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.
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?
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.
as opposed to the testosterone filled world of internet shit-talking?
I love America, and the American people.
I have been there once, and i plan to return often.
As you say, the assholes on TV is not representative of the American people. This is VERY true.
But, why do you let these assholes represent you?
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
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...
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.