This is the story of the man behind the
most remarkable discovery. One of the greatest minds the world of
physics had seen for years. We were used to joke that this guy is
either going to Stockholm or he's going to jail.
It seemed that Hendrik Schon had been so far ahead of his rivals
for a very simple reason. This is the Nobel museum in Stockholm
Sweden. It's a surprisingly small building, and it's not actually where they give out the awards. That would be the
Stockholm concert hall. But it is the public face of the nobel
foundation and the only comprehensive showcase of all 597 prizes
that have been given out to 950 winners since the very first ceremony was held
all the way back in 1901. Alfred Nobel, better known as the
inventor of dynamite was an absurdly wealthy swedish businessman who died in
1895. In his will he laid out his wishes to
establish a yearly prize fund for the greatest human achievements
in five categories: Physics, chemistry medicine, literature and world peace. You can make the case, and many already have, that these categories are a bit arbitrary and leave certain
obvious fields unrepresented. Well these were the
ones in his will so that's just how it is. Unless you're the
Swedish national bank and then you can just declare a new prize in economics in
1968 and everyone will be a little bit
annoyed at you. The Nobel prize isn't the end-all be-all of human achievement
plenty of other awards exist to celebrate the fields not covered by the
six categories not to mention the thousands of
deserving nominations that don't go on to win. But there's some sort of innate
satisfaction that comes from having this universally respected institution that
can take a snapshot of our progress as a species year after year. In 1901 the first award in physics went to one guy
who happened to discover something he called x-rays, and five years ago a team
of thousands measured gravitational waves from the
collision of two black holes one point three billion years old.
Jan Hendrik Schon never won a Nobel prize. In fact it's impossible to know if
Hendrik Schon was even nominated. Nominations for the
prizes are kept secret with only nominations older than 50 years
being publicly listed. The most up-to-date version of the
archive only includes nominations as recent as 1966 and even for just the first 65 years of the prize's existence that's a total of
22,240 nominations. If Hendrik were to have
been nominated it most likely would have been in 2001 or 2002
which means we won't know for sure for another 32 years.
Of course this video isn't about a Nobel prize. In September of 2002,
one month before the winners are traditionally announced, Jan Hendrik
Schon is fired from his job. A little less than
two years later he'll lose his PhD. This is the story of
the most blatant and egregious case of academic fraud in
all of modern physics. Jan Hendrik Schon was born in august of 1970 in northwestern Germany As a young adult he attended the
university of Konstanz on the German Swiss border,
and in 1993 he received the equivalent of a combination bachelor's and master's
degree in the field of physics, with a specialization in electronics. As is common after graduation Hendrik was offered to work on a PHD which he would
eventually graduate with in 1997. Konstanz is a well-respected
institution and slackers who are just looking for a fancy piece of paper don't
last long. As a student Hendrik was seen as a solid worker but by no means as a
genius. He was intelligent and had a keen
sensitivity to other's results and expectations,
but he was not brilliantly creative. When it came down to it he would follow
textbooks to the letter. He was quiet, contemplative, and when
faced with a confrontation or disagreement he wouldn't put up much of
a fuss. He was not the ambitious mind you'd
normally associate with other famous innovators of science.
This hardly paints the picture of a man who would take the academic world
by storm in five short years. So let me be clear:
He got lucky. He got absurdly lucky. The reason Hendrik got any attention at
all is because he just so happened to be at the right places,
at the right times, with just the right people. We're gonna talk about what his
work was eventually but before we do it's necessary to establish some
historical context. I think you'll find that Hendrik
fits the statistical profile of a Nobel prize winner disturbingly well.
With 597 prizes and 950 total winners you have a massive amount of data that
can provide some truly fascinating insights into our technological
breakthroughs of the last century. Take this 2010 study
for instance: This trend shows you how academic dominance shifted from europe
to the US over time. Turns out when you spend more
of your GDP on research funding you tend to get more Nobel prizes.
But also because post-world war ii many of the most successful German scientists
were poached by the US government to run agencies like NASA and head up
departments at universities. So what I'm gathering is that if you're
planning on winning a Nobel any time soon you should: A.
Be born educated in Germany and B. Work in the United states. Guess who
checks both of those boxes. What about age? Hendrik would have been
31 in 2002 and not a single category has an average
winner's age of less than 50. There's no way he would have been
considered that early into his career right? Like he wasn't even five years away from being done his PhD. Well, there are some
exceptions that nudge this into the realm of possibility.
