LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor | Hacker News Reader

LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

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565 pointsfofoz631 comments

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Damn, why is nobody talking more about the theory of it?

What I see to ponder:

- (1970, brinkman, rice) "application of gutzwiller's variational method to the metal-insulator transition"

- (2001, hyun-tak kim) "extension of the brinkman-rice picture and the mott transition"

- (2002, hyun-tak kim) "extended brinkman-rice picture and its application to high-Tc superconductors"

- (2021, hyun-tak kim) "Room-temperature-superconducting Tc driven by electron correlation"

even briefly reading relevant research (other than these papers) says even if a group could not replicate lk99 at first try, there's more to it. cooking the right way should be insanely difficult because this is a probabilistic event after all. should not be happening homogenously and should not be happening in a wide-band of parameters. I think the groups will eventually reach a narrow range of parameters to replicate but will take a lot of effort.

The brinkman paper is interesting, but the others are a bit too hand wavy.

By the rumors that I read in forums,

Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim hit the first sample (the prototype of LK-99) in 1999 trying to prove the theory of their professor Choi Dong-Shik. Around 2017 YoungWan Kwon joined to the team and they got investment enough for to buy an SQUID and a EPR. In 2020, L and K hit with LK99. They tried to submit a paper to Nature, but was rejected. They contacted with HyunTak Kim after read his 2021 paper (the one you point), and HyunTak Kim joined to the team.

The above are rumors. I'm not sure if such 2021 paper may give tips in the theory or synthesization behind LK99.

>They tried to submit a paper to Nature, but was rejected

This should be "were rejected" because "were" refers to "they". It cannot refer to the paper even though that would make sense. You could say "but it was rejected" to force the sentence to refer to the singular paper.

Okay, if we don't correct English on HN that's okay. My foreign friends ask me to do this with them but I get that HN is a different forum and that we are not friends.

There was nothing offensive or corrosive about the way you stated the correction so I don't see why you should be down voted; as someone who is learning a foreign language, I can say that having this kind of correction is useful.

Rewarding the mob for its hysteria and stupidity by hiding away from them is the wrong move in my humble opinion; after all, you're only losing internet points which aren't real.

Don't pay too much attention to votes anyways you do you do long as you're politics and helpful (as you have been).

Important additional rumours I heard from a little birdie:

The Nature rejection was because of the Ranga Dias affair, and it wasn't an outright rejection but a requirement that the paper be submitted to a local journal and peer reviewed by local scientists before it would be considered.

Before Kwon joined the team at LG's alleged insistence, the reason that Lee and Kim had restarted research at all was because Choi Dong-Shik had summoned them to his deathbed, and his dying wish was that they prove his theory right; Lee and Kim judged that LK-99 was the best candidate for doing so. If true, that is objectively insane. Imagine if we actually get RTAPS because of an old professor's dying wish, like something out of a fairytale.

> If true, that is objectively insane.

I dunno about that. Look at it this way: we don't know how to make a room temp superconductor, we don't know how to learn what we need to learn to make one. There were some more obvious ideas, they didn't work. There were a lot of less obvious ideas, lots of people tried them, they didn't work.

At this point, one could argue that continued research specifically directed to making a room temp superconductor, absent some kind of new externally originated discovery or a constraint relaxation (like ultra high pressure), is objectively a waste of time.

So we should also expect that the discovery will either be a bit insane or will be a totally unexpected accident from unrelated work (why are my results weird? oh this drug I was testing turned out to be a superconductor!)-- and maybe a combination. Perhaps it turns out that the LK-99 sample is superconducting but due to some accidental impurity in their synthesis, for reasons totally unrelated to their expectations, perhaps one that would have been discovered before but most people making new ceramics aren't testing them for superconductivity.

The sane people are busy making discoveries that if not quite guaranteed are at least in domains where many people haven't already failed.

How much money does actually go into this? I know it's an active research area, but I didn't get the idea this is some kind of "main" focus for humanity. For example a figure I could find is that US$24.5 billion is spend on cancer research (which frankly I find extraordinarily low). I couldn't find a figure online but I doubt it's even 10% of that.

To me it just sounds more like we are just playing around a little bit and not actually taking finding a room temperature super conductor seriously.

If that cancer figure is true, that’s depressingly low for something so devastatingly common and increasingly common.

Actually a lot of strides have been made in cancer survivability rates from that funding - depending on type of cancer, many people can be essentially guaranteed survival these days when just decades ago e.g. prostate cancer was a death sentence.

For sure! That also not what I was implying. The US solo spends something like 770 billion per year just on the military. That means even the entire world together spends 3% of that on cancer research. You can't really tell me this is even remotely sane.

> one could argue that continued research specifically directed to making a room temp superconductor, absent some kind of new externally originated discovery or a constraint relaxation (like ultra high pressure), is objectively a waste of time.

Really? I’m not convinced of that. If anything, the prior papers published by other authors pointing in this direction say the exact opposite to me.

> The Nature rejection was because of the Ranga Dias affair, and it wasn't an outright rejection but a requirement that the paper be submitted to a local journal and peer reviewed by local scientists before it would be considered.

Note that this is indeed what has been told by the group, but it might have been indeed happened (say, as a polite way to say GTFO), or the Nature paper was outright rejected and the notice was made up. There were enough people that questioned the veracity of this very anecdote.

There is no way this is true. Nature only publishes original papers, which means publication in another journal - why would it have to be "local"? - would preclude their ability to publish.

It's the claim they're making, I don't know. Nature hasn't commented publicly at this stage.

If it was a flat-out rejection, the spin on the story may be an attempt to smooth things over and leave the door open to collaboration with Nature in the future. It comes across as the opposite of vindictive, and there's really no way this story makes Nature look bad with the authors saying this. On the other hand, if Nature had rejected it outright and then LK-99 is the real deal, I think that could have been embarassing for them.

I'm so ready for Christopher Nolan to direct this movie.

By the looks of it, to me this is just the once in 5 years rumor cycle. The authors have been working on it for a long time and have been rejected by Nature. Other co-authors have said they weren't consulted before uploading the paper. The author who uploaded had to give a talk, and for whatever reason uploaded it on Arxiv before uploading, and didn't expect it would blow up like it has. For official confirmation of room temp superconductor, I would rather go with a big publishing journal group organising a press conference before paying any attention.

Been following this very closely. Seems like the one takeaway is that whatever material this is, it's interesting. It's also difficult to synthesize in bulk, which is a shame because superconductivity is not easy to observe in non-bulk materials (think: powder).

Note: I have a physics degree and a little bit of condensed matter experience, but nothing like anyone actually working in the field. Just some graduate courses and a bit of lab work experience.

Assuming LK99 is legitimate, my hope is that the principles that make it work are more broadly applicable - and with that, refined production processes or newer alloys can be found. Simply knowing that it's possible would lead to a huge amount of research immediately focusing on this kind of thing.

There's nothing more revolutionary than a discovery of a new class of materials. After all, we often name eras throughout our history after them :) (Stone age, etc)

> There's nothing more revolutionary than a discovery of a new class of materials. After all, we often name eras throughout our history after them :) (Stone age, etc)

I wonder what was involved in the discovery of stone.

Evolution of enough intelligence to use stone as a club, or make an edge on flint for cutting?

A rigorous peer review by graduate students.

I see the potential for a Far Side cartoon in that...

“Ooga ooga peer review…”

Abstract: Our rigorous dialectic treatment shows that stone, while well suited for the smashing open of certain types of nut, is not well suited for any other purpose. Advocates from the more radical fringes of the tribe who suggest stone may be employed in varied areas such as warfare or even homebuilding(?!), are herein put in their proper place.

There are many different types of stones, and techniques for shaping them became progressively more sophisticated over time.

With instruction, it would probably take you less than an hour to learn how to make the types of simple chopping stones that human ancestors used 1 million years ago. However, it takes much more considerable time and skill to learn how to make the types of stone tools humans were using 100k years ago. You get the sense that each group of ancient humans probably had an old expert toolmaker who passed on the trade to the next generation.

It just occurred to me that this might relate to why people get near sighted with age. An old tool maker may no longer be as productive in hunting and gathering but instead masters his or her craft thus aiding the tribe.

Evolution caught using planned obsolescence

hitting each other with every other available substance?

Being in the wrong place, at the wrong time. ;)

I think the Ice age came before the stone age - can't imagine those tools lasted very long - so Stone tools would have been a big advance :-)

Ice ages tools : https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/frozen-poop-kn...

> I wonder what was involved in the discovery of stone.

Mostly archaic humans hitting rocks against each other until they notice that flint knapping [1] creates a sharp edge.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapping

2023, the beginning of the... Room Temperature Superconductor Age!

The RTS Age has a good ring to it.

The CuO25P6Pb9 Age

Why is it hard to make in bulk? I thought the chemicals were easy and cheap to obtain, and then you bake it at a high temp?

What makes it difficult?

I don’t have really any expertise here but it looks like it bakes into a powder pretty much every time. Sure you get LK-99, but you can’t measure superconductivity in a powder since it’s a bulk property.

The variables that lead to its formation are not all accounted for yet. The process is understood, but it doesn’t always work. So there must be something missing every now and then.

So they have a batch of the material as proof, but no idea how to exactly reproduce it?

That would be a wild story if true.

The theory is the crystal structure induced by oxidation and vibration is responsible for the superconducting effect. They literally dropped and cracked the quartz ampoule by accident and produced the sample.

Its not enough to produce the material itself, it seems it is an emergent property of the structure and formation of the material similar to piezoelectric effect?

Not that crazy. Steel was the same at first.

Wild guess is that the dopant that creates wells doesn't always end up where it should. The paper that claimed superconductivity in layers of graphene at very particular angles also seems to be very sensitive. A similar one claimed graphene with alkanes was observed to superconduct. Perhapes whatever impure hydrocarbon they were using held the sheets at the perfect angle. All the quantum wells these things are claiming to rely on seem terribly difficult to arrange perfectly enough to work consistently. Assuming any of them ever did.

No indeed. Lots of this in our history. You can't do most of electronics without semiconductors. But, if you have no idea what's going on you can make some rudimentary electronics experiments work - unreliably - without knowing that - e.g. the "Cat's whisker" crystal radio technology. The reason this actually works is because it's a semiconductor, but since you don't know what those are yet, you just know if you fiddle about with a fine wire and certain types of crystal, sometimes it does what you wanted, and if it doesn't keep fiddling with it until it does.

I'd imagine early history of sugar products is the same. Today you can precisely control the temperatures and so you can engineer getting exactly the desired products from sugar, but if you're not so good at either measuring or keeping careful control of temperature, you get... something. It's sugar so in most cases it's delicious anyway, but if you wanted fudge but you've made toffee you may be disappointed. With practice you can "eyeball" it without better equipment, like the cat's whisker, but with better equipment an idiot with no experience can make it do what they wanted because the numbers were correct.

> you just know if you fiddle about with a fine wire and certain types of crystal,

Even an old rusty razor blade will work as a diode if you try hard and long enough.

Samurai sword making took what, a thousand years of trial and error? The forgers had no idea how making steel worked, they just found a way to make it work.

More interesting that they found a way to work with poor quality iron

I have repeatedly read that Japan has poor quality iron, but what exactly does that mean? Iron is an element, so all of the reserves were in an unfortunate oxide requiring sophisticated refining? Just low total abundance?

Lots of impurities and limited quantity. Most of it was in ironsand, and even then most of it was in fairly low quality ironsand.

They had to get pretty creative in their use of ironsand to produce high quality steel.

Getting a pure ingot of iron is no simple task if you don't have access to a good furnace. So you'll end up with 'bad' (impure) iron if it doesn't come out of the ground in reasonably pure chunks.

All the cool swords seem to come from societies without access to good iron. Ever seen a 'Viking' sword?

Impurities.

Notably phosphorus is very hard to get rid of when it's in your metal. Before better metallurgy, the best steel worldwide was made out of low-phosphorus ores.

Or bread… have you ever thought what must’ve gone through somebody’s head to think of grinding all those cereals, adding random stuff, and baking it? How the heck did anybody come up with that??

Yes, based on the materials and type of process, it seems like the default assumption should be, if it's real at all, it's going to be a tweaky, unreliable process at first. A more surprising result would be if the published process reliably works 100% of the time.

>So they have a batch of the material as proof, but no idea how to exactly reproduce it?

No, we don't know how to reproduce it, with "we" being everyone not on the South Korean team.

The papers everyone is trying to work from to replicate this are the "leaked" arXiv papers. That actual peer reviewed paper is still in process, and presumably that one includes more information on how to replicate the material.

Could the material need to be "seeded" by the proper polymorph?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearing_polymorphs

Given the sheer amount of samples material scientists may produce I imagine accidentally hitting your target characteristic through impurities rather than direct formula may happen more often then they care to admit. That being said even if they haven't actually narrowed down on the exact formula knowing it can even happen in the first place is a major discovery

If it was well understood what made it difficult, odds are it would be improving fast.

Note that “bulk” in this context means a single large chunk, not a large quanitity.

The first time it demonstrated superconductivity they dropped the quartz tube it was in, cracking and accidentally oxidizing it at a specific point in the heating process and providing vibration that caused the formation of a crystal structure in the material.

That's... not easily replicable.

I hope this doesn't end up like a physics equivalent to Fermat's Last Theorem

That would be better than the physics equivalent of cold fusion (which seemed promising at first, but turns out to not exist - at least so far). Only time will tell, though if it really is, but so difficult to replicate that we need a few hundred years it may as well never exist for purposes of our lifetime.

Assuming that replications fail but they really do have samples of a superconductor that can be thoroughly examined, this is still fantastic.

Once we know the exact structure, the problem of synthesis is very solvable.

I can't help but feel that is an awfully convenient story..

There are wilder ones. Penicillin, the pacemaker and the microwave for instance.

There's a chemist who gave a breakdown with what's known so far: https://twitter.com/Robert_Palgrave/status/16846158677267988...

It's not clear exactly what compound constitutes "LK-99" because the equations in the papers are unbalanced and the synthesis is ill defined. What they say they got doesn't make sense for how they say they got it. Most likely it's a mixture of compounds, any of which could be producing the alleged superconducting phenomena.

> It's also difficult to synthesize in bulk

Is there any hard limitation that prevents synthesizing in bulk? If not, I would not worry about this at the moment and if it proves to be a material with desirable properties just leave it up to the engineers who will hopefully find a suitable production process.

There’s not really such a thing as superconductivity for a fine powder, so people are having trouble determining if this material even superconducts.

edit to clarify: Bulk here refers to having a single chunk of the material, and does not refer to the total quantity. Some physical properties only exist or only surface in chunks of material, not in the powder form.

Conversely, the tape-type high temperature superconductors are generally made with a colloidal deposition process - which is based on a powder as a starter material.

Assuming this is real, that would be the obvious process by which to try and build useful conductors and magnets - it also suggests a refinement process (passing it over a magnet would quantum lock superconducting grains and let the rest slide off).

Is there's no sintering or other process that could fuse the power together into a solid? (obviously without destroying its useful properties)

Paper mentions amorphous state plus an annealing step. Should be glass like at the end. If so, heat rates (up and down) of the last step are important and hardly mentioned.

Yup, and the "preprint" (which doesn't have a number of controls in the process) leaves a lot to be desired, so the "real" paper will presumably have some of this worked out.

I expect things like the cooling rate (which affects crystal growth) and oxidation will both have variability in them.

I’m not an expert, but I’ve used superconductors (I believe YBCO) when I taught physics lab. We cooled samples down with liquid nitrogen and put them over a magnet. They levitate, but not like in the video that the Korean team released. True superconductors enjoy “flux pinning”, meaning wherever you put them on a magnet, they’ll freeze in that position (or move around an axis of constant flux.) In the LK-99 video that they released, they show that the sample is repelled by a magnet. This seems to contradict the HTS claim and wondered if I’m missing something because surely so many experts can’t be this wrong.

My background is in physics, but not superconductors.

Type-II super conductors may exhibit "flux pinning". Type-I super conductors do not.

Cool thanks. Gonna read up a little on that.

Edit: yea it's interesting. Believe it or not, I studied L-G theory in grad school, taught a lab about (type-II) superconductors, but had no idea that type-I superconductors didn't flux pin.

Just leaving this here from Wikipedia:

> The superconductor must be a type-II superconductor because type-I superconductors cannot be penetrated by magnetic fields. Some type-I superconductors can experience the effects of flux pinning if they are thin enough. If the material's thickness is comparable to the London penetration depth, the magnetic field can pass through the material.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_pinning

Also to follow up on your original point, this is a purported example of a linear superconductor. There are parallel columnar lines of superconductivity inside the mineral, like a bundle of wires. No such thing has ever been demonstrated before, and it is unlikely to have macro properties like those you are familiar with.

For example, flux pinning is (IIRC) due to circular currents induced in the superconductor. But how do you induce a circular current into a straight-line conductive wire with ~zero cross section?

> If the material's thickness is comparable to the London penetration depth, the magnetic field can pass through the material.

Indeed. A girl I was seeing told me the same once, but obviously things didn't work out between us...

As far as I understand it (not an expert on these things), flux pinning is caused by microscopic defects that allow the magnetic field to penetrate at certain points. An idealized superconductor that is perfectly uniform expels the magnetic field at all points and so would not display the effect, it would simply be diamagnetic. So it’s mistaken and somewhat perverse to view the absence of flux pinning as proof that something is not a superconductor.

In the case of LK99, the claim is that it does not show flux pinning because the sample is impure and not uniformly superconductive, i.e. it is not expelling the magnetic field enough.

No defects needed for flux penetration in a type-II superconductor. When the conference length is smaller than the penetration depth (up to a factor of sqrt(2)), flux vortices can nucleate as soon as the surface magnetic field gets above the lower critical field Bc1.

Sorry, that should say “coherence length”.

That also explains - assuming it is all true - the lack of current through the sample.

> Type-II super conductors may exhibit "flux pinning"

Type-II diamagnetism?

Even for type-II superconductors one may need single crystals if the material is anisotropic enough (e.g. if the flux pinning is confined mostly to 2D layers then randomly oriented grains in a powder aren't going to trap flux well)

Many experts are indeed questioning the apparent lack of flux pinning and wonder if it's just strong diamagnetism.

I think it would be easy to recognize diamagnetism vs Superconducting and thus these superconducter experts wouldn’t embarrass themselves outing such papers

I've already seen some videos/images from the lesbian Soviet hedge chemist and some other amateur/non-lab repro attempts showing that if it's diamagnetism, it's much, much stronger than pyrolitic graphite. At least 15x stronger. Diamagnetism also wouldn't explain the resistivity, critical temp, critical current, and critical field graphs.

I think the realistic options at this point are:

1. Complete fraud, including opportunistic fraud by some online accounts who are faking partial replications. 2. Real superconductor of some kind, the papers are all fucked up because of the early leak by Kwon and internal Nobel jostling drama, and the production process is difficult, but fundamentally this is the real deal, RTAPS, but with a critical current and critical field that's lower than we would like, possibly (it's unclear what the measurements for these actually are). 3. They discovered a new type of material which is a very strong diamagnet, and then decided to fake the rest of a superconductor's properties because superconductivity is much more prestigious than a new powerful diamagnet. Replication efforts are having limited success with diamagnetism because it is actually diamagnetic.

