Report: Superconductivity researcher found to have committed misconduct

Details of what the University of Rochester investigation found are not available.

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[charles5619]

Some researchers under extreme pressure also behave differently?

They turn pink, of course.

 

[charles5619]

IDK, as much as I hate lieing cheats it still seems wrong that his career is ruined without the details of the misdeeds being revealed.

There's the possibility of even more shenanigans than the pink stuff. The university where he got his PhD is also investigating his actual thesis ... IIRC, somebody found copy-pasted text in his thesis from previous work, and other discrepancies.

For an academic researcher, falsifying research is a cardinal sin. Research communication is the currency of the profession, and he made counterfeit currency. It's nearly the same context as a banker embezzling. Scientists have a hard enough job without falsified research. He'll never be trusted again to gain grant money, and no grad student will touch him with a 10-foot pole. Even private money will consider him a huge risk.

He might find a job as an adjunct teaching professor, or maybe an industrial lab as a junior lab-rat... maybe... but every bit of data he collects would be scrutinized for years.

 

[charles5619]

i always wonder what the endgame for people like this is.

like a) if you're promising an earth shattering, commercializable breakthrough, it will be scrutinized. do you honestly think that your forged data will withstand scrutiny and recreation attempts? if you don't think your forgery will stay up, what on earth is your exit strategy? and b) lordy the grad student co-authors of your paper know that you bought the material, and they know what the data actually is. what on earth did you think was going to happen when you lie so blatantly??

I was at APS when he did his talk. 10,000 condensed-matter physicists, many of whom have decades of experience in synthesis and superconductivity. Within days, groups all over the world had done DFT computation on the stuff (said "there might actually be something going on"), synthesized it, tested it, and posted to arXiv.

But when you think about it, LuH wasn't commercializable. It was at 1 GPa (10,000 atm) that he claimed it would superconduct near 300K. Nobel Prize worthy, yes, but not really deployable. It would have been enough to snag some good VC to develop further, which then would have probably gone nowhere.

LK-99 would have been a commercial, and that looked like a Pons-and-Fleischmann sort of thing - two groups scared of getting scooped by the other, so they rushed to publish.