Isn't it sufficient to have another lab confirm that the existing sample is a super conductor? Then we can all sprint to replication.
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.
If the samples are actual RTSC, knowing that such a thing can actually exist is pretty far from worthless
There's value in both validating existing samples and producing new ones.
Talk about a confusingly written tweet, though!
Isn't that Hyun-Tak Kim of William & Mary?
https://www.wm.edu/as/physics/people/researchfaculty/kim_h.p...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve heard a rumor a team from MIT has travelled to Korea.
Who knows right now.
Does anyone have an explanation on why no one is examining/validating the sample they already have?
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.
Don't read the above as an accusation. Only a justification to wait until it is replicated.
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.
Why not? It would help their case immensely, especially if replication is tricky.
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.
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.