You're just now feeling silly? As pointed by Nowhere Man...

Folks here have "got your number", Jerry...they have understood your "M.O." for quite some time now.

Jerry,
I was sending responses to your PM, however the third one bounced as your box was full. The gist of that one was that I did a search of the web site you mentioned (despite the broken link) and found everything as normal including the experimental position listing. I don't know what you or your "source" found suspicious.

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"I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." - William Thompson, 1st Baron Lord Kelvin

"If it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be, but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!" - Tweedledee

This isn't right. This isn't even wrong. - Wolfgang Pauli

Since Jerry is now back, I figured this thread should be bumped as well. So Jerry, we've gone two months, the new set of Nobel prizes has been awarded, and Wolfgang Ketterle still has his Nobel prize in physics. Any new rumors?

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"I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." - William Thompson, 1st Baron Lord Kelvin

"If it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be, but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!" - Tweedledee

This isn't right. This isn't even wrong. - Wolfgang Pauli

Well, he asked a very good question, which hasn't been answered: "I can't find any public documentation to support this claim: Have any U.S. prize winners been stripped of their prizes lately?"

I see this as very open-ended.

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I am Mugs, of the Alien clan of Usa, Nordamerica, a Terran, of Sol.

Perception isn't reality. It's merely an abstraction thereof, and quite often not a very good one at that.

I am human. Fully human.

It's not open ended. The door never opened. No-one has ever had a Nobel Prize revoked. Just go check their site.

Jerry claimed that an American Nobelist was about to be stripped of his prize because his work was not true. He never named the person in the thread back in August, but in a PM he told me that the person in question was Wolfgang Ketterle of MIT who was one of three physicists who won the 01 physics prize for creating the first Bose-Einstein condensate. He had a source, who I will not mention here for privacy's sake. In my opinion, however, that source is someone with an extreme case of sour grapes. The complaint that RAF, and I made back in August was that Jerry would drop innuendo, but not name names publicly.

My opinion, as a physicist, is that Ketterle's prize is based on solid physics and that Jerry's source was not feeding him good information.

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"I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." - William Thompson, 1st Baron Lord Kelvin

"If it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be, but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!" - Tweedledee

This isn't right. This isn't even wrong. - Wolfgang Pauli

I see that Jerry has now posted again over in ATM, so I figured that I'd bump this one more time. As I mentioned back in October, Jerry, we've gone through a Nobel season and Ketterle still has his Nobel and is still on the faculty at MIT. Any new rumors?

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"I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." - William Thompson, 1st Baron Lord Kelvin

"If it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be, but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!" - Tweedledee

This isn't right. This isn't even wrong. - Wolfgang Pauli

Is your friend still trusted?

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Ten + years ago Sook Jong Han challenge the results of Wieman & Cornell & Ketterle, and there has been precious little collaborative evidence from anywhere, other than Colorado - where the initial results were spectacularly tight...way too tight. No one has come close to duplicating the stunning 3d charts made by Cornell just before leaving on his honeymoon.

Han argued that the BE state is impossible to achieve. Han was a particle physcist at Los Alamos National laboratories. He was dismissed shortly after his challenge.

I have read the biographies and experimental descriptions leading up to the discovery, and it is clear Wieman & Cornell were under a great deal of personal and professional pressure at the time of 'discovery' both were expected to make major presentations in twe weeks time.

They had just made a major modification to their chamber, adding a second magnetic source to prevent atomic 'leakage' through the bottom. It is easy to see how this 'gravity correction' could have introduced either heat energy or a wave function that became the signature of their 'too good to be true' results.

Finally, I have contacted MIT, and they stand by the original research. They have told me much of the original research has been duplicated. I have not found any papers that claim the process is as simple, or the results as conclusive, asl the original Wieman and Cornell paper, but I would love to be corrected.

A 1971 Nobel prize was awarded in biology for a bee study, where honey bee's were reported to return to the hive and do a dance that included coded information about the distance and direct of a source of nectur. Almost thirty years later, this study is highly suspect, even dismissed by many in the field.

It will be worth keeping an eye on Bose Einstein condensation research - are the results of Cornell and Wieman holding up?

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jwj

It's ok not to know. We should try harder to find out.

It took me less than 2 minutes to find other examples. You might want to look at the University of Innsbruck and Utrecht University and the Oxford BEC group and from there: Lev P. Pitaevskii and S. Stringari, Bose–Einstein Condensation, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2003. Mark Kasevich's heads Yale's effort and there is also groups at Institut d'Optique (headed by Alain Aspect) and Ecole Normale Supérieure (EMS) in France. There are quite a few more results out there that I left off as I suspect you would dismiss anything coming from Colorado, (either JILA or the university) or Ketterle's group at MIT.

From the results of those other groups, I'd say so. Especially as a fermionic condensate was produced in 2003 (although again, you may dismiss this as the experiment was performed at the UC at Boulder, although it wansn't by either Cornell or Wieman)

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Some try to tell me, thoughts they cannot defend,... - Moody Blues.

Jerry, you have been misinformed. There is no Nobel prize in biology. The closest is the Medicine & Physiology prize. In 1971 that went to Earl Sutherland "for his discoveries concerning "the mechanisms of the action of hormones." The Chemistry prize went to Gerhard Herzberg "for his contributions to the knowledge of electronic structure and geometry of molecules, particularly free radicals." The other prizes are in physics, literature, peace, and economics all of which seem unlikely categories for work on honeybees. Maybe the work is suspect (and I have heard so myself) but if it won a Nobel it wasn't in 71.

