Ask HN: Why is LK-99 public? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is LK-99 public?

22 pointsG4E59 comments

Don't get me wrong, I love the fact that a break through technology is shared with the rest of the world immediatly. Let's assume that it is real. I can't help but wonder why a so significant discovery is published so soon. Wouldn't the laboratory or even the state in which this discovery was made want to keep it secret, to have this edge over its concurrents ? Akin TMSC for exemple. Isn't there significant military applications possibles ? With that in mind, would it be possible that : 1/ that discovery is not new, and better superconductor already exist somewhere ? 2/ the rushed publication would be like a leak, to prevent exactly that ?

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I'm just a bystander with no understanding of the specifics, but there are lots of general reasons why it might happen this way:

1. The discovery was in a university research context, where publishing results is normal practice.

2. Maybe publication was mandated by the funding source.

3. Maybe it's not yet certain that it's a breakthrough and they want more eyes on it to help validate.

4. Maybe they want to be publicly acknowledged as the discoverers, for future patent/prize/fame purposes.

5. Maybe it's so early stage, or with so many practical limitations, that it is not yet ready to be industrialized.

6. Maybe the recipe is so simple that there's no realistic way to contain knowledge of it.

7. Maybe it's a revolutionary technology that will save the world and the best outcome for everybody, including the researchers, is to get it into as many hands as possible.

No need to invoke conspiracy.

Thank you for your response. You are right that my phrasing implied a bit too much conspiracy. That was not really my intention, but I was curious to have experts views on those hypothetis.

8. Patents have been granted and can be monetised independently of publication.

It appears one of the discoverers feared he wouldn't be properly credited, and rushed the publication. See https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/15b27wn/the_st...

Perhaps his fears were founded. A few hours later in fact his name was suppressed in a second version of the paper.

A theory I read was that because at most 3 people can share a Nobel prize, one rushed it out naming just two others. Subsequent versions have named about 8.

Well, it was leaked so…

Also, we have no clue if the US or other military has already discovered and been using this and for how long.

I feel it was going to get out eventually. If you’re using a room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor for things which require room-temperature ambient-pressure superconducting, unless you conceal that you actually need it, people are going to realize. And once the existence is known, many top-tier labs would be analyzing it and trying to discover the manufacturing process like they are now…

The nice thing about academia is that people don’t hide breakthrough discoveries, they post them publicly and get rewarded for that. If real, these people are on track to win a nobel prize and lifelong fame and probably, lifelong funding (though probably not as much, but more than enough to survive). If real and these people hide how to produce, what would they get? Possibly more money, because governments and businesses would buy what they make for a lot and hire for even more. But governments and organizations would also want to kidnap and extort them, and most people would hate them. Meanwhile many, many labs with as much equipment and as talented researchers would be working on reproducing, and taking whatever samples they can get to do so, so their extra opportunities may not even last for long, but their notoriety would

>Also, we have no clue if the US or other military has already discovered and been using this and for how long.

Highly relevant: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36967333> and <https://np.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/15fy1xw/superconductor...>

It appears that the development and the consequent publication was driven by vanity, that is the researchers really really wanted to claim the glory for their invention.

Why I say this? The events of publishing, retracting and re-publishing the original paper happen over drama among the people involved with the discovery.

It also appears that that the development wasn't a smooth sail as would a conspiracy may theorists like to describe technological innovations. They had hard dime finding funding and people who believe in them, so having this great epiphany in 1999 then working with the governments to develop it is not a realistic scenario at all. Instead, they grinded for 2 decades and finally got something good enough to show for. Even then, their discovery is still under heavy scrutiny and it might turn out to be a dud(Although, at this point I would bet that they are onto something real).

Here is a thread on the history of the development of the substance: https://twitter.com/8teAPi/status/1685641634892128256

> It appears that the development and the consequent publication was driven by vanity, that is the researchers really really wanted to claim the glory for their invention.

Or it's just public science funding working as it's supposed to - scientists with high-impact findings get rewarded with citations, prizes, tenure and further research funding.

To me it's no mystery why an academic researcher would want to publicise findings like this - I'm surprised they didn't rush to publish it 20 years ago!

