Hacker News Reader

Comment by febed | Hacker News Reader

A source (German) attributed to the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research thinks the paper is bogus [0]

For context, Fefe is a rather famous German hacker and his blog serves as rumor mill for German nerds. So on one hand I wouldn't trust it that much, on the other hand it is precisely where I would expect knowledgeable people ranting about a bad paper anonymously. (And what they are saying sounds like the type of thing domain experts would pay attention to.)

"It should look like this" - until these guys made a scientific discovery and now it looks like this other different never before seen graph. This is hardly a proper rebuttal, expert opinion or not. We need these gents to try to replicate the results and then chime in. Otherwise it's just some dudes opinion. At one point the Earth was considered the center of our solar system.

Appreciate whatever this dude is trying to say in their blog, but judging by his writing style and overall presence and demeanor, he doesn't really want to be listened to, does he?

Interesting that the video of levitation isn't mentioned at all in this rebuttal.

Assuming the scientists acted in good faith and this isn't a complete scam, maybe we found something else that doesn't conform to our current understanding of superconductors, but does levitate over a magnetic field at ambient temp/pressure.

One response to the levitation video is that it is hard to distinguish from a non-superconductive diamagnetic effect, which can occur even in not very exotic materials.

There are videos of graphite levitating that are circulating, for example.

Not true. The graphite needs two magnets, not one like in the video.

The video of “levitation” is one of the things that makes me, a complete ignoramus of the subject matter, skeptical.

https://sciencecast.org/casts/suc384jly50n

All other instances of “quantum levitation” that I have seen has a “locked in” effect: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ws6AAhTw7RA .

Whereas the material in this video seems to bounce and warble in a way that appears to me more akin to standard static or magnetic repulsion.

Hope I’m wrong.

Pushing this higher up, this is the first real expert commentary I have seen.

Pretty sure I read this comment somewhere else (not attributed to Max Planck Institute), I think it was a guy on reddit.

Maybe they are the same but could be just copy paste from Reddit.

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/159jojs/scienti...

https://twitter.com/8teapi/status/1684571913908293633

He didn’t even try to explain the levitating video displaying the Meissner effect..

There are non-superconducting materials that exhibit diamagnetism, too.

  Q: Das Layout sieht Scheiße aus!

  A: Jo, das ist das historische Default-Layout.

solid.

My German is poor. Does this say:

Q: The layout is very shitty!

A: No, it’s the historically default layout.

Jo translates more to Yes or Yeah

No, it says:

A: Yes, that's the historic default layout

"Jo" is "yupp"

Thanks! I've casually studied German, but I'd never come across "Jo".

"Jo" kind of reminds me of Dutch vs. German, where many corresponding words are just slightly different.

Jo (pronounced a bit like your without the r sound) is affirmative in lots of European languages, including Finnish and Czech (it's spelled joo in Finnish iirc)

Interesting. In colloquial (American?) English, "yo" is used to get someone's attention, or to you've heard someone asking if you're present.

E.g., "Yo! Doofenschmirtz! You're new inator has been delivered."

Or: "Is Phineas here?" "Yo!"

True but that's a diphthong, "jo" is just a long(ish) o vowel sound. A lot of English dialects simply don't have an equivalent sound so it's hard to spell it. It's the IPA "o" or close to it. In my accent (south East England) "your" is pronounced almost identically to "jo".

In a week there will be a lot of thinkpieces on how the internet got this so wrong. A lot of people just want to believe, full of hope, because their life situations (poverty, housing crisis, hot weather) are so dire.

I haven’t seen this get much play outside of HN and… those are not the problems facing most HN commentators

I should say that even if it doesn't affect them personally, it creates their worldview when it is 90% of their news. Homeless crisis, war in Ukraine. Why wouldn't you want and allow some positive, apolitical, hopeful story about noble science to consume your attention instead?

What would the internet have gotten "wrong"? It's a paper and now people will try to replicate it. Some informed people give their take on why it sounds right and/or wrong, but ultimately they aren't (and can't) verify or debunk it yet pending further investigations. I have zero expertise to give an opinion either way, and honestly the impact of room temperature/pressure superconductors just doesn't seem that overwhelming. Maybe more maglev trains?

As with many things now, there are that small set of people who need to pick a "position" early and then stake a part of their ego on it. Which is super weird and destructive, and underlies many of the bad tendencies of the web.

This story deserves no more attention than the 10,000 crank papers submitted to Arxiv every day about time travel, prime numbers, antigravity. There is nothing worth replicating. That's what they got wrong.

Except one of the authors on the good paper is a professor at a legit research university with thousands of citations.

Just like Avi Loeb, the Harvard astrophysicist claiming he's about to find ET. Or the MIT profs a few years ago who thought they could be billionaires with a naive bayes algo for trading bitcoin. Guess what they're doing now? Hint: still have dayjobs.

It depends on the quench current, but yeah, maglev, hoverboards, much cheaper MRI machines, less reliance on the diminishing helium reserves, lower cost experimental fusion reactors and particle accelerators too. That last could lead to progress speeding up in that research as more people can try stuff. Lower cost for power transmission would make renewables that are geographically limited more usable. Also coil and rail guns would probably proliferate... If the quench current is high enough you could see handguns that charge on usb-c and are not legally firearms in any nation I'm aware of. Quite a disruptor.

As far as HN's discussion goes, I'd say the community has been getting it right. The conversation has been curious and substantive, everyone knows it's probably not true, but most are not making shallow dismissals. There's a shared sense of waiting for the replications to succeed or fail, and in the meantime, discussion of the details as well as what the impact would be if it does turn out. Also driving interest is that the claims are said to be easy to replicate if true, so the answer is expected any time now. Imminence fuels anticipation—like waiting for election results.

The shallow dismissal reaction is taking for granted that it's not real and everyone's wrong to give it a chance. The thing is, almost everything is wrong—you can rely on this almost completely, and placing your bet on "wrong wrong wrong" achieves a high batting average—you'll be right almost all the time. The trouble is that your expected value will be zero, and you will be both bored and boring (I don't mean you personally—this is a common pattern and we all do it to some extent).

It's in the low-probability/high-impact quadrant that the interesting things reside, alongside crank material and dross, and it's not easy to tell them apart. That's natural. But one thing we can be sure of is that rejecting everything in that quadrant is a sure way to fail in the long run, and probably also to keep oneself in a bad mood.

Dang, Dang. Well said.

I enjoy HN most in times like this.

This really nicely echoes a response to Eliezer Yudkowsky that I saw: if you always just play the odds on stuff like this, you're gonna be wrong about the real breakthroughs, which by definition defy the odds.

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical, but I remain hopeful. All the theoretical critiques are extra interesting if this is real and the data is basically accurate.

I thought wow, what a substantive, insightful comment on HN, I need to save this one. And then I saw you wrote it! Glad you're the one running our madhouse, thank you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com