Details of what the University of Rochester investigation found are not available.
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Report: Superconductivity researcher found to have committed misconduct
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I'm not sure that many people here are old enough to give first-hand accounts of a time before publish or perish became the norm.
I doubt that those early references reflected quite the situation that we see today, but there was already significant pressure to publish the better part of a century ago.
I would bet that there were supply/demand issues with academic talent during periods like WWII and Viet Nam that lowered expectations, though. My dissertation advisor was one such example. He had an offer for a tenure-track position when he completed his PhD, but before doing any post-doctoral research. He said that so many people were drafted for Viet Nam at the ages when they would otherwise be entering undergrad or grad programs that there was a real lack of PhD-level academic talent at that time.
The economic crash of the early 1990s introduced a glut of said talent, though. Jobs were few and far between, so many people chose to ride out those tough economic times by pursuing advanced degrees while supporting themselves with stipends and student loans. Having a PhD makes you even more marketable in whatever your chosen profession is, right? Unfortunately the surplus of PhDs meant that very few were able to find positions in academia, and that academic institutions could raise their expectations -- more publications of more significance and evermore post-doc positions on your CV became the norm. Some applicants even began to leave their PhDs off their resumes/CVs for non-academic positions because, while a bachelor's or master's holder could be happy with a job in biotech or other private industry, there was a suspicion that PhDs were always just looking for any opportunity to get back into academia and were therefore unreliable as long-term hires.
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I hope that this is not career ending for them as a result though. I’ve read that many people who’ve spoken up about unethical behavior of professors end up unable to find work. Even when their concerns were born out by official investigations.
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Seems to have been a number of stories of late of journals having less than ideal publishing standards. Also, what was Dias' end game? Make a billion dollars on an IPO? Then what? For someone supposedly intelligent did he really think he wouldn't eventually be found out? He should pen pal with Elizabeth Holmes.
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Cold fusion isn't impossible, or even implausible. It has been achieved in the lab, way back in the 1950s at the dawn of the nuclear age. What's extremely implausible is Pons/Fleischmann style static mechanical catalysis of fusion.
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I mean, most studies in the field of psychology fail the reproducibility test, and people still take that pseudoscience bullshit seriously.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health...nces-many-studies-fail-the-reproducibility-te
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"The outcome is likely to mean the end of Dias' career, as well as the company he founded to commercialize the supposed breakthroughs."
The fact that Dias had already formed a startup to sell his "breakthroughs" suggests to me that he might have been intending to try and win his own little game of "Theranos: Materials Science Edition". But he failed to realise that Holmes only got as far as she did in the biomed-tech-startup space due to her family's/associate's connections and influence at the big end of town.
The fact that Dias had already formed a startup to sell his "breakthroughs" suggests to me that he might have been intending to try and win his own little game of "Theranos: Materials Science Edition". But he failed to realise that Holmes only got as far as she did in the biomed-tech-startup space due to her family's/associate's connections and influence at the big end of town.
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Periodically there’s a story about a rich person shoplifting a trivial item. They often do it repeatedly, seemingly testing how long it will take for them to be caught. I think the overall psychology is vaguely the same. This seems like the same sort of knowing they will be caught and testing how long they can pull it off. The second attempt to publish almost seems to reflect a disappointment that he didn’t get his desired outcome the first time.
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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.
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My $0.02: in my field, Science is a lot better than Nature in terms of both reliability of results and completeness of presentation. This hasn't been true over all time -- Nature in the 1960s was incredible -- but nowadays I really do take most Nature papers with an unpleasant heaping of salt, while I generally accept something that appears in Science at face value. I'd also say my field prizes Nature most, so oh well.
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Expect Dias to be offered the position of OSTP Director in another Trump White House.
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A Rush to judgement? Perhaps. We will have to watch his every move. Hopefully not a misogynist, though.
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Not that different from a certain ex-President. Why does society think this kind of behavior is ok?
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I’ve peer reviewed hundreds of papers in my career. When you are reviewing a paper you only see what they present. If the authors fabricate the data, you have no way of knowing unless they do something that shows up in the presented data. some journals are now requiring the raw data for certain assays to work against that issue. In the end though, others will try to duplicate the work, especially if it is something extraordinary. The truth will come out eventually. What the students did in this case doesn’t surprise me at all. No graduate student will want to be associated with work that they think is not honest. It’s hard enough to succeed in academia as it is. If you are associated with fraud, you are irretrievably fucked.
