6 ms·

Allegations of Scientific Misconduct Mount as Physicist Makes His Biggest Claim

155 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
sp332 4y ago
The first paper was retracted by the journal due to a lack of detail around a key measurement, which doesn't automatically mean misconduct but certainly leaves room for it. And the same journal knew about this when they accepted the new paper, so hopefully they made sure the data was looking better for this one?
- SiempreViernes 4y ago
  Now that _would_ be the journal providing a valuable service indeed, we'll just have to wait and see if they actually did.
CyberDildonics 4y ago
Scientific misconduct -> copying and pasting data, falsifying data Biggest Claim -> announcing (again) that he's found a high temperature low pressure super conducting material This is basically a non story turned in to clickbait. Someone no one believes announces a world altering breakthrough.
alsaaro 4y ago
The subtext in the article claims the room temperature superconductor exists at 'near-ambient conditions', though reading further in the article this material is a superconductor at about a gigapascal (about 9.8k atm). I have heard of diamond anvil room temperature superconductors, it appears this is in that class.
- calgarymicro 4y ago
  The ones you've heard of are likely this guy's 2020-era work, which is currently in doubt. Regarding the near-ambient thing, that's probably relative to their prior work, which was at ~2.7 million atm.
- sp332 4y ago
  This is much lower pressure than those others. It's not that it's practical to make a useful device, but it is much more practical to do in a lab where researchers can analyze the structure and hopefully design new ones. So it might be a very useful stepping stone.
jerf 4y ago
Some people just get too big for their britches. If you're going to commit scientific fraud, you need to do it in the edges where nobody really cares, nobody's going to try to replicate it, nobody's going to try to build on it, and nobody's going to try to get you to explain more details because they want to build on it. You want to be working in the dead-end cul-de-sacs. You do not want to be going "I've got a room temperature superconductor" or "I've detected a dark matter particle" or "I've got a simple procedure for flipping matter to anti-matter" or "I've cured all cancers". People are going to want follow-up details and to reproduce it and to begin building on it and turning it into engineering. You gotta keep your aspirations realistic. You need to be working off in the darkness somewhere, not trying to conquer the territory where the brightest lights are shining. Don't try to fraud your way to Nobel-prize level work.
- pmarreck 4y ago
  but what if you actually do have a room-temperature superconductor, but the entire community is dead set against considering even the possibility? we already have plenty of evidence that even science people (flawed humans, like us all) cannot "do proper science" because they are swayed by irrational arguments such as distaste, shame, appeals to tradition, conformism etc. etc.
  - EliRivers 4y ago
    but what if you actually do have a room-temperature superconductor, but the entire community is dead set against considering even the possibility? Well then you'll have no trouble demonstrating it and you will receive the accolades, the fame and the fortune that creating the first room-temperature superconductor will bring you.
    - carbocation 4y ago
      Exactly. Even just in medicine: you’ll sell an MRI that is far cheaper than anyone else on the market, with no need for a quenching system, and with bigger margins. Etc.
  - 4y ago
mellosouls 4y ago
Discussed here yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35070643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35070643
winter_blue 4y ago
Why would someone do something like this? He’s essentially going to become persona non grata in the scientific community. His career in science is basically over. On top of that, according to a Reddit thread, he raised $20 million in VC funding for his “room-temperature superconductor”. Due to the deception, he’s likely going to not only lose any money, but likely face federal securities fraud (and other fraud) charges. He’s literally looking at prison time right now. The baffling stupidity that could cause someone engage in such idiotic (and self-destructive) conduct is perplexing, to say the least.
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  The Laws of Human Stupidity (Carlo Cipolla): 1: "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation." Do not be fooled by traits assumed to be exclusive of stupidity such as education or career. 2: "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person." 3: "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses." The corollary is that the exact nature of stupidity is difficult to predict and therefore guard against. (Refer to the QZ article covering these laws for an interesting graph comparing stupid people to all other types of people.) 4: "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances, to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake." 5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person - more dangerous than an intelligent but selfishly-motivated actor.
- originalcopying 4y ago
  edit
  - pmarreck 4y ago
    RPI is pretty legit. Or at least, it was back when I was in college
