When people rush to replicate an experiment, everybody with a positive result has something to publish very quickly, and everybody with a negative result need a lot more time to be certain of it.
The kinds of results we are seeing are very hard to get by chance or due to bad experimental setup. But as a rule, we can't really differentiate a real thing from random noise in as little time as have passed.
How is that possibly true? LK-99 is already amongst the highest-temperature superconductors ever found (with that claim substantiated by at least two independent research teams as of this moment).
People are way, way overconfident. Most people in the field would not be willing to put it at >50% odds at this point.
Do you have a source for this claim? It sounds like you just made it up.
But, for what it's worth, as both an LK-99 optimist and as someone who has worked in the field and who still talks to people in it, most people in it seem to put the chances well below 50%.
That leaves the original, that is clearly diamagnetism, but still could be misleading in many ways.
We don't know how many labs are working on replicating this. So we have no idea how unlikely mistakes we should expect to see.
Only one of the four labs that completed replication has claimed to have found diamagnetism, but how could that video be explained otherwise?
At this point I've changed to this is probably true, but I don't know how big it is. (if it is true but impossible to produce at industrial scale it is not revolutionary)
Maybe there's a lot of smoke and no fire, but there's videographic evidence of something weird going on.
Why would different newspapers spread hoaxes? Yet it happens...
Poor source checking and then issuing a retraction is not the same as a conspiracy among the papers to make something up completely.
you couldn't, suggesting that it isn't true
by the way, you forgot to respond to [0]
I don't think anything was faked, nor did I think anything was faked before videos began appearing. But that's precisely why this is an opportune time to exercise recalibrated judgment in not allowing the videographic character to inflate my cautious enthusiasm.
Then decades later, it's still kind of open question. Aren't there some studies still going on, more on the down-low since it has such a bad reputation. Kind of like the super-conductor, have to keep it quiet and make really sure before publishing.
Sabine did video on Cold Fusion that was pretty interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbzcYQVrTxQ
Some people made a career studying the kinds of sonoluminescence needed to explain what that experiment saw. (And AFAIK, nobody found a use for the theory yet.)
Cold fusion always was dependent on new physics to be discovered
You need Muons, a negatively charged particle that is 200 times heavier than an electron. They replace electron in the atom. Two Muon-replaced atoms of hydrogen can fuse at room temperature.
The problem is that muons a very expensive to produce and decay quickly. So you spend more energy producing muons than you get from fusion.
No one measured a huge flow of neutrons, that were expected to be generated by the fusion and are more easy to distingish from noise.
This material is fascinating and I love the interest and good debate it’s generating.
Sometimes it feels like we missed so many golden ages but we might still get to experience something world changing before our eyes and understand what it means.
Real technological progress and societal improvement breed optimism. This could be the start of something big. Even if it isn’t it reminds us why we are still searching for theorised technologies.