Abstract
Without suggesting a name, in 1971 Amnon Marinov and collaborators announced to have detected element 112 by bombarding a tungsten target with high-energy protons. The discovery claim was not accepted by specialists in the synthesis of superheavy elements who were unable to replicate the experiment. Nonetheless, Marinov and members of his group insisted that they had discovered the element. They later claimed to have found long-lived nuclides of element 122 in natural samples, a claim which was also not accepted. The other case described in the chapter is quite different in substance but also concerns a failed discovery claim. The announcement in 1999 that a research group in Berkeley had produced element 118 turned out to be based on false data, namely fraud committed by Viktor Ninov , a member of the group. The Ninov affair caused much alarm, not only in the scientific community but also generally. Element 118 was eventually synthesised, but only in 2016 was its existence officially approved.
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Notes
- 1.
Minute of meeting in Torino, August 2007, of the Inorganic Chemistry Division, IUPAC, see http://old.iupac.org/divisions/II/II_Torino07min.pdf.
- 2.
Cassiopeium, discovered by Auer von Welsbach in 1907, was for a period accepted by the German Atomic Weight Commission (but not by the International Commission) and it entered Bohr’s periodic table in the early 1920s. Only in 1949 did IUPAC abandon Cp as an accepted symbol for element 71. For the complex story of the element, see Kragh (1996).
- 3.
Inorganic Chemistry Division committee of IUPAC, minutes of meeting at Glasgow, 2009. https://www.iupac.org/fileadmin/user_upload/divisions/II/II_Glasgow09min.pdf.
- 4.
http://www.marinov-she-research.com/Super-Heavy-Elements-Research.html. In an interesting film placed on the internet called “Element 112, the Marinov Affair,” Marinov is presented as a modern version of Galileo or Bruno, a bold and visionary scientist who became the victim of a prejudicial community of established nuclear physicists. See http://www.marinov-she-research.com/A-Documentary-Film.html.
- 5.
In experimental high-energy physics the number of authors may count several thousand. A paper on the mass of the Higgs boson appearing in Physical Review Letters 114 (2015): 191803, lists no less than 5,154 authors! It is hard to imagine that all authors read the paper critically and attentively if at all.
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Kragh, H. (2018). Failed Discovery Claims. In: From Transuranic to Superheavy Elements. SpringerBriefs in History of Science and Technology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75813-8_4
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