Does anyone know what became of Jan Hendrik Schön ?

[rbj]

in case you wonder who Jan Hendrik Schön is, you can check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Hendrik_Schön .

where is Schön today?

after reading that his Ph.D. was yanked in 2004, is there any web article that mentions what happened to him. where did he end up? what does he now do for a living? despite his misbehavior (in which he has paid for dearly), i would think that he still has value as a physicist.

it's just a curiousity.

 

[zoobyshoe]

despite his misbehavior (in which he has paid for dearly), i would think that he still has value as a physicist.

I've never heard of him before this. However, the description given is clearly of a con-man. Whatever price he's paid wouldn't have cured him of the impulse to fool people. There's no point is trying to employ him in physics anywhere because you couldn't be sure of a word he said. Everything he did would have to be meticulously monitored. Why bother?

There was a similar case a couple years back where a guy was found to have been pulling dates for early man fossils off the top of his head and claiming they were the results of radio-carbon dating. This gave him some fame because the dates he gave changed the prevailing notions about the distributions of populations. Some one checked his dates with a further radio-carbon test and found the dates he'd given were fiction. One of the skulls he said was thousands of years old turned out to be 200 years old. When asked to repeat his test in front of witnesses it soon became clear he didn't even know how to operate the equipment. As a side scheme he had been secretly selling off his employers specimens to collectors.
http://skepdic.com/protsch.html


So, no. People like that should not be let back into the field of study in any capacity.