Doing time in Science jail

David Harris' Science Newsreports that charges of misconduct have resulted in the termination of Jan Hendrick Schon by Lucent Technologies:

The committee found Schön guilty of substituting data from one experiment for another, re-using the same data to represent multiple experiments, failure to keep systematic records of experiments, and destruction of samples, data and working devices. Schön was found to have acted intentionally or recklessly and without the knowledge of his co-authors.

This is of course disappointing for two independent reasons: (a) I have Lucent stock and (b) physicists are supposed to be beyond such things. This episode does underscore the fact that science - like most human activities - is a community based on trust. As this review of Steven Shapin's The Social History of Truth points out:

[Shapin] orients his study in opposition to some received views about science and scientific discourse. One is epistemological individualism--the official position of the British empiricists--according to which the "legitimate springs of empirical knowledge" are located, not in the discourse of groups of people, but "in the individual's sensory confrontation with the world" (202). On this view, the ideal scientist bases his evaluations of empirical claims as much as possible on his own observations and reasonings, instead of depending on the testimony and theorizing of others. Shapin argues, to the contrary, that scientists rely so heavily on the testimony of others whom they trust that we cannot understand the production of scientific truth unless we understand how trust is established and maintained, weakened and lost.

Trust is a social good that is not a universal constant between different societies. Studies of trust as a social phenomena indicate that the highest levels of social trusts are found in Northern European societies, which interestingly is where modern science developed, and may be one reason why science was stillborn in Greece, India and China.