99 in the name comes from the year it was discovered. However, it was only researched more thoroughly during the last few years. It was patented a few years ago.

But yes, there was a leak in the form of the first whitepaper published by Kwon who was a former member of the group—so perhaps had it not been for that release then they would still keep trying to enchance the process more before releasing.

Like for a decade ;).

Im still trying to wrap my head around superconductors.

When energy flows from one and of a wire made from a superconductor to the other end, then no heat is produced? Where did the energy go then?

If CPUs were made from material without resistance, would they stay cold?

How much of the heat a CPU expells is inevitable?

Could (non-reversible) calculations be done without creating any heat? If yes, where did the energy go? There is no way to compute something like 10+20 without "using up" energy, right?

So many questions...

(Edit - the question is now different so my comment is stale)

My understanding is power is expended when current flows through a metal with resistance, and that loss is in the form of heat. The lower the resistance, the lower the loss and therefore lower the heat

But you do lose energy as current flows.

When you start with 10 elecrons on the left of the wire and none on the right and end up with 5 on both sides, you lost all energy that was stored in the system.

The mind-blowing thing is that electrons, as far as I understand it, don't actually flow through wires at all. If they did AC power would be pointless

Well they do but very slowly. With AC they just wiggle left and right.

This is some kind of a simplified view of how a battery works. It is not how an electric field functions.

>Where did the energy go then?

Through the circuit. Heat is energy loss.

The heat comes from the resistance. No resistance, no heat. To be more specific, the heat is from the kinetic energy of electrons bumping into the conductive material; no collision no heat.

Lets make a simple Gedankenspiel with only a wire made from LK-99 and a bunch of electrons sitting on the left end of the wire.

After a moment, the electrons will be spread out evenly through the wire, right?

So after a moment, the energy that was stored in the system (When all electrons were on the left) is lost.

If no heat is emitted, where did the energy go?

Nowhere, it's still there - a loop of superconducting wire would also be a perfect energy storage because the electrons would just keep going around without any loss(it would be an extremely small capacity storage though, superconductors lose their superconductivity at high enough amperage which is basically what introducting more energy into the system would be).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_energ...

I suspect that a circular trajectory implies acceleration and when a charged particle accelerates, it radiates away energy.

Superconducting circuits can still have AC loss. You’re basically describing discharging a capacitor through a superconductor. If there’s no loss anywhere, it will be be an LC oscillator. If there is loss, the energy will dissipate.

Why would the electrons spread evenly?

They move over to the other side and back and forth resulting in an oscillator.

That causes all your energy being radiated into the surrounding via radio waves.

That is how your microwave oven works but instead of a superconductor it uses a magnetron with free flowing electrons.

That's not how electric current works. It's more like a wave in an ocean. A wave may travel from Hawaii to California but no actual water molecule moves that far (or even very much at all). Electric current is a wave of excitation of electrons, which is what moves at the speed of light. The actual drift of individual electrons in the current is much, much slower (and IIRC in a superconductor is zero).

Veritasium has a cool video on this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHIhgxav9LY&pp=ygUVdmVyaXRhc...

Interesting video, So it is sad that they did such a terrible job explaining why the the answer is 1/c.

It makes it sound like the bulb is getting full power at 1/c, when it wont. As I understand from further reading, the power will build up over time, and that time depends highly on the shape of your circuit.

Current in a conductor does not involve the potential energy of charges (electrons) being concentrated. This should be clear by the fact that currents cause magnetic fields, but do not give the conductive wire a charge gradient (or an electric dipole moment).

I guess calculations are done using semiconductors. So you could perhaps get energy to a transistor without heat, but the transistor itself is not a superconductor and will still emit heat.

Well CPU's are made of transistors. So one could ask if it is possible to make a transistor out of a superconductor.

The answer is yes. It is possible to quench a superconductor with an external magnetic field for example and make it an insulator. These things actually do exist but i forgot the name.

But switching that field still requires energy. So while it is possible to build such a CPU there would be still energy required to do any calculations.

Today's CPU's don't heat up because of internal resistance (mostly) but because there is current flowing due to the field effect transistors needing their gate voltages being raised and lowered.

