The papers were not ready for publication
twitter.com
twitter.com
It's pretty great for humanity if it turns out to be real and relatively simple to produce.
That’s the rub. I agree with you morally, and I think most people would agree that inventors of fundamental tech should be as well-compensated as founders who “merely” bring it to market. But were Einstein or Feynman wealthy, or Newton before them? Perhaps it’s the scientific fate to be at odds with capitalism.
On the other hand, no amount of money can immortalize you the way this type of discovery would.
Nevertheless, he also got sucked into the infamous South Sea mania of 1720, which was basically the monkey JPG of its day, and consequently he lost a great deal of his wealth.
“Newton's financial misadventures in the South Sea Bubble”: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2018.001...
Given that, why not have a government spend a bunch of money to buy the rights, then release it to the public domain.
If I had to guess, the scientists would be willing to sell it into the public domain for less money then they would to a private company; however they probably would not be willing to donate it to the public domain when there is massive private money on the table.
Given all if this, the fact that there will likely not even be an offer for this by the government is a policy choice that we will be paying for for the next 20 years.
I find your faith in governments, or naivete, quite disturbing. There is no such government that would do that. They'd be stupid doing it, too.
They'd just keep it and profit from it themselves.
Who owns the patent? It wouldn't be out of the ordinary to assume the company they are working for owns it. Maybe they'll do OK, but I don't think it is a forgone conclusion that the discoverers/inventors will be suddenly wealthy.
200 million is private jet money.
No. Whatever problems LK-99 might solve will be rapidly replaced by new, even more pressing, "problems."
EDIT: to the dead sibling comment: nope, not denying climate change. Was speaking in reference to giving the inventors enough incentive to give up the patent while the technology still being wildly beneficial to humanity, should it be proven useful.
I’d like to see important discoveries free from “IP” and patent encumbrances and instead of inventors (hopefully) getting paid based on market viability, getting paid based on the positive different it makes to the health of the world.
Just imagine the renaissance on fresh food, for example.
Regardless, I don't think I'm going to be super hyped about the LK-99 story until we see some replication, which should hopefully happen within a couple days.
People calling each other "autists" is a WallStreetBets practice, from Reddit. It's not a thing on 4chan, not even on the interesting place that is /biz/.
4channers would use the "friend"-word as a neutral term (oldfriends, newfriends, etc), or less often "schizo" as an insult, but not autist.
Don't ask me why I'm taking the time to type all of this out, or who cares. Slow news day.
The first time I came across the use of “autist” as a semipejorative term of endearment was on IRC in the late 1990s warez scene, around the same time as the concept of neurodivergence was gaining traction.
I suspect the term has deeper roots than most people realize.
They aren't othering someone by calling them autists, they're calling them one of themselves by highlighting that they're behaving in a similar way.
Powerleveling for a moment, but in my circles an “autist” is used positively, neutrally, and negatively. It can play a synonym to “obsessive”, or be used to criticize behavior. It naturally is also used for it’s actual definition. On the contrary “otaku” refers exclusively to those who are into Japanese media but who do not worship Japan, as those are always weeaboo.
Huh? I thought people that are obsessed with trains can also be referred to as otakus so it is not exclusive to Japanese media.
However, on the Japanese-speaking Internet (mainly 2ch), and to a lesser extent in English-speaking circles (4chan’s /a/), “Otaku” was co-opted from an insult to the tongue-in-cheek name of the subcultures surrounding anime, manga, video games, idols, and nowadays Vtubers. The dedicated “Otaku subculture” is essentially all forms Japanese media, but especially manga.
It’s best to think of it like the real world definition of autism compared to 4chan’s definition of autism.
I think any from these communities (4chan, crypto, etc.) already feel marginalized. So they probably don't care what people outside of their community think about their word usage.
On the example it's the typical - the "the early bird catches the worm".. meaning the first to get in the trade, makes the buck, the last one in is stuck with an overpriced stock/instrument which is about to deflate. So.. they got in too late.
The "retard" that (unwise & unkind) people use comes from "developmental retardation" (https://healthquery.net/developmental-retardation.html). And the rest is history...
But it’s just telling them they can flare.
It doesn't prove that it's a scam, but it's not looking good, either.
Link (in Korean): https://gall.dcinside.com/board/view/?id=superconductor&no=6...
They may have been wanting to find someone to collaborate on the validation so they could get that Nature paper out.
Question:
Do you have any thoughts on this video?
Nature, which I heard was reluctant to publish a paper about it, asked for the results to be published in another academic journal first.