    - deleted 4y ago
scythe 4y ago
I would strongly recommend reading the critique of the data originally published by these authors: https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0217979223750012 https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S02179792237... The fact that "measured" data fits a cubic spline so well is extremely strong evidence of misconduct. This just doesn't happen with real data. The misuse of significant figures is also implicative.
moremetadata 4y ago
[dead]
davidgrenier 4y ago
People are deadset on the fraud allegrations arguing that one must be incredibly stupid to do this. It stands to reason then, that they haven't. I feel they are simply lazy-on-the-paperwork tinkerers. I can understand since academic publishing seems to be such an ordeal.
- dkqmduems 4y ago
  There is a reason why people do not use their 'nonstandard' way of subtracting noise.
  - davidgrenier 4y ago
    Probably, I'm not familiar with the domain. I'm suggesting their data and publishing practice could be dogshit while their process might still wield a room-temp superconductor, in which case it would be a little unfair to conclude they are fraudsters.
    - dkqmduems 4y ago
      stupidity or fraud, their results should not be trusted until successfully and independently reproduced.
    - mgsouth 4y ago
      If you take two independent source datasets, A and B, and combine them (add, subtract, whatever) to produce C, then C is correlated to A and B, but A and B are uncorrelated. So in the paper, there are two datasets D and E, and a third F. The noise in D and E are uncorrelated and the noise in F is correlated [edit: to D and E]. Clearly F is the result of combining D and E. The problem is that D is labeled "raw", E is labeled "final, clean result", and F is labeled "background". Thats... pretty damning. They took raw measurements, added them to a desired result, and claimed the result was "background". Edit: to my mind, the biggest problem here isn't that an exciting new physics discovery is reversed. It's that so many people show little regard for truth. I'm not speaking to the parent of this post so much as to entire community. In the APS article it says that Rochester > "'determined that there was no evidence that supported the concerns.' But the university has not made the remit of the investigations public and has not provided any rationale for the investigations or details on how they reached their conclusions." In regards to clearly plagarized sections in his PhD thesis Rochester also said > “Dr. Dias has taken responsibility for these errors and is working with his thesis advisor…to amend the thesis.” Even one of the scientists who uncovered problems with the first 'discovery': > “'Still, I don’t want to believe [the allegations] because it’s too serious,' Eremets says. He would prefer the field simply forget about the irreproducible CSH result and move on."
calgarymicro 4y ago
> While Hamlin was digging into the CSH data, he came across familiar-looking sentences in the paper that presented the raw CSH data—lines that he recollected writing in his 2007 PhD thesis. On a hunch, he pulled up Dias’ 2013 thesis and fed both his thesis and Dias’ into a plagiarism checker. His computer screen lit up; the two documents contained numerous identical passages. Oof. When the guy investigating your paper is the same guy you plagiarized for your thesis.
- pianoben 4y ago
  My memory is a little fuzzy, but back in 2012 or so, this programming whiz applied for a job at Square on the security team (I think?). He was impressive, and had written an SSL implementation (EDIT: it was actually a certificate authority) entirely in Ruby. Breezed through the coding challenges. Just our luck that one of the interviewers was the actual author of that implementation! Seriously, it was really just luck. It makes me wonder how many people successfully bluff their way through their careers.
  - skrbjc 4y ago
    Reminds me of when the MIT admissions dean was found to have faked her degrees: https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2019/05/15/mit-dean-foretold-admissions-scandal-before-experiencing-her-own-disgrace/MAu8N1AFDsuSMH3lVE4k6J/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2019/05/15/mit-dean-for...
    - smcin 4y ago
      Marilee Jones (that article is subscriberwalled). "...and co-author of the popular guide to the college admission process 'Less Stress, More Success: A New Approach to Guiding Your Teen Through College Admissions and Beyond' (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2006)"(!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilee_Jones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilee_Jones
    - nullc 4y ago
      Interestingly it's really easy to fake degrees because the universities are prohibited by law from sharing information on students.
timcavel 4y ago
[dead]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
twic 4y ago
> The writer of this story—Dan Garisto—had no communication about this story with his father, Robert Garisto, the Managing Editor of [Physical Review Letters]. !!! I'm sure that's genuinely fine, but it's a slightly awkward way to wrap up an article about scientific impropriety.
swayvil 4y ago
We think that your claims are bunk AND that you are a plagiarist. When your case offers 2 totally different accusations like that... it's weird.

