Seth's Blog

Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World by Eugenie Samuel Reich, a science writer, tells how a young physicist named Jan Hendrik Schoen, working at Bell Labs on making electronic devices from organic materials, managed to fool the physics community for several years, publishing many papers with made-up data in Science and Nature. This podcast summarizes the story, with the new detail that after his disgrace — even his Ph.D. was revoked — Schoen managed to get a job as an air-conditioning engineer in Germany.

I enjoyed the book, partly for the drama, partly for the physics, and partly for the light it sheds on the culture of physics and Bell Labs. When anyone says “science is self-correcting” I’m amused because, as the speaker must know, the amount of fraud that goes uncorrected is unknown. It may be far larger than the amount that is detected.

The author’s website.

When I was a grad student I was inspired to self-experiment by something I read about teaching math: The best way to learn is to do, said Paul Halmos, a math professor. A more recent version is fail early fail often fail cheap.

A maker of infomercials put it like this:

We were fortunate at American Telecast, in that most of our learning days were in our first 12 years, when we were in the 2-minute business. Learning was a lot cheaper. Failure was a lot cheaper than what failure is today in a 30-minute commercial. When you fail with a 30-minute commercial you can lose half a million or a million or a million and a half dollars. When we failed with a 2-minute commercial back then, we were failing with $15 or $20 thousand.

Self-experimentation made failure so cheap, so much cheaper than conventional research, that I was able to learn much more.

All this seems so obvious — yet self-experimentation by professional scientists is very rare. Psychology and nutrition professors, for example, could easily do self-experimentation, but don’t. And the infomercial maker describes himself as “fortunate” rather than as deliberately creating the situation.

Steven Knapp is president of George Washington University in Washington, D. C. It was inevitable he wouldn’t like a book attacking the current structure of higher education but it wasn’t inevitable that he would write this:

A similar point could be made about the educational value of working at the frontier of discovery in one of the research centers that Mr. Hacker and Ms. Dreifus [the book authors] decry. Have they spoken with undergraduates who have enjoyed the privilege of assisting a top investigator in an active, federally financed laboratory? In my own anecdotal experience, the best of those students, far from shutting themselves away in a narrow specialization, are very likely spending their time outside the lab in life-expanding service activities that, again, were quite beyond the ken of undergraduates in earlier generations.

At UC Berkeley, I spoke to many undergraduates like that. Most of them, perhaps 90%, were working in a lab because they thought it would help them get into medical school. Almost none were interested in a research career. All of them were being supervised by graduate students and had little or no contact with the “top investigator”.  Because of the mismatch between what working in the lab could teach (what research was actually like) and what the students wanted to do (which wasn’t research) the “educational value” was slight. Knapp fails to understand this basic point about education: It matters what the student wants. Almost none of them, even at UC Berkeley, want to be scientists.

Yes, outside the lab they did do “life-expanding service activities” — volunteer for the Red Cross, work on a suicide hotline, and so on. By making them take lots of classes in which they were assigned lots of homework, the university made such outside activities more difficult.

Before he became university president, Knapp was an English professor — where he no doubt claimed he taught his students how to think. His thinking, in this review, consists of banalities that don’t bear examination. At least this is merely an unwittingly revealing book review instead of an entire delusional book.

Waiting in line at Tokyo immigration control, I met a woman from North Carolina who’d come to Japan for an organized tour of Japanese baseball parks (17 of them). She learned about the tour from a friend. In America, she’s visited 117.

I told her I was a psychology professor and had a theory of evolution in which connoisseurship played a big role. She was a baseball-park connoisseur, I said.

The evolutionary role of connoisseurs and collectors was to provide demand for finely-made stuff — things made by state-of-their-art artisans. Connoisseurs and collectors would pay more for features that had no clear value otherwise. By trading for these things, the connoisseurs and collectors helped the artisans make a living and thereby push their technology further.