There aren't any Soviet chemists...

Not everyone agrees, and therefore... https://youtu.be/oOV32P59-yI

They claim that only a small part of that sample is superconducting, and that's why it shows that unusual behavior.

Regardless if LK-99 is truly a Room-Temperature Superconductor or not, only 112 years passed since Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovered superconductivity on April 8, 1911, 4 PM [1] [2]: resistance not futile, but "practically zero". The first loaf of sliced bread was sold commercially on July 7, 1928 [3]. The rate of progress is astonishing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heike_Kamerlingh_Onnes#Superco...

[2] 2010, "The discovery of superconductivity", https://www.ilorentz.org/history/cold/DelftKes_HKO_PT.pdf

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Frederick_Rohwedder

As I learned from the Dave's EEVBlog video [1], their demonstration video [2] says in the description that the material was deposited onto a copper plate which could probably explain the interaction with the magnet. And as I just noticed, the description has since been changed and now says »The sample was thermally deposited on a enriched uranium 235 plate.«

EDIT: Correction, I got the link to the video saying deposited onto uranium [2] from [1] but that is not the actual link from their web page which is [3] and still says deposited onto copper. So someone on eevblog.com was having some fun.

[1] https://www.eevblog.com/2023/07/31/eevblog-1555-korean-lk-99...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-w2qc_BoEiU

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtVjGWpbE7k

That's highly suspicious. I guess they're banking on nobody having an enriched uranium 235 plate at hand to verify what happens if you do this without any LK99...

For me, this, and the combination with the name ("Quantum Energy Research Center") is another push in the direction of ignoring everything named "quantum"

too often quacksalver territory

Is this really their channel? Why do they only have 1 video, 8 subscribers, and why is the video unlisted?

>ignoring everything named "quantum"

This heuristic is probably a good one for non-scientific stuff but I'm not sure how accurate it is when we're looking at a group researching quantum effects

you wouldn't expect a lot of subscribers to a channel with only unlisted videos, right? Some people use youtube solely for video publishing, and have zero or less interest in the social aspects of the site.

Its not like nobody has ever investigated the magnetic properties of uranium. You could just look it up.

Can someone explain why you'd use the 235 isotope? I know there are different magnetic properties but it still seems an odd choice to use something that is highly controlled, difficult to produce, and rather dangerous. It seems like there would be far better choices unless you absolutely need that mass or they very weak valance electrons.

And those videos being identical is also suspicious. [2] Uploaded 2 days ago, claims 235U substrate, is from @q-center, and created their youtube account in 2012. [3] is from @qcentre, uploaded 5 months ago, claims Cu substrate, and created their account in February. If it was the newer account posting the new video it would be easy to believe lost password or something but this reversing feels weird. It makes it feel like they changed the video description (but didn't edit the original to prevent history checking? But could have just uploaded a different video?) to combat the induced magnetic field as claim?

But it feels like it gets even worse. [3] (older) is a 4k video while [2] is 720p. Just hiding detail? The material looks neither like copper nor uranium ceramic (very distinctive orange color), but that can just be the material which is claimed to be thin film deposited and that's believable. Maybe they're hiding the sample identification etching on the front? I'm not sure what those mean and it's very possibly arbitrary. But adds a level of suspicion.

I just assumed the uranium one is a joke created after this story started by some third party and made to look like the original one, so I also did not look any deeper. But the channel being created in 2012 then makes no sense. Someone just sitting on that channel name? Or can you rename a YouTube channel?

Yes you can rename, probably just trolling.

In this EEVBlog [1] thread they also conclude this after some confusion.

[1] https://www.eevblog.com/forum/blog/eevblog-1555-lk99-ambient...

This does make sense then about the older (Cu substrate) video being higher resolution.

"Their demonstration video" makes it sound like there is only one.

No smug takedowns of the video that made the rounds first:

https://sciencecast.org/casts/suc384jly50n

The most people have been able to say is "it might be the most diamagnetic material anyone has ever seen by a remarkable amount".

From what I've gathered, the ingredients of LK99 are common but cooking the right way is difficult. Supposedly the team itself only gets it right 1 time in 10.

There have also been a lot of complaints that the patents and papers are missing info you'd want to have when reproducing. So that's making it even harder to reproduce. The upshot tho is that the discoverers seem to be available for tips by email.

All in all were going to have to wait more than a few days for reproduction it seems.

>Supposedly the team itself only gets it right 1 time in 10.

Source?

We thought Oppenheimer was the way to instill a love of physics to young people but turns out LK-99 was the way to winning people's hearts and minds to delve more into physics.

Don't understand how a movie largely about the psychological horrors of developing and using a nuclear weapons is being construed to be "pro physics" lol. If anything it's the opposite

Yeah, it sounds like GP hasn't even seen the movie, the themes conveyed are quite clear.

It's a movie about changing the world by calculating equations and understanding how they describe reality.

Of course it is empowering for STEM people.

One of the themes of the movie that gets repeated over and over is "these boneheads who draw equations on whiteboards but can't follow security rules are literally the most important people in the world."

I was massively let down by Oppenheimer.

It’s 90% interpersonal/political drama (Including a bunch of unnecessary nudity thrown in for dramatic effect), a few token scenes with Albert Einstein, a 10 minute detonation with decent SFX, and a small fraction of real physics and engineering. If you’re actually interested in the Manhattan Project you’ll be way more inspired by a history channel documentary than anything in that movie.

Hmm the “token” scene with Einstein was the pivotal interpersonal misunderstanding / paranoia trigger for the antagonist.

It also tells us that Strauss does not quite understand the game.

He had the medal pinned on him, he thinks this is a badge of honour. A mark of the lowly shoe sales man come good. Einstein tells us this was the marking of the end of his usefulness.

I loved the movie. Ultimately there can be no tension around the creation and use of the bomb. We all know that much of history atleast.

Instead it's a richly weaved tapestry asking an important question in various ways and giving various answers. "can you commit sin and expect sympathy"? We see this asked about nukes, about infidelity, and suicide, political maneovering. About science itself(original sin).

Take even the scene with the poisoned apple Bohr, Placket and Oppenheimer.

Bohr and Oppenheimer talk about forbidden knowledge (don't lift the rock if you're not prepared for the snake) as Bohr holds and apple. The forbidden fruit tempted by the snake in the garden of Eden.

No one with knowledge of WWII science sees a cyanide poisoned apple and doesn't think of Turning. Discarded after the war and persecuted for being gay (as Nazis persecute Jewish scientists and Americans communist scientists).

As Izzy Rabi says, bombs fall on the just and the unjust alike. As Oppenheimers constructed this bomb, the poisoned apple, which is about to hit the just (Bohr) and not Blackett (who he thinks unjust). Before regretting it.

Einstein regrets the bomb before he even started work after writing the letter with Szilard, others reject.it after construction, after testing, after Hiroshima, Oppenheimer seems to think enough is enough after Nagasaki. Teller goes further still... Where do we draw the line?

The apple scene alone is deeply layered with the major themes of the movies.

That's why people enjoyed it.

> We thought Oppenheimer was the way to instill a love of physics to young people

The only person so far that I've seen publicly saying that is Sam Altman. Never crossed my mind that this could inspire people (albeit I haven't seen the movie). Same for the Turing movie, or the Hawking movie, none of them really made the work look that cool IMO.

I don't know about cool.

But the movie demonstrated how science, and even individual scientists, can have enormous practical impact, shed light on reality, and raise moral questions of the highest order.

That level of impact inspired me to aim at a science career when I was a student, before I found other pursuits more inspiring to me personally.

For such an important discovery (if it is real), that seems it could be replicated in a few days, if I were the team that did the discovery, I would create a video recording of the whole process and all the measurements and share it with the textual article. It sounds like that would provide for an easier way to replicate plus more proofs of the discovery.

The team that did the discovery seems disorganized and amateurish though, and with the multiple papers all submitted at the same time by competing factions, riff with infighting - but they stuck with a hunch for longer than anyone else and followed it doggedly. If it turns out to be true, it will be a great movie with an underdog making one of the biggest discoveries of the century.

> but they stuck with a hunch for longer than anyone else and followed it doggedly

That's an understatement.

>discovery seems disorganized and amateurish though, and with the multiple papers all submitted at the same time by competing factions, riff with infighting - but they stuck with a hunch for longer than anyone else and followed it doggedly.

Pretty good description of all of human history so far, to be fair

Did you read some that said they were amturish or did you actually think that

They are not well polished academia types who publish a couple papers or more per year using their students. I have some friends who do that, they get multiple papers accepted at top conferences every year and make increment progress on a regular basis. These guys are completely against the type here. Off in their own lab with no publications in years, having trouble raising money to fund their research, shifting to part time, then bringing in collaborators merely to get money, their attempt at publication is a mess as a result. Yes, compared to normal academia, they are amateurs or at least idiosyncratic weirdos.

I'm rooting for them, do not get me wrong, but they are not normal academics.

My concern is they are doing this to get funding as the material maybe close but not yet there

Their amateurishness and the infighting somehow makes me think this is legitimate.

Was wondering why it doesn’t sound surprising and then remembered that squid game is also Korean. Puzzles immediately fell into place.

I translated a survey about LK-99 papers to English

https://hackmd.io/DMjYGOJFRheZw5XZU8kqKg

Thank you so much for this!

Isn't it sufficient to have another lab confirm that the existing sample is a super conductor? Then we can all sprint to replication.

Yeah, having another lab confirm the behavior and makeup of that sample would go a long way. I wonder why that isn’t happening?

Does anyone have an explanation on why no one is examining/validating the sample they already have?

I mean they already characterized it six ways to Sunday and posted a video of it levitating.

Independent validation. Physical peer review.

That basically helps rule out scammers or gross incompetence and ensures that even if initial attempts to replicate fail because of the complexity or lack of clarity, people keep trying.

Any physicist can make up something that sounds reasonable to other physicists. With a little trick photography (or CGI!) you can make a video something levitating that looks like room temperature super conductors.

Don't read the above as an accusation. Only a justification to wait until it is replicated.

what are you talking about?

the authors haven't given anyone a sample to inspect, so every other solid state physics lab in the world is instead trying to follow the notional recipe and test their own sample.

> the authors haven't given anyone a sample to inspect

Why not? It would help their case immensely, especially if replication is tricky.

There are claims that they are going to share, but since it is fragile and they only have a few samples the logistics are tricky. They might not be telling the truth about sharing samples, but I'd wait a couple months before accusing them of lies. In fact if they share too quick I'd suspect it is so they can ship a box of dust and claim shipping damaged the only sample!

>I wonder why that isn’t happening?

Because it's been ~10 days since it was announced in a preprint article.

The complexity and resources involved are much higher than "building websites with React", so, things happen on a different timescale.

How do you know for sure that the existing sample was actually produced by the LK-99 process?

Even if it was produced by the LK-99 process, how do you know if all of the required steps and conditions to achieve replication are adequately documented in the process? Reference the FOGBANK debacle.

What does it matter if the sample is a room temperature super conductor?

Sure but if you had in your hands a superconductive material at room temperature and ambient pressure you’d be pretty amazed. That’s a lot of credibility right there.

Why would that matter? It's not like they could just be taking an over-the-counter room temperature superconductor and passing it off as something they made. If the thing exists and someone can make it, the specific process doesn't matter (but also why would they make it, publish a fake process and then go through all this rigamarole?).

Grifting doesn't always make sense to those not in on the grift.

Huh?

Desperation? Momentary fame? To get funding to continue research? Any number of reasons humans do silly half-honest things…

There are some plausible allegations that the authors were a struggling pair of researchers and essentially stole this research and published a sloppy half baked paper they knew would make waves.

I think you're missing the point: there is no such thing yet as a room temperature superconductor. If they have such a thing, they made it. If they failed to document the process well, that's a separate issue from whether the sample they have actually is a superconductor at the temperatures described.

The data isn't good. They don’t have such a thing. They think they have such a thing. What they think they have is certainly interesting and potentially world changing, but if this (or some other reason like infighting over credit) lead them to rush publication, you have to be ready for the conclusion that whatever they have isn’t a superconductor as we know it.

This subthread is discussing whether it makes sense to have another lab validate the existing sample before we even try to follow their steps. Neither I nor the person you're responding to are assuming that the sample is what they claim it is, we're simply arguing that it doesn't matter how it was obtained—it's either a room temperature superconductor or it isn't, and if the researchers failed to document the process well but still have a room temperature superconductor then we can move on from there. If it turns out that it isn't, then we saved ourselves a bunch of time trying to follow their instructions.

> but also why would they make it, publish a fake process and then go through all this rigamarole?

This, from this subthread and directly from the comment I replied to, is what I was responding to. I don’t think I’ve missed some obvious point. I think you just misunderstood which topic I was responding to.

> > How do you know for sure that the existing sample was actually produced by the LK-99 process?

> If the thing exists and someone can make it, the specific process doesn't matter (but also why would they make it, publish a fake process and then go through all this rigamarole?).

You took one sentence out of context, reinterpreted it, then replied to your own reinterpretation. In the context of the full "if" sentence, it's pretty clear that OP was asking: "in the hypothetical situation where they did successfully create a superconductor, why publish an invalid process?"

There are lots of possible answers to this question, but your answer was not addressing that question, it was answering the question "why would they lie about having created it?"

Context matters, otherwise we'd all end up talking past each other all the time.

I didn't reinterpret anything and I don't think what you state as pretty clear is entirely clear to me (or I just didn't read into it as deeply). Anyway I simply responded with some reasons why one might publish a fake process and go through all the rigamarole. I probably should have quoted the sentence in my reply to avoid confusion.

I'm the one who posted the comment you're referring to, and the poster you're responding to has it correct.

> but also why would they make it, publish a fake process and then go through all this rigamarole?

That was what I said, and here you're saying "Anyway I simply responded with some reasons why one might publish a fake process and go through all the rigamarole." You ignored the first part of the sentence - I didn't ask why they'd publish a fake process, I asked why they would make it (it being a room temp superconductor) and then publish a fake process.

> and someone can make it

If the specified procedure is incorrect, then we can't make it. It doesn't need to be an elaborate con, it could just be a reasearcher misread a measurement, or recorded the wrong number, or their feedstock was contaminated. Replication ensures that the recipe includes the secret sauce that makes it actually work.

I don't think they're arguing that no one should try to replicate the process of making it, just that it makes sense to have another lab test the sample that has already been created. If it is in fact what they claim it is, then the worst case scenario is that we have a repeat of FOGBANK[0] and have to reverse engineer it.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank

I'm not arguing that another lab shouldn't test the sample already created, just stating why replication is important. A FOGBANK situation is a very bad scenario.

> How do you know for sure that the existing sample was actually produced by the LK-99 process?

If you hand me a room temperature superconductor but your published recipe doesn't work for me, I'm about 95% as excited as I'd be if I had the right recipe.

no one gives a shit at all about any of that if anyone shows up this week with a room temperature/pressure superconductor.

whoever eventually does it gets a nobel prize and the front cover of whatever journal they pick, and then a chapter in the history of the 21st century.

Do we know they haven’t? The published papers were rushed (due to rogue ex-team member publishing one unauthorized) and they maybe weren’t ready.

I’ve heard a rumor a team from MIT has travelled to Korea.

Who knows right now.

I've heard those rumours as well, and also heard rumours that a sample was sent to a Chinese group.

CAS supposedly has a sample according to rumours amongst Chinese academics. They would certainly be logical to include in any sample dispersion, they're the closest very high quality/very high prestige institute.

At the end of the day, materials science is still science. The institutional framework is optimized for a very specific process, so it's generally faster to let the process play out as usual rather than go and cut corners. Rest assured; there are a lot of scientists out there! We can afford to let a few of them chase clouds once in a while.

In any case... the creation process described in the original paper is relatively cheap and low-tech enough that labs will likely generate their own samples in less time than any procurement process would take.

> the creation process described in the original paper is relatively cheap and low-tech enough that labs will likely generate their own samples in less time than any procurement process would take.

But what if the probability of synthesis failure is very high? This seems to be the case given then "1000 experiments" history of the original scientists. If they have a golden sample that is at least extremely paramagnetic, that would be huge.

And again... This is no ordinary claim. Everything in the procurement chain would be expedited. No sane lab would turn it down.

Yes, the fact that everyone is trying to replicate the process rather than validate the existing material is very weird. Replication is hard, validation is much easier. If they've had this material for years, just send some off to a few labs...

People claiming unusual abilities/etc usually focus on a very difficult ceremony/situation/feeling/process rather than the outcome. Ghosts, spiritual experiences, etc. really avoid the areas where they would be easily disproven - they prefer murky, unspecified criteria. This paper is full of unspecified details, and also doesn't provide samples. Of course, there is a story for why - the drama between the scientists, etc. There always is a reason. But at the end of the day, they're claiming something amazing, which if they would just _send a piece of the material to MIT_ this whole drama would be over. The longer the uncertainty lasts, the more suspicious it is that they haven't taken this path.

It's the same with the recent US Government reports on alleged aliens. There is a lot of focus on rare, hard-to capture or reproduce events, and little focus on just showing us the actual alien ship wreckage, even though that'd be much easier, if it were true.

I have made a play money market asking the same thing: "A physics lab will have received a package of the LK-99 material sent from the researchers by the end of August" [ https://manifold.markets/StrayClimb/a-physics-lab-will-have-... ]

Not many traders yet, 57% yes, too optimistic in my view.

Validation is good for the original team, replication is good for the new team.

Interesting point, yes. Also, if LK-99 is real, there are may be some close or easy adjustments or improvements to it to produce other, new interesting materials, which a replicating lab would be set up to start exploring ASAP. So I can see their preference for that path.

Agreed, why haven't hundreds of journalists with cameras lined up on the lab yet? Document everything, film and publicize the floating sample, film the entire production process, have a press conference etc.

Allegedly, samples have already been sent out

Validation proves that the material exists, it doesn't prove that the specified process creates the material. A few samples are worthless if no one actually knows how to make more.

> A few samples are worthless if no one actually knows how to make more.

If the samples are actual RTSC, knowing that such a thing can actually exist is pretty far from worthless

Researchers were already working under the assumption such a thing can actually exist.

What if I told you stimulating a universe like ours is also possible.

I would ask what that means.

Why do you silently assume that samples aren't being shared around as we speak? CMTC of the University of Maryland stated that the authors are cooperating in regards to this https://twitter.com/condensed_the/status/1684960318718406656

There's value in both validating existing samples and producing new ones.

Oh that would be great! Sorry if my assumption is mistaken. I'd love this to be real! I'm not just thinking about this last week, though - if the LK group had these samples for multiple years, it seems like they would have been able to share & convince at least one PhD to support them publicly. The fact that they haven't just seems weird! Sure, they were preparing the papers, etc. etc but you do have to balance that against the life they would have if they just published asap - wealthy, famous, respected, free, as well as the benefits to the entire world of letting this be known.

Talk about a confusingly written tweet, though!

