“Electron microscopes with Dr. Amélie Chloé Archambault.”
“No, I don’t think so. Next.”
“Valence bond theory. Graduate student: Daiyu Lin.”
“That could maybe be Bond_ValinceBond. I don’t remember her commenting on Dr. Kramer’s thread, though… no, the last time she posted, she was announcing a teaching position in Boston. Hopefully Harvard. Which is great. But not useful for us. Next one?”
He opened an abstract on atomic clocks for GPS systems. “Is Forster your handle?”
“Didn’t you say that keeping art isolated from work was good hygiene? I agreed with you. So, not Forster. I’m SnarkyQuark64.”
“Because quarks were discovered in nineteen sixty-four?”
“Obviously.”
“Clever.”
“Thanks. Who’s Dr. Kramer’s lackey for this GPS clock paper?”
They compared professional names with user handles for the GPS article, then for the next paper, the next, and on through a whole sequence ofnexts, but without success. The non-atomic, non-GPS clock on Ethan’s monitor had ticked almost to lunchtime before a relevant abstract appeared.
“Number seventeen: the hardness of random quantum circuits, with second-author Dr. Lethabo Swanepoel, on how random circuit sampling could allow quantum processors to perform tasks that are impossible for classical computers. Anything?”
Erin’s stomach rumbled. She ignored it. “Did Dr. Kramer publish this at Fermilab?”
“Yes.”
“Someone commented about the hardness of random quantum circuits on his post. Let me find it…”
Comment Deleted
“But why would she…damn. That was analmost.”
“Next?”
Quantum tunneling effects in negative differential resistance devices.
Superfluidity.
Orbital stability of electrons in atoms.
“No. Next.”
“This one’s with Dr. Laura-Jean Anders, about how a quantum computer created time crystals.” Ethan pressed his thumbs into his temples, then moved to close the abstract. “No, that’s just Ted Chiang’sAnxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedomwith citations. Next—”
“Wait.” Her hand shot out over his. “Time crystals?”
He highlighted the words for emphasis.
Her fingers skidded across her own screen now. “Someone mentioned time crystals in the thread. Look!”
DataDominatrix:Do you think he could’ve moved from Fermilab to SVLAC? I was doing preliminary research on time crystals in the Quantum group there about eight years ago. I had to take some unexpected medical leave, and by the time I got back, my supervisor had published a paper on the crystals and my job was eliminated. I was cited as a lab tech in the study, but that was it. All my research information was wiped from my computer. There wasn’t anything I could do. I remembered a lot about my data, though, since I’d spent so much time cleaning it. Some of his claims about my numbers weren’t conclusions I’d drawn—and I’m not actually sure that they were even my data sets in the paper. Not that I could prove anything.
But maybe Dr. Erin Monaghan and Dr. Ethan Meyer could.
“He didn’t just plagiarize her work. He falsified data!”
Almost giddy, she opened a private message with the user.
