New Superconductor Scandal: What We Know So Far
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- Опубліковано 8 кві 2024
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Last year, Ranga Dias from the University of Rochester in New York claimed he had found a material that was superconducting at room temperature. He has now been accused of research misconduct. This is a summary of what we know so far.
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#science #sciencenews #superconductor - Наука та технологія
A sad tale of a scientific super misconductor
you are translating😮
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ئەگەر ناوت تۆمار نەکەیت لە ماوەی ٣ ڕۆژدا دەمری😂
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Scientists (narcissists) today need to be heard and faking papers do just that.
Look at the west and the downfall. Morons galore.
@@l4g you need to post that to less scientific channels, nobody believes you here.
@@l4g Bruh, I understand you love twinks, but this is neither the time nor place.
@@ScandalUK😂
I worked in a commercial (aerospace) R&D lab for more than a decade. Management told them that unless 40% of the ideas failed they weren't being brave and bold enough. Too bad that the academic research framework is so hide-bound and timid; they might progress a lot faster if failure was an option.
There are the problems of things very well known that absolutely ain't so. A very big problem in biology.
Drugs fill receptors.
Pain empties receptors. PTSD empties receptors.
Filling empty receptors makes you feel good.
Empty receptors create a desire for drugs.
Drugs do not create a desire for drugs.
Yea but no one wants to give grant money to failures
Note that of two examples given, one was from university, the other was from private Bell Labs where grants were not an issue. Actually, it is pressure to run university research as businesses which is a source of much of 'pressure'
Sounds very reasonable.
Yeah but at the aerospace company when they fail they write a paper that says so.
"Science is about not fooling yourself. And you're the easiest person in the room to fool."
Richard Feynman keeping me grounded every day.
Same here. I watch one of his lectures every now and then to remind myself how a scientific mind should, must work. with every statement he made he considered its meaning and literal validity. He was his own most brutal critic at all times.
@@johnwest7993 "This theory takes for granted a force that acts instantaneously across infinite distances. Only a madman would belive such a thing." -- Sir Issac Newton. On a theory of gravity that stood for 200 years before That Guy Again added a constant to it.
@@andersjjensen Maybe the universe just isn't continuous. Stephen Wolfram might be onto something.
hah and he couldn't explain or understand what magnetism was. Okay. Sure jan, I'll uh let him "not ground me" one bit ;) See, I found a giant, asked nicely, and the view from up here is so much clearer. That, and dielectric mutual mass acceleration makes more sense ;)
I've not read any Feynman, only just heard about him recently from Freakonomics radio. He sounds like a real one.
We often joked that there should be a scientific journal "Fail One" where one can publish work that essentially fails in delivering sufficient evidence for a reasonable first idea and where more than a million dollars were spent (not wasted) in experiments and so on.
Essentially: Showing that a reasonable hypothesis is not true has value in itself!
Not being able to publish negative results is a giant scientific blind spot.
there is the Journal of Negative Results. but publishing there isn't going to get you prestige or grant money.
@@ChrisStavros I am confused, what prevents this?
Nothing at all. A publisher might help.
@@_PatrickO The nature of academica. Most publications must add knowledge to the field. Negative result do not add knowledge, they just say what knowledge can't be added. Since I'm not a STEM field PhD, I can't say the following for sure, but in my field, it would be very difficult to peer review negative results as well, and peer review is the holy grail of publishing. Publish an article where something isn't peer reviewed (usually double-blind review) and it is worthless for rank and tenure and also worthless for gaining grant money.
"Why would a university not investigate allegations of fraud very hard?"
They get a chunk of the funding, and they get a chunk of the prestige. They've likely figured out the fraud already, and want to deal with it quietly, so as to keep the first two intact.
Such investigations are not good for the bottom line of the University. It has became more about fame, notoriety, and It's All About the Benjamins! So they tell a few lies and over hype the truth they may get lucky.. in time. It's about these people having no honor and personal integrity and let's not have any accountability when they get caught! Money is causing the dishonesty which these educated idiots are in the process of destroying science for their own personal egos and self interest. It's "show me the money" mind set or the root of all evil.
because university is just a group of people who often have ties with the accused and they usually do not suspect scientific misconducts. So, they just do these investigations to only stop the allegations.
@shubhamsinha5826 Agreed. So they send Ray Charls to investigate. Predictably, they find nothing.
On the bright side, most researchers aren't abusing the system. The cursory inspection allows good researchers who made a mistake to keep trying.
@@geraldfrost4710 No. If you're being investigated for scientific misconduct you can't be judged for having made plain old mistakes. Misconduct require actively falsifying data, refusing to take a critical look at your methods when qualified scientists raise concern, abusing positions of power to get "naysayers" fired, etc. Nobody ever got fired for misconduct because they forgot to calibrate an instrument and then spend 6 months trying to "recreate the conditions that led to this ONE sign their theory might be right".
