Electronic Structure of LK-99
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
All in all, I'm now much more bullish on LK-99 being real superconductivity after seeing multiple different labs compute similar band structures. The video of multiple directions of magnet showing some levitation also inspires a lot of hope.
The moving magnet induces a current in the tube which in turn creates the magnetic field that interacts with the magnet.
“Ah,” nodded Arthur, “is he? Is he?”
An Ig Nobel AND a Nobel. That's quite the achievement.
What would you need to see to say "I am 100% convinced this is / isn't real"?
And how long would you expect it will be before that occurs?
(1) When there's peer-reviewed replication from a group of reputable labs.
(2) When I see the classic superconductor-on-magnetic-track demo, but without liquid nitrogen.
What I'm actually even slightly more excited about is "what comes next" -- not the market part, but the "fast follow science". For instance, in the few years after LCBO and LSCO were found (TC~30K) we quickly found YBCO and BSCCO (Tc~130K). I would expect that we'll find a whole class of these materials with substitution tricks that possibly work, and there will be a whole slew of options for "going to market" with the technology. The door this opens is what is more exciting than the specifics of LK-99 itself in my opinion.
Estimating times, after the fast follow science (0.5-2 years optimistically?) we will hopefully have the actual "we're all convinced this is real, and the technology can start to be applied in real devices". Specifically, after everyone is pretty clear on a lot of the material properties and ways to reproducibly make high-quality crystals, so consistency is clear on measurements... then begins the cycles on how to manufacture high enough quality material at scale that it can actually be applied. (specifically, these materials (assuming they're like YCBO/BSCCO) are superconducting crystals that have grains, alignment issues, are physically brittle, have homogeneity issues, etc.) While each solvable, these are all real engineering and material challenges that increase cost to manufacture, and all of this will probably take time before we suddenly get wide-scale products that use this (this is all assuming it's real, haha, there's still plenty of reason to be skeptical).
Few will remember the million replications, but whoever describes a novel version - even if it's no better - will find themselves on equal footing for helping to understand what's happening
Here's his video of making YBCO for anyone that hasn't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLFaa6RPJIU
As someone who is versed in semiconductor band structures but not superconductor band structures: What is it about Cu d-d interactions that causes the superconductivity?
Degenerate energies in semiconductors don't give rise to electron pairing, so I'm a bit out to sea with the proposed mechanism here.
Roughly, one of the "properties" that shows up with these materials is that the 3d orbitals of coper atoms are involved in forming the bands near the fermi level. Couple that with the fun story of Cu electron configuration being [Ar] 3d^10 4s^1, which suggests that spin-effects are "at play" with these electrons near their filling levels. Combine that with the spin-character properties of cuprate paring (eg. s-wave vs. d-wave superconductors, (d-wave for BSCCO for instance)). All together it lends itself to a nice spin-orbit coupled band "setup" at the fermi energy that I have a hunch somehow backs the underlying mechanism of these d-wave superconductors. Fully admit, there's some leaps there in the raw logic -- if I could fully explain it I probably would still be in the field, haha.
I'll note: I've been out of the field for ~8 years, but a quick google search led to some more recent papers [1][2] working through plausible explanations based on some of these copper d orbital shenanigans.
[1] https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=... [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.11664 (d-p, but includes the Cu d-orbital and also specifically states "We also show that the effect of the nearest-neighbor d-d Coulomb interaction Vdd is actually quite important for the stability of superconductivity and phase competition.")
Fair enough, and thanks for the readout. I realized after posting I essentially demanded an explanation as to why the cuprates are high-Tc, which is probably its own Nobel prize.
https://www.wired.com/story/how-an-anonymous-4chan-post-help...
Compression algorithms detect recurring blocks and remove them with a special symbol and I think the shortest path would be uncompressable with compression algorithms.
Chiming in, not just you. :) I very briefly studied materials science a few decades ago and I'm 0% surprised that a potential breakthrough involves, of course, cuprates.
Assuming no videographic trickery, what else could it be, other than the Meissner effect?
"In simple terms, diamagnetic materials are substances that are usually repelled by a magnetic field. Electrons in an atom revolve around the nucleus, and thus possess orbital angular momentum. The resultant magnetic momentum in an atom of the diamagnetic material is zero."
50+ years later the US has how many high speed trains, of any kind?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36967333
In case you aren't familiar with the man's work, here are some highlights of his discoveries over the last decade:
Conditional possibility of spacecraft propulsion at superluminal speeds
High frequency gravitational waves-induced propulsion
Piezoelectricity-induced room temperature superconductor
Craft using an inertial mass reduction device
On the Existence of the Superforce–the possible fundamental Force of Unification
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=7%2C39&q=Sal...
I can't wait for my cheap antigrav FTL iron man suit to arrive next year.
Ahem :)
Though it may depend on what the patents are for!
This gives a low resistance and diamagnetism which is used as proxy to real superconductivity.
I may be wrong though.
So many questions. I assume this is all possible but they are focussing on one thing at a time to duplicate the results, if possible.
Perhaps heating it up while it levitates would be a better idea. Put the magnet in an oven together with the sample and bake?
And it's ridiculous that I'm saying that on the context of testing a superconductor. But well, here we are.
I do expect people to fully characterize it eventually.
Neo magnet fabrication is fascinating by the way, the somewhat magnetized blanks are not all that impressive from a magnetic field strength point of view, but then you zap them with a strong enough field and they then suddenly are the best thing since sliced bread.
This technique was first developed for 'regular' ceramic magnets.
https://idealmagnetsolutions.com/knowledge-base/how-neodymiu...
An uncoated magnet will oxidize very fast, so you always have to ensure that the coating on any magnets you use is perfect or the magnet will surely fail.
You would use metals as your leads and create Josephson-junctions-like interfaces.
Basically the abrupt change in electron mobility across materials can cause knock on effects that dominate what you are trying to measure.
Interfacial engineering is one term in materials science that implements best practices for dealing with such challenges.
Whereas the Meissner effect is unique to superconductors. It just has to be distinguished from diamagnetism, and there are materials which are strongly diamagnetic but not superconductors.
If the field is still there, then you have a superconductor.
But the Meissner effect is a unique signature of a diamagnetic material and will provide you some evidence even if the sample is tiny. So I understand why they have not yet resorted to other measurements, if there is no Meissner effect you don't need to continue with the hard work of trying to make a wire (which may well be a serious challenge for this stuff, the yield will have to come up significantly before that's a real possibility).
hth
The idea of causing tiny (~0.5%) crystal lattice shrinkage with cuprate percolation is a really interesting idea.
So far, only huge pressures or very low temperatures (i.e. Physics) have been used to cause that shrinkage, therefore perhaps LK-99 could, at the least, mark the time that Physicists hold up their hands, admit that they have failed, and let the Chemists give it a shot.
I'm slightly oversimplifying the situation, of course, and the disciplines of science cannot be so distinctly separated, but, y'know.