155 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

The first paper was retracted by the journal due to a lack of detail around a key measurement, which doesn't automatically mean misconduct but certainly leaves room for it. And the same journal knew about this when they accepted the new paper, so hopefully they made sure the data was looking better for this one?

SiempreViernes 4y ago
Now that _would_ be the journal providing a valuable service indeed, we'll just have to wait and see if they actually did.

CyberDildonics 4y ago

Scientific misconduct -> copying and pasting data, falsifying data Biggest Claim -> announcing (again) that he's found a high temperature low pressure super conducting material This is basically a non story turned in to clickbait. Someone no one believes announces a world altering breakthrough.

alsaaro 4y ago

The subtext in the article claims the room temperature superconductor exists at 'near-ambient conditions', though reading further in the article this material is a superconductor at about a gigapascal (about 9.8k atm). I have heard of diamond anvil room temperature superconductors, it appears this is in that class.

calgarymicro 4y ago
The ones you've heard of are likely this guy's 2020-era work, which is currently in doubt. Regarding the near-ambient thing, that's probably relative to their prior work, which was at ~2.7 million atm.
sp332 4y ago
This is much lower pressure than those others. It's not that it's practical to make a useful device, but it is much more practical to do in a lab where researchers can analyze the structure and hopefully design new ones. So it might be a very useful stepping stone.

jerf 4y ago

Some people just get too big for their britches. If you're going to commit scientific fraud, you need to do it in the edges where nobody really cares, nobody's going to try to replicate it, nobody's going to try to build on it, and nobody's going to try to get you to explain more details because they want to build on it. You want to be working in the dead-end cul-de-sacs. You do not want to be going "I've got a room temperature superconductor" or "I've detected a dark matter particle" or "I've got a simple procedure for flipping matter to anti-matter" or "I've cured all cancers". People are going to want follow-up details and to reproduce it and to begin building on it and turning it into engineering. You gotta keep your aspirations realistic. You need to be working off in the darkness somewhere, not trying to conquer the territory where the brightest lights are shining. Don't try to fraud your way to Nobel-prize level work.

pmarreck 4y ago
but what if you actually do have a room-temperature superconductor, but the entire community is dead set against considering even the possibility? we already have plenty of evidence that even science people (flawed humans, like us all) cannot "do proper science" because they are swayed by irrational arguments such as distaste, shame, appeals to tradition, conformism etc. etc.
- EliRivers 4y ago
  but what if you actually do have a room-temperature superconductor, but the entire community is dead set against considering even the possibility? Well then you'll have no trouble demonstrating it and you will receive the accolades, the fame and the fortune that creating the first room-temperature superconductor will bring you.
  - carbocation 4y ago
    Exactly. Even just in medicine: you’ll sell an MRI that is far cheaper than anyone else on the market, with no need for a quenching system, and with bigger margins. Etc.
- 4y ago

mellosouls 4y ago

Discussed here yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35070643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35070643

winter_blue 4y ago

Why would someone do something like this? He’s essentially going to become persona non grata in the scientific community. His career in science is basically over. On top of that, according to a Reddit thread, he raised $20 million in VC funding for his “room-temperature superconductor”. Due to the deception, he’s likely going to not only lose any money, but likely face federal securities fraud (and other fraud) charges. He’s literally looking at prison time right now. The baffling stupidity that could cause someone engage in such idiotic (and self-destructive) conduct is perplexing, to say the least.

CatWChainsaw 4y ago
The Laws of Human Stupidity (Carlo Cipolla): 1: "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation." Do not be fooled by traits assumed to be exclusive of stupidity such as education or career. 2: "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person." 3: "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses." The corollary is that the exact nature of stupidity is difficult to predict and therefore guard against. (Refer to the QZ article covering these laws for an interesting graph comparing stupid people to all other types of people.) 4: "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances, to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake." 5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person - more dangerous than an intelligent but selfishly-motivated actor.
originalcopying 4y ago
edit
- pmarreck 4y ago
  RPI is pretty legit. Or at least, it was back when I was in college
  - deleted 4y ago

scythe 4y ago

I would strongly recommend reading the critique of the data originally published by these authors: https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0217979223750012 https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S02179792237... The fact that "measured" data fits a cubic spline so well is extremely strong evidence of misconduct. This just doesn't happen with real data. The misuse of significant figures is also implicative.