>it seems like they would have been able to share & convince at least one PhD to support them publicly. The fact that they haven't just seems weird!

Isn't that Hyun-Tak Kim of William & Mary?

https://www.wm.edu/as/physics/people/researchfaculty/kim_h.p...

I would find it very easy to believe that they produced something that is superconducting but following their directions didn't work. An unknown factor could very easily be involved. But proof that their sample is even "interesting" (it doesn't need to be "superconducting" in the strictest sense of the term to still be "interesting") would be enough to say "Hey, let's keep looking over here, we know there's something to find!"

Sometimes just knowing there's something to find at all is 90% of the battle. Many historical examples, in both science and non-science fields.

>little focus on just showing us the actual alien ship wreckage, even though that'd be much easier, if it were true.

I don't believe in the current alien thing, but how exactly would it be easier for a whistleblower to steal the actual wreckage out of some secret lab? Compared to giving a testimony?

How hard would it be to smuggle a cell phone to snap a picture? Don't build a false dichotomy.

Into and out of a facility for what are undoubtedly TS/SAP materials??? Would you like to go first?

The witness says that he has never seen the alien material himself. What was he supposed to take a picture of?

There is no false dichotomy. We are comparing difficulty of doing X and Y. I have not said that X makes Y impossible or the other way around.

There’s some emerging evidence that it may be a new class of “1-d” superconducting material that only superconducts in certain places/directions. Will turn into big academic fight to redefine superconductivity if so, I think.

Importantly though, 1-d is all it needs to sound incredibly useful.

That would support the existence of a material with the stated properties, which would be important on its own, but not that we can manufacture one. Why not prove both at once? Depending on the size of the sample produced, distributing it around several labs for independent testing may be impractical so you would still get this race as the sample was sent to one lab and the rest rush to try be first to reproduce the processes and test the result. Also transporting what could be a very valuable substance (maybe a fragile one, I've not looked into it) as far as another lab with the relevant equipment, may be difficult/costly to arrange.

Given the finding seems to have been rushed out, perhaps they did plan to send a sample (perhaps producing another themselves) to another lab for confirmation, but those plans have been overtaken by the interest as details slipped out earlier than they intended.

I'm really confused why everyone is claiming the replication would be easy. The paper specifies very large ranges for both times and temperatures that would take years to try all combinations, and ignores basically all of the details.

The effect could be caused by some incredibly lucky contamination/impurities and then nobody would ever be able to reproduce it at all. Why not reverse engineer this one apparently working sample instead?

Because knowing what something is tells you less about how to get there than the paper does?

You can see the exact chemical structure of the material and still have no idea how to create it. Especially for composite materials like these where the junction of dissimilar materials gives rise to the desired behavior.

Whether or not this turns out to be real the whole incident has been extremely entertaining, way more than I would have expected. Replication attempts being documented in real time on Twitter and livestreamed on Twitch, news about infighting and drama among the researchers who published the paper, constant fluxations in the betting markets as new news comes out. It's been a wild ride.

welcome to the new world...It is fast, efficient and very interesting...

it's not fast or efficient - the authors appear to think they invented a very easy to make room temperature/pressure superconductor far over a year ago, and then announced it in a truly silly way with no clear data and no samples.

Materials going from concept -> public testing in less than 200 years is fucking shocking in the scale of human history.

When did the Chinese invent gunpowder? What about the discovery of uranium? The rate of attention span decrease is much greater than the still shocking increase in rate of discoveries.

It's a lot like the EmDrive incident, except replication attempts are easier.

Both are strange discoveries that are poised to change the world as we know it.

Hopefully this one turns out, unlike the EmDrive.

EmDrive was supposed to work better with Superconductors!

You might be excited about ivo quantum drive that is going to be tested in space, NET October

That's a drive with which your exact position becomes uncertain so... you might be there already.

Traveling on a spaceship like that, always know where your towel is.

The good old improbability drive.

The social event is similar. But the experiment is nothing alike.

The EmDrive was hard to replicate because it was a tiny reported signal in an ocean of noise.

I already completed forgotten about EMDrive.

This is the best state of affairs sum up at the moment and my favorite plot line is the soil scientist.

https://twitter.com/8teAPi/status/1685960703658860544?s=19

Can we put this LARPing scam artist out of the conversation? They are setting up a bitcoin wallet to, "raise money" to post a video of their admitted non-replication (They didn't use the original replication steps at all), but still superconducting result using kitchen cookware?

Also they spend more time promoting bizarre Soviet propaganda, furry porn, and LARPing than science.

Please, can we stop taking this seriously?

She's also begging on twitter for people to stop attacking her since it's "getting to" her loved ones.

Who’s taking it seriously? It’s fantastic armchair entertainment.

>Who’s taking it seriously?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36941556

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36940398

> She posts her kitchen chemistry process over the weekend, at arrives at 2 confirmed Meissner effect levitation stones, beating all other public teams. She posts the pics on Twitter and begins to indulge in her favorite hobby, insulting the intelligence of westerners.

Editorialized, but quite close.

The original thread is one of the best on Twitter. The character of the Soviet anime lesbian kitchen chemist dropping some amazing lines in between posting pics of casually cooking a superconductor is just chef’s kiss. I don’t even need it to be true, got my money’s worth.

Can we stop promoting this ateapie loonie. Every post they made is so thick with narrative it is completely divorced from reality.

or the e-cat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer

It may be unfair to compare to EmDrive; that was not possible under current physics frameworks, while there is no such obvious restriction for superconductors.

The neat thing is that -- whether or not LK-99 is a hoax -- the public will have engaged with real scientists doing real science in a rather personal capacity. It's novel and interesting to be able to tune into the materials science equivalent of live-coding.

I was in college (and a physics major!) when cold fusion hit. Really similar vibe -- competing press conferences and publications, huge public excitement tempered by frowning disbelief from experts, a rush to replicate from many labs, with only occasional claims of success, all of which turned out to be errors. Still, I'm rooting for you, LK-99.

Oh man yeah, so many dedicated amateurs building calorimeters and learning that calorimetry is hard as hell to do right... all talking over UseNet. Fun days.

So, Russian anime cat girl seems to have cooked a sample and demonstrated some of the claimed properties, although she's explicit that it shouldn't be considered a "replication".

https://twitter.com/iris_IGB/status/1685731177523449856

nitter link https://nitter.net/iris_IGB/status/1685268812663271424#m

its always the people with an anime pfp that do the most godly shit

Probably often people with autism.

there are some weapons grade anons with 30 followers

I think it's what happens when you just stack all of your character points in intelligence.

Smartest person I ever met is now some kind of non-binary fox person. An ivy league masters in math, does risk modeling for some mega insurance company, and lives in a kawaii fever dream while doing it.

If you could magically erase all anime from the world, the global tech industry would come to a grinding halt :)

It’s a meme in cryptography too. Cutting edge cryptanalysis and furry profile pics go together like steak and red wine.

> If it's a diamagnetism it's a fucking strong one

That's a pretty good point.

Is there any reason to believe their results? While their reproduction could definitely be legitimate, there are no credentials or affiliations mentioned on their bio, except for “molecular biologist” which typically means a skill set more oriented towards organic chemistry (as opposed to inorganic chemistry, which this is about), and neither have they posted any hints as to what their methods are.

The "demonstration" is a photo of a single crumb of material inside a transparent pipette. It's claimed that the crumb is "levitating" inside the pipette, but what's stopping a random internet anon from gluing a crumb onto a pipette and taking a picture of it?

I don't know about you, but if I had just succeeded in replicating a literally history-making experiment, I would perhaps take a video of it, and demonstrate how the crumb actually behaves without the support of the pipette.

>but what's stopping a random internet anon from gluing a crumb onto a pipette and taking a picture of it?

Nothing, just like nothing would stop a random internet anon from faking a video of the same thing. Even if that existed, it still wouldn't be sufficient evidence (especially given this is a different synthesis than the one in the paper), it would just be much more overblown.

Wait for lab reconstructions, or at the very least, this anon's writeup, instead of following a live twitter blog and then complaining that it's not conclusive.

>I don't do videos of things I intend to be writing a text from. Ever. It's bad tone. I hate when it happens to me, and I don't want anyone to share this fate. >I will put a GdPO4 bead and one of the good samples onto paper ships and film >But it will be only After I will be sure I Got It, okay?

https://twitter.com/iris_IGB/status/1685930149739409408

"I don't do videos of things I intend to be writing a text from. Ever. It's bad tone. I hate when it happens to me, and I don't want anyone to share this fate"

Ah, yes. The good old incoherent "here's why I can't do something totally normal" excuse.

Looking through their tweet history, they're an insufferable and toxic troll.

They seem to block anyone that doesn't agree that the USSR, despite not existing anymore, is still pushing progress worldwide.

The revisionist types are the worst and they are emboldened by the war.

I'm amused people actually believed and retweeted whatever that troll posted.

This makes it more believable not less. History is littered with nut jobs achieving. The wilder the story the more credibility I give it. Within bounds. Universe is optimised for entertainment and irony

That's pretty untrue. Its just that nobody remembers the crackpots that achieve nothing.

Can you give an example? I'm struggling to think of historical comparisons. I suppose I can think of a couple of "unlikely" achievers:

- Ramanujan: if he lived today, I could imagine him tweeting some awesome infinite series, which could be verified easily by other mathematicians.

- ...maybe Tesla? But he had a solid track record of invention before becoming a nut job.

But who else?

Not that I agree with GP, but:

Isaac Newton? Brian Josephson, certainly. Francis Crick. Werner Forssmann. Marie and Pierre Curie, the way they kept on working even when dying from radiation poisoning. Tycho Brahe (with the partying and the drunken pet elk). Pythagoras. Probably Paul Erdosz? And a good number of the people working on energetic materials research.

In what sense were any of them nut jobs? All of these were traditionally pedigreed scientists, doing groundbreaking research at their institutions, under their own names. I'm asking for a historical parallel of a researcher who published an earth-shattering result anonymously, from their home lab, in a field unrelated to their day job, on a random night off chilling and watching movies?

Ah, sorry for misunderstanding. I was thinking of traditional scientists who turned out to be partially crazy. The context here should have made me catch your logic better.

History is littered even more by several orders of magnitudes with nut jobs achieving precisely zilch. If someone seems like a nut job, it's probably because they're actually a nut job, not some misunderstood genius.

Don't get me wrong, I want to believe (tm) as much as anyone, but this particular part of the story has a lot working against it:

* This person is anonymous (account created in Apr 2023), so we don't know anything about their affiliation or credentials.

* They do seem to have good knowledge of materials science (although I have no way to judge), but the rest of their twitter history, which is all we have to go on, doesn't inspire confidence.

* This person decided to replicate this experiment on a whim, as a distraction (because they couldn't stream a movie that night, according their tweets), while serious labs around the world have been trying frantically for several days, without any results.

* This person refuses to submit a video ("bad tone") or any additional footage of their achievement, despite it being the most unique and world-changing compound on the planet.

If 1000 people with geeky interests all try to make this stuff I would be surprised if one did not get lucky with the variations in their uncontrolled home lab environment and hit the perfect sequence for making a grain of it... unless the material does not exist; but honestly if you want to hear the opinion of some person on the internet, I think that it is real.

That may be true, but I'm not seeing 999 other people with geeky interests reporting their failed attempts. We are, however, starting to see actual labs reporting negative results.

People getting excited over an oreo cookie crumb in a pipette? Wait till someone puts the oreo cookie wafer on an air hockey table for a fun levitation video.

By their own admission, they've messed with the prep and synthesis stages mentioned in the paper:

https://nitter.net/iris_IGB/status/1685774956330635264#m

Also, forgive me for taking this person's word with a massive grain of salt when they post stuff like this:

https://nitter.net/iris_IGB/status/1686017042665582593#m

Sure, but what is this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32047663

I'm not claiming to have made a room temperature superconductor.

huh lol ... Well she obviously has the time to tweet a lot of sh*t while being much faster than any other team on earth. She alone from the USSR must still be the primary (progressive) power worldwide ... who knows ...

Everybody's talking about reproducing the material which is great, but will take time. Why don't the authors supply their existing material to an independent lab for earlier confirmation?

If they really believe they have the only sample they won't let it out of their sight most likely.

It'll be superconducting tomorrow if it's really superconducting today.

Is that necessarily true?

I'm 200% not a physicist, but it is possible that during transit, minor bumps / temperature changes / ionizing radiation / oscillating E-M fields could screw up the material in a way that matters?

I meant in the abstract sense. They seem to be able to make the stuff with albeit with a very poor yield.

Not necessarily true. Complex compounds can be susceptible to oxidisation and generally decay and degrade over time.

Apparently, they've offered samples to "serious experimental groups".

"Condensed Matter Theory Center (a Twitter account affiliated with University of Maryland) says they will send samples." - sanxiyn 2 days ago https://twitter.com/condensed_the/status/1684960318718406656

That would mean it's insanely difficult to reproduce.

Not necessarily. Just that the paper is rough and problems in synthesis aren’t well documented or explored.

Devil's advocate: If the existing material and the process to make it can't be replicated, who really cares? Well, aside from the people who might deserve a Nobel. The rest of the world doesn't because we can't all share it like some kind of magical medallion.

I'm on the "Probably a nothingburger" side of things but just getting confirmation that it is possible and some understanding of what the process involved is is a massive jump for science.

If it's actually superconducting we've got a wide variety of ways to inspect what LK99 actually is that will shed a whole lot of light on how to create more of it, or more of a similar superconductor. It'll be one of the most important scientific achievements in our lifetimes regardless of whether or not it can be replicated with the process in the paper.

So much speculation but I don’t see anyone asking this: Who has access to samples from the original lab? If synthesis hasn’t been cracked yet, wouldn’t the next-best thing be independent validation of the original samples?

This has been asked over and over again in this thread.

Apparently that's what they're doing: https://twitter.com/condensed_the/status/1684960318718406656

>Odds for 2 (1) below have increased (decreased) exponentially

Can someone help me parse this? Is it referring to #2 or #1 in the quoted tweet? Have the odds increased or decreased?

Increased for 2, decreased for 1.

Odds for option 2 have increased, odds for option 1 have decreased.

This is a common pattern in academic writing, which compresses two sentences into one, like so:

> In sunny (cloudy) weather, the sky looks blue (gray).

So the sentence above means that odds for scenario 2 have increased, while odds for scenario 1 have decreased.

Iris Alexandra's twitter is especially enthralling. Seems like so much discoveries and innovation happens from computer science to physics, chemistry and biology all from people with anime profile pictures.

I hope we get a video from Iris proving it's not glued to the support, if they were able to produce a levitating grain that's amazing. Regardless if superconducting or not.

That's a small enough sample that static electricity alone could explain the "levitation".

https://twitter.com/iris_IGB for those looking for the account.

I'm watching all of this unfold as an unknowledgeable bystander. I'm at a loss for half of the technical terms and have no clue how many of those people are just LARPing.

But the positive energy of this all is very refreshing. This is what the internet was made for and I'm glad I can take part of it even if only by contributing moral support.

> anime profile pictures

Either that or furry ones. Amusing apparent correlation.

Highlighting this tweet in particular:

> Here's a chunk of pyrolytic graphite on the same magnet with the same stick. Even with less density and more surface normal to field.... It doesn't lift off. If it's diamagnetism it's a fucking absurdly strong one

https://twitter.com/iris_IGB/status/1685804254718459904

Her findings, and suggestions of manufacturing process improvements, are very interesting.

Seems silly to compare to that absolute chunk of pyrplytic graphite. Shouldn't it be a similar size spec?

AFAIK the chunk will levitate irrespective of size up to some maximum. Diamagnetism is a property of the material, not the shape.

There's a certain subset of people on the intersection of high IQ, high-functioning ASD and LGBT that produces a lot of high impact activity in STEM fields.

Well I mean at this point, if I think I'm sitting on a big discovery the first thing I'm doing is changing my avatar to an anime one.

High-functioning LGBT for sure

Do you have a point or did you just feel like inserting your homophobia?

What homophobia?

LGBT is not strongly correlated to diminished executive function.

There is no comma between ASD and LGBT, so I would assume that user is making an "eats, shoots and leaves" type joke where the humor comes from the concept of high functioning LGBT rather than an already existing assumption that sexuality and gender directly affect one's functions

I think there's also an aspect of doing it and presenting it in an unusually attention-grabbing way.

I heard from a psychologist that homosexuality is associated with higher creativity (possibly explaining why it wasn't eliminated through evolution/natural selection). That seems true in art anyway, but I am not sure if in science the flamboyant online profiles simply make them more memorable characters or if the association holds.

She's acknowledged her results were a hoax at this point.

I haven't seen any such acknowledgement in her twitter feed?

Where? Saying something like this should be accompanied with proof

The report of that I had was false, sorry. She has NOT said that.

It is interesting to see how much of the replication is done by the Chinese and how little is done by the Western countries. Is this the difference between the making-stuff-happen attitude and the sclerotic attitude?

I doubt the table is representative of actual replication efforts going on, as according to some tweets, suppliers everywhere are out of precursors due to a large amount of orders. I would guess that there are many labs that started trying to replicate as a side-project with an attitude of "if it replicates we'll go public, if not, we don't, as we don't want to spend a lot of efforts on retries".

Based on that trying to connect that to wider cultural innovation trends seems quite far-fetched.

Someone on Twitter spoke on this, so I cant' confirm its accuracy. They said that the reagents for this are usually made in China. As soon as this paper was published, labs in China bought out the reserves and they became hard to source in the West.

Weren't the raw materials lead, copper, sulfur and phosphorous or something like that? Seems hard to to buy out elements that are so common in industrial and chemical processes.

Those are the raw atomic elements, which are not the products you just put into your oven.

There's nothing exotic in there that you can't just buy from Spectrum Chemical (though they need to know you and that you're not likely to be making methamphetamine).

In one of the notes it says

> Red phosphorus cannot be obtained on short notice from a new customer in the USA due to DEA restrictions

So we just need some fireworks companies to get after reproducing it, then?

Isn't that also a part of the same sclerosis?

"From a new customer" is the key phrase. This is only a serious issue for amateurs, not for real established labs.

It’s definitely a serious issue for amateurs or new entrants in general but I think it’s conceivable that a capable and legitimate institution might want to or otherwise be able to run the experiment, but they just didnt happen to have red phosphorus.

Yes, but they won't be a new customer to chemical suppliers. If they've ever bought anything DEA List I before (like iodine) they can just pay a few hundred bucks and get a few hundred grams in a couple of days.

The US was a hotbed of scientific quackery at the same time it was developing its leading position in the physical sciences (~hundred plus years ago). So, let's just wait 100 years and see how many of these "replications" are really just fooling themselves (and others).

This is a race that I earnestly hope either someone wins quickly, or everyone loses... again rather quickly. For incredible claims you typically require incredible evidence, at the moment we're slightly better than hearsay but we've a long way to go get conclusive proof.

> everyone loses... again rather quickly

that's the thing - if it is hard to manufacture and works maybe 1:10 tries, how can it lose quickly experimentally?

