Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World by Eugenie Samuel Reich, Palgrave Macmillan. Hardback ISBN 9780230224674, £15.99 ($26.95). Paperback ISBN 9780230623842, £12.99 ($17).
This book devotes 266 dense pages – 20 of them listing hundreds of notes – to a case of scientific misconduct staged at Bell Labs between 2000 and 2002, with Jan Hendrik Schön as the central figure. The plot follows the path leading up to the discovery that Schön’s breakthroughs on “molecular electronics" (which included lasers and superconductors made of organic plastics) were fraudulent.
Reich makes a good case in defending the argument that the economic situation at Bell Labs and the need to justify keeping a strong basic-research department in the company made the ground fertile for an ambitious young person to flourish and enchant (fool) the senior people. It is actually quite amazing to see that the co-authors of Schön’s papers knew so little about important points of the reported work, and that the fabrication of data was not uncovered earlier than it was, given the frequent questions being asked by many Bell people, including close collaborators, managers and other staff. It helped that many of his papers presented “measurements" that matched predictions. He seemed to write his papers backwards: first the conclusions, then the “data" that supported them, often generated from equations rather than from the apparatus.
In hindsight, it looks preposterous to think that Schön could possibly write more than 20 groundbreaking publications in such a short time period, including seven papers in a single month, November 2001. This, alone, should have alerted people to the possibility that the reported results may have been fabricated. The journals Nature and Science emerge from this book as not being very careful about reviewing the articles that they publish, placing the emphasis on selecting papers that will make the headlines (the “breakthrough of the year") rather than in ensuring that they provide enough technical details to allow for a good scrutiny of their plausibility and for an efficient verification by other labs. Many people wasted time and money trying to replicate the fabricated results. Schön’s publication “success" surely benefited from having signed the papers with a senior co-author, a well known expert who gave further credibility to the fraudulent results by giving a multitude of seminars on the subject, to the point of being awarded, and accepting, prizes for the “discoveries".
This is an interesting book and Reich clearly convinces the reader that, despite our natural tendency to think that scientists can be trusted (honest people, who might make mistakes), some of them deliberately fudge the measurements to fit with preconceived ideas, old or new. The scientific method needs to be learned, sometimes through years of careful training, modulated by sceptical professors (who can notice patterns that look “too good to be true"). However, I would gladly have exchanged many of the specific details about this single case for more information about other cases, together with a global discussion of the factors that lead to such frauds. Are they caused by young people with inadequate training and supervision? Or by ambitious senior people desperately looking for an important prize and pushing their young partners to search for anomalies and “new physics", neglecting the importance of time-consuming validation checks? Are there branches of science where they are more frequent?
Reich was very meticulous and gives all sorts of details that interrupt the fluidity of the reading. She could have redesigned the narrative, avoiding some repetition, placed the introductory text of chapter 9 (!) at the start of the book, and removed a few of the lines and paragraphs containing little information. Without an introductory chapter preceding the main plot and giving a broad overview of this field, most readers will lack the minimum background knowledge needed to appreciate the reported saga. As a side remark, it is curious to learn that Nobel laureate Bob Laughlin repeatedly claimed that Schön’s results had to be fraudulent but his opinion “didn’t count because he was known to be too sceptical".
Carlos Lourenço, CERN.
Perspectives on LHC Physics by G Kane and A Pierce (eds), World Scientific. Hardback ISBN 9789812779755, $99/£55. Paperback ISBN 9789812833891, $54/£30. E-book ISBN 9789812779762, $129.
This book could hardly seem more timely, with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) having started operations and new discoveries being eagerly awaited (but quite possibly a few years off yet). It consists of 17 chapters, each on a different topic, ranging from a description of the detectors to discussions of naturalness in quantum-field theories of particle physics.
The contributors are particle physicists, several of whom are prominent in the field. However, each chapter has different authors, so the result is inevitably a little patchy. The chapters differ widely in scope, in character and in the level of expertise assumed for the reader. For instance, the chapter on dark matter at the LHC is very basic and could be read by undergraduates, whereas the informative chapter on top physics is of a graduate level. There are also some much more general expansive essays, such as one that explores similarities between the BCS theory of superconductivity and particle physics, and the introductory chapter. The introduction assumes a fair amount of prior knowledge and is much too optimistic for my taste about the chance of discovering supersymmetry at the LHC. The author asserts that supersymmetry must be correct because of several pieces of circumstantial evidence, but I really think that other such a posteriori scraps could be used to prop up the evidence for competing theories.
There are a couple of obvious omissions, for example quark-gluon plasma physics and the ALICE detector. After all, the LHC will spend some of its time providing collisions between heavy ions, rather than protons, and ALICE will be trying to divine the properties of the resulting soup of quarks and gluons. The other missing topic is that of diffractive physics. It is likely that both the ATLAS and CMS experiments will eventually have forward detectors to measure protons that have just grazed another one in a collision. Under certain theoretical circumstances, it is even possible to produce Higgs bosons in the central detector during these collisions. Such rare events could provide useful experimental constraints on the properties of Higgs bosons. The chapter about the ATLAS and CMS detectors is welcome, but it could benefit from some basics about how particles interact as they travel through matter. This important link in the logical chain is missing from the discussion.
Perspectives on LHC Physics is a timely, heterogeneous offering, with some interesting gems and informative parts, as well as some fairly off-the-wall speculation. I think that there should be sections of it to interest most readers in the physical sciences, but that they may well wish to choose particular chapters to read. Luckily, the format of the book makes this easy to achieve.
Ben Allanach, DAMTP, University of Cambridge.