LK-99 is an online sensation but replication efforts fall short
nature.com
nature.com
However, Nature weighing in that way feels premature to me. It's been what ... 2 weeks? If that? Somehow it just feels that something as momentous as a plausible room temperature superconductor should take a bit more time to rule out as a fake. Unless there's some pretty blatant fraud involved where they're literally levitating it with a string.
Nature feels like the sort of publication where their job is to have the final say after all of the dust has settled. Participating in hot takes with a negative conclusion just feels like they're hedging their bets. If it turns out to be false then they can say that they were right at the beginning. If it turns out to be true, then everyone will be so excited that they'll forget about anything nature came out with.
Meanwhile, wikipedia feels like it has pretty objective reporting on things that are actually happening more or less as they're happening. It just doesn't have a narrative to go along with it.
Will people forget about Nature making fun of the researchers that are working trying to replicate the thing?
I did expect nobody to publish anything until there's more certainty, and I did not expect any early publication to have any lasting impact anyway. But this piece is well, pretty heavy handed. I'm not sure people won't hold a grudge.
Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36994214
Andrew McCalip demonstrates synthesis of LK99 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36997821
I do not understand this mentality. There is no conflict between these two statements:
- LK99 cannot be considered a proven superconductor until there have been multiple replications that withstand expert scrutiny.
- The evidence that is freely available on twitter and elsewhere right now is worth getting excited about.
Look, this isn't like Covid, where at least there is some public interest served by a skeptical approach to treatments. At least for the next six months or so, LK99 is an almost purely scientific topic with almost no wider implications.
But people love to clutch their pearls - I have read twitter commentators claiming they are concerned that amateur replicators may get lead poisoning! Lead, while dangerous, is not polonium or something - there are plenty of reasons people choose to tolerate some exposure (recreational shooting, civil aviation, fishing...), all of which I would consider less compelling that what may be the biggest scientific breakthrough in decades. I do not think people are truly concerned about lead exposure, I think they want people to "stay in their lanes". An attitude that I find detestable.
The fact that such a (possible) enormous breakthrough is within the reach of chemistry amateurs is wonderful! Everybody who has the equipment, knowledge, and inclination to attempt a replication should do so, and if you do, I hope you will post videos online so I can cheer you on.
In the 1800s people were often inventing and researching in their garage labs, we need more amateur science not less.
these guys claimed big, but their equipment couldn't generate temperatures above 127C (Celsius), basically just a bit more than a tea kettle.
they seem to lack the hardware, and super-computing power required to model and simulate the molecular dynamics.
But yes, the chance of a 'superconductivity winter' is definitely there. What surprises me is how this whole thing has blown up. People that would not be able to tell a copper wire from an aluminum one are talking about superconductors. That really gets me, why the sudden massive interest?
i know this was hyperbole, but I think the fact that it is almost certainly false is important.
I think the reason that people are so excited is that you can learn the basic facts about superconductivity in a few hours on wikipedia. The basics are not that complicated: Superconductors have zero resistance below a critical temperature, are diamagnetic due to induced eddy currents that cancel out magnetic fields, and the high temperature ones exhibit "flux pinning" where magnetic field lines can get stuck at defects in the material, leading to stable levitation.
Having learned all this over the past week, I certainly don't consider myself an expert. I'm well aware I don't know 10% of what a first year physics grad student probably knows. But it's enough to follow along, and ask basic questions. Its _okay_ for people to do this even if they aren't remotely qualified to make final judgments about LK99.
To me it seems no more improper than someone talking excitedly about the rocket equation or orbital mechanics even though they don't have an aerospace degree.
As for why the sudden massive interest? Why wouldn't there be massive interest? Its a huge potential breakthrough, with multiple claimed reproductions already, and, most astonishingly, it could have been discovered (though not understood) in the 19th century! Maybe even earlier! Of course the fact that something so basic was just lying around waiting to be found is generating interest!
I know what you're getting at but your list isn't the 'basics', those are the symptoms. It's like saying you understand the basics about cancer because tumors grow and people die. It doesn't even begin to scratch the surface and it certainly isn't the basics, it is just the part that laypeople (myself included) see when looking from the outside in.
The 'basics' not being so simple is exactly why the search for conveniently usable superconductors is an ongoing thing after a century. Copper wire was solved on the day we needed it, and even if it would not have worked we would have had a whole bunch of fall back materials available.
We all see weirder weather than we used to and man made climate change is implicated.
War in Ukraine.
Tensions with China.
Political turmoil in the U.S. with small minorities driving the news cycle with crazy talk.
We just got through COVID, and hopefully end of the inflation scare.
Housing prices suck the hope out of most on a daily basis.
Suddenly, a miracle material seems to appear that could change the game at so many levels, not owned by one corporation or country. And its a magnet, and everyone loves magnets....its the one things we've all experienced that feels like magic...and that magic was going to save us.
So yeah. That's my diagnosis.
Because if this is real it's basically science fiction come to life.
But I have seen absolutely no evidence that anybody is acting in bad faith here, and so I see no reason to treat this the way we ought to treat fraud.
