The silver lining is that the media hype probably got a lot of people interested in physics and materials science. Some of them will undoubtedly go on to make great discoveries and contributions to the field in the future.
He also featured in Time -
<a href="https://time.com/collection/time100-next-2021/5937727/ranga-dias/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://time.com/collection/time100-next-2021/5937727/ranga-...</a><p>And he falsely claimed that his company had funding from OpenAI and Spotify.
So here I'm learning that Nature published their paper, which claimed an absolutely world-changing breakthrough, after the lead authors had already had two papers retracted?<p>the Springer Nature Group has a profit margin of 26% on annual revenue of ~€1.7bn [0]. If they were keen to publish this paper, they could have afforded to send an expert to the lab to actually see the process for themselves.<p>But that's not the kind of thing you do if your core business model is to publish splashy headlines...<p>[0] <a href="https://group.springernature.com/gp/group/media/press-releases/springer-nature-releases-annual-progress-report/23572562" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://group.springernature.com/gp/group/media/press-releas...</a>
Found this bizarre: the authors response has a whole section that reads like an ad for MATLAB: <a href="https://twitter.com/dangaristo/status/1707165711427063902" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://twitter.com/dangaristo/status/1707165711427063902</a><p>Not sure what the point of that is, it almost sounds like ChatGPT
The disappointing part of this is the large parts of the population who will look at this and other recent cases (see: Francesca Gino) and think that "academia is broken" or "scientists can't be trusted". That narrative will even be amplified by many YouTubers and periodicals who were quick with those headlines. However, as soon as this work came out, multiple scientists voiced concerns, several even filed complaints with the journal. Those in the field even took steps to reproduce the work found in the paper. The fact that this error was caught and several were skeptical enough to comment is how the system should work. Arguing over results that are too good to be true, taking steps to try to reproduce it independently, and publicly taking it down is why science can be trusted. Research isn't going to be perfect every time but peer review and reproduction should weed out the less than credible.
Just this one? Only the beginning...! <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03544-w#change-history" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03544-w#change-hi...</a>