This is the story of wunderkind physicist Jan Hendrik Sch#65533;n who faked the discovery of a new superconductor made from plastic. A star researcher at the world-renowned Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, he claimed to have stumbled across a powerful method for making carbon-based crystals into transistors, the switches found on computer chips. Had his experiments worked, they would have paved the way for huge advances in technology--computer chips that we could stick on a dress or eyewear, or even use to make electronic screens as thin and easy-to-fold as sheets of paper. But as other researchers tried to recreate Sch#65533;n's experiments, the scientific community learned that it had been duped. Why did so many top experts, including Nobel prize-winners, support Sch#65533;n? What led the major scientific journals to publish his work, and promote it with press releases? And what drove Sch#65533;n, by all accounts a mild-mannered, modest and obliging young man, to tell such outrageous lies?