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  • Essay / Book review "Plastic Fantastic": How the biggest fraud in physics shook the scientific world

    What a fantasy to discover a new type of superconductor made of plastic. This could be a scientific breakthrough and could be used as computer chips or a flexible, paper-like screen. However, it turns out to be a fraud. At first I thought what I read could only happen in some novels, but the writer told me that the whole story is real in details. The book describes a true story that occurred in 2000-2002, a scientific fraud perpetrated at Bell Labs by Schon, a physics postdoctoral fellow. In people's eyes, Schön was always a pleasant person, a mild-mannered, modest and helpful young man. How could he tell such a blatant lie and deceive the entire scientific field? The book highlights many of the factors that contributed to the perpetration of fraud and the difficulty in detecting and stopping it. The personality, pressures and environment that created and allowed the fraud to spread. For example, people thought Schon and his colleagues were “reliable.” So even if Schon tried to produce "real" data, his colleagues and others would not doubt it. The book illustrates that in May 2001, Schon produced data showing superconductivity at 117 degrees above absolute zero, a result better than any colleague expected. Say no to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essay Additionally, political and economic pressures contribute, such as the shoddy way in which Lucent patented Schon's research, ignoring the critical reviews. It's for many of the same reasons that Schon pulled off his scam for so long and so spectacularly. Eventually the fraud was exposed, the fraudster was arrested, Bell Labs was downsized from a research powerhouse. And the author concludes that science is self-correcting, but the danger is that the correction process turns out to be more human, more random and much less systematic. And this happens a lot in exploratory research. Scientists and managers take risks by relying on bold new claims, hoping that future science will correct the errors, and they get away with it. The result appears to be a happy ending, but it still wastes millions of dollars invested in research translation. The author highlights at the end of the book what we need to keep in mind when carrying out scientific research to guard against the possibility that a currently reported revolutionary discovery is fraudulent. In this book, two lessons are worth learning: first, scientists are just ordinary human beings, which means that some of them will do stupid things; secondly, it is particularly important that no one can deceive nature, those who commit fraud would ultimately be unmasked. After such a research scam, some people blame the peer review process. Because the journal of Science sends articles to different experts for review. This achievement is so remarkable that people should judge it critically. Also look at the process of exposing the whole story, we will find that the strictest inspectors are not the peers of scientists, but reality itself.The greater the research result, the more rigorous the reality . Schon's findings have attracted technical experts who hope to apply them to.