In other words, what is a satisfactory proof that it doesn't work, apart from analyzing the original apparatus?

> that's the thing - if it is hard to manufacture and works maybe 1:10 tries, how can it lose quickly experimentally?

Simple, given enough (say > 3) fully accredited labs trying and failing to get a result with the published process, it's a fair conclusion to say that the results cannot be replicated.

It's not looking good so far. This team reproduced several variants of the formula, and none of them behaved in an interesting way: https://nitter.sneed.network/altryne/status/1686029047053090...

It's only been a week! I'm a materials scientist and the recipes for material growth are true for their systems. I have to find the truth on my system, so if a recipe calls for a deposition temperature of 100 C and anneal at 600 C I may find I need to anneal at 675 C to get similar results to that in the paper.

I'd be surprised if someone had already reproduced it so soon. These things take a few months to get right.

I love being excited about science and research again.

These are the kinds of things I truly enjoy seeing in HN.

This live crowdsourced approach is a far better way to test and refine hypotheses than peer review and the current state of science journals.

That's how it has always been done.

During the 1989 cold fusion fiasco, the findings were announced in a press conference, pre-prints were circulated in the community, and many groups attempted to reproduce the results.

The first publication came weeks later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion

My reply to you was cut off by dang.

Only as long as the experiments are reasonably simple. There are probably still some things requiring only simple experiments to be discovered, but most of the low hanging fruit has probably already been consumed by a couple of centuries of experimentation and scientific progress.

The single most famous mathematical result this century (solution ofthe Poincaré conjecture) was verified by consensus after the claimed proof was published to arxiv.

Which falls into the category where I said it would be possible - you don't have to bring your own Hadron collider but only your brain in order to check whether the proof is correct. Admittedly not any brain will do, so in a sense you still need some specialized equipment.

requires a really significant result in order to demand widespread effort in to replicate.

I've been live following this thread:

https://twitter.com/iris_igb/status/1685731177523449856

This thread is super frustrating. The person posting it does not at all seem interested in actually demonstrating the effect works... how can you have such a sample and only post this one image which could easily be created by gluing a pebble to the glass? Where's the video of it in action!

I want this material to be real so badly.

We all do, andersa. We all do. I can feel the disappointment brewing. Deep down, I'm almost ready for the archetypal "measurement error".

To be fair a video could also be faked and they explain why they're not doing videos and that if you want a replication just wait for the big labs.

Agreed, if they are unwilling or unable to demonstrate it well, why even bother, why waste viewer's time and attention?

A bad/unconvincing/incomplete demonstration is indistinguishable from a scam

If they want to show and distribute the capital-T Truth, they need to take their ego out of the equation

lol they're just having fun let them be. She's not trying to claim anything

I think it's an obvious fake, the account is trolling on multiple fronts.

I'm resigned to disappointment for this. It's the modern days Pons and Fleischmann.

Hopefully the lack of confirmation so far is due to people checking, double checking and triple checking, along with a healthy dose of "we don't want to be tarred with the same brush".

Reminds me of EmDrive. That was such a tease and then utter disappointment.

Hope LK-99 doesn't go the same way.

The similarities are only superficial. A reactionless drive would violate the most fundamental physical laws.

Whereas room temperature/pressure superconductors are not believed to violate any physical law. If you asked “Will we find such a material this century?”, the answer would be a solid maybe. Which end of the century, who knows.

It’s more like proofs of the Riemann Hypothesis. Most mathematicians believe that RH is probably true, or at least hope so, but any claimed proof is viewed with extreme suspicion merely because of the sheer number of false ones.

Note that the original table has been more recently updated: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/claims-of-room-tempe...

So what is the wordpress post for?

Basically theft.

> This is (initially) a copy of Guderian2nd’s table on the discussion thread on Spacebattles with a bit of cleanup. I’ve rewritten most of the notes to be more concise as I track the updates myself, where I can.

How is it theft? The original source is prominently cited, the author of the blog post is an active participant to the original discussion, the whole point of the post is to collect and summarize various sources in one place.

Usually copying someone else’s work without permission is considered (intellectual property) theft.

Also, this person just copied the initial work but isn’t as committed to keeping things up to date. Much better to use the original source.

Except in the case of citation.

No, citing who you copy doesn’t remove copyright protection.

Go look up "fair use" under copyright laws.

I did, there's nothing about including a citation to the original making something fair use. Although if I cite some work using its title like so

   Person *et al*(2023). "The Unbearable Lightness of Tardigades", *Little Creatures*, 27, 100-110

Then even though the title is really clever and creative copying it into my citation list is still fair use.

EDIT: I guess you could argue that the absence or presence of a citation is a factor in the character of the use or the use's effect on the market value of the original with a straight face but it's very, very much not going to be either necessary or sufficient for either of those tests.

IANAL, but copying this table in the way they did seems OK under US copyright law.

In the US, some compilations cannot be copyrighted and some can.

Before a Supreme Court decision called Feist, copyright could be based on either "sweat of the brow" or creativity or both. Sweat of the brow is the work of taking data from original sources and putting it together. Creativity is something you add, like choosing what to include. (If I make a mere list of all restaurants at Disneyworld, that's sweat of the brow. If I make a list of the restaurants that are worth visiting, that's creative.)

The Supreme Court decision was about one company copying another company's white pages phone book. (White pages are the simple name/number listings.) The court said sweat of the brow isn't enough. There must be some amount of creativity. It's a low bar, but it has to be there. So they said the white pages cannot be copyrighted, and copying the entire thing is allowed.

About these LK-99 tables, the "Notes" and "Reliability of Claim" columns of the original table look creative to me. So I'd guess the table can be copyrighted. But the copy of the table didn't include those columns. It just included the factual data, and I think that's allowed.

Sources:

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_compilation

(2) https://www.copyright.gov/reports/db4.pdf (Sections IA and IB give the basic idea.)

The author apparently did not intend widespread readership:

> Whoever is out there, please stop clicking my link. I used to get 10 views a day from Vtuber wannabes and it's now a weekday. I don't even consider it a good enough summary! I thought the 60 views yesterday on the post was good, and now it's a hundred times that! What. Is. Happening.

> Seriously, this is weird. I already got two pingbacks from suspicious sites stealing my post. Joke's on them though, I'm constantly editing it when I have time.

https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/claims-of-room-tempe...

Ok, I guess we'd better switch to that from https://eirifu.wordpress.com/2023/07/30/lk-99-superconductor... (the submitted URL). Thanks!

I've only seen one picture of an alleged successful replication yet: https://twitter.com/iris_IGB/status/1685731177523449856

Since Twitter is no longer allowing public access to posts, it would be better to not link to it. Or better yet, re-post the tweet somewhere else and link to that.

They backpedaled on that and restricted it to single tweets.

So if not logged in you can see a single tweet now but no longer threads.

This is a very different experiment.

The author has acknowledged that one as a fake.

Where? I haven't seen that in her twitter feed.

The report I had of it was false, sorry. Ignore the above.

Why does China alone have so many reproduction attemps? I assumed it would be tried everywhere.

China has more people, more money to spend on research, more equipment, more manufacturing base, more STEM graduates, more everything, and all of that by huge margins.

I'm not sure about the other claims but the most logical reasoning is that China has better supply chains and way more STEM graduates.

China wants to gain a technological edge on all other countries. If they happen to be the first to turn a room temperature superconductor into usable commercial or military materials, then they'll have a huge military or economic advantage for some period of time.

God, this kind of thinking is so brainwashed. The relentless China demonization propaganda has made it so that people in the West don't actually believe that Chinese people have normal human behaviors. In a way, the western media has succeeded in portraying all of China as evil and themselves as good.

Argonne National Lab has synthesized LK-99 and is beginning analysis: https://twitter.com/BenShindel/status/1686115699779878912

Jorg Maser (PhD, Gottingen) at Argonne is working on it: https://twitter.com/8teAPi/status/1686000150777614336

I am surprised that anyone still thinks this thing is legit. I mean, I wish it was true, but the publication, the approach and the infights in the team do not instill confidence.

To me, it seems they can not recreate the "effect" themselves. Otherwise they would be shipping their samples around the world by now.

Don't really get this extreme sensitivity to downvote. I mean - it seems what it seems. May be it seems really promising and trustworthy to some, good for them.

That apart - it seems low hanging fruits in the nature are almost over. Scientific progress might not be as rapid and consistent as in past in coming decades especially when world seems to be heading towards multiple (avoidable) conflicts.

I'm not necessarily saying I believe it's real, I'm still on the fence, but if anything, the in-fighting for credit from the researchers almost makes it more credible for me. Why would they be so desperate for credit if they knew their findings would be disproven in a week or two? It seems obvious they're vying for a Nobel Prize. So at the very least, I believe the researchers believe what they published is true.

Could well be experimental error, and they are fighting over a false positive result.

That is exactly my guess. I have been in the lab, and I know how easy it is to see something because you desperately want to see it...

then reading about the many failed attempts of creating the first transistor will give you hope.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_transistor

So how long before NileRed takes a crack at it?

I’m just curious as a layman, why aren’t the paper authors helping in this race whatsoever? It seems a lot of folks are guessing on the recipe. I haven’t seen any communication from the LK from LK99. Seems like radio silence

maybe NDA, maybe trade secret. commercialization is a valid reason not to be all too chatty

They are, if you follow the threads they are apparently quite available through email and has responded to quite a number of people. Though probably not everyone, given the amount of email that they must be receiving right now.

If they have this unicorn superconducter. Then they have it next week, and next year.

And it's patented. There's no rush for them.

If they are faking, then there's still no rush.

This twitter handle contains some interesting back story investigation https://twitter.com/8teAPi

Where? I just see bandwagoning from a shitpost account.

start here then go to comments for branching out https://twitter.com/8teAPi/status/1685960703658860544

nitter link https://nitter.net/8teAPi/status/1685960703658860544

This is silly and reads like a thriller rather than a recounting of real events.

> interesting back story investigation

No! As stated in their reply to this, you should assume that everything that account writes is fiction.

They said that they were essentially trying to write a The Big Short-style screenplay in real time as the story unfolds. To do that, they link to actual newsworthy tweets and "fill it in with realistic stereotypes".

It's a shame that this account is one of the most responsive aggregators of new developments, as I find their real-time fictionalization incredibly irresponsible.

I'm pretty sure that by the end of this month we'll know that the discovery was either instrument, method, process or humam error.

This month ends in about 10 hours depending on timezone, so they'd better get their skates on.

This some big leap type world changing stuff if it’s true. I wonder how gas prices would fall if this is true

I hope people work on something more interesting than making gas prices go down slightly

Gas powered vehicles would be obsolete.

This is great. Much easier to tell what’s going on than going by the chatter. Thanks

I feel like I am out of the loop on this one. But everything I am seeing makes me skeptical, can anyone explain why I should be excited about this being anything more than just a fake paper?

Multiple authors instead of a single quack. Former leader (now sadly deceased) was a respected superconducting material researcher. They ran the essential tests, albeit not very well. They were at it for years in silence, and it was only after this current material's synthesis that they were tripping over each other to publish, with the apparent firm belief that they were onto a Nobel Prize level discovery. The theory they proposed -- while perhaps wrong -- also makes intuitive sense.

Cold fusion had many of those elements also, but the difference is that superconductivity is easier to verify.

Many people like the overall concept of using doped crystals to produce compressed or stretched lattices, which seem to be one of the enablers for superconductivity.

Compare with cold fusion, where there was no reasonable theory to explain how the palladium lattice would bring hydrogen nuclei close together.

I love that this is happening realtime in the open. I can just about follow the science, and it's so incredibly exciting to watch this unfold live

Please can someone explain this to me ?

There is a lab in South Korea that claims to have discovered/developed superconductor that works at room (and higher) temperatures.

This kind of discovery would be worth a Nobel prize and would probably give us access to a whole range of new/improved technologies in the future.

All of this happened maybe 10 or so days ago, so other labs are trying to replicate the procedure to verify that the claims are legit, as I said, this would be a huge discovery so it has generated a lot of excitement everywhere in the world.

Which companies are yall investing in?

gotta say, this is slowly looking like a giant nothing burger

Is there any HN effect by which enough contrary early opinion here could increase the odds of eventual triumph?

On the chance that there is, I will do my part:

In mice.

Morphic Resonance theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake

No synthesis. Less critical current than YBCO. Lame.

oh god i understood this reference. we love you cmdrtaco

The naysayers say nay.

Saw some people hyping up markets where people are betting on prediction markets whether or not LK-99 will replicate. Can't help but feel like that money would be better spent just paying off some labs to actually try to replicate the process.

The response I got from a predictions market enthusiast was that having a sufficiently large market would motivate people to attempt to have the process replicated and buy options on the outcome once they confirm their findings in order to cash out. Which gives me strong feelings of scamming the uninformed and gullible.

As for comments on LK-99 itself, I don't understand why nobody has gotten their hands on an existing sample to verify that it's legitimate. Shouldn't the minimum requirements be a magnet and the material sample, to demonstrate it floating through the meissner effect?

Just making a bet does not really spend the money, it will just change hands, presumably from the less informed to the more informed, who should be able to eventually spend it more wisely. As far as forcing the outcome, if it turns out to be possible, but the market got it all wrong, there is your incentive to give it a shot regardless.

> making a bet does not really spend the money, it will just change hands

Pretty sure most people would call the money changing hands "spending" that money.

Yes, but the original post means "spending" as "making good use of if" or "putting it to a productive end". People betting money has very little effect on the world. But consider the case where I pay you to be idle for an hour. I destroyed 1 hour of your labor, you got paid but we are not in any shape or form richer because of it. Or consider people attending a charity event. They pay to attend, then spent 1 hour having fun. After the event, they will have to in fact labor to provide the charity when the fund raising event starts to spent its money. There is no cheating nature.

> Shouldn't the minimum requirements be a magnet and the material sample, to demonstrate it floating through the meissner effect?

The minimum requirements should be that it doesn't heat up when you send a large current through it.

Are there any prediction markets where you can bet money on this?

I thought people talked only about Moneyfold, which is just a game. (You cannot take money out of it, although you can use it to make a charity donation.)

I suspect that people on actual real money market would make different predictions to Manifold.

Polymarket uses real money, I think https://polymarket.com/event/is-the-room-temp-superconductor...

https://polymarket.com/event/is-the-room-temp-superconductor...

I like that that website seems to use just smallish penny amounts, no big betting amounts. And that it's a simple formula; if you're right, you win $1 per share, if you lose, you get nothing. There's one about whether Trump wins the election with everyone voting 'no', so the winners will gain fractions of pennies on their bet. But if he does win, those voting 'yes' can gain 99% of their bet.

The concept isn't bad but the problem with these markets isn't necessarily the amounts played, rather it's how they're resolved. What exactly counts as 'event has happened' and 'event has not happened'? I think Polymarket uses some kind of oracle¹ to establish the outcomes. What I know for sure is that there have been a couple of cases of fraudulently set up markets already, so anyone who wants to bet has to really understand the conditions before jumping in, even if they're very sure about the outcome.

Again, I think it's a cool concept but I'd advice people to stay away from touching these until there's a solution for that problem. The small amounts people are betting are likely a reflection of this problem, because it's hard to understand if the setup is trustworthy.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain_oracle

There's been at least one badly mis-resolved market on Polymarket, too.

This type of instictive negative reaction to prediction markets is, unfortunately, common, but, I think, misguided.

Prediction markets are one of the (or just, the?) best ways of aggregating knowledge from multiple sources and producing the best predictions. Having good legible predictions of impactful events such as LK-99 replication is extremely useful for society - it would be an invaluable input for a savvy policy maker for instance.

What I think is silly is that vastly bigger amounts of money are put in betting markets for any mildly important sportsball game. Meanwhile, markets on LK99 replication, one of the most potentially important possibilities in the world right now have only on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars in them.

And there is no scamming involved. If you are participating in a prediction market, either you have some reason you believe you know something the market does not or you should expect you are simply subsidizing those with better information. The latter is a perfectly reasonable thing to do - it's not easy for an average person to "pay off some lab", but if they provide liquidity to the prediction market they are giving an explicit subsidy for anyone that can answer the question.

I agree with you and think it parallels the equity market a bit.

Stock prices embody the market's collective knowledge, expectations, and emotions about a company's current and future value.

And to your point if you are blindly investing or blindly buying via instruments like ETFs you can end up subsidizing those with more/better information.

What do these prediction markets produce? Some people are saying "yes" and others are saying "no", and the answer is either "yes" or "no", but why bother spending money on predicting when society can spend money on replicating it? Wouldn't an actual replication attempt be more useful?

> The latter is a perfectly reasonable thing to do - it's not easy for an average person to "pay off some lab", but if they provide liquidity to the prediction market they are giving an explicit subsidy for anyone that can answer the question.

Is any of this liquidity going to actual (replication) research, because if it is not, again: what are these markets tangibly producing? Moving a bunch of numbers around a ledger does not seem very useful.

They're producing the wisdom of the crowd, which is a real and highly accurate piece of information. It's quite difficult and expensive to produce information as fast and reliable by other means. And they don't cost much, it's mostly money being moved around.

edit: I interpreted it as asking wether prediction markets in general produce value. In this specific case I'm 100% with you, they're absolutely useless in predicting wether this finding is going to replicate or not.

BTW probably 100% useless is going to be better than trusting a single reply in a HN thread. Even averaging out a group of replies on HN is going to be pretty bad, probably worse than averaging out a group of replies on Reddit.

The idea of wisdom of the crowd is based on the idea that knowledge about a topic (both false and true) is roughly normally distributed (as many things are in nature), so the averaged result of a large group of answers is likely to be close to the real answer, as long as there are no external factors pushing the whole distribution left or right.

Also, the final result is not going to be the answer if it's gonna replicate, but more the odds of it replicating (i.e. the odds of a paper like this being legit). The odds could be 1 in a million, and it still wouldn't affect the reality of LK-99 being super conductive or not.

"They're producing the wisdom of the crowd"

Yeah we saw how wise was the crowd's wisdom with crypto.

This is correct - the overwhelming majority of people did not get involved with crypto. Even for people and companies who did most put a fraction of their money into it.

"They're producing the wisdom of the crowd, which is a real and highly accurate piece of information."

I have strong doubts, that the wisdom of the crowd here is competent in judging whether a revolutionary new superconductor is real, or not.

what's an alternative that is better?

There is literally zero wisdom in the crowd about a brand new just discovered material that’s only ever been produced by one small group by definition.

This market fetishism is out of control.

That's not correct. Condensed matter physicists will have a good handle on how plausible this is (but not certain). Other people will vote randomly so their votes cancel out, effectively leaving the final result as biased by the expert opinions. That's how the wisdom of the crowd works.

The opinion of a crowd is "real and highly accurate"? The opinion of crowds is frequently completely disconnected from reality. Crowds are often an amplifier of individual delusion. As for accuracy, the only thing the opinion of a crowd is accurate about is the opinion of that particular crowd (not even "the crowd" - look at election polling)

The wisdom of the crowds works given a large and diverse sample of independent predictors. People who don't know anything about a topic will vote randomly so their votes effectively cancel each other out, but people who know more about a particular topic will be biased towards correct answers.

