I had a depressing day yestoday after reading a news from APS News.  I used
to take pride of being a sientist for being one of the trustworthy souls.
But the fraud defeated my confidence.  I need some education and
psychological treatment  by my coleagues.  Should I jump into Tennessee
river and kill myself?

        Here are excerpts from the article.


        ____________________________________

        Several chemical elements have been withdrawn as evidence mounts
that the experiments reporting their discovery had been faked, according to
an article by Martin Bridge on the latest issue of American Physical
Society News:

        "It started last spring with elements 118 and 116, whose
'discovery' in 1998 at Berkeley had been reported in Physical Review
Letters.  But when other labs could not reproduce the results, internal
investigation revealed that the lead author on the paper might have
manufactured the evidence, and the paper was withdrawn, taking the two
elements with it.  Subsequently, it was alleged that the same person had
faked earlier experiments reporting the discovery of elements 110 and 112
at the GSI laboratory in Germany.

        "That was just the begining.  For years the Particle Data Group at
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory has been keeping close tabs on the properties
of elementary particles, but stimulated by these events they turned their
attention to the chemical  elements.  In a report issued last week, they
conclude that there is no basis for believing in seven of the transuranic
elements, which have atomic number beyond 92, and fully 18 of the so-called
naturally occurring elements probably don't exist either.

        "Particularly hard hit have been the rare earth elements. ... even
some well known elements are threatened with extinction.  Potentially the
most serious is silicon, only recently thought to be the most abundant of
all the elements on Earth. 'Imagine what this will do to the semiconductor
industry when they find out that they named their valley after a fictional
element.  Silicon comes from silly con, which just means ridiculous fraud.'

        "But if silicon and the other elements don't exist, what is the
true composition of all the materials thought to contain them?  The
Berkeley group believes it knows.  "Most likely they're all different forms
of carbon,' the spokesperson said."



***************************************
Dr. Ling Jun Wang
Professor of Physics
Department of Physics, Geology and Astronomy
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Chattanooga, TN 37403
Phone/Fax: 423-755-5248
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