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Comment by gnode | Hacker News Reader

I don't think they meant it was fraud, just that it's sensationalist drivel. It's choosing a way to interpret results for the sake of sounding impressive, rather than improving understanding.

Choosing a temperature in order to say "this will last as long as the universe's current age", or finding ways to count extra dimensions is the behaviour of marketeers, not academics.

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And yet, I pulled those claims out of the paper, which I linked. Are you suggesting Peter G. Kazansky, a research professor with over two decades of experience in optics, does not count as an academic? Or are you saying the paper doesn't make those claims? Or are you saying the paper also isn't a real academic paper and just marketeer noise?

(I'm not quoting the other authors, who are of course also distinguished scholars :-))

The complaint here appears specifically to be a lamentation that academics are behaving this way, so in attempting to prove their priors you're only strengthening the argument. Your tone seems to be adversarial, so I'm guessing that's not your goal...

"The paper isn't a real academic paper and itself also marketeer noise" is one of the options I've outlined as a debate position. But let's be clear: we started by calling research "phony" over something that would've been trivially clarified by reading a short paper. In order to even get to that point, I have to acknowledge that maybe you get to call research "phony" without seriously implying fraud. I have a hard time taking that as a serious, bona-fide argument.

There are actual papers. Press releases and popularizations are not the same thing. If you look you can find the actual papers.

It appears you’re agreeing with me? I’m suggesting the confusion would have been alleviated by reading the actual paper.

While his tone seems a bit adversarial, at least he is providing relevant information to the topic instead of a generic rant. I greatly prefer the former.

The temperature at which it will last the universe's current age is 462K. This is 189 Celcius, or 372 Fahrenheit. They didn't choose an unreasonably low temperature to say it'll last the universe's age. They picked a temperature to say it'll last the universe's age even if you crank up the heat to an absurd degree. They could have given a much larger timespan if they stuck to room temperature.

"Room temperature" is a pretty meaningful rough measurement for storage of anything.

But the temperature was 462K (about 189C), far beyond room temperature, or what we'd expect to store data at. This is just the temperature at which the expected lifetime is the age of the universe, which has no bearing on the technology itself.

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