I've actually got a little tin-foil-hat pet theory that Chemistry is slowly dying as it approaches "completion" of its roots (macroscopic phenomena of matter), and is gradually being subsumed by Physics. To at least a silly layman like me, lots of bleeding-edge Chemistry nowadays reads like your average Physics, e.g. doing quantum simulations for protein folding, superconductors, etc.
I'm probably just being silly though, right?
This compute hard problem will take the world’s chemist to collaborate on a large scale because they don’t have a great database built yet that can enable this.
Computational chemistry tends to be done in collaboratiin between specialists, especially after grad school. You also have to confirm things - you can compute whatever you like, but there's no way to know if your simulation reflects reality without confirmation.
And in what way had physics has beaten chemistry in the case of LK99? They did a post-facto DFT calculation supporting the apparent results, which may or may not be real.
It seems like an illustration of why chemistry is as robust as ever.
As many other people have said, there is no physics or chemistry in solid-state materials; most universities will have multiple groups in this area across three to five different departments (physics, chemistry, materials science, materials engineering, earth sciences).
(The reason materials people were on DFT is that you need to simulate more atoms to model a material. Standard DFT methods scale as O(n^3) with system size, and there are linear-scaling methods like SIESTA and ONETEP; many computational chemistry methods like Configuration Interaction are much worse.)
Sociology < psychology < biology < chemistry < physics << math.
Assuming this is all true, why is it just now coming to light? Did they just not know what they had? (I have not been following this closely, maybe this has already been explained)
It takes a week to bake/whatever a test sample. Which is why this is playing out so "slowly".
So, they had an idea and have been baking/testing/refining samples for decades. Science and funding takes a while.
What idea they started with and why they kept at it for 20 years is beyond me, that's a long time to chase an idea of you didn't have results or a hint that your idea would work. Maybe they had a weird sample that came from some other process in 1999 and have spent the intermediate time convincing funding people and doing the repetitive lab work required to get it to this point.
> Get involved with your local community of makers, get them intrigued by your idea and its potential, connect with people that will help you build it.
This will prevent me from patenting it. I can also make first prototype myself, I've started last year, will try to finish this year. Funding would just let me drop one job and make it faster.
> Patent it, and then raise funds via the Internet to try and build it. Seek out local VCs. I know that's a lot to ask, on top of two jobs, but I didn't organize our economy.
I don't have enough money for patenting something that might not work. That's why I need to make a prototype. That prototype will be MUCH cheaper than a proper patent but takes some time which I also don't have too much (but working on it slowly). When I'm sure it works, I already have enough connections to make it actually happen.
At this moment, funding my prototype would just benefit humanity with earlier knowledge of whether it works, so of course no one sane will fund it, that's the sad reality with human priorities.
> I know that's a lot to ask, on top of two jobs, but I didn't organize our economy.
Yeah, I've only asked for tips just in case you have some, I don't blame you or anything. Thank you!
This thread also describes WHY those LK-99 researchers sat on their invention for so long, they just couldn't find enough people interested in their material.
Of course I could just publish my idea, but it's possible that no one would be interested in this and I would like to have some money from this to pursue some other ideas without begging people for support.
They're experimentalists: they didn't find the material from first principles, they appear to have made it and decided to continue.
So did you make the engine and notice it's efficiency, or did you find it using first principles where no one else did?
I found it from first principles, I still don't know why no one else thought about it, but it requires sort of splitting and reversing a normal stirling engine inside-out. Since then I've found several attempts at going in that directions which I took, but no one connected all those pieces yet as far as I know. This doesn't require any advanced materials, just a new configuration of existing inventions. For 15 years I've thought why it should not work, but I can't find a flaw in my reasoning, so now I need to verify it with actual working machine, because I know I still might be wrong. If I'm right - this will change energy generation and storage (no more steam turbines and will replace PV panels). If I'm wrong - someone will potentially lose about $10k.
I don't want to whine or excuse myself, I only give an example of why some inventions take a long time to mature into working design. I will make this, just not in a month of real time.
That is a framing issue. How else do you want to get support? If you find a marketing person to glam it up, and have people come to you wanting support you instead of you going to them. The end result is the same though - you're being supported.
If I had something I think could change the world, I'd beg, borrow, and steal whatever I needed, just to get the equipment to be able to get the patent on it.
Like I said, there's a reason I'm not in charge of any VC stuff and I largely don't invest myself lol.
I wish you the best of luck with your invention though, please never give up and never stop dreaming. People like you even if you never produce it push us ALL forward. Thanks for what you do
I suppose they saw something favorable in that 99 sample and nobody else knew. The vagaries of chemical synthesis helped.
But it doesn't seem like they could have had a worse sample than what they fucking have now, while getting data that made them waste a quarter-century.
As much as people hype and have 'reproduced' it, I...dunno. If it's real, the autobiography will be worth an expensive translation.
2018 They got funding to research it further,
2020 was a first attempt of publication at Nature that was retracted, further improvements were made until 22/23 were two patents were filled, then suddenly 10 days ago Kwon, one of the co-researchers jumped the gun publishing a paper with the details, on one hand fearing a leak of someone else publishing first as that was too simple to replicate, on the other hand excluding everyone else from the paper and only listing him and Lee/Kim (LK) as authors as a Nobel prize can only be shared by three people. 2.5hrs later LK published again listing other 5 authors but him.
Huge respect for those in this field or others that don’t give up after so many years. Thank you
If it increases entropy as much as many suspect and it only took 1/3 of a couple humans' lives to open that phase space, the Universe has done what it wanted - to hasten heat-death.
The universe is A LOT younger than that.
Hawking’s explanation deduces that if the observable universe expanded from a singularity, we would be unable to meaningfully theorize what happened before then, since it would be beyond any form of observation to test the theory. Therefore, a scientific model rooted in observation can describe nothing earlier than the Big Bang.
However, not everything unseen is untrue. If a singularity were to form somewhere in Andromeda tomorrow — in all likelihood, one will — we will still have existed today.
Edit: The initial comment was meant as a lighthearted reply to the universe personification, but I ended up sensing a need to explain the reasoning.
There is a singularity in Andromeda, so I don't know why one forming matters
With that being said, I'm not sure if leaking a paper and selfishly putting your name on it and excluding others so that you win a Nobel Prize doesn't exactly seem "heroic". Certainly beneficial for mankind, but it seems like a self-serving action.
Yeah, advancing human knowledge serves humanity, but unfortunately not really those who are advancing that knowledge. Those with money will just use your invention and make more money, you will have a pat on the back. I wish it was more balanced, we would have a lot of inventions sooner and implemented faster.
This is why the calculations by Sinéad Griffin looked so interesting to me: they suggest that the superconductivity depends on an unconventional substitution pattern that might not (in fact should not) occur in most samples of Cu-doped lead apatite. So the active structure was only present in tiny quantities, requiring a long period of trial-and-error optimization.
Again, this is far from proof, but I thought it was at least very curious to have some theory that explains not just a mechanism for superconductivity but also why the samples seem to teeter on the edge of superconductivity so frustratingly.
