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Comment by blackkettle | Hacker News Reader

100% true and actually a very interesting statement. Can you imagine if he had tried to present this idea to the c-suite as a potential marketing or PR coup?!

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Do we really care if they confirm it in a week or two ? Are we on a hurry ? I don't know anything bout supraconductors but given the number of failing attempts to repicalte (and the number succeeding), I would not be suprised if it'd take quite some time before we can be certain. Moreover, we'll need a consensus among all the people who understand the subject. So, a week or even a month won't make any difference.

We're not talking about a vaccine.

As engineers we are given building blocks that we can build things from. Iron, steel, copper, plastic. Every once in a while a new building block arrives. It takes a while for us to figure out how to use it. But when we do, the world changes.

- batteries + touch screens => iPhone

- batteries got better => Tesla

- reinforced concrete => pretty much all the worlds buildings and bridges

- neodymium magnets + gyros => drones

A room temperature superconductor... well, that changes things on a completely new level. Order of magnitude smaller losses plus order of magnitude higher magnetic fields? OMFG can we build SciFi things from this if it pans out.

So yeah - we are in a hurry. If this pans out, there will be a massive shift in how pretty much anything is made. And the reward for the people who can figure it out first are insane, in terms of potential value created.

We're in a hurry in the sense that we don't want to leave investigation of this on the back burner for a few months, but we're not in a hurry in the sense that it's going to make any difference in practice whether a lab group reports today that they've reproduced it, or takes a bit more time to be careful and reports more thoroughly in two weeks time. Any first mover advantages are likely to accrue to the groups who come up with a reliable reproduction method over the next couple of months, not to the ones who send out the first press release and twitter post this week.

From a scientific perspective, you are probably correct.

But think about it from a company/wealth creation perspective. Are you then really sure the correct course of action is to take it chill?

My point partly is that as outside observers we can't deduce "is taking it chill" merely because we haven't seen two press releases and three tweetstorms from any particular lab yet. They might be slogging away but not caring to report every step on the path to the outside world.

This is why Elon takes dumps on competitor companies.

He understands how to market in the social media age.

The point is not whether it takes one week or two weeks.

But eastern competition is fierce, and the western world is mired in esg and bureaucracy.

Something is rotten at a general level, and if its not fixed soon, this trend of lagging behind will also start manifesting where it starts to hurt.

Ever felt schedule pressure / been on the critical path? This is that concept applied globally. The hurry is that delays in initial research measurably delays potential rollout. I'd like to see this material meaningfully used in my lifetime for its potential global society wide benefits / ease of human suffering / margin on total ecological collapse. The pace set now affects the mean and standard deviation of probability of that happening on the timeline.

My point was not actually about the ultimate result of replication. This guy undoubtably performed an indirect marketing coup for his company by engaging competently on this tangentially related topic and then following through.

In my experience though, if he had made any effort to link those two things prior to doing this - e.g. by proposing this as an internally sponsored marketing stunt - it would probably have been rejected.

Eh, I have met the CEO of Varda. They are very much a startup and have that startup energy. One of the founders of Varda has been very vocally supportive of this on Twitter as well.

Of course, this is all Varda IP as they’re in California and anything a head of research performs that generates IP is owned by the employer.

Is that a law in California? My understanding of the labor law is that California protects employees, so that if they sign a contract assigning IP to the company (which is almost a sure bet today, but not a law afaik- please correct me otherwise) they are actually protected such that it only applies if:

- using company resources, such as time, hardware, or office space, unless otherwise stated.

Clearly the case here, but my understanding of this law doesn’t align with how you described it.

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