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If this means his career is over, then
edited for clarity.
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Rindan said "the lack of a full reveal," not the investigation itself. A full reveal would not stop this from ending his current career. It simply allows him to benefit from the ambiguity over whether his misconduct represents lack of competence in his field or straight-up dishonesty, which would make him less employable in other fields as well. If he thinks the investigation's findings (which would certainly have been communicated to him) show less severe forms of misconduct than what other people might speculate, he is free to release those findings himself.
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I dunno about putting it on the same level with cold fusion, to be honest.
We already have ambient pressure superconductivity at almost half "room temperature".
With fusion on the other hand, this is about doing fusion at many many times lower temperature. And even then there is muon catalyzed 'cold' fusion, although it can't make net energy.
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No, I think at this moment lots of rules for vocalizing about it and having staging spots at the job he'd researched himself to so far are active. Also a crazy hot $20MM series A he was in didn't keep its life, so there's his hypetrain gatcha track filling with trash instead of calls to collaborate in new work, not that I'd much hate to see researchers list near campus dining instead of the university sometimes.
When Rochester U. issue a statement, what will it possibly be like; an infosec warning against prepping diamonds with many nitrogen vacancies installed from previous experiments but then trusting spectroscopy and stuff you knocked error out of 9 ways but sideband attack? X is how to not play yourself with a Markov chain of 6 postgrad and PhD candidates with a spicy diamond and certain probe wavelengths.
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If you are talking about sustained fusion, it is very implausible and pretty much impossible considering our current understanding of nature. It most certainly was not achieved at any point in time, at least in Human History. Unsustained fusion becomes possible but still very, very implausible.
To have D-T fusion you need to overcome an energy barrier of the order of magnitude of 0.5 MeV (and others are worse). Accounting for things like tunnelling and plasma confinement, the particles need to have about 10 keV of kinetic energy. The kinetic energy of a particle at room temperature is 26 meV, it’s off by a factor of 400,000. You can help with pressure but even then the equivalent pressure would be 10^10 atmospheres.
Probabilities are never 0 in statistical Physics, but in this case it is vanishingly small.
To have sustained fusion you need this to happen often enough. That is just not going to happen. Providing at least a credible source would help your argument, but it would need to be very solid.
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Would not be surprised if the psychological mechanisms behind this are similar to gambling addiction. It starts off small with an innocent lie in a thesis nobody scrutinize...
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And even if it worked to generate a reasonable amount of energy... how would you keep it cold?
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Muons. You don’t keep it cold any more than you would a fission reactor, but you use “heavy electrons” to compress the atoms and reduce the temperature requirements. Generating an economical source of muons is an exercise left to the reader.
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Pons and Fleischmann's purported cold fusion method had nothing to do with muons. It supposedly took place within a palladium cathode immersed in heavy water. The existence of fusion was inferred from heat pulses within the apparatus.
So if it worked at all, how to extract significant energy from such a system without disrupting it seems far from obvious.
From Wikipedia:
Events preceding announcement[edit]
Electrolysis cell schematic
Martin Fleischmann of the University of Southampton and Stanley Pons of the University of Utah hypothesized that the high compression ratio and mobility of deuterium that could be achieved within palladium metal using electrolysis might result in nuclear fusion.[29] To investigate, they conducted electrolysis experiments using a palladium cathode and heavy water within a calorimeter, an insulated vessel designed to measure process heat. Current was applied continuously for many weeks, with the heavy water being renewed at intervals.[29] Some deuterium was thought to be accumulating within the cathode, but most was allowed to bubble out of the cell, joining oxygen produced at the anode.[30] For most of the time, the power input to the cell was equal to the calculated power leaving the cell within measurement accuracy, and the cell temperature was stable at around 30 °C. But then, at some point (in some of the experiments), the temperature rose suddenly to about 50 °C without changes in the input power. These high temperature phases would last for two days or more and would repeat several times in any given experiment once they had occurred. The calculated power leaving the cell was significantly higher than the input power during these high temperature phases. Eventually the high temperature phases would no longer occur within a particular cell.[30]
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