Evidence of Near-Ambient Superconductivity
nature.com
nature.com
> Yet Hamlin and other researchers insist that the group’s past requires that today’s historic claims be met with historic levels of scrutiny.
[snip]
> Most recently, in 2020 Dias and his co-authors published a study of a carbonaceous sulfur hydride (CSH) that hit its critical transition at around 14 degrees Celsius (57.2 degrees Fahrenheit) and 267 gigapascals. Almost immediately, a handful of experts spotted unusual patterns in the data used to verify the material’s response to magnetic fields. When Dias and his frequent collaborator, Ashkan Salamat, a physicist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas released their raw data a year later in the form of a 149-page document, they detailed an unusual and complicated method for eliminating background magnetic interference — one they said was necessary for them to detect the tiny magnetic field rejected by the small sample. This method was inconsistent with how they’d described the procedure in the original paper, which led Nature to issue a retraction last September.
[snip]
> Dias defends his work vigorously. In the months since the retraction, Dias has conducted additional experiments on the CSH material at Argonne and Brookhaven National Laboratories. In these, he invited independent scientists to observe the material’s superconducting transition. He recently submitted a new manuscript to Nature that repeats the claim of high-temperature superconductivity in CSH with rigor he insists will dispel past allegations.
[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/room-temperature-superconduct...
> “We have clear, detailed instructions on how to make our samples,” Dias said. “We are not going to distribute this material, considering the proprietary nature of our processes and the intellectual property rights that exist.”
How do the instructions work if the processes are proprietary? It seems self-contradictory.
It's some guy just saying "trust me bro" except he's already been caught out committing academic misconduct.
The history of scientific fraud is full of mysteriously uniquely special researchers who were only able to get their results in their own labs, with their own equipment, when they alone were using it. No end of "free energy" charlatans do the same thing.
This is pretty normal in materials science. You can produce a super amazing product you keep the recipe as secret as possible.
I can see protecting the information due to national security concerns, but rice-bowling knowledge for financial gain (to an individual or otherwise) seems contradictory to the point of funding basic research with tax payer dollars.
> In a 2021 talk organized by the Sri Lanka Association for the Advancement of Science and later posted to YouTube, Dias said “We recently raised $20 million just to, you know, focus on the science part of this. And these are the investors that we used for this kind of technology.” At that moment (43:25 in the video) a list of names appears on the screen. Under the category labeled “Investors (Series A),” the names include Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Daniel Ek, co-founder and CEO of Spotify. Following the publication of this article, a representative for Dias told Quanta that those were “aspirational statements,” that the company had not raised the money, and that the names listed were prospective investors.
But for the past three years, the Rochester team—and Dias in particular—has been shrouded in allegations of scientific misconduct after other researchers raised questions about their 2020 claim of room-temperature superconductivity. In September, the Nature paper reporting that result was retracted, as documented in Science and For Better Science. Further misconduct allegations against Dias have recently emerged, with researchers alleging that Dias plagiarized substantial portions of someone else’s doctoral thesis when writing his own and that he misrepresented his thesis data in a 2021 paper in Physical Review Letters (PRL). Jessica Thomas, Executive Editor of the Physical Review journals, confirmed that PRL has launched an investigation into that accusation. “This is a pretty serious allegation,” she says. “We are not taking it lightly.”
To understand those allegations, Physics Magazine independently examined Dias’ thesis and spoke with more than a dozen experts in high-temperature superconductivity, including Dias. Although opinions differ, an overwhelming majority agree that some form of misconduct has likely occurred. Dias denies the accusations. “I really do see all this as a scientific debate,” he says. “So even though these are meaningless, baseless claims, I really do think that these are adding to advancing the science.” He insists that the data for both of his room-temperature-superconductivity claims are robust and valid.
and
On a hunch, he pulled up Dias’ 2013 thesis and fed both his thesis and Dias’ into a plagiarism checker. His computer screen lit up; the two documents contained numerous identical passages. Physics Magazine independently compared the two theses and found dozens of paragraphs that match word for word and two figures that have striking similarities.
Even ignoring that it's better than what it used to do.
Sloppy cheating is disappointing on so many levels.
That’s not to say I think they’ve necessarily achieved their claim. If their procedure is as incredibly fiddly and measurements as subtle as I infer from the stuff I’ve read, that’s a lot of chances for mistakes and noise.
[0]: I'm not a materials scientist or any kind of physicist, so I'm leaning a bit on Wikipedia here. Please correct me if I'm wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_superconducti...
For reference, that’s about 150psi, which is well within conventional engineering range. You can pick up Schedule 40 PVC pipe at your local hardware store that will do 150psi comfortably.
(Serves me right for not sanity-checking, I know 1 bar is 14 psi, I could have picked that up if I was paying attention)
Reducing it 200 folds put it in the realm of possibility for a commercial application.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35070643
More context on the retraction: https://physics.aps.org/articles/v16/40