
Fraud in superconductor physics - gumby
https://twitter.com/gravity_levity/status/1029061204919177216
======
_Microft
The comment by Brian Skinner who discovered the _correlated noise_ in a graph
is available on Arxiv [1]. It's not claiming fraud but points out that such an
effect of correlated noise below a threshold temperature between seemingly
independent measurements has not been observed before.

Quit-your-bullshit played safe ;)

[1]
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.02929.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.02929.pdf)

~~~
komali2
That is a really smart way to play it, because while it is astronomically
unlikely, it's possible the answer is "woops, we charted the wrong data there,
here's the actual results" and we enter a beautiful new world of room
temperature superconductivity.

I get kind of exhausted of the typical response to Hot New Shit In Science,
which hasn't changed in about four hundred years: outright, arrogant
dismissal.

~~~
SubiculumCode
One would hope that the correlated noise was a problem in a plot command. Two
observations. 1) The correlated noise in that plot seems obvious. If one was
to fake data, why make it that obvious? 2) If it was a plotting error, that
would be easy to check and to respond about.

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luddaite
This is giving me flashbacks to the whole STAP cells fiasco of a few years ago
where a research group in Japan published a "simple" way to generate
pluripotent stem cells. Everyone and their mother tried to replicate the
result and eventually the paper was shown to be fraudulent. On the bright
side, the larger scientific community acted as a backstop to the journal/peer-
review system. On the other hand, the amount of resources expended to nullify
this claim was probably enormous and is hard to quantify. Putting out bad data
not only poisons the well, it also chews up lots of productivity cycles of
everyone in the field.

~~~
T-A
It's giving me flashbacks to

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schön_scandal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schön_scandal)

~~~
amai
You are so right. It feels like a dejavu:

"Lydia Sohn, then of Princeton University, noticed that two experiments
carried out at very different temperatures had identical noise.[3] When the
editors of Nature pointed this out to Schön, he claimed to have accidentally
submitted the same graph twice."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal#Allegations...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal#Allegations_and_investigation)

------
tschwimmer
The title is a bit aggressive I think. While the correlated noise discussed in
the tweets is suspicious, there doesn't seem to be any definitive evidence of
fraud yet.

It's also possible that the plot of the noise was an honest error or something
else.

~~~
jcranmer
Matching noise in plots isn't proof of fraud, but it's something that is so
suspicious that it changes the game from "convince me that this paper is
fraudulent" to "convince me that this paper isn't fraud." In that light, other
worrisome elements of the situation are problematic:

* Claiming one of the holy grail properties of modern physics is achievable with rather pedestrian materials.

* The methodology section is apparently on the vague side. Sort of on the order of “we prepared silver nanoparticles using standard techniques, then incorporated them into into a gold matrix.”

* Response to the announcement of "your data presentation has serious errors" is "we won't share our raw data to confirm."

------
gumby
The reason this looks more like fraud then accident is the forged email and
the weird facebook request, both described down thread.

A FB request from a rando by itself isn't weird -- FB pretty much invites this
to happen -- and a FB request from a brand new account would be both
believable and, in the detail, suspicious (because of the name). But a random
request from an account name from the forged mail _but which was created a
month before_ makes me wonder if somebody hired some sort of "reputation"
service to defend the paper, which is, in my mind, just _completely_ bonkers.

------
okket
See also [https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/08/room-temperature-
sup...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/08/room-temperature-
superconductivity-claim-has-side-dish-of-dodgy-data/)

------
dekhn
is there a service that turns these into readable correspondence to the
editor? because I am not going to read a series of tweets alleging fraud. It's
like there is an entire user-visible packetizing mechanism in the way of the
content.

~~~
phyzome
[https://threadreaderapp.com/](https://threadreaderapp.com/) will do it --
[https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1027717419400392705.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1027717419400392705.html)

and yes, it's ridiculous that this is necessary

~~~
noja
Have you got something that will handle replies (in date order) too?

~~~
paulgb
It's not quite what you're asking for, but Treeverse represents the
conversation (including replies) as a tree
[https://github.com/paulgb/Treeverse](https://github.com/paulgb/Treeverse)
(disclosure: I wrote it)

------
kabes
But what's the point of faking this? Wouldn't this be debunked very fast
anyway if it was fake? So what's there to gain?

~~~
lainga
People can do irrational things under pressure to publish.

------
Robotbeat
I'd like to point out 90 Kelvin isn't the highest temperature superconductor
(likely) reported, not even close. There were Mercury-based HgBa2Ca2Cu3O8
"high temperature superconductors" (thought to operate similar to the common
YBCO ones) that have achieved up to 134 Kelvin years ago.

Recently, there was also a _conventional_ superconductor at up to 203 Kelvin
(!) at extremely high pressure based on HS3 or somesuch and that seems to have
been pretty widely accepted and replicated.
[https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14964](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14964)

It's thought that modifying the sulfur hydride based superconductors could
result in near-room-temperature superconductivity (above 0 Celsius).

Occasionally, people claim room temperature superconductivity in carbon
allotropes such as graphene, but take those with a grain of salt as they
haven't really been replicated.

Anyway, yeah, this silver and gold material is almost certainly bogus.

------
pvaldes
The plot has other problems also in the symbols choosen to print the values.

The gray cross into a square symbol looks particularly ugly. If the goal is to
assure that nobody can understand the real structure of the data; is the
perfect symbol. Many values printed in the red set are also hidden by the blue
and green dots.

------
maxander
As a guy who does a lot of scientific data analysis and plotting, I'm
surprised that no one brought up the obvious explanation; in the general scrum
of final manuscript preparation, the data analysis guy mistakenly made a plot
with the same data replicated several times, but shifted each time so that the
plot looked plausible at first pass. It would require a lot of things to go
wrong at once, sure... but with experience, you learn to _count on_ a lot of
things going wrong at once, _especially_ just before something like a
manuscript submission. :)

But that the _authors_ , who presumably could check the raw data the plot is
coming from, didn't immediately come back with this explanation, makes it
sound much more likely that this is just fraud. Oh well.

~~~
DoctorOetker
your mixup does not make any sense: look at the 2 traces in question, on the
left half both traces seem like a simple small vertical shift of the other,
but in the right half of the same plot one plateaus earlier than the other,
both plateauing at the same height.

the conclusion is unmistakable: either the data is real and unexplained (or at
least no agreement on any explanation yet) or the data was doctored by summing
vertically displaced noise with horizontally displaced sigmoid.

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InTheArena
If this is fraud, why on earth would you claim something that (theoretically)
that is: 1) a holy grail of any field of science. 2) likely to attract a lot
of attention 3) likely to be disproved quickly. 4) likely to result in you
being compared unfavorably with Fleischmann–Pons?

~~~
toasterlovin
People are irrational.

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lgats
[https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1027717419400392705.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1027717419400392705.html)

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chrisbrandow
Maybe it’s been answered though I didn’t see it addressed, but couldn’t the
noise issue simply be some sort of copy paste error in excel?

~~~
mabbo
When you announce room temperature superconductors, you sure as heck better
have found and fixed _every single error_ , including dumb ones like excel
copy/paste errors. You touch that topic like you touch cold fusion.

And besides, if it was something as simple as that then all they need to do is
release their data. They haven't.

~~~
scythe
It's an arXiv preprint. If it were submitted to a journal I'd agree with you,
but the fast sharing of new data is the whole point of arXiv.

------
1ris
Here somebody claims superconductivity above 200 Celsius.

[http://www.superconductors.org/216C209C.htm](http://www.superconductors.org/216C209C.htm)

~~~
scythe
Superconductors.org is an old and well-known sham.

