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Comment by danbruc | Hacker News Reader

Maybe not yet the final nail in the coffin but I would no longer bet much on a successful replication. Which leaves me wondering how we got the initial papers. Does fraud make any sense, how could you possibly benefit from something like this? And if I would think that I might have produced a room temperature superconductor due to experimental errors, I would double and tripple check what I did. Assuming there is time for that. So incompetence? Self-delusion due to a desire for it to be true?

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Apparently [1] the group wanted to play safe and push for more verification internally, but Kwon (the third author of the first arXiv submission) posted his own draft without others' consent. So it's in my opinion useless to discuss whether the submission itself was sincere or not---it was never their intention.

[1] https://hackmd.io/@sanxiyn/S1hejVXo3 (Semi-automatically translated: https://hackmd.io/DMjYGOJFRheZw5XZU8kqKg). Disclosure: I wrote a draft for this report.

This is a very nice summary, especially for those of us who cannot read Korean. Thank you. If you posted it as a top level comment, it might get some more visibility.

I believe the report was also directly submitted a few times before (not by me), but hadn't seen much visibility. Repost probably?

Could be a skill issue on the part of the replicators? The russian anime girl scientist had to make a bunch of modifications (and was cursing the orig authors) before she could make her rocks float.

>The russian anime girl scientist had to make a bunch of modifications (and was cursing the orig authors) before she could make her rocks float.

link?

https://twitter.com/iris_IGB/status/1685322871306928128

>emerges for engineering conductivity pili of bacteria into the superconductors of this class.

What...

Was that fiction? I saw someone mention that the Russian anime girl scientist was fiction.

Maybe thinking of this? https://twitter.com/quantian1/status/1686174330793660416

@8teAPi = Random guy writing Sorkinesque fanfiction about this whole saga.

@iris_IGB = Random Russian anime girl scientist who synth'd in her apartment kitchen.

Ooh okay thanks. I learned about iris from @8teAPi so I wasn’t sure if both were fake or what.

Of course under the assumption that LK-99 is indeed not what has been claimed, I am not completely ruling out that they just failed to reproduce the material. And while I initially said that the LK-99 paper does at least not look like a crackpot paper [1][2] and still think that was not an unreasonable judgment given my complete lack of expertise in the field, just comparing the presentation in this paper and the original LK-99 paper makes me judge the replicators as more competent. But sure, looks can be deceptive.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36865636

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36871103

I find that Twitter account to be pretty dubious.

Honestly I found their account dubious, it’s difficult to believe that a person with a background in molecular biology to have synthesized it especially given that other groups have failed to do so. There are also no affiliations mentioned on their profile.

Falls into the bucket of "specialists can have weird hobbies" element though - i.e. the background to do this is basically "has access to lead oxide, copper and red phosphorous" and "a kiln" - particularly if you dispense with trying to do the vacuum synthesis as that account claimed too (also a point in favor: having random access to dangerous chemicals is sort of something I'd expect out of states with less enforcement of drug synthesis laws).

The mechanism is plausible - if the reaction actually proceeds by driving off the sulfate and substituting in the copper at high temperature, it's entirely possible the vacuum synthesis of the authors is unnecessary (I have in fact had personal experience with trying to replicate a paper where it turned out that a pretty important step was acting as an oxygen-diffusion rate-limiter, and this just...wasn't identified at all by the papers authors).

a nitpick - I think it's more likely that person is he/him. anime is gender and masculinity averse/avoidant so everyone/everything is depicted in girly tone, else they don't exist

Her name is Iris and she’s lesbian.

Is there any reason to treat Iris_IGB seriously? (genuine question)

The authors already said that they were not able to consistently replicate it.

And so we have one failed attempt based on limited information and then suddenly the authors are accused of fraud ?

I just think people need to take a deep breath before jumping to wild conclusions.

It seems there was a race for the patents and an early draft of the paper leaked by a researcher related (somehow) to the project.

The betting market is of the opposite opinion. It went from 27% chance of replication (by 2025) to 47% since yesterday.

https://manifold.markets/QuantumObserver/will-the-lk99-room-...

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