REVELATIONS IN SCIENCE: A Half Step Away from the Nobel Prize
Art design: huxley.media via Photoshop, inspired by René Magritte’s painting Portrait of Stephy Langui, 1961
How is science funded? It used to be simpler — it wasn’t. Ancient philosophers (with the possible exception of Diogenes) were wealthy slave owners who pursued science for their own pleasure. Yes, they charged fees to their students, but for teaching established truths, not for discovering new ones.
The same held true later: one worked for money, but made discoveries at one’s own expense. For the likes of Cavendish, a duke’s son, or Lavoisier, a chief tax collector — men who never had to count their coins — this was no problem. The rest stretched their legs only as far as their cloak allowed .
Major prizes for solving important scientific problems (a typical example being the aforementioned invention of the chronometer) and the establishment of academies — which, thanks to royal favor, could provide some financial support — brought about certain changes.
However, those days are gone. Today, the main source of funding for research is grants — special payments allocated for the development of promising scientific ideas. Yet a new problem has emerged: how to obtain a grant and attract the interest of grant providers.
German physicist Jan Hendrik Schön (born in 1970) solved this problem — so successfully, in fact, that the scientific world followed his publications with excitement and envy, with many predicting a Nobel Prize in the very near future. Unfortunately, there was one small flaw in his sensational system…
A SUCCESSFUL START
H
is career began both impressively and extremely efficiently. At the age of 27, he had already earned a PhD from the University of Konstanz in Germany, and in the same year, he was hired by Bell Labs — an institution with a legendary reputation. Its staff had received ten Nobel Prizes and had pioneered such groundbreaking innovations as the transistor, laser, radio astronomy, solar cells, the Unix operating system, the programming languages C, C++, and AMPL… and so on, and so on.
Naturally, an organization with such a list of achievements could afford to be very selective in hiring. And yet Schön was brought on — clearly, the leadership at Bell Labs saw in him someone capable of bringing even more renown and prestige to their institution. A mathematician might say they were not mistaken — Schön’s work made headlines around the world. The only problem was the sign of that fame: it turned out to be negative instead of positive…
A young researcher accepted into such a distinguished team inevitably feels a certain pressure — results are expected of them that match the status of the institution, if only so no one questions the decision to hire them. And for about five years, Schön exceeded those expectations.
Already in 1999, he announced that he had observed the quantum Hall effect in crystals of the aromatic hydrocarbon pentacene — an organic compound. This demonstrated extraordinary experimental skill, as the quantum Hall effect can be observed only at extremely low temperatures, near absolute zero, and its detection requires the utmost precision and care. After the publication of this work, Nobel laureate Horst Störmer, who also worked at Bell Labs, called his young colleague a magician.
REAL MIRACLES
Already in the following year, 2000, Schön reported that he had built a laser based on his setup using organic crystals. Moreover, according to him, this was a remarkable laser unlike any other. A typical laser requires an initial light impulse, which is then sharply amplified through stimulated emission of light at the same wavelength. But Schön’s laser, he claimed, produced effects characteristic of conventional lasers — without any initial light source at all! At least, that’s what he asserted, publishing papers that included specific figures to demonstrate the significance of the observed effect. Pure magic!
And then, in 2001, Schön announced that he had succeeded in creating a transistor from organic materials — at the molecular level, no less. He claimed that molecules of certain organic compounds would self-assemble into a transistor under the influence of an electric field. He named the phenomenon SAMFET, or «self-assembled monolayer field-effect transistor», and later renamed the fruit of his labor the «single-molecule organic transistor».
This promised incredible opportunities for creating integrated circuits that were far more powerful and cheaper than traditional models. It seemed that a revolution in microelectronics was on the verge of erupting, and the world would soon be flooded with astonishingly cheap, powerful, and miniature computers.
And just for good measure, let’s mention his announcement of the discovery of a superconductor in which electrical resistance vanished at –156 degrees Celsius — far above the liquefaction point of most common gases. Imagine this: drop a conductor into liquid air and transmit electricity across thousands of kilometers with virtually no loss. Just think about that!
IF THIS ISN’T TRIUMPH, THEN WHAT IS?
It’s no surprise that Schön’s publication count in scientific journals was absolutely astounding — in 2001 alone, he authored or co-authored a scientific paper every 8 days. Some of these articles appeared in Nature, a journal with an extremely high reputation, known for its rigorous selection process.
Prestigious scientific awards rained down on Schön like gold. That same year, 2001, he received the Otto-Klung-Weberbank Prize in Physics and the Braunschweig Prize. In 2002, he was awarded the equally coveted Outstanding Young Investigator Award by the Materials Research Society — how many people could boast of such achievements before turning 35? Discussions that Schön was the obvious candidate for the Nobel Prize in Physics became more and more frequent — and with good reason.
Schön’s successful scientific career also had administrative consequences. In 2002, he received a truly remarkable offer. The Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart — a highly respected research institution with a strong international reputation — invited Schön to return to Germany and take up the post of director. At his age!
