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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
I'm guessing you weren't alive (or paying attention) in 1989 for the cold fusion stuff.
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
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.