As to another group working on BEC's here's a link to Brian DeMarco's group at Illinois. Yes, he's originally out of the Colorado bunch, but unless you can come up with concrete reasons why his continued work is suspect I'd drop this topic.

Edit to add. Ah, it was 1973 in Medicine. Karl von Frisch shared the prize with Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen "for their discoveries concerning organization and elicitation of individual and social behaviour patterns." Lorenz and Tinbergen's work had nothing to do with bees. We'll see what happens with von Frisch's. Given that he died in 1982 it would be hard to see what he could do.

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"I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." - William Thompson, 1st Baron Lord Kelvin

"If it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be, but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!" - Tweedledee

This isn't right. This isn't even wrong. - Wolfgang Pauli

Kasevich left Yale in 2002; he's back at Stanford. (In case anyone tries to follow up on this.)

BEC investigation has become pretty widespread, as has investigation of Fermi degenerate gases. Yes, the results are holding up.

http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/18/6/8

and the long list of links at the end

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"I have a cunning plan that cannot fail."
S. Baldrick

Thanks for the update swansont. I just did a quick check and didn't go into it in any depth.

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Some try to tell me, thoughts they cannot defend,... - Moody Blues.

The 1923 Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded to Sir Frederick Banting and John MacLeod for the extraction of insulin. MacLeod was supervising Banting's work with MacLeod's student Charles Best. Later MacLeod brought chemist James Collip into the team, who actually achieved the critical breakthrough in separating pure insulin. Banting and MacLeod fell out. Later on being awarded the prize, Banting halved his with Best, making it clear he did this because he considered MacLeod's contribution less important than Best's. MacLeod then shared his prize with Collip. History now generally remembers Banting and Best. I read a re-evaluation which suggested that Banting's gesture was a rather clever way of cementing his own status, diverting attention from his own minimal contribution, and Collip's crucial one.

One Nobel Prize winner who did doctor his data in non-scientific fashion for his Nobel cited work was Robert Millikan (Physics, 1923). His famous oil-drop experiment, where oil-drops with charges of small integral numbers of electrons, 1 or 2 or 3 so, are held from falling against gravity by an electric field, thus enabling their charge to calculated, and the charge on an electron deduced from the quantisation. He selectively removed experimental results inconsistent with quantized charge, putting those ones down to error. Luckily, he seems to have been right, so history has not judged him too harshly. One weakness of the scientific paradigm is that it can be difficult to distinguish experimental error from falsification of the hypothesis...

Not involving a Nobel Prize winner, Eddington's famous "confirmation of relativity" by the observation of the solar eclipse in 1919 is another famous experiment where the truth is that the experimental data was fudged. The observations were in fact too hazy to tell, but Eddington discarded the inconvenient observations and got his confirmation. Again, he was fortunate enough to be right.

Sticking to the two physics and astronomy cases both Millikan and Eddington's results were subject to reproduction, validation, and verification. If subsequent experiments and observations had not shown that they were right their results would have been tossed onto the trash heap. And yet, despite the apparently somewhat dodgy nature of the original results, Millikan's Nobel prize was not revoked and given to the first person to do a "good" experiment. Eddington, likewise, is remembered for his observation as well.

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"I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." - William Thompson, 1st Baron Lord Kelvin

"If it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be, but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!" - Tweedledee

This isn't right. This isn't even wrong. - Wolfgang Pauli

Further, re Eddington: while the data were not good enough to "rule GR in, and rule Newton out", they were certainly consistent with the GR predictions.

As the observations had not been done before, there was the possibility that the results would have been strongly inconsistent with GR (10" ± 2", say).

I have again looked through the data presented, and I have still not seen the level of precision, or rather the volume of condensed atoms, building nice little tunnels like the very first set of data presented by Cornell & Co. This is atypical of the analytical process: Development of methodology and analytical procedures should reduce the error bars and tighten the curves. I can't find this in the data.

I would say the jury is still out, but by definition, all scientific discovery is always tested, always subject to critical review. If the prizes Eddington and Millikan are tainted to any degree by pencil pushing, this should be preached to students as openly as the virtues of what they produced.
I will not bother them about this issue, but I will point out to Science the volume of evidence running contrary to Supernovae Ia theory, and the difficulting Middleditch and others are having getting alternative theories published.

Peer review appears to be a poor safeguard process. In my opinion it has the potential to throw out the baby-with-the-bath-water, but provides little protection against dry labbing...as long as the data are consistent with peer expectations.

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jwj

It's ok not to know. We should try harder to find out.

Another Nobel year, another year of no evidence.

Still can't produce it, Jerry? You so enjoy challenging mainstream thought. What happened when you challenged your trusted friend's claim that "U.S. Nobel Prize winners had fabricated data and were about to be defrocked"?

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I'm sorry 101101001, but what was the point in resurecting this thread just to try to goad Jerry back into this debate? The last post was in December. I think he's dropped his claim. Why are you trying to make him take it back up now, just because it's Nobel time?

I'm by no means defending posters who make claims without factual base, or refuse to identify sources for their arguments. But is it necessary to antagonize?

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