Right, they have nothing to gain and everything to lose by self policing. If they ignore it they know nobody else is policing it either.
The entirety of peer reviewed acedemic research is a house of cards, and nobody wants to ne the one to take it down.
Like nuclear war, it's the self preservation of MAD.
While Dias may have ruined his career, the worst part is he may have also ruined those of his students.
Unlikely...they will proper depending on their talents
@@agaragar21it’s very unlikely any of them will go into academia at least. He will have ruined their career in academia, but I don’t think they’ll wanna stick around afterwards
@@theangledsaxon6765 "academia" is the root of the problem ...no loss for anyone actually competent in any field
@@agaragar21 It won't be so easy for them now, they'll always be tainted. Unless some other PIs take them under their cover and guidance they'll find it hard to find a place, and knowing academia, it's unlikely this will happen. Then there's also the question about whether they'll even want to go ahead with research after this experience.
@@theangledsaxon6765 academia sucks anyways. its not about the pursuit of objective truth, more the pursuit of endless funding. What idea can you concieve that will require an endless stream of money, guarantee no results, that investors will invest in. That is acedemia.
I was sitting with this PhD from Princeton. He had a biotech company that was collecting hundreds of millions of dollars. Supposedly it was going to be the next Genentech. We're sitting at a picnic table eating barbecued food. I asked him "Do you really have anything or are you just hoping to get lucky?" The expression on his face told the whole story. I was just being flippant. Within two years the whole thing went down the tubes. He hit the divorce and he was hiding in a rehab. His wife also a PhD walking around like a deer in the headlights. He was hiding assets and filing for bankruptcy. "Theranos" the home edition another game by Milton Bradley.
otoh our friends started with genentech early on and are retired young multi millionaires.
oh wow, I am sorry to hear that
@@meesalikeu There are some really marvelously well educated and talented people out there and they are making the difference. They are making a significant contribution.
I thought that people that were well-educated and had the privilege of money would also be ethical. No it's not true there is no correlation.
An example of this would be how gravity is independent of horizontal motion. No matter how fast the bullet is it falls at the same rate- horizontal and vertical motion are independent. You do find roses growing in piles of shit. Everybody loves a beautiful rose.
@@ericheine2414 Often times there seems to actually be a negative correlation between privilege and morality.
@@SabineHossenfelderthe Eminem quote really threw this video over the top and i love it lol 😂
The "letter of recommendation" system is insane. It's like it's not even scientists who thought of it. It's 100% noise. As a psychometrician employed to study how to measure educational constructs, it's the amalgamation of every worst idea of the field of education.
What do you suggest ? This is the only system that somehow works
It exists anywhere/everywhere
I have seen this my whole life in any field as a normal/recommended practice
It's called corruption/business, especially refer to collectives/organs/objects/ppl that put 'money' as top priority(more important than most other !things!(EDITED:change !things! to aspects))
Edited:added: In short. GREED or in chasing of illusion by mindly slaving others(cheating/scam) in a pyramid way/structure
@@dmitripogosian5084 A letter of recommendation is a bigger reflection on the one who wrote it than the one it's about. If you get an "easy to work with" from someone who's an absolute asshole what it means is "will not raise the alarm, even on the most critical matters, if they believe it will make you mad". If you get "has issues communicating" from someone who has no patience that means "feels it is important to get the details clear".
@@andersjjensen In science, every specific field is not that large. In my field I know personally or at least heard of practically anybody who is writing letters. If I am interested in a candidate, I would call the people who wrote letters, and talk to them, if there are any questions. Usually, people on hiring committees know about everybody who is on a market in a particular year, from postdoctoral position up, and they surely know if not person previous supervisor (and know what to read into the letters), then somebody at his/her institution.
@@dmitripogosian5084 So what you're saying is that the letter is in itself worthless except for the single item that it has the name of a person you can contact for a personal recommendation. (or not). 🙄
In biology at least, it's a huge problem that scientists convince themselves with their own faulty reasoning. Most cases don't involve fraud, and they happen in papers far less consequential than these. But their cumulative effect is to dilute genuinely good science and harm the credibility of the field overall.
I wish that was true. Google for example amyloid 56, or Research into theory of mind you will get a pile of retracted papers. The problem isn't simply fraud it's making claims in excess of what the weight of evidence really supports. Otherwise known as premature certainty, premature closure, or just plain intellectual arrogance. See all areas of science for details. Scientific prestige has an uneasy relationship with pathological narcissism.
It becomes far more interesting when you view who funds the studies - there are too many biased papers that escape respectable peer review.
It reminds me of something i read about micology on 4chan.Some chinese scientists are using DNA sequencing to rewrite fungus philogeny but lack knowledge of anatomical structure of those fungi.So their analysis is all wrong because they use the wrong species.
