#79 Sabine Hossenfelder’s Plagiarism, Sponsored by MagellanTV

Oct 082021

By Steven B. Krivit
March 28, 2022

On Oct. 2, 2021, Sabine Hossenfelder, a popularizer of science and a theoretical physicist, published a video episode for her monetized YouTube channel “Science Without the Gobbledygook” on the ethical shortcomings of how nuclear fusion is being sold.

The main focus of Hossenfelder’s 13-minute video was the power value discrepancies of two reactors, JET and ITER. She also focused on the distinction between reaction gain and reactor gain. In her video, she did not explain how she had figured out those values. That’s because she didn’t, I did.

My Research and Film

I had done all the heavy lifting to figure it out, verify it with experts, and even produce a 70-minute documentary film about it, released in April 2021, months before Hossenfelder published her video. My film is called “ITER, The Grand Illusion: A Forensic Investigation of Power Claims.”

My film was a summary of investigative journalism I had done on thermonuclear fusion for the previous five years. I’ve published more than 100 news articles on thermonuclear fusion and my work has been cited in the news media and in several books. Until I started that investigation, nobody outside of a small circle of scientists were aware that the JET and ITER power values had been misrepresented. The real power values for JET and ITER were deeply buried and did not appear in any news story, book, or Web page.

I had learned about the correct JET input power value in 2014 and the minimum required ITER input power value in 2017. I explained how I found out about the correct input power value for JET in my book Fusion Fiasco, published in 2016. I explained how I found out about the correct input power for ITER in October 2017. This brief article summarizes this.

Plagiarism

Hossenfelder took my 70-minute film, did a rather effective job of condensing it into a compact, 12-minute version, and presented her video as if she had uncovered and investigated the entire matter herself.

According to the University of Oxford, plagiarism is not just copying someone else’s words or images, it is also “presenting someone else’s work or ideas as your own, with or without their consent, by incorporating it into your work without full acknowledgement.” And that’s exactly what Sabine Hossenfelder did.

Cornell Law School has this to say: “Plagiarism is the act of taking a person’s original work and presenting it as if it was one’s own. Plagiarism is not illegal in the United States in most situations. Instead it is considered a violation of honor or ethics codes and can result in disciplinary action from a person’s school or workplace.”

Not only did Hossenfelder, without crediting me, wholesale copy my research and the facts I developed, but the narrative of her video is a condensed version of the narrative in my film, with nearly the same sequence. Almost all of the sources she used in her video were sources I had used in my film or news reports. After choosing from my film which of my content to copy, she or her staff located other URLs for that content and listed those as her sources in the footnotes to her video.

For the two segments of my film that she directly copied and pasted into her video, she wrote this in the footnotes to her video: “Footage at 11 mins 14 seconds from this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnikAFWDhNw which is worth watching in full length if you want to know more about the problem.” That’s right, in those notes to her video, she did not mention my name, the name of my film, or the name of my publication.

Attempt to Resolve

Initially, and diplomatically, I tried to contact Hossenfelder and ask her to respectfully attribute my work to her derivative work. She refused to respond to me directly, instead, directing two of her staff members to respond to my e-mails.

Eventually, per my request, she added my name and the name of my film to the notes in her video description. She and/or her staff also, after the fact, found URLs for the JET and ITER input power values and added those to the notes.

But none of that matters. Anybody watching her film gets the idea that she did the research, she figured it out, and she broke the story, as so many of her viewers assumed. She presented the information in the video as if she alone figured it out and did the research.

She Knew In Advance

On Aug. 19, 2021, eight weeks before Hossenfelder published her video, Hossenfelder had written in a New York Times book review that “figuring out how much energy actually gets used in fusion [experiments] is far from straightforward.”

Yes, it was hard to figure out. Those values were buried for decades.

I suppose I brought this situation on myself, not knowing that such predatory practices existed on YouTube. Before she published her video, I had written to her, on Aug. 24, 2021, to thank her for her book review. I applauded her criticism of Arthur Turrell, the book’s author, for not taking the “opportunity to clear up the widespread confusion” about the distinction between reactor power gain and plasma power gain. I told her that’s exactly what I have been doing for the last five years.

In my email to her, I suggested that she read another book recently published by Springer, by L.J. Reinders. It’s called Sun in a Bottle?… Pie in the Sky! The Wishful Thinking of Nuclear Fusion Energy. In his book, Reinders cited and summarized the results of my investigation into the ITER and the JET fusion reactor power discrepancies.

YouTube has no policy on plagiarism, let alone on the ethical indecency, per Oxford, of “presenting someone else’s work or ideas as your own.” But perhaps, with the money flowing for YouTube producers with big followings, this is just business-as-usual at YouTube, so content creators beware.