Response:
I've never seen anything like this video. This is what happens when you put a copper-neodymium magnet next to it. Superconductors do not show this characteristic.
Copper does not stick to magnets. However, copper reacts when a magnet moves. This is because when the magnetic field applied to copper changes, eddy currents flow in copper to prevent the magnetic field from changing. This image shows a typical example of copper and a rapidly moving neodymium magnet.
As the representative of the academic community, I try not to express my opinion on room-temperature superconductivity until the verification by a professional institution is completed. But I was convinced after seeing this. If it is a superconductor with the Meissner effect, even if the neodymium magnet is pushed very slowly, the superconductor should be pushed out. If a permanent magnet is moved quickly in this way, a phenomenon occurs in which the copper disk is pushed or pulled by the eddy currents induced in the copper disk.
If there is a superconductor of this size, it can be verified by sending it to a professional institution and just measuring the electrical resistance.
How could these kids grown it to be so big? This is not something that can be picked up. There was also a century-old lie of this level in the last century. Room-temperature nuclear fusion.
There is a 0.0001% chance that I will be embarrassed, but if that is the case, I will apologize with a happy heart. What's going on?
---
Then there's some discussion about who the people who created the video are and the letters DOD appear but I have no idea if that means "Department of Defense" or some other acronym.
---
Someone posts sarcastically:
Hahaha, The era of room-temperature superconductivity has finally arrived! And it's not even in a high-pressure environment! Maybe my luck will change now?
But why at 127°C? Everyone else expresses critical temperature in absolute temperature, right? Why 127? Oh, I see, that's 400 K. It's not common for a material to have a critical temperature that's so precise and at a nice round number.
I received a document in the mail that was meant to be sent to a professor at Seoul National University. I guess they made a bunch of copies and mixed up the envelopes and documents.
I wonder if this professor, who is an honorary professor at Hanyang University, has ever even attended an international conference. If he presented these results at an international conference, it would be a huge success.
Superconductivity and energy...they use all the buzzwords.
---
They post a picture of the letter which says:
Dear Professor,
I am writing to inform you that the research you have been conducting has been successful. We have achieved room-temperature superconductivity, which is a major breakthrough in the field of energy.
I would like to thank you for your hard work and dedication to this project. Your contributions have been invaluable, and we could not have achieved this success without you.
I am confident that this breakthrough will have a significant impact on the world. It has the potential to revolutionize the way we generate and use energy, and it could lead to new applications in many other fields.
I would like to invite you to present your findings at an upcoming international conference. This would be an excellent opportunity to share your work with the world and to discuss the potential applications of room-temperature superconductivity.
Thank you again for your contributions to this project. I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Sincerely,
Kim Hyuntak
CEO, Energy Research Institute
I don't think there's any mention of "DOD", it's just a screenshot of a low-quality discussion in yet another discussion board where people were asking "So who the fuck is this guy?" (i.e., the guy who's saying it's probably a scam).
* I probably should have mentioned that this site is roughly a Korean equivalent of 4chan and the discussions are generally low quality and filled with swears. But the screenshot of the Facebook post seems genuine.
I think this kind of back-biting and drama is precisely why cultural norms around virtue, dignity, and respect are valuable. I suppose the alternative view is that this is all small beans, and the important thing is that a major discovery was made no matter how messily.
It's turning out to be a wild story regardless of the science... which still seems to be valid, although not publicly replicated yet.
I'll see if I can summarize the present situation: A couple of days ago, two papers were posted to arXiv (science publishing repository) describing a room temperature and ambient pressure superconductor created by a Korean team working at an institute in Korea. It looked promising (still does) and many people work on duplicating the results. Such a discovery would be the most important one in physics this century/Nobel prize material.
The papers had some oddities - a cut and paste error, different authors listed between the two, missing some data and neither one was peer reviewed. Nonetheless, the author scientists (some who are well known) stand by their discovery.
Today, how the papers were published with the above issues was discovered. One of the "authors" listed on one of the papers (YH Kwon) is the one who uploaded both papers (apparently without permission from the other authors, and maybe without being an author) to arXiv.
This person apparently is affiliated with one of the corporate sponsors (LG) of the work in Korea, and he came to the team as a condition of funding for the work. When the team decided to start to publish according to the process (they'd been working on this material for a couple of years, doing their scientific due diligence) about four weeks ago, they apparently decided not to give any credit to the industry person because he was just "there" because of funding. The industry person quit the team then, and left the organization.