The synthesis of LK-99 involves powdered lead salts. There's quite a lot more hazard in handling those than there is in handling metallic lead in the course of shooting/fishing.
I'm sorry, FROGS!?
I looked this up and it's very fun: https://www.ru.nl/hfml/research/levitation-explained/diamagn...
- the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize for frog levitation:
- the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on graphene.
After that, where do you go? Write poetry? Go start a turkey farm?
Lots of objects are diamagnetic, including human beings, and can potentially be made to float in a strong magnetic field.
As for the videos, are the people posting these joke videos trying to imply that the videos we're seeing of partial levitation (including one put out by an actual Chinese lab) are fake? One can point out that the videos are likely merely evidence of really good diamagnetism without pretending they're hoaxes.
As someone who loves Nature, I would like to commit a dash of heresy. A manufacturable, room temperature superconductor with a low current density wouldn't lead to maglevs, but it would revolutionize the world. It would be one of the starkest turning points in human history.
Most of the heat generated by a CPU is generated shuttling electrons back and forth. A superconductor instantly changes the calculus and, depending on whom you ask, makes processors 500x more efficient. And that's just the start.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_computing
The before/after is so stark that it's really hard to game out all of the consequences, but it's quite obvious that it instantly changes the cost of running these massive AI models as well as the cost of doing highly detailed FEM simulations.
Even if some of the properties are replicated, the strangeness of this material puts us on track to that world. It's incredible what it could be. I'm extremely excited!
This seems pretty overstated. Developing the tooling to build chips takes years, there is good reason to think that even if this material does revolutionize chip efficiencies, it will be years at least before we start producing those chips and probably years more before that production scales to fully supplant the existing production infrastructure.
I'm excited too, but "instantly" is not how I'd describe retooling semiconductor fabrication to include a new material. Besides, nobody has claimed that you can dope silicon with it.
But since we're dreaming, I'm hoping it'll make doing plasma physics cheaper (via simpler superconducting magnets) which will then make nuclear fusion power plants feasible.
Superconductors do not have zero inductance.
This is a dishonest argument. Frogs and pliers don’t levitate on a typical magnet in ambient conditions, so you can’t say the behavior is ‘similar’ just because ‘everything levitates in a strong enough magnetic field’. If your measuring stick can’t distinguish these two significantly different behaviors, it’s a useless measuring stick.
Also, more generally, the logic of science is statistics, not Boolean logic. We all know that
[(p —> q) and q]
doesn’t logically imply p, but still observing q makes p more likely when thinking probabilistically.
Overall I found the article to be very dismissive of weak evidence and also shortsighted when considering the potential applications that we can’t think of right now (even if those are not the typical hoped-for applications like efficient power transmission).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Thompson_Jaynes
"Jaynes strongly promoted the interpretation of probability theory as an extension of logic. "
No; it's claimed to superconduct at temperatures up to 127 °C. They didn't perform tests above 127 °C.
Right, exactly, they're claiming that Tc is above 127°C. The claim is that it's a superconductor at (some) temperatures even higher than what was tested. It's also still a superconductor at temperatures below.
I have little knowledge of the field, but as an EE, I would have thought that making sure that you are actually able to measure the effect you are trying to prove would be step zero in an experimental setup, no?
I still think it won't be replicated, but on the off chance we've got the real deal on our hands, science publication will have changed forever and this article will have aged very poorly.
Also mainstream science: no stop talking about us!!
What's the bfd? This isn't IV bleach for COVID... So what if tiktokers are suddenly talking about the quirks of BCS?
Nature is just bitter imo because they passed on an article that the public was fascinated by because as the authors put it "trauma".
They are reacting just like all the publishers who passed on JK Rowling because no one wants to read a fantasy book a girl wrote.
This is like YouTube telling people not to watch Cobra Kai on Netflix because they passed on it.
Science is the process. It's taking your time, proving your work, and most importantly, replicating your results.
I'd be more sympathetic to this had scientists not done such a terrible job of distributing the funding my taxes pay for
I think you could argue that the initial spark of intuition-- the thing that makes you go "huh. Let me look into this more" before gathering evidence and peer review, is one of the most important steps of "the science"
Have you considered that the way we “do science” is actually a broken process made of absolute bollocks?
I get that disappointment in the past make people jaded. Weren't there false hope in superconductor as well? Or are people here too young to have experienced that?
I'm excited enough about this that I've read about 3500 HN comments on the subject over the past few days. I've talked about it with friends of various levels of science literacy. I've seen it come up in various discords, IRC channels, etc.
And... I'm not seeing any real amount of people doing that. The twitter crowd is largely people just memeposting with "FLOAT THE ROCK!", places like HN have a bit more technical discussion about it, lots of other places it comes up in conversation and people shrug and go "huh that might be cool hope it works out tell me in 6 months"
But even as someone with enough free time this week to read all these comments and engage in the discussion so much, it's not like I'm sitting here expecting 15 years from now we'll all be living in a superconductor wonderland. If I had to make a bet one way or the other, I'd probably bet it won't be. But that doesn't mean this whole thing isn't fun and entertaining.
