“We are not cheating” (YH Kwon superconductor comments)
twitter.com
twitter.com
It’s obvious there’s a limited number of samples and they potentially don’t feel like they have a complete grasp on how to reliably produce more using their current level of knowledge regarding the process they used to create the first one… sometimes science involves luck. They have been working on this for years, I can completely believe a non-trivial portion of that time was spent trying to go from a fluke to having at least some ability to produce samples that demonstrate superconducting properties.
They may have only a half dozen samples of varying purity and quality…
The samples may not be particularly “strong” and given the powder based process involved may be too brittle to safely “send” and thus require careful hand courier delivery like a fresh organ for transplant, just without the urgency…
It’s entirely possible they may be mistaken and it’s not a superconductor, but these people are not fools, so I’m inclined to “give them enough rope” and to let this all play out and see where the either falter and the falsehoods exposed by the absence of any further evidence, they are are shown their mistakes once others get their hands on samples, other’s reproduction proves them correct, or their samples are studied by others and the evidence from their paper proves to be correct regardless of novel theories regarding the mechanism of superconductivity involved.
Science is a process, and to be honest it’s fun watching how fast people are pouring on the gas and trying to find out if this is real or not … stark contrast to the abject scepticism and shoestring budgets given to many innovative potential ideas.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_universities_and_colle...
The experiment has to be reproduced and measured by others.
Then we will know.
According to the tweet in question, YH Kwon had samples with him and was willing make them available for investigation but they didn’t have the tools for.
Related Twitter space recording available https://twitter.com/andrewmccalip/status/1685465431317114880
(That's the only one I'm aware of. There may be more)
Twitter is members-only, a private site. Better to post the primary, public, source.
this is Satoshi/Wright all over again. All Wright had to do is sign a document with the original key to provide (reasonably) plausible proof that he was indeed Satoshi.
Behavior of grifters always has this constant: infuriate your peers by making excuses and dazzle the outsiders/media with techno-babble. Sit back and watch both camps fight in social media, from where it infects MSM. Once it takes off the 2 camps battling another ensure it stays in the news and the cult that was created ensures their idols (gods) are protected. The public can no longer tell truth from fiction because as they understand "where there's smoke there's fire". At this point the suits and corporate talking-heads promise big returns, so there is no stopping it because money is being made regardless from it being real.
replicate || GTFO
> Following a three-week trial in late 2021, a jury found Wright liable for conversion but awarded Kleiman's estate US$100 million in damages while Kleiman's estate had sought upwards of US$25 billion at trial. Wright took the position that verdict served as a vindication of his role in inventing bitcoin and stated that he would not appeal the jury's findings
Really childish stuff.
Do room temperature semi conductors break physics as we know it? I didn’t think they contradicted known physics, which is why so many people were researching them.
What known physics do they break?
“Breaks physics as we know it” seems very much to imply “perpetual motion machine” sorts of claim, that violate pretty strongly held physical laws.
Anyway, this is more a minor quibble with the specific language, rather than a broader disagreement, but just a heads up that to me (and I’m guessing many others), that specific phrase holds a far broader connotation than it seems you intended.
No one spends this much effort trying to get their name associated with a discovery that they know is a fraud.
Maybe they just have discovered an material with interesting electric properties rather than a super conductor. Time will tell.
exclusive property over ideas is an old practice that needs to stay back in the 20th century, where it was useful and when the technology was not just here yet
can we have a 21st century digital renaissance yet?
It’s like the 19th century race to claim credit for discovering the source of the Nile, except obviously falsifiable due to communication technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99
The part I don't understand is why they don't just FedEx a sample of the stuff to another lab, so they could replicate the results immediately.
Their claim is for an easily/cheaply synthesized room temperature ambient pressure superconductor. They call it LK-99.
At the same time, having watched Oppenheimer recently, when humanity discovered how to split the atom was chaotic too and met with a lot of scepticism.
I guess that's how we work as humans.
But you have to also understand every discovery is met with skepticism, because 99.9999999% of them turn out BS.
Ideally, humanity would cut it out with the idiotic hot takes (both rejecting and glorifying the paper... based on "hunches") and review the paper and try to reproduce. Unfortunately that's hard. While idiotic hot takes are easy.
And we like easy things.
> Einstein's Relativity was called "fake Jew science".
I heard a historian once describe the SS as “what you would get if you made the Church of Scientology a branch of the military.” The Nazi party was kind of unique in that it was more of a cult with a political party than a simple political party in the classical sense.
