Superconductivity scandal: the story of deception in a physics lab
nature.com
nature.com
Indeed it is scary, because as a student your PI can in fact ruin your life and ruin your career, without much recourse in most cases. This behind-the-scenes is a good insight into the bad incentives and lack of accountability for PIs in academic research. I suspect this kind of thing happens all the time in smaller fields, and never gets discovered because it's not a headline-grabbing topic like room-temp superconductivity.
I had a bioengineering PhD friend who said she spotted obviously fraudulent papers all the time in her field--publications claiming they grew such-and-such bacteria in so-and-so medium, when she knew damn well that said bacteria cannot grow in said medium.
The students here didn't really do anything wrong, but Dias used his position of authority to essentially blackmail the students into becoming complicit in fraud, and attempted to justify it essentially with an "everybody does it" excuse. Kudos to them for taking the initiative to retract their paper over the head of their PI! That takes a lot of courage, given the immense powers an advisor holds over their students.
Explain to me why Nature would publish a paper without having access to/requiring the data. Could it be Nature wanted to be the first to publish such a ground breaking discovery? Dishonest people are simply a fact of life. The entire point - supposedly - of peer review is to insure that scientist do not make unsubstantiated claims. Job well done Nature. Job well done.
Hence, it doesn't surprise me at all to see that he was the one to call out Dias. Some things never change!
BTW: I am not criticizing the actual reviewer of the paper. Data availability should be a policy of the journal and required for publication. How can you improve quality without access to the data? In this instance requiring data would have likely prevented the paper from even reaching peer review and wasting a busy individuals time.
I am not in the field, so I cannot comment on the specific relevance of the request, but in my area, there are absolutely some mandatory data inclusions which should block a paper from being published. Presumably this was not on that list.
Nature is a "premier journal" known for publishing cutting edge research. Any data - in this case a bunch of numbers - used to support the conclusion should be made available. I am sure there are disciplines where the evidence would be difficult to provide directly - fossils, physical items etc. Maybe this PI did the experiment himself - thought he won a Noble - only to find he could not in fact reproduce the results after publication - oops. IMO Nature did not do its job. Just pointing that out.
[1] https://plos.org/resource/how-to-store-and-manage-your-data/
Requiring (raw) data is relatively new, and is only in a few fields. For most of the history of peer review data was not required. In fact, none of the PIs I worked in during grad school would ever agree to releasing the raw data. I'm pretty sure they're still not in most of physics.
IMO, it's reasonable to require it, but understand that this is a relatively new requirement and not part of peer review culture.
That on its own is scandalous
I was reading of the "reproducibility crisis", in computing, in the nineties
Science still wants to be the warm friendly club, whilst playing competitively for high personal stakes.
Cannot be both. Fraud, deliberately cynical fraud and hopeful naive fraud, has been rampant for decades
The journals benefit directly and seem to be utterly complicit. The system is dreadfully broken
Nobody should wonder why people do not trust science
Science isn't a religion, nor is it a paper, thesis, or journal. It's a method for understanding the world around us through rigorous application of testing and retesting.
Science can be trusted. Measurements and the testing and retesting can be trusted. It's people that can't be trusted.
We call people in the field of Science, Scientists. Perhaps we should stop labeling fallible and untrustworthy humans as such. Science is trustworthy. Humans are not.
This is an important point and I think people should make it more often.
A human scientist who is committing fraud is misrepresenting facts about the world. And the way you would accurately describe those facts is with science. It's not that science is in the wrong here, it's that the human is lying about what the science says.
You want to be able to say "objectively, this guy lied about his research." But if you want to say that, then you need to be able to accurately describe both the world and the research so you can compute the diff between them. So if you throw out the science with the human scientist, then you've thrown out any objective means by which you were going to say the human scientist did anything wrong in the first place.
>Science can be trusted. Measurements and the testing and retesting can be trusted.
I still wouldn't go so far. Science doesn't provide a pure understanding of the world it produces at best a model based on observations and axioms. These both can be wrong without politics,money, or personal bias. Our senses are fallible and sometimes you measured the wrong thing with the wrong tool. You shouldn't trust science, you scrutinize it and use what you find works until it doesn't (and then publish that).
Taking an iterative approach where you make a prediction, test the prediction, and adjust course in response to the test (AKA science) is literally the only possible thing that can work to discover true things about the world. So if someone distrusts science they're basically giving up on a belief in objective reality.
But I agree it's not surprising that people don't trust science, any more than it's surprising that people believe in astrology, lizard people, or ESP. Human minds don't have a special science sensor that lights up when they read true things. It's pretty much garbage in garbage out.
