External ethics - e.g. development of mass destruction weapons, research with questionable consequences for health, environment, projects that may hinder development in poor countries

"The physicists have known sin" Robert Oppenheimer

Internal ethics - academic "misconduct", e.g. forgery of data, copying results, exploiting PhD students ...

Ethics in Physics

The case of Robert Andrews Millikan

Exploiting students?

"Cooking" data.

Felix Ehrenhaft in Vienna used a similar apparatus as Millikan and obtained electric charges much smaller than Millikan's value of e (published in 1910). In a second paper (1913) Millikan published new series of experiments, in which the charge of every droplet studied was, within a very narrow error, an integer multiple of e. In the paper Millikan writes:

But: for the period Nov.11, 1911 and April 16, 1912 Millikan reports results of measurements on 57 drops, whereas examination of Millikans private laboratory notebooks shows that he in fact studied around 175 drops during this period. Most of the studied drops would have supported Ehrenhaft's position! MISCONDUCT?

It turns out that the drops that observations that were left out represented experiments that were flawed in different ways (too small or too large drops, experimenting with pressure to test a new model for Stoke's law). All this is accounted for in the paper and the reasons for "cooking" are well motivated.

Since then the physics community has been shaken by two monumental scandals at renowned research centra, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Lucent Technologies' Bell Laboratories.

"To the best of my knowledge there has never been an outright falsification of data in physics" Steven Weinberg in "Dreams of a Final Theory" (1992)

Berkeley (1999): Victor Ninov claimed successful production of element Z=118 PRL 83, 1104 (1999) (theoretically predicted the same year).

BUT nobody was able to reproduce these findings and when the original data were reviewed, no sign of Z = 118 particles could be found!

A more flagrant case of scientific misconduct is that of Jan Hendrik Schön at Bell Laboratories.

A large number of papers in high profile journals within hot fields of research (nanoscience) during the period 1999-2001.

Among discoveries was

The first organic laser Superconducting molecules (tetracene, pentacene) Superconducting fullerenes (C60) Single-molecule transistor

Curves look identical at the high voltage end in all three panels, taken from different papers, and at the low voltage end for the top two panels. All three give the input-output characteristics of a field-effect transistor, but for different materials: (a) a self-assembled monolayer of undiluted 4,4'-biphenyldithiol, (b) a self-assembled monolayer of the same molecule but diluted with non-conducting molecules, and (c) pentacene.

From Science 296, 1396 (2002)

Data substitution was found in a paper describing gate-induced superconductivity in polythiophene. The published Figure (left panel) shows resistance for four values of surface charge density. Superconductivity sets in at the highest density. The bottom two curves are replotted in the right panel, with the curve for a density of 4.9 × 1013/cm2 divided by 3.96. An investigation found that the data were the same, except for one point.

What may be the rational reasons for misconduct?

1. Career pressure

2. The perpetrators always think they know the answer.  

3. The work is in a field where the reproducibility is not very precise.