New replication video coming from China
It couldn’t have come at a worse time for drama either, as the right wing is currently on possibly their most massive anti-science tirade world wide that they’ve ever pushed.
It was in a Twitter thread linked on an HN thread a couple days ago wherein someone had done some digging online into resumes, publication histories, etc and recapped a bunch of the apparent history of LK99 and the related scientists and institutions. Sorry, I didn't bookmark it. But it contained quite a bit more drama including possible team conflict over potential Nobel credit and a deathbed promise to the team's mentor, one of the initial LK99 discoverers.
No matter how this turns out, there's probably a helluva good book or movie in the backstory as it appears to be a team of unlikely underdogs stubbornly pursuing a long-shot while scraping together minimal funding over many years, being passed over for tenure, taking on unrelated side work and having their initial paper rejected by Nature, etc. It makes me extra hopeful that LK99 is at least an interesting novel material, even if not a superconductor.
but the same person admitted they're writing fiction (I would call it speculative fiction drawn from known facts) https://twitter.com/8teAPi/status/1686217806298423299
In both cases some are very happy with their choice, others not so much.
US labs dont find replication work exciting enough. If the effect is genuine, good, if not, life goes on.
Chinese labs are looking to build credibility, so they will benefit by publicly resolving this.
They won't jump to publish a video on social media of the first replication of diamagnetism that they get. They'll be putting together a definitive and defensible paper on the production and properties of the material. That will take longer.
And if they can't replicate it, then it'll drag on longer without hearing anything from them, since they'll have to try multiple different methods and reach out to the authors, and iterate until they've exhausted enough possibilities that they feel confident enough publishing a failure to replicate.
Do you expect American and European scientists to work during weekends?
The analysis from this article is a publication from Berkeley National Lab that has already come out, and Argonne National Lab has announced they have synthesized the material as of yesterday and will release results from their replication attempt in the next few days.
All of what you say is true, yet in academic research China is still far behind the USA in nearly every field. They haven't yet been able to build institutions with the staff, structure, and culture needed. That will likely change in time, but at present the best Chinese scientists are still coming to the USA to work, and staying here. Despite the USA having a lot more research output, a substantial fraction of the top scientists in the USA are from China.
My Chinese colleagues tell me that the bureaucracy and authoritarianism in Chinese institutions puts a lot of hurdles in place when trying to do research. Simply buying equipment, hiring staff, etc. is a nightmare, and results in "evaporative cooling" where the top researchers with the option to work anywhere don't tolerate this and leave.
Edit: I will also add that in some sense US academia is supported by overcharging Chinese students for tuition. If and when Chinese institutions get to the point where the best students want to stay there, there will be a huge crisis in US universities, possibly being unable to support tenured staff.
> at present the best Chinese scientists are still coming to the USA to work
IMO not true anymore. This isn't pre 00s where PRC send best abroad as part of state strategy and best have some english fluency because it's needed for science. More and more PRC best aren't English fluent since there's sufficiently large and growing chinese science ecosystem and best also have good access to resources in tier1 labs. Hence US cracking down on 1000 talents program where PRC entice scientists to work in PRC due to unparallel resources. Or acadmeic exchanges with PRC in general. Also see stats of record amount of scientists returning to PRC this yearm
>best students want to stay there,
Best PRC students go to PRC C9 (Ivy equivalent) now. Top US institutions captures the occasional talent with english proficiency and desire / resources to go abroad. But PRC best have been largely staying in PRC last decade. TBH most Chinese students in west now are those who couldnt hack PRC gaokao/teritary selection system but have rich enough parents to send them abroad. They're B tier talent. Still adequate to work in western labs but you simply don't hear much about PRC students in west who tested top of their districts anymore like in 00s. They're no sending their best and haven't been for while. But generally their ok is good enough. Medium term expect even less PRC students, partly due to geopoltics but also PRC likely phasing out mandetory English as core subject which will make brain draining next gen more difficult. There's always India who seem systemically incapable of preventing brain drain.
