Every time I look into those I come away thinking that Occam's Razor would suggest a different explanation: the original characterization was, knowingly or not, incorrect. Patents so frequently fail to contain sufficient information to allow a practitioner skilled to in the appropriate arts to reproduce the claims that it seems more plausible that the disappearing polymorph stories should be reclassified as "someone was caught fibbing" stories. In the replication crisis, we don't assume that the problem is that something about the world has changed, we assume that the original was flawed, and we should do the same here.
It would be much more convincing if there were more cases that weren't economically significant. A strange property of chemistry that only comes up when money and lawyers are involved seems inherently suspicious.
alt Hacker News
Every time I look into those I come away thinking that Occam's Razor would suggest a different explanation: the original characterization was, knowingly or not, incorrect. Patents so frequently fail to contain sufficient information to allow a practitioner skilled to in the appropriate arts to reproduce the claims that it seems more plausible that the disappearing polymorph stories should be reclassified as "someone was caught fibbing" stories. In the replication crisis, we don't assume that the problem is that something about the world has changed, we assume that the original was flawed, and we should do the same here.
It would be much more convincing if there were more cases that weren't economically significant. A strange property of chemistry that only comes up when money and lawyers are involved seems inherently suspicious.