Comments on: Nature’s Missing Crystal – Found It!

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 08:00:44 +0000

Cristina, I think the incident did lead to some some embarasment although he was perfectly happy to tell me about what happened. He will most certainly have checked the literature and acted on good faith having not found the structure mentioned in the literature searched. However, he is in one field and the original discovery was made in another, the two don’t tend to overlap much in everyday practice and perhaps the fact that the discovery was made in the late 1970s and was not in fact earth-shattering meant that it was not commonly cited since and so did not show up in a standard literature search.

Looking at it another way, it’s like teenage fashion victims today opting to get tattoos and pierce their bodies with safety pins and other objects and imagining that this doing so is something original without realising that (aside from the punk rock movement of the 1970s) that humans have adorned their bodies with piercings and tattoos in cultures stretching back millennia.

By: Cristina Gutierrez

Cristina Gutierrez — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 00:46:51 +0000

I find it quite interesting how he didn’t know that someone else had already invented the (10,3) structure. I thought when a discovery was made, that you are supposed to check to see if it is in fact a NEW discovery. Kind of embarrassing if you tell me.

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 07:39:58 +0000

You touch on an interesting point regarding the likes of Slashdot. If only there were an equivalent website on which researchers from all disciplines could announce their papers and be ranked according to novelty and value etc…

By: Mitch

Mitch — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 21:56:04 +0000

In many ways, the act of publishing itself is a method of cross-pollination, but being mentioned on slashdot will accomplish the same goal quickly. :p

I suppose, never underestimate the power of a press release!?

Mitch

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 18:19:24 +0000

Yes, indeed. I thought I'd mentioned that. There are more details in the SpectroscopyNOW article, of course. The structure he thought he was predicting is known as the (10,3)-a structure and was first described by A. F. Wells (Three Dimensional Nets and Polyhedra", Wiley (1977). I discussed this with Toshi and he emailed me details, which he had published on another site db

By: SEWilco

SEWilco — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:13:48 +0000

The oversight is not described here. What oversight was reported? Are there existing minerals with the specified structure? Was the described structure already described in another field?

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 15:16:47 +0000

Chad, Polymaths are a dying breed. I think Feynman was almost close, but I guess specialisation is the key to success in some sense these days and it’s almost impossible to have fingers in all the pies that are on the table now.

By: Chad Cloman

Chad Cloman — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 13:44:18 +0000

During one semester of my sophomore year in college, it seemed like we covered something by Euler in nearly every science/engineering class I took. That man was a multidisciplinary genius.