Usually I am not a big fan of Quora (it’s funny and all, but a bit excessive for my taste), but this post has stuck in my mind since yesterday.
It shows the case of an academic fraudster: after the wrongdoings of the physicist Jan Hendrik Schön were revealed, he was excluded from the academic community. Everything seems to be clear—the truth was restored, and the guilty was punished—yet something still bugs me.
The author describes Schön as a “wunderkind,” a prodigy, who, apparently, managed to amaze his peers even in his pre-academic years. Once inside Academia, he engaged in the most fast-thinking, super-efficient years of hard work, producing the best (at least, from the beginning) results and definitely matching all the expectations of being “young, gifted and ambitious.”
What could one anticipate for such a character? A Nobel? An academic school of his own, after the fastest tenure track and the highest H-index? Maybe. Or maybe not. Or even not at all: being under the constant pressure of his previous success (bogus or not, nobody can say for sure anymore), feeling that the days of quick achievements were left far behind, Schön chose the wrong path, starting to manipulate the data (absolutely unacceptable in each and every scientific community and certainly in physics), trying to produce as much “academic revenue” as possible. He remembered, of course, that “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that” and won’t stop: at least, not voluntarily.
Since some of Schön’s data were so blatantly and ridiculously faked, one could get the feeling that Schön almost wanted to be caught—a psychological phenomenon widely known amongst the psychiatric community, linked to Freud’s classical study, “Some Character Types Met with in Psycho-analytic Work,” where Freud addresses “criminality from a sense of guilt,” or the burden of a compromised mind.
And here is the question: was it right to expose Schön’s scientific crimes? Undoubtedly it was. But I can’t but think of the possibility of redemption for people like him—talented, neurotic, and overly confused: you cannot undo the wrongs yet you still can try to make an atonement. I am not sure, of course, if this is even possible, when a reputation so carefully built was ruined so staggeringly and the downfall was so quick, but I want to believe that some things might not be irreversible.
As for Schön, Google says, “at last report, he is working for an air conditioning company in Germany. He has been barred from working as a scientist.” Good to know that he’s still alive and, hopefully, well.
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