Physics and Pixie Dust

Abstract

For many years, historians of the Re naissance have lauded the value of forg eries and fakes. Counterfeit documents, passed off as real, offer invaluable clues about the wider culture in which they were made. They iHuminate subtle, taken-for-granted assumptions and habits of the time; after all, forgers must have had particular ideas in mind about what counted as genuine when crafting their fakes. Anthony Grafton, the distinguished Princeton historian, has gone even further. In his 1990 book, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship, Grafton argues that much of what we recognize as scholarship in the humanities today?entire fields such as literary criticism, jurisprudence, the history of ideas, religion, art and more?matured thanks to a constant back-and-forth engagement with frauds and forgeries. Those fields took form by honing esoteric techniques for scmtinizing documents and works of art, perpetually improving clever ways to sort authentic wheat from forged chaff. A kind of arms race ensued: As methods for detecting forgeries improved, forgers grew more sophisticated in designing fakes, and so on down through the ages. What could that possibly have to do with modern science? A great deal more than we might suspect. Just in the past few years, the scientific world has been rocked by a series of high-profile frauds. Within the physical sciences, accusations arose in 2002 of data rigging in a search for exotic nuclei at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The curious story of Igor and Grichka Bogdanov broke that same year: Twin theoretical physicists working in France, they were widely suspected of having succeed ed in getting nonsense articles through peer review at major physics journals. Then it was the biologists' turn. Late in 2005, South Korean researcher Hwang Woo-Suk was accused of having fabricated the data on which at least two of his articles in Science about stem cells and