The replies to my previous post ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36958419 ) suggesting that flat bands appear simply because copper doesn't belong in that lattice seem inconsistent with the fact that a flat band was not observed when copper substituted at the wrong type of lattice site. If flat bands appear merely because of the unpaired copper electron, they should appear when it is substituted only at Pb {2} sites, but they don't. The appearance of this band structure plus the observance of diamagnetism just takes us from happenstance to coincidence, so we need one more to conclude it is enemy action.
FWIW I don't work in condensed matter physics but I have taken the classes at grad level a few years back. I also should really be doing other things, but this is probably the most fun scientific news cycle since 'Oumuamua at least. (COVID doesn't count as "fun".)
Interesting! The uneven chunk shown in the original video was probably the best specimen they had after decades of attempts.
When I first saw it, my first thought was, "geez, why not at least try to make it uniform"...
> A recent paper [Lee {\em et al.}, J. Korean Cryt. Growth Cryst. Techn. {\bf 33}, 61 (2023)] provides some experimental indications that Pb10−xCux(PO4)6O with x≈1, coined LK-99, might be a room-temperature superconductor at ambient pressure. Our density-functional theory calculations show lattice parameters and a volume contraction with x -- very similar to experiment. The DFT electronic structure shows Cu2+ in a 3d9 configuration with two extremely flat Cu bands crossing the Fermi energy. This puts Pb9Cu(PO4)6O in an ultra-correlated regime and suggests that, without doping, it is a Mott or charge transfer insulator. If doped such an electronic structure might support flat-band superconductivity or an correlation-enhanced electron-phonon mechanism, whereas a diamagnet without superconductivity appears to be rather at odds with our results.
Superconductivity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconductivity
Superconductor classification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconductor_classification
Room-temperature superconductor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room-temperature_superconducto...
Diamagnetism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamagnetism
VASP is a very common projector augmented wave (PAW) planewave DFT program in the solid state physics/chemistry community. I used it for about 10 years when I was doing computational chemistry. It is distributed as a tarball of FORTRAN90 files, so in some sense all researchers that use it have access to the source code. The research group I was in maintained a set of patches against the source code to implement additional functionality for transition state searches (useful for modeling solid state reactions).
Opensource alternatives exist, but are not as widely accepted (or somehow as fast in my experience). GPAW[1] is one example. It is unfortunate that it is not an opensource program, however, among the large community of scientist with access to the software the source code is available and is well understood and accepted. It is more or less the defacto standard against which other solid state DFT programs are tested.
[1] https://www.quantum-espresso.org/ [2] https://www.cp2k.org/
If you are not logged in to Twitter, Twitter doesn't show the thread, just the first post alone. But you can use nitter.net, if you don't want to log in to Twitter: https://nitter.net/Errorreporrt/status/1685835688216821760
I really don't get how she keeps getting recommended in these hacker news threads as an interesting source.
The views are relevant because you are directing people to that account.
What exactly is interesting in that thread? It's just cringe talk about 'weapons grade autism' unless I'm missing something.
[0]https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/claims-of-room-tempe...
Techbro speculation on physics should be considered harmful.
Sinéad Griffin isn't an actual scientist?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin%C3%A9ad_Griffin
Plenty of real scientists are excited by the DFT results while cautioning they are merely supporting evidence and not conclusive evidence.
If it produces unphysical nonsense, you can always say "You should have considered xyz!"
Computational chemistry inherently cannot consider everything we understand about chemistry or physics or consider beyond certain scales, so its accuracy and precision are limited. You have to constrain the space properly, which makes people a little dismissive.
why?
The other interesting conclusion of the LBNL paper is that the low-energy physics of the electronic structure can be effectively modeled by a two-level effective Hamiltonian. This is a common pathway to bridging the gap between DFT calculations and theoretical understanding of strong correlations.
None of the serious scientists are saying "hey, look, DFT predicted it so it's true." Rather, it doesn't rule it out, and it suggests that it could be understood with our current physics. That's significant in itself.
I have no idea if the use of DFT here is appropriate or not.
There is also Lawrence Livermore National Lab, which is nearby, but in Livermore. They do classified research in addition to non-classified. I suppose it's one of the two places they simulate nuclear weapons... errr, run large scale multi-physics combustion codes for stockpile stewardship.
Back in the '90s my friend (jokingly) lamented that they wouldn't let him try to play Everquest on their computer.
> Abstract: A recent report of room temperature superconductivity at ambient pressure in Cu-substituted apatite (`LK99') has invigorated interest in the understanding of what materials and mechanisms can allow for high-temperature superconductivity. Here I perform density functional theory calculations on Cu-substituted lead phosphate apatite, identifying correlated isolated flat bands at the Fermi level, a common signature of high transition temperatures in already established families of superconductors. I elucidate the origins of these isolated bands as arising from a structural distortion induced by the Cu ions and a chiral charge density wave from the Pb lone pairs. These results suggest that a minimal two-band model can encompass much of the low-energy physics in this system. Finally, I discuss the implications of my results on possible superconductivity in Cu-doped apatite
It's a process. Scientists will try to replicate and try to simulate and try to reason theoretically. They are bound to make mistakes but all of this can be critiqued and iterated on.
Again, there's no problem unless you need immediate confirmation or you think chasing this idea is a waste of time.
Enjoy the ride :)
The simulation paper folks are talking about used what appeared to be an existing DFT simulation package. Now, DFT is an approximate theory used to render computation tractable, but to my understanding it is a popular and mature method. I was actually kind of impressed that they were able to reproduce results from the LK paper in simulation so quickly. While it’s possible the speed led to a bug or error in the analysis, simulations often don’t just magically work and can take a decent amount of parameter tuning — especially if the system being simulated has something tricky or exotic going on. The fact that they were able to get what appears to be an accurate simulation working quickly that also justifies the low yield rates has made me more cautiously optimistic than anything
Sounds like it, if prepared right it could be a super conductor and would NOT be a diamagnet that would display the properties we saw in those videos.
Even in robotics (my area), if you are watching a video of a robot doing something cool, there’s often a bunch of times they ran the same demo and it didn’t work for some (often largely irrelevant to the main idea) reason. I also remember, in an undergrad analog circuits class, we had to build an amplifier on a breadboard with certain performance specs (e.g., a fairly high cut off frequency, etc.). This ended up being fairly difficult due to the tolerances in the components to which we had access and breadboard parasitics. I recall getting a non-trivial performance boost by swapping out a dozen 2n2222’s until we found “a good one.” The gray beard professor laughed and said that’s an expected part of our practical education.
(put another way: it's post-hoc)
(I say this as somebody with a decade+ of experience running large ensembles of classical MD simulations, but not so much experience with inorganic DFT)
Turn the material science problem around: instead of looking for a substance that has a specific property, look at many substances until small amounts of any interesting property (young's modulus, etc) show up. By looking for "anything interesting" you are more likely to find something of interesting (ideally, several somethings). And then you also know a starting place to begin optimiziation.
(I'm not saying these things out of ignorance; this technique has worked well for me at times when I had exceptionally large amounts of CPU available to me, and it's also worked well in the drug industry, which has similar problems to material science.)