Don't miss the story here, which is that the study failed to replicate and the fraud was detected. In many human endeavors there are frauds that have persisted for centuries.
> That on its own is scandalous
Yeah it is, I agree. Providing data should be mandatory to the reviewers. It should IMO also be provided publicly if feasible (at least upon request if it's financially burdensome to host) if the work is publicly funded.
Maybe it should be. "Peer reviewed" is taken as a sign of reliability in many contexts, including public policy. If it isn't actually such a sign, then either it needs to change so it is, or we need to stop taking it as a sign of something it isn't.
Even just reevaluating a submitted dataset is no guarantee. Someone committing an elaborate fraud could have faked the raw datasets as well.
What you're saying is, the first option I gave, to fix the peer review process so it is a good indicator of the reliability of research, is not feasible.
If that's the case, that just means we have to pick the second option: stop treating peer reviewed research as if it is reliable.
It's a system built upon honesty. A dishonest person is obviously going to take advantage of it. Really blatant things are caught in peer review, but sneaky fraud will definitely slip through.
Fraudulent research would obviously not be of the desired quality, wouldn't it?
> It's a system built upon honesty.
But if the purpose is to characterize the research in terms of quality, this can't be right. Since fraud is known to happen, and there are known to be incentives for fraud, any process that claims to judge the quality of research would have to have some way of checking for fraud.
Something can appear to be of very high quality and yet still be completely fraudulent. This occurs in countless fields; art, counterfeit money, deepfakes, etc.
Scientists are attempting to address fraudulent research in other ways, but peer review is not the best means for it and it should not be thought of in that way.
So in other words, peer review does not judge actual quality. It only judges apparent quality. Which is not what anyone actually wants to know.
It is the case, and that second option is exactly what we do. One article is nice, but replication is key before some new finding is accepted. That is exactly what happened with LK-99, for example, which is interesting because it was very public.
I don't think so. I see claims made all the time about science being "settled" purely on the basis of it being peer reviewed.
> replication is key before some new finding is accepted
If only that were true. In many cases it isn't.
We always joked that if you read it in Nature, it was certain to be wrong, but realistically, it meant that the topic was likely an important one with a small number of competitive groups who could all evaluate each other's papers and will loudly complain about every inconsistency or irreproducible detail.
My own research is creepy and I want to leave (except my professor will ruin me): https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/67897/i-dont-wa...
My professor is using us to rig the IEEE elections (except afraid of losing scholarship and grad courses): https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/69486/what-shou...
My professor is rigging nanotechnology data and plagiarizing (except I don't stand a chance against him): https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/31265/my-profes...
There are bad professors in academia just like there are bad bosses in industry.
Hopefully anyone with bad ones will find better ones.
Seniority, bonuses, equity vesting, resume damage
Relatively minor. Most senior people I know who leave with bad blood end up with equally senior roles, and often "fail upwards" to even more senior roles in another company.
Bonuses/Vesting: Very common to get good vesting at a new company to make up for what you're losing. Of the people I know who've moved, it's the exception that didn't get decent replacement for vesting.
Resume damage: What? Person spent 4 years at a company and left. What resume damage? Your experience still counts.
Contrast with a PhD who leaves in the middle of a program: The years he spent are 0. Generally, the experience/knowledge accumulated is not factored into it when he applies elsewhere for a PhD - unless he has some fantastic publication.
Still, this is the good outcome - I've often seen students leave an advisor or school and succeed elsewhere. The real danger is when you get your PhD and the advisor will not write letters of recommendation. Unless you've made some really special connections, it means your academic career is over. You won't get a post doc. You won't get an academic position. You won't get into a national lab. And depending on your field, you won't get a research position in industry either.
In the industry, no boss has that power.
When I relised this kind of power inbalance during my PhD resulting docile behaviour of my collegues and partly myself, I even did not even wanted to chage my supervisour nor make a protest as the power inbalances are normalized. This awareness made my PhD easier as I did not put false hopes and did not invest my leisure time into becoming more specialised or come up with my own ideas which could latter be turned down to not allign with funded project as my collegues did. I found the remedy in fight for a better tooling and investing my leisure time in completely different field in which papers were still not been written by robots.
Once you are in a PhD program you are locked in for 5+ years. It's almost as bad as the green card timeline.