So practically speaking, what can you do with the fact that X% of fans (because people betting are enthusiasts) think LK-99 will reproduce and Y% think it wont?

You assume all the people betting are enthusiasts. The theory of prediction markets is that rational actors in the market will recognise that a portion of the betters is overhyped and adjust their bets to make use of their irrational behaviour.

If the rational actors are actually effective at making such adjustments I don't know, I bet there's statistics out there on how well prediction markets correlate with reality.

In any case, even if the market was perfect, it wouldn't tell us if LK-99 would reproduce, which I guess is the meat of your question. It would just tell us how likely it is that an experimental result made under those specific circumstances would reproduce. And what you could do with that information depends on what your answer to the question: "How would I be affected if LK-99 would reproduce?" would be.

If you're a big energy business leader, and you want to filter what topics to spend your valuable time on maybe you could set a rule that you only want spend time reading scientific papers that have >10% odds of being legit.

More realistically though, I think things like prediction markets are mostly useful to traders who are trying to arbitrage things like resource markets. What's the price of copper going to do when this turns out to be true? You could adjust your futures based on that.

Have you heard the one about the Emperor of China's nose?

https://imaginatorium.org/stuff/nose.htm

Basically, making an average of a large number of estimates of an unknown value will (of course) fail if most/none of the estimators have any idea of the actual value being estimated.

> most/none of the estimators have any idea of the actual value being estimated.

A subtle distinction is who is allowed to participate in a prediction market.

"Everyone with $1" is a terrible answer, and produces the bad results people are pointing to.

Financial markets avoid this because of their scale, where there's enough smart money to (usually) punish stupid money.

Absent that scale, it's just stupid money muddling the decisions of smart money.

Prediction markets with a knowledge barrier to entry would produce better results.

How would you construct such a knowledge barrier? Another prediction market?

Also, suggesting that there is such a thing as 'smart' money - presumably due to having more of it? - is amusing. As pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, there has been a lot of smart money acting particularly dumb over the last few years.

A "Do you understand what superconductivity is?" or "Do you have a physics or engineering degree?" barrier?

And the relevant question isn't whether 'smart' money does dumb things: it's whether 'smart' money does dumb things less frequently than a random sample of money.

No one is an oracle, and there are absolutely outlier events that specifically confound experts, but I can't believe that increased expertise is uncorrelated with increased accuracy.

Tetlock’s Superforecasters performed better than experts, though: >In the Good Judgment Project, "the top forecasters... performed about 30 percent better than the average for intelligence community analysts who could read intercepts and other secret data"

I don't think I've seen that before. But the article you linked doesn't make the conclusion you suggest at all, instead they pose a corrected value. If indeed no one estimating had no information at all, the average length of Chinese person's nose would be close to that corrected value.

It's the same with this topic. You won't get an answer to the question "Is this particular paper true or not?" but you'll get an answer to the question "Are papers submitted under these circumstances making claims like this likely to be true?". The crowd will only answer the question they can answer. I think that's from "Thinking fast and slow".

It's not well explained in the version I linked (apologies, I should have looked for a clearer version).

The point of the story when I originally heard it is that no one has SEEN the Emperor's nose. So any statistical function (like averaging) of estimates is totally useless as they are all guesses.

No one has seen 'papers submitted under these circumstances' so no amount of 'crowd wisdom' will make any difference.

Also, as an aside the idea that 'the crowd will only answer the question they can answer' is ... bizarre. People will answer anything you ask them, and you have no way to know if they are just making it up.

> They're producing the wisdom of the crowd, which is a real and highly accurate piece of information.

Unless the group of people is not a crowd but rather a mob.

The opinion of a crowd is generally useless in highly technical matters. The people betting on this stuff generally do not have the background to evaluate any claims appropriately, and just react to what other people (who they believe to be more informed) are saying.

In what way would the people in the prediction markets fund a replication? That's not something that normal people just do. And if I wanted to do that, I don't even know how.

And society doesn't spend money. People do.

> What do these prediction markets produce? Some people are saying "yes" and others are saying "no", and the answer is either "yes" or "no", but why bother spending money on predicting when society can spend money on replicating it? Wouldn't an actual replication attempt be more useful?

They are producing predictions of future value. It's not clear when you're only considering a single case, but what if you only have enough money to fund two projects and you have 15 applicants? You could pay a panel of experts to evaluate them and now you can only fund one project, or you can exploit the prediction market and fund the projects that seem to have the best chance of success according to the crowd. So in effect, the crowd is funding projects by freeing up funds that would otherwise go towards bureaucracy.

The wisdom of the crowds works given a large and diverse sample of independent predictors. People who don't know anything will vote randomly so their votes effectively cancel each other out, but people who know more about a particular topic will be biased towards correct answers.

What do stock markets produce?

The way resources are allocated is very important, but getting it optimal is very hard. Stock market is one of structures which helps to create long-term incentives to optimize resource allocation.

You can directly see how it works if you compare market-based economies to e.g. a planned economy Soviet Union: a lot of goods produced by Soviet industry were not in demand, especially consumer goods. When Soviet Union was no more a lot of factories were closed because they were producing some utterly irrelevant shit.

> Is any of this liquidity going to actual (replication) research, because if it is not, again: what are these markets tangibly producing?

Many economic concepts work in practice only at scale. E.g. if there's a one-off $1000 incentive, it might not attract people capable of doing that. But if there's an opportunity to make $1000 every second, people might put an effort into taking that opportunity.

Prediction markets create incentives to do particular stuff, as all markets do.

If there was enough money at stake, it could definitely incentivize replication research.

There are two scenarios.

Scenario 1: Suppose you have a lab with all necessary equipment and materials. Normally you would use it for your own research (i.e. research new materials). But if there's e.g. $100M prediction market on replication of a particular result, you might consider redirecting it to replicating that research instead.

If you do it before others, you can sell your replication proof to a hedge fund which will then get a position on prediction market before revealing the proof.

Scenario 2: If there's enough money in replication markets, hedge funds might specifically fund laboratories which replicate stuff.

> What do these prediction markets produce?

Vigorish.

The issue is there’s zero utility in aggregating knowledge on LK-99 as apposed to simply running these experiments. It’s going to take weeks not decades for someone to replicate it.

Markets are useful when people act more efficiently based on the information, but there’s no efficiency to be gained here.

Not to take away from your point, but there is a better way than prediction markets, and that's careful objective research by non-experts (https://goodjudgment.com/).

It's been shown that teams of such researchers consistently beat prediction markets on these sorts of topics. Anecdotal evidence suggests it might be that the presence of experts and cultural preconceptions corrupt prediction markets enough to diverge the result from the "wisdom of the crowd" effect.

> It's been shown that teams of such researchers consistently beat prediction markets on these sorts of topics.

This sounds like free money.

Running prediction markets is probably more free money than that. Building and maintaining research teams like that is not easy or cheap, if it would be then Good Judgment Inc. would be rolling in cash.

Edit for context: Good Judgement Inc. is a sort of consultancy firm formed based on the results of an experiment called "The good judgment project" where psychologists challenged a community to predict (geopolitical) events. By structuring it as a team based tournament they figured out a list of qualities/rules that would make an individual or theme very good at accurately predicting events. The teams that followed these rules outperformed prediction markets. Following the rules is basically a full time commitment.

The list is here, go get your free money: https://goodjudgment.com/philip-tetlocks-10-commandments-of-...

> Running prediction markets is probably more free money than that. Building and maintaining research teams like that is not easy or cheap, if it would be then Good Judgment Inc. would be rolling in cash.

You get your money from the prediction market if you are better at predicting.

> it has been shown ...

Can you please share your sources?

LK-99 is a brand new material that almost nobody knows anything about. The market is not a knowledge aggregate, it is vibes based.

You are severely underestimating how good vibes from a lot of people are at giving good estimates.

There has to be _some_ level of knowledge to base it off though, this is just hope.

They are actually only good if the members of that crowd have some sort of empirical experience with the problem they are being asked to solve. Guess the number of coins in a jar? People know coins and have experience packing things in a limited volume to the crowd has a hope of being wise. Guess an obscure materials science and physics result? Not a chance, the crowd is worthless.

> You are severely underestimating how good vibes from a lot of people are at giving good estimates

Anyone else remembers how people were selling and buying doge coin at 70 cents based on good vibes? No? Ok.

How about this scenario:

I am the PI of a laboratory. I buy up the market and (falsely) announce that I succeeded in replication. Sell and make profit. Then a couple of days later I announce that I made a terrible mistake.

How do you prevent this scenario? I did nothing illegal, I just "not noticed the mistake I made".

A version of that probably happened last night with Lk-99, the “Iris” replication claim.

Why do think it’s such a problem? Those are the risks of speculating and the market adjusted back downwards in very short order. If Iris was a manipulator the gains were minimal and fleeting.

The anti-markets comments all over this are so unfortunate and misguided.

By your own logic don’t you just prove that a real lab is now potentially motivated to investigate and even replicate? If I’m working in a lab and it looks like it is working, why not let me place money on yes and speculate? I have excellent information.

But a fraud was perpetrated and the scammer got away. The markets are supposed to ignore that? Money was taken out of the market by a bad actor. If anything this encourages quick fraud over slow honesty.

Markets don’t ignore it, they learn from it. They don’t need you or any authority to protect them.

Edit: Understand that the scammer has to buy, then release the false information, and then sell. They only “scam” the buyers that don’t critically assess this new information, such as it’s provenance and quality. This means that over time only the best analysts survive and thrive. Smart speculators likely sold the spike, limiting the number of buyers the manipulator could find. This scenario is actually an argument FOR prediction markets.

> They only “scam” the buyers that don’t critically assess this new information

Yes correct that is a scam, no scare quotes. A scam doesn't become less of scam because it worked or didn't work.

So you feel governments should babysit prediction market speculators who can’t evaluate information for themselves? Or wait that’s too hard, so let’s just ban them, well because … fairness obviously.

The issues are not problems as people make them out to be, you don’t have an intrinsic right to not be scammed, or to take vacations, as nice as it sounds, those are just fantasy that leads to worse situations when attempting to make reality.

> they learn from it

And the lesson is that betting markets are a scam.

But then you get people criticizing the ones telling you that lesson. Is it because newborn fools must be preserved until people can take their money?

How are betting markets a scam? They are remarkably useful, you can watch the LK-99 market now and you will know immediately as new information arrives.

The "replication" does not use the same methodology and the "scientist" is asking for bitcoin to post a video of the quantum locking effect.

The existence of the market is encouraging literal scams.

So what it’s also encouraging real information.

Well, that's your claim.

Somehow you expect people to act differently if that market wasn't there. Personally, I doubt a large number of those interested even know the market exists.

Yet, scammers are deeply aware of betting markets. they seem to always be there, and even create new ones just so they can play.

The base prior (the market price) is that this will not replicate. This scenario is a way to make a quick buck claiming the opposite without doing any actual hard work.

In regular markets you can't just say "we increased our sales 1000%" and a week later "oops, sorry, misplaced decimal dot". You can do that in prediction markets.

If you are participating in a prediction market and blindly believe random claims, yes, you will lose your money. As you should.

I don’t understand what you think is different with other markets. Information must be assessed for it’s accuracy and acted on by participants.

In this case I’d even argue the prediction market helped focus attention and resulted in rapid counter analysis that questioned the claims.

Perhaps without the LK-99 markets effects the false information would have had wider and longer reach? The losses of the unskilled participants are a perfectly acceptable cost and in fact beneficial in the long term.

The reason regulation is introduced in every trading market is because scammers are killing the market. How long do you think an honest operator can survive in a market where 90% of participants are scammers? You talk about skilled participants. The way to have 100% skill is to manufacture an event.

The history of financial markets is rich in examples.

Or more recently, the endless supply of scamming in sports betting where athletes collude to fix games.

I understand that is the common perception and an understandable one based on how the information on this topic is presented to the public. However it’s likely not true, unregulated markets have boomed and provide many valuable services and information. I’ve personally heard an argument promoting even removal of insider trading laws and that markets would actually be fairer and more efficient without them.

You would risk someone else of stature announcing against your position. There are also liquidity risks.

Or the opposite. I successfully replicate in my lab, but the price on Yes is high, so I make a post about how there definitely isn't superconductivity, buy up all the Yes, and then say "Woops I made a mistake. It really does superconduct."

OP is downplaying the shenanigans that can go on here.

The only way to prevent it is some sort of SEC insider trading or market manipulation laws.

The market already takes this possibility into account

I believe that falls under insider trading.

Conceptually, but not legally.

Insider trading has a very specific definition, which does not apply here. In fact there are huge financial markets, like forex, where insider trading mostly doesn't apply.

This is illegal btw.

Absolutely and people might be interested that in this case the prediction market for LK-99 is reacting in real time to new tweets from people trying to replicate. The “yes” spike to 32c yesterday was in response to a twitter account posting an image of a levitating grain in a tube. The credibility of that replication attempt was then evaluated by many and the market backed off afterwards.

There is always a subtle anti-markets theme on many HN debates, likely from highly educated ans literate posters. I believe we still in this age simply don’t provide proper education on the massive benefits that markets bring to so mang problems. They are literally the nervous system of our incredible global organic economy.

In this case, why in world would you have something against prediction markets?

Is it fascinating the risk of a nuclear weapon detonation by December 31st of 2023 is accessed to be around 9%?

If anything we need to liberalize laws around prediction markets. Currently they are relagated to off shore and various backwaters. The CME should be listing tbese types of markets ideally and institutional money hiring top analytical talent would then participate.

I think we are all too aware of markets and their benefits and disbenefits.

It's not clear why you think the "education" is missing only in one direction.

You don’t observe a frequent knee jerk like anti-markets reaction from comments across HN?

What are good examples of their “disbenefits”?

You don’t observe a frequent knee jerk like anti-markets reaction from comments across HN?

I find HN one of the most balanced online forums on most subjects.

What are good examples of their “disbenefits”?

The race to the bottom is all around us.

> The race to the bottom is all around us.

You live in SF by chance?

Because globally and historically that’s absolutely not what the data says about markets.

Marketers take a lot of credit for achievements that don't belong to them.

Take, for example, Hayek's rather more honest commentary on vacations and human rights generally:

>[The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights] is admittedly an attempt to fuse the rights of the Western liberal tradition with the altogether different concept deriving from the Marxist Russian Revolution. It adds to the list of the classical civil rights enumerated in its first twenty-one articles seven further guarantees intended to express the new ‘social and economic rights’. (…) The conception of a ‘universal right’ which assures to the peasant, to the Eskimo, and presumably to the Abominable Snowman, ‘periodic holidays with pay’ shows the absurdity of the whole thing. (…) What are the consequences of the requirement that every one should have the right ‘freely to participate in the cultural life of the community and to share in the scientific advances and its benefits’. (…) It is evident that all these ‘rights’ are based on the interpretation of society as a deliberately made organization by which everybody is employed. They could not be made universal within a system of rules of just conduct based on the conception of individual responsibility, and so require that the whole of society be converted into a single organization, that is, made totalitarian in the fullest sense of the word.

https://redsails.org/concessions/

The decay we witness today is simply the rollback of concessions copied from socialist states and artificially bolted onto capitalism to reduce socialist ferment. The consequences are predictable.

I see. So this is about “the right” to take a vacation? What are you talking about and what am I? we seem to live in different realities. I can’t even imagine somehow I would have a government “right” to take a vacation. Who is paying for it? I don’t get it.

All so-called "capital returns" are in reality produced by working people, and therefore people get to democratically decide what they do with them, through whatever decision-making forms they politically choose and consent to organize themselves under.

Insofar as there are disagreements, because capitalist "geniuses" don't think their riches should be subject to democracy, we have a struggle between socialism and capitalism.

Except history shows us that in 100% of the cases that working people seize the production and allocate the gains they do a unbelievable bad job. Socialism is the single most failed idea in human history, yet we refuse to properly teach that in our education system. I suspect in the future it will be view a bit like refusing to teach other scientific subjects, like evolution.

In reality a mob of people end up producing nothing without capitalists and markets. There is a joke that the IQ of a mob is roughly the highest IQ in the mob divided by the size of the mob.

Cool joke.

I encourage anyone on the fence between this libertarian and I to read the "Concessions" essay I linked up above.

> Socialism is the single most failed idea in human history, yet we refuse to properly teach that in our education system.

Well... let's see until we have the capitalist end game before we draw that conclusion, there is a fair chance that it will make the failures of socialism look like a picnic.

> I suspect in the future it will be view a bit like refusing to teach other scientific subjects, like evolution.

Economic systems aren't science, they are just means of organizing large numbers of people in ways that are hopefully sensible. A system that maximizes for growth can work, for a while, but isn't long term sustainable. So depending on your horizon you may think it is a great idea or a terrible one. Markets aren't bad per-se, but they have the potential to lead to catastrophe and if you don't acknowledge that potential and deal with the risk then the chances of it happening increase.

Refusing to view economic systems scientifically and quantifying objectively is a seriously big problem. Gotta stop the fairy tales.

The problem is that every economic system ever proposes is predicated on a bunch of assumptions that do not necessarily hold true over time. So you end up with a model that may work for a while but that's not how science works. Science extracts facts from observations using the scientific method. Social constructs - and social sciences of which economy is a branch - effectively model people and people are emphatically not as predictable as lab equipment and substances.

So you will always end up with fiction dressed up in a scientific coat. It looks and talks like science but it really isn't. There are no testable hypothesis, there is a ton of politics and there will never be consensus.

Do you mean Communism instead of socialism above? Socialism has nothing to do with "seizing the means of production". For socialism it is sufficient to regulate private industries to achieve social good.

And flavors of socialism are very successful so far. Most first-world countries (particularly in Western Europe) have adopted aspects of it and significantly improved individual quality of life compared to those countries who haven't.

Nice strawman.

Western europe is being left behind and it’s politicians are getting nervous. Claims of higher quality of life are false information.

>There is a joke that the IQ of a mob is roughly the highest IQ in the mob divided by the size of the mob.

How can you possibly be saying this and "the wisdom of the crowd in markets is all-knowing" in the same thread?? Did you forget to say "and multiplied by the wealth of the mob"? :)

Do you think you have a right to take breaks at work? To go to the bathroom? To a safe work environment?

People aren’t machines. We have a complicated social contract that says companies may employ labor so long as they meet certain requirements for safety, health, and treatment.

It’s not unreasonable to see time off as part of the deal. Who’s paying for your bathroom breaks? Same answer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annual_leave#Leave "Most countries have labour laws that mandate employers give a certain number of paid time-off days per year to workers." (it goes on to point out that the USA - with the exception of Maine and Nevada - is the outlier in western industrial nations in not having this)

The "right" is also in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_rest_and_leisure

Ironically, a lot of this dates back to the Haymarket Riot in Chicago in May 1886 (over the eight-hour-day movement), which led to May Day being a worker's holiday in much of the world...but US politics meant they got an alternative holiday in September.

As RedCondor points out, "who pays for it" has it backwards, companies gain value from the work of their employees, so effectively it is just giving back some of what they "pay" the company in labour.

