In light of all the recent cases of plagiarism is the scientific community, Fëanor says that scientists, being human, as as prone to skullduggery as anyone else.

Skullduggery began early. That much vaunted astronomer Ptolemy is credited with a superb cycle of observations and experimentation to validate his geocentric theory of the universe. Although the theory was supplanted by the Copernican heliocentric one, Ptolemy’s scientific credibility was never doubted. According to Grant, 20^th century astronomers began to study Ptolemy’s data and reports. Ptolemy worked in Alexandria, but his observations would fit better had they been made in Rhodes. It turned out that Hipparchus, an astronomer preceding him by a couple of centuries, had made those observations - from Rhodes. Ptolemy was passing off Hipparchus’s results as his own, having copied them from records in the great Library at Alexandria. Grant continues:

The clincher came when the modern researchers calculated the exact time of the autumnal equinox in the year AD 132. Ptolemy recorded that he had observed it very carefully at 2pm on September 25; in fact, the equinox occurred that year at 9:54am on September 24. Ptolemy was attempting to prove the accuracy of the determination Hipparchus had made of the length of the year; using as his base a record Hipparchus had made of observing the moment of equinox in 146 BC, 278 years earlier, Ptolemy simply multiplied Hipparchus’s figure for the year’s length by 278. Unfortunately for Ptolemy, Hipparchus’s figure was slightly off, hence the 28 hour disparity in AD 132.