In industry, competitive hiring and job-hopping are considered to be normal. Confidentiality is assumed, for the most part. There are some stock, face-saving reasons why you're leaving your previous job, that don't open cans of worms. There are lists of questions that you don't ask. And It's not weird if you're changing jobs after a couple of years. Your seniority and promotion clocks don't typically get reset to zero.
What a mess.
After the "metrics" revolution we started to measure and incentivise everything. It has not worked well for science.
That and reputations trees. The tree that spawned this rotten apple, root to roof, has spawned many more.
Sometimes, this power balance pushes people over the edge. There is a case of a PhD student who, after a struggle with his PI wanting him to publish fraudulent results, had a breakdown and took his own life. https://huixiangvoice.medium.com/the-hidden-story-behind-the...
To remain in the US on a student visa, you need to be "in status". The government has rules on what that is, and mostly it is that you continue to register for a full load. I do not think the government has specified additional requirements.
However, each university has an international programs office and they are required to specify for each international student whether the person is compliant with the university's guidelines. In your university's case, that office may have decided that "Hey, if you're a PhD student, you can't go too long without an advisor, because that would mean you're not making progress towards a PhD." I've seen them say similar things if it's taking too long to get a degree (e.g. over 6 years for undergrad or 8 years for PhD). Or if the GPA is too low and you're on probation
Typically, these rules apply to all students, and not just international ones. It's essentially the university saying "You're about to be kicked out/expelled, so we can't tell the immigration folks that you are progressing towards your degree"
Still, I really doubt your university has a rule specifying only 30-60 days to find a new PhD advisor. To give you an idea, in many sciences, it's common that you don't have a thesis advisor until after your first year (you focus in the first year on passing your qualifying exams, and only once you pass it are professors interested in taking you on).
If indeed your university is enforcing a 30-60 day rule, it's a really crappy university.
TLDR: The law doesn't require it, but each university has its own policies.
Yes, exactly that, it was something along the lines of "you are not sleeping with me, consequently you are not progressing to your degree".
I had figured the LK-99 team might actually have something interesting considering that they were promising a proper presentation of their work at the American Physical Society. I had heard it had been withdrawn and wrote it off as another case of academic fraud, but looking it up right now, apparently it's weirder than that.
Someone pretended to be the corresponding author and submitted a withdrawal, but this was fixed and the conference the presentation is at should be happening around these days.
And I don't mean what you probably infer from that. If you look into the way that hydrogen adsorbs into a platinum lattice, and how phonon resonance modes can induce tremendous crushing forces on anything between two platinum atoms, cold fusion actually looks quite plausible. It's not like perpetual motion--there's a clear possible mechanism for it which is surprisingly fully compatible with the laws of physics as we understand them. That said, Pons and Fleischmann rushed publication on shoddy data, making a mockery of themselves and causing cold fusion to become an untouchable subject no one would go near a generation later due to perceived guilt by association.
The theory behind LK-99 is pretty solid. The linear structure of these apatite compounds create chains of conductive electron bands that in theory might have sufficient band gaps to enable superconductivity. If you could get atomic precision in the copper/lead alternating pattern that creates those stresses. However I fear any research into room-temperature linear superconductors will now be as taboo as cold fusion.
Yes, they were shoddy
But no, the field was swamped within weeks with people trying to replicate it. It has lost its luster, and become a parody, but that is because it was wrong
It took a decade for the excitement to die down
LK-99, or at least the manufactured samples of it, is not a superconductor. But some other variation or different manufacturing technique might. Yet I predict no one is going to look very hard in the years to come.
No, it is not. These things are well understood. The behaviour of hydrogen in crystals is studied a lot. In metals because of issues with hydrogen embrittlement and fusion stuff, in some oxides for the storage of hydrogen for energy applications, and in material in general because proton irradiation is a common tool when studying them. All of this to say that this is not something that was never investigated.
> It's not like perpetual motion--there's a clear possible mechanism for it which is surprisingly fully compatible with the laws of physics as we understand them.
The orders of magnitude just do not match. The pressures involved is typically 1 GPa (usually less in metals, more in ceramics). That is far from enough to bring nuclei sufficiently close for fusion. There is a reason why nobody claims this, and it is not because we don’t look at the behaviour of hydrogen (or other light nuclei like deuterium, tritium, helium, or lithium for that matter).
> The theory behind LK-99 is pretty solid. The linear structure of these apatite compounds create chains of conductive electron bands that in theory might have sufficient band gaps to enable superconductivity.
Again, it is not. Some preliminary electronic structure calculations showed interesting features, but these features were no indication of superconducting behaviour, and indeed LK-99 is not a superconductor. There were plenty of people who tried to reproduce the results and it clearly showed that the initial paper was wrong.
