This paper has been withdrawn by Lauren WeissAAAS Science explains:
[Submitted on 31 Mar 2023 (v1), last revised 7 Apr 2023 (this version, v2)]
The Kepler Giant Planet Search. I: A Decade of Kepler Planet Host Radial Velocities from W. M. Keck Observatory ...Comments: It has come to my attention that there are significant concerns about the author list of this manuscript. It is very important to me that I honor everyone's contribution to this work appropriately. Accordingly, I am revisiting the author list, with the goal of setting a standard for authorship that fairly acknowledges everyone's contribution. -- LMW
Within 2 weeks after a preprint was posted to arXiv on 31 March, outrage erupted on Twitter and multiple co-authors requested their names be removed. The issue wasn’t the science, which focused on the detection of exoplanets, but its authorship. To the dismay of many astronomers, Geoff Marcy was listed as the third of 16 authors.Okay, an online gossip site published a character assassination, but why would that stop a paper on extraterrestial planets?Marcy was once a prominent astronomer at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, known for leading efforts to search for planets in other solar systems, and he was key to the formation of a multi-investigator project called the Kepler Giant Planet Search (KGPS) that gathered the data behind the recent preprint. In 2015, BuzzFeed News published a bombshell story reporting details of a university investigation
Even if Marcy was guilty of some bad behavior ten years, I do not see what that has to do with publishing an astronomy research paper.
Lawrence M. Krauss has the full story. Weiss was a grad student of Marcy, but probably not the chief villain here.
History is replete with harpies and assholes... who accomplished many many things. Shocking, I know. But a fact none the less. It often takes a lot of daring and ego to break through the determined barriers of convention and dogma which have always been the gate keepers of the smug establishment, and this usually comes at some sort of individual cost, with womanizing being quite common if somewhat low on that list of character flaws.
ReplyDeleteIf you want discovery, there is always a cost.
Best you be mindful of it.
'Male aggression and lust are the energizing factors in culture. They are men’s tools of survival in the pagan vastness of female nature.' ~ Camille Paglia.