The Independent has an article illustrating the dangers of reaching for goals out of legend – for scientists. They were in search of metallic hydrogen:
To do the research, the scientists crushed tiny bits of hydrogen beneath diamond anvils, exerting more pressure on it than is found at the centre of the Earth. Small steps forward have been made through the work, but no researchers have yet been able to show off the shiny metal that would be expected to be seen.
That is what the two Harvard scientists claimed to have done. But they cannot yet show off the piece of metal because it is still stuck between the jaws of the anvil – and they say that removing it might cause it to disappear entirely.
The researchers believe however that the reflective and shiny material they can see crushed in the anvil is metallic hydrogen. One of the scientists, Isaac Silvera, said that when looking through a microscope at the sample it looked to be shiny and so “you can only believe [it] is a metal”.
But …
The Harvard researchers first posted their work to arXiv, a website that collects scientific studies before they are published through peer-reviewed journals, in October. At that point it attracted huge amounts of criticism from other scientists who argued that it was based on a mistake.
But the paper was published this week in the journal Science all the same, heralding a succession of headlines that claimed that humanity had made a huge breakthrough that could shed light on some of the central questions of the universe.
The pressure to publish on research professors – especially those at high end institutes such as these two at Harvard – may have caused them to not be complete in their work. After all, the phenomenon of duplicate discoveries is fairly well known, and even if they didn’t know of any competing teams, that doesn’t mean they aren’t out there.
The two wanted to “… publicise their “breakthrough event”, and that further experiments would shed more light.” It’s not a gamble to not check your results thoroughly, it’s really just bad science. I can understand them wanting to get the stick in the ground, marking the territory as their’s – but I fear they may end up on the Retraction Watch web site.
