Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza tallies tenth retraction (2023)

retractionwatch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 84 posts

Re: Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza tallies tenth retraction (2023)

#31

Post by Karellen »

mjburgess wrote: post #21
somenameforme wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Einstein's discovery of relativity is something everybody takes for granted now, but think about how exceptionally ridiculous the notion that light travels at the same rate of speed from all perspectives is; or how the universe will bend over backwards, including having people 'advance through time' at different rates of speed or literally physically change the distance between things, in order to maintain this perce…

Einstein did not discover that the speed of light was fixed. This was a consequence of Maxwell's research on electromagnetism in the late 19th C. It is entirely reasonable for any physicist (indeed, Maxwell himself could've done it with enough time), to work through the consequences of a non-relativistic equation for the speed of light. This approach is routine in physics, and there's nothing in it that would appear…

> Einstein did not discover that the speed of light was fixed. This was a consequence of Maxwell's research

Maxwell certainly did discover that the speed of light was fixed.

But he did not discover that it was fixed for all observers. It was presumed to be fixed relative to some reference medium that permeated the universe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether

There were 40 years of experiments after Maxwell figured out the speed of light where people tried to show how the aether worked and how the Earth moved through it, before Einstein "discovered" the idea that the speed of light was fixed relative to all observers rather than relative to the universe.

Which is deeply weird, if you live in a universe where nothing like that has ever been discovered before.

Re: Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza tallies tenth retraction (2023)

#32

Post by roomey »

somenameforme wrote: post #20
nojs wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lucky for this guy https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1949/moniz/facts/

In many ways though, I think it's a strength that such a prize cannot be revoked, because it emphasizes the zeitgeist of a time. I think it can help provide not only some humility to us in a different era, but also perhaps help us learn more from the past. As an interesting factoid, lobotomy was practiced at all levels of society at the time. Even JFK's sister was secretly lobotomized [1]. It was covered up for years…

What a story, I never knew about this. Again and again these public families with public images doing the most toxic things behind closed doors. Thanks for sharing this.

Re: Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza tallies tenth retraction (2023)

#33

Post by mft_ »

mianos wrote: post #22
Aeolun wrote: post #13

How do you accidentally have 3 images that are exactly the same?

Only half joking, but have you ever had the issue on a Mac where you copy something and it randomly fails to copy, so when you paste, it pastes the previous copy? Easy to imagine, slack that it did not get seen. (I think the bug is at least 15 years old).

Seems to happen a lot when I'm pasting in/out of a browser; not sure if that's the same issue, or one further augmented by Firefox? :)

Re: Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza tallies tenth retraction (2023)

#34

Post by vmurthy »

nojs wrote: post #17
vmurthy wrote: post #7

One has to wonder if the Nobel prize was a mistake. Even if it was, no , a Nobel prize can't be revoked as per this[0] [0] https://www.nobelprize.org/frequently-asked-questions/#:~:te... .

Lucky for this guy https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1949/moniz/facts/

But Moniz's case isn’t a case of fraud , no? I’m not insinuating this case is fraud fyi

Re: Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza tallies tenth retraction (2023)

#35

Post by perihelions »

mjburgess wrote: post #21
somenameforme wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Einstein's discovery of relativity is something everybody takes for granted now, but think about how exceptionally ridiculous the notion that light travels at the same rate of speed from all perspectives is; or how the universe will bend over backwards, including having people 'advance through time' at different rates of speed or literally physically change the distance between things, in order to maintain this perce…

Einstein did not discover that the speed of light was fixed. This was a consequence of Maxwell's research on electromagnetism in the late 19th C. It is entirely reasonable for any physicist (indeed, Maxwell himself could've done it with enough time), to work through the consequences of a non-relativistic equation for the speed of light. This approach is routine in physics, and there's nothing in it that would appear…

- "Einstein did not discover that the speed of light was fixed. This was a consequence of Maxwell's research on electromagnetism in the late 19th C."

It's not enough, unless you explicitly insist that Maxwell's equations are invariant under coordinate transforms. This step is so obvious from the modern perspective that it's easy to overlook (the grandparent comment is insightful!) But pre-modern physicists thought it was the opposite which was intuitively obvious: that the constant "c" in Maxwell's equations implied the existence of a fixed frame in which solely those equations were valid. That Maxwell's equations should "obviously" transform in some different way in which c is additive, like the speed of sound.