I speculate that this is why the Nazis are such a symbol of evil in spite of Stalin having a similar body count. It’s the same reason the Manson murders are creepier than your average serial killing or shoot ‘em up. The culty stuff gives it this extra layer of dark edginess. Stalin just wasn’t as edgelord.
Nazi mysticism and volkisch stuff lives on in the New Age and other areas which is why flipping people in those worlds to Q and other thinly veiled fascist cults was so easy. There’s already a ton of esoteric fascist memes floating around that world.
Not even close. In the XX century Mao leads generously, followed by Stalin and Hitler is the distant 3rd.
I suggest you read about communist plagues caused by his regime after WW2, not just before or during.
In particular:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
and
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names"
Nothing in my comment said anything about the post-war period or implied any positive interpretation of Stalin or in fact the direction of the totals at all.
I kindly ask that you consider your interactions here more carefully.
I can imagine someone being offended by that in the same way someone making excuses for the nazis would be offensive.
And I see this all the time on HN. Somebody responds to my comments just to be argumentative for the sake of it when I reply, despite me just making a simple comment. And then when I take their reply seriously and respond with proven facts they go with "oh HN rules and conduct bla bla". Well, maybe next time check the facts first, then be argumentative.
That was as a general idea. Now, personally, for this subject here, me living in an Eastern Europe country, having witnessed the horrors of communists, and fully know that Russia/USSR's Iron Curtain was just modern slavery where they (the red plague) pillaged and took all our countries resources and shipped them to Kremlin (hence why in the beginning of space race USSR was head to head with US) making them rich and the rest of us poorer, when somebody like you dismisses those facts I get to a boiling point.
Also, while on this subject, you can see that effect today. Everybody on the Eastern Europe/former Soviet Bloc countries hates Russia and why we simply took Ukrainian refugees in our homes without our still corrupt governments moving a finger at first. That's why we keep donating to Ukraine's war effort. Because a dismantled Russia is our only chance to have peace in Europe. And this is what Russians and Putin don't understand about us. We simply do not want another half a century of pillaging from them. And this is why Stalin vs Hitler body count are not similar. Both are bad, but Stalin was way worse.
I feel no need to engage with you further, it's not an honest discussion, you're just making strawmen.
Also, he was an ally and posed in historical pictures celebrating history with his good friends, Churchill and Roosevelt. It took a while to overturn good rep like that.
This is because you are a witness and obviously past discoveries are read in books just as a facts. Even when there is a story, the story doesn't have the "resolution" to mimic every hour, day, weeks, etc of the event. And in such great events, even if they don't work but the people involved think they work, there is great greed. Pure Shakespeare?
Borges wrote in Funes the Memorious [1] "Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day; he had never once erred or faltered, but each reconstruction had itself taken an entire day." [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funes_the_Memorious
[2] https://formazione.indire.it/paths/jorge-luis-borges-funes-h...
Given the current facts we just need to wait a few days or a few weeks for replication results. Anything else is entertainment/noise/attention-getting
In this case, the challenge is that these are relatively unknown scientists, from a relatively unknown lab. Of course their findings can be genuine, but we need to wait until it has been replicated.
One red flag is that he claimed he had a sample, but nobody could test it. If it is a room temperature, or close to room temperature super conductor, not a lot of equipment is needed. You just need a strong magnet to confirm the Meisnner effect. You can do this with off the shelf neodymium magnets. I have some on my fridge.
Given the historical importance of confirming the super conductivity at room temperature, I am sure you could obtain such magnets from an university department. Personally I would happily pay for an Uber to collect them.
I don't get it, what else would you expect? Any claimed scientific breakthrough should generally be met with a healthy dose of skepticism at first. Competition between multiple or overlapping groups working on the same problem is common, and that alone will often result in some not-so-pretty scenes. Look up eg the story of the discovery of the HI virus. That's what you get when 'only' career accomplishments are at stake. Now add billion-dollar commercial potential to the mix, and I'd say that some nerves starting to unravel is a rather expected outcome.
The good thing is that this is science, and nature doesn't care about any of that. So we'll know soon enough.
Well, I've heard the name LK-99 is from the initials of discoverers Lee and JH Kim, and the year of discovery (1999).
So I don't buy that they were under great time pressure due to fear of getting scooped. Surely they'd have mountains of samples if they've been making it for 24 years?
I'm guessing you weren't alive (or paying attention) in 1989 for the cold fusion stuff.
The 1989 cold fusion situation was already mentioned so I point towards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%E2%80%93Newton_calculu... instead.
Even the brightest scientists have egos (maybe even more than the average person) and the prospect of fame and money has clouded the mind of many persons before.