The remaining team submitted their paper for peer review in a well known journal, where it's working through the process now.
The industry person went on to upload the two papers (one with edited author list) to arXiv, and apparently today gave a speech at an industry conference in Korea taking credit for the work. So, he's not happy with the team and he's apparently trying to take credit.
The rest of the team working on this material stands by their work and is waiting for the proper peer review process to complete on the paper they submitted to the scientific journal to be done, at which point they would (quite properly following the process) publish it.
So here we are, with one rogue scientist doing his best to claim credit for this discovery and bypassing all standard scientific publishing practices, with the non peer reviewed version of the team's paper and an edited/incorrect version of another paper sent out to the world before the original team could publish theirs.
The good news from all this is that all these people (including well known/respected scientists and professors) are behaving not like frauds but as if they've actually discovered what they say they have. This lends credence to the idea that this major discovery in physics and materials science is real and may change the world.
Attempts to replicate the material (called LK-99) are proceeding based on the "unready/leaked" papers and may or may not succeed. If they do not, it's likely when the peer reviewed version comes out that replication by at least one "real" scientific lab will already have been done prior to publication, and the peer reviewed version of the article will have more/more correct information to aid in duplicating the LK-99 material.
Regardless of what happens, this is an amazing story. The link I CCed above is to a Twitter post giving details on the above. There's now a Twitter list being compiled of all the people working on replication and reporting on the drama, see here: https://twitter.com/altryne/status/1685148163223719936
*Edit: Here's the actual list of LK-99 related Twitterers: https://twitter.com/i/lists/1684446795731206144
The papers on arXiv are "crap" because they weren't ready for publication... the actual team's paper has been submitted for peer review to a respected journal and is being looked at/corrected/tested.
What got published was leaked, hence the poor quality work.
Check the twitter list for more info.
Meanwhile, the very well credentialed HyunTak clearly believes it’s real, but he was parachuted in late in the development.
Personally, I think we will just have to wait the week to see if this is real.
It's very obviously not a U-235 disc by the color, unless the LK-99 film changes that somehow? Plus, if it's supposed to be pure U-235, why use that? Weapons grade enriched fissile uranium used in demonstration of properties of a thermally deposited film?
That video makes no sense at all.
Still believe the safe bet is this is spurious.
But it’s some drama that feels a lot more enjoyable and less consequential than most things in the news recently.
Going to be really an interesting August and even if it doesn't pan out to be "superconducting" the theory is one that leads to more structural investigations into crystal structures that "might".
I have a friend that worked for years at CSH.
Watson is an ... interesting ... chap.
Good at bringing in the money, though.
It's amazing how we can be quite forgiving of people that make money. Maybe there's an [ig] Nobel prize for me, if I can figure out why.
Have a great day!
Note the "hard science" qualification -- obviously the Peace and Literature prizes have a controversial history, but disregard those for the moment.
Most recently, Nordhaus, whose work on which the award was based is an absolute travesty.
As with the Peace Prize, the nominations and selection are strongly political.
Bad maths modeling, insipid correlative relation, ignoring of tipping points, etc., etc.
Addressing the shifted goalposts in your "by Keen's math" follow-up: if you're referring to the "rational function" introduced before the fourth-to-last paragraph, note what the context is:
A model that only applies in conditions where it is not needed, when you don’t have an alternative when it is needed, is worse than useless. ... This can easily be illustrated by replacing Nordhaus’s quadratic with a very similar one that does have tipping points.
And Keen specifically chooses a tipping point of +4°C, based on the paper Nordhaus himself cites and Nordhaus's admission that business as usual (BAU) would lead to a +4°C temperature rise by 2100.
The equation also fits observed data.
The point isn't to demonstrate that this is the correct equation, but to show that on the same basis as Nordhaus used to choose his own modeling function, very different results can be demonstrated.
Which Keen makes more than abundantly clear:
Contrary to Nordhaus’s assertion that caution is needed “when using [his model] for large temperature increases”, his model is unreliable for temperatures that are well within the levels on which he has made pronouncements about what global warming will do to GDP.
It just struck me that both the red and blue traces in the last graph he presents, where he arbitrarily(?) adds another term to the math, are so ridiculous as to not be worth further consideration. If there's a more subtle point, like I said, I'd need to re-read to find it. Either that, or the author needs to bring his lede up front and center. Demonstrating that one bit of math is bad by making up another equally bad one doesn't carry the point as effectively as he was probably hoping it would.
[1]: "The man who almost faked his way to a Nobel Prize" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfDoml-Db64&list=PLAB-wWbHL7...