Given this poster's history, I would not do that
It was China's STEM graduates and not just the stereotypical "cheap labor" who built up the Chinese manufacturing base.
Would you accept “chooses to spend more on research”?
The US certainly could spend more but, imho sadly, we do not.
Even if you end up lighting the money on fire, at least it's a more societally productive fire than, say, SoftBank's portfolio.
(Edited to clarify “ideally” parenthetical, in response to a reply that really didn’t deserve to be dead.)
Yeah, I agree, its way cooler, but way more risky for VC.
I understand how VC works. I'm annoyed that - let's even take the Saudis as an example, since they fund half of Silicon Valley anyway - would rather flush their money down the drain on stupid shit than do long-term projects that may help secure their existence post-oil. Even with every motivation to focus on the long-term, still it gets blown on short-term complete garbage.
The rampant short-termism is the real issue
Saudis have built entire top-equipment universities out of nothing (KAUST), and hired top foreign professors, and offered generous scholarships to foreign students to fill it up.
You rant about short termism, but don't seem to like doing research yourself.
If you have a big ole' brain, why would you take $80k to work in some crumby lab when you can get paid $350k to maintain a login screen from the comfort of your mountain side home.
But when you don't assume all smart developers are monomaniacally focussed on money, there’s also plenty of combinations of priorities that might favor an $80K lab job over the $350K login screen job.
But the fact of that matter is that many people would rather work on something they find interesting enough, while also being able to comfortably afford a good life for themselves and their family.
Betterment of human existence, preservation of habitable environment, etc, those are bigger than the self.
However, total R&D is quite a bit closer, with the US spending $660b to China’s $556 billion. [1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...
It ultimately requires being embedded in a culture that, to quote Popper, "seeks truths that are difficult and interesting". From that view, the problem for US scientific efforts is entirely home made, but it's also a problem that's much more pronounced in China.
Japan is a technical powerhouse but that doesn't inevitably lead to ending hegemony. It requires a lot of other work too.
Median age USA, 2022: 38.9
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
China has triple the young people we do, but quadruple the old people that depend on the young people.
The other thing to look at in those population distributions, besides the upside-down age distribution, is the absolutely pathological gender imbalance. The number of surplus males under 30 should be keeping Xi Jinping up at night because if there is anything that is going to trigger another revolution it is tens of millions of disaffected young males migrating across the country who eventually get fed up with what they perceive as a dead-end future.
The core part defined by long standing military and economic ties is about 1.5 billion people.
China has serious fundamental problems and if you account for its gigantic population - it's seriously underachieving not only compared to US, but even compared to the rest of the developed world.
It's fashionable to talk about China taking over, but it's far from guaranteed. China is pretty much confirmed to be falsifying its economic stats for example [1] [2] but people just take them at face value anyway. I don't understand why.
[1] https://www.voanews.com/a/satellites-shed-light-on-dictators... [2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-forensic-examination-of...
This statement would have been viewed as absolutely obvious and ridiculous 2 decades ago. The fact that it even needs to be said now is indicating how fast they are advancing.
I highly doubt they can preserve their pace of growth for next few decades without significant changes to the regime and liberalization.
Once they return to the mean - they will very likely slow down. Arguably they already did (3% official growth last year + people accusing them of falsifying data for 1-2 percentage points of growth each year would make them already grow slower than some western countries, including the US).
"Demographics is destiny" also comes to mind.
Note how the era of "Japan Inc." during the 1980s was also the time when the post-war baby boom population were in their 30s-40s (i.e. peak productive worker population). As this cohort has aged and are now in retirement, Japan's economic performance has tailed off.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#/media/F...
If you look at the Chinese population pyramid, we could already be at the point of maximum Chinese economic growth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#/media/F...
From the geopolitical standpoint, this may also explain why China and Russia have become more belligerent - they will lack sufficient numbers of young fighting aged men in the next few decades.
There are so many factors that contribute more to economic and political success than sheer population. I would even say that a large population is a bad thing in many cases. India would be better off with fewer people. Their infrastructure can't handle their density, they don't have enough jobs for their educated workers, there's a lot of sectarianism conflict between various religions and casts, etc.