The social sciences in particular have a *big* problem with reproducibility.
Which shows what a great scientist Charles Darwin was, since he spent much of his life looking for ways to discredit his own work.
"Reality did not comply..."...I'll be using that phrase for a wide variety of topics and current events. Thanks Sabine~!
we might say: "Reality did not agree."
(see: Maxwell's Silver Hammer)
Reality did not agree nor comply...
Sadly it didn't for Lenin, Marx and Stalin.
That's the only good thing about it. Reality cannot be cheated.
When you hear news like these, remember two proverbs:
"Great claims require great evidence."
"If something sounds too good to be true, it's most probably too good to be true."
Most often these are just honest mistakes, but sadly sometimes they are scams.
"Those who sling mud.....lose ground."
Also wait for independent corroboration. For example, symmetry nonconservation in the weak nuclear force and the initial high temperature superconductors were easily and almost immediately confirmed and won the predictors in the first case and the discoverers in the second very quick Nobel Prizes.
"If you are looking to your left the opposite way must be right"
Leonard Bernstein, now _that_ was a super conductor.
He's room temperature now as well!
ha ha
"....and he would have gotten away with it, if it hadn't been for those meddling kids!"
🙂
hehehe
The students, of course, left in a large van with an odd dog and a lot of scooby snacks.
*pesky 😂
The resistor monster is a man in a mask!?!
I'm so tired of this same problem playing out over and over.
Thank you for the great coverage as always, Sabine.
I truly hope we get affordable and accessible room temperature superconductors someday.
Either that... or proof that they cannot exist
@@rodschmidt8952 How would such a proof look like?
That's why I wait 5 years before buying into any revolution in science or engineering.. And almost always they turn out to be quack.
maybe fewer people should work writing papers using tax money , and switch to producing cheap goods that can be sold.
That usually happens long after such info has established itself into inarguable global dogma, sadly.
Nothing is real until it has a commercial application. Everything prior to that is theory with varying stages of props.
@@p0t4toePotato With that approach, we wouldn't have a great many of the actual breakthroughs that we have had. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
@@TheChurlishBoor Proclaiming it the norm is a strong assertion. Do you have anything in particular in mind or are you circumlocuting for....reasons?
Self deception is the sad part of it. It is like when you're conviced in a debate that your position is right so you allow yourself to use an argument that you know is slightly fallacious or manipulative because at the end, you're right so what matters is making others side with your opinion. You use a stunning metaphor that you are aware it adds nothing to the strength of your stance but it seems to shut down and confuse the opponent. You care about the small short term win untill you have time to formulate your surely strong arguments. Because you can't allow failure at that time, you become short sighted.
After Skool did a video about this. It was more politics oriented, but the same premise. Intelligent people can do mental gymnastics to justify their toxic behavior.
@@chazbertino6102 Thanks for the reply. Indeed it's a trap a lot of people fall for. Btw what's the title of the after skoll video, I am curious to see it and thanks
@@ahmedtoufahi5198 "Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things"
ua-cam.com/video/5Peima-Uw7w/v-deo.html
I read an article for the CFA exam back in the 90’s called “Managing Ethics from the Top Down” by business professor, Saul Gellerman. I haven’t read it in years, but it’s central premise always stuck with me. If you give unusually high rewards or unusually severe punishments, people will act in ways they ordinarily would never do. If you do both, you end up with the Wells Fargo cross-selling scandal where 5,000 employees signed up customers for services they didn’t request. Of course, the bosses got the big rewards, the rank-and-file got the punishments. A perfect storm and an avoidable tragedy.
And those perfect storms of capitalist incentives and circular self-congratulations (JO circles) could lead to the collapse of human civilization under the right curcumstances. Like that movie "Don't Look Up".
One thing I've always believed is that consequences should be higher at the top than at the bottom...because when the opposite is true, those at the top feel free to break rules - and the law - with impunity, leaving those at the bottom the choice of risking livelihood or playing along. Witness the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq...the ultimate cause of the problems came from higher up, but the consequences fell on the lower enlisted alone. That is awful for morale as well as good order and discipline.
In the corporate world we see this all the time. When the corporation does well, the rewards flow directly to the top...the workers have to fight tooth and nail to get even a small share. When the corporation does poorly, those at the top lay off those at the bottom, and get rewarded by the shareholders for their "bold restructuring." And if the CEOs ever do get fired, they get a golden parachute package that makes them set for life...while those lower down are still getting laid off.
Sorry for the rant, but this kind of thing really strikes a cord.
@@njhoepner indeed
The sad part is that an accurate paper on why the hypothesis failed to produce superconductors would have had scientific value.
But journals only publish "breakthrough research" so disproving a valid hypothesis and what you learned/confirmed from it isn't publishable even though that is the basis of the scientific process.