Only three people have ever won in their 20s: Two for peace...one for physics. This dot right here is Sir William
Lawrence Bragg, winner of the 1915 prize for his work on x-ray crystallography.
He was 25. To put that into perspective if right out of high school you got a
bachelor's a master's and a PhD in the standard 4, 2, 4 year cycles,
without taking any breaks, you'd be 27. Of course it would be
misleading if I didn't mention that he was awarded alongside his father: William
Henry Bragg, Who was literally a fellow of the royal
society by that point which is like the equivalent of being
knighted, for being smart. Not to take away from Bragg jr's impressive later
career but let's just let's call this one an outlier. The second youngest
winner for physics is actually a four-way tie at age...wow! Look at that! 31 That's pretty interesting. That tie is
held by... in chronological order: Werner Heisenberg...yes "that" Heisenberg. Paul Dirac, Carl D. Anderson and Tsung Dao-Lee, so clearly a Nobel at age 31 is within the realm of possibility right?
Unfortunately it's not that cut and dry. The real question is how long did it
take between their prize-winning work and their actual award? The Nobel
foundation is notorious for belatedly giving out awards on the time scale of
decades. The record from what I was able to find was a wait of
55 years for Francis Peyton Rous' breakthrough in cancer research.
Recently the awards have been so retroactive that the record for the
oldest laureate has been broken in back to back years,
with Arthur Ashkin at 96 and John B. Goodenough at 97. So what about our young winners?
Heisenberg had a three-year wait. Dirac, five years. Anderson three years and
let's throw in Bragg jr who also had a brisk two-year wait. Now
compare this to the average wait time across physics, chemistry and medicine: 15 years. Just because the average is high
doesn't mean exceptions can't happen. We just saw five solid examples of people
doing their prize-winning work in their late 20s. Wait sorry did I forget one? Oh yeah, Lee.
Zero years. He got the award the same year he published.
There's no minimum waiting period. As long as the scientific community views
your results as significant and innovative,
you're up for consideration Hendrik's publications first gained significant
traction in early 2000s and ramped up considerably throughout 2001. He wasn't
just making headlines for a bunch of nerds,
he was making headlines in the New York Times, so him getting the award in 2002
is well within the realm of possibility. Of course he wouldn't be getting it
alone Hendrik wasn't a lone wolf and contrary
to what we grew up learning science is rarely pushed forward by lone
visionaries. The da vinci's the galileos the newtons, even the einstein's.
Unfortunately the structure of the Nobel prizes encourages a false perception.
In the 21st century science is a far more collaborative endeavor.
Controversially they refuse to give out awards posthumously leading to
situations where key contributors who happen to have passed away are left as
nothing more than footnotes in the history books.
And of course awards can only be given out to one, two,
or three individuals. Never more than three. This inevitably leads to some
difficult and controversial choices as the years go on, as deciding how credit
should be shared and between whom is hotly debated.
Literature has almost exclusively been awarded to a single person but the
sciences have overwhelmingly been awarded to groups of two and three
as the decades have marched on. So yeah Hendrik wouldn't be getting sole credit.
He'd be sharing it with these two: Jan Hendrik Schon:
The wonder kid, the man with the magic touch. Then you have Christian ,Kloc
the chemist. Finally the one who lends the whole group,
legitimacy. Bertram Batlogg. The supervisor.
the trusted name. These three would have been a shoe-in for the 2002 prize.
After all they were co-authors on more than 70 of Hendrik's early papers.
Now obviously the elephant in the room here is that you know the ending to this
story. I already told you he gets caught. Surely
the Nobel committee would know better than to nominate someone who would later
come out as a fraudster. But the Nobel committees,
although we like to think of them as infallible,
are still made up of just six, typically swedish,
humans...and humans have a history of *occasionally*,
making mistakes. Take Enrico Fermi's prize from 1938.
Now Fermi quite deservingly is remembered as a giant of the field.
He created the first nuclear reactor, theorized the neutrino,
and wound up having an entire class of particles named after him. But his nobel
prize, awarded for the creation of what we now
call plutonium, turned out to be a mistake. He hadn't made plutonium at all,
he actually demonstrated nuclear fission. His "new" element was actually a
combination of smaller elements like barium and krypton.
You also have Johannes Fibijer's win in 1926 for medicine.