High population + low GDP per capita is probably the worst situation a country can be in IMO. So it's not enough for China to have a billion people—those people have to be doing something productive for the economy.
PRC currently generating ~5m STEM per year, aka OECD combined, multiple times more than US has ability to train or brain drain. And relatively proven ability to coordinate talent. Project that out next 20-30s from previous 20-30 years of birth rate and PRC on trend to add 50M-100M STEM to workforce, just STEM, not including other skilled workers, which is the greatest high skill demographic divident in recorded history. Literally no country in the world, at any time in the past or projected future has better demographics for actual global competition than PRC in the next 30 years. Including India who will have more people, but have all the issues you noted that will likely prevent them from actually coordinating human capita enmass successfully in the time it takes their youth demographic divident to expire.
Contrary to naive PRC demographic pyramid bomb arguments that doesn't address what you correctly note below - quality of human capita. By 2050, PRC is going to add more STEM talent than US is projected to increase population. All the news of PRC climbing up value chains, leading in science and innovation indexes from last few years? Or moving from 1T to 18T economy. Done by growing STEM from ~2M to ~17M STEM exploited via industrial policy that west is now copying. PRC is moving from workforce with 25% skilled talent to 60/70/80 of modern economies with 60% and increasing tertiary education rate that biases towards science will look weak on per capita stats due to huge existing cohort of old / undereducated, but it absolute terms it's a demographic advantage no country currently has conditions to remotely rival. Then note how net population decline will reduce resource dependency and you basically have the most optimal mix of demographic trend for PRC with respect to geopolitical competition.
Are those demographic issues difficult to govern/manage? Yes, but they're also close to ideal conditions for improving comprehensive national power within PRC's constraints. PRC's big population = with big demographic curse but also big demographic divident post 2050s. But they don't cancel each other out. Likelt follow JP/SKR trend where TFR collapsed in the 80s/90s but GDP increased 500% because workforce was net gaining skilled/productive people, while losing unskilled. JP (and later SKR) are/will only entering process of real stagnation when TFR cannot replace level of skilled labour at parity. Which for PRC is a post 2050 problem and even then countries will be competing with a PRC roughly 3-5x larger than now.
On the actual demographic curse of aging, the blessings of huge segment of PRC old getting old before they get rich is there simply isn't going to be high expectations for advanced economy levels of welfare and social support. There's a reason PRC has 90% (96% in rural where poor concentrates) home ownership and very high household savings rate. Old expects to weather most of retirement without substantial state support and increasingly family support since they don't want to burden future gens. If you look at JP, old are basically rotting/dying alone, unceremoniously. In JP it's called Kodokushi, in SKR, it's godoksa, it's happening in HK as well. In households that pressure young for support, you know what the east-asian human response to that is? Being miserable whiel working even harder. Half the reason JP/SKR/TW lead in high end industries they currently dominate is because those societies have resigned to working 100% harder for 10% competitve advantage.
Arguments about China’s inevitable collapse are more about comfort than about the an reality, because as you have mentioned if you think at all seriously about the demographics argument it just does not make sense.
I think the biggest risk for China demographically is if their aging population translates to an extremely conservative, risk-averse government/society that harms their technological progress, as has happened with Japan (ie. top multinationals stuck in the 80s with fax machines, paper, etc.)
Because while Japan and South Korea are the 51st and 52nd US states, China is a superpower vying to usurp the US as the preeminent world superpower.
So no, they do not control access to the oceans.
I think this fact is being severely understated, perhaps even denied by almost everyone in the west.
The way the US-China cold war has been playing out, the US and friends keeps closing doors only for China to go "Go right ahead, I don't have to play ball." and just succeed even harder on their own. Adding insult to injury is they then take that success and just wholesale buy the doors the US keeps closing.
A surefire way to lose Pax Americana is to become delusional that Pax Americana is winning when by all accounts it's losing and losing hard. I think this ship can still have its course corrected, because Pax Americana is better for us than Pax China, but not if we just keep up this kabuki theatre.