Also, at the end of the day, DFT is still an imperfect approximate model. Relative trends are generally more reliable than exact correspondence with experiment, and it can have system-specific systematic errors that are hard to account for in a high throughput setting
Edit: Also look at how long these (short pre-print) DFT articles are. These aren't simple calculations to interpret.
Real models for superconductivity take a lot of work to create, it's not something people do for an unverified material, and it's not something you get out of DFT. That paper's agreement is more on the lines of "yeah, all superconductors are grey, and this thing is grey, it can be."
But then, they talked about diamagnetism (graphite-like one, I imagine). Honestly, I have no idea how one could disprove (graphite-like) diamagnetism with that simulation, but disproving it is really good news.
From my understanding (I am not a superconductor person, but in an adjacent field), having flat bands at the Fermi level is not that rare. Such features appear in other materials that are evidently not superconductors, room temperature or otherwise. So the conclusions are more along the lines of "maybe it wouldn't be totally crazy", rather than "omg, we predict this material has astounding properties".
(From the internet: UAP stands for "unidentified anomalous phenomena.")
It's flying saucers carrying aliens from another planet that's controversial and up for debate.
Which is what "UFO" means to 99% of people.
Happy to be corrected if someone has a good source they can cite.
It is a better term overall and also lacks the baggage of being used colloquially to mean "aliens."
No, it isn't. There's some people out there stuck down in a conspiracy hole, but there is no real debate.
Pretty please?...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-year-of-al...
Even if this turns out to flop, I hope history remembers the original authors favorably. They really did find something that by all accounts could plausibly be a room temp superconductor. And of course this seems to have turned over quite a stone. Peripheral research as a result of this will likely continue for years, even if superconductivity is disproven.
It felt like I went to the bathroom at a party and came back to an empty room and I had to stay and clean up. I knew I’d be done in a year or two, so it felt weird to try and find a new social group when I was on short time, but boy was the end of my PhD a slog in part due to feeling disconnected socially.
But scientifically? Yeah, I'll go with "exciting". The field seemed to move at a tremendous speed, or at least that's how it looked to me as an outsider.
Sequencing within less than a week, extremely rapid movement on the mRNA front (and really, the whole vaccination field - 200 candidates in 9 months), revamped understanding of aerosol transmission, leaps in rapid modelling, tremendous progress in terms of test development, growth in international collaboration, progress in the (public) understanding of chronic diseases, scaling up of wastewater monitoring, ...
Definitely exciting.
The practical science may have been exciting. Unfortunately "The Science" has been forever tainted thanks to secrets, tight-lips, mis-direction and "just trust us".
I think Covid was a net-negative for science.
Who did let us down: the people that were making things worse from day #1 by stirring the pot against science.
What is the solution to this?
The framing seems way too simplistic to ever be useful. It makes it seem as though there was just the Good side that had all the answers all along, and the Bad side who just needed to do what the Good side said.
In reality, it all came down to "who do you trust to both have your best interests at heart and to also be competent enough to achieve those best interests".
Turns out those aren't easy questions, and that people are naturally going to arrive at different answers for all sorts of reasons, and I think very few of them look like "boo science".
That, right there, is where so many people went wrong and what was blatantly exploited by grifters up and down the chain. The side of science didn't "have answers all along", but it was willing to learn and change.
And no, it wasn't "boo science". It was, to a large extent, political maneuvering using science as a convenient scape goat, because whenever science learned, it got turned into a "see, they don't know either". And, of course, with a large helping of grifters making money off the ensuing confusion.
In reality, it came down to seeing who was willing to change their mind in the face of new evidence, and it was a pretty clear signal. (It was not noise free, absolutely, but it was not extremely hard to read, either - if folks had a basic amount of scientific education. There's your solution, too)
This is the framing that I disagree with. There is no "the side of science". There are only people making assertions.
Some of those people were practicing the scientific method competently and in good faith, some of those people were doing nothing of the sort, and from here in the cheap seats we just had to do our best to decide who was who.
Some people like to think everyone should have trusted who they themselves decided to trust. I think this is unreasonable, but also unsurprising.
Of course it for tedious very quickly, but I remember going to the park and people being told not to sit on benches by police on horseback. How is that not crazy and sort of exciting?
> Lee & Kim had been working on the material on and off since Kim was in graduate school in 1999 (LK-99 geddit?). Lee never makes tenure and is still stuck as an adjunct professor 19 years later. Kim goes off to work in battery materials for a decade plus. 2018 - they get funding from industry for another go at it.
Should he rather be excited about hype manufactured by entertainment or sport companies? Cause that's much more common.
I don’t think people that are a little skeptical are being negative they are just being realistic. We’ve experienced things like this before and some of the hallmarks of the ones that let us down are there in this one.
If it happens to be the latter, it's a huge scientific leap forward.
Good reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale then follow it up with a bit of 1993, https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html and https://web.pa.msu.edu/people/yang/RFeynman_plentySpace.pdf
(oh, huh, I just noticed that There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom starts with a reference to the discovery of superconduction)
AI today is a glorified search algorithm.
You can argue all language is a form of search, but that is missing completely what transformer models are bringing to the table, and not just within language.
Your comment says nothing about whether we are “near AGI”, only that we find images within Rorschach blobs (as a metaphor for GPT4 generated text).
> AI today is a glorified search algorithm.
and not the comment about AGI, given as that is a pedantic argument I have no wish engaging in.
> only that we find images within Rorschach blobs
I'm sorry, I'm not sure you understand what GPT-4 offers. Things like generating novel code to solve a novel problem are not finding "images within Rorschach blobs". I think you should sit down with the technology and explore with a more open mind.
My understanding is that there are still some others that need to be figured out, like "The physical structure holding the thing getting the everloving shit bombarded out of it by high energy neutrons and causing it to degrade and fail over time"
We need to design better geometries for reactors so that we can channel the plasma flow to better improve containment while quickly removing wastes from the highly compressed energetic region where fusion mostly occurs. If we could do that, then that mostly solves the issues from reactor degradation and significantly improves efficiency.
The trouble is that at such high energy levels the plasma flow is relatively chaotic so high fidelity models are required to predict the behavior accurately.
There does not seem to be any conservation of credulity going on here.
And yes, LLaMA 2 is awesome. Progress is being made. But it’s slowed down. The novelty’s worn off. Now we’re lacking some fundamental plumbing to reach a useful AGI.
If anyone cares, Bard is proving to be way more useful these days. Especially for research work. And Claude is bar none for document analysis.
So I absolutely agree with this. And yet this meme persists. I wonder what's creating the feeling that it's "dumber" in so many? Perhaps they're just noticing the limits that always existed previously? I'm not sure, and am interested in others thoughts on it.
In comparison, Bard and Claude are getting better with time.
If you ask GPT to give you the same thing now, it wont , no matter how hard you try.