Any system that is in control and doesn't actually manage to stop progress can make this claim, monarchies and socialist systems included. Capitalism is very good at maximizing the amount of money available for investment, so it probably is uniquely qualified to make a claim to be the best system for encouraging progress, but just as clearly it aggressively funnels technology down paths that are tuned for maximum value extraction and that's not something I believe is good for society as a whole, or even progress on a long enough timescale.

For what it’s worth, not much, but me personal believe that you believe that without evidence and primary due to the propaganda governments have fed you to scapegoat the evil “capitalists” and markets as a way to deflect blame for serious problems away from themselves.

Governments need to regulate to prevent harm, we all agree. Yet they claim it’s the markets doing it! No, markets do what is most efficient and optimal given the rules they can operate within. Governments are the failure point for basically all the serious problems. Instead of making neutral evidence based rules as regulations, politicians tend to reach for redistribution to buy votes, which when combined with scapegoating markets, is a winning combination to remain in power. Unfortunately history shows, unambiguously, it’s a losing combination for the society.

Funny, I think that you believe what you do without evidence primarily due to the propaganda spread by the wealthy elite that own and control the system and want to deflect blame for serious problems away from themselves by blaming the government.

The private sector is bigger than the public sector, both in terms of dollar expenditure and in terms of political power. Politicians have to be vetted by rich people (the campaign finance process) before they are even options for election. If you're wealthy enough to monetize policy changes, it's easy to lobby with positive net expected value, if not, it isn't. The whims of the wealthy are in the driver's seat, the will of the people is not.

Quick exercise. Many people are confused about the social class they inhabit. Tax policy is the easiest way to demonstrate the actual reality, because whoever is in charge always decides that someone else should pay the taxes. Take out last year's 1040. I want you to look at 3 lines: Line 1, what you earn from working, Line 7, what you earn from owning assets, and Line 9+3/4, your unrealized capital gains. Line 1 has high tax, Line 7 has low tax, and Line 9+3/4 has no tax. Who do you think decided these tax levels? Populists? Do you feel in charge here?

> markets do what is most efficient and optimal given the rules

Markets don't maximize value in the colloquial sense, the value that they optimize is wealth-weighted. Feed a starving orphan? Zero market value because the orphan has no wealth to pay you. Merge up all the banks so they can load up on risk and arrange for bailouts when they go bust? Enormous market value because it makes rich investors richer, the single most weighted value in all the world. The market will ejaculate capital and connections all over this brilliant value-creating enterprise. Oh, and part of it will involve bribing public officials so you can even blame the government for allowing you to rob the plebs. Lol.

Ok, so the markets don't do what people want, they do what wealth-weighted people want. What rich people want. Is that so bad? You and I still get enough weight in the process to live a decent life. Besides, Warren Buffet seems pretty humble and someone has to be diligent about the high level investment decisions, right? Well, here's the problem: financial assets are a moral hazard. Cynically, capitalism entitles rich people to get paid for being rich. Passive income is the ultimate luxury, the most valuable commodity, and rich people indulge exorbitantly. Even Warren Buffet. Especially Warren Buffet. When his passive income streams are threatened, the happy investment grandpa turns into a nasty selfish asshole out to bust the balls of the people doing the real work at the companies he owns (seriously, look into the terms of the BNSF negotiations) because on the opposite side of a passive stream is (arguably) a stream of unreciprocated labor. The counterargument is that Labor Theory of Value is clearly bunk because there's more to value than labor, but just as clearly there is moral hazard in letting someone who doesn't produce the surplus value decide what to do with the surplus value. Wouldn't they just stuff it in their pockets? Yes. That's literally what the stock market is. The entire private sector is organized explicitly for the purpose of stuffing pockets and everything else is merely an emergent consequence of that.

Maybe that's ok. After all, every contract is individually agreed to, right? Problem: one side gets much more control over the rules of the game than the other, so consent is dubious. On the first day of business school they teach the prisoner's dilemma, where freedom to control the rules of a game trumps freedom to choose inside of a game. In theory, competition keeps businesses is check, but in practice businesses do everything they can to avoid competition, some successfully, so does it really?

In any case, every system needs investment and investment is all about reducing consumption today (which rich people are in a unique position to do) in order to spend the money instead on a factory or a risky venture or something that is expected to make the world better tomorrow, returning a cut to the investor, rewarding success and punishing failure. This is good for everyone, right? Well, yes... when it plays out that way. But markets are amoral. They don't really know if you created value or extracted value and they don't care. The money in your pocket doesn't care if you are a highway robber or robber baron or someone who worked hard for that money. As far as markets are concerned, "create problem, sell solution" is just as legitimate an enterprise as solving an actual preexisting problem. Better, even, because fundamental value creation is hard and you have to compete, while monopolization is all about not competing. What do the best performing market sectors over the last few decades have in common (health care, housing, and education)? Monopolized scarcity. Is this really best for society? You notice how business school tends to focus less on building a better product and more on building a better moat? They know what they are doing, and while it's the best strategy for them, is this really the best way to run society? By maximizing free money for the rich and observing that a somewhat functional society springs up as a side effect?

Capitalism is great at growth and terrible at stewardship. It wins a land grab but it leaves behind a nasty class structure. Is it worth it? I have no idea. I just try to win. I'm a lot less certain than I used to be, though.

> Capitalism is great at growth and terrible at stewardship. It wins a land grab but it leaves behind a nasty class structure. Is it worth it? I have no idea. I just try to win. I'm a lot less certain than I used to be, though.

I think we're roughly on the same page. The interesting part about capitalism is that it scales fantastically, for a while and as long as the bills aren't due you can improve your standard of living and those around you considerably. But some day those bills will be presented, it can be during your generation, your kids or two or three down the line. And that's when you find out about the stewardship component. But by then it is too late. It's a study in how local optimization can cause global catastrophe.

I really like this discussion because it's a rare example of things being discussed in real terms, where the financial considerations are secondary; actual power over real resources being wielded by the wealthy.

If you think about it in terms of resource consumption per capita over a lifetime then it gets a lot more difficult because now you have to divide all those resources across all of the humans that have lived and that will every live taking into account any kind of improvement on recycling. This is a really hard problem, the estimate is that right now about 7% of all that people that have every lived are alive, and that the total number of people have have ever lived is 117 billion people. But because historically people would consume less than we do today there is a 'surplus' that we started to eat into at the beginnings of the industrial revolution. Now we're in debt to the future and those 'wealthy' people in your comment are over represented in terms of resource consumption but we're not that far behind when compared to say the people from 400 years ago.

Extrapolating into the future then is probably going to show an even larger percentage of consumption per capita compared to the budget, and that at some point in time will result in a shortage. The people that will live through that will look back at us as the incredibly wasteful denizens of the 20th and 21st century that wasted resources on a scale that at that point in time probably will be criminal.

Sustainability is more than just a nice slogan, it is sooner or later going to be our end-game and the earlier we start doing this for real the longer the species will exist and the more comfortable the members of the species will be.

You make very interesting points, but I'm having some trouble understanding exactly what you mean.

When you say that at some point in time there will be a shortage, what do you mean, exactly? A shortage of what?

The way I understand capitalism is that shortages, in a sense, don't actually exist in free markets (except temporarily if there are unexpected disruptions), because capitalism is mostly a system of allocating the resources that are available, in the most efficient way that we know of.

Or another way of thinking about it, is that there is always a shortage of almost everything, because we could always take advantage of more resources if they were available.

So what do you mean exactly?

Resources are finite, they will eventually run out. All resources are finite except those that nature provides as part of its own sustainable cycle, everything else sooner or later comes to an end and the more of nature that we destroy the more we will have to provide ourselves. Resource availability has five stages: we don't have it because we can't get at it, we have access to it and we're actively getting it, getting it has become too expensive (you end up alternating between this one and the previous one for a while), we have to get it from our previous waste material because the original sources have all run out and finally we no longer have it in a form that we can get at it because it has become too dispersed.

Every resource that came as a gift with the 'bare' planet (before life began and exposed by various tectonic processes) follows these stages. So the more of nature we leave in one piece and the more we work in a sustainable manner (maximize recycling, for instance) the longer humanity will survive in a recognizable form. The only other way that I can think of is to go off-planet.

That's the most thorough smack-down I've ever seen on this forum. Great read.

> it aggressively funnels technology down paths that are tuned for maximum value extraction

In this context, if you start using the words "creation", "production" or even "availability" rather than "extraction", I think your perspective will change drastically.

The “bottom” is also subjective. I see small-town grocery stores everywhere in Indiana dying due to cheap Dollar General stores popping up next to them.

So much for fresh fruit & vegetables, so much for the Amish bakeries that would distribute baked goods through the local groceries.

But hey, cheaply-made goods from China are more widely available.

Not every negative aspect of changes caused by a market-driven process is actually an indication that those changes are negative as a whole.

You should contemplate why the market caused resources to be allocated this way, instead of your preferred way, as usually the market allocates resources more efficiently than any single person could ever hope to achieve.

It may turn out that the negative changes you perceived are more than balanced by other positive changes that you weren't able to perceive. In your example, the lives ot Chinese people who benefitted from those changes may have improved a lot more than whatever setbacks you may have experienced. Or maybe people around you can now buy things they couldn't afford before.

That said, this is not always true, as markets don't take into account externalities.

But still, we don't know of any system of global resource allocation better than letting markets do their job while governments try to control their externalities.

> The race to the bottom is all around us.

Isn't this more a side effect of corporations, advertising and corruption rather than markets themselves?

To some, they're the same thing.

Any number of the many, many, negative externalities[0], where market transactions are unable or unwilling to capture the often serious negative effects of an activity in its price, that have been documented and researched by economists over the years? Air pollution and greenhouse gases are just two of the biggest examples, with absolutely massive external costs that are not captured in the price. There are even positive externalities with various activities where societal benefits can't be captured in the price.

Regulatory capture[1] and rent-seeking are also examples where markets can fail. There are plenty of others.

Markets are just tools for the exchange of economic activity. Nothing more, nothing less. But as a society, we tend to ascribe all sorts of greater meaning to them that make it harder to recognize where they come up short and actually do something about it. If knee-jerk anti-market reactions are bad, then might I propose that knee-jerk pro-market reactions are just as bad, insofar as they gloss over or outright ignore the negative aspects of markets as we've implemented them?

Imagine a screwdriver. It does one job: turn a screw. If you have the right one, matched with the corresponding screw drive--let's just assume a Philips screw--at the right size, it does its job perfectly. But it'll get less effective as the tip and screw sizes diverge. What about other screw drives? There are a bunch of types where a Philips will sort of fit, and you'll probably be able to turn the screw, albeit with more effort and a greater likelihood of camming out and damaging the screw or your screwdriver. A flat-head screwdriver gets used and abused in all sorts of fun and interesting ways. You can use a flat-head screwdriver to pry open a can of paint, but an actual paint can opener is still less likely to distort or damage the lid or slip and injure you. At some point, you open the tool box and grab another tool. Maybe it's another screwdriver, because you're turning another screw. Or maybe it's a different tool altogether, one designed for the specific task at hand.

Markets aren't so different, if not quite as narrowly-defined as a screwdriver. They work well in some areas, less well in others, and in some, they simply can't function. All to varying degrees. Recognizing their failures and limitations allows us try and develop policies that address their worst parts while maintaining their more desirable parts.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

For the record I believe I agree with you. However I view it as governments are the failure point in the issues you list, not markets. They have outright failed to address the negative externalities as they have been captured by private interests. In my opinion the entire financial system is captured and the regulations they tend to introduce are simply to allow the corrupt private entities further control.

One neat part of anonymous online prediction markets using unregulated digital currencies is how they exist outside this crony capitalist system.

It’s not markets to blame. It’s bad government!

Yes, the police are to blame for the rash of murders and arson is clearly the fire department's fault.

It takes two to perform regulatory capture -- unless one of them can buy votes from lawmakers. And guess what the "market" found was most efficient?

And the politicians also buy votes from the people using redistribution policies. Seems we agree the government is the problem!

I would describe myself as cautiously pro market, but I think it's hard to deny that they are effective externality seeking machines. If there is any way of providing a benefit while finding a way to impose the cost diffusely, you can bet that the market will find it. Market based systems guarantee that costs will be hidden and imposed on those who don't receive the benefit to the maximum extent possible given physics and law.

On top of that, it's interesting that we only use the market concept at the meta level. Vanishingly few of the businesses that compete in the marketplace are internally arranged on market principles. Instead they follow bureaucratic and oligarchic principles internally. And when the survival of the state is on the line because of war, we don't trust markets to allocate resources to get important things built quickly - rather the state takes power to directly cause some things to be built and other things not to be.

Although the market gets praised for being good at allocation of capital, I would say it's good in the way evolution is good at finding things that can survive. It might find great solutions that a planned process wouldn't, but it'll take a long time and a lot of things will die in the process.

Isn't military work mostly done by private contractors? It's not like the USAF actually owns and operates its own plane factories.

Some companies do approximate market operations internally, any company that has a notion of internal billing or where teams talk about internal customers is to some extent like this.

Companies not using market principles internally isn't a strike against markets, if you believe Coase's theory of the firm i.e. companies form at the break even point on transaction costs

Child labor.

Slave trade.

Sweatshops.

1000 different environmental catastrophes.

You know, the reasons we have regulation. We had markets FIRST, then we got regulation on top of that, and we never looked back.

All of those things, including environmental catastrophes, existed for millennia before Adam Smith came along.

So did markets.

Absolutely government’s fundamental role in human society is regulating against harm.

But somehow the narrative is markets are “bad”, they obviously aren’t as they seek out information and efficiency, which is a good thing. Markets are the one’s you should thank for telling you child labor, slaves, and sweatshops are a problem, and the environment issue, so you pressured your government to regulate those issues. Without free markets the alternative would be the government doing all those horrible things, which btw they certain used to.

People are mixed up, the primary problem is government failure to regulate and be transparent. It’s very difficult for governments to admit they create the problems so academics and politicians find the boggy man of markets.

Kennedy understands this topic well and while it’s unlikely he will win, I deeply hope he can somehow.

We need more markets for more things with clear and clean regulations build based on empirical evidence and scientific and not created by lobbyists involved in regulatory capture.

> But somehow the narrative is markets are “bad”

The mainstream opinion is "markets are ok as long as they are well regulated".

The only narrative that is trying to compete with that with any success is "markets are perfect without any regulation". Which provokes the rebuttal you refer to.

I've yet to see anybody claiming seriously that "markets are inherently bad and can't be saved". Even in communism there were markets, as abysmal as that system was (and I lived in a communist country for 6 years).

If our markets right now were regulated enough - we wouldn't have global warming problems. Clearly there's a lot of externalities that aren't priced-in. So - there's too much market and too little regulation.

We likely actually agree.

The issue is politicians tend to push redistribution and direct action of the government over rules and regulations.

Child labor has been a thing since well before any market ever existed. Slavery has always existed and was made obsolete not due to some new moral prerogative but because it couldn’t compete with new labor saving devices. Sweatshops are basically the same as slavery and mostly exist in places which have not fully accepted free markets or where the value placed on human life is shockingly low. They can only obtain workers because their economy is absolutely unbalanced - there is no reason to believe a market wouldn’t fix that eventually. Regarding environmental catastrophes, that seems to be a result of technological advancement more so than “markets”, but markets are the thing that is most probably going to bring the third world out of poverty and make them actually care about it.

The only reason people like us are able to sit and argue on HN is because we aren’t worried about finding dinner for our 8 kids tonight. We live privileged lives. By demonizing the very thing that allowed us to move past these things you are basically attempting to pull up the ladder so no other unfortunate people can come up after you

> What are good examples of their “disbenefits”?

Overwhelmingly unaddressed externalities.

Prediction markets seem blessedly free of externalities though, compared to, say, the energy market (CO2) or textiles (child labor, sweatshops.)

except for incentivizing action to tilt the odds, which is weirdly amoral. if you bet on a bad thing happening, you can cash in by making it happen yourself.

Feeding gambling addictions is the one big externality that comes to mind.

> except for incentivizing action to tilt the odds, which is weirdly amoral.

It depends on what's at stake. One example is predicting someone's death.

> if you bet on a bad thing happening, you can cash in by making it happen yourself.

Yes, and that could be a huge problem, don't you think? It creates an incentive for a bad thing happening that wouldn't exist otherwise.

I say this as someone who is in huge favor of markets but also hates their externalities.

Vast topic.

Markets definitely have their issues.

Here are a few:

* The most obvious one is the fact it's an overhead, it doesn't produce goods or services by itself. That's not a major issue, but for example in the US ~5% (~7M of ~150M) of the workforce is dedicated to this overhead.

* It's prone to internal instabilities. Too often, the markets disconnect from the underlying economic reality, sometimes with only mild effects (for example, that time petroleum prices went negative), sometimes with more serious ones (2008).

* It can lead to overly quantitative views, ignoring the qualitative. It's the "metrics becoming the objective and thus compromising the value of the metric" (example: tech stock prices).

* It over-emphasizes individual interests over the collective one (think for example: environmental issues & global warming).

Markets definitely have their issues. But so far, the other systems we experimented with (planned economy) were even less able to cope with the incredibly difficult task of balancing an economy.

Lastly, it is to be noted that we are not operating in a pure market economy.

We are in an hybrid system where States (hopefully representing their people) definitely have a lot of say in economic matters and that's probably for the better.

> Markets definitely have their issues. But so far, the other systems we experimented with (planned economy) were even less able to cope with the incredibly difficult task of balancing an economy.

The worst issue that the Soviets and other attempts at central planning failed to account for was flexibility and buffer. Say a natural disaster hits and you need an extra amount of concrete for reconstruction, but all the concrete production was already allocated for something else and the plan is considered sacrosanct. Or some innovation (e.g. refrigerators, cars, washing machines) proves to be way more popular than expected, but there is no way to adapt the plan, and so you had to wait years for a Trabant car.

Ironically, Western-style "free markets" eventually converged towards the same issue with the unholy invention of "just in time" manufacturing. Both capitalism and communism sought to eradicate "inefficiencies" and destabilized their entire foundation doing so.

To extend, interesting read on the subject of the soviet economy:

https://chris-said.io/2016/05/11/optimizing-things-in-the-us...

HN discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515225

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25084479

> Too often, the markets disconnect from the underlying economic reality, sometimes with only mild effects (for example, that time petroleum prices went negative)

I may have misunderstood the situation at the time or am now misremembering it but I thought:

Some crude futures were about to become deliverable, meaning people who had been speculating on the price and have no fundamental use for unrefined petroleum were going to receive it. Normally they sell the soon-delivering futures for some later-delivering futures and lose or make relatively small amounts of money in the difference.

But there was no one to sell to, because COVID had reduced processing capacity and demand for gasoline. So all these traders who had no use for crude were about to be stuck with it. It's a noxious, volatile, dangerous chemical that requires special handling.

As the date approached it became important to find somewhere to _put _ the stuff, so much so that traders were paying people to take it off their hands. Which seems like a very elegant mechanism?

