'Science' is often seen by the outside world as a perfect, well oiled machine. Money pours in, smart-guy scientists work towards a predetermined goal, and then after reaching said goal they use it to help humanity. Outsiders like to think that any problem in science (and especially medicine) can be fixed by just throwing enough money at it. Scientists are infallible geniuses and if only they had enough time and resources all problems and questions in our world would be solved. Plastic Fantastic is an attempt to give laymen a look inside the way scientific progress is really made, and how scientists as individuals are far from perfect.
Plastic Fantastic follows the story of Hendrik Schön and his rise and fall within the scientific community. Schön received his PhD from the University of Konstanz in 1997 and then went on to work at the prestigious Bell Labs in New Jersey. Even those who don't know much about the history of science may have heard the name Bell Labs before, and if you haven't it was the site of many important discoveries of the 20th century including the creation of the transistor, the discovery of cosmic background radiation, and laser atom trapping (by our Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu!). Bell Labs was the place to be for cutting edge research, but it has since fallen on hard times and is nowhere near the powerhouse it used to be. In just four years Schön published eight papers in Science, seven in Nature and six in various Physical Review journals. Science and Nature are the two most prestigious journals for those within the scientific world to publish, and Physical Review is the main outlet for discoveries in the field of Physics. This rate and quality of publications is almost unheard of, and it seemed that Schön was on his way to a Nobel Prize and other greatness until it all came crashing down.
It turns out that all of it was fake. Schön manipulated existing data, created artificial results from theoretical functions, and even duplicated the same plot on multiple papers. Plastic Fantastic takes a journalistic approach to figure out how and why this happened, and why it took so long for the scientific community to catch him.
In part, Plastic Fantastic is an attempt to try to describe how the normal process of checks works in science and how it failed this time. Typically, when a scientist believes he or she has done some research of worth, they submit a paper to one of the various journals in which their research topic is published. The editors at said publication then sort through the submissions, and send many out for peer review. Peer review involves the editor sending the manuscript out to multiple authorities in the field on which the paper is based, and the authorities taking an objective look at the science to see if it is new, interesting, and correct. If the reviewers decide on a whole that the paper is a good one (often with corrections or additions needed) the author is allowed to make changes before the paper is published. This can be a long and laborious process, but it usually weeds out badly written papers or those with bad science. However one aspect of the paper that the reviewers don't usually check for is fraud. Science is based on trust, and the reviewers are trusting that the results reported in the paper are factual.
This is where Schön was able to fool the scientific community and those close to him. Because the reviewers were not checking to see if he was lying, or just plain making stuff up, his papers passed with flying colors. In preliminary discussions, Schön would present some data to a colleague and ask him what experiments he might try next, and what results he might expect. He would then go off, and seemingly work hard to get those results, and then would precisely replicate that which was expected. In this way he played off scientists hubris in that they were more than excited to see their theories come true. Because all of his early papers seemed reasonable and had wonderful plots that mirrored what theorists would expect, he was able to get away publishing fraudulent papers at a breakneck speed.
He was finally caught because a couple of skeptics started to look hard at him and his suspicious data. No one was able to replicate his results, and he was unable to describe his techniques to those interesting in doing so. Finally someone noticed that two of his plots where exactly the same in seperate papers describing wildly different devices. This lead to a review of his work and eventually it was discovered that he had never done any of it, and that all the work others had been doing to follow up on his results had been a waste.
Plastic Fantastic is written from a journalistic point of view, trying to get all the specifics of when and where and who down to try to build a complete picture of Schön's actions. It's very successful in this and those even more familiar with the case or the people involved might get much more out of it than I did. Where Plastic Fantastic fails is in trying to build a central narrative or trying to flesh out the people, especially Schön. I was not left with a strong feeling about Schön, and maybe this was a reflection on his personality, but I would have liked much more about what kind of person does this. Schön wasn't particularly egotistic, and he wasn't really that selfish or headstrong, he just seemed like a guy who wanted to fit in and wanted to appease his superiors. However beyond that description there wasn't much personal information about him, and more anecdotes might have been nice. Additionally the subtitle 'How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World' is bit much. Although it's true that these events had a huge effect on those involved with the subject at hand, it would be quite a claim to say that they 'shook the scientific world.' I'm sure many scientists are aware of the case, but it is also true that many are only overly familiar with their own field and it probably barely affected them.
One interesting note that was brought up was that apparently Isaac Newton was guilty of fraud! Apparently during his work on optics, he claimed that something was true (that you couldn't make an achromatic lens) in all cases even though he only viewed it in a specific case. Furthermore he reported results that would be ideal as work he had actually done. Newton was also apparently notorious for fudging numbers and figures in his work on gravity. However this makes sense because his gravitational theories are only approximately true and one needs Einstein's work to fix the problems. It's just very fascinating to me that one of the sharpest minds of human history could fall prey misrepresenting his work because he wanted his theories to be 'perfect'.
I think that Plastic Fantastic works pretty well as an introduction into the way science works, and the kinds of people involved in the work behind the curtain. It's important for people to understand how 'Science' works, and how results are made. The book is also fairly informative on the science involved, which is nice for those with somewhat of a technical background and want to know what was going on scientifically. Obviously people aren't infallible, and in this case it took a little while, but science is self correcting and the truth will be found out eventually. Reproducibility the corner stone of modern science, and without it we would just be a bunch of alchemists trying to turn rocks into gold. In this case 'Science' won, but not before a sad man had everyone on the ropes wasting tons of resources and believing ridiculous claims.
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