> If you could get atomic precision in the copper/lead alternating pattern that creates those stresses.
Our understanding of what causes superconductivity and the creation of Cooper pairs is not complete. Otherwise, we’d design materials with the right properties from the beginning, rather than testing a lot of stuff just to see what works.
> However I fear any research into room-temperature linear superconductors will now be as taboo as cold fusion.
Contrary to cold fusion, superconduction is actually a thing. Current high-temperature superconductors work at the temperature of liquid nitrogen; finding one that works 100K higher is not that much of a stretch. The gap is not 6 orders of magnitude like with cold fusion.
In fact, there is quite a lot of funding for research on high-temperature superconductors even this year so your fear is not really well founded.
We're just starting to get a handle on the mathematics underlying this phenomenon, but it does exist. And the causes of the phenomenon transpose directly into crystal latices. So we absolutely should expect "rogue phonons" that have energies orders of magnitude above average phonon energy, enough to overcome Coulomb barriers and trigger D-D or D-T fusion reactions.
Of course thinking of using this to generate energy is something else entirely. It's a freak occurrence, and if there is a way of making it predictable or enhanced in some way, that solution is not obvious. But it should be detectable with very sensitive equipment, and would be a wonderful experimental physics result.
Not at that scale. 10m waves are common. 5 orders of magnitudes from this is not a rogue wave, it’s a wave that goes higher than the moon. I understand you are convinced you had a bright new idea, but if you want others to be convinced as well you need more solid arguments than “it could happen”.
Again, the kind of stresses at the atomic scale in materials are a few GPa. You need much more than that, on top of a few million kelvins to have deuterium fusion (hydrogen is even harder).
> So we absolutely should expect "rogue phonons" that have energies orders of magnitude above average phonon energy, enough to overcome Coulomb barriers and trigger D-D or D-T fusion reactions.
We really should not, after just basic napkin maths. The energy given by 1 GPa is around 0.001 eV. The energy barrier for a deuterium-tritium reaction is 0.1 MeV. The difference is not an order of magnitude or two; it’s 8. It is just not going to happen in anything that looks like a solid, which is exactly why we do it in confined plasmas.
But even if we take this for granted and think a bit about the consequences it gets even more absurd. The same deuterium-tritium fusion reaction releases 17 MeV. This is going to first, melt the crystal close to where the reaction is taking place; and the shred the structure of the material over centimetres.
> It's a freak occurrence, and if there is a way of making it predictable or enhanced in some way, that solution is not obvious.
Or rather, it would be a freak occurrence if it were happening. The likelihood of this being in the same realm as a wave putting some water on the surface of the moon.
> But it should be detectable with very sensitive equipment, and would be a wonderful experimental physics result.
You don’t need very sensitive equipment to see the damage caused by 17 MeV neutrons in a crystalline material. Fairly standard electron microscopes are enough.
https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-...
(Could skip to "Cornelis Drebbel".)
So the term was used more as a synonym for "continuously working", like a water wheel, without presuming any violation of the laws of thermodynamics that had yet to be invented :
https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-perpetual-...
(Today we would call that one "a resume-padding buzzword.)
I'd love to hear any other possible explanations for this behavior, because it seems to delusional to fabricate this and think you wouldn't get caught.
Sometimes that belief pays off spectacularly. Often it results in a junior researcher’s career going down the toilet because they or their supervisor backed the wrong horse and they ended up with nothing exciting to publish.
1. https://www.science.org/content/article/plagiarism-allegatio...
2. https://www.science.org/do/10.1126/science.adi2603/full/dias...
203 K is -70 °C, not +70 °C
Legend has it that the submissions tracking system consisted of a particularly wide windowsill, in which the submitted manuscripts were stacked up in piles for each month.
- Nature published a paper twice after the reviewers voted "no". Of course, it is not a voting process, the editor makes their decision. But evidently the editor didn't use the referee's input for that decision. That input, must I say, is free work that academics do for the journal. Click-baitiness simply weighted more to the editor and her supervisors. People should just stop paying attention to what Nature publishes.
- The students... I think this is the worst part of the story. Sometimes, students are on a student visa that depends on them holding for dear life to their university position. Been there, done that. I remember when I did my PhD: four to five international students--very well prepared I must say--to one from the host country. The ones from the host country were the ones with the best soft skills but they rarely put the long hours. I'll never forget that Iranian student who was a political refugee passing as a PhD student, because she couldn't bear the indignity of an asylum process. She couldn't return to her home country either.
