Big trouble In The World Of "Big Physics"

klevin writes "Hey, scientists are human too, who woulda thunk it? Nice bedtime reading for anyone who thinks science is an impartial search for knowledge and understanding. `Six months ago, Jan Hendrik Schön seemed like a slam dunk nominee for a Nobel prize. Then some of his colleagues started to take a closer look at his research.'"

Glaring Error in the Article

[Anonymous Coward]

"think of the untested O-rings on the space shuttle Challenger that froze stiff in the upper atmosphere"

The O-rings weren't frozen stiff in the atmosphere. Ice worked into a joint while the launcher was on the pad. The rupture happened even before the thing left the ground.

This is a Lesson in Good Science

[CheshireCatCO]

No, I don't mean that researchers who falsify data are doing good science. But you'll notice that the falsification was caught. And it wasn't just the revelation that they included an incorrect figure and some of their plots had identical noise. Collegues have been growing suspecious of the results for over a year now because they've been unable to reproduce them.

This is good science. Scientists individually screw up all the time. I certainly have. Usually, we make honest mistakes. Sometimes, we make dishonest ones. But science is not and has never been about any one person or group. Science is a collective effort. It's not just the group doing the experiment, it's the other groups that try to reproduce it, the reviewers who look at it critically and the opponents who try their hardest to tear it apart. If you want to consider "good science", you need to add all of these into the picture. One of these segments clearly failed in this case (the original researchers) and another didn't catch it (the reviewers), the others did their job.

So, really, while the individual scientist was doing bad work, this illustrates exactly how science should work under real world circumstances.

The work itself

[Anonymous Coward]

Schon was working on many things, almost all based on (organic) molecular crystals. I took a class on organic devices during the time when the scandal was first uncovered, early this year. He reported organic PV cells at greater than 5% (the highest report before that was 3%). He reported superconductivity in heavily doped C60 based crystals at T~120K as well as a host of lower temperatures for other organic crystals. He reached these dopant levels supposedly by using Field-Effect-Transistors (applied a huge field across a crystal to induce large amounts of charge on the surface, by which one can heavily P or N dope a material without changing it's structure). The problem with organic crystals is that doping doesn't work the same as Silicon. In Si, you can substitutionally dope: the dopants do not significantly affect the structure... in order to chemically dope in organic crystals, you actually have to add molecues or ions to the structure, which causes lattice mismatches and general ugliness. the FET is a way around that (FET's work, just not as well as he reported). He justified the lack of reproducibility by saying that he had a yield of under 1% (of 100 devices he made, less than 1 worked) One of the issues was he had literally hundreds of data points, which would have meant tens of thousands of devices.

Some of his work involved molecular transistors. He reported results of successfully making a single molecule transistor. In fact, IBM set up an entire lab based on his findings. (oops). Not to say that these things won't be developed. Most of his "findings" are scientifically sound... at least the theory behind it, but with current technology it just can't be done (according to the 100's of researchers doing the same work). In a rush to publish lots of stuff, he re-used graphs with the scales hastily changed, and other undergraduate techniques for falsifying data.

Interestingly, The articles in question started only after Batlog's name started appearing on the papers (a reputable Bell labs guy). There were some other things he was working on. A lot of what he did at the beginning was quite real, people still believe a lot of his work on Pentacene.

In the end, my point is this guy was working on organic semiconductors used in all fields, as well as exploring the possibility of superconductivity in many organic systems. Hence the confusion.