Sure; the Lorentz coordinate transformation falls directly out of Maxwell's equations—if, only if, you add that particular coordinate-invariance condition.

Re: Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza tallies tenth retraction (2023)

#36

Post by passwordoops »

somenameforme wrote: post #18
ggm wrote: post #8

Worth remembering that Linus Pauling went off the deep end on Vitamin C. Not that he faked stuff, but that even very smart people get sucked into wierd science sometimes. So leaping from this, to Semanza is emperor's-new-clothes is pushing too far. If he's moved into a space where marginal behaviour around research is normalised thats really bad but it doesn't have to mean his Nobel wasn't warranted, that depends on…

Einstein's discovery of relativity is something everybody takes for granted now, but think about how exceptionally ridiculous the notion that light travels at the same rate of speed from all perspectives is; or how the universe will bend over backwards, including having people 'advance through time' at different rates of speed or literally physically change the distance between things, in order to maintain this perce…

I agree it's the scientists who take us to weird places that advance the needle (and something that's discouraged in academia, but that's a different conversation).

However there's a big difference between proposing something exceptionally ridiculous and fraud leading to retraction

Re: Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza tallies tenth retraction (2023)

#37

Post by passwordoops »

cm2187 wrote: post #23
mianos wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only half joking, but have you ever had the issue on a Mac where you copy something and it randomly fails to copy, so when you paste, it pastes the previous copy? Easy to imagine, slack that it did not get seen. (I think the bug is at least 15 years old).

Or if you have 20 files in a folder called IMG0887.jpg, IMG0897.jpg, etc, and you need to open them one after the other with an open file dialog, easy to pick the wrong one. A scientist isn't necessarily IT smart, particularly in medicine. Not saying it's what happened though.

Hence I'm hammering in the importance of good data handling and clearly identified file structure to the (chemistry) grad students working in the lab with me

Re: Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza tallies tenth retraction (2023)

#38

Post by aleph_minus_one »

pyrale wrote: post #15
ggm wrote: post #8

Worth remembering that Linus Pauling went off the deep end on Vitamin C. Not that he faked stuff, but that even very smart people get sucked into wierd science sometimes. So leaping from this, to Semanza is emperor's-new-clothes is pushing too far. If he's moved into a space where marginal behaviour around research is normalised thats really bad but it doesn't have to mean his Nobel wasn't warranted, that depends on…

It's a pretty common thing, too [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease

Concerning Nobel disease:

Couldn't is be that what makes (some) Nobel-prize-worthy discoveries possible is an openness with respect to "crazy" ideas, of which some small amount actually turn out to be right, and thus lead to Nobel prizes?

So, I think these Nobel prize winners just continue as before: thinking about and exploring "crazy" ideas that might have a huge impact if they turned out to be right. It's just that the next times, it will be the very common situation that these crazy ideas won't be right?

Re: Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza tallies tenth retraction (2023)

#39

Post by agos »

mianos wrote: post #22
Aeolun wrote: post #13

How do you accidentally have 3 images that are exactly the same?

Only half joking, but have you ever had the issue on a Mac where you copy something and it randomly fails to copy, so when you paste, it pastes the previous copy? Easy to imagine, slack that it did not get seen. (I think the bug is at least 15 years old).

wait it does not happen just to me? is it widespread? I thought I was going mad or my keyboard starting to break down!

Re: Nobel Prize winner Gregg Semenza tallies tenth retraction (2023)

#40

Post by mjburgess »

Karellen wrote: post #31
mjburgess wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Einstein did not discover that the speed of light was fixed. This was a consequence of Maxwell's research on electromagnetism in the late 19th C. It is entirely reasonable for any physicist (indeed, Maxwell himself could've done it with enough time), to work through the consequences of a non-relativistic equation for the speed of light. This approach is routine in physics, and there's nothing in it that would appear…

> Einstein did not discover that the speed of light was fixed. This was a consequence of Maxwell's research Maxwell certainly did discover that the speed of light was fixed. But he did not discover that it was fixed for all observers . It was presumed to be fixed relative to some reference medium that permeated the universe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether There were 40 years of experiments after Ma…

All you're saying is that it's Maxwell + Michelson–Morley (who discovered there was no aether) that we should thank, more than maxwell alone. That's true.

That is even moreso to my point that einstein did not just say, "what if crazy-unprecedented-idea? "

Add more names if you like, that's only further evidence of my view.

Post reply on HN