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Comment by gus_massa | Hacker News Reader

Everyone agree. Oversimplifying, there are 3 categories to classify the initial team:

1) A bunch of clowns.

2) Interesting

3) Next Nobel prize winners

I think they had a good reputation in the community, so the opinion of the hivemind was to discard 1. But there was still the possibility of a honest mistake or something weird.

If this post is correct, other team confirmed that they discovered a new family of "high temperature" superconductor. The old families have been tweaked and explored to death. A new family gives a lot of room to optimize the composition and building process. So perhaps they found it.

If this is confirmed they are definitively in the "interesting" category, at least.

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I disagree. First, there have been many RESPECTED scientists who have thrown it all away for fraud. This happened RECENTLY with retracted papers on near-ambient superconductors so you should be wary. Just like cold fusion claims. So it’s possible at least one of these did, too. Another possibility is they fooled themselves (see Feynman’s quote) and maybe one of them faked data to help garner credit.

Secondly, there is no middle ground here. If it’s a room temperature superconductor like some of their data showed, then it’s Nobel Prize.

I agree that 1) is not discarded, it's never discarded. From scam to honest mistakes, sloppy handling, weird unexpected things, ... I'm just saying that if I has to guess, it's probably not 1).

There is middle ground. They may have discovered a new kind of (not room temperature) superconductor that is an achievement. It's good to publish a few papers, but we would not be discussing it all week.

Another middle ground is it is a superconductor at -15°C (5°F). That's not room temperature unless you live in Antarctica and forgot to close the window. But it's freezer temperature that is much cheaper than liquid nitrogen or liquid helium.

> Another middle ground is it is a superconductor at -15°C (5°F). But it's freezer temperature that is much cheaper than liquid nitrogen or liquid helium.

I suspect this will make MRI machines much cheaper than they are currently and will radically improve the healthcare for many.

You got me thinking about the viability of superconductor-based EV motors that are cooled by compressed gas refrigeration; drink chillers might come standard on EVs since you'll be having beefier compressors than for just climate-control

From my understanding the first paper was published without authorization. So it was likely they were not ready for it to be published. So 2) still seems possible to me. Like what if the team was it seems like we have a room temperature super conductor we need to do more work to be 100% sure though, and then someone then just goes and publishes your rough draft. It could still just be something interesting, and not fraud.

-EDIT- Like if the first paper was not released as is let's say after their testing it turns out to not be room temperature and ambient pressure. They could have easily revised their paper to be about new class of super conducting material ect.... or just not published the paper if it was dud.

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