We've got some potentially world altering thing that is potentially real, and replicating it is easy enough that we have engineers and scientists all over the world doing it in public. Most of these kind of things require lots of funding, labs with advanced tools, access to exotic materials, etc. Instead, this time, we get to watch it on Twitter, Bilibili, etc.
It's possible for people to recognize that this is a potentially world altering discovery and be hyped about the process and visibility we have in it, as well as realize that the most likely outcome at this point is "LK99 does some weird diamagnetic stuff that looks cool but probably isn't actually an RTAPS"
It's only been a few days! The fact that cutting edge science from a pre-release version of a paper isn't going perfectly doesn't mean much. Give them time. Eventually we will have more solid answer.
And I know nothing about superconductors, I am talking about steel, a material that we have worked with for centuries, it's in the first chapter of every textbook and is practically everywhere.
Things are hard.
I suspect that what they actually have is some incredibly tiny superconducting crystals suspended on a material that is almost identical except for the placement of a few atoms. Very hard to work with.
Or it's just a regular diamagenetic material.
1 Copper atom 25 oxygen atoms 6 Phosphorous atoms 9 lead atoms
There are many ways to arrange these constituents.
It’s hard to create the environment where they want to go exactly where you hope over a large volume. Sometimes this level of precision requires atomic control of layer growth and extreme temperature management. That’s why the methods list days between steps to get the atoms diffusing, and that’s for a few micrograms of material.
At the bottom of this page you will find a Guidelines page with an "In comments" section:
" Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
You were both not entertaining and added nothing to the discussion.
As much as I agree with you, people are excited for the potential of an extraordinary result, and in my view this article's tone is completely out of place for a publication with the historic weight and impact of Nature.
Research and replication are crucial components of the scientific process. Context switching too frequently can indeed lead to wasted time, as researchers may not have the opportunity to delve deeply into a particular topic and build upon existing knowledge. Replication is essential for validating findings and ensuring the reliability of scientific claims.
While some interesting discussions may occur on Twitter, it's important not to dismiss academia entirely. Academic institutions provide an environment conducive to rigorous research, peer review, and collaboration, which are fundamental aspects of advancing scientific knowledge.
“A superconducting magnet is cooled by liquid nitrogen, producing a strong magnetic field that causes the magnet to levitate.”
Like superconductors don’t float because they’re a “strong magnet” they float because they reject all magnetic fields beyond the London depth and this somehow leads to levitation. Right??
"The Meissner effect (or Meißner–Ochsenfeld effect) is the expulsion of a magnetic field from a superconductor during its transition to the superconducting state when it is cooled below the critical temperature. This expulsion will repel a nearby magnet."
"There’s no guarantee a material that is a room-temperature superconductor would be of practical use, Vishik says."
We have a lot of arrows in our quiver to shoot at these problems -- I would be optimistic that the promising applications of a room temperature superconductor would attract plenty of investment and talent. On the other hand, I imagine it may take years or even decades before we have answers to these hard questions. As the quote says, "there's no guarantee" that we can solve them, because right now we know so little about the properties of the material at this time. Of course, that is no reason to throw in the towel right now!
Regardless it is a promising development with the potential to flip several industries on their heads in terms of what is possible with current understandings but also what is possible from the mind of someone who grows up with the internet like those born post 2k with the internet
but i'm glad about that, because it means communication on other platforms are more effective at sharing results than an outdated publishing system that drains people of their livelihood
Is my understanding right? If so, slightly shocking that these replication attempts are garnering so much visibility.
LK-99 with Varda – This Week in Startups [live video]
Also, why does the chunk in the image levitate in a stable manner? As in, why doesn't it slide off to one side, like it would if you just tried to balance two north ends of a magnet on each other?
I don't know what this new thing is, but isn't 'locking'/'pinning' a known characteristic of superconductors otherwise?
that's the whole point of the 'train track' demo they do with cold superconductors for college kids.
*some of the magnetic field penetrates onto the surface of the superconductor, but internally, there's 0 magnetic field within the superconductor.
There can still be torque (i.e. rotations) for type I superconductors, and type II superconductors when they're fully superconducting. I'm not familiar with how the specific dynamics work though - I'm guessing it's related to gravity?
It's a defect (where small amounts of the field aren't expelled) that allows for the pinning to happen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type-II_superconductor#Flux_pi...
Reframing- there is no reason to change from the default position of skepticism - that the material is uninteresting.
If you ignore the viral hype, and only pay attention to the replication attempts: They have been rushed. They lack rigor. Still, the summation of their findings is reason to think there is something very interesting going on with this material.
I do see some manic hysteria. I understand the urge to push back on that. It's smart to advise people to maintain skepticism. But if you do not think that the replication attempts are an indication that there is something there, I think it's because you have some sort of error in reasoning.
It's just nice to see the scientific process get carried out - here's something we discovered, and now labs are working to reproduce the result to see if it's an actual thing or not. From my understanding, this stuff generally takes years to validate, but we're getting "immediate" glimpses here and there which makes it really exciting.
I get that the paper hasn