The man who almost faked his way to a Nobel Prize

Schön got away with it for years. One of my favorite video essays is a long exploration of that case: [VIDEO]

This reminds me an amazing piece of documentary[1] I've watched a couple months prior about a man who tried to "scam his way onto a Nobel prize". It really goes into showing how the majority of the system is based on trust and reputation and without well skepticism fraudsters can thrive. [1]: "The man who almost faked his way to a Nobel Prize" -- [VIDEO]

For those unfamiliar with the story of Jan Hendrik Schön, I suggest watching this excellent series of videos by BobbyBroccoli on YouTube [1-3]. The series does a good job breaking down the context and the situation that Schön was in, along with the incentives that encouraged Schön to commit fraud. [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]

>Most research is flawed or useless, Also the research could be downright fraudulent. A very interesting case is the Schön scandal, involving organic semiconductors. [LINK] There is an engrossing set of videos about it: [VIDEO]

It reminds me of Jan Hendrik Schön, who looked like physics' next emerging all-star wunderkind until his "discoveries" of crystalline semiconductors won him so many awards and attentions it was discovered his entire career had been built on falsified data. A huge embarassment for Bell Labs and a black mark on the final years of more than one great physicist's careers there, since so many people thought they were helping a great new mind succeed when they were in reality perpetuating his fraud. There's a great 3-part documentary on youtube about it, which argues Schön was probably a contender for the Nobel Prize in Physics before everything collapsed: [VIDEO]

Oh yeah, he is absolutely fucking wild. There's a great documentary on him, here's part one, the other two parts of the documentary are also on YouTube on the same channel: [VIDEO]

My mind immediately went to Bell Labs Jan Schön superconducting plastics almost landing him a Nobel [VIDEO] (spoiler alert - it was all a scam)

Fabricated data and fraudulent results are not unknown to the hard sciences either. See f.e [VIDEO] A professor manipulating data for an amusing pop-psychology result is small potatoes in comparison to what has rocked the physics world.