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."

Comments

How the hell

[NIK282000]

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.

once again

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly the same type of scenario when Rosalind Franklin made her discoveries regarding DNA.

So why not...

[jd]

...have an independent organization that allows scientists to register discoveries prior to confirmation, so that:

1. The discovery can be verified,
   
2. Nobody else can "steal" the find (because it has been registered) and
   
3. It can be double-checked that nobody else previously made that discovery?
   

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.

Did the British steal Neptune?

[maggard]

Check out this fascinating Dec. '02 article: Scientific American: The Case of the Pilfered Planet [ ASTRONOMY ]

Apparently this isn't the first time international competition has resulted in dubious claims of "discovery". The most interesting part, IMHO, is:

Whatever the case, Adams utterly failed to communicate his results forcefully to his colleagues and to the world. A discovery does not consist merely of launching a tentative exploration of an interesting problem and producing some calculations; it also involves realizing that one has made a discovery and conveying it effectively to the scientific world

Emphasis mine. Interesting words in the era of "intellectual property".

Why Brown didn't report earlier

[rdwald]

A lot of people are saying, "Well, if Dr. Brown wanted to get the credit, he should have announced the discovery as soon as he made it." I like Dr. Brown's response on why waiting benefits not only the scientific community but also the public at large:

Consider, for example, the instantaneous Ortiz et al. announcement of the existence of 2003 EL61. Headlines in places like the BBC web site breathlessly exclaimed "new object may be twice the size of Pluto." But even at the time we knew that 2003 EL61 had a satellite and was only 30% the mass of Pluto. We quickly got the truth out, but just barely. Sadly, other interesting aspects of 2003 EL61 also got lost in the shuffle. No one got to hear that it rotates every 4 hours, faster than anything else known in the Kuiper belt. Or how that fast rotation causes it to be shaped like a cigar. Or how we use the existence of the satellite to calculate the mass. All of these are interesting things that would have let the public learn a bit more about the mysteries of physics and of the solar system. In the press you get one chance to tell the story. In the case of the instantaneous announcement of 2003 EL61 the story was simply "there is a big object out there." We are saddened by the lost opportunity to tell a richer scientific story and to have the public listen for just one day to a tale that included a bit of astronomy, a bit of physics, and a bit of detective story.

Ortiz violated Scientific Ethics

[EccentricAnomaly]

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.

In the name of fairness

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Use timestamping and digital certs for your ideas

[guidog]

1. scribble down ideas
2. digitally sign
3. send to official timestamping certification authority
4. give thoughts to reviewers

Re:Ortiz and Santos-Sanz do not look legit

[rempelos]

In this case, anyway, there isn't any stolen data. Brown's log confirms that the data from the telescope were publically available and could be reached by using the common web searching methods everyone in this planet use. So they had something but others got there first, pity.

evidence of what?

[idlake]

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?

Re:Ortiz and Santos-Sanz do not look legit

[CmdrGravy]

Perhaps Ortiz has already discovered the object, heard Brown talking about what may have be the same object and decided to check whether or not it was so guage when he should publish his finding to avoid being beaten to it by the newcomer Brown.

discovering someone else's data isn't a discovery

[EccentricAnomaly]

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.

Proper credit is the bugaboo of Science

[WillAffleckUW]

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.