This makes journals sound like the Weekly Midnight Star
@@rodschmidt8952 Not the National Enquirer anyway, those guys have fact checkers.
Whatever happens, it's going in Plos One.
Extensive experiments with room temperature superconductors have lead to resistance among members of the Berliner Philharmoniker.
Genius! 😂
strongest physics x music oneliner I've ever seen
Karajan was the hottest superconductor to be discovered in the 20th century, but his lack of resistance against the Nazis later drew criticism of misconduct.
Yes Schöns case imediately came to mind when i read about the scandal.
Pons & Fleishman, for me
@@rodschmidt8952 So you're not powering your home with a glass of cold water? 😁
Your videos are great. No unnecessary preamble or introduction, since the thumb nail tells us who you are. Also, no damn music. That by itself is fantastic. Your content is always timely and very well delivered. Your content is also personal to you when the occasion calls for it.
Keep doing what you’re doing the way you’re doing it.
A bit of logic here, Me likes it. Most UA-camrs use two minutes of filler to get more money for that over 15 minutes UA-cam video. This is wasting my time. Every video created gets the automagical two-minute filler, no creative content.
Sigh. Your recent video on "You failed" in physics (really?!) and some by A. Collier's channel on similar things has helped sooth my ego that I bailed out of my grad work with a masters. This is another datum making me feel better to just hobby study it now in my 50s. Worse, I LIVE in Rochester, NY. We consider the UofR a world class university. What is going on in science these days troubles me deeply. (Not to mention broader problems in academia as a whole). Please keep up the good work Sabine!
Never would have heard this if it weren't for channels such as yours, pat yourselves on the back team, thank you!
Fascinating story for "the quality review" at Narure and sick research system in general.
Feynman warned about seeing what you want to see in experiments. Why he liked theory instead.
check out the history of 'N-rays'
Indeed. Feynman (and Schwinger) needed Dyson to sort through the mathematics which means (to me) even a good theoretician can use a little help with mathematics. That was certainly true for Einstein.
Science is an experimental discipline first and foremost. The theorists gave us String theory, which absorbed an entire generation of physicists. But what has String theory produced? The scientist must continuously refer back to reality through experimentation. Otherwise you're trying to compute the universe from your armchair.
@@MyMy-tv7fd Another invention from Africa stolen by the White man
And then comes String theory.
love the freddie cameos 😂
His band buddy seemed to know a thing or two about physics too.
@@wellesmorgado4797 out of curiosity, would that be Brain May? he literally had Isaac Newtons haircut 😂
Haircuts seem to be directly correlated with physics ability.
@@MOSMASTERING yeah, Einstein's hair was like that because there was a lightning storm in his head!
@@EnmerkarUnugKi 😂😂 yup!
I wish there was more publishing stating, "We went down this rabbit hole and it failed." Even failure is progress in science.
Thank you, Sabine, and your team. You've saved me a lot of time. Not solely by this video , but overall :)
It takes you that long to read?
@@ScandalUK tri troll trulllala🎶
@@Thomas-gk42 yeah maybe I’ve been playing too much monkey island this afternoon
I can identify with the students of Ranga Dias. It's like reporting a Counter Strike teammate for cheating.
The way you interpret the info is amazing !
yes, she´s a gem.
Watch a "Horizon BBC" programme about Superconductivity back in the 1970s. The Royal Navy, still a major player then, were working on it for Submarines. It looked like we were only afew years away from a wonderful world of cheap energy with Generators and Machines using Superconducting components.
However .. like they promised me, a young boy of 5 years old, a flying car in 20 years. It was just another of life's disappointments 😢.
I was promised flying cars every decade since the 1950s. Where is my car?
I was also promised self-driving cars every year for the last 15 years. Where is my car?
We have flying cars, just not the ones imagined. They are some combination of impractical, commercially unviable, terrible, unsafe or is subset of something else like a helicopter. Imagine sticking wheels on a helicopter, you got a 'flying car'. No one actually wants that though.
@@oohhboy-funhouse I was not litteral, just sarcastic, since we have neither vehicle and being sold a bag a nothing by this con man.
A good friend who recently died used to work with liquid helium to cool the receiver in 100-foot parabolic dishes which used Pulsars or neutron stars wher used to set the dish as they're are a reliable measurement to set a values, Super cooling was also used in the first hydrogen bomb using liquid hydrogen, The fusion reactor being built in France uses super cooling systems for fusion, removing the energy from liquids causes cooling as in refrigeration Albert Einstein and a associate invented the refrigerator, If there is a way to go below absolute zero new natural phenomenon maybe seen.
@@robhavock9434 nikola tesla said the study of the ultra cold would reveal the nature and physics of the fabric or medium of reality....
funny how the quantum priests do everything they can but admit this universal geometric medium MUST, i repeat MUST exist.