(Though I'm not aware of any poorly-supported hard-science Nobels to date.)
It's not going to work here, but similar efforts have confused attribution in the past.
I could be wrong but as I understand it the claim is that lanarkite and copper phosphide, when ground together at a 1:1 ratio, sealed under vacuum in a quartz tube, and heated to 925C, become a *room temperature superconductor*.
This claim is incredible and verifiable, so much so that it annoys me to hear any side chatter.
We should know "soon" (c.f. https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/breaking-supercond...)
It either works or it doesn't. Unlike many other claims, this one doesn't require anything rare or super hard to do. The furnace, tubes, materials, could be bought for around $10k.
I'm only a hobbyist scientist. When I saw the pre-print my first thought was "if this works, why the f- haven't we noticed before!? Someone should have done this accidentally freshman year!"
The good news is we shouldn't have to wait long.
The bad news is that we have to wait at all.
This time in the 20th century, relativity was “obviously” the most important discovery of the century, with the new theory of quantum mechanics right around the corner.
I also hear that it's not uncommon for superconductivity groups to intentionally include "errors" in their early drafts to avoid competitors copying their work before they're ready to publish.
(To be fair, this feels like a problem specific to the scientific community in Korea.)
- 50% copper phosphide in the material. - Lenz's law effect on copper content (e.g. trojan horse situation.."lets use copper because this will make the demos easy"). - No clear demonstration of the Meissner effect.
Link to eevblog and replicating the v silly video on the landing page of the institute (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHPFphlzwdQ). There are other problems but this screams of professional fakery but fakery indeed.
https://www.science.org/content/article/how-battle-lines-ove...
- transport electricity from anywhere without losses - handheld tomography devices - super powerful small/light electric motors - light electric motors means: electric planes - cheap maglev trains - rail guns - possibly faster computer chips using josephson junctions
I would be extremely sceptical that this would help electric planes all that much. Current brushless motors aren't really all that heavy for their kW output and already boast 90% efficiency at optimal load and RPM, which on a plane will be for the majority of the cruise.
So maybe you can reduce the plane mass by a few percent, give it a bit more efficiency, but it doesn't change the fact that kerosene has 100x more energy density per kg than lithium ion. Electric drivetrains are already god tier in terms of power and efficiency, they just need an energy source that doesn't completely suck.
Every doctor's office having an MRI and terahertz processors that use next to no power will be very cool though, if this all pans out.
The highest power brushless motors listed on Amazon are about 8kW (motorcycle hub motors). Superconductors could make possible a motor of the same size with approximately a 50kW output. The weight savings would be considerable.
Read this paper for more info - the paper also has a picture of a 5 MW high temperature (liquid nitrogen) superconducting motor, which is about the size of a car, and being tested for potential use in propelling large ships.
https://utw10356.utweb.utexas.edu/sites/default/files/Superc...
A 60kW motor in a tiny package. A single Tesla plaid motor can do a third of a megawatt. It's very doable without superconductors.
That kind of induction doesn't happen in a superconductor. That's the Meissner effect - a superconductor rejects the induction of currents by exterior magnetic fields. I don't really understand the physics but, I think, the zero resistance is a property of a state of matter able to transfer electrons without electrons actually being involved. It's immune to normal electromagnetic effects.
Practically speaking, when you charge up an inductor made out of a superconductor, and then connect the two ends together -- the current cycles endlessly and the coil holds the magnetic field. It behaves like a permanent magnet you can turn on and off.
If you were to then apply a load to the terminals and break the loop, the energy held in the magnetic field will flow back out of the inductor as electricity.
It's already a thing, practically. Such systems have been built to load balance spiky transmission lines, etc. They fit into a unique niche somewhere between capacitors and batteries in trade-offs.
Consider: why does a permanent magnet stay magnetized even in a changing magnetic field? Why do two permanent magnets stay magnetized when you bring them together and apart again?
When you move through the magnetic field of a permanent magnet, no energy is drawn out from the permanent magnet. All of the work occurred externally. It's the same with an energized superconducting electromagnet. Its field will not be "stripped away" by interacting with magnetic objects. The flux might be reduced if you brought an opposing magnetic flux near it -- but it would be increased again when you moved it back away. Net zero work.
..but SMES has low energy density (but high power density).
He's excellent at electronic engineering but he's not a physicist
Do you also need to be a physicist to point out that their "levitating" sample is in fact still touching the magnet?
Or that the "0 resistance" is actually 1000x more resistive than copper.