The Relative Longevity of Science Frauds

Monday, January 30th, 2006

What didn’t Feynman do? From The Relative Longevity of Science Frauds:

Hwang’s claims are far from the first fabrications in science. Nobel Physicist Richard Feynman made pertinent remarks on supposedly newly-found Maya documents that were publicized in the 1970s. They were quickly found to be fakes. Feynman had earlier translated (for fun, naturally) a section of a Maya astronomical almanac from the authentic Dresden Codex in which mathematical symbols denoted regularities of the sightings of the planet Venus. When the finding of a new Maya codex was announced, Feynman quickly saw it as a forgery. The arcane calculations for Venus were repeated from the Dresden Codex, and merely copied in a different style, that of the authentic Madrid Codex.

In other words, the forgery wasn’t very clever. “Out of the hundred thousand books originally made [by Mayans],” notes Feynman, “we get another fragment, and it has the same thing on it as the other [very few] fragments. It was obviously, again, one of these put-together things which had nothing original in it.”

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