This is a user sandbox of
MattKapnick. You can use it for testing or practicing edits. This is not the sandbox where you should draft your assigned article for a dashboard.wikiedu.org course. To find the right sandbox for your assignment, visit your Dashboard course page and follow the Sandbox Draft link for your assigned article in the My Articles section. |
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Fixed: grammar errors, removed and replaced sentence about Beadel house
Atomic Lies: How One Physicist May Have Cheated in the Race to Find New Elements [1]
Lawrence Berkeley Lab concludes that evidence of element 118 was a fabrication [2]
California lab fires physicist over retracted finding [3]
Heavy-element fizzle laid to falsified data. (Heavy-Ion Physics) [4]
Heavy Suspicion. [5]
Fraud in science [6]
Final assignment: Family, friends and colleagues help complete late Pacific professor’s book [7]
Victor Ninov was born in Communist
Bulgaria in 1959.
[1] He grew up in the capital city of
Sofia.
[7] In the 1970s, when Victor was a teenager, he and his family left for
West Germany; they bounced around from house to house.
[1] Shortly after the move Victor's father went missing, and turned up dead 6 months later in the Bulgarian foothills due to causes unknown.
[1]
Victor Ninov attended Technical University of Darmstadt near Frankfurt, Germany. [1] [8] Here he distinguished himself as very capable physicist: he was particularly good at building scientific instruments and coding analysis programs for them. [1] [3] This landed him a job at the nearby German research center GSI (Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung) where he worked on his doctorate and postdoctoral work of creating new elements. [1] [9] For his expertise he was given sole control of the computer analysis program. [1] Here he became a rising star by co-discovering elements 110, 111, and 112 ( Darmstadtium, Roentgenium, and Copernicium respectively) by smashing heavy elements with protons in GSI's cyclotron (a type of particle accelerator) and analyzing the debre. [1] [3] These discoveries were made with the help of his addition of a gas separator to the particle accelerator to help filter out everything but the heavy elements they were looking for. He worked at Stanford for a time. [7] He was hired at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in 1996 as a world class expert for particle accelerator debre sensors, and analysis programs. [1]
While working at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) Victor Ninov and his team pursued a hypothesis that element 118 could be formed at relatively low energies by smashing Kr-86 and Pb-208 ions together. [4] [1] Ninov initially doubted the hypothesis he was pursuing; he is quoted in saying "We didn't know how many orders of magnitude he was wrong" of the scientist who created the hypothesis. [1] Victor, again, held sole control of the data analysis program, and he was the only one on the team that knew how to use it. [1] In 1999 Ninov and his team reported sightings of element 118, almost exactly as predicted, and a decay chain that also produced element 116. [1] [2] [3] [4] However, other laboratories were unable to reproduce the results. [5] Eager to prove their discovery, the team double checked their instruments, and tried again. [1] One more sighting was made by Ninov, but it was dismissed by a colleague, and a full formal investigation was spawned to get to the bottom of elements 118 and 116. [1] The original element 118 data was independently analysed, and in the original binary data, there was no indication of the presence of element 118 or 116. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] The investigation dragged on for a year, until it was concluded that "Ninov... intentionally misled his colleagues-and everyone else-by fabricating data". [5] Victor Ninov, who had been placed on leave, was fired. [1] [3] The rest of Ninov's team officially retracted their claims in 2002. [2] There was also an investigation conducted into Ninov's unsupervised science at GSI; it was found that "two sightings were spuriously created". [3] However, very perplexingly, these false flags were found amongst lots of real data that still supported that his co-discoveries were still legitimate. [3] It was the conclusion of the GSI investigation that "discovery of elements 111 and 112 still stands". [3] At minimum it is certain that Victor Ninov made a "wrongful claim" about elements 118 and 116. [2] The heavy elements 116 and 118 were discovered and verified in a joint nuclear research center in Dubna, Russia, and were observed contrary to LBNLs observations. [5] Victor Ninov maintains that he was innocent to this day. [1]
This fraud came as quite a shock to other scientists as Victor Ninov had previously regarded as a very respected physicist. [1] In the aftermath of the fraud it was troubling to many that so many co-authors on the papers about LBNL were none the wiser, to learn they had contributed to a false statement. [6] So, in a twist of fate, the falsifying of scientific data by Victor Ninov resulted in stricter guidelines being set for coauthors; these rules "clarify co-authors' roles and duties" and they are "requiring all coauthors to vouch for their contribution to published work". [6] [10] The American Physical Society has also called for increased ethical training and oversight at research institutions, and has sponsored several speakers in an effort to make the scientific community more comfortable and resilient to scientific fraud. [10]
Victor Ninov is still alive today, but is retired from physics. [7] He lives in California. [7] His wife, Caroline Cox, a former history professor University of the Pacific, died in 2014 of cancer. [7] They were married 29 years. [7] Victor helped finish her book, "Boy Soldiers of the American Revolution", and it was published postmortem. [7] He is an avid sailor, and pilots a four seater plane. [7]
This is a user sandbox of
MattKapnick. You can use it for testing or practicing edits. This is not the sandbox where you should draft your assigned article for a dashboard.wikiedu.org course. To find the right sandbox for your assignment, visit your Dashboard course page and follow the Sandbox Draft link for your assigned article in the My Articles section. |
~~~~
Fixed: grammar errors, removed and replaced sentence about Beadel house
Atomic Lies: How One Physicist May Have Cheated in the Race to Find New Elements [1]
Lawrence Berkeley Lab concludes that evidence of element 118 was a fabrication [2]
California lab fires physicist over retracted finding [3]
Heavy-element fizzle laid to falsified data. (Heavy-Ion Physics) [4]
Heavy Suspicion. [5]
Fraud in science [6]
Final assignment: Family, friends and colleagues help complete late Pacific professor’s book [7]
Victor Ninov was born in Communist
Bulgaria in 1959.