What a rocking video, fits with all the other reports in Sabines videos and her book "Lost in Math ".
Is she still paid by big polluting companies or did that stop?
@@ScandalUK What companies did pay her and how do you know?
@@ScandalUK The crazy rabbit -- and a new troll was born...
@@ScandalUK it stopped.
Decades ago, as kid, I used to play a lot with magnets. Sometimes they accidentally cracked. What's shown on video is behavior of cracked magnet in magnetic field.
Scammers exist in every human endeavor......... welcome to humanity 😔
Next thing you know, they’ll tell you they’re not destroying the planet for a quick buck lol
So science research is like selling used cars?
But scammers are usually attracted to environments where the rewards are high, there is little oversight and/or you largely have to be trusted based on your word. If you combine that with an environment where the consequences for lack of results are severe and reaching results are also hard, then anyone NOT willing to falsify shit quickly leaves for other endeavours.
glad i wasn't the only one reminded of jan hendrik schon by this story, i just rewatched the bobbybroccoli documentary about it recently and it felt eerily similar
Mr schön, ahhh thats a good doco tbf
Great series.
Sabine - I smile thru your pain. I am a retired engineer. Much of my career I worked for a university lab that did consulting for the physics dept. I enjoyed it. I made more money than many of the Phd(s). Always thought that was strange.
Just know that there is a distribution in academia, but what you describe is consistent with what I have seen.
Also note that I am happy you are with us, you do a great job introducing many topics which I find compelling.
The academic community looses and we WIN! thanks for being you.
Another excellent video, Sabine. Well done.
I saw things analogous to this happening in the field of Archaeology 50 years ago.
They would have been better off staying ohm.
This seems like a systemic pressure to me, that not everyone succumbs to. Your "Fear of Failure' point is very noteworthy; grant writing competition is highly counterproductive. Experimental "Failure" is just as important to the progress of science as success is, and I think if Schön could have continued his experiments with no negative repercussions for a negative result, he wouldn't have tweaked the data at all.
Authority is *always* problematic at its core and checks and balances might work for a while, but will come up short. Students needing the good opinion of their Professors has nothing to do with how good of a scientist they'll be, and scientists having to appeal to someone else who doesn't know enough to make the decision, but has control of the money, is a serious impediment to the progress of science.
Problem #1: negative results are not publishable.
Problem #2: students need a lot of papers to have a chance to survive in academia.
The incentives stream is already all set...
@@wellesmorgado4797 I agree, those are both fundamental problems. Negative results are incredibly important, and volume of papers has a negative correlation with importance of discoveries. One "important paper" is worth a lot of "unimportant papers," but those unimportant papers are very necessary too. The two pressures you mentioned in combination are very bad for science.
Even without systemic pressure, there would be fraudsters.
@@sergiojuanmembiela6223 True, but if the systemic pressures encourage it, that's bad.
Thank you for this reporting from the student perspective, Sabina. The school shut our lab down and put our entire program remote online when I was in class a number of years ago. Most of the work could be done online but some not at all. We went to the dean and the Dean pretty much laughed us off. So thank you for giving the students perspective.
Fifty years ago at U of Rochester, Ron Parks led one of the greatest university groups in solid state physics research including superconductors.
Now we have this creep.
Omg. The poor students, what a situation to find yourself in.😱
Yep, students are in bad position, but it is recoverable
Oversight seems like a very inefficient general solution to an occasional minor problem. So I wouldn't criticize "lack of oversight." The lack of a way for students to blow the whistle when they suspect a problem looks like the big issue here, and it ought to be easy to solve. A reward for blowing the whistle could also be created.
This isn't a minor problem. We took a cultural turn towards "say and do whatever it takes, to get what you want". And it's not just dumb people or bad guys. That attitude has made it to scientific publishing already.
>GizzyDillespee : It's minor, because unreproducible claims eventually get exposed and retracted. For most scientific researchers, that creates a strong disincentive against intentional fabrication... they don't want their reputations destroyed and their careers lost.
@@brothermine2292It's a majority of papers. Some say 90%. ua-cam.com/video/42QuXLucH3Q/v-deo.html publish or perish
Honestly, graduate students at early stages of their studies can rarely judge whether there is a problem or not (unless it is something explict). They rely on judgement calls of their supervisor, and for good reason. It is looking back after gaining some experience, that you can see what could have cause the concern
>dmitripogosian5084 : Students aren't the only defense. The scientific community eventually weeds out results that can't be reproduced. My comment mentioned students only because Sabine's video did... she mentioned the risk & lack of opportunity for students to sound the alert when they perceive problems.
The music inserts are hilarious. Kept it up Sabine!
Thank you for the video.
I like the way you pronounce "plagiarize" with a hard 'g', makes it sound like "plague", which that stuff IS a plague :D
Sometimes I'd like to know the thought process behind faking research. Like how can they not know they'll get caught and that'll pretty much be the end of anyone taking them seriously.
