Wait, did people actually believe this was real? I’d seen it faked before, so was a bit jaded at the news.
Glad to have peer reviews!
I did not know this story! Thanks! Important precedent it seems in framing a foundation of scepticism.
One fraud happened and therefore everything with the word “conductor” in it is fraud afterward? The Jan Schon scandal was about single-molecule semiconductors, which have nothing to do with lead apatite superconductors.
Scientific fraud is a weird phenomenon that many do not intuitively see coming. That it happens at all is worth keeping in mind, as well as the manner in which it is done. When a new finding seems to good to be true, it helps to remember that it may just be so.
In this particular case, my feeling is that an unhealthy lab dynamic led to a small group of people get carried away with their excitement. I’m betting fraud hasn’t happened here, but rather scientific negligence in the pursuit of glory. All my relatively uninformed speculation of course …
From what I’ve gathered the group of 3 comprise one elder and former supervisor and two former graduate students. Don’t underestimate the weird sway a scientific elder can have on younger researchers, nor the strange psychology that can develop around the pursuit of one’s legacy. Competing with Einstein and Nobel prize winners can be a helluva drug, and the elder/senior research can influence all sorts of decisions and aspects of the research through the amount of deference the receive from the younger researchers.
As for the two younger researchers, without knowing where their careers are up to, they’re probably fairly desperate to get more papers and grants, as all researchers are. Once you’ve started a project, you want something out of the time you’ve spent on it. If you’ve dived in on a long shot project that might go no where, you start to really want to find something in there the longer it goes all while sunk-cost fallacies haunt you everyday and pull you along longer and deeper than you really wanted to go. Combined with respect and deference to an elder pushing them along, the young researchers may very well have found themselves in a weirdly confusing space with not entirely healthy mindsets. I’m talking about losing perspective on what matters in terms of research/scientific integrity as well as managing resources for the sake of their life and career and how much trust they have for their research group on the whole, where a good deal of weird suppression followed by dramatic outbursts in an unhealthy mental health sense can happen.
Now that is all speculation, of course, but I write it just to illustrate that these kind of situations can occur, especially in science/research, and it’s helpful to be aware when dramatic confusing things like this situation arise.
The guy behind this paper has the exact same issues as Schon. Plagiarism in his PhD thesis, faked data, retracted papers, etc.
No he doesn’t?
Don’t get me wrong there are many places where the paper can be wrong (eg fig 1 or their magnetism exceptionally looking more similar to diamagnetism than superconductivity) but you are mixing him up with Ranga Dias who has had a history of data fabrication.
Dias has nothing to do with this paper though.
I was, and am, skeptical, but I also must admit, the potential breakthrough is teasing my psyche with that feeling of just wanting it to be real. A part of me hopes that maybe it will still end up confirmed by other peers, but, granted, it was a low chance even when the news first came out.
There goes my hopes dashed
As always, this is why peer-review is taken in such high regard. Replicate, replicate, replicate.
Well, just to push back a little on any impression some might get from this episode of the health of science (all IMO of course)
Most things aren’t subjected to replication attempts like this, largely because I think people have a decent amount of self-interest in getting on top of this material as early as possible if the claims are real, and, the manufacturing of the material is relatively trivial. In science in general, game changing technologies or techniques can get replication attention like this, but overall a lot of “discoveries or findings” just aren’t challenged as there is no real incentive to do so as a researcher, to the point that often you’ll get pushback if you try to publish a failed replication study.
It’s a shame that it so far seems that this superconductor experiment was a bust, but even still, I’m happy to see the scientific process at work.
What, one failed experiment about 15 minutes after the paper was first published is sufficient grounds for declaring the technology a bust is it?
No but a previous history of making shit up and falsifying data along with a failure to replicate?
our compound shows greatly consistent x-ray diffraction spectrum with the previously reported structure data
Uhh, doesn’t look like it to me. This paper’s X-ray diffraction spectrum looks pretty noisy compared to the one from the original paper, with some clear additional/different peaks in certain regions. That could potentially affect the result. I was under the impression from the original paper that a subtle compression of the lattice structure was pretty important to formation of quantum wells for superconductivity, so if the X-ray diff isn’t spot on I’ll wait for some more failures before calling it busted.
yea interesting! It’s definitely the arc I’m hoping for here …
that either the material is tougher to make than the papers suggest, or,
to get into my fantasy land, the material they made is a superconductor but they don’t really know why or how to make it the way they did as it was kinda some accident they weren’t in control of. If true, it would make whatever is left of the material rather valuable and subject to some drama I’d imagine.
