After claims of high-temp superconductivity were retracted, Ranga Dias lost his university job.
See full article...
See full article...
Scientist behind superconductivity claims ousted
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
Once the fraud starts, it’s hard to stop. You can get a completely unrelated job and that’s an off-ramp. Otherwise, the lies just keep piling up. Whether or not they think they’re going to get away with it, they can’t stop because if they do, then they’ll get found out.
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
I think that the scale for scientific misconduct is normally* measured from 0.0 to 1.0 in units of Schöns. https://www.aps.org/apsnews/2022/08/september-2002-schon-scandal-report
*There might be outliers or, even better yet, "outliars".
Upvote
2
(2
/
0)
There was one thing spotted at the time and let go because it related to his supervisor's publication. After the current analysis going into much greater detail and uncovering so much, who knows how his graduate school will view his request.
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
I was hoping to post something like this.
We usually (but not always) eventually catch the liars in science.
The key word here is 'eventually'.
Here in the US, our newly-minted president-elect was found to have lied tens of thousands of times (30-40K I think) during his first term in office.
Sad to say I'm not kidding.
Upvote
5
(7
/
-2)
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
this is so, so good.
And I don't know how to fix it--short attention spans are good for some things.
Science (and engineering)?
Not so much.
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
And it will be an unofficial department that requires absolutely no FBI vetting, ever.
Upvote
-3
(1
/
-4)
He is evidently a rather clever data fabricator. Unfortunately for him, he is not the cleverest person in the room. Kudos to those who did the data analysis, clearly first rate minds at work there.
Upvote
1
(2
/
-1)
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)
If you haven't climbed up onto the top of at least one building while at university have you even earned your diploma?
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
I think you are over thinking this one.
The guy is a liar. He sued over being caught lying which makes him seem psychotic. This isn't a mistake, this is by definition a professional fraudster.
The institutions he defrauded need to look in the mirror and figure out how they are going to make it harder for people to maliciously do this again, because honestly, they let him do this to them, and they look like fools for it.
Upvote
3
(3
/
0)
I had to google this b/c the last few years are all too fuzzy...and that's without any long-covid to contend with. Just a general case of smooth-brain I guess..
This debacle (the article subject) was a few years before the LK-99 debacle, which now sounds like maybe it (LK99) was just some one-uppance in the BS superconductor academic world. Good thing we have international bullshit competition in multiple markets these days. Totally gonna end well..
This debacle (the article subject) was a few years before the LK-99 debacle, which now sounds like maybe it (LK99) was just some one-uppance in the BS superconductor academic world. Good thing we have international bullshit competition in multiple markets these days. Totally gonna end well..
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
One of my favourite things on Ars is seeing people who've been here forever, with very low postings per year. At less than 0.5 ppy, I think you're winning! Obviously, don't sully your numbers with a response to this call out...
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
This clown professor is a full-on baddie, and would be an anomaly anywhere. Look upthread for the link to the investigation. The institution is fine.
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
No, not really anything clever about his fabrications. It's mainly just that most people generally don't expect you to blatantly lie to their faces. For example, one of the cases in the report simply has him telling people from a different university that some data was measured at his lab, while telling colleagues in his lab that it was measured at the other university. There was nothing clever or subtle about it; the lie was discovered the moment someone bothered to actually ask about it. It's just that in the normal course of things, why would anyone worry that they needed to go behind their supervisor's back to double-check the provenance of data that they've been told came from a lab they really are collaborating with?
Most of the cases are along similar lines. He claimed data was measured in a particular lab, but when asked about it later they said they weren't actually capable of performing those measurements. He claimed test material was made in his own lab, but when asked about it later people who had worked there said it was just bought from a supplier. The sorts of things that colleagues wouldn't usually think to question, and that peer reviewers wouldn't normally be capable of checking, but which immediately become obvious the instant anyone gives it even the slightest bit of scrutiny.
Even when it comes to the parts that actually required some data analysis to find, there wasn't anything particularly clever involved. This all first came to light when multiple people noticed that some of his figures appeared to have been created by simply adding a straight line to real measured data to change what a trend looked like. It was visible by eye just by zooming in on the figure, the analysis just showed exactly what manipulations had been performed. An actual clever data fabricator would have done things like make resolution match between the real and fake data, and check if the result looked like something that could actually be produced by the equipment used. Dias just did the simplest addition that could possibly have been performed. And then when responding to criticism of the paper on that basis, he plagiarised the PhD thesis of the person who published the criticism.
The really sad part is that those suggesting he may have started faking it because he really believed he'd found something may be correct. Some of the data does show a drop to zero resistance as a sample is cooled. But then when cooled further doesn't stay at zero. He manipulated that data to show a true transition to zero, and then when further measurements didn't agree or had a transition at wildly different temperatures, engaged in more and more fraud to keep everything consistent. The investigatory committee suggest the equipment in at least a couple of cases probably had a problem with an intermittent connection that sometimes caused the measurement to drop to zero, which was supported by one of the people who worked in the lab who had noted an issue with a dodgy connection at one point. It's entirely possible Dias ruined his career over a loose wire.
Upvote
4
(4
/
0)
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
No, I don't think so. If you read the Investigating Committee report (linked elsewhere in these comments), they looked at some of his historical work going all the way back to his PhD thesis as well as the 2 retracted papers and they found significant and damning evidence of academic and research misconduct going back to his graduate school days, so it's a long-term pattern of behavior and not "merely" a one-off thing. It just stinks.
Last edited:
Upvote
0
(0
/
0)
Look, things got a little hot for him and his personal magnetism wasn't working anymore, so he stopped resisting and resigned under pressure.
Upvote
1
(1
/
0)