A paper claiming room temperature superconductivity from India! But is it faking data/mistake/extraordinary phenomenon?
The Big News
I was not active in steemit for a long period. Because I am really busy with work and other stuff. But I cannot stop posting this. Recently a research paper from IISc Bangalore in arXiv preprint came with very high claims. It was about superconductivity. I am by no means an expert in the field. But could not resist posting it. This paper reports room temperature superconductivity in a nanostructured solid composed of gold and silver nanocrystals. The paper title is Evidence for Superconductivity at Ambient Temperature and Pressure in Nanostructures written by Dev Kumar Thapa and Anshu Pandey.
Professor Anshu Pandey's page: http://sscu.iisc.ac.in/faculty/anshu-pandey/
But But!
The interesting thing is that someone in twitter found out discrepancies in their data. IISc is a very reputed institute in India and if this is a case of faking data this is going to be very very bad for the entire science community here in India. The twitter user Brian Skinner has posted his observations about data here in arXiv and posted it on twitter.
The issue
Brian Skinner found that two data series had "same noise" values (other than an offset value). Salute to his golden eyes.
See the blue and green dots. They are identical except an offset.
(Taken from here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.02929.pdf, Author: Brian Skinner)
This points out to the fact that either:
- The data is faked very carelessly
- something exceptional is going on!
- a mistake (which is also possible.)
Anyway Let us wait to see what really happened!
References:
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.08572.pdf (The paper)
[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.02929.pdf (Brian Skinner pointed out data discrepancy here)
Worth pointing out that this sort of thing is a good argument for including raw data in a well-defined format. Stuff like this would be (kinda) trivial to detect with open enough data.
Completely agree with your point @effofex. Yesterday I and my friend at our institute was discussing the same point.
Huh. Do you know what the consequences could be if the data was faked? Because sure, the people responsible will be discredited as scientists, but surely the institute won't suffer too much. Isn't the author of a paper more responsible for it than the institute he works at?
Yes this is serious. Of course, the authors are the responsible people than the institute itself in this issue (if it is data fabrication).
I read about this in Twitter yesterday. Waiting to know author's response to this.
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