- ISBN13: 9780230224674
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
This is the story of wunderkind physicist Jan Hendrik Schön who faked the discovery of a new superconductor made from plastic. A star researcher at the world-renowned Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, he claimed to have stumbled across a powerful method for making carbon-based crystals into transistors, the switches found on computer chips. Had his experiments worked, they would have paved the way for huge advances in technology–computer chips that we could stic… More >>
Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World
Why would an intelligent person fabricate results? Shon was apparently carried away by his success after his first fabrication. Once he had started down that slippery slope, there would be no turning back. Why, then, did it take so long for his co-workers and supervisors to uncover his fraud? Scientists have an intrinsic trust in each others’ veracity. We want to believe. Cases like this should alert the scientific community to the possibility that even the nicest people may be pulling the wool over our eyes. My mentor used to say ‘not only must you be sure, you must be really sure’. Shon’s confreres forgot to adhere to that axiom. Are they equally guilty of the fraud for letting it go on for so long?
The physics involved in the telling of this tale is not for the uninitiated but tale itself is a fascinating rendition of how good people — not just Shon himself — can be led down a crooked path.
A tale well-told by a talented writer.
Rating: 4 / 5
I found that the book moves at a good pace, because as events unfolded I kept asking: “how does Schon continue to pull this off?” and “how will he get caught?” As the excellent first review of June 13 described, his managers at Bell Labs we unable to discover or contain the fraud, took no responsibility for their lack of oversight, and, for the most part, suffered no repercussions.
How could Schon fool (nearly) everyone for 4 years? He was a mediocre student, with a poor grasp of the physics underlying his publications. Wouldn’t other scientists pop into his lab to see the amazing devices that nobody else could replicate? Did nobody ever insist that he keep notebooks of his experiments, as well as the raw data collected. (Schon apparently kept everything in the Origin graphics package.)
How did he satisfy the colleagues? He used their knowledge against them. He showed them his fictitious data and solicited their suggestions for the next thing to do. He would then fulfill their expectations by manufacturing the data that he had been told to expect. If he were challenged, he would try to be accommodating, changing the graphics or description of the device, or falling back on the excuse that he didn’t understand what was happening, but was just presenting data,
Certainly Schon was the wrong person at the wrong place at the wrong time (Bell Labs during breakup and rapid downsizing). His greatest ability is to tell people exactly what they want to hear, to get useful information from them for his next fraud, and — always — to hide his deceptions. Schon is a risk-taker; he lives for the thrill of his game — manipulating others to get undeserved rewards (praise, fame, money). All his energy goes into planning and generating the next fabrication and deflecting criticism of previous fakes. Such a personality disorder is totally foreign to most scientists, who get their thrills from the real game, and for this reason very few scientists came to the logical conclusion that the whole thing was a con job.
Reich’s publisher, Macmillan, did a poor job with the book. There are enough typos to make the book appear not to have been proofread. They used cheap paper, barely above the quality of newspaper. And there are no illustrations or photographs, as others have noted: illustrations to help explain the physics of the devices and show the graphics that eventually got Schon caught, and photos of the people involved.
Reich’s treatment at the end of the book suffers because it has no discussion of the specific findings of the external committee that found the work to be fraudulent. This would have been a more satisfying conclusion than simply stating that Schon was fired as a result. But she does an excellent job laying out the problem of scientific misconduct, and the difficulty of its detection when the perpetrator is accommodating and actively deflects criticism. Ultimately, Schon was brought down because he couldn’t restrain himself from publishing wild new fabrications on a nearly bi-weekly basis. So I had to wonder how long he might have remained undetected if his rate of publications had not been so frantic and in so many different specialized areas.
Finally, to really understand Schon’s motivations, as well as the reasons for his success at Bell Labs, I would suggest the book “Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths go to Work,” by Babiak and Hare. Hare is the world expert in this personality type.
Rating: 4 / 5
Reich does a great job explaining how Hendrik Schon was able to perpetrate the biggest [...]in physics history, duping the folks at Science, Nature and seemingly every prize committee on the planet. But more interestingly, Reich shows how the culture of science, especially the pressure-cooker, cost-cutting atmosphere within Bell Labs, allowed the [...] to happen, possibly promoted it, but ultimately uncovered it. This is an important, valuable book, and should be required reading for young scientists.
Rating: 5 / 5
In this interesting book, the author describes the recent case of a young physicist who was found guilty of fraudulent behavior in his field of research. The field involved is condensed matter physics – in particular, work related to micro-electronics and nano-technology. It is clear that the author is highly familiar with the case and she is quite fluent in the scientific jargon of this field. The writing style is authoritative, fast-paced and very detailed throughout. Perhaps because of this last point, I found several passages in this book to be a bit dry, although some sections are really quite gripping. Many technical details are provided and specialized terms are usually explained, but not always. Unfortunately, the book only contains two figures (graphs); several more figures, including photographs of some of the main characters and perhaps of some of the equipment used would have been useful. Editorially, the book contains a fair amount of unnecessary repetition and a greater-than-average number of rather annoying typographical errors. Although a general reader can certainly glean a great deal from reading this book, those who are likely to enjoy it the most would include scientists working in this field, scientists in general as well as science buffs.
Rating: 4 / 5
I read this book with interest because I used to be in condensed matter physics. Tangentially, we dealt with Bell Labs, which was indeed one of the best places for research in this field. It is unusual to see a book like this, presumably directed at a general audience. The level of physics detail is not what is typically offered.
The sociology of research, and specifically in this field of physics, can be fascinating. Grad students and researchers in many sciences should be able to relate to the happenings here.
As far as a rogue researcher in a large group being able to fabricate results, this is not unknown. Especially when the group leader doesn’t have the time to parse everyone’s work in detail. A similar event happened in molecular biology in Lee Hood’s group at Caltech in the 90s. Though no book was written about it.
The problem with the current book is the paucity of diagrams and photos. Not a single photo of Schon! Why is that? Surely some must exist. Perhaps from Bell Labs publicity shots before the scandal broke. Or even from their archived web pages. For example, I just searched on the web, and found a photo of him from Wired. Reich or her publisher should have provided some image. Ironically, the book is heavily footnoted, not unlike a research journal article. So there has been no lack of research done on it.
By the way, you should ignore the subtitle about “shaking the scientific world”. Even within physics, I doubt if the high energy or nuclear folks were much shook up. Instead, they probably looked at it in curiosity, just like other scientists.
The book describes how data is collected these days in labs. By computerised instruments, and thence written to files. I wonder. I got into physics at a time [1980s] when labs were transitioning from manual writing down of data points in lab books to this automated collection into computer files. It is certainly possible to fabricate handwritten data; there have been notorious cases. But to some extent, once the data has been written, it has some permanence. Short of tearing out the pages, which doesn’t work too well if the pages are numbered, or surreptiously inserting or adjusting some numbers, the data is fixed.
However, computer files are malleable. Even when ostensibly timestamped by the operating system. If you have root access, you can temporarily change back the time, edit the file, and then reset the time to the current time. The book doesn’t speak of this. But I do wonder if the ease of doing this played some part in Schon’s frauds.
Rating: 4 / 5