Many scientific publications are faulty nowadays and more often than not there is none to call them out. People would be shocked if they new how broken academia is
You look at much financial fraud it is usually going to be found out in the end. I have investigated such things at work where people take actions and raid the petty cash purely for a small gain today. They just do not possess the imagination to grasp the inevitable future dire repercussions out of proportion to any gain.
Wow!! Thank you so much for your tremendous forthrightness in sharing your experience of a scientific career in modern academia. One gathers, if one is attentive, that the situation is generally as you describe, and increasingly so as specialization and monetization of science advances, but hearing a personal experience of it from a reliable, clear-eyed, honest source is really helpful.
A friend was PhD student in Henrik Schön‘s lab back in the days at Bell lab. She couldn’t reproduce his results and got stuck because of that for a long time although Schön tried to „help“ her in the experiments - until it turned out it was all a big fat lie. Fortunately, she still managed to save her career, but it was definitely a hard hit!
Looking forward to the Cold Fusion paper by Ranga Dias soon then.
Go retro: Re-read the Fleischmann and Pons paper from the late 80’s.
I was working at LBL then and the moment I saw that paper, i knew i had to have it as a piece of science-gone-bad history. I hate it when i’m right.
@@baomao7243 Interesting, I'll take a look.
Just here to support. Keep doing what you're doing. 👌
I loved the musical bits on this video
It's not your usual style, but I like it
What happened to peer review before publishing?
Hmm, unfortunately your peers have to trust you aren’t just giving them fake data, which this guy did.
but still, after the first paper was redacted, Nature went ahead and accepted the second paper. and it went all the way to being published!!!
@@shreyadas5065 part of the problem is you have to pay to be published in most journals, don’t know about Nature specifically. So there is a financial incentive to publish garbage.
Instead of having a random material that shows superconductivity under very high pressure it would be much more practical to have a more complete theory about superconductivity, so it would be much easier to search for the right materials.
I don't think we will ever have materials that show superconductivity at room temperature at manageable pressure. But if we could find a material that has superconductivity around the triple point of CO2 (-56,6°C/5,19 bar) it wouldn't be to difficult to create power lines - and we would have a perfect use for excess CO2. 🙂
Never say never.. there may well be a complex material that exhibits superconductive properties at room temperature and pressure.. maybe AI can search through potential materials given enough data about what creates superconductive propertirs in the first place.
@@MOSMASTERING Using AI for searching for the right material would be a kind of a self-reference process, as we really don't know how superconducting at high temperatures work. We understand superconducting in metals, but we already have tested them all.
I wondered why I hadn’t heard more about this because it was pretty amazing
thanks for the lessons.
Thanks, Sabine. Business as usual in modern science.
Not it's not...
Business as usual is that people like this getting caught... because "Science" and stuff...
Modern academia is completely broken. How do we fix it?
It is broken for decades now. Publish papers to be the first and to earn money. We students were already surprised about such bs papers in the 80s.
In principle, it would be relatively easy to fix, although no one will do it for ideological reasons and because of money. The main problem is that there is simply way too many people going to graduate school and aiming for an academic career. About 90% simply don't have the chops to be good researchers. What this means is that there is a desperation to get some sort of position. You spend 10 or more years of your work life aiming for one goal and after that ten years you are literally living below the poverty line. Imagine reaching the point, and most do, of throwing all that away and finally getting into the real workforce at the bottom floor or fiddle just a bit to capture the brass ring.
If we produce fewer candidates then there would less pressure to fudge towards success, a research position would be there either in Academy or some government department. Problem is that now, grad students are slave labour for their supervisors and University departments get funding depending on number of graduate students.
It's just a symptom of the metacrisis/coordination failure /moloch . That's the thing we need to work on
No, not completely broken. It still corrects itself pretty well, at least in the sciences.
Such a breath of fresh air Sabina
Around the same time as the guy at Bell Labs had his "breakthrough" I was still working there and a friend of mine got to go see a demonstration of the "relatively" high temperature Yttrium superconductor they were developing. He said there was an eerie aura around the devise. Ten years later I was working as a Power Systems Operator in New Mexico and a company tried to get investors to build a superconductor transmission line. They had developed the real thing and their proposal was amazing. They were going to use a pressurize tube with liquid nitrogen and a Yttrium ceramic ribbon. People wouldn't invest in it. Instead they pore venture capital into pie in the sky "stuff" hoping for some miracle breakthrough. Real engineers don't get support either.
The worst part is a system that imposes fear of failure. That tends to eliminate the possibility of discovery.
Elon Musk is in many ways the north end of a southbound horse...but what he's been able to accomplish at SpaceEx is simply amazing. A big part of that success is his willingness to absorb the costs of repeated failure and keep striving. I respect that.
