engleski

Reflections on the Schön affair

In her feature article on the fraud perpetrated by Jan Hendrik Schön (May pp24–29), Eugenie Samuel Reich concludes that the fake data Schön generated at Bell Labs were designed primarily to meet the expectations of his peers. She is probably right, but the Schön case was by no means the first of its kind. A century ago the Piltdown fraud, in which medieval cranial fragments were matched with part of an orang-utan jaw bone, convinced British archaeologists and palaeontologists that early hominids developed on the South Downs. The scientific evidence was never fully accepted outside the British Empire, but it still took the UK's Natural History Museum 50 years to recognize the hoax. "Piltdown man" was created to meet the expectations of the British archaeological community, and hence the fraud succeeded.'Phenomenological classification of coauthors'is discussed.

authorship

Pismo (Letter to the Editor, 'Feedback') (Naslov promijenjen od strane urednika).