Suspicions are swirling and Bell Labs is burning

In the midst of the worst period in his company's history, a lone physicist shines as a beacon of hope thanks to his ingenuity and hard work. But soon, Bell Labs will be making headlines for all the wrong reasons. These are the lies of Jan Hendrik Schön. Part 2 of 3.

Massive thank you to Scott Bunch for sitting down and speaking with me.

0:00 Chapter 8 - Double Bubble
4:19 Chapter 9 - Best Listener in Physics
14:35 Chapter 10 - Sputtering out of Control
21:37 Chapter 11 - The F Word
32:58 Chapter 12 - Whistleblowers

Jan Hendrik Schön, the Bell Labs Fraud. Plastic Fantastic. Bertram Batlogg. Schön affair, Schön scandal. Nobel Prize fraud.

[confused-as-ell]

hendrik really went "oh sorry you wouldn't know my conclusive evidence, they go to a different school" and it somehow worked

[kenthefele]

"I didn't believe it could have been fraud because I didn't believe one person could make all that up. Then I realized, we all made it up."
Damn

[Banksie]

This guy was the “5-minute crafts” of academia.

[AbsolXGuardian]

Hendrick feels like a guy who got so traumatized by k-12 and undergrad that like you said, he couldn't adapt to the mindset of academia. All he could do was identify the parameters for "getting a good grade", understand was results would get him such a "grade", and when he couldn't get the "right answer" through honest means and so when his job was on the line, he cheated. It's like when you have math homework and you know you're not finding the correct answer on one problem because the checks aren't working, so you give up and look up an online calculator that will do the entire problem automatically.

[FizzleFX]

Hendrik: Fakes years of research
Hendrik: can't be bothered drawing another graph
👍

[-topic]

maybe this guy should just become a science fiction writer, since it's practically similar to what he was already doing.

[hedgeearthridge]

Remember too, that Aluminum Oxide (Alumina) is a notoriously difficult substance to work with. It's like the 2nd hardest natural substance ever, after diamond. It's melting point is 2072°C; compare that to Iron, which is already highly difficult to melt, at 1538°C. Aluminum wouldn't exist like we know it without the Hall–Héroult Process. (You know how adding salt to water drops it's melting point? Adding Florine (in the form of Cryolite) to Alumina drops it's melting point too, to around 980°C, which is pretty easy to achieve.) Yeah dealing with Silicon and Silica for electronics is hard, but dealing with Alumina is insanely hard. Hopefully that helps with illustrating why it's even more crazy that he was claiming to use Alumina so easily for this

[euchale]

When I started out as a lab tech, I was with a Postdoc who was clearly using one of our machines wrong (sucking in air instead of cells). I told him that what he is doing is going to lead to false results and was told to not worry about it. These results would later go on to be published in Cell Biology and Nature. They stayed up for 5 years, but later had to be retracted.

[thesleepydot]

that little "my mom" was... honestly a bit tragic. There's something about that background music, and the fact that you didn't even say it, but showed it, that genuinely made me sad.. like some unspoken sad truth. you're phenomenal at creating tension, anticipation and just like atmosphere in general

[Iyerbeth]

I'm a physicist at the end of my PhD, and I'm aware of (but wasn't involved with) what I'd personally decribe as a fraud in physics that isn't widely known and it's exactly because it's so difficult to outright say another team lied or cheated. Nothing on this scale, of course. Those who identified it thought the results from the original team were remarkable, and wanted to use the technique with their own work, and emailed for advice but were not so politely told to figure it out for themselves from the paper. This caused some frustration, but it did lead to a "fine, we will" attitutde and when it was finally replicated it became very clear why they didn't want to share their methodology - their results were correct but only if you ended the experiment at the exact perfect moment. Like, a ridiculously arbitrary time. Any time after that point caused the trend to evaporate, and the longer it was ran, the worse the result gets (in this particular work, this should not be the case). The method used was claimed to be substantially better than existing methods but it turns out to be useless, unless you already know the outcome you intended to get.

The people who identified this put out a new paper explaining what the results show, and discussing some of the limitations potential pitfalls to be aware of, all of which were mistakes in the original work. But they couldn't call the other team frauds, or say they did it on purpose. In my mind, they likely did, but you can't prove it and you certainly can't go accusing people of it without a lot more evidence than one bad paper. I suspect others believe it was intentional too, but the record was corrected with a new paper and there wasn't much else you could do. I could very easily imagine myself back then in that semiconductor field being quite unsure of how to properly raise concerns in the correct way.

[kristenjensen]

This is what happens when Imposter Syndrome is so prevalent among individuals in a collaborative field. Everyone thinks THEY'RE the problem and that makes them the problem.

[valeriaQwiUi]

As a physics student, I can understand why he didn't get caught earlier. The science community is filled with very non-confrontational people. We are perfectionists when it comes to our work, but is really normalized for researchers to never doubt the "scientific postdoc star" because, how could you?

Great video! Loved this series. So sorry for your mom's layout, that part just broke my heart.

[ricardoalmeida]

Dude just social engineered his way up through a mountain of the Earth's finest brains. That in itself is kind of deserving of a Nobel prize

[karstenschuhmann]

The funny thing is his name, Schön. In German we say "die Ergebnisse schönen" meaning to "fiddle to improve your data".

[EvanZalys]

My advisor was a postdoc at Bell Labs around that time. He was arriving as Bob Laughlin was clearing out his desk. Knowing Bob. was a big shot, he asked "Got any tips?" Bob responded "yeah, publish fast." I guess Bob's 2 years were up.

[Delfigamer]

Listening to the part "Best Listener in Physics", and this makes me think of a certain other time when the science was a little bit bamboozled: when there was a horse, that could read the people's expectations so well, when its owner gave it an arithmetic task, the horse would tap exactly as many times as what would be the right answer. People, who obviously knew the correct answer, gave an unconscious reaction to each tap of the horse's hoof; as the number got closer to the right one, the anticipation grew higher, reaching its peak just as the horse tapped the last time needed and it was time to stop - reaction so subtle, it may be imperceptible for other people, but for the horse, it was clear enough - so it understood, "these humans expect me to stop now", and stopped. And people were impressed.
So... can we say, that Jan Hendrik Schön just Clever-Hansed the scientific community?

[davidfalterman]

Halfway through watching this, my house caught on fire. After a while, and after salvaging what we could from the wreckage, I crashed on a friend’s couch for a while. Tonight—it’s the same night—I finished watching this video.

If that’s not an endorsement of what compelling content this is, I dunno what is 🤷‍♂️

[maverickhuntersyd]

This dude literally did what I in high school science classes when my data was a mess because I was...a literal child.

[cynthiasterling]

“Whenever people asked him what his secret ingredient was, he’d always give the same answer.”
Me: “Love!”
Him: “Aluminum oxide.”
Me: “Awwww…”

[trybunt]

2:00 "my mom" ouch, right in the feels. idk why, but that simple graphic was heartbreaking. Very well done 👏 😥