Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World (Macmillan Science)

This is the story of wunderkind physicist Jan Hendrik Schön who faked the discovery of a new superconductor made from plastic. A star researcher at the world-renowned Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, he claimed to have stumbled across a powerful method for making carbon-based crystals into transistors, the switches found on computer chips. Had his experiments worked, they would have paved the way for huge advances in technology--computer chips that we could stick on a dress or eyewear, or even use to make electronic screens as thin and easy-to-fold as sheets of paper. But as other researchers tried to recreate Schön's experiments, the scientific community learned that it had been duped. Why did so many top experts, including Nobel prize-winners, support Schön? What led the major scientific journals to publish his work, and promote it with press releases? And what drove Schön, by all accounts a mild-mannered, modest and obliging young man, to tell such outrageous lies?

Highly regarded science journalist Eugenie Samuel Reich recounts the case of wunderkind physicist Jan Hendrik Schön, who faked the discovery of a new superconductor at the world famous Bell Laboratories. Many of the world’s top scientific journals and experts, including Nobel Prize-Winners, supported Schön, only to learn that they were the victims of the biggest fraud in science. What drove Schön, by all accounts a mild-mannered, modest, and obliging young man, to tell such outrageous lies? Reich dives into the riveting world of science to examine how fraud perpetuates itself today. Schön’s rise and fall will be an essential and fascinating account of the missteps of the scientific community for years to come.

Publishers Weekly

Reich, a former editor at New Science, unravels the absorbing story of Jan Hendrik Schön, a researcher at the prestigious Bell Laboratories from 1998 to 2002, who achieved star status in cutting-edge materials technology-super-conductivity, lasers, nanotechnology-by falsifying data. A graduate of Germany's low key University of Konstanz, he dove immediately into a demanding environment... known for big discoveries, ambitious expectations. When his papers on experiments with organic crystals were rejected, he manipulated data and made false claims; publication followed. When the tech bubble burst, Bell came under increasing pressure from parent company Lucent to justify its existence; short-circuiting the normal process of peer review, the lab turned to public relations, press-releasing exciting scientific findings to fool investors, customers and Lucent into believing Bell had a sound long-term technological future. Reich's clear explanation gives general readers a real sense of the excitement generated in the scientific community by Schön's discoveries, how he made them appear credible and how his ability to dissemble eventually failed him; he also raises profound ethical questions that resonate with current concerns over science and its place in the public sphere.
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Traces the infamous fraudulent discovery of physicist Jan Henrik Sch��n, a star researcher from Bell Laboratories who claimed to have developed technology that would enable the creation of virtually limitless computer chips, in an account that evaluates the motivations for his scam and how it successfully duped some of the scientific community's most informed minds. This work presents an investigation of a scientific discovery that was revealed to be fraudulent by a journalist with a unique insight into the case. Schon's discovery of a plastic that worked as a superconductor was noted as a scientific triumph before revelations that his discoveries were fake