Hacker News Reader

Comment by deeg | Hacker News Reader

I'm astounded that the MSM seems to be ignoring this ATM. I did a Google news search on LK-99 and saw nothing from major publications. A search on the NYTimes returned an article from 1974.

View on HN

I actually appreciate that caution. Things have been extremely up in the air and it would be very hard to properly explain what is happening, how it matters and if it matters. The last part I think is why it's a good thing that they held back. There was enough unknown that it wasn't clear if this would ever amount to anymore than "some scientists may or may not have made a big mistake." I think we are hitting the point, with multiple teams saying this is either possible or has happened, that we will start seeing MSM stories. They aren't ignoring it, they are being cautious. I promise you their science beat reporters are watching this like a hawk.

I appreciate reputable news organizations as a reliable filter against noise out there on the internet. If I want early rumors I have sites like this. If I want something filtered, curated and focused, I go to them.

After racing with each other to fuel political extremism or push the corporate narratives like how working from home is terrible for the worker or how good it is for us that the rich don’t pay the taxes, how unaffordable housing is good for the economy… this is what they choose to be careful about?

Nah, this just doesn’t sell or is not a paid article.

The EmDrive was first publicized in 2001, but wasn't picked up by the mainstream media until 2013, and then again in 2016 after NASA picked it up. That Korean scientists have this discovery on their hands and the materials world is racing to keep up, and isn't frontpage of the New York Times, is editor's choice. Currently, that's Joseph Kahn, but (unfortunately) science ranks below politics and sports and business.

It's hard to not let cynicism like this get to me especially when the argument makes so little sense. This doesn't sell? Isn't sensationalist enough? A possible end result of this is magic flying space trains. This isn't exactly some boring in the weeds things. This is extremely easy to hype if you just want to draw eye balls. But sure, yeah, MSM corporate plutocracy or whatever.

It's possible that the people responsible for deciding what makes a a good article for the science section are different from the people responsible for the articles you mention.

I think this is true

To be frank, the available evidence at the moment is pretty shaky. Derek Lowe here is pretty optimistic, but most of the comments I've seen from the superconductor folks are pretty pessimistic [1]--and given that Derek Lowe isn't in the field, I'm inclined to favor their views over his at this point.

The original articles are a pair of papers posted to arxiv in a field which I believe isn't well-known for arxiv publications, and most science journalism tends to wait for a peer-reviewed paper to come out in a notable journal before reporting on it. Although it has been reported by some specialized outlets already (a category which I'd include Derek Lowe's In The Pipeline).

[1] See, e.g., https://nitter.net/i/status/1686373516286005248, which goes into why even the recent theoretical-confirmation papers are unpersuasive to them.

Thanks for that link!

My feeling watching all this has been that it's weird people are getting so excited about the replication when the actually interesting question (is it truly a superconductor) hasn't even been answered yet. Glad to see that isn't just my ignorance.

I think them waiting until there’s more research is preferable to them coming out and making random claims which pan out not to be true.

That hasn't stopped them in the past...

I think it's more likely that the bulk of folks don't fully comprehend why this would be so important. I would imagine alot of reporters look at the things they could write about and the choices are politics, war, polarizing news, or nerds nerding hard trying to prove other nerds right or wrong, and it just doesn't make the cut.

No...that's not the case here, to wit, we can observe writers from these publications discussing it casually.

This plus vacation time in the Northern hemisphere - that one science reporter per large news org who actually understands the importance is AFK.

Newspapers don't work like that. The same reporter isn't responsible for politics, war, and science—they specialize, and a dedicated science reporter is going to be at least as savvy as a random commenter on HN.

They may want to cover it and just have a hard time explaining it to their editor, but I think "we can afford to wait until a peer reviewed paper comes out" is more likely.

Right. There's nothing to write about (yet!), but their science reporter is scrolling science twitter harder than we are. The movie can come later.

Though that's like the opposite of how most media operate.

True, but that hasn't stopped MSM in the past

Because the media is of course known for studying topics in high detail to make sure they don't report the wrong thing and not for rushing half written hearsay out the door before the competitors do.

Genuinely a laugh-out-loud take on mainstream science reporting.

Why aim to improve when we can just keep making the same old mistakes?

I misread it as saying the news always does it this way, which was clearly not what they meant.

I took it as saying "they usually jump in too early, so this is a refreshing change of pace."

Oh yes, you’re right, I think I read it too quickly.

Wait wait wait... Are eggs healthy again?

I am also completely baffled by this! So many stupid mouse-model medical discovery stories over the years and actually zero LK-99 coverage.

