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The title is a bit aggressive I think. While the correlated noise discussed in the tweets is suspicious, there doesn't seem to be any definitive evidence of fra
by tschwimmer 8y ago
The title is a bit aggressive I think. While the correlated noise discussed in the tweets is suspicious, there doesn't seem to be any definitive evidence of fraud yet.
It's also possible that the plot of the noise was an honest error or something else.
- lainga 8y agoWell, besides apparently spoofing one of their senior colleagues' email addresses to send another colleague an email asking him not to criticise the authors' works. Through Protonmail.
- m0nty 8y agoIt seems to me that the forged emails are what is being called out as a bizarre fraud, since they definitely are fraudulent. The rest of the thread makes it clear that the experimental results are still to achieve a consensus one way or the other (although it doesn't look good, does it?)
- jcranmer 8y agoMatching noise in plots isn't proof of fraud, but it's something that is so suspicious that it changes the game from "convince me that this paper is fraudulent" to "convince me that this paper isn't fraud." In that light, other worrisome elements of the situation are problematic: * Claiming one of the holy grail properties of modern physics is achievable with rather pedestrian materials. * The methodology section is apparently on the vague side. Sort of on the order of “we prepared silver nanoparticles using standard techniques, then incorporated them into into a gold matrix.” * Response to the announcement of "your data presentation has serious errors" is "we won't share our raw data to confirm."
- sdinsn 8y agoI think the bizarre thing was that someone (allegedly) posed as a researcher in an attempt to get a different researcher to back down.
- legohead 8y agoCould be an honest mistake, except that the authors are defending it, which rings the alarm bells. Not even getting to the spoofed email...