Lowering that voltage means the energy must be vented somewhere which results in heat. That would not change if any part is superconducting.

> How much of the heat a CPU expells is inevitable?

There's a lower theoretical limit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle

> Could (non-reversible) calculations be done without creating any heat?

Thermodynamics says no.

Maybe watch this video about entropy. Its not about where energy flows, its about hoe entropy can be used to calculate.

https://youtu.be/DxL2HoqLbyA

> When energy flows from one and of a wire made from a superconductor to the other end, then no heat is produced? Where did the energy go then?

Just to make an analogue. Imagine that you're stitched some reactive engine to some cart without wheels and trying to move it. Lots of friction, so lots of energy will convert to heat. That's basically insulator. Need a lot of energy to go through it.

Now you add wheels to the cart. Well, it moves quickly now. Though still you have some friction and some heat. That's conductor.

Next: you add wings and don't need wheels after lift-off. Only air friction. Still some energy converts to heat, but speed and efficiency much higher. That's copper, one of the best conductors.

Now remove air, you're in the space. Well, no friction, you can accelerate as much as you want. So this is superconductor in a nutshell.

There's nothing fundamental about resistance. Yes, most elements are not superconductors, but some are superconductors and they require not very exotic conditions. So there's nothing groundbreaking about inventing room-temperature superconductors, physics won't be rewritten because of that. But lots of practical applications, of course, so it's incredible useful invention if true.

I don't know how much CPU efficiency can we squeeze theoretically. There will be losses, even if everything is superconducting. Radio waves, for example. And it's not clear if it's possible to make everything superconducting.

The technology is over a hundred years old, people have merely been refining it, spending their entire careers. There will be rivalry.

Assuming it is real, one must consider the perspective of the discoverer. In science, it's a race to publish and this will certainly win a Nobel Prize. That's why scientists publish in communications/letters/preprints.

This is exactly how collaborative, peer-reviewed scientific research should be. Public.

A general or corporate exec looking at this from outside has no reason to take this groups claims seriously until it's been validated by the physics community. It took years of effort by multiple Noble prize winners to get the US government to invest in the atomic bomb. And probably getting LK-99 into a form ready for large scale deployment will take more effort than can be provided by the existing group.

Plus, the initial publication seems to have stemmed from dissension within the group. There's no way they could have kept this secret.

This is a great question, we need more of it.

Whenever there's a new piece of information or "news", always stop and wonder who is telling you that, why, and why now. Not enough people do!

Because the world does not work like conspiracy theorists think it does.

Science is never obviously a breakthrough, people like to talk about and get credit for cool stuff they do, and revolutionary technology isn't necessarily of any benefit if no one knows about it.

This is like asking why the US government didn't keep the transistor a secret: because the transistor is of no use to anyone until people made microprocessors with it, and to do that they needed to first make better transistors.

Nitpick: transistors were broadly used before microprocessors and still have thousands of uses that have nothing to do with computers.

Of course: but the point remains, the transistor by itself wasn't really useful - certainly not the first transistor.

It took the resources and creativity of a nation to figure out what it could do, and to make it cheap enough for its advantages to create revolutionary technology with it: otherwise vacuum tubes "would do" - and did - for a very long time.

A secret program of transistorized electronics would've been of no use at all: since all the advantages came from making them ubiquitous and cheap.

"the transistor by itself wasn't really useful"

Not to sound like an ass, and I know it is early yet here on the East coast of the US, but damn this is the most ignorant thing I have read on the internet all day! Not sure what hole you need to have your head up to not realize the impacts of the transistor that don't involve the microprocessor.

This is harsh, but I agree. It's baffling to me that he doesn't seem to understand this point. WTF.

I've gotten in trouble on hackernews pointing this stuff out, but this is a MASSIVE cultural problem on this site! All these SW nerds just baffled that anything exists outside their universe. (and I'm sw too)

The transistor was such an immediately obviously useful invention, it immediately became the toast of the town AT LEAST a decade before the first microprocessor.

Vacuum tubes suck, and everyone knew it at the time. The transistor itself was one of the single most intrinsically useful inventions ever.

