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.'"

Hate to say it but ...

[smallfries]

... If you tie funding into results the way that it is in universities at the moment (OK, the guy worked at Bell Labs) then people are forced to chase and publish results. In some more theoretical fields it may be less of a problem, where there is more room for disagreement and differing opinions. In this case though, when you are publishing experimental results, then they either work or they don't. If you have people who spend their careers chasing money then temptation to take shortcuts is going to catch up with them, maybe thats why the guy published so much; perhaps he wanted to get caught out and pushing into the most prostigious journals and flooding the system will get you noticed.

Question for the physists though, the article was a bit scant on details, what did the guy claim he could do? How was he claiming to turn materials into semi-conductors?

Not really "big physics"

[apsmith]

This is actually usually called "small" or "benchtop" physics, as opposed to the real "big physics" that goes on at accelerator labs etc. with hundreds of physicists working together. Making this worse is the coincidence with the bogus element-118 discovery at Berkeley, which was also revealed over the last few months. The APS, where I work, has some rules people are supposed to follow: the 1991 Guidelines for Professional Conduct [aps.org] - but investigation and resolution of problems (which happen more often in lower profile cases such as contested authorship of papers) are left to the institutions where the people involved work; it's starting to seem that perhaps more is needed.

Re:Glaring Error in the Article

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and to top it off, this wasn't an incident of "bad science" costing lives, as the article says. Rather it's a case of bad politics costing lives. The scientists were opposed to launching but were overruled.

A little over the top

[hubie]

That article was a bit sensationalist. To read it, it sounds like the peer review system completely failed and the whole foundation of physics is crashing down. There certainly appear to be problems within that research group in that so many coauthors seemed to have been happy to attach their names to the papers without scrutinizing the results, but once the papers were published the scientific system worked.

It is a reasonable criticism directed at Science and Nature that they seem to compete with each other to publish attention-getting results (the recent bubble fusion experiment comes to mind), but what it comes down to is that a reviewer of a paper has no way to validate experimental data given to him. You have to take the research group at its word that the data are not fabricated. You can question their data reduction and analysis methods, but if they said they did this measurement and these are the resulting data then you have to take them at their word.

One of the ways science operates is that results like these are presented, and if the results are interesting enough (i.e., unexpected or never seen before) then other labs repeat and verify the experiment. When the results are confirmed, then great. If not, then the results (or at least the conclusions drawn from them) become suspect. This happened with cold fusion and it looks like bubble fusion is heading down the same road. This has happened in the past (N-rays [skepdic.com] are another example), and it will happen in many other instances that don't draw the big press stories. That is how it should work. The Salon article seems to suggest (among some valid points) that the paper reviewers should have had some all-knowing wisdom and immediately questioned the data.

I also doubt, as the article suggests, that the reputation of physicists has been harmed and that all over the world school children are crying "Say it ain't so Jan Hendrik." The biosciences have many many scandals related to data forging, or at least questionable massaging or analysis of data, because the stakes ($$) are much higher for a new drug to come to market as well as the difficulty in collecting consistent data. The biosciences continue to draw huge numbers of people into the field and it enjoys (deservedly) a positive reputation.

I also thought the article was way over the top with regard about the government funding aspect of this. It made it sound like that all the government money spent on R&D is a waste as it obviouly is going to charlatans and rouges. The author should have looked up the research dollar amounts in relation to the total government budget (such as its percentage of the GNP) as well as in relation to the total non-DoD R&D budget and see how well the NSF or the DOE compare to, say, NIH (I'll give you a hint, they are quite neglected). This isn't "Big Science" by any stretch of the imagination.

Science is an impartial search for knowledge.

[kasparov]

Nice bedtime reading for anyone who thinks science is an impartial search for knowledge and understanding.

Science is an impartial search for knowledge and understanding. Falsifying the results of experiments is most definitely not science.

The myth is that science is impartial!

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who actually has done some science either in the schools or especially in industry knows that science is NOT an impartial search for the truth. Overall it is one form of inquiry that has matured over centuries but it's hardly perfect and possibly never can be. The notion that scientists and science is this impartial knowledge gathering enterprize is pure propaganda.
The history of the activity doesn't bear this out, the work experiences of scientists themselves doesn't bear this out, the public relations apparatus of science by way of popular press books hyping the latest and greatest doesn't bear this out, and actual survey data of scientists attitudes, as opposed to speculations about them, doesn't bear this out. When competing for fame or grant dollars, politics data distortion and hyping/fraud can play a role.

Of course this isn't everybody but it's not as small as some people, mostly those that haven't actually don't any basic science work, like to believe.

Science is a human activity with lots of compitition for prestige/ego and grant money. The problems of self-interest, whether of individuals or whole fields, is a very big part of all this.

Mechanisms that help around this are independent replication of results. However, this doesn't always work as it should either, in fact results can and have been accepted long before proper replications occur...if they ever do.

Re: Big Science == Big Business

[Black Parrot]

> That attracts the best and the brightest, but unfortunately it also gives them the incentive to cheat.

Contrary to intuitions, it is often the best and brightest who cheat at universities, too. Lot of pre-med students get busted. Apparently the B&B are very good at rationalizing things to themselves.