When his theory that ringworms were causing cancer in rats was found to be
incorrect. It was actually a lack of vitamin A that
was causing the cancer. Of course these two are rather benign
examples. The 1949 prize for medicine was awarded
to Antonio Egaz Moniz. Widely known as the father of the
lobotomy, a procedure that was often administered without consent of the
patient, and is now illegal in most countries. The
Nobel committee is not without fault, and a premature award for falsified work
would be far from the ceremonies most controversial.
Oh wow you hear that? It's the audience participation round!
I've prepared some graphs of my own and you, the audience, have to fill in the
blanks! I went and manually did a control-F
search on the Wikipedia entry for every nobel laureate. All 950.
I did that. I hated it. It sucked. And I recorded how many
times a certain word appeared on their pages. Can you guess what word
Francis Crick, Winston Churchill and William Shockley,
all have in common? If you guessed pizza! You'd be wrong.....the word isssssssss eugenics!!!
Haha yikes alright moving on. I searched all the nobel laureates and recorded the
most common first names. What do you think the top
five most common first names for a nobel laureate are? Feel free to pause and take a guess. Here's a hint um..it's probably a name...
a white guy would have. In fifth place we have Richard, with a grand total of fifteen. We have a near tie for third and fourth
between Paul and William depending on whether you think it's fair to count
Bragg senior and Bragg jr as different Williams.
In second place we have Robert pulling ahead in the 1990s.
And yes i counted Bob Dylan because Robert is his birth name.
Now the one you've all been waiting for, we get a new laureate with this name
approximately once every three years, for a grand total of 31......John's Because John's are special people. You remember how I mentioned Hendrik just happened to be at the right place at the
right time? That's because in the final year of his
PhD thesis his supervisor offered him an internship that would change his life
forever. So where was this internship? Well I've got a question for you.
What university do you think has the record for the most nobel prize winning
alumni, postdocs, and professors. Go ahead...name a
school. Better yet, name three schools. I
guarantee you one of them breaks the top three. Top of the list with a commanding lead
is Harvard. Makes sense, it's well known for a reason.
The only one even in the same galaxy as harvard,
we have the university of cambridge, then a little further down we have berkeley.
Going further down than that the spread becomes way more dense.
We've got chicago, mit, columbia, stanford, caltech, oxford, princeton, yale, all of the
other famous names that you grew up hearing as the dream schools for
protagonists in high school dramas. Now I have a much trickier question for
you. Ignoring all universities, ignoring all colleges,
all publicly funded government institutions.
What commercial research lab do you think has the most nobel prizes?
That means which for profit, owned by a big business, lab
whose job it is to make money? I'm willing to bet 95 percent of you
have no idea. Assuming you haven't looked at the
section titles, please don't do that i'm trying to be dramatic. There's a reason why all the top spots are universities.
Universities are where passionate researchers go to study the questions
that no business wants answered. If it's not a product,
investors aren't going to fund it. Nobel prizes are awarded to celebrate
the massive strides humanity makes into the unknown, and the unknown
isn't exactly something you can package up and sell at a Best buy. There is one
major exception to the rule though, One place where the best and brightest
minds were paid a salary to do research with no clear financial
payoff. This... ...is bell labs These days its full title is Nokia Bell
Labs but it's gone by several other names and just as many owners throughout its history. Bell Labs Innovations. AT&T Bell
Laboratories. and first and foremost: Bell Telephone
laboratories. You may be thinking wait does does that
mean...? Yeah Bell Telephone labs was named after none other than Alexander Graham
Bell. The inventorBZZZZZZZthe first man to patent, the telephone. That's a whole scandal on its own but probably best left for
another time. He founded the american bell telephone
company in 1877 and through a bunch of convoluted business decisions to drive
down their tax rate eventually came to be known as American
telephone and telegraph. You know it as AT&T, which went on to
found bell labs in 1925 as its research and development branch.
After the telephone Alexander Graham Bell himself actually had very limited
involvement in the technology giant he gave birth to,
and eventually fucked off to Nova Scotia to mess around with hydrofoils, solar
panels, and....eugenics! Yep. Yep. Now as its many name changes suggest Bell labs very quickly grew beyond the
narrow focus of telephones, after all when your parent company
controls almost all of the telephone lines for the entirety of the united
states and canada, and is the largest technological
monopoly the world has ever seen and was only brought down by the largest
anti-trust lawsuit ever administered by the US department of justice,
you tend to have a lot of money to throw at R&D.