Like, I don't want crude oil at my house. I'm not gonna worry much about the price to get it taken away, probably.

And at that moment the market was paying for someone to take the crude, meaning anyone who could bring additional storage or processing capacity online very quickly was delivering something valuable.

Yes, that's what's happened.

I was using this example to illustrate the disconnect between the market (which was trading oil like some immaterial stuff) and reality (oil is definitely a product you need to store properly, plus oil storage is not infinite).

In fairness, because it occurred during COVID, i.e. a really abnormal situation, this is a bit of a weak example.

>What are good examples of their “disbenefits”?

The fact that you are asking this with a straight face tells me everything I need to know. Even the most rabidly capitalist person recognises that there are many severe problems with capitalism (they usually argue that it's simply better than the alternatives).

Because markets aren't nearly as clever as is always claimed.

Lehmann Brothers anyone?

More like governments aren’t as clever as claimed. The markets would have put all the bad actors out of business permanently and redistributed the resources (like shinny new buildings and engineers) to areas where they would better be utilized.

Instead it was turned into an opportunity to launder money at planetary scale.

This likely hints to why the truth about the benefits of brutally efficient free markets is distorted in education, it would require the teaching of the remarkable incompetence of collectivism and governments! which we know who won’t like that.

At what cost though? Surely the wealthy will continue on like nothing ever happened while the rest of us are here holding the bag.

Markets seem to benefit some much more than others. Not everyone wants to play this game.

I was there and know all the details what happened and you nailed the key point, they used fear to have you believe what you wrote.

I remember Paulson talking about how ATMs would fail. AIG won’t pay it’s policies. The US equities would crash even further. I hate to tell you but ALL lies, blatant “misinformation” as the new term is.

They needed you to be terrified to save their own skins. Blackrock became the largest landlord in the country afterwards. The very companies that facilitated and promoted and literally caused the bubble and crash were rewarded.

The waitress and mechanic couple with a baby who had carefully saved up $30K never got the opportunity to buy that house down the street from their parents for $90K at foreclosure from the bankrupt banks. Nope, Blackrock exchanged their bad paper, worth, 20c for $1 to your very government for new fresh cash, bought it instead at $120K, down from $150K.

Go crony capitalism! Which isn’t what markets are about.

It's really funny that you're essentially saying "true capitalism has never been tried, we need to give it another shot, it will work this time I promise" without even realising the irony.

Markets are perfectly capable of rewarding bad actors for a very long time. even if they eventually converge towards reality it's not something that you should assume about a market in any given situation (for one thing, a market is only reflecting the opinions of others about a thing, not the reality of the thing. Even if you think the opinions are on average wrong you don't make money by finding the reality, but by predicting when and how the opinions will change).

I think markets are an extremely useful decision tool in a lot of circumstances but they do still have many failure modes which aren't related to not being 'free enough' (especially w.r.t. regulation it can in fact make markets more efficient as opposed to less, depending on the regulation and the market).

What system isn't capable of rewarding bad actors for a long time?

Random allocation.

Which then erases all information.

A perfect market would do this, but it would also suffer from other well documented problems.. the markets we have are very far from disinterested allocation optimization systems.

"Real capitalism has never been tried."

And, of course, cannot fail--only be failed.

Don't act like markets and government are independent entities. The markets influenced the government in their favor long before Lehmann brothers and they did the same afterwards.

The markets you think of are as possible as working communism.

You are well outside mainstream economics. The existence of market failures is only disputed by a tiny minority of economists. You can disagree with the consensus of experts, of course, but it's ridiculous to claim they don't have the "proper education".

I don't think you even realize that your beliefs are fringe.

That’s a pretty clever trick you got there. First you take all of the problems inherent to markets. And then you say “actually it’s the government’s job to fix that, and they’re doing a terrible job”—which you then turn around and use as a justification for more markets and less government!

Looking past your "rah rah financialization" partisanship, one question:

Why is a prediction market for replication per se more interesting than the existing market of all the public companies who would be enriched / wiped out based on the result?

(Note that "well, the effect would be too small" flips just as easily around to, the smaller markets are obviously way too noisy given what people are actually getting away with...)

What are people getting away with exactly? Prediction markets more rapidly expose fraud and misinformation than without them.

Generally the decision to list a market or contract is based on providing specific utility and information. They provide a better signal to noise and therefore provide risk management as well.

The fact you believe markets are a “partisan” topic illustrates exactly the problem. They are objectively and scientifically an important and critical part of humanity, which isn’t taught.

As I’ve said elsewhere there reason is obvious as in teaching such facts and information will require simultaneously teach about how horrific and harmful governments have been, and we know who won’t like that.

Exposing fraud you created the environment for is not particularly interesting.

Oh so fraudulent SC claims would have no better avenues without prediction markets? I’d argue they would have more and with more capacity not less!

I don't understand, how do prediction markets create the environment for fraud?

More directly about the actual issues policy makers care about, so you lose less info to confounders.

Markets are perfect except when they don't capture "actual issues" and then you need different markets with different participants? How does this support market primacy?

> Why is a prediction market for replication per se more interesting than the existing market of all the public companies who would be enriched / wiped out based on the result?

If you knew precisely which companies would gain or lose, how much relative to their stock price, and all these companies were liquid and public, then maybe you could make this comparison. Even then, there'd be plenty of noise from unrelated factors. So, it's pretty clear why a prediction market is superior.

Prediction markets got Donald Trump wrong on the election night and Brexit too[0].

Given such a huge failure why should we care what they say?

[0]: https://archive.li/7m8s6

Weren't they still much better than what many media experts were forecasting? Iirc, CNN put Clinton at 97%.

Serious analysis, like 538 (not just poll aggregators like CNN), put Clinton at ~65%.

Are you saying they are no better than chance? Or just that they are not 100% perfect?

Because we should deeply care about any source of information that beats chance, even if it is imperfect.

I mean that is two fucking big ones to get wrong, no?

Would maybe be interesting to see some data to look back and see how correct they are in general, but to be practically useful it would have to be quite a lot better than chance.

Agreed. Stock markets are very similar to prediction markets. They are priced based on future projections, technical feasibility and probability of achieving certain milestone, ability to reach market first, internal and external factors, etc. I don't see much difference between a prediction market and a stock market. Theoretically, we could allow both of them and treat them similar. But one major risk I see is that big players can influence it with big money and distort the reality. It becomes a casino, just like the current wall street. Right now, most of the participants in prediction markets are likely knowledgeable in the subject area, or even subject matter experts and it's probably better to leave it that way.

"attempt to have the process replicated and buy options on the outcome once they confirm their findings in"

This is called insider trading in stock markets and illegal. So your analogy breaks.

If some company claims to have discovered a way to make widget X and I make widget X at home and trade on that information, that’s completely legal.

fwiw there are very coherent economic arguments as to why insider trading should not be illegal and might be more “fair” with it permitted.

Re: nuclear weapon detonation, the implied probability of 9% (I take it source is: https://polymarket.com/event/will-a-nuclear-weapon-detonate-...) might be factoring in the premium for the insurance that participants that predict a detonation are interested in acquiring.

Let's say that the real odds of detonation are 1% and that everyone participating in the market knows and agrees to this. You would expect the implied probability that the market produces to be 1%.

But in practice, a nuclear detonation would be a highly disruptive event where the impact is hard to assess. This creates an asymmetry of interests. If you want to protect yourself financially from such an event, you would pay a premium for it (which in a prediction market implies placing a higher bet on "detonation will happen" than a perfect gambler). If you want to protect yourself from the event _not_ happening, you would also do the same, but no one really does that other than speculators.

Similarly, you can sell tornado insurance to a lot of people, but very few people are interested in insuring that a tornado _will_ happen (maybe concrete bunker architect studios?). So the underlying prediction market would skew towards overestimating the likelihood of tornados.

"Will a nuclear weapon be detonated (including tests and accidents) in 2023?" is at 18%

https://manifold.markets/ACXBot/8-will-a-nuclear-weapon-be-d...

There are some caveats in the description, and this is play money, but people on the site do take their profits seriously.

It seems to be too thinly traded to read much into it? From what I can see a $100 bet would make the implied probability of detonation 93%.

yes, but then players would use their cash to bring it back to a reasonable number. That's why there are temporary blips on the site but markets which have at least 40-50 traders tend to stay where the whale consensus still is.

I admit it's a weakness, but even play money markets generally do tend to track real-money ones where they exist. People on the site mostly take their profits seriously.

> Is it fascinating the risk of a nuclear weapon detonation by December 31st of 2023 is accessed to be around 9%?

If a nuke goes off, full-scale nuclear war becomes much more likely. In the event of nuclear apocalypse, your money will become worthless. So shouldn't that risk be undervalued?

>Is it fascinating the risk of a nuclear weapon detonation by December 31st of 2023 is accessed to be around 9%?

That tells you all you need to know, but probably not in the way you think.

> Prediction markets are one of the (or just, the?) best ways of aggregating knowledge from multiple sources and producing the best predictions.

They would be true if people with most money and appetite for risk were also the most knowledgeable and smart.

They are not. As you can easily tell from recent coverage of idiocy of even the richest people who have propensity for big bets.

It has been researched and discovered that people with more money do not make smarter bets than those with far less. So at best, looking at prediction markets, gives you exactly as much knowledge as polling random people on the streets and asking them what would they bet on.

This exactly - the idea that a whole load of well informed people are driving a prediction market is about as realistic as saying that crypto investors are all experts in economics.

Counterargument. Prediction markets could also be used to hedge.

E.g. if you invest in technology around LK-99, and then use prediction market to prevent going bankrupt in case you were wrong.

THUS: it doesn't mean that prediction markets give good predictions.

By the way. Do you have some data on that? I.e., statistics of prediction markets being right vs wrong?

The hedge is still a signal of the degree of risk you ascribe to the possibility your technology won’t work.

If I invest in technology (hoping it will work) but use the prediction market to hedge in case the technology won't work, how does that tell anyone watching the prediction market that people have net positive feelings about the technology?

If you were 100% confident you wouldn’t hedge at all. If you’re 80% confident you’d hedge less than if you were only 60% confident.

This all translates into an price signal if the market is functioning and liquid.

You should explain how this works then. How exactly do you derive a prediction from the price? Also if the people with deep knowledge of the technology use the prediction market for hedging, and all the "outsiders" use it for speculation, then the signal is disturbed anyway.

> If you are participating in a prediction market, either you have some reason you believe you know something the market does not or you should expect you are simply subsidizing those with better information.

Sometimes people just vote for "their team", similar to a sportsball fan placing a large bet on their favorite team winning, without any insider knowledge. I've seen it a couple of times on PredictIt for the more contentious predictions (presidential election being one, control of the house / senate, etc). While in the end those with better information will usually come out on top, in those kinds of markets the favored prediction doesn't align well with the data.

> Having good legible predictions of impactful events such as LK-99 replication is extremely useful for society - it would be an invaluable input for a savvy policy maker for instance.

How?

Would it not be better for the "savvy" policy maker to JUST WAIT until this discovery is confirmed, definitively, by multiple legit research institutions? And even better, wait until it shows some promise of practical application? Policy, as we know it, almost never reacts within hours to anything, let alone a scientific discovery. What exactly can a policy maker even do with faster than hot-off-the-press knowledge about this stuff?

Prediction markets are really just for people that hustle in markets or who are looking for a news scoop. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that, though some might argue it contributes to needless volatility.

For example, if I'm deciding right now whether to fund a mine for one of the materials needed to create this supposed superconductor, knowing how likely it is to be real helps me make a better decision or hedge my investment.

Right, there's nothing wrong with that, but it's appropriate for someone who is hustling the market. Not a policy-maker. Even if it's a government doing the funding, a response time measured in hours doesn't really help anyone.

If anything, it is likely to introduce extreme volatility, jacking up prices because of speculation.

>Prediction markets are one of the (or just, the?) best ways of aggregating knowledge from multiple sources and producing the best predictions.

That's an extraordinary claim with zero evidence behind it. Do you have any evidence that "prediction markets" provide more accurate predictions than e.g. specialist surveys or other mechanisms? I don't see any empirical evidence nor any logical reason for that to be the case.

That's not all that different from how the financial crisis came to be: derivatives on top of bad loans. Here it is bad bets on top of a possible phenomenon that probably none of the participants in the bets have any insight in.

The bets were never the issue. The leverage in the banking system was. The bad bets were just the spark that lit it. The prediction markets are not leveraged

No reason why they wouldn't become leveraged.

A few things:

* the paper wasn’t ready, and internal drama is what led to it being released

* I’ve read that the process of making it is quite difficult. There probably are not many samples out there in the world

Basically, it wasn’t ready for primetime, but I believe it’s close

The topic on how hard or easy it is to replicate seems to be as fast changing as other information. The first time I read about it, it was deemed to be super easy as all you needed are the two base materials and a vacuum furnace. But with all the drama involved I would not be surprised if the process is actually very complicated.

The paper is vague unfortunately. Here are some of the questions Andrew McCalip has (and he is fairly far along the path of actually making LK99):

Precursors:

•What level of purity is required for the precursor materials?

•Are there any necessary preparatory steps for the precursors just before use?

•What are the required particle sizes for the precursor materials?

Thermal steps:

•What is the environment (air or vacuum) for the Lanarkite reaction?

•What are the temperature ramp-up and ramp-down rates for all three reactions?

•Are there any thermal annealing steps involved?

•How sensitive is LK99 to the duration of the final 925°C step?

Results:

•Could you elaborate on the observed differences between the bulk material and the thin film?

•Does the bulk material share the same composition as the thin film?

•How repeatable is the prescribed recipe, is SC behavior stochastic across samples?

•Could you provide details on the equipment used, setup photos, and procedures employed to measure the critical current in response to an applied magnetic field, as seen in figure 8 of paper 3?

Thin film deposition:

•What type of glass substrate was used in the vapor deposition process for the thin film?

•Could the exact set-point temperatures of the tungsten boat be provided, instead of ranges? (e.g., 550 ℃ to 900 ℃, 900℃ to 2000 ℃)

•In patent figure 22, from which region was the resistivity value taken? The light gray or the dark gray area?

https://twitter.com/andrewmccalip/status/1685891722675687424

The stock market is no different, there's inequality in access to information there too.

It's worse than that. If you've confirmed results, you now have an incentive not to publish your results, instead building up a market position on prediction markets for as long as possible.

No. You're incentivized to build a market prosition on prediction markets, or sell your information to somebody who can. (E.g. if a lab has a replication proof it might partner with a trading firm to maximize their profit.)

But there's definitely no incentive to do it "for as long as possible". E.g. once the trader gets into a favorable position, they are incentivized to reveal their information ASAP to be able to take profit.

The amount of market position you (or someone you have sold the information to) can build up is limited by market liquidity / trade volumes.

It's like they say, when all you have is a hammer...

The worst part is that those market people are delusional enough to believe what they say.

> buy options on the outcome once they confirm their findings in order to cash out

What stops that being textbook insider trading?

Note that real prediction markets with money are currently illegal in the US because of some legacy law. So Polymarket (currently the major prediction market I believe) is only usable outside the US anyway.

Currently the only US alternative is play money. Manifold and Metaculus use this system. Metaculus doesn't really use play "money", but a non-zero-sum system to award points for more accurate predictions. It's in both cases a game and an exercise in checking how well-calibrated your beliefs about the future are.

And here is the canonical FAQ on prediction markets, and the social/policy benefits they could have:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/prediction-market-faq

Kalshi is a real money prediction market that's (only) legal in the US. No market on LK-99 though.

From the FAQ:

> Kalshi can only ask a few specific regulator-approved questions; the limits are so harsh that they’re not even allowed to predict elections

I was absolutely certain I saw a photo of LK-99 floating over (partially, part of it was still touching) a magnet. Of course, this proves nothing as it's a photo, but I have this memory of seeing it, so maybe someone else saw it in some official capacity.

This is purported to be a video of what you saw a photo of: https://sciencecast.org/casts/suc384jly50n

YES! That's the one!

Off topic: any tool to have a quick summarization like this?

---

The blog post is about the discovery of a purported room-temperature-and-pressure (RTP) superconductor, labeled "LK-99". The discovery was announced in two papers published on arxiv.org on July 22, 2023. The first paper, which was short and seemed hastily written, had three authors: Sukbae Lee, Ji-Hoon Kim, and Young-Wan Kwon. The second paper was more detailed and had six authors, with Young-Wan Kwon being removed from the author list.

The LK-99 superconductor, originally synthesized in 1999, is claimed to have a critical temperature of 127°C, above the boiling point of water. The synthesis method is simple: finely grind and mix Lanarkite (Pb2(SO4)O) and Copper Phosphide (Cu3P) and bake it at 925°C in a vacuum chamber for a day.

The discovery has sparked a mix of skepticism and curiosity online. Young-Wan Kwon, the removed author from the first paper, crashed a science conference to talk about the discovery, adding to the intrigue.

The blog post also discusses the implications of a room-temperature superconductor, which could allow for things like an infinitely long power cable without loss, or a portable MRI scanner. It also provides a timeline of events and a list of ongoing replication efforts by various academic and private groups. The author emphasizes that scientific research is a gradual process, and the validity of the LK-99 superconductor is still being investigated.

ChatGPT

The kagi universal summarizer has been pretty descent on my end. But I've only lightly tested it on two pages.

Stone Age

Bronze Age

Iron Age

LK-99 Age

(source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36869209)

Stone Age

Bronze Age

Iron Age

I would add Steel Age here

LK-99 Age

Given that human flight and putting things in space rely on Aluminium, I think that's worth a mention too.

And the beverage can! While it seems mundane it's extremely effective at what it does and it's actually recyclable (unlike most things).

I think a silicon age would be appropriate too.

I was thinking steel reinforced concrete but yeah Aluminium or Silicon would fit here also.

And Silicon after Steel

Do not forget the Carbon Fiber age.

Silicon?

Don't forget the plastics age...

Okay, I think I've got it.

Stone Age

Bronze Age

Iron Age

Steel Age (1800 - 1940. The development of mass-produced steel of high quality, and its widespread adoption and use in construction and by industry.)

Aluminum Age (1940 - 1965. Tremendous growth in the aeronautical and space industries, enabled by the futuristic light alloy.)

Plastics Age (1965 - 1985. Ubiquitization of lightweight, durable plastics in all forms of consumer goods and media. The M-16 "plastic rifle" and the polycarbonate compact disc are symbolic of this era.)

Silicon Age (1985 - 2023. The age of computers in everything, the internet, "smart" devices, gig economy, etc.)

LK-99 Age (2023 - ??. Could end next week, could last a while. Nobody knows.)

No silicon age and plastics age?

Could this be the new 4 minute mile? Will [humanity] evacuate on ourselves?

Whatever this may be, it’s exciting.

I don’t know what you’re trying to say, but to “evacuate on ourselves” means to shit ourselves.

That is exactly what I intended to say.

Everyone thought the 4 minute mile was impossible, until it was done, and then everyone started doing it. Had Roger Bannister had a cardiac arrest and evacuated on himself, people would have stopped trying for it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFH0qcmw36Q

I've seen the 4 minute mile myth posted a lot around LK-99 stories:

https://www.scienceofrunning.com/2017/05/the-roger-bannister...

