Plastic Fantastic: How The Biggest Fraud In Physics Shook The Scientific World

This is the original story of scientific fraud at the renowned Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. In 2000, Jan Hendrik Schön was a young physicist employed at Bell who stunned colleagues when he claimed to have developed a powerful method for turning organic crystals into transistors. Even as Schön's data thrilled his close colleagues, managers and mentors, independent scientists struggled to recreate and build on his experiments. Eventually whistleblowers uncovered a pattern of duplicated data spread throughout Schön's work. Bell convened an investigation that found him guilty of data fabrication and falsification, and released a public report in 2002. But why did so many top experts, including Nobel prize-winners, support Schön? What led the major scientific journals, including Nature and Science, to publish his work? What drove Schön, by all accounts a mild-mannered, modest and obliging young man, to tell such egregious lies? This book, first published in 2009, provides answers in the form of a detailed account of the pressures and incentives that continue to operate in today's scientific community. This, the second edition is a new release without changes to the content after rights reverted to the author on August 15, 2024.