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Comment by Ajedi32 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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