Elements 116 and 118 are Bogus?

prostoalex writes "In this era of corporate misbehavior and overstatement of results who can you trust? Scientific sources, of course. Well, turns out people at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory lied about their discovery of elements 116 and 118. Associated Press has the story, quoting the lab officials charging the researchers with "scientific misconduct"."

Old News

[Townshend]

This is not new news at all, in fact Berkeley scientists retracted their paper back in 2001. Here is a link: http://enews.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/118- retraction.html [lbl.gov].

Re:Just one person

[martissimo]

Well considering that much of the problem is not just the one physicists bogus claims, but the fact that the rest of the people involved at the laboratory obviously neglected to verify his claims...

i'd say it's pretty safe to use the plural version

Re:Is it possible....

[Rupert]

These elements are extremely short lived. You can't keep them around and poke at them until you're sure of what they are. You can just look at the tracks in the bubble chamber and see if you can construct what that lead nucleus used to be a microsecond ago.

Re:Old News

[Anonymous Coward]

The news is not the retraction, but that the false signal was due to deliberate fabrication of the data rather than to a misinterpretation of "honest" data.

Re:Is it possible....

[prof187]

If my memory of science serves me right, which it could very possibly not, one of the earliest periodic tables had many gaps. They were just assuming that there would be elements to fill in those empty spots, and amazingly (for that early of science), they were correct.

Re:Trust?

[marauder404]

Which article did you read? There are two articles linked in the Slashdot blurb. The first article [lbl.gov] links to the original announcement of the discovery dated June 7, 1999. In that article, there's a link to the retraction [lbl.gov], dated July 27, 2001. Today, July 15, 2002, there's an article [yahoo.com] reporting that the original discovery wasn't a discovery at all. It was fabricated data and the announcement was intentionally done based on fake information. That is fraud. That's a trust issue.

Had the original announcement was a discovery that they believed was based on real, bona fide data, that would be different -- just part of the normal scientific discovery process.

"Strange" names for elements

[Pulzar]

This page [chemicalelements.com] explains why all of the new elements have this strange Unun-something names, and how they are determined.

Angry? Why?

[tswinzig]

If you read even the summary of the slashdot article you mentioned, you'd see that, "It looks like he has left a few spots for new elements, and it is nicely modular, in the event an element is found not to exist."

Re:Angry? Why?

[billbaggins]

And if you take the trouble to look at the pictures on the site again, you'll see that 118 is still blank...

Re:Is it possible....

[Anonymous Coward]

This was indeed the case but completely unrelated to the gaps spoken of now. The periodic table is arranged based on the electron structure of the elements. For instance, all transistion metal elements have valence electrons in d (l = 2) quantum orbitals. Anyway, the stability of nuclie has nothing to do with electron/atomic structure. Electron or atomic structure knows nothing of "stability" in the sense that nucleons know it. Electrons can form stable structures around any charged nucleus. Nuclear structure is much different. The interactions are much more complex and there are much more complex arrangements occuring such as nucleon pairing or cooper pairs, and a origin isn't sharply defined. A decently sharp origin can be used for closed shell nuclie and for nuclei one proton/neutron away from a closed shell since central force methods can be used. With nuclie away from closed shells, we generally use more collective models like the Quantum Rotor model. However, you still got to take extra things into account like internal currents or vortices, etc... using SP Group structures. Anyway, the stability of nuclei isn't continous like the stability of electron structures.

Cheers, Mitch (Georgia Tech)

Re:Just one person

[martissimo]

I'm not saying that they didn't eventually catch it, because the article points out that they certainly did. But also taken from the article...

Shank admitted that basic verifications necessary for such lofty scientific proclamations were not followed.

"In this case, the most elementary checks and data archiving were not done," Shanks said.

When the lab's director says that "basic verifications"..."were not followed", i feel pretty safe in saying they "obviously neglected to verify his claims" (at least for a good while)

fine line between inspiration and fabrication

[pmineiro]

i remember talking about millikan's famous oil drop experiments in freshman physics class. turns out he selectively edited his experimental results, because he had a vision of what the right answer was.

i'm not going to say with a straight face that what millikan did is the same as what this guy did. i'm just noting that these are two points on a behavioral continuum also known as "the slippery slope".

this guy had already discovered one element. he probably truly thought these other two elements were right there and if didn't hurry up and find them, somebody else would, and if he was right, what's the difference? he knew what the data should look like.

the lesson: peer review exists for a reason.

-- p

and in different news...

[g4dget]

If you read Nature and Science, you'll see that there has been an uproar in solid state physics about a researcher who kept publishing the most amazing results ("superconducting buckyballs", "organic transistors", etc.) and seems to have been reusing the same graph over and over again for completely different results. He, too, had collaborators.

What it tells us is that no scientific result is credible until it has been independently replicated by others.

What is so depressing about these cases of fraud is that they discourage the replication of interesting but implausible results: if fraud is common, people aren't going to spend time and money on things that may be fraudulent. That is why this kind of thing really hurts science.

Re:Is it possible....

[lostchicken]

Francium (#88) was discovered in 1939. It has a very minute half-life, and is nearly (let's not start a flame war here...) useless. As the physicists kept digging for larger elements, they got Americium (#95) in 1944. It's used in ionizing smoke detectors, one of the most sensitive types.

If we had stopped looking after Francium, the ionizing smoke detector would never had been built.