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36940487.

tldr; no successful experiment outside original labs reproduces the results.

Fingers crossed...

OTOH only one lab announced a failure and they say they haven't followed the recipe.

Fingers crossed...

Currently, Cold Fusion used in small scale isotope breeders for medical purposes. One 2kWt breeder with CF can replace 100kWt traditional breeding plant.

Cite please. I think you've mistaken neutron feed sourced medical imaging radionuclide from low energy research reactions for cold fusion e.g. https://www.itnonline.com/content/fda-approves-additional-mo...

NorthStar produces non-uranium based Mo-99 in collaboration with its manufacturing partner, the University of Missouri Research Reactor (MURR), in Columbia, Mo., using neutron capture technology.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtfUeip4vyA&t=335s

That's not "cold fusion" that's low energy fusion. It explicitly has surplus neutrons and radioactivity.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_electrostatic_confi...

It's energy consuming. It's just lower energy than other methods, and it's emphatically not cold fusion.

Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR), AKA Cold Fusion.

When someone mentions cold fusion, they are explicitly referencing a net energy-producing process that operates at room temperature. That isn't what you are referencing.

> Cold fusion is a hypothesized type of nuclear reaction that would occur at, or near, room temperature. Wikipedia

It works at near room temperature.

The goal of the reactor in the video is to produce isotopes. It does the job.

It can not ever produce net energy in this setting, so no, it doesn't do the job.

It is in a room, but the temperature inside that vessel is anywhere north of 35,000 C. Unless you have a very hot room that isn't 'room temperature' by any stretch of the definition. Note that room temperature is about the temperature of the process not the temperature of the building containing that process.

35kK in this reactor is much closer to room temperature than 150MK in ITER, isn't?

Sure, but that's fine and expected since you don't need a sufficient fusion density for net energy.

Look, call 35K cold if you want. It's relatively easy to make some fusion at home [1] at even colder temperatures. However, the real issue here is __producing__ energy (edit: more than you put in). This has never been done in a sustained way (H-bombs produce net energy, there were some promising inertial confinement and tokamak results recently, but never for sustained periods of time).

And in the chain, it's pointed out quite clearly that everybody understands "cold fusion" as referring to "net positive energy".

[1]: https://fusor.net/board/index.php

I am old enough to remember "The Storm in a Glass". Back then, there was a discussion about excessive heat, because the scientific community doubted the possibility of nuclear fusion reactions at such low temperatures and energy costs. My own hypotheses were: a) the reaction is caused by cosmic radiation (muons), and the deuterium filled lattice only amplifies natural high-energy cosmic radiation; b) the reaction occurs through contamination of samples with radioactive materials, and the matrix only amplifies natural decay reactions; c) cracks in the material create resonance with alternating electric current, and as a result, a natural particle accelerator is formed.

In the video, researches use lattice to boosts fusor performance by few orders of magnitude. Why you think that they cannot boost it further?

> Why you think that they cannot boost it further?

That's not how this works. Why do you think it can?

I have not tried, but my idea (more than 10 years ago, before the war) was to cover the lattice with atom-thin blanket of depleted Uranium, then to shine at it with radiation from hot mix of radioactive isotopes, with hope that lattice will boost performance of Uranium by 1k-10k. The obvious problem for practical use of this idea is small cross-section of the Uranium blanket, so maybe thousands of thin layers of Nickel-Uranium will be required to make it work, or Nickel-Uranium alloy at 98%-2%.

PS.

The purpose for of the device is to heat homes, to avoid need of Russian gas, not to generate electricity.

Your comment makes it sound like you don't understand the physics of it at all.

What does Uranium have to do with this? What does "performance of uranium" means? What do you think will happen when you bombard it with "radiation"? What kind of "radiation"?

Uranium is most commonly used in fission devices, not fusion ones. Fusing Uranium would absorb energy, not liberate energy, this is why we split it. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/170716/is-there-...

For heating, you'd be better off using a heat pump. Or I guess you could take some radioactive material and shield it. Or even a breeder reactor, but that's fission.

I do not want to come across as disrespectful, but what you're saying sounds like alchemy, or the kind of "science" they show in superhero movies.

I could understand using a layer of metal to produce x-rays, and concentrate these to heat a sample (a bit similar to H-bombs, BTW), but I am not a nuclear physicist either. Real physicists have thought about this much more than we did, and if there was a simple pathway to practical fusion, we'd know about it by now. I think you underestimate the complexity of all this (kind of a "Dunning-Kruger" effect), go watch the "MIT's pathway to fusion[1]" videos for an introduction to the problem and modern approaches :)

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk

Do you know how LENR works? Basically, deuterium is dissolved in palladium or nickel (the lattice), until metal starts to crack, to create high concentration of deuterium. Then muons are used[0] to start some fusion. Higher concentration of deuterium means that single muon can accelerate more nuclear fusions, so yield is better. However, artificial muons are expensive to produce, while cosmic muons are rare, so reactor may run fine on one day and fail on other just because of bad or good cosmic weather. If we will have cheap source of muons, then LENR will be practical.

My idea is to try to accelerate fusion by banging Uranium in the lattice, instead of bombarding it with muons. It's just an idea with little chance that it will actually work as-is. Many iterations of research and fine tuning are required to make it work.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion

I'm not saying it is 35K, I'm saying it is at least 35K and probably much higher.

Whether it is closer to room temperature or not is not relevant, when someone says 'room temperature' they are talking about 21 degrees Celsius plus or minus a couple, not above the temperature where any kind of solid matter exists. Even tungsten, which melts at 3422 degrees C and boils at the magic number of 5555 C is just vapor at that point. Closer isn't relevant, at all.

As you can see, the apparatus didn't evaporate while working, so, probably, temperature is much lower.

It didn't evaporate because it is constructed carefully not to, but that doesn't mean it isn't blazing hot, just like the gas burner on your stove can be made out of aluminum which would be melted by the flame if it ever became mis-aligned.

But that doesn't mean the flame has a temperature lower than the melting point of aluminum, it just means that whoever designed it knew enough to ensure that the aluminum is never exposed to more than that it can handle in spite of being in close proximity to something that is able to melt it instantly. The biggest factors there are flame shape, stand-off and cooling effect of the gas supply itself.

Note that when you casually write 'plasma' that you are talking about material that is so hot that it has shed all of its electrons, it is just the nuclei that you're looking at and if it so much as touches anything at all it will waltz right through it as if it isn't there. See also: plasma cutters[1] for a nice demonstration of what happens when you use these facts to your advantage. But for things like plasma based fusion they are a very tricky problem because you have to maintain the plasma while simultaneously extracting energy from it.

The device shown in the video is very, very nice and well engineered, it is amazing that they got it work as well as they did with such simplicity but the process is eminently unsuitable for energy generation as far as I understand this stuff, keeping the plasma stable and cooling the whole thing uses many kilowatts. It's an improvement over a linear accelerator or a tokamak for the production of short lived nucleotides it is not an energy generating device.

[1] Plasma cutters also don't instantly disintegrate the cutting tip, that's because they blow copious air through the nozzle to keep the hot plasma away from the tip itself and to direct it onto the workpiece that you are cutting. But woe to you if your air pressure unexpectedly drops.

Although the plasma cutter creates extremely hot flames, it operates at room temperature and does not require powerful radiation protection, except for protective goggles, and it is easy to turn on and off. This sets it apart from the blast furnace. Similarly, a cold reactor may require a source of high-energy particles with very high temperatures to start, but they operate at room temperature, are easily turned on and off, and cannot be used to create a bomb. Note that heat is the problem for an isotope breeder because the reactor will require more powerful cooling. It's not designed to generate heat or electricity. This doesn't mean that it's not possible to create a cold reactor that generates a lot of heat, but it also doesn't mean that such a reactor will be economically viable. We don't know.

I mean that it is time to stop stigmatizing Cold Nuclear Fusion because a reactor for isotope breeding could have been created 30 years ago, saving many thousands of lives. The hating of Cold Fusion has cost many people their lives. It would be better to allocate a small fraction of a budget for other nuclear power plants and direct them towards CF, because the cost of CF iteration is orders of magnitude lower, and a few million dollars or euros could significantly advance science.

Can you explain why you continue to say things that make no sense after it has been pointed out to you multiple times by multiple people? It's a bit strange, normally you'd realize your mistake and adapt, but you seem to persist in purposefully misunderstanding what it means when people talk about 'room temperature fusion'.

Let me spell it out once more and then as far as I'm concerned we're done here. Room temperature as a qualifier for a process means that the entire process operates at room temperature. Boiling an egg does not take place at room temperature, even if it takes place in a room. Superconduction - for now - does not take place at room temperature but far below it (this may change shortly, the jury is still out on that). Plasma, aka the fourth state of matter can in very extreme cases be created at low temperatures but we're talking about a couple of nuclei worth at best ( https://www.livescience.com/64422-plasma-cooled-with-lasers.... ) but normally only does so at thousands of degrees.

This means that the term 'room temperature' simply does not apply.

> This doesn't mean that it's not possible to create a cold reactor that generates a lot of heat

You really should read that sentence again. Cancel out the double negative and see if it makes sense to you.

> The hating of Cold Fusion has cost many people their lives.

This is complete nonsense.

> It would be better to allocate a small fraction of a budget for other nuclear power plants and direct them towards CF, because the cost of CF iteration is orders of magnitude lower, and a few million dollars or euros could significantly advance science.

Science budgets are limited and tend to be directed to areas that are suspected to be fruitful. This makes it hard to get funding for what is - charitably - called crank science (or, more precisely, pathological science), which includes cold fusion. If you are a strong believer in the concept you should fund it yourself rather than to put the burden of your beliefs on others.

Temperature is statistics. Our bodies are penetrated by high-energy cosmic rays, but they do not change the room temperature. Cosmic muons can accelerate tens of thousands of nuclear fusion reactions in a deuterium-filled lattice, melting the metal, but it does not change the room temperature a lot. So, at what temperature do these reactions occur? On one hand, high energies are required to overcome the Coulomb barrier, and on the other hand, the reaction does not require heating of materials to 1MK or higher.

I have used the term Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (low relative to High Energy Nuclear Reactions in thermonuclear fusion). LENR allows for the creation of a cold fusion reactor, that can be started at room temperature and operated at low temperature, unlike thermonuclear fusion reactor. Please, see the difference between «nuclear reactions» and a «nuclear reactor».

> You really should read that sentence again. Cancel out the double negative and see if it makes sense to you.

Not a native speaker. It makes perfect sense in my native language. :-/

> This is complete nonsense.

I mean that delay or absence of medical treatment caused lot of premature deaths in these 30 years. Progress saves lives. Delaying of progress reverses the process.

> Science budgets are limited and tend to be directed to areas that are suspected to be fruitful. This makes it hard to get funding for what is - charitably - called crank science, which includes cold fusion.

As you see, private capital is not afraid about loss of scientific reputation. IMHO, it will easier to get funding for LENR reactors when they break the ice. I was unable to find a funding for similar idea before the war.

> If you are a strong believer in the concept you should fund it yourself rather than to put the burden of your beliefs on others.

I will try that after the war. However, I may pursuit a different goal - a bluster (photon streams with watts of energy per single photon), to kick Russian drones out from the sky.

> Temperature is statistics.

Temperature is a measure of the kinetic energy of the molecules in a substance, a measure of velocity.

> Our bodies are penetrated by high-energy cosmic rays, but they do not change the room temperature.

They in fact do. Every time a high-energy cosmic ray interacts with a particle in the room the room temperature goes up. The chances of that happening are small because from the perspective of such a ray space is very much empty. But some substances (such as water) are pretty good at absorbing those rays and that's part of the reason why hard radiation is risky for organisms.

> So, at what temperature do these reactions occur?

Those reactions, when they occur are more like traffic accidents. The impact results in the transfer of kinetic energy and will result in a 'shower' of particles emitting from the point of impact and some of those particles in turn will fragment (but slightly later). They will typically spray out from the impact point. Cloudchamber photographs can show you in nice detail what such interactions look like. So the question at which temperature those reactions occur doesn't really have meaning, each particle has it's own velocity and the end result is some photons emitted by the electrons of the excited particles and probably some new particles (think of them as fragments spraying out from a traffic accident).

> Cosmic muons can accelerate tens of thousands of nuclear fusion reactions in a deuterium-filled lattice, melting the metal, but it does not change the room temperature a lot.

I can't parse any of this. But you're going to have to trust me on the physics of electostatic confinement fusors: the losses are such that there is no known path to producing net energy through that method. You can fuse nuclei, and your link above is interesting but it doesn't change the fundaments at all, it is an optimization and a good one but it doesn't get you closer to 'net out' any more than being able to run the 100 meters in 5 seconds would get you closer to breaking the lightspeed barrier, or like how piling up bricks gets you closer to the moon with every brick but you will never get there.

> So, at what temperature do these reactions occur?

This is again not a very meaningful question, the answer is 'much higher than room temperature'. The interesting question would be: does it produce more energy than you put in and if not can it be improved so that it does and I'm afraid the answer is simply 'no'.

> LENR allows for the creation of a cold fusion reactor, that can be started at room temperature and operated at low temperature, unlike thermonuclear fusion reactor.

That's a novel interpretation of the words 'cold fusion', and uses 'low temperature' in a way that I'm not comfortable with, even if it stops short of getting into the millions of degrees.

> I mean that delay or absence of medical treatment caused lot of premature deaths in these 30 years. Progress saves lives. Delaying of progress reverses the process.

Nobody is delaying progress. Well, maybe except for those that would siphon off budget from legit science to pursue their pet fringe science subjects.

> As you see, private capital is not afraid about loss of scientific reputation.

And that's perfectly fine. Whoever manages to do this in their garage will win a Nobel anyway. But if you don't have an advanced physics degree the chances of you discovering a novel principle for fusion that leads to net energy out on your table top are nil, and if you do have that degree you are probably not much better off. If there was so much as a theoretical path to net energy out fusion that does not require many billions of $ you can bet that there would be people all over it, in fact I would wager that we would have already found it.

> IMHO, it will easier to get funding for LENR reactors when they break the ice.

Possible, but not likely, see above bit about breaking the speed of light.

> I was unable to find a funding for similar idea before the war.

That's not surprising, really. Investors tend to evaluate the risks.

> However, I may pursuit a different goal - a bluster (photon streams with watts of energy per single photon), to kick Russian drones out from the sky.

I wish you all the best with that. But do be aware that a single photon carries no more than 10^-19 Joules and that Watts are a measure of power, not of energy...). This makes me suspect that you know a lot less about this stuff than the confidence with which you present yourself warrants.

This doesn't looks like a healthy discussion. I will reply to healthy bits only.

> That's a novel interpretation of the words 'cold fusion', and uses 'low temperature' in a way that I'm not comfortable with, even if it stops short of getting into the millions of degrees.

I'm aware that many scientist are interpreting cold fusion as «room temperature nuclear reactions», then immediately discard the baby with the bath. It takes lot of energy to explain that «Low Energy Nuclear Reactions» doesn't mean «No Extra Energy Nuclear Reactions». It just LENR guys are trying to lower the Coulomb barrier or boost performance, to make reaction happen in cooler environment, while ITER guys are trying to make hotter environment.

> But do be aware that a single photon carries no more than 10^-19 Joules and that Watts are a measure of power, not of energy...).

I'm obsessed with ideas of reproduction of quantum effects at macro scale, so macro-photon is my goal №1. Of course I have no knowledge required to do that, because it will be for the first time, but I have an idea for the starting point.

Ordinary fusion reactors don't melt either, despite even hotter temperatures, so I don't think you're making the point that you think you are.

Aye, it produces neutron isotopes, but not at room temperature and not with a net excess of energy.

It's the difference between going on a Sunday walk and a Monday commute. Yes, technically, your body is physically moving places, but the similarities don't extend much beyond that point nor would we encourage mistaking one for the other.

35 thousand Kelvin in a "cold" nuclear fusion reactor is much closer to room temperature than the temperature in a "hot" nuclear fusion reactor. Both types of reactors do not produce excess energy, but the cold reactor has already found application while the hot reactor will be ready in 25 years. Which kind of reactor is hoax?

The cold reactor fuses nuclei by virtue of energy input, the other tries to extract energy from a fusion reaction larger than its input. On a complexity level you're looking at 1:10000 difference or worse.

Cold Fusion doesn't work because we are exchanging high-energy particles, which are expensive to produce, for low grade heat in bulk of material.

If we will have cheap source of muons, we can change equation. We can drop a tiny bit of Nickel lattice filled with Deuterium, and then strike it with muons from all angles, to create implosion. This will allow us to create tiny blast of hot plasma, which is much easier to extract energy from.

Sadly, we have no such cheap source of muons, AFAIK.

> If we will have cheap source of muons, we can change equation.

You can make them but the cost in energy is exactly the problem: you will be spending money on energy to make muons at a considerable loss due to the inefficient ways in which we know how to make them (proton beams, which require a huge amount of energy to create), resulting in an insignificant number of particles. If your goal is to get net energy out it would be good to keep an eye on process efficiency from the beginning. Starting off with a billion to one or so conversion loss for step one raises the bar for the subsequent steps considerably.

> Sadly, we have no such cheap source of muons, AFAIK.

Indeed we do not, and that's pretty logical.

We have tons of free high-energy radiation in space. LENR can be impractical on Earth, but be practical on Mars, or on a space station, or in Van Allen belts. Mars is very cold, but constantly bombarded by cosmic rays, because it lacks magnetic shield. Thin atmosphere allows much larger flux of particles with lower energies to reach ground. It may work, if lattice will be exposed to the cosmic rays. LENR can be used here as lightweight source of heat for domes.

This one, specifically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion#Response_and_fallo...

It doesn't work anywhere near room temperature. Fusors operate at 10-30 keV, which is about 100 Million to 300 Million C. The plasma is extremely low density so there is very little power to heat things, and thus these units can safely run on a table top, but the temperature of the ions is enormous.

You are right, nuclear reactions requires enough enormous energy to overcome the barrier OR a heavy particles (muon). However, fusor works at room temperature. It doesn't require preheating to 150MK to start operation, like ITER do.

No, the Fusor does not work at room temperature, the same electric coils that contain the ions also heat the ions. It actually runs substantially hotter than ITER.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36940489.

Why not to just shadow ban me again, but leave thread intact? Or cut it at one level up???

Because it is off-topic, wrong and distracting.

I don't know what you mean by "shadow ban me again" but detaching off topic subthreads is a standard moderation thing on HN.

My two-cents from my armchair spaceship: I thought we had solved quantum mechanics! If this material is real, why can't somebody run a computer code and calculate its theoretical conductivity/resistance? Did I suffer all that childhood trauma with wave functions to now, in my forties, have to learn it was all smoke and mirrors?

Oh, Quantum mechanics is completely characterized. We have complete theoretical modeling of chemistry and most electric phenomenon.

But you just try solving the equations our models create.

A computer can certainly simulate this material, on the CS theoretical sense, where all computers are the same and time and memory are both infinite.

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