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Nano-scientist's dark secret
- Thread starter iGav
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how is this news?It is an interesting story, but this stuff is two years old. the scandal broke out in spring 2002, he got fired by Bell labs in september 2002. he has been stripped of several prestigious prizes he had been awarded. He was already aknowledged to be Nobel prize material (I think he had something like 15 publications between Science and Nature at 31), but --surprise!!!-- he was a complete fraud. His claims were completely, deliberately made up, and NOBODY could reproduce the data.
The scientific community was rocked by one of its worst scandals ever, but I guess the peer-review "system" eventually caught up with him (if a tad slowly) so at least that part is good. the bad part that all the co-authors in his works got away with it clean. Even if they were fooled as well (mmmmhh....), they still should be held responsible for what was published with their signature.
What i don't get is why BBC would run a story like they just made a scoop.
Besides,
"One of the most brilliant scientific researchers of recent years stands accused of committing an elaborate scientific fraud"
"One of the most brilliant"? Says who?
Hellooo??? This guy was a FRAUD. how does that make him brilliant? for ruining his career (and possibly other people's)?
"stands" accused? Judgement was passed years ago. This is booktext case of scientific fraud now.
At least they could have told us which bridge this guy lives under now
uops... sorry.
i guess I got a bit carried away. In my defense I can only say that... mmmhhh... I invoke the fifth
It would be an interesting documentary to watch, and I really wonder what the guy is doing now.
i guess I got a bit carried away. In my defense I can only say that... mmmhhh... I invoke the fifth
It would be an interesting documentary to watch, and I really wonder what the guy is doing now.
Originally posted by Don't panic
uops... sorry.
i guess I got a bit carried away. In my defense I can only say that... mmmhhh... I invoke the fifth
It would be an interesting documentary to watch, and I really wonder what the guy is doing now.
the fifth won't save you... heheheh
It was actually very good, Horizon usually makes highly interesting and thought provoking viewing.
This dude, I think at his core is a brilliant and hugly intelligent man, and undoubtedly didn't get to this point without been intelligent.
But some of his experiments and papers are fabricated beyond belief.... it finished though saying that he still stands by his experiments and results...
It's interesting how he could fool the ENTIRE scietific community for so long with this study... maybe he has got something.... who knows... great viewing though.
The cold fusion of the computer world?
Just like cold fusion, nano-computers are a holy grail. Cheap, customizable and eventually easily made cpus - supercomputers the size of pin heads...wow, heady stuff. Too bad its still sci-fi.
But its also great that there are people working on this sort of thing. I wonder how long it will take that show to make it to the states?
D
Just like cold fusion, nano-computers are a holy grail. Cheap, customizable and eventually easily made cpus - supercomputers the size of pin heads...wow, heady stuff. Too bad its still sci-fi.
But its also great that there are people working on this sort of thing. I wonder how long it will take that show to make it to the states?
D
some of the people they interviewed were proposing some really crazy stuff... basically things like human warfare would stop, because you could program these little crtters to go and kill people, and because they so small, you wouldn' even see a swarm of them coming towards you, then you'd breathe them in, and they'd finish you off from the inside out.
And then they mentioned that you'd need 'good' protective critter things to police the 'evil' critter things.... real head spinning stuff, but for some reason totally made sense, and was totally believable.
This Henrik guy though, they had interviewed all these Scientists been interviewed, and all said what this guy was doing, was way, way beyond what anyone was capable of, now in hindsight people know why, but it raises questions about firstly, how he managed to even get invited into Bell, and secondly how people could be fooled for so long...
Don't these programs get shown on BBC America??
Disclaimer: I am no chemist/nuclear physicist so take everything I write with a cup of salt.
I think the Schoen story is quite different from the Fleischmann and Pons (cold fusion) story. mainly in the fact that the cold fusion story could be substantially correct. it was just so out of mainstream science that most of the contemporary specialists just refused to even consider it (and huge media hype, and the hot-fusion big-money interests didn't help either). Their finding have been validated hundreds of time. Others couldn't reproduce the data. It's still a controversial issue and there is vast literature in both directions, but I think that most scientist would agree that somehow "anomalous heat" can be produced by some sort of "nuclear" reaction. The actual mechanism is what is still not known. However, even the skeptics never considered it a fraud, but reputed it to be the result of a flawed experiment/interpretation.
So i think that cold fusion is an example of an unorthodox view that might or might not become mainstream one day (i think it will), Schoen's experiments are something that mainstream 'wanted' to happen, and he was hailed as the nanomessiah. Maybe he had great intuitions and/or terrific preliminary data, but his lack of morality and scientific integrity caused him his (possibly brilliant) career and set back the field reather than advancing it. I think we'll probably get to nano-computers someday, and maybe Schoen was correct after all (if so, on his intuitions, not the fabricated data), but his story should be archived under "stupidity" rather than "brilliancy"