Suspicions are swirling and Bell Labs is burning

Imagine being this guy and you're just scrambling to keep this house of cards from falling. A terrifying position to put yourself in.

Oh wow what a coincidence I'm from Ottawa too and my Dad was laid off from Cisco because of the telecomms bubble burst

As a mediocre computer layman, these videos feel like I’m jacked into the matrix getting flooded, and entertained, with information about this physics research world, and I love it.

Great video but I can't get over how dude says acadamia and not academia. Sounds super dumb.

Ok, I can see why Open Science is important.

I feel like they're should be dedicated anonymous members of the science community specifically dedicated to pushing the community as far as it possibly can through these means to force out all the weak areas of the environment.

Hendrick may not have won a Nobel award, but he sure deserves an Oscar 😂

When a sociopath takes advantage of introverts.

"most of it financed by debt... don't ask me how that works"

well, i guess we didn't need to ask. You decided to do an in-depth case study of one of the most extreme cases (i almost used the word "victim" but that wouldn't really be accurate) of the telecom bubble exploding anyway.

It definitely wasn't Schön's primary motivation, but a similar figure who is maybe like the head of a company or team or so and faking results to keep the funding coming so they don't lose their jobs would be an amazing protagonist to a TV show.

What I really don't understand: How the fuck did he get away with that for so long without significantly changing the data (e.g. the duplicated plots with the same noise profile). I've heard of people uncovering scientific fraud using highly sophisticated data science techniques to show that believable data was made up and he just literally copied and pasted it? How!

Me bullying my way up the ladder of socially awkward and polite nerds;

So much about „one can fool one person all the time and all people once“.

As someone who has published several papers internationally before, I can definitely say most of academia and research is a scam. Journals, like Nature, care more about money. I know so many people who fake their data. It disgusts me. It's why i am no longer in research.

Strong Jon Bois vibes

I feel bad for laughing at “my mom” being laid off 🤣

Rewatching this in 2024, a lot of what's going on sounds exactly like what LLMs like ChatGPT and Bard do when you catch them fabricating data...

Anyone who’s watched S2 of Doctor Death on Peacock can see how employers & institutions DO NOT WANT any of their research staff outed for fraud…they work really hard to make sure that never happens, even when its true.

I’m SHOCKED by his willingness to reply w/ such a detailed sputtering process (assumed he’d use the common pushback-method to “avoid stolen work”)….

Ya, a Cornell student will give up BUT professionally funded labs (told to recreate his results) would just say “ok he just gave us everything we need…down to pre-cleansing w/ an argon mixture. Lets get the supplies & equipment from same manufacturer’s & we’ll get the same results”…which means they should’ve known it was bullocks long before it got this far!

Where are the sources?

This is so well put together - I was momentarily confused why the video ended only to realize that those almost 40 minutes went by in a flash. 😅

Regarding the bubble: I graduated college in 2001 and had a retail job at the Linens N Things in Eatontown, NJ, the summer before I went off to grad school. Eatontown is only a few miles from the Holmdel facility of Bell Labs. I remember distinctly taking a job application from a man who'd written that his prior employer was Lucent/Bell Labs and he had multiple Ph.D.s. Very few things have ever so seismically shaken my trust in the inherent justice of the American economic creed - work hard, be smart, and you'll prosper - quite like that.

There is this line of reasoning that fraud in science shouldn't be called out, because it would "undermine the trust in science" and thus further anti-scientific rhetoric. But it is this very reasoning that gives this anti-scientific rhetoric actual, real fuel. "Why would you trust the people who sided with the fraudsters?"

You stock put the sweet peas where the chickpeas go in a grocery store, and your manager is breathing down your neck. This guy is making incredible scientific discoveries that cost thousands if not millions of dollars and no one is watching him.
This society is a joke.

the whole video was great, and also: whoever does the floating 3d void animations, take a bow. great editing all around.

So basically scientists are ripe for conmen. We're screwed🙄 Here's hoping all the academic fraud going on doesn't lead us to dangerous assumptions.

"in 2001 there was another crash" lmfao

Bob Laughlin is a beast! Right out of the gate: “you should be ashamed of showing these graphs.” Literally wasn’t fooled for a second

Go figure. Money always wins...until it doesnt.

the music in this series slaps

The music is bangin' bro

"There's a lot of Bobs in science."

Somebody call Jon Bois! I know where they all went!!!

are there links to sources on this? is it just from the same book?

It feels odd to note but there's a certain strength to zooming in on a graph to reveal a deeply personal tragedy that the narrator silently acknowledges before moving on. There's just something so... I guess human about it? It's taking a massive statistic, and creating an individual connection to it. I dunno, something about that just hits hard.

What I honestly can’t wrap my mind around is how long all this was able to go on, like you said the others good faith in Schon held him to safety. I can’t believe that all of those scientists did not have enough faith in their own ability to come out and say “I can’t do what he did, I’ve been here with the best equipment for years, he has to be up to something”. It’s a direct accusation with hardly any direct evidence but at the end of the day if you’ve been out here doing it for years, you have to make that claim

J. H. Schön made one mistake - published too many papers and went for a too high-stakes goals.
I wonder how many people do the same Schön did, only stay out of the public eye, and do some low-stakes "research"... for decades...

Dude just “yes and”ed his way to the top of the physics world

Reminds me horribly of Ninov - crazy parallels. Claims they found the element first and then hopes someone else does the heavy lifting for them.

What I’m gathering so far is that Schön would have been fantastic at writing out textbooks and/or theory, and was just in completely the wrong job

The phenomenon were a blatant obvious fraud keeps getting the benefit of the doubt would probably be exasperated by the reverse Dunning-Kruger effect. According to the Dunning-Kruger effect, less intelligent people tend to overestimate their knowledge and abilities. In this case the very intelligent people that were Hendriks piers in Physics, were not as hard on him because in part they thought that the problem was with them not being able to reproduce the experiment instead of the experiment being completely wrong and fraudulent

how tf did so many people assume so many things ?

This really is a story of a bunch of people knowing something is wrong, even figuring out it was wrong but not wanting to rock the boat incase they messed up, or accidentally ruined a carreer over a small mistake, or just because of the economy and trying not to step on peoples toes during such a fragile time.

Hendrik was remarkably social and not particularly dedicated to rules. Are we sure he's German?

This series is insanely well explained, clear, and engaging!