What material and setup could even fake that result?
On reality, you would need a good computer with a large set of sound emitters just outside of the screen and a huge lot of tries. It would be a project for a small team and many months of work.
Or maybe a few transparent wires and less photoshop.
I do think the easiest way to fake a video like that would be to use a cool superconductor and change the atmosphere so nobody notices its temperature.
The bits and pieces of this certainly look like little are being genuine, so the new question is what non-obvious mistake could they be making?
And given the easiness in reproducing the study, there doesn't seem to be any point in fabricating it.
Like you'd question why someone would photoshop results[1] in a paper, because surely they'd have to realize they're fabricating data, but they go ahead and do it anyway.
The videos are convincing but are they of what they really purport to show? I agree - what would be the point of fabricating it. But weirder things have happened in the breadth of human experience.
[1] https://thenextweb.com/news/who-scientists-used-photoshop-to...
Nonscientific objections:
* it was published in a low h-index journal (not a scientific objection)
* poor formatting, misspelled title (not a scientific objection)
* patented and has a company (not a scientific objection)
* seems too simple, it has to be more complex than that, how could we have missed that? (not a scientific objection, also rather ahistorical)
I consider all of these pretty irrelevant given that the authors are not no-names and the actual paper makes clear claims, does exactly what everyone says you should be able to do if you have a real superconductor (show a video of it floating!) and makes replication easy. If it's straight up fraud it will be easy to discover.
There were also many pseudoscientific objections raised by field-adjacent people that I found uncompelling, responses from people actually in the field in parentheses:
* The first video looks like normal copper, the second like other diamagnetic materials or is otherwise unconvincing (not evidence against it being superconducting, at least one materials science lab had several members look at it and thought it looked legit).
* They are trying to hide the magnet structure somehow (the video shows it in clear view).
* The wafer isn't fully levitating or the way it falls is suspicious (not really unexpected given that the superconductive part is supposed to be present in only a few percent of the material).
Scientific objections I find more compelling made by people more familiar with the field, but more bourne of natural skepticism than disqualifying, with there being a lot of subtlety:
* both effects shown can be achieved in known ways by non-superconducting materials (but at the same time? would at least be a major material science advance in that case as it would apparently require diamagnetism ~ 150x as strong as graphite. Author who mentioned this said it would be "materials science magic" and I'm not sure why you'd rather believe in this than superconductivity given that neither have ever been seen before and it's consistent with sueprconductivty. Unless it's straight up fraud).
* Mesner effect graph don't go exactly to zero / happen exactly where you'd expect, maybe reflects a measurement error? (apparently, given the small % of the material that's supposed to be superconducting and material distribution, this isn't really evidence either way. not like we have other room temperature superconductors to compare it to).
* no max temperature where superconductivity vanishes measured, so is it really superconducting? (standard measurement devices only go up to what they reported, scientists seem very mixed about whether it would be easy to DIY measurement at higher temperatures for such a small current)
* not a similar mechanism to known good past "high-temperature" superconductors, and proposed explanation doesn't really make sense given slight deviations in pressure compared to what is in this substance (other scientists seem to disagree and think there could be something there, but it would also not be the first time something novel was discovered and worked for reasons totally different than those the scientists initially imagined)
Overall I find the quality of the objections really weak which increases (to me) the chances that there is something novel here, even if it's not superconductivity. That or it's obvious fraud and we'll know in like three days.
Fortunately if we're dealing with a real effect, this will be easily replicated and proven. But with the fixed perspective of a video, you can create a large number of apparent effects that look real in the constraints of the video format.
The biggest point in favor is that there's full reproduction instructions. I am eagerly waiting someone to try and pull this together separately.
Where I get hung up is, it's an extraordinary, world-changing claim. The standard of proof is very high (and while I could get access to a kiln, I can't get access to high pressure vacuum vessel on short notice).
* he and his team did discover a (probably) novel diamagnetic material. * it may or may not have interesting properties * however, it is not superconductive.
According to people who were able to more fully read the "real" paper, the key issue is that their measurements, if taken at face value (and not as due to, e.g., bad contacts with the material) suggest two contradictory things:
* the sample is extremely pure (due to the shape of the first graph).
* the sample has impurities causing it to not exhibit zero resistance, and not to exhibit "full" superconductive properties (i.e. having zero resistance under a magnetic field with increasing strength).
Additionally, since they were never able to measure Tc, they can't show the full Meissner effect as that requires heating up the sample to above its Tc first and then cooling it and flipping it, something you can't do with a diamagnet. By itself the fact that they didn't reach this temperature did not bother me, because I assumed that the senior authors were experts in superconductivity and had made sure that the material simultaneously exhibited other superconductive properties like zero resistance (or close enough when factoring in impurities). The fact that they were so focused on replication and the process was so simple made it unlikely to be fraud.
But, the fact that the first chart doesn't make sense unless the sample were completely pure, plus the lack of expertise they have with superconductors, indicates that it is much more likely measurement error on their parts, in which case it's not clear whether there's any evidence at all for superconductivity right now outside the diamagnetism. Given that there are many room temperature diamagnets known (albeit perhaps none as strong as this one?) and no room temperature superconductors known, this puts the odds that this isn't a superconductor at practically certain, IMO.
No, only ferromagnetic material would behave like that. Copper foil will also move in a moving magnetic field, and won't be attracted to a stationary magnet.
He should hold it in his hand for 10 seconds before the test.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruko_Obokata#STAP_cell_contr...
I don't really have an explanation other than they're simply crazy.
> And why fake it in the first place? I don't see the benefit.