Book Review of "Plastic Fantastic": How The Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook The Scientific World

What a fantasy to discover a new kind of superconductor that made of plastic. It could be a breakthrough in science, and could be used as like computer chips or soft paper-like screen. However, it turns out to be a fraud. At first, I would think what I read could only happened in some novels, but the writer told me that the whole story is real in details. The book describes, a real story that happened in 2000-2002, a scientific fraud was perpetrated at Bell Labs by Schon, a post-doc in physics. In people’s impression, Schon was always an agreeable person, a mild-mannered, modest and obliging young man. How could he tell such a big lie and fool the whole scientific area? The book brings out many factors that contributed to perpetration of the fraud and to difficulty in detecting and stopping it. The personality, pressures and environment that created and enabled the fraud to spread. For example, people thought both Schon and his co-workers were “reliable’’. So even if Schon tried to produce some “real” data, his co-workers and other people would not doubt about it. The book illustrates that, in May 2001, Schon produced data showing superconductivity at 117 degrees above absolute zero, a result better than anything expected by a colleague.

Also, political and economic pressures contribute, such as the slapdash way in which Lucent patented Schon’s research, ignoring critical reviews. For many of the same reasons that Schon got away with his scam so long and so spectacularly. Finally, the fraud was exposed, the fraudster gets busted, Bell Labs downsized from a research powerhouse. And the author concludes that science is self-correcting, but the danger is that the correcting process turned out to be more human, more haphazard, and far less systematic. And it often happens in frontier research. Scientists and managers take a risk on bold new claims, hoping that future science will correct mistakes, and they get away with it. The result seems to be a happy ending, but it still wastes millions of dollars invested in the application of research. The author in the end of the book point out, what we should keep in mind when do scientific research to guard against the possibility that a groundbreaking discovery being reported right now is fraudulent. In this book, two lessons are worth learning: first, scientists are just ordinary human beings, which means that some of them will do something stupid; second, it is particularly important that no one can deceive nature, those people who make fraud would finally be exposed. After such a research scam, some people accuse the peer review process. Because The journal of Science sends papers to different experts for review. This achievement is so remarkable that people should have a critical judgement on it. Also review the exposure process of the whole story, we will find that the strictest inspectors are not the peers of scientists, but the reality itself.

The more important the research result is, the more rigorous the reality is. Schon's findings have attracted technical experts who hope to apply them into inventions, and there will naturally be more tests ahead. This remind me one of the similar researcher conduct happened in 2014 in China. Chun yu Han, a young bio-scientist, was accused of making fake data in his article published in Nature. After the published of the paper, the story of Chunyu Han, a "non-famous scientist", was widely praised, apart from his "heavyweight achievements", he was praised more for his scientific pursuit in poverty, which is exactly what people expect from the spirit of science. However, when some people try to follow his work, but could not reproduce the data, the fraud exposed. In conclusion, scientific dreams only belong to those who truly love science, respect science and keep the spirit of science in mind.