15 employees of Bell labs have won a combined 9 Nobel prizes. 8 in physics 1 in chemistry. To put that in context
of the 213 laureates who've won for physics, 6.6 percent
have some sort of tie to Bell labs There's even a bit of a rounding error
depending on how you count John Bardeen, who is one of only four
people in history to win two nobel prizes. These
achievements range from math-intensive theoretical models to fundamental
inventions that dragged us into the 21st century.
Did you know that it was two Bell labs employees who recorded the first
evidence of the Big Bang. And you can thank these two for the
invention of the CCD sensor, the first ever digital photo sensor that was
essential to the creation of digital cameras.
Of course as I've already said multiple times the Nobel prizes fall short due to
their focus on the natural sciences and often under represent engineering
and computer science. I'd argue that many of Bell labs most
famous inventions, the ones you're most likely to recognize,
are the ones that didn't win the Nobel prize.
C, C++, and UNIX? They're all invented here. Stereo sound. Bell labs. The decibel unit? Named after their founder. Solar cells,
cell phone towers, the laser! Okay not actually the very
very first laser, but Ali Javan proposed and helped build the now iconic red
helium neon laser. I've left a ton of important milestones
out particularly in the realm of telecom and signal processing. The techniques
they invented back in the telephone days have just continued to be scaled up into
the era of fiber optics. and there are a large part of why your
internet is measured in megabytes per second,
and not kilobytes. Bell labs had become such a powerhouse of invention that by
1999, Bell labs was applying for more than six
patents a day and earning as many as four!
There was, no joke, a digital patent clock in the front lobby of its new jersey HQ
that kept ticking up day by day. You know what? Here's every award they've ever won
just all on screen None of these are jokes.
Like they've literally won an Oscar, a Grammy and three technology Emmys. All of this is to say is that if Bell labs claimed
they discovered something new Academia listened. I've left one invention for last though
because it's central to telling the rest of our story.
Bell labs first ever Nobel went to three men John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley Wait where the **** where do I recognize that name from oh yeah okay yeah i should
have, i should have known, i should have known!
It was in 1956 for the world-changing invention...
of the transistor. Their Nobel was a little belated, by almost a decade
actually, but it was quickly becoming clear that the transistor
had transformed the way we as a society were going to function.
You've almost certainly heard the word before: transistor.
But what is it? What does it do? Well, its most basic definition is "a
three terminal device used to amplify or switch electronic
signals" which I imagine doesn't...doesn't clear much up. So
think of a two terminal device like a light bulb!
You hook it up to a battery, complete the circuit, now electrons can
flow in and out of the bulb, heating up the filament, and producing
light. Easy! But what if we wanted to switch the flow
on and off? We want to add in a valve. A third terminal that can shut the flow of
electrons on and off. Of course if it's a light bulb
we're talking about just add a light switch.
A simple mechanical solution but what if you're making a wi-fi router?
Like if you wanted to send digital ones and zeros at gigabit speeds?
Are you really going to flick that switch a billion times a second?
See a mechanical solution isn't going to cut it here we need something
way way faster, and that's where the transistor comes in.
It's a device that turns off depending on whether the voltage you hook up
is positive or negative. If current is flowing then that's a 1.
If current is blocked then that's a 0. Without the transistor you can't add or
subtract, Without the transistor you can't
multiply or divide you don't have RAM, you don't have CPU,s you don't even have
the video you're watching right now. It is literally the most widely produced
invention in the history of our species. Not the wheel, not the spear, we've made
13... ...sextillion of these bad boys! The modern
world would not exist without transistors.
And it all started at bell labs In 1965 Gordon Moore made his iconic
prediction: That the number of transistors that can
fit on a chip would double approximately every two years which in turn would lead to a doubling of computing power. His informal "law" has remained
astonishingly accurate for the past 70 years.
Thanks...to Silicon. You see Silicon is one of the group IV elements,
which makes it a semiconductor. It sits right at the tipping point of the
conductor/insulator spectrum and a small push from a voltage will
turn it on and off in the blink of an eye.
The very first transistor was not made of silicon, it was actually made of
germanium. Both elements have their advantages and
disadvantages but there's a key reason why silicon
makes up 99.9% of all transistors produced since the 1950's. It's cost
effective, it scales well to mass production, and
there is decades of infrastructure that has gone into foundries,
clean rooms, R&D and even trade deals, but...there is an end in sight to Moore's law.
At a certain point shrinking your transistors down stops being feasible.
You're working on the scale of individual atoms of silicon and with so
many atoms packed so tightly, the heating would fry your CPU. Silicon
just has a fundamental barrier at the nanoscale. So what do we do?