It doesn't even matter if it works or not as for whether it's newsworthy; the mystery, human backstory, and Argonne/China/independent scientists jumping to replicate alone is a whole swathe of viable and fascinating topics ready to be published.

The crazy thing is NYT just bothered to publish a story about the Dias superconductor paper retraction; a paper that had never even crossed my radar in the first place because TBH I don't care about superconductors unless they're going to be a huge step change in practical applications, which the Dias "finding" wasn't.

What are they doing?!

> What are they doing?!

Trying to make ad money with views, which is their profit incentive.

Mouse models are nearly always spun as applicable to humans, which an average, aging, viewer would be interested, usually relating to "Cure <ailment>", "regrow limbs", "stop aging", etc.

The average viewer isn't interested in superconductors, and the 10 seconds the news orgs have for each bit of news isn't enough to explain them.

The NYT has published 3 articles about room-temperature superconductors since March; all about the insanely high-pressure one that is INFINITELY less exciting than the new claim and turned out to be bunk anyways.

hmm, the high-pressure room-temperature superconductor turned out not to actually be real?

wp says

In 2020, a room-temperature superconductor (critical temperature 288 K) made from hydrogen, carbon and sulfur under pressures of around 270 gigapascals was described in a paper in Nature.[71][72] However in 2022 the article was retracted by the editors because the validity of background subtraction procedures had been called into question. All nine authors maintain that the raw data strongly support the main claims of the paper.[73]

Almost all of the stories in major newspapers are commissioned ("pitched") by interest groups that want to see that article published. It's why a lot of articles contain quotes from weirdly specific people with middle-office titles in specific organizations. Journalists aren't cold calling random office workers to get these quotes. An outline of an article is provided, journalists do some minimal fact-checking and write it out into a proper article. Beat writers that cover a specific topic regularly and have made their own contacts in that field are an exception.

99% of science journalism is repeating a press release that came out of a university's press office.

It's very hard to become a science journalist where you can pursue your own stories, because the market for this is practically zero in comparison to other parts of the media.

I always try to pay for media that publishes stories from the likes of, say, Ed Yong, and leave messages that I'm doing it for the science journalism. But I doubt it has much substantial effect on how much real science journalism happens.

What should the headline be? "South Korean scientists claim room temperature superconductivity again! Are they lying like their last paper? Let's celebrate!"

"Potential superconductor breakthrough sends national labs scrambling"

Nature published their last big superconductor claim and then had to retract it. Publications getting burned by these folks makes them understandably reluctant to get worked up again.

Well, half the comments are making fun of the spotty quality of the evidence and it's been barely a week since the paper was published. I think it's reasonable to wait for at least a pre-print of a successful replication. I don't think it's fair to say the MSM is ignoring it, the possible discovery literally just happened and some combination of low awareness and caution with the evidence means they haven't covered it yet.

Most people I talk to don't recognize the importance of room temperature superconductivity.

A floating grain is cool, but not something that jumps out at people like a rocket or a big fusion reactor.

The application is similarly unintuitive. Many here on HN ask why such a thing would be important, and they are probably the 99th (or 99.9th?) percentile in materials science and EE literacy.

Even if it is true, we are a long ways off from Star Trek utopia. No idea if macroscopic quantities can be robustly produced, what their limitations will be, cost per gram, etc. If the material is confirmed, there will be oodles of money pumped into the space, but it could still be years before commercial applications begin to appear.

>Most people I talk to don't recognize the importance of room temperature superconductivity.

I don't. I read someone saying it would be the biggest breakthrough since fire. Is that true or hyperbole?

Thats kinda hyperbolic.

Its more like the transistor.

The transistor was unequivocally the biggest technological breakthrough since fire

breakthroughs since fire more important than the transistor probably include cooking, agriculture, the wheel, metallurgy, glass, ceramics, the heat engine, mechanisms in general (with things like pulleys, hydraulics, screws, and gears), construction cement (originally lime), math, writing, optics, electricity, chemistry (including things like distillation, the atomic theory, and recrystallization), plumbing, carpentry, weaving, sewing, automatic digital computation, and possibly language, depending on when that happened

it seems like maybe you haven't thought much about the history of technology

Don't forget: Soap/handwashing, antibiotics, the smallpox vaccine, the Haber-Bosch process, blood transfusion, anesthetic and PCR!

soap is a good one for sure; the others might turn out to be less important than the transistor

time will tell

Haber-Bosch is the reason there are over 7 billion humans on Earth instead of closer to 2 billion. It's very difficult for any digital technology to compete with that.

agriculture is the reason there were 2 billion instead of 20 million, which is a much bigger difference

it seems likely that digital technology will be crucial in enabling there to be far more humans off earth than on earth; o'neill cylinders could enable many orders of magnitude more physical humans even within this solar system

to say nothing of the possibility of backing up your mind with a brain scan and thus becoming immortal, and possibly forking into more copies of your mind than there are humans alive today

