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Comment by AYBABTME | Hacker News Reader

> In addition, when a pressed Pb10-xCux(PO4)6O pellet is located on top of a commercial Nd2Fe14B magnet at room temperature, no repulsion could be felt and no magnetic levitation was observed either.

Unless we assume the original paper's authors were straight up lying, it sounds like this paper's author didn't end up with exactly the same material?

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The original authors have apparently said they are only able to successfully produce the material in around 1 in 10 attempts and they don't yet know why. Also, replicators have reported that the information in the papers and the patent aren't entirely clear on some potentially significant implementation details.

Unfortunately, real science makes for a pretty lousy spectator sport :-). Given the context of the release, it was always a near-certainty that early replication attempts would be a random mix of "No" and "Maybe" results. I think our best chance for any meaningful near-term clarity rest with the team of scientists reportedly visiting the original authors in their lab to test the author's own samples. While a positive result from that won't be a definitive replication, it will at least be external validation of the original process and results.

> Unfortunately, real science makes for a pretty lousy spectator sport :-).

I’ve found this whole thing incredibly entertaining and informative.

I actually agree with you because I've enjoyed it immensely but I suspect you and I share fairly nuanced and informed perspectives. My statement was more directed to those who seem to be expecting some kind of near-term definitive verdict or box score, more like a sporting event.

This is more like a high stakes multi round baking competition :)

I never thought of replication experiment as an alternative to televized sports, but this does it for me (caveat: I never really was into following sports competitions).

Imagine if national sports were replication attempts :P I suspect this whole story is at least going to inspire a few material science/chemistry/EE careers in South Korea!

They mention the possibility of a mistake when measuring resistivity, which has already been discussed.

But yeah, the partial levitation is not a mistake. Their abstract suggests LK-99 is a "highly insulating diamagnet", but they are not even able to "detect any reliable diamagnetic signal" with their instruments.

I'd rank the possibilities as: fraud, a different material, or some comical series of bizarre mistakes and contamination from the original team.

While fraud is always possible, so far I'm not getting fraud vibes. I'm really rooting for an eventual outcome somewhere between: "These guys are an experimental mess but damn it seems to kind of work" and "It's not a room temp superconductor but it is something new, interesting and maybe even useful."

If it’s fraud, what’s the end game?

There's betting markets on this, aren't there? The super cynical take is that the original scientists know that it's a fraud but in the lead up to it being proven as fraud can make a lot of money before coming out and saying "sorry, we messed up, experimental errors etc etc"

How are they going to make money with this? A few weeks of buzz isn't going to make anyone rich. It's not like they're going for some product placement along with the buzz.

I guess they could bet heavily against themselves, try to get prediction markets to coalesce around the result being genuine, them come out saying "oops, we were mistaken"? Bam, rich!

There's also the possibility that the original team is deceiving themselves. By all appearances, they're deeply committed to this result (that could be an act, but that's not the sense I'm getting). But those biases could creep into the analysis of the material: in this particular field, a lot of things are witchcraft (witchcraft that occasionally works). So take a novel material with some interesting properties and human interpretative fallibility, and you get the paper. Which would still mean a powerful diamagnetic material, but that's... well, not something we'd have kilothreads on HN about.

My stance (did research in high-Tc superconductors in undergrad ages ago, but doing banal software dev nowadays): who knows. The "easy replication" idea has faded away, which isn't promising, but maybe? It's fun to put my faith in Twitter anime catgirl avatars, though, so I'm still rooting for it.

Yeah, self-deception is a distinct possibility, and it would certainly not be the first time for something like that to happen.

If it's fraud, this would be the second time a South Korean scientist has tried to lie about work that revolutionizes a field

I think it’s disrespectful to accuse scientists of fraud in public, when there’s zero evidence of any fraud. It’s just not a good look.

When they say "highly insulating diamagnet" they are referring to Pb2SO5 and not the (claimed) LK-99.

It would be interesting to understand if they believe Pb2SO5 would exhibit levitation. I presume they would say so if they did.

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