It's not so much fashionable as it is literally state propaganda used to try and shoulder its way into the South China Sea and the Pacific by claiming it is so prosperous and populous that it is entitled to increasingly large sphere of influence and direct control.
China doesn’t believe in western democracy and has as a stated goal ending American hegemony.
It’s not even slightly confusing or subtle, not sure why American elitist types like to just handwave it away.
Actually I am sure. Everyone is making too much money. Until they aren’t.
The Chinese Communist party has the resources, people and determination to follow a different course. It might underperform relative to its size, and the one-child policy is going to cause a disastrous demographic situation, but even if you consider just coastal, urban China, that's getting pretty close to US in terms of people and economic power. The communist party is developing its military capabilities at a fast clip, and fusing its military and civilian economies to accelerate its technical development. Where almost every other government has been unable to wrestle control of Internet information, the Chinese Communist party has successfully turned its version of the Internet into an effective tool of govt propaganda and social control.
In other words, there are lots and lots of very concrete reasons to believe that the post-development trajectory of China can be very different from Japan's or South Korea's.
>comfirmed falsifying
Here's a more rigours NBER light study on PRC GDP being underestimated by much more accomplished economists aka not retarded like Martinez study.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w23323
Here's a more comprehensive GDP resconstruction by Rhodium, leading economic search group that focus on PRC that also reports underestimation, ~10% by 2014. Including work by David Dollar, one of the more competent PRC economic analyst at Brookings that also led discussion of your second link, noting it had 2 models of over estimation and went with the much higher overestimation model vs the lower (basically marginal amount) one that was probably more correct.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/broken-abacus
No one takes PRC GDP reporting at face value, but anyone with half a brain can see PRC climbing western science and innovation indexes (controlled for quality), moving up global value chain, displacing other advanced economies in increasing amount of intermediate and final goods and doing all that rapidly in last 10 years that US basically needs to go full spectrum containment beyond what they did for USSR while acknowledge PRC is greater challenge then USSR ever was. Anyone with half a brain can also napkin math future skilled workforce between US @35M STEM + ~600K per year, vs PRC @20M STEM ~5M (M as in million) per year and understand PRC will have more STEM workforce than US in a few years, and possibly 2-3x more STEM by 2050 even factoring in PRC demographics. Cut that in half and PRC's future potential is still outrageous.
E: over post limit
E2: removed reply to deleted comment
As you noted, there's labs working on this, they've said they're working on this, and I take the lack of minute-by-minute social media updates to indicate that it's serious and they want to get it right.
The original paper drop was July 22nd.
Doesn't China also have a huge incentive problem in research? I've seen plenty of stories about low impact journals feeding the system with the publications it demands, regardless of quality of results.
China’s growth currently appears magical simply because of scale and a shittier starting point, also a lack of whatever it is that ails India.
The material in question will have these effects at room temperature and pressure.
But yes, Maybe I'm interpreting the video wrongly. Yet, to me it looks like the bulky part of the sample is being repelled by both poles of the magnet as it stands upright with the pointy end at the bottom each time. IMHO if this was due to attraction, the pointy end would be at the top.
That it interacts strongly with a magnetic field shows that a big change in the material, consistent with superconductivity, has occurred.
Quantum level effects are newly appearing in the macroscopic world, and that's always interesting.
Most materials are diamagnetic, but only very weakly so.
I think that a new room-temperature material that was so strongly diamagnetic that it could lift the weight of its own volume in lead probably would bring some interesting new applications.
Getting "stuck" in a magnetic field is called "Flux pinning", which is what we're seeing here, from what I understand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_pinning
Magnetic material can't do this. They're attracted. As some of the videos have shown, with large magnets placed next to the samples, they are not attracted.
In addition to being the fastest way that doesn’t require any video editing, I can’t really think of a way to do it that would be more likely to be real.
https://vdn3.vzuu.com/HD/7d42236a-3065-11ee-a787-7e9db7aa394...