moremetadata 4y ago

[dead]

davidgrenier 4y ago

People are deadset on the fraud allegrations arguing that one must be incredibly stupid to do this. It stands to reason then, that they haven't. I feel they are simply lazy-on-the-paperwork tinkerers. I can understand since academic publishing seems to be such an ordeal.

dkqmduems 4y ago
There is a reason why people do not use their 'nonstandard' way of subtracting noise.
- davidgrenier 4y ago
  Probably, I'm not familiar with the domain. I'm suggesting their data and publishing practice could be dogshit while their process might still wield a room-temp superconductor, in which case it would be a little unfair to conclude they are fraudsters.
  - dkqmduems 4y ago
    stupidity or fraud, their results should not be trusted until successfully and independently reproduced.
  - mgsouth 4y ago
    If you take two independent source datasets, A and B, and combine them (add, subtract, whatever) to produce C, then C is correlated to A and B, but A and B are uncorrelated. So in the paper, there are two datasets D and E, and a third F. The noise in D and E are uncorrelated and the noise in F is correlated [edit: to D and E]. Clearly F is the result of combining D and E. The problem is that D is labeled "raw", E is labeled "final, clean result", and F is labeled "background". Thats... pretty damning. They took raw measurements, added them to a desired result, and claimed the result was "background". Edit: to my mind, the biggest problem here isn't that an exciting new physics discovery is reversed. It's that so many people show little regard for truth. I'm not speaking to the parent of this post so much as to entire community. In the APS article it says that Rochester > "'determined that there was no evidence that supported the concerns.' But the university has not made the remit of the investigations public and has not provided any rationale for the investigations or details on how they reached their conclusions." In regards to clearly plagarized sections in his PhD thesis Rochester also said > “Dr. Dias has taken responsibility for these errors and is working with his thesis advisor…to amend the thesis.” Even one of the scientists who uncovered problems with the first 'discovery': > “'Still, I don’t want to believe [the allegations] because it’s too serious,' Eremets says. He would prefer the field simply forget about the irreproducible CSH result and move on."

calgarymicro 4y ago

> While Hamlin was digging into the CSH data, he came across familiar-looking sentences in the paper that presented the raw CSH data—lines that he recollected writing in his 2007 PhD thesis. On a hunch, he pulled up Dias’ 2013 thesis and fed both his thesis and Dias’ into a plagiarism checker. His computer screen lit up; the two documents contained numerous identical passages. Oof. When the guy investigating your paper is the same guy you plagiarized for your thesis.

pianoben 4y ago
My memory is a little fuzzy, but back in 2012 or so, this programming whiz applied for a job at Square on the security team (I think?). He was impressive, and had written an SSL implementation (EDIT: it was actually a certificate authority) entirely in Ruby. Breezed through the coding challenges. Just our luck that one of the interviewers was the actual author of that implementation! Seriously, it was really just luck. It makes me wonder how many people successfully bluff their way through their careers.
- skrbjc 4y ago
  Reminds me of when the MIT admissions dean was found to have faked her degrees: https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2019/05/15/mit-dean-foretold-admissions-scandal-before-experiencing-her-own-disgrace/MAu8N1AFDsuSMH3lVE4k6J/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2019/05/15/mit-dean-for...
  - smcin 4y ago
    Marilee Jones (that article is subscriberwalled). "...and co-author of the popular guide to the college admission process 'Less Stress, More Success: A New Approach to Guiding Your Teen Through College Admissions and Beyond' (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2006)"(!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilee_Jones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilee_Jones
  - nullc 4y ago
    Interestingly it's really easy to fake degrees because the universities are prohibited by law from sharing information on students.

timcavel 4y ago

[dead]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

twic 4y ago

> The writer of this story—Dan Garisto—had no communication about this story with his father, Robert Garisto, the Managing Editor of [Physical Review Letters]. !!! I'm sure that's genuinely fine, but it's a slightly awkward way to wrap up an article about scientific impropriety.

swayvil 4y ago

We think that your claims are bunk AND that you are a plagiarist. When your case offers 2 totally different accusations like that... it's weird.