Put a hold on the super batteries and transmission lines.
They’re all happening, but not by this route, and not as soon as we’d like.
A physicist whose burgeoning career has been rocked by accusations of plagiarism and professional misconduct has now had his biggest discoveryinvalidated by the journal that published the research.
In March, Ranga Dias and his team made the electrifying claim that they had identified a room-temperature superconductor—a discovery that, if true, would have been a step toward revolutionizing energy grids, battery technology, computer processors and a host of other electrical systems by making them work more efficiently.
Instead, after months of public criticism from other physicists, a written requestfrom eight of the study’s 11 authors and an internal investigation of its own, the journal Nature on Tuesday retracted the paper.
“These concerns are credible, substantial and remain unresolved,” a notice now posted alongside the paper states. Dias and two other authors didn’t say whether they agree with the retraction.
Dias, who led the research at the University of Rochester, told The Wall Street Journal in September that he “never engaged in the fabrication, manipulation, or misrepresentation of data in any of my research endeavors.”
In the now-retracted paper, Dias and his team said they observed superconducting behavior in the rare-earth metal lutetium when mixed with hydrogen and nitrogen. Superconductivity—the unusual ability of some materials to pass electrical current without a loss of energy—is seen only at impractically low temperatures, and often also requires very high pressures.
Dias’s team purportedly showed superconducting behavior at about 70 degrees Fahrenheit. They named the material “reddmatter” because, they said, it transformed from bright blue to shiny red as it was pressurized. The name was also a wink at the “red matter” substance that formed black holes in the 2009 Star Trek movie.
Scientists at once raised doubts about the new work.
The paper’s lead author, Ranga Dias, already had one paper retracted at the time. A TechCrunch+ investigation later that month revealed that Dias had falsely claimed the company he founded was backed by big-name investors, including Sam Altman, Daniel Ek and Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures.
Then in August, another of Dias’s papers was retracted, and in September, eight of the 11 authors on the March paper asked for Nature to retract the most recent one.
Now that paper has been retracted, too, over concerns “regarding the reliability” of data in it. “An investigation by the journal and post-publication review have concluded that these concerns are credible, substantial and remain unresolved,” theretraction notice reads.
At first, the material described in the Nature paper published in March was cautiously heralded as a breakthrough. Scientists were hopeful, but also circumspect. Dias’s name was already enmeshed in controversy. Once experts began to dig into the details, they found graphs and charts that didn’t jibe with the data or the methods listed in the paper.
Retractions are part and parcel to the scientific process, but they’re also something of a black mark on the researcher’s curriculum vitae. Science depends on peers picking apart other scientists’ claims.
Usually that happens quietly at the peer-review stage, before it becomes a more official part of the scientific record. But occasionally, problems slip through the process undetected. Sometimes they’re oversights that can be quickly corrected and disclosed. Other times, the concerns are more vexing.
In their letter to Nature requesting a retraction, Dias’s co-authors claimed that he “has not acted in good faith in regard to the preparation and submission of the manuscript.” The group also listed their concerns.
Now with the retraction a reality, the odds of researchers discovering a room-temperature superconductor are looking even longer. Never say never, but probably best not to get our hopes up next year.