A cold eye on a hot young physicist

Baltimore Sun ^ | June 9, 2002 | Michael Stroh

[Cincinatus' Wife]

In four short years Jan Hendrik Schon went from scientific nobody to one of the most talked-about young physicists in the world. His competitors had any number of reasons to be impressed.

There was his jump from a little-known German university to Bell Labs in New Jersey, one of the most storied research centers in the world. There was his seemingly tireless ability to crank out scientific papers - 76 with his name since 2000, a pace that leaves many physicists in awe.

[Rodney King]

bump

[DooDahhhh]

Bet all these folks were Democrats!

[Diogenesis]

"The last time a physics experiment drew such intense
scrutiny was in 1989, when two little-known University of
Utah scientists announced that they had harnessed the secret of the sun's energy in a
test tube at room temperature - the discovery of so-called cold fusion.
The announcement, which promised a nearly limitless source of cheap energy,
turned out to be wrong. But a panel later
determined that the scientists were guilty only of sloppy lab work and wishful thinking."

Nonsense. Cold fusion is real, and has been confirmed in
several labs including the US Navy.
Even the recent international ICCF-9 meeting was a success
and present more developments.

If Robert Park and those who in that past attacked cold fusion
for their own PERSONAL reasons damaging US security,
are attacking this scientist,then Schon may be correct.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Graphs in several of Schon's papers looked oddly similar though they illustrated very different experiments.

How "brilliant" could he have been if he didn't know how to create a mathematical model including a random number generator?

[DB]

Sad story. I hope there is a better explanation than outright fraud.

[Greeklawyer]

Repeat the experiment and see if it can be duplicated.
Scientists can be a clique driven bunch.
Check to see whose ox is being gored before passing judgement.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Look's like Schon's career is in the dumpster. He'll probably wind up peddling climate models to the EPA, dealing seconds in Kansas railroad hotels and writing books on the dangers on nuclear power.

In an early era he would have been an alchemist.

[G.Mason]

"Fraud in science is rare."

Yeah....right.

It would appear Michael Stroh has his "frauds" confused with his steaks.

[SBeck]

This is why peer review rules.

[twntaipan]

You mean scientists took something on [shocked look] faith? How can that be? Scientists never makes mistakes, they just find conflicting data and rewrite the script.

[Fishing-guy]

The key is for other scientists to reproduce his discoveries. Only time will tell.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Check to see whose ox is being gored before passing judgement.

Let me clarify, what I meant to say was that if a truly brilliant (or merely technically competent) person wanted to cheat, all he would need to do is create a mathematical model of the expected observations, including measurement noise, pick a random number seed and let 'er rip.

If he produced "oddly similar" graphs, there are two explanation, the actual underlying physical models are oddly similar or he is cutting corners. Occam's razor points me in a direction that I don't like to go. We need to apply doses of healthy skepticism to any unusual claim in the world of human affairs.

An example of seemingly unrelated physical processes that have similar underlying models are the Fourier Transform of a continuous time process and the far field diffraction pattern of an aperture. (F'rinstance, the graph of the Fourier Transform of a rectangular pulse looks just like the far field diffraction pattern of a uniformly illuminated aperture.) Turns out, on closer examination the equations of a Fourier Transform are similar to Fraunhofer's equations for a diffraction pattern. That would be one example where oddly similar results have a valid explanation.

[Elsie]

Fraud in science is rare.

---

Now, if it turns out that this guy was a Creationist; the 'E' folks will say with glee:"SEE, I TOLD you they wuz all fakers!"

But, if it turns out that this guy was an Evolutionist; the 'C' folks will say with glee:"SEE, I TOLD you they wuz all fakers!"

[Greeklawyer]

Peer review has changed.

What used to be one published paper is now broken up into three.

You can't always trust peers. What happens when my results
disprove established scientific dogma.
In other words, prove my life's work was wrong.
The peers, go out of their way to say the results are
irelivant, wrong, impractical, inconsistent, or worse ecconomically unmarketable.
Peers try to protect their research grants and turf.

I don't know enought to pass judgment but I do know
I need to see if the tests were actually faked.

ps: if you don't beleive the dogma argument, look at the
masters and johnson sudies.
Blatent fabrication of observations and the fraud which was
adopted as fact is still held up as acceptable by the peers.

[Diogenesis]

May your karma run over their dogma.

[AndyJackson]

You mean scientists took something on [shocked look] faith? How can that be

No we don't. Such is the state of support of science in the modern world that 95% of what gets published is of so little value to anyone else that it is not worth taking any view of it at all, much less a skeptical view. The scientist adds another publication to his CV and that is the end of it.

When it matters, it matters because the result is useful for some further work of some other scientist. He tries to reproduce the result - or at least use it for some further purpose of his own and then the discrepency is disocvered. All major breakthroughs are major because of their derivative influence in this manner, and so it is impossible to forge a major breakthrough and get away with it for any significant length of time.

That scientists are selective in the data they use to support their theories - well that is nothing new. Such are the vagaries of experimental science that most data is bad data and you have to work really really hard over years and years to get your experiment to produce good clean useful data at all.

The competition to publish first always presents the peril of publishing too early, and taht is a difficult judgment call. Scientists do from time to time withdraw their findings after they obtain better data.

But never ever is science just based on someone else's say so.

[Physicist]

But even before the discovery of the suspect graphs, some of Schon's published claims were viewed with skepticism, if not outright suspicion, by some physicists who were having trouble repeating the experiments in their own laboratories - the test that all discoveries must pass before being widely accepted. Even Schon's former thesis adviser admits that he has been unable to reproduce his former student's experiments.

The moral of the story is: don't even try to fake your data. In the end, you'll be caught, for nature cannot be fooled.

[Physicist]

You mean scientists took something on [shocked look] faith?

Not in any sense. Read again the paragraph I quoted above.

[AndyJackson]

if you don't beleive the dogma argument, look at the masters and johnson sudies. Blatent fabrication of observations and the fraud which was adopted as fact is still held up as acceptable by the peers.

there are a number of pseudo-scientific fields where their is no substantial and effective peer-review community and where you can publish almost anything and have it stand for years. Much of the social sciences fell into this category - though as time goes on the rigor has improved.

One of the difficutlies in fields dealing with human or animal behavior is that the complexity of the problem is so vast and the scatter in the data is so large that reaching reliable conclusions is very difficult. Therefore the standard often does become one of political acceptance.

Physics, chemistry, molecular biology, etc. are not such fields.