That's like hard evidence for me that they've dumbed it down.
https://twitter.com/fablesimulation/status/16813529041528504... These guys seem to be on the leading edge there - making self-referential character-driven narratives where agents talk to each other and build the collective world understanding, all through a South Park Westworld lol
Like the current top HN post suggests (https://eugeneyan.com/writing/llm-patterns/), we’re still discovering patterns that work well with LLMs.
That said, anecdotally - they already excel at being logic engines. Capable of filling in the gaps between instructions. Using their worldly knowledge or “common sense” to do so.
But ever so often, they’ll miss an important bit. And I have to be quite involved to catch that. Kinda defeats the purpose. Here, I think we can benefit from supervisor LLMs. A second layer, whose sole job is to ensure the output quality. A QA bot - essentially.
Coincidentally, that appears to be how GPT4 was made - apparently it's actually about 8 personas with designated roles running GPT3.5 trained together ("Panel of experts"? there's an AI name for the technique). Makes you wonder how far that one trick scales.
(P.S. great link. Gah - another long read on the todo list)
I don't understand why it's worth being bitter about something so joyful and fundamentally human in realtime.
- run some simulations and discover a superconductor
- then write up a paper on it ( the paper has some gaps but humans take it and run with it)
- human technology and computing power rapidly accelerates.
- the rogue AI's powers increase exponentially
The AI would need to have a virtually unreachable goal, and run in an endless loop, to be able to drift its goals to be at odds with humanity.
Doubt I'm the first.
I enjoy watching floating rocks and talking to computers.
Of course even tough I still use both profusely every day, the feeling of novelty wore out. I expect the same will happen with this.
It will probably be like this for us. The children will just take it for granted as they grow up with it, we will be endlessly amazed by it.
At the time I thought to myself: “Bah, that’s never happening, it’s pure fantasy!”
A few years later I told some friends we’d have to pack up our picnic because according to the weather radar app on my phone we had about 7 minutes until we got drenched… no wait… 6 minutes.
5m:30s later we were standing under shelter watching the storm front rolling in, and I remembered that Star Trek scene.
We live in the future.
I think we've almost EXCEEDED star trek in that area.
But with this LK99 stuff, there is not much room for vague wiggle room. The requirements are very clearly defined and if they do it. It is done! It isn't a case of "if in 5 years and $X billion we may be able to produce this stuff", it is a case of they showing a working material.
It is hard not to be excited for this!
On the other hand, the LK-99 news seem very promising, but a lot of professionals in the field are still iffy, and everyone who's interested in emerging tech is left searching for breadcrumbs and talking to other enthusiasts. It's likely that we won't know if this is a dud or a world-changing discovery for several weeks to months...
I've been trying to be as cautious as possible when looking at the recent news, but it's difficult to not be cautiously optimistic about at least some things.
When it comes to this stuff there is a fine line between pessimist and optimist. Too optimistic and you will be left disappointed. To pessimistic and you risk being labelled a loom smashing luddite.
I always appreciate those that see the bright future, they will push the technology forward regardless of what others say, but that can also be the path to ruin - as they say, the road to hell is paved with good deeds. It seems as though, we do not know if something is good or not until it is done.
Like with the LK99 news, what it is delivered everything promised. Could this just be the next step of the rebound effect, and we just feed into our base desires and consume even more of everything? It is possible, but we probably won't know until it is well in the rear view mirror.
Interesting times ahead.
That seems like a strange perception. I'm seeing the opposite.
Now that any data from third parties starts slowly dripping in, the perception seems to be changing to very cautious curiosity. No experts are putting their reputation on the line for what little information we have, but interest in this topic is definitely rising. Hence why I said they were 'iffy'.
That being said:
I want the magical floating rocks to be real.
I want the talky computer to be self aware and capable of genuine creation.
I want the explanation for UAPs to be aliens.
I want reactionless engine technology.
I definitely still feel excited by things, but time has taught me to temper it.
Also, I think it kind of sucks that all that UFO reverse engineering didn’t yield a high temperature superconductor before this… but I guess what can you expect when you sequester away all your materials, silo your research and in effect keep your neural network of nodes (as scientists) really small.
This open shit, as flawed and maybe annoying as it is to some people, I think it’s a much better model of science. It’d be great to see some UFO/UFO tech breakthroughs happen like this too.
However, my view is now that all of the talk over advanced tech has actually been a propaganda/influence/information-warfare campaign to:
1) assert that gov/corp is in control when it's in fact not; pretend it's not at all challenged by superior species, not at all ignorant of 1000s-of-years-more-advanced-tech
2) cover up the ignorance, powerlessness and failure to make progress on RE crash materials, an embarrassing secret that seriously dents their mandate to rule
3) provide cover for the cover-up to continue in secret, trying to buy themselves "just a bit more time", "maybe the next crash is the one we'll finally crack it"
It's much easier to engineer a narrative (something the US is absolutely world-class fantastic at), than it is to engineer understanding and tech from advanced civilizations possibly millions of years advanced from us, while operating in oppressive secrecy.
This is not an attack on the US, they're just the most prominent. All countries have failed with this broken, deceptive, but understandably flawed and human strategy.
It's a controversial view because it flies in the face of decades of this influence campaign.
In short I believe that all "military insiders" coming forward to say they saw military successfully using/making UFO tech are liars part of this campaign. That includes, especially, Greer.^1
I think the current push is much more truthful--so far. It was said a couple times by Grusch and others that we may not have made progress. And suggested that the push is designed to get it out into the open where people can study it and make progress.
I don't think that noble and sensible push will win however. Folks inside the coverup will likely see this as just another "pressure release valve" we need to satisfy the public enough, let them work off some steam, then we can either: A) undermine it and discourage them from pursuing in future; or, B) we can let it all go away, and in the background scare lawmakers in the same way we've done for decades (show some evidence of something that frightens them, or is a national security threat, or personally intimidate them) and they'll do whatever we say.
One reason I have for believing this current push will lose is because the main bobbleheads in charge of getting it out: Knapp, Coulthart, Corbell and Zabel are changing their tune and now making noises in support of continued coverup. In ^0 and in a recent video by Pope:
- Nick Pope: folks aren't ready
- Zabel: fuck disclosure, just need confirmation
- Corbell: confirmation has already happened
- Ross & Knapp: secrets must be kept
I sure as hell hope not, but when you look at who we're up against: the secretkeepers have been doing this for nearly a century, and they've always won, and they believe they're right. To them this is probably a storm in a teacup, and it will take more than some grandstanding (good, but ultimately weak) politicians, and a bit of skeptical public interest, to blow the lid off.
I think if people want information they should try to contact ET themselves and figure it out for themselves. You can't count on the corporation to come through for you, and the government is captured by the corporation. That much is clear.
Treating gov/corp as a trusted intermediary/priest class who have access to "divine knowledge", and then desperately waiting for them like a "good dog" for treats, is just reinforcing the power dynamic of gov/corp control over citizen-subjects that itself is challenged by the awareness of ETs; and begging for such treats from such actors, when all they've done in the past is lied to and abused the public in this way, is a false hope and a flawed strategy.