- The replication...For the first retraction, I could find nowhere in the article that replication attempts were made. If those replication attempts were impossible to produce with the data published in the article itself, then its not a scientific paper, but a promotional brochure. In fact, some promotional materials are more extensive than Nature's articles; they really want to make the thing very short and academics are forced to jump through hoops to condense their publications, until they are practically impossible to understand, not to mention replicate. Again, the only solution to that problem is to ignore Nature.
The LK-99 paper, lots of attempts at replicating the results. Crazy quick. Like front-running the published results.
These results, like people never even had the thought to try, and it devolved into arguing sampling issues rather than just trying the material.
There is some certain sub-segment of humanity that often feels that way. Like 8B humans will all bend over backward to let them get away with almost anything. Totally abandon all normal procedures, safety checks, laws, replication, validation, ...
I appreciate that Nature's news team is willing to publish information about Nature's massively embarrassing failure to do their job reviewing the paper, and I hope they mean it when they say “We are looking at this case carefully to see what lessons can be learnt for the future.”
It's "loss" in the sense that our truth determining apparatus (e.g. peer review) appears to be highly unreliable, and a massive, unquantified amount of bullshit research has already passed it and is actively being used as a foundation for subsequent research.
Nature intentionally plays loose with potentially world-changing discoveries. It probably makes sense to have some journals that publish with fairly high rates of (post-hoc determined) false positives, simply to move the fields forward more quickly.
How else can it be interpreted?
Most fraud uncovered has been careless. So the fastidious fraudsters are flying high?
That would be the logical conclusion
Science needs to win its credibility back, not claim this is "...[a] win for science."
Science needs to be realistic about its decaying social license
That although scientists are people and so there will always be some who try to cheat and lie, those lies will eventually be found out and when that happens the record will be put right. It shows that science is not only non-dogmatic in the sense that new information which challenges or improves on our previous best understanding of a given topic will be used to update or replace the old, but that even when there is no new evidence, new research is still being openly challenged and tested by other scientists.
Scientific journals have their problems, but finding and correcting mistakes, and being transparent about the correction and about how those mistakes were made, are all indications of credibility. Even better, in this case, the alarms were sounded very very early and yeah Nature really fucked up by ignoring them for as long as they did, but there were people who cared about the truth who were persistent and in the end Nature did the right thing. That's says something really good about science.
The replication crisis is still a big problem. Lots of less dramatic results are probably false and will likely go unchallenged for a longer time, but that's just something we have to consider when deciding how confident we are in those results. Results which have been independently verified multiple times are those we can be more confident in, results which haven't been verified should be taken with a much larger grain of salt. It'd be silly to take examples like this as a sign that science as a whole shouldn't be trusted.
I hope science can one day overcome people like you and actually address the systemic issues it is facing. Denial that there is anything really wrong, that ultimately everything works fine so nothing has to fundamentally change, is exactly the problem that causes those systemic failures we are seeing in science and academia all the time.
This is exactly why Nature can write about their own failure, because there are no expectations beyond "hoping" and trusting they change. But of course nothing will ever actually change.
Here are my reasons why I think peer review will not reach a higher standard.
1) Peer review is hard work and probably tedious. In order to do a really good job, someone would have to spend tens or hundreds of hours reviewing a paper. The best reviewers would actually replicate the research. This probably will not happen often.
2) Peer review is not rewarded. No one is going to get tenure for being an excellent reviewer.
3) Good reviewers may even be punished. Unfortunately, many humans do not like critical feedback and hate having their work invalidated. Some of these people take revenge, and "shoot the messenger".
I think the solution is to stop thinking something is correct because it is published in a peer reviewed journal. Instead, people need to recognize that while the scientific process may eventually get the right result, it often makes mistakes, and is not perfect.
Of all the problems in science, this seems like one of the easier ones to fix.
I think the LK-99 thing made it pretty clear that it is pretty difficult to do, there are lots of variables and lots of things that need to be ruled out to prove that something is superconducting.
The way it works now is already reasonable, actually. One paper is not a proof of anything, it is a claim. A ground-breaking article starts a gold rush of people who want to be where the action is, which leads to a lot of follow-up or exploratory studies, which leads to independent verification and replication. At this point, the initial claim starts being accepted. For all the noise in mainstream media, something does not become the state of knowledge after a single article. This is actually quite robust because that system works even if individual articles are unreliable.
I agree publish or perish may not be the best system but we should not excuse people for being corrupt. People can and do chose to behave ethically. Those who don't should be punished.