsighted.
Ortiz' side of the story can be found here on the Minor Planet Mailing List - seems he has a good case for priority if he can prove his statements.
That depends on the definition of "continent" you are using. You can find an excellent presentation of this in Wikipedia.
According to at least one of these definitions, America is only one continent because it's a large, continuous landmass. That definition is not only used in several countries nowadays (including almost all the other countries in "the Americas"), but it was in fact the only definition at the time the ill-called United States of America was baptized.
"Somebody else discovering it too..." -- like Darwin and Russel, or Newton and Leibniz, is not what the American Astronomer now believes happened. The computers that control the telescopes the American team used keep logs -- extensive logs, that can be googled and accessed over the internet.
What the American team discovered was that shortly before the Spanish team announced the discover of the object the Americans had been tracking the logs showed an unknown party had accessed the logs showing where the American team had been pointing their telescopes.
The leader of the American team gave the Spaniards gracious congratulations, and were willing to acknowledge that they had independently discovered the object his team had been tracking.
But, when further investigations showed that the unknown party who had accessed the the American team's telescope logs could be tracked, through their IP address, to computers at the Spanish team's institution, this was the smoking gun.
Discovering a celestial object through peaking at your competitor's instrument logs is not what most people would call a real discovery.
The leader of the American team acknowledged a mistake they had made that made the "discovery" of his teams results easier. His team had picked code names for various KBOs they were looking for. They picked a code name for the then undiscovered KBO larger than Pluto. They picked some other code names. And the logs the Spaniards found used these code names. The American team, and maybe most Astronomers, did not realize that google could search logs that used their code names.
So, in a very limited sense, one could say the American team was at fault for not being suspicious enough to anticipate tricky competitors would take advantage of the insecure log files.
Maybe because they don't see Ortiz's team's actions as like violating the GPL, but see it more like innocently downloading MP3 tracks to fill their ipod.
Personally, I would wholeheartedly agree with anyone who insisted on all textbooks, journals, etc, correctly crediting those who did the work. I doubt a single textbook (and very few journals) would meet that standard, which would make for a very limited educational system.
From a more "flexible" perspective, there are other points to consider. Scientists often place their work in the public domain because concepts of ownership really don't apply. There isn't a warehouse, somewhere, where they stock up on laws of physics to be sold on eBay. A planet or a comet exists, whether you are there to observe it or not. 1+1=2, and will continue to do so long after Sol has become a red giant, destroying the planet.
From this perspective, science is communal. It exists, it always will exist, it always has existed. All you do is enter into that realm. You can't change it, you can't add to it, you can't take any of it away, all you can do is observe.
Of course, to be self-consistant and honest with oneself, if you DO hold such a view, you cannot claim credit or ownership when disputes arise. If something is communal enough for you to "borrow" from someone else, then it's communal enough for you to have no particular rights yourself. You can't have it both ways.
My personal view is that scientists (and communities in general) need a mix of these two perspectives. There are some things I can fully understand being private or privately owned, and the true ownership should be acknowledged and accepted by all. If it is an identifiable entity that can be labelled and distinguished, and which is also mutable, then private ownership is unquestionably the right thing.
If it cannot be identified, if it is some universal property, or if it is something you can't actually do anything with, then you cannot truly be said to own it. If you think of ownership in a hierarchical sense, then something cannot be both subclass and superclass of the same thing at the same time. If you ban paradoxes then anything that is paradoxical to own should not qualify as ownable.
In this particular case, I don't see that it neatly falls into either of the above two scenarios. There was actual theft of something that (by my standards above) was privately owned. On the other hand, the data on which the theft was based was universal and therefore could not be truly owned.
(The Earth simply isn't big enough for observers within the same hemisphere to notice a significant difference in position of an object that distant, when using a standard coordinate system, so the values are not the product of the observer, they are the product of the observed.)
Finally, both teams did work which only when unified produced a result that was meaningful. In consequence, neither team could be said to have actually made the discovery, per se, because neither had the data to do so.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
We found a very bright slowly moving object in three images while checking some of our older images of the modest TNO survey that we carry out from Sierra Nevada since 2002.
And what made them look at those images? How did they find that needle in the huge mountain of old data?
If they did a systematic search, where's the evidence? To me is seems very likely that they used Brown's data to calculate an orbit for the object, and then used that orbit to find the old images.
Based on what I've seen, Ortiz's story is just as plausible as Brown's. If you had discovered a new object and you read an abstract about another such discovery, wouldn't you also try hard to determine whether the other object was the same as yours?
If that is so, why didn't they mention Brown's observations in their announcement. They were aware of Brown's data and didn't cite it. That is academic misconduct, and they should be dismissed from their institutions.
I've made what was a big discovery only to find prior work by another group that was similar enough for me to not be able to claim the discovery (even though they didn't know what they really had). And I made a point to cite their work. It was an obscure sviet-era russian publications no one would have found, but I cited it and pointed out that they had made the same discovery years before. Sure it sucks to lose the glory, but it was the ethical thing to do.
Generally, in science, if you don't protect your experimental results or if you carelessly talk about new ideas to other people, don't complain if people scoop you.
It's one thing to be scooped, it's another to have your work used without attribution. Brown has proof that they viewed his data and they didn't mention it in their announcements. That is misconduct plain and simple.
I think what Slashdotters find annoying is that people leave their data unprotected and then try to blame others for the mere possibility of having misused the data.
This isn't the possibility of misuse, Ortiz et al viewed Brown's data multiple times, and they didn't cite it... It doesn't matter if Borwn left the data on a table at a restaurant for Ortiz to find or if it was on a public server... Ortiz *knew* it was Brown's data, and he should have mentioned that he used it.
in any case, let's keep this in perspective: the discovery of a new planet, at this point, is not a crowning intellectual achievement, it is simply sweat and a lot of luck.
maybe in your view. But when kids dream of being astronomers, discovering a new planet is the sort of thing they dream of doing. If I found a new planet, I would view it as one of the main achievements of my career. And its one thing to be scooped, and another to be stolen from.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Just for the record, ACTS and AX[E] are pronounced differently
acts, as, well, acts, and AXE as acks. Some lazy speakers might drop the T from acts, of course, but in britain and ireland at least, acts and axe sound different.
And you are a fucking faggot. Pronounced with extreme gayness lisp.
True. Originally there was only one America, later subdivided into two or three parts (or not divided at all), depending on the viewer.
That's also the case of the province of Carolina being divided into North and South Carolina (and large parts of Tennessee and Georgia), and the Dakota territory, now divided into North and South Dakota.
(Also, West Virgina used to be part of Virginia, but this doesn't fit as nicely in the "America" discussion).