Rebooting the entire microelectronics industry with a new material
is just unfeasible. It would have to be thousands of times cheaper to justify
the change over. With no loss in performance. The silicon
transistor fundamentally altered how the human race communicates, and it
shapes the global economy to this day, When Moore's law fails and it will the
economic ramifications will be immense. But in the year 2000 something amazing
happened An unknown german postdoc had unlocked a secret... ...that could have saved Moore's law. By the time the 90s rolled around
Bertram Batlogg was one of the most highly cited physicists
in the world. He was 4th in fact, out of a study of 1120.
With second and third place going to two other Bell labs co-workers because
of course it did. At the beginning of our story he was the head of the solid state
physics and material research division at the bell labs HQ in Murray hill.
Basically the most pure physics-y department in the whole
company. More than anything he was an expert on super conductivity.
That's the effect when you freeze material near to absolute zero
and its conductivity becomes well...super There's so many subtopics in physics
that the field comes and goes in fads. A breakthrough emerges everyone scrambles to get in on the action ...people gradually begin to realize
they've exhausted all of its potential and drop off,
usually within the span of a decade. Superconductors were one of those fads
and it dominated the late 80s and early 90s. The holy grail
was finding what you'd call a high T superconductor.
As phenomenal as superconductors were they'd never be useful commercially
because any money you'd save on power consumption would be wasted on cryostats to keep them refrigerated. To this day no one has ever found a room
temperature superconductor, and the field is now left to the true diehards.
Researchers at Bell labs had historically been afforded a lot more
freedom than the average scientist in the private sector,
but Batlogg, even with his reputation had to financially justify his research.
And so he pivoted in a new direction. After discussions with Bob Laudise, a
senior director who would sadly pass away in 1998,
the two of them came up with an idea: Organic
Crystal semiconductors. AKA plastic transistors. The word organic has varying
meanings, when it comes to food we tend to think
pesticide free, but when it comes to biologists and
especially physicists, it means only one thing: Carbon. Silicon's next door neighbor. But it's even more versatile when it comes
to bonding with other elements and it's particularly good at forming
infinitely long repeating chains called polymers. Which in turn make up plastics. Thing is plastics are generally made up of
massively chaotic tangles of carbon chains and rings.
An electron floating through all that not going to be easy.
They are, with the occasional exceptions: insulators.
Batlogg and Laudise hypothesized that if you take some of those organic molecules
but grow them into large, ordered, neat and tidy crystals,
electrons would have less to bump into and their conductivity would
dramatically improve. This made some intuitive sense. Silicon
is grown in massive ordered crystals so why not organics? Even to physicists
though crystal growth is thought of as somewhat of a black magic. You tinker
around with different air pressures, gas combinations, humidities and
temperatures until you land on a recipe that works.
But even with all that hassle the advantage is the crystal growth is
something you can do with a beaker of chemicals at your
desk. Growing silicon in mass scale quantities is expensive,
requires massive foundries and thousand degree temperatures.
Organics was worth giving a shot. Christian Kloc had a decade of
experience in crystal growth when he got recruited
into Batlogg's research group in 1996 and he set to work refining his
technique of growing large pristine crystals.
But neither Batlogg nor Kloc had any experience doing semi-conductor
measurements. There was one missing piece of the team
left to fill and so they reached out to Kloc's old lab at the university of
Konstanz, that happened to be run by Hendrik's
PhD supervisor. Huh. Lucky for Hendrik. Wrong! He was even luckier than that! His supervisor recommended two other
students before him but they had prior engagements.
And that was how Hendrik found himself. With an internship at one of the world's
most prestigious research labs. Hendrick would spend January to May of
1997 in new jersey, after which he went back
to Konstanz to finish his PhD. His internship had gone well and he
returned to bell labs in the September of 1998, after spending most of the year waiting for a visa. The difficulty with the sort
of work that Batlogg's group was doing is that for the majority of organic
crystals you're not going to see anything worth making a fuss over. Unexciting data that suggests "hey this specific crystal
might be a dead end" well that's necessary to the scientific process
even if it's not going to turn many heads. There's no shame in boring science
but it can be massively discouraging. Between the start of his internship up
until his eventual return as a postdoc
Hendrik struggled to get any results they were publishable, with some papers
being outright rejected and others that were simply unremarkable.
But this dry spell wouldn't last forever. In february of 2000 he'd finally done it.
