The man who almost faked his way to a Nobel Prize

Just for the record, the fact the man who invented the lithium-ion battery being named John B. Goodenough will never not be funny

“You are without a doubt the worst PhD holder I’ve ever heard of.” “But you have heard of me.”

I worked for Bell Labs and it was amazing! They would pay you a portion of the profits gained for any idea you came up with that streamlined any process or reduced a cost. Some of the things we were doing were insane. I was blown away watching them develop a way to gold plate glass fibers.

People at Bell labs were hired without the thought of inventing a specific product. They were hired to be creative and think about things that nobody thought of before and then tried to make these things. Bell labs are and will always be legendary in my books.

I'm sorry, someone named "John Be Good Enough" won a Nobel Prize? Reality needs better writers

Random story: at one point you show an image of Bednorz who won the Nobel prize for the discovery of superconductivity in ceramic materials. This reminded me of a talk he gave one time at our university, and I have to tell you I have never seen a guy so excited about a topic. He kept talking and talking and talking, showing you all the applications since the discovery all excited like a little kid. At some point his wife (who was in the audience) started to give him angry looks, and he said “my wife is indicating I should end this talk soon”, which didn’t keep him from continuing his talk for another 15 minutes. I think he must have exceeded his planned talk time by over half an hour 🤣 anyways, super fun dude and very excited, wish more people were like him

“He was intelligent and had a keen sensitivity to others’ results and expectations” 4:26 The entire story foreshadowed in one sentence!!!

This was great! I am quite interested in scientific fraud and more than a few people pointed me in your direction. Looking forward to watching more

This video felt like I went to the library, found a book that looked interesting, flipped through the first bit of it, and got interested enough to want to buy it Great work

I always ask myself: How many frauds are there that run around with a PhD and never get caught?

That "Because Johns are special people" gave me WHIPLASH. I was tasting the Jon Bois influence but that line and subsequent zoom out just gave me chills. I love how you incorporated that style and gave it your own influence, it's truly something special.

Great story telling of a sad event. The number of people in the story that I knew or worked with kind of blew my mind. Many fond memories of my years at Bell Labs.

FINALLY, someone who differentiates between "inventor" and "first to patent."

Further details, since I was curious: Bell Labs won their Oscar for their "multi-cellular high-frequency horn and receiver," their Grammy for "outstanding technical contributions to the recording field," and their now five(!) Emmys for, in order: their work on HDTV, their work on DVR, fiber-optic cables, the CCD you mentioned, and the .ISO file format.

"Humans have a history of occasionally making mistakes" might be one of the greatest understatements in history 😆

As I recall, Bell Labs common practice through the 80's (in research organizations) has support staff assigned to each [PhD] staff member. Later cost cutting greatly reduced the researcher/support-staff ratio. It would seem if Schön had a lab tech, even a part time lab tech, none of this "insanity" would have taken place.

Hendrick when submitting a paper: "UNLIMITED POWER!" Hendrick when caught red handed for research fraud: "Help me. I'm too weak."

John Goodenough after receiving his Nobel Prize not only at 97 years old but decades after the prize worthy feat: "Good enough"

Transistor?? I have one of those, and we love her very much

I've been working with electronics (on a surface level) my entire adult life, and roughly understood transistors. But the simplicity of how you explained it was a revelation to me. It's so obvious now, but for some reason I never thought through the actual mechanics of it. Funny enough, you didn't even fully explain it by the time it hit me. It was just the way you began describing it that made a light go off in my head and I had an epiphany about how they're used to amplify signals. They're just electromechanical relays sans the mechanical part. Well, thanks for that! Haha.