Plastic Fantastic How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World

by Reich, Eugenie Samuel

• ISBN13: 9780230224674
• ISBN10: 0230224679
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-05-12
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Summary

This is the story of wunderkind physicist Jan Hendrik Schon 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 Schon's experiments, the scientific community learned that it had been duped. Why did so many top experts, including Nobel prize-winners, support Schon? What led the major scientific journals to publish his work, and promote it with press releases? And what drove Schon, by all accounts a mild-mannered, modest and obliging young man, to tell such outrageous lies?

Author Biography

Eugenie Samuel Reich is a former editor at New Scientist. She has written for Nature and New Scientist, and is known for her hard hitting reports on irregular science. Several of her reports have resulted in institutional investigations. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
Into the Woods	p. 11
Hendrik	p. 27
A Slave to Publication	p. 45
Greater Expectations	p. 65
Not Ready to Be a Product	p. 85
Journals with "Special Status"	p. 105
Scientists Astray	p. 129
Plastic Fantastic	p. 151
The Nanotechnology Department	p. 163
The Fraud Taboo	p. 183
Game Over	p. 209
Epilogue	p. 235
Notes and Additional References	p. 241
Index	p. 259
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.