Hendrik had done what had been considered impossible
up to that point. He'd found an organic crystal: pentacene,
with a conductivity that rivaled silicon. Not only that, he managed to use
pentacene to make two important building blocks of computer
circuits. First he made a transistor where the on/off current ratio was 10 to
the 8, a phenomenal result! He then used two transistors to make an
inverter. If your input is high, your output is low. If it's low then it
goes high. No matter how you looked at it this was
an indisputable breakthrough. This was leagues ahead of anyone else's work with
organic crystals but Hendrik had already gone ahead and made functional
circuits out of it. After a frustrating start Hendrik had
found his footing in the cutthroat world of academia.
This would have been a huge relief to Hendrik. By december of 2000 he had been
upgraded from a temporary postdoc to a full-time salaried member of the
technical staff. At Bell labs it was exceedingly rare for
a postdoc to be offered a full-time job once the two-year term was up.
Take it from Doug Natelson. At one point in my time there I shared a small
office with three other postdocs. Only one of the four of us got an offer to
stay as an MTS, and that's probably higher than the
average rate. One former Bell postdoc who had hoped to get a permanent job in the
exact same period as Schon Told me that publications strong enough
to apply for professorships at good universities were not necessarily enough
to get hired at Bell labs in this period. Just like in academia, at Bell labs it
was publish.... or perish...Hendrik...
chose the first option. What is a peer-reviewed study? Like I
know you sort of know what it is, we know what means
science, but what is it exactly? Journals are private companies owned by
traditional book publishers or subsidized by universities and science
foundations. The journals themselves don't do
research. Scientists from relevant fields send in manuscripts according to the
guidelines set out by the journals. The journals employ editors who have
backgrounds in the scientific fields. They do a first screening of papers
which filters out the bulk of submissions,
and the ones they think are interesting and worthy of publishing they then send
out to more experienced professionals in the field,
working at universities or similar labs. This is where the peer in "peer review"
comes from. The reviewers don't work for the journal.
They're working for free and anonymously by writing valuable comments and
critiques that they then send back to the editors, who then relay those back
to the original researchers for changes. This stressful tennis match
goes back and forth for a few weeks to a couple months and the paper either gets
published... or it gets rejected. Journals serve an
important and necessary function by sharing scientific advancements with the
rest of the world under a consistent set of standards.
Publishing is not a quick process and nor is it an easy one.
It's absolutely not a perfect system though, don't get me wrong.
At the end of the day journals are still a business, which is why you usually need
to shell out $15 a paper if you don't attend or work for
a university. With that in mind let's pull up
Hendrik's output. For the purposes of this video Scopus has the best analysis
tools and it's especially accurate for anything post 1992, which
most of Hendrik's work occurred after that. Scopus lists 143 documents
attributed to Jan Hendrik Schon. Of those 143, 104 are standard
articles: what you think of when you hear the words peer-reviewed study.
7 of them are conference papers: if you're going to present at a conference
you usually submit a written version of your presentation as well.
One of them is a review which isn't original research but rather a
compilation that summarizes the state of the art in the field.
Another 31 are what we call an erratum. A fancy word for correction. We don't need to be looking at those because every single
one is just a retraction notice. To be clear if 22
percent of your career history is corrections, something has gone
terribly wrong. The first publication ever to feature
Hendrik as an author was during his PHD work in Konstanz,
when he was working on materials for solar cells. To this day it only has 34
citations and it didn't get its first one until two years after it was
published. I gave it a read. It's fine. Like I
don't know man...like it's it's not especially interesting. That's
not the worst thing in the world though. Plenty of people get PHDs on obscure
subjects. Your PHD is meant to show that you can conduct
independent research not make you a celebrity.
As you can see here the closer he got to the end of his PHD the more papers he
started publishing, but nothing particularly
earth-shattering. Even after he began working for Bell labs full-time
he still put out some papers with his old group in germany and
bingo bango bongo you can see that he maintained a steady pace, but the larger
scientific community still wasn't paying attention. These green columns account for 29 of those 104 articles i mentioned,
so the remaining 69 were all produced at Bell labs
seen here in blue. Huh. That's odd. Is that really all of them?
We still have 63 papers left are you trying to tell me that he put them
all out in two years oh oh no.........oh no In 2001 on average he was putting out one
paper every...eight....days. I need you to
understand that i do laundry less frequently than that. In december of
2001 he put out seven papers, which is almost two per week. The fact he was putting out this many papers
was enough to raise some eyebrows but it went beyond just his pace...
he was in the big leagues. Much like how there's a pecking order to traditional
news outlets the same can be said for scientific journals.