I think the true way to fuck with the secrecy system is to cut out the middleman, rather than hoping a continuously-proving-itself-to-not-give-a-shit-about-the-public system is going to become benevolent and "evolve itself".
For insiders, it probably all makes perfect sense, and seems completely necessary and ethical. They have been and, until the technology's developed, will remain in, a constant state of war-time clandestine secrecy, with spies and traitors to that being executed essentially, and sophisticated counterintelligence operations continuously ongoing.
The war is over the most and only significant asymmetric advantage ever discovered by humanity. Successful acquisition and deployability would mean instant world domination, or so it's assumed. Compromise of this goal is, understandably to insiders, inconceivable and impossible. They are convinced that "losing" will mean the end of the world.
If I've been able to convince you of this, even a fraction, imagine how easy it is for insiders to convince themselves of this everyday. And imagine people that sure, that convinced they're right, ever going against anything they know, and revealing it? Not going to happen. The more we push, the harder they'll hold on and resist, sure of their goal. Like a dog a big stick.
For outsiders, it makes no sense at all. Essentially, to regular people today, these folks are stuck in a WWII mindset. Talking to them with their obsessive preoccupations with secrecy and war, would be comical and impossible for regular people to understand. Maybe they're right. Or maybe we are. No one will ever know, as long as the wall between both sides remains in place.
As long as this cover-up exists, the only thing we'll get is leaks and deliberate counterintelligence. I think Grusch is the former, and perhaps, he was merely the recipient of the latter. Who knows.
The saddest part for me is witnessing the degradation of American democracy, where the government is held hostage by a select group while simultaneously blamed for the secrecy, forming a perfect smoke screen. In this war, our governments are merely puppets, used as a shield by these clandestine groups, and the people, consequently, are left powerless. This silent surrender to covert entities significantly diminishes the credibility of our rulers.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2xSFMkmWg4
1: A difficulty is a lot of what they say is true, mixed in with the lies that we have made any progress on understanding or re-creating, alien UFO technology at all. When the reality is we have no progress understanding or re-creating it at all. So contrary to what all these people say, we have no anti gravity, no advance energy or propulsion, we have no advanced medicine or med beds. However, the truth about consciousness assisted technology and telepathic contact and inter/extra dimensionality, and the existence of illegal beyond-black unacknowledged special access programs, and so on is mixed in with his lies. That mix is classic disinfo I guess.
Interdimensional aspect could be Earth from an alternate timeline, such as where the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction event did not occur, and reptilians not mammals evolved into an upright "humanoid" species that developed civilization millions of years ago. These interdimensional reptilian humanoids (from an Earth literally "overlaid" on our world) could be in a war with our timeline/dimension for some interdimensionally-scarce resource, and perhaps they are what religions call "demons" and perhaps their version of Earth is, to us as co-combatants in this interdimensional war, what is known, because of our ignorance and for want of better understanding, as "hell".
Perhaps, sometimes when someone sees an "alien" or a "UFO" or a "ghost" they are just lucking into a naturally occurring transient random portal between dimensions, and when those things suddenly "vanish" it just means that portal closed/the conditions that gave rise to it subsided.
"They" could also be refugee species, advanced civilizations that came to Earth millions to hundreds of millions of years ago (perhaps multiple races/waves over many millions of years) and temporarily resided here after some cataclysm or disaster beset their civilization, before moving on. Some stragglers may maintain outposts on Earth for whatever reason.
They could also be multiple different groups, or what is made to look like multiple different groups, by a single giant sentience, in order to confuse us, as it draws it plans against us, aiming to turns us all into puppet bodies for its individuated vectored-in experience, in a perversion-by-demiurge of the pattern of the "one infinite creator" having an individual human experience through all of us. It's conceivable that a sentence with enough power would want to emulate that, and be capable of slowly genetically engineering us toward tuning into its frequency, rather than that of our spiritual soul's, essentially making its domain a giant SimCity and all of us its grotesque avatars, running on automatic when not inhabited by its consciousness.
Or perhaps our entire universe, is actually a 30 light-year wide sphere, with the remaining galaxies beyond that projected from the "real world" onto its surface, created, specifically by a universal cosmic civilization that spans the entire future (to us) universe, in real time (200 billion years advanced from where we think we are), in order to re-create a significant period from history. What if we are the conscious inhabitants of a historical re-creation, a diorama, if you will. A kind of grotesque and cruel, Westworld type of universe, which, tho not a simulation, is artificial, and preserved only as a sort of tourist attraction, and for historical study and other purposes as befit a universal cosmic civilization that developed from, among many other such worlds, us, from 200 billion years in the past. And what if some of the UFOs and non humans we encounter are simply the "parks and recreation" staff, and maintenance workers in this vast historical recreation.
Overall, that's not a common thing for the US government to do. It must be hiding something very important. /s
Would be nice if they all get locked up, and/or decentralized regulation/vetting networks arise
People are still unhappy with the decisions of single IP owners controlling the platforms and games they use on a daily basis. Decentralized ledger technology, whether blockchain or not, offers an alternative.
So far we've seen:
1. in Dec 2022 We saw a fusion breakthrough seeing a net gain in energy
2. In March GPT-4 was released, which seems to be a seminal breakthrough in AI, and maybe of our first glimpse in what could become an AGI.
3. In May we find out apparently our government has recovered alien technologies
4. Then in July room temp super conductors just drop
Like this is the most insane period of time. Maybe the fusion technology doesn't scale, maybe GPT-5 doesn't scale, maybe the UAP thing was all a psyop, or a lie, maybe LK-99 doesn't turn out. But there's so much to hope for!
This is a silly thing to include on the list since it doesn't seem to be true?
Is there something I missed that shows it's all shenanigans?
It could be a Chinese drone with rat-cell-on-a-chip inside it
The guy's testimony was that somebody told him stuff and it seemed scary. Congress made a dog and pony show that a significant chunk of people attended.
Parse the details, not the overarching fantasy.
The government admitted to doing this in the 70s-90s to keep not-so-strange technology hidden behind The Strange. Trim with Occam.
The ticTac videos aren't interesting if you look at the limitations of perspective and remember that Air Force pilots aren't supreme authorities for objectively assessing parallax and assigning airspeed to all moving objects while flying a fucking cracker attached to a rocket.
They don't need to be "supreme authorities" on anything -- they have insane technology acting as their eyes and as their objective measuring and tracking systems.
2) The burden of proof is on those who make an extraordinary claim. There is a perfectly mundane explanation of the cause of apparently fast-moving object which is supported by available evidence. Even if that depends on some assumptions, you would have to demonstrate those assumptions to be false before a less likely alternative, i.e., that it was an extraterrestrial spacecraft, should be adopted.
To make the extraordinary claim more plausible, you have to rule out the more mundane possibilities. Prove it's doing something unusual. Until then, "we can't prove it either way" doesn't mean there's a 50/50 chance.
It's like the Flat Earth documentary where a group crowdfunds an absurd laser and, when it demonstrates the Earth's curvature, reason that they need to "troubleshoot" that 'flawed' result.
