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Comment by n2d4 | Hacker News Reader

>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

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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.

"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.

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