A good rule of thumb is that if a journal's name is one noun...
it's probably a big deal. Nature and Science are two of the oldest journals
still publishing today. Dating back to the late 1800s. Nature
being based in the UK and Science in the US. Historically they
both had a bigger emphasis on biology papers but by the 1990s both journals
were making an effort to attract more physicists.
Who would you rather publish with? Solar energy materials and solar cells?
Or Science? I bring this up because Nature and Science are notoriously hard
to get into. To anyone in research a single one would
be a career milestone. Hendrik had done it 16 times and he was
barely in his 30s. How had he done it? When it comes to the
"big two" plenty of well-researched and thorough papers still get rejected.
Although framed like non-profits both journals generate significant revenue
from ads. It's in their best interest to publish only the most
exciting and novel discoveries. Not only do you need to meet quality control but
your research can't just be incremental. It needs to push the field forward in a
major way. And let me tell you no one in physics
was doing anything half as exciting, as Hendrik was. His paper on pentacene transistors appeared in Science and it quickly
caught the attention of the solid state physics community.
By 2002 it had been cited 194 times putting it within the top 0.01 percent
of all physics papers of the year 2000. That might not sound like a lot
especially when we're used to seeing numbers in the millions for
retweets and subscriber counts but think about it like this:
Each of those citations is from an original piece of research
carried out by teams of people that took months, maybe even years to carry out,
write up, and then also get through the journal review process.
Hendrik had broken down the organics barrier. There was now a viable
semiconductor to rival silicon and every lab in the country wanted in
on the action. To this day this is still Hendrik's most cited paper and
he took advantage of the hype to pump out several more papers on whatever
organic crystal his buddy Kloc had been playing with that week. But
Hendrik's seemed to recognize that swapping out pentascene for a new
organic crystal was going to get old at some point and the
community would lose interest. So he went several steps beyond he had
invented the world's first organic superconductor. Not just
that a high T superconductor. By high T we mean about
52 kelvin, so you know not room temp but compared
to zero kelvin that that is tropical. Thanks to one man organics have gone
from insulators with questionable utility, to viable
semiconductors, after which it completely skipped over
conductors and hopped into the realm of super conductivity!!!
This was as one researcher described it like turning
an apple into an orange. At one point a colleague told Batlogg:
You're going to put chemists out of a job, and Batlogg didn't deny it.
Hendrik went wild with super connectivity. It seemed like every new
crystal he touched had untapped potential no one had seen
before. He didn't stop there though. Not long after he published a paper on
the quantum hall effect. The quantum hall effect is an obscure phenomenon where
the resistivity climbs in a discrete staircase effect, like you can
see here. It's observed only in temperatures close to absolute zero
because you've removed all the thermal noise from the system and you're quite
literally observing the flow of individual electrons.
Again by demonstrating it in organics Hendrik had claimed to another first
for physics. When Hendrik signed on to Bell labs
Batlogg was already getting up in years. By the turn of the century he opted to
take a professorship at his alma mater the Swiss institute for technology.
Batlogg had been the trio's resident expert on super connectivity and without
his mentor to go to bat for him at conferences,
Hendrik had to diversify his work. He'd already mastered transistors and
superconductors had apparently been a cakewalk. What other flashy
areas could he dip his toes into? Well uh... Here he is inventing the world's first
and only organically driven laser. His second most
cited paper. Do you understand now? Do you understand how batshit this man's output was? He was a god. On their own:
transistors, superconductors, lasers, and the quantum
hall effect all won Nobel prizes sometimes multiple. Over a span of two years Hendrik released cover after cover of
the greatest hits of physics and his signature hook was doing them
with organics. After Batlogg had left Bell labs for good
Hendrik continued to work on the crystals provided to him by Kloc but began
collaborating with some chemists in france as well.
But it was his collaboration with Bell labs chemist Zhenan bao which would prove to be his boldest, but also final performance. On paper you
can just make transistors smaller and smaller,
pack more and more into the same space and computing power should
keep increasing. But in reality silicon can't be miniaturized
past a certain point. Power density doesn't scale down
alongside the transistor so you're still pumping the same number of watts per
unit area, and with your transistors packed so
tightly you get current leakage and overheating.
It means at our current pace with silicon Moore's law is going to fail.