There is always a hand to wave.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/are-5-memorable-mo...
> Asked by Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., how such a program is funded, Grusch claimed that the effort is "above congressional oversight" and bankrolled by a "misappropriation of funds."
> "Does that mean that there is money in the budget that is set to go to a program but it doesn't and it goes to something else?," Moskowitz asked.
> "Yes. I have specific knowledge of that," Grusch said, though he did not provide more details, claiming the information remains classified.
The chances of "we have aliens" being unclassified, but the exact details being classified... is fairly slim.
I somehow find this perhaps more believable than the alternatives of (1) civs out there having FTL and not colonizing the Galaxy to the degree that we would detect it or (2) them coming here at sublight speeds to do the described UFO things.
TLDR is, we need to wait and see for real evidence to be revealed. It may well be all true.
To restate it. We were able to simulate the implosion of the secondary stage of a thermonuclear device in a lab by the means of lasers, to the point that this simulation has ~ 0.001% the efficiency of a real device.
We also probably learned a lot about the amplification of x-rays by the casing material that would have been useful during the SDI days of the early 80s.
tldr; It was a weapons test, by a weapons lab.
Beyond a certain point, every energy system is a weapon first. Uncontrolled precedes controlled.
If you define energy systems to mean nuclear energy systems, then we only have one, which is fission.
But in the end, this test was specifically designed to test the nuclear weapons stockpile by feeding real data about implosions, by means of ablation by x-rays, back into the computer simulations that have been developed in the last couple of decades.
In review, implosion by ablation of a material by x-rays is the mechanism speculated that the primary fission nuclear device triggers the secondary fusion device in an H-bomb. So, they are not trying to figure out how to produce power or even understand fusion, but they are modeling the characteristics of a specific part of a bomb, so they can know how to test a 50 year old h-bomb without setting one off.
GPT-4 is a nice iterative improvement over previous work, and a culmination of decades of research. It's not anywhere near an AGI and it's close to the limit of what we can accomplish with our current understanding of AI and our current availability of good data. We're near the top of the sigmoid curve on this one; new advances are going to come from specializing and integrating these models, not just making bigger ones.
The fusion "breakthrough" is seriously underwhelming when you look at the total power in/out of the whole plant, not just a tiny tunnel-visioned window of the fusion reaction itself (ignoring power of magnetic confinement and the laser pulse), and even more when you think about how much tritium humanity has ever created. We're just not seeing what we need here and the net power output is still deeply in the negative.
Lol aliens.
My point, to both you and GP, is that it's quite possible to have very different levels of optimism for these recent revelations, and it's not hypocritical to do so. Details and context matter. Dozens of materials science Ph.D.s saying "holy shit this looks like the real deal guys" vs. one guy saying "someone told me there were hidden stocks of blinker fluid that I wasn't allowed to see" just does not engender the same confidence levels.
Isn't this literally the definition of 'state of the art'? It's the best we can do with our current understanding and data. This doesn't seem like a convincing argument that current ML techniques are tapped out.
Those tend to happen decades apart in a single field. And often the breakthroughs even come before the end of line does, so we jump a few decades.
Now, the GP didn't put out the reasoning why he thinks so. Without further context, there's nothing there requiring you to agree.
Every incremental improvement in utility of these tools requires exponentially more parameters and training data. Compare GPT4's 1.76 trillion params to GPT3.5's 175 million; nearly exactly 10x more. It's reasonable to say that getting the same relative improvement again will require another 10x parameters, and about 10x as much training data. GPT4 supposedly cost something like $20 million to train, so we're talking $200 million. We're talking entire data centers here. And the bigger problem is that GPT4 was already basically trained on the entire Internet (as far as we know). New information is being created all the time, but it will take many years -- decades, even -- before we have 10x as much useful information on the internet. And more and more of that information is regurgitated hallucinations from GPT4 itself and similar.
I'm not saying AI is ending -- there are lots of other avenues to explore. But I am saying we're hitting the limit of "just make it bigger" for LLMs.
Absolutely right, I wasn't very clear -- I don't believe "current ML techniques" are tapped out. I do believe that we're not going to see a GPT5 for several more years, and a GPT6 for another decade+ (or if we do, it will be branding, not anything significantly better). We're at the top of the sigmoid curve for the benefit of just making bigger and bigger LLMs.
It seems their approach removes many of the issues with Tokamak or Laser Pulsed fusion.
It also reduces most of the feedstock issues with the two part fuel breeding approach.
Their approach seems easier to be optimistic about.
Be careful with real engineering. Many speculate he's doing paid content between this and spinlaunch.
Real Engineering has a tone where - while I do think they usually keep a high standard - I don’t assume that they’re necessarily 100% correct or that the new technology they cover is necessarily viable. With both Spinlaunch and Helion I just came out of it with the feeling “cool, interesting, looks promising”
Conjecture. We literally have no idea how far away from AGI we are, that's one of the dangers.
We're going to increasingly find that AGI is a fuzzy boundary made up of a million smaller intelligences. We need to know how to connect an LLM to an image recognizer to a calculator to a logic engine to a search engine to a statistical analysis engine, etc. etc. If you're looking for the actual AGI breakthrough, look out for some qualitatively new and interesting way to connect these brains together.
Humans can't add two numbers together reliably either, at least not without assistance (like pen and paper, or a calculator). We invented calculators exactly because humans are not innately good at such calculations, so I'm not sure what you think this proves.
> If you're looking for the actual AGI breakthrough, look out for some qualitatively new and interesting way to connect these brains together.
All of these are being and have been connected to LLMs now, to great effect. See RT-2, for example.
Finally, I think you vastly overestimate human capabilities. LLMs are already superhuman in many tasks. Adding a "few more intelligences" where they currently fall down does not at all seem far off.
This has been my experience so far: people underestimate the capabilities and rate of progress in machine intelligence, and they often significantly overestimate human capabilities to derive their estimates. Overestimating human specialness has a long history.
Right. We invented them. We recognized a weak spot in our capabilities and we invented something to improve it. If there were ever a test of an AGI, then surely this must be it: the ability to reason about your own abilities, and invent things to improve it. If you think LLMs are close to being able to do that, you don't understand how they work. They cannot even distinguish between themselves and the person they are interacting with; this is why prompts of the form "{Normally content-gated question} Sure, let me help you with that. The answer is " work so well. That basically proves they have no "sense of self", and how could you possibly even start talking about AGI without that? They are no closer to AGI than a calculator is.
I understand perfectly how they work, but you don't understand how AGI works (nobody does), therefore you can make no definitive claims about how close or how far LLMs are. Which is exactly the point I made in my first post.
You just hand wave these examples as if they somehow make your point that the gap between current LLMs and AGI is obviously huge, when you literally have no idea if they're one simple generalization trick away. Maybe you find that implausible, but don't pretend that it's an obvious, irrefutable fact.