(nitpick, transistors aren't digital)

The mass-energy equivalence and how it led to the discovery of nuclear fission/fusion and how to control/cause explosive atomic chain reactions was probably one of the most impactful technologies of all time, in a literal sense.

maybe, but it's not yet in the same league as math, writing, cooking, sewing, and electricity, in terms of its effects on human life

i mean all five of those were probably prerequisites for it?

maybe if the humans build torchships or nuclear-powered starships, or convert the electric grid to mostly nuclear, i'd agree, but those all seem far in the future

I'm curious: why sewing in particular? As opposed to say spinning or weaving or knitting?

it's surely debatable, but my thought was that sewing seems to have predated weaving (of cloth), nålbinding, especially knit and crochet, and probably even spinning, and it was sewing that enabled the humans to live outside the tropics

sewing without spinning or weaving still gives you tents and jackets (of hide or felt, at least). i think weaving without sewing only gives you floor mats. spinning without sewing gives you rope, which makes longer fibers than natural sinews, and thus lassos and lashing, but i think these are less transformative technologies than tents and jackets

i think the humans probably could have developed the fission chain reaction without spinning but probably not without sewing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewing_needle#Prehistoric_sewi... sewing: 50–61 kya or possibly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_clothing_and_textil... 170 kya

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_spinning#History spinning: 41–52 kya

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weaving#Archaeology weaving: 27 kya (cloth doesn't survive but its clay impressions do)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%A5lebinding#History nålbinding: 8 kya

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_knitting knitting: .9 kya

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crochet#Origins crochet: .2 kya

Yes, I did mention "one of"

NYT did mention it the other day, as a side note to this story about allegations of misconduct by a physicist who has studied superconductors.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/26/science/ranga-dias-retrac...

It's still not believed. It's just Twitter that I've seen the juicy stuff, like a (very sketchy) claimed replication from a Russian, and now another claim from a Chinese group.

I could still see this being something "new" but not a true superconductor. If you read the link, there seems to be some kind of discovery brewing, but the original discovers may not have understood what they found.

While you're correct about the scarce and sketchy evidence currently it is in the process of narrowing down. Or to put it better the evidence is mounting that it might be a breakthrough. It likely hard to manufacture correctly, but simulations done at Berkeley Labs seem to support the claims of the original paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16892 And aside from that to be honest I hope that we have time to prove or disprove those claims, before any major news outlet jumps onto the hype train and ruins it.

The paper you referenced doesn’t say anything about the room-temperature superconductivity claims.

Why a throwaway account for this? It honestly makes me immediately question your take.

Really? Here’s an article from one of switzerland’s biggest newspapers: https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/ein-supraleiter-fuer-den-alltag...

It's because it's a piece of news that doesn't cause outrage and polarization so they don't know how to profit off it.

Danish and German media has covered it by interviewing local scientists who are all calling it bullshit.

that does indeed sound like a very German reaction

I haven't seen a particularly great explanation that explains why this is such a positive discovery that is copy/paste/digestable. No MSM outlet is going to run this story unless they can say an impact.

There are a ton of them on Twitter.

Yes and many of them are completely wrong.

I keep seeing people saying "CPU's that don't generate heat". How exactly would that work? When a transistor turns off/ switches to 0, where does it dump the electrons? Hint: into heat

Sorry, can you explain? My understanding is that transistors don't "dump" electrons anywhere. The gate controls the voltage, which in the `0` state forces resistance to be high enough s.t. current flow through that transistor stops.

As the Veritasium video explains [0], current flow is not a literal flow of electrons, but a state of the electromagnetic field (or something to that effect... it's been many years since my electromagnetism university courses).

[0]: https://youtu.be/bHIhgxav9LY

current flow isn't always a literal flow of electrons, but in a wire or transistor it is

you probably should trust your electromagnetism textbook more than a youtube video

There will literally always be heat from computation, that's Landauer. The point is that LK-99 could be or lead to a breakthrough in making computation produce much, much less heat because you're getting rid of most resistivity losses. Which is important, because heat is actually a serious constraint on a bunch of use cases.

Because until more scientists can replicate this the news is little more substantial than the typical post on /r/futurology on any given day.

There isn’t much to report.

There have been several false reports of high-temperature superconductors during previous months. There seems to be backlash to the high-temperature superconductors claims now.

I think if it got true mainstream acceptance, it might. Or if it is some spectacular bust (praying this is not the case), they may cover it.

it's showing up on science news sites though, even major ones.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com