Jan Hendrik Schön: World Class Physics Fraud Gets Last Laugh - A Whole Book About Himself |

Jan Hendrik Schön, if you have heard the name, will either fascinate or enrage you. His ability to progress from ridiculous fibs to world-class deception as a 31-year-old physicist working at Bell Labs in New Jersey is certainly impressive. How did fellow scientists let him get away with possibly the worst case of physics research fraud known? It deserves a whole book, and Eugenie Samuel Reich is here to help. If you can't sit through a whole book like Plastic Fantastic (out next week), her short version is in Physics World.

Bell laboratories have made the statement that an independent committee was made to probe in to the authenticity of some research work by a group of Bell Labs and other researchers. The report revealed that one person of their group, Jan Hendrik Schon, had committed research misconduct by untruthful, unproven and non-existent research data. Schon has been fired from Lucent Technologies on ground of misconduct.

The fabrication of information and data was shown to collect from 1998 to 2001. The other members, who were co-researchers as well as fellow authors, were acquitted of the charges. The question of unauthentic research data was raised by the other researchers of different institutions as well as of Bell Laboratories. The formation of committee was a deliberate act of Bell Labs to verify whether or not the allegations against their Lab were true. They formed a neutral commission comprising Malcolm Beasley who is professor of Applied Physics and ex-dean of School of Humanities and Science at Stanford University as chairman and four other renowned scientists and researchers

The commission was allowed total liberty in their decision to reach at the conclusion regarding the allegation. The exaggerated and fabricated information was related to ’superconductivity’, ‘molecular crystals’, and ‘molecular electronics’ and had nothing to do with Lucent’s recent products. “The evidence that manipulation and misrepresentation of data occurred is compelling,” the committee wrote. He was spotted at 16 places where he fudged figures and deliberately twisted the information to prove his research findings. He was found to do all this misadventure alone and other group members and co-authors did not know about this.

Tags: Hendrik Schon Where is He now, Nanotechnology, Jan Hendrik Schön, Moore S Law, Schon, Hendrik Schon, Jan Hendrik Schön

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