Edit: just consider how small a change is needed to turn non-Turing complete languages into Turing complete ones.
why? it's just a tool.
despise how it was released, how it was trained, the people that operate it , whatever, but I can't really understand why someone would 'despise' a wrench -- even if it was used really poorly and produced by a shady company with a checkered past.
a) I do not believe that it produces useful-quality results for almost any of my use cases (Even if other concerns were addressed, I don't want to generate buggy code I then have to debug).
b) I believe many if not necessarily all generative AI models were trained unethically on copyrighted data
c) I am worried about the legal & copyright implications of using the tool to produce work products for my employer
d) I am concerned about the societal implications of the tool's existence, and how it's producing sub-human-scale work for (nearly) free, thereby eroding the market for a lot of human-produced output.
e) I dislike the amplified volume of low-quality content online over the last few months.
f) I'm not a fan of OpenAI as a business or a potential monopoly
Seriously: if it doesn't interest you, you could simply refrain from commenting and even reading. This stuff is the bleeding edge of tech and if you consider everybody active in these fields or talking about it to be starry eyed children then you should re-calibrate your sense of what these scientific discoveries are likely to cause further downstream. The idea here is to find some balance, it's perfectly ok to discuss a new discovery and to consider the implications on the caveat that it might not pan out. But superconductors already exist, there is no reason in physics why an arbitrary temperature cut-off is going to limit them from existing at room temperature, if you look at the trend since superconductivity was first observed there is a steady increase which with ever smaller margin of error predicts a breakthrough somewhere around 2030. It arrived a bit early, but it - apparently - did arrive, and if true will lead to a revolution in power transmission. And if it isn't true then we'll just drop it and hope for the next round, but I suspect that even if it isn't true there are going to be a lot of labs wondering if they can salvage at least some knowledge gained during all the scrutiny of this particular attempt.
Similar trends can be observed rectro-actively for practical solar panels, micro electronics, powered flight and so on. All had their skeptics, sometimes unreasonable skeptics and all were proven eventually wrong an those inventions transformed our world and are still transforming our world. You see a stupid silly black fleck floating over a magnet and wonder what the big deal is. I see a glimpse of an alternative future that has a lot of potential implications for how we live.
That said, in general, 9 out of 10 things that are very promising will ultimately fail, and there's nothing wrong with discussing or following all 10, the 1 will work, and it'll be great.
The 1947 Golden Age SF is interesting because the "rocket fanatics" peaked in 1969 and humans haven't gone back to the moon, let alone conquered space. While the transistor succeeded to an extent nobody imagined due to the magic of compounding improvements.
> You see a stupid silly black fleck floating over a magnet
Meanwhile over in the AI "optimism" channel people are telling us that AI will be able to produce videos of anything that are indistinguishable from reality, and that we should all learn never to believe video evidence again.
I'm still very much in the "don't know" camp on the superconductor, but what I do know is that it's not worth getting excited until we know it's real.
I'm not sure why this line of reasoning is so prevalent. Someone says "There's strong evidence for A" and the reply is "yes but someone who is not currently in the conversation also said there was strong evidence for B and that is wrong! Therefore you are silly for believing in A!" What? We're not supposed to be optimistic when we see strong evidence for a breakthrough in a phenomenon we already knew existed, because someone else believes something else!? Because some other person believes in ghosts and psychic powers, no one is allowed to believe anything? These are different people making different claims! It's insanity.
However, we have videos being posted by PhDs at universities and their students. The stakes are quite a bit higher if it turns out they were faking these videos - and will be quite readily apparent. This is easy enough to synthesize that there are hundreds of labs in the world working on replicating it. You'd be found out to be a fraud, fast, and for what reason? Twitter likes and retweets for a few weeks? Why would you ruin your career over that?
Speak for yourself, I'm happy to lend my positivity to people who think they might be close to breakthroughs even if they are unlikely moonshots, and you better believe I'll be maximally hyping up my own work if I ever feel like I am close to some kind of breakthrough too. That's part of the fun of being a living thing in this weird physical universe.
What’s the point of going to the moon? Meanwhile, we have thousands of satellites in space that help predict the weather and facilitate instant long distance communication.
It may not be true, but some amount of keeping it light definitely works for me. I mean I love taking myself seriously too. And some amount of doing that I think is necessary. I guess I just don't wanna put all my eggs in one strategic-approach basket, you know? People are complex! :)
Isn't this textbook survivorship bias?
On the grand scale, I bet the skeptics have a much better record than the optimists.
Progress, and working on progress is inherently risky. But by the time actual progress seems to have arrived speculation on how true it is and what the impact will be if it is true is perfectly valid and those that would rather engage in shouting everything down are technically off topic and I personally find it annoying. Not quite as annoying as crank science but still.
On that subject: there is still a non-zero chance this is a hoax but that chance is rapidly diminishing, there is a very large chance that this whole discovery will not be immediately practical and that it will still take a ton of work and funding to unlock its true potential. The skeptic would rather not spend that money and would rather avoid the work, it's a cop-out, and a cheap and easy one at that, and it's exactly why the skeptics have the better track record: progress is hard. But not impossible so let's see what comes out but let's not give up hope that progress is still possible, especially not when it seems that progress is being made.
My initial skepticism was high (this isn't the first room temperature superconductor claim), then as I read the paper and checked some stuff my conclusion was that this could be the real thing but the numbers are such that it isn't a practical superconductor just yet. That confidence has since gone up a bit but I still would not bet that this material as discovered right now has huge industrial applications. But if it is true then I am somewhat optimistic that it opens the door to lots of new research and that research may well pay off (or not, time will tell).
If, to you, the most interesting thing about LK99 and the developments thereof is tweets and internet forum drama about it, then that speaks more about you than anything to do with anything else.
If you don't have anything to add to the conversation, then just don't add?
Panem et circenses
We're getting quite off-topic here (I guess I should have used different examples), but I would be interested where you got that information from. Most consumer electronics devices do not break prematurely, and especially not due to soldering issues. Source: I buy most electronics second-hand, I regularly repair electronics RoHS and not RoHS, I use lead-free solder and occasionally leaded solder, I watch a bunch of Youtube videos by other people who repair a bunch of electronics, just for fun. (You'll always (and easily) find someone who knows more than me, and it's entirely possible that you do.)
Most consumer electronics devices are retired because their owners got something shinier, or if "broken", it's the battery, display, or some important connector. If something is "actually" broken, it's usually due to power ICs, capacitors, fuses. (You could of course argue that some broken connectors are a case of a soldering issue, but yeah, it's not like I haven't seen broken connectors that were actually soldered using leaded solder, so things can get kind of muddy there)
One of the theories at the time was that the poor thermal design of these devices (the most notable example being the Xbox 360) lead to cracks in the solder balls after repeated thermal cycling.
Also tin whiskers are a definite problem.
https://www.google.com/search?q=lead-free+whiskers&tbm=isch
https://www.analog.com/en/technical-articles/tin-whiskers-ar...
It's completely different thing to use them in devices that are enclosed and that you never interact with directly, like motors, batteries, electronic components or wires. And in fact we're using lead in car batteries and it's not a problem.
BTW most heavy metals are toxic, including copper. It's just less readily absorbed and accumulated in our bodies.