How did fellow scientists let him get away with possibly the
worst case of physics research fraud known? It deserves a whole
book, and Eugenie Samuel Reich is here to help. If you can't sit
through a whole book like Plastic Fantastic (out next week), her
short version is in Physics World. The world's first organic
electrical laser! The smallest ever transistor! It's like a late
night paid advertisement, except it cost taxpayers millions of
dollars - and all Jan Hendrik Schön got was the sack. Why did
the self-correcting nature of science not bring the fraud to
light sooner? Some of it is that there are bad scientists, just
like in any other occupation, and they are drawn to money and
silliness, and some of it is that peer-reviewed journals were
not doing their jobs. As book author Gary Taubes, no stranger to
ferreting out bad science, said in in an interview here: I used
to joke with my friends in the physics community that if you
want to cleanse your discipline of the worst scientists in it,
every three or f