Sunday, April 26, 2009

Plastic Fantastic

Seems that TV shows and books on the Hendrik Schon debacle are starting to creep in. When is Hollywood going to jump onto the bandwagon?

I mentioned earlier about a rather puzzling TV show that I thought was going to cover the Schon scandal, but went on a tangent into nanoland. Now comes a book dedicated to cover the whole incident in detail. It is a book by a science writer Eugenie Samuel Reich.

Has anyone read this? I would probably try to read it but I have so many things to catch up on right now that I won't get to this this much, much later. It would be interesting to see who she got access to, and how much of the Beasley's committee report was covered. So if you've read this, I'd be interested to hear what you have to say.

Zz.

2 comments:

Valerie said...

I'm reading Plastic Fantastic at the moment and it's a real pager turner. To be honest, I'm suprised just how engaging it actually is. It is meticulously researched -Eugenie interviewed well over a hundred scientists, journal editors, Hendrik Schoen's former colleagues, and contemporaries at university to understand what drove Schoen to fake his results and how such a fraud could have been allowed to happen and persist for so long. The one person she didn't manage to talk to was Hendrik Schoen himself, but I'm convinced that the book is better for that as it made the author dig deeper for insights. It's an utterly compelling read and one of the best physics books I've read in ages. Make time to read it!

Disclaimer - I'm an ex-colleague of Eugenie's. I thought she was crazy to leave her job to write the book but she's pulled it off brilliantly

Anonymous said...

Just finished reading Plastic Fantastic yesterday. It's extremely engaging and pretty well written. I finished it in 2 days and really liked it. Like Valerie mentioned it's amazingly well researched and you see many different perspectives into the story. I highly recommend it. The only thing that bugged me is there are a few spelling mistakes and typos which were somewhat annoying (e.g. silicone instead of silicon on occasion).