Immediately, two things jump to mind:
(1) the peer review process is clearly ineffective, and there are no alternatives or mitigating controls -- which amounts to negligence, given the amount of money and the array of education of young people that depend on this thin reed.
(2) there are usually perverse incentives at work, when an ugly mess is ignored in the face of ample evidence and a foul stench.
What can we do to break the legs of this Ponzi scheme? I usually start with, "where is the money coming from?" And I don't only mean the explosives industrialist who restored his legacy with a trivial gift of ...ill gotten gains!
P.S. does anybody else think it's odd that universities can be involved in patents and other forms of intangible property, and rent-seeking??? Surely no government grant money is involved in... wait! What???
I do very much appreciate the messenger, here. I want to be clear that complex stuff is often inherently messy. My point of view is that of a controller of public financial statements. We can do "truthiness" right, for a while, usually after we get burned bad enough. 😢
It would be hard for a reviewer to find fault if the data is manipulated, which was the case here. However they should have asked for Raw data I guess? Not a physicist so idk.
I looked more into the matter and now I agree that there is fault on reviewers too. Because they published this when there was much controversy in his previous work, which resulted in retraction of a previous superconductor paper. Other than that, within few weeks of publishing this paper, other scientists found that there were odd things in this paper, like the graph. That not being found by reviewers means that the review panel was not expert enough on the subject. I guess a significant ammount of blame should be there on the reviewers too.
Our first year physics practical had a whole chapter on data integrity and plagiarism and Sch\"on was heavily featured.
A significant part of this problem is the fact that this sort of behavior is strongly encouraged by the system of academic finance in which publishing "breaktrhough" results is equivalent to being able to pay rent next month.
A paper saying "We did this. It didn't work." is equally important as a part of the scientific process, but you're far more likely to have your employment terminated if you publish too many of those. Or if you take your time to verify results.
Aren't articles in Nature supposed to be peer reviewed? What are we paying for?
Marxist garbage
you’re not paying for it
@@agatenikaidou1126 where I live, universities and libraries are fully tax funded.
Unfortunately, any improvements to the electrical grid which might result from any break throughs in superconductivity thereby resulting in reduced transmission power losses, will quickly be squandered owing to increased consumption.
How are these bogus papers not getting picked up in peer review?! Isn’t that the whole point of those ridiculously expensive journal fees
I read that as Miss Superconductor and thought there was a beauty pageant😂😂
This sucks. We have perverse incentives in academia that select for people who only want the JOB, not the WORK.
Only the tip of the iceberg.
Absolutely correct. Not even counting the “Paper Mill” journal papers published from Egypt, Iran, India and Russia which are fabricated by AI, which is just crazy. Look at Wiley and their Egyptian subsidiary if you don’t believe me.
I love your podcast, Sabina…… You are a star in my book
This is such a great channel.
I hope you enjoyed your day out in the sun with the eclipse. Tell me you made proper use of the sunblock while you were out ;)
She put a little vid on twitter, she was at lake erie in during the eclipse. She highly deserves it.
@@Thomas-gk42 Kool. Sabine said she hadn't seen a total before, and definitely is deserving of some science play time considering the effort she puts in :)
An eclipse may sound a little insignificant and ordinary to some, but to others who have studied the heck out of it and never got to actually participate I can understand the inner excitement :)
>
At 58 I had a similar experience as the eclipse started. In AU that was about 3am AU EST, so watching the eclipse on a NASA live feed. I walked outside for a stretch and just as I looked east I watched a green meteor come in. Never seen a meteor like that before in my life and have spent many nights out in the desert just to watch the meteor showers. Usually all meteors I have ever seen are bright white with a slight colour haze to them like off white paper and predominately in orange shades. This one was solid green like that pretty green you see on boat and ship navigation lights.
It came in "fast" (about 2 secs). I am well aware of the physics of oxidizing certain metals over the heat of a Bunsen burner etc, but apparent you need a very high speed impact with the atmosphere to get the heat required for another stage of that reaction.
...
OK, excited over a meteor, but I can appreciate Sabine have an inner moment over an eclipse :)
It is the tip of an iceberg, without an iceberg !
Food for Shrinks !
I get you now! Sorry it took me so long. Love this channel!
Excellent video
This behaviour has parallels with that of big pharma who are actively influencing the democratic process.
Mom's spaghetti
A superconductor at room temperature is simply not possible, since the thermal kB·T-energy rips Cooper-pairs apart (see Ginzburg-Landau equation and Diagram). The one and only situation, where even bulk Cooper-pairs can exist at room-temperature is termed a configuration as topological insulator. E.g. nano-particles from Bi (bismuth) below about 9nm particle size have a transition temperature of +63.5°C, Below this temperature, the stuff is a perfect insulator with a quite large bandgap and a high relative dielectric constant. Above, it turns into a regular conductor. The «secret» lies in the geometrical arrangement.