But is there another way? What if instead of taking a piece of bulk material and
shrinking that down you could instead build a transistor
from the ground up? Maybe even atom by atom? Could we make a molecular transistor? This would be hundreds of
times smaller than anything that's been done of silicon.
It would be on the level of individual electron hopping.
On paper this is the true final barrier for Moore's law. And in october of 2001 it looked like
Hendrik and his partner Zhenan Bao, had actually
done it. But is it Nobel prize worthy? That's the
real question right? In truth i'd argue that even without the
crown jewel of his molecular transistor Hendrik was well on his way
to a Nobel prize but it would be nice if we could back that up with something
more concrete. It's one thing to boast about citations but
citations don't pay the bills. In july 2000 along with Batlogg and Kloc he
shared a ten thousand dollar industrial award at the international conference of synthetic materials.
In october of 2001 they shared again the Braunschweig award for a hundred thousand DEM After Batlogg moved into his professor
role in Zurich, Hendrik began to emerge from his mentor's shadow.
Science mentioned his molecular transistor as part of their breakthrough
of the year for 2001. At the materials research society spring
meeting in San francisco he accepted the outstanding young
investigator award a $5000 prize. He made MIT's list of innovators
under 35. The soft-spoken Schon recalls being very
surprised by how well his molecular transistors worked.
Yeah I bet he was. In december of 2001 he traveled to Berlin to receive the
Otto Klung Weberbank prize for 50 000 DEM. The man handing him that
novelty oversized check? That's Horst Stormer who at the time was
Bell lab's most recent Nobel laureate He got his for the discovery of the
fractional quantum hall effect an effect Hendrik had just recently
demonstrated in organics. Turns out Horst Stormer had won the same prize as Hendrik in 1985 and later won his nobel prize in 1998.
The parallels between the two were pretty apparent with a german headline
reading "tipped for a nobel prize" Stormer is even quoted as telling
Hendrik: "welcome to the club". It's hard to trace rumors 20 years after
the fact but if i had to guess where the buzz
around Hendrik winning the Nobel came from...
I would guess here. In 2002 it seemed like Hendrik was considering leaving
Bell labs behind. As well as being under consideration for
a professorship at Princeton he was near to getting an offer from the Max Planck
institute back in Germany. Hendrik would have been the youngest
person ever to receive a full research directorship there.
It would later come out that Hendrik had been chosen as the winner of the
William L Mcmillan prize, worth $2500, which is given out by the
university of Illinois to a physicist within five years of finishing their PHD.
Hendrik had been on the shortlist for 2001 but they opted for someone else
since his results had yet to be replicated.
But a year later the committee reasoned that even if half of his work turned out
to be wrong he was still ahead of the runner-up
candidate. Hendrik would never receive that prize letter.
In May of 2002 the contest had been put on hold.
That same month an editor from Nature had sent him an email asking for a
clarification on what appeared to be a simple mix-up.
They just needed to know why these two graphs.....
looked so similar..... Except this was no mix-up..... It looks like bell labs had a
whistleblower.
Very interesting, eagerly awaiting the next parts.
This was a great video! At the beginning I didn't like how the intro was too long and you never got to the point. But 10 min in I had just accepted that this was going full Vsauce with the tangents, with you analyzing the man's whole career. Still, it was very enjoyable, I'm surprised you have so little subscribers.
Nice video, although brevity is the soul of wit (bit on the long side!).
In over 40 minutes, the video hasn't even touched upon the fraud perpetrated by Schön. I guess we have to wait for the next episode to get anything substantial?
Almost half of the video is spent on the hypothetical case of Schön being nominated for the Nobel prize. This, as narrated in the video, won't be known for another 30 years. Yet much effort is invested in painting Nobel prize winners in a very negative light.
The context is important. People nowadays don’t appreciate a tale.
Great script, engaging animations/visuals.
Screw the TL;DR meth junkies. Keep up the good work mate.
Cheers.
I had heard of this guy, but mainly because my friend's PhD advisor (Paul McEuen) was the guy who reported the pervasive evidence of duplicated data to editors at Nature/Science. (McEuen wasn't the first to find duplicated graphs/data claiming to represent different things in Schoen -- someone had found one example right beforehand, but he and a colleague were the ones who uncovered and reported the widespread fraud in his data.)
This was so goo thank you for this , I’m eagerly waiting for part 2
God....the number of times I had to watch docus about him in my lab classes.......
Seriously awesome work, earned yourself a subscriber.