This was not just a prestigious position or a great opportunity — it was global recognition! For many, such a position would have marked the pinnacle of a lifetime’s work. But for Schön, it seemed only the beginning of a brilliant career (a curious coincidence, since schön means «beautiful» in German!). And yet, this is where things began to get truly interesting…
THE EXTRAORDINARY, CLOSE AT HAND
Schön’s experiments were so significant and important that many scientists wanted to replicate and verify them — a standard procedure in science. However, their experimental skills seemed to fall short of Schön’s — nothing worked for them. For instance, the organic crystals Schön had described would, for some reason, shatter when cooled to 100 Kelvin in other labs, leaving nothing to freeze to near absolute zero — why? Was it sloppiness? If so, what kind exactly?
Far more serious was an observation made by Princeton physicist Lydia Sohn: two experiments conducted at entirely different temperatures showed exactly the same noise level — the random interference that, even in theory, cannot be identical. This simply doesn’t happen if you’re conducting actual experiments rather than writing down desired results by hand…
Schön defended himself as best he could — for instance, regarding his miraculous graphs, he claimed he had accidentally submitted the same graph twice — sorry, a mistake, will correct it… (but why then were they supposedly measured at different temperatures?). Bell Labs had to form a special investigative committee to look into this unpleasant situation, and the committee certainly heard a lot of «interesting» things from Schön. They requested his lab journals — he replied that he never kept any (which is a violation of scientific ethics in itself).
The committee asked for raw data files from the experiments — Schön claimed that his computer’s hard drive lacked space, so he had to delete them to clear memory (and apparently saving them to magnetic tape or a CD wasn’t an option?). The committee wanted to examine the experimental samples — he said they had all been damaged or discarded. In short, the essence of his responses boiled down to: it wasn’t me, and the horse isn’t mine.
AND THEN CAME THE CRASH
But such tricks don’t work at that level. On September 25, 2002, the committee published a report concluding that, of the 24 serious allegations of scientific misconduct brought against Schön, 16 were found to be completely valid (even one would have been enough to ruin his reputation!). It was proven that several of Schön’s reported results had simply been drawn using mathematical functions to support the conclusions he wanted in plain language — blatant and proven fabrication.
The scientific community was stunned. Falsification of data by researchers had occurred before, but mostly in biology and related fields, where things are not always clear-cut. Physics, by contrast, had long been considered immune to such deception — everything is checked and quickly exposed! As it turned out, not so quickly — for five years, Schön had published fraudulent data without a care in the world.
Punishing Schön proved difficult — the committee specifically noted in its conclusions that «there are no clear and generally accepted standards for the conduct of scientists», as this was a question the «scientific community had not yet thoroughly addressed». Clear deception, with the goal of material gain — and yet there were no grounds for prosecution. What if he had just been sincerely mistaken? He really wanted to see certain results, and accidentally only noticed those… That’s how things stood, for the time being.
Nevertheless, his alma mater, the University of Konstanz, eventually revoked his PhD in 2004 on the grounds of «dishonorable conduct». And what do you think? He appealed the decision! On October 28, the university upheld its ruling, so Schön sued them. On September 27, 2010, the court overturned the university’s decision!
Of course, the university appealed — and in September 2011, the court ruled that the university had acted correctly in stripping the wayward graduate of his doctorate. Even so, Schön continued dragging the case through the courts, and in July 2013, the Federal Administrative Court had to confirm the university’s decision. Schön took the matter all the way to the Federal Constitutional Court, which finally rejected his appeal in September 2014.
HOW IT ENDED
It seems Schön eventually calmed down and now works quietly as an engineer in his field, without any fear of further punishment for his fraud — after all, there’s no law against it! His articles were, of course, retracted — including by highly respected journals like Nature and Science.
In principle, Schön could take pride in what he achieved — he managed to pull off something that was considered virtually unthinkable. But I wouldn’t recommend it — his story is not likely to be forgotten anytime soon. As Wolfgang Dietrich, a representative of the Department of Physics, aptly put it, Schön’s case was «the most significant fraud in physics in the last 50 years,» and he added that it undermined public trust in science.
I tend to be more optimistic — after all, the traditional scientific mechanisms of result verification did work, and they dragged the fraudster out into the open. But I would certainly advocate for a bit more critical scrutiny when it comes to scientific «sensations» — they’ve become profitable, and those tempted to repeat Schön’s actions are bound to appear. It’s better to be prepared — it might come in handy…
And one more question: should this sort of thing not be punishable by law? If you know the answer, share it. How can we avoid punishing those who are honestly mistaken? There’s a real risk of overreach. So what should be done?
LITERATURE
-
Peter Kehlert. Fake: The Most Amusing Falsifications in Science, Art, and History. Moscow, Kuchkovo Pole, 2016, 207 pages.
-
Winning Streak Brought Awe, and Then Doubt
When copying materials, please place an active link to www.huxley.media
Select the text and press Ctrl + Enter
