SCIENTIFIC HONESTY AND QUANTUM COMPUTING'S LATEST THEORETICAL HURDLE

THE MAJORANA ANNOUNCEMENT
Delft University of Technology announced they'd generated MZMs in indium antimonide nanowires. The next year Microsoft, a company that wants to back topological quantum computing architecture, opened a research center on the school's campus.

Sounds great, right? A researcher from the University of Pittsburgh read about the advance in the journal Nature, a well-respected scientific journal. He and a partner in Australia had been doing similar work and asked for the raw data from the Delft group.

What they found was surprising. Some of the Delft paper didn't seem right and it seemed possible some graphs had been manipulated. Data that didn't support the conclusion had been excluded for no apparent reason, and processing all the data told a different story. The head of the Delft project looked at the data again and in 2021 asked Nature to retract the paper and published an apology.

According to an article in Quanta, an independent committee concluded that the paper wasn't deliberately fraudulent, but noted: "The authors had simply fooled themselves by zooming in only on the results that showed them what they hoped to see."