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.'"

Re:Big Science == Big Business

[Daniel Dvorkin]

I'm afraid that's probably the best explanation. This guy is the equivalent of the crooked CFO who gives artificially inflated results to drive up his company's stock price. Bell Labs, like the article says, is (or at least was until very recently) an absolute dream job for a scientist. That attracts the best and the brightest, but unfortunately it also gives them the incentive to cheat.

The problem is, I don't see a way around "big science" any time in the near future, in most fields. Let's face it, the easy stuff in physics has been done; small labs don't have the resources to do ground-breaking research any more, and they probably never will again. New sciences, or new branches of existing disciplines, occasionally pop up that allow the little guys to make serious contributions -- right now, bioinformatics is an example of this -- but research inevitably gets big and expensive as all the cheap discoveries are made and duly noted. There may be a solution to this problem, but damned if I know what it is.

Money for nothing

[scistu]

Undergraduate science students, in particular physicists are taught that to report results of experiments that don't work is just as important as the reporting of positive results. While this may be true for the pursuit of knowledge, it doesn't really fit with human nature. Since when have money, reputation and Nobel prizes been the reward for the scientist who proves nothing. Is there any other way to reward these people or should we just rely on their own sense of scientific truth to continue this work anonymously and relatively poorly rewarded.

Sad but hopefully good in the long run...

[virve]

It is sad when these things happen. A lot of people have put their careers in jeopardy by trying to keep up with these exciting "results".

Unfortunately, science is only a human activity so it is subject to all of the faults of people. The way the career and funding system works puts significant pressure on the shoulders of aspiring scientists and things like this will continue to happen. Fortunately, the peer review system managed to stop him in the end though it would have been a lot better if it had happened on day one.

The big dilemma is that science both has to be open to new (surprising?) results and extremely critical at the same time. Redoing an experiment can be incredibly hard and is always time consuming and expensive. A negative result is much too often no result at all.

virve
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Er....

[Zevon 2000]

...small labs don't have the resources to do ground-breaking research any more, and they probably never will again.

That seems to me to be overstating things quite a lot. In addition to the new branches and disciplines you mention, small labs without monster budgets will also benefit from their own improvements in technology. Just because budgets remain relatively small doesn't mean that technological capability needs to remain stagnant; as an obvious example, processor speed seems to be a lot cheaper now than it was fifteen years ago.

But even more than the new scientific avenues that cheaper technology opens up for small labs, how can anyone say that all that's going to be discovered (without an enormous budget) has been?? It seeems to me to be very unlikely that more discoveries, even significant discoveries, are not just around the corner for small labs. It may not be as drastic as faster-than-light with household products [slashdot.org], but surely there are implications even of what we already know that have yet to be fleshed out. We don't know what is going to be discovered, but that doesn't mean nothing can be--and besides, people have been saying that everything's been discovered already since ancient Greece, and probably even before then.