It seems you have an extremely biased and narrow perspective on technology.

> because the transistor is of no use to anyone until people made microprocessors with it

What? That's not true at all. Discrete transistors are absolutely useful in a massive range of analog electronics. Open up any electronic device from the 1970s, and you're likely to find transistors — and unlikely to find microprocessors.

You can beat roulette with like 12 transistors. In 1961.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9085523

Tiny radios? You might not care, but back in the day it was the bees knees.

It's always shocking to me how software centric this site is. Everyone here thinks the world revolves around software and electrical engineering didn't exist before, just like it doesn't exist now ;)

Transistor was pretty quickly useful, I think. Integrated circuits took quite a while to catch on. Integrated circuits were available for some time before microprocessors. Microprocessors were arguable available for a long time before they became revolutionary to the average joe.

You could argue that the transistor was a bigger deal than the move to ICs & Microprocessors. You better believe everyone knew how great they were when they got their hands on a radio... it's an iconic moment in technical history.

"when they got their hands on it".

The transistor was a big deal when people could use it to solve problems. When an ecosystem around it existed.

But it wasn't going to revolutionise anything if it was kept a secret like is being implied with superconductors like the topic title is asking.

I could've been more precise in my language, but the point was that the big revolution of transistorized technology - the game changing stuff - came much further down the line then the original invention.

A small supply of secret transistors wasn't going to give anyone a massive technological advantage.

>I could've been more precise in my language, but the point was that the big revolution of transistorized technology - the game changing stuff - came much further down the line then the original invention.

This point is really wrong too. It was immediately useful. They could have used the transistors to make unexpected new inventions. There's so many applications, if you were a competent electrical engineer (back then at least), you'd be able to think of many uses.

>A small supply of secret transistors wasn't going to give anyone a massive technological advantage.

That depends on what you're actually holding, and having a handful of microprocessors may not be as useful as you think. Simply owning a few would be of limited utility without computer science, or the developers to make cool stuff. It wouldn't be able to talk to too much. They were doing more than you think with active electronics back then.

You keep barking up the wrong tree. For some background, this is very frustrating, because I've had these discussions repeatedly with "SV types", who can't understand that entire universes of engineering exist outside their comprehension. Meanwhile, fairly minor, poorly adopted tech is something "everyone knows".

People say "it's an SV site" what do you expect? Well, it's also a tech site, and these perspectives are wacky. You can't talk about technology while pretending entire fields don't exist, because they aren't so relevant to you.

The Wikipedia page lists the publication history, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99#Publication_history and the initial paper and patent history go back to 2020.

And according to Wikipedia LK-99 was "discovered" back in 1999, hence the name. It isn't clear if it was also first manufactured back then, but assuming it was, 24 years does seem an awfully long time to notice these allegedly simple signs of room temperature super-conductivity (e.g. if you put a magnet near it then it is said to float as per Meissner effect).

I have similar thoughts. If this is real it is hard to believe that Korean government was not involved in it.

Theyre going to have patents assigned...if they keep it secret someone else could get them first

If I'm not mistaken it's not that they 'published' the finding as in 'publish in a peer-reviewed article' but more like depositing pre-print in a database (arXiv) for not yet peer-review journal.

it's simply not published in a peer-reviewed journal, but it is published on arXiv, as per definition of 'publishing', i.e. "the business of making books, magazines, or newspapers available to the public" (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/publishi...)

True, but in academia and R&D, when researchers talk about "publications" they always refer to peer-reviewed journal publication unless stated otherwise.

as the name suggests, it was first synthetized in 1999 and only now the public got to know about it - that's 24 years and we know about it only because of human spite

Does that mean the patent should start from 1999?

Patents start from the day they are applied from, right? They just kept it secret until they applied for it. So the patent starts from 2020.

Anyway, I wonder how important that patent https://patents.google.com/patent/KR20210062550A/en is in the end, as it seems their way of manufacturing it is not very effective anyway and it might even be possible to find nearby compounds with similar properties.

Thankfully, scientific research is one of the last bastions not completely overrun by capitalism.

If the rock floats, it will be the biggest indictment against the current way of doing research you can possibly imagine.

Could you elaborate?

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