I’ve met Dias and several of his then-Harvard coauthors when I was a PhD student. At the time, they seemed to work in a group where experimental work was mainly treated as something annoying chore you had to complete in order to confirm a foregone conclusion. This type of culture has an easy time taking hold at ‘elite’ institutions, where students/post docs are routinely told how great they are for just being there. My guess is that they did indeed drift too far out the path of “publish or perish” (because they started pretty far along a bad path) and didn’t have the fortitude to stick to the truth.
Papers get retracted when they’re reviewed.
That’s why review exists.
You’re watching a system work properly.
Most papers aren't considered at all. Especially if they're novel whatever that means.
Jan Henrik Schön actually passed the review system.
I don't agree. The problem should have been identified alreadyin the peer review. Since this is not always the case, one of the problems is the peer review process. Retraction only after publication is problematic, since the 2amazing" result probably got already alot of publicity.
They are supposed to be reviewed before publishing, not after
These older papers sailed through peer review. They only got caught because the author was becoming a kind of celebrity. How many papers are likewise fraudulent, but harmless because people are not really interested? I would love to know the % 's.
The thing is that as long as high temperature superconductivity is related to the kind of crystalline structure present in ceramics, room temperature superconductors will be useless. We don't need superconductive tiles or bars, we need superconductive wires. Not to mention that high temperature superconductivity can't move through gaps, which means that there is no way to join two lhigh temeprature superconductive pieces and make the union superconductive too... you can't just weld two crystals together.
Great video. On another topic, how was the eclipse?
How do people think they can get away with falsifying data on a subject as big as this, as if no one tries to replicate it?
I really cannot believe it took this long to even get him under investigation. He should obviously be fired, but for it to take this long when the signs were so clear... How could you also not be angry at the University of Rochester? Did they think that having a "star" researcher would net them more financial interest? Were they willing to overlook his misconduct for some short-term gain? Getting a paper retracted is a very serious offense, but no one thought it was that serious there? I think there's a lot more to unpack here.
Great Job..
I really enjoyed Bobby Broccoli's Broccumentary on Jan Hendrik Schön
A dog stuck in a toilet? This is the best channel on UA-cam!
I live near the University of Rochester. Whenever the news carries a story about an investigation they're conducting people don't wonder what they'll find, they wonder how much it's going to cost. U of R keeps a lot of lawyers in business.
That's because they're super conducting investigations.
Fantastic!!!
Of course, we won’t mention how university hiring practices have become insane, and qualifications now have little to do with whether an applicant for a professorship is hired.
What we can talk about is that associate/assistant professors are not being promoted to full professor. Instead, administrative positions and pay are bloating beyond reason. Some of these associate professor positions pay surprisingly little, and may not come with full benefits or tenure. Even worse are the growing number of “instructors” who are treated like interns, or dead-end postdocs. Creating more academic positions that provide teachers to students, and a decent living, and cutting the dead wood in administration might remove a bit of this pressure to take risks if there is a potential career path. Are these good people driven to desperate measures, or bad people allowed in the door?
Another issue is the unfortunate students caught up in this. On too many campuses in the US, in too many disciplines, grad students aren’t so much college students as they are disciples of the professor who takes them on as their advisor and mentor. You really apply to the professor, not the school. Your future is in their hands. Now that he’s gone, will other professors take on those students? Perhaps not, as they would have to pay their tuition and wages out of their lab funding, and labs are almost always short of grant money. And there’s the fact that the students’ reputations are definitely tarnished. Even if they are not at fault, and took steps to blow the whistle, they are tarred with guilt by association from a public scandal this big. They shouldn’t be, but I’ve heard about good people having their careers tanked over less. It’s an archaic system that should be brought out of Medieval times and modernized, and grad students, postdocs, and professors should be hired based on ability, merit, and integrity. These kids definitely showed integrity, even at possible great personal cost. I salute them.
Thanks!
Queen is awesome. Thanks Sabine!
I learn a lot of new things watching your videos
“But, maybe it’s normal in New York. What do I know.” 😂
Thank you
Do we know if room-temperature superconductors are possible?
Is there any way to know in theory before finding one?
Darn it
I was hyped up about these
Nice vid! Subscribed
What I don't understand is why success is only measured by who finds the next big superconductor. Doesn't research exist which goes the other way? Something like: "Yep, this doesn't superconduct, we've tested it like this and that in these and those conditions and this is our results / conclusion". With many such valid and real results the search pool for actual superconductors could be narrowed down instead of trying to find a needle in a huge haystack.
Unfortunately negative results (i.e. what did not work out) don't sell well, even in academia.
Edison would be proud
My Dream Died. I would have thought that just about any university in the world would have snapped you up. Amongst other things you are a truely gifted presented of complex material.