[1] He grew up in the capital city of
Sofia.
[7] In the 1970s, when Victor was a teenager, he and his family left for
West Germany; they bounced around from house to house.
[1] Shortly after the move Victor's father went missing, and turned up dead 6 months later in the Bulgarian foothills due to causes unknown.
[1]
Victor Ninov attended Technical University of Darmstadt near Frankfurt, Germany. [1] [8] Here he distinguished himself as very capable physicist: he was particularly good at building scientific instruments and coding analysis programs for them. [1] [3] This landed him a job at the nearby German research center GSI (Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung) where he worked on his doctorate and postdoctoral work of creating new elements. [1] [9] For his expertise he was given sole control of the computer analysis program. [1] Here he became a rising star by co-discovering elements 110, 111, and 112 ( Darmstadtium, Roentgenium, and Copernicium respectively) by smashing heavy elements with protons in GSI's cyclotron (a type of particle accelerator) and analyzing the debre. [1] [3] These discoveries were made with the help of his addition of a gas separator to the particle accelerator to help filter out everything but the heavy elements they were looking for. He worked at Stanford for a time. [7] He was hired at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in 1996 as a world class expert for particle accelerator debre sensors, and analysis programs. [1]
While working at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) Victor Ninov and his team pursued a hypothesis that element 118 could be formed at relatively low energies by smashing Kr-86 and Pb-208 ions together. [4] [1] Ninov initially doubted the hypothesis he was pursuing; he is quoted in saying "We didn't know how many orders of magnitude he was wrong" of the scientist who created the hypothesis. [1] Victor, again, held sole control of the data analysis program, and he was the only one on the team that knew how to use it. [1] In 1999 Ninov and his team reported sightings of element 118, almost exactly as predicted, and a decay chain that also produced element 116. [1] [2] [3] [4] However, other laboratories were unable to reproduce the results. [5] Eager to prove their discovery, the team double checked their instruments, and tried again. [1] One more sighting was made by Ninov, but it was dismissed by a colleague, and a full formal investigation was spawned to get to the bottom of elements 118 and 116. [1] The original element 118 data was independently analysed, and in the original binary data, there was no indication of the presence of element 118 or 116. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] The investigation dragged on for a year, until it was concluded that "Ninov... intentionally misled his colleagues-and everyone else-by fabricating data". [5] Victor Ninov, who had been placed on leave, was fired. [1] [3] The rest of Ninov's team officially retracted their claims in 2002. [2] There was also an investigation conducted into Ninov's unsupervised science at GSI; it was found that "two sightings were spuriously created". [3] However, very perplexingly, these false flags were found amongst lots of real data that still supported that his co-discoveries were still legitimate. [3] It was the conclusion of the GSI investigation that "discovery of elements 111 and 112 still stands". [3] At minimum it is certain that Victor Ninov made a "wrongful claim" about elements 118 and 116. [2] The heavy elements 116 and 118 were discovered and verified in a joint nuclear research center in Dubna, Russia, and were observed contrary to LBNLs observations. [5] Victor Ninov maintains that he was innocent to this day. [1]
This fraud came as quite a shock to other scientists as Victor Ninov had previously regarded as a very respected physicist. [1] In the aftermath of the fraud it was troubling to many that so many co-authors on the papers about LBNL were none the wiser, to learn they had contributed to a false statement. [6] So, in a twist of fate, the falsifying of scientific data by Victor Ninov resulted in stricter guidelines being set for coauthors; these rules "clarify co-authors' roles and duties" and they are "requiring all coauthors to vouch for their contribution to published work". [6] [10] The American Physical Society has also called for increased ethical training and oversight at research institutions, and has sponsored several speakers in an effort to make the scientific community more comfortable and resilient to scientific fraud. [10]
Victor Ninov is still alive today, but is retired from physics. [7] He lives in California. [7] His wife, Caroline Cox, a former history professor University of the Pacific, died in 2014 of cancer. [7] They were married 29 years. [7] Victor helped finish her book, "Boy Soldiers of the American Revolution", and it was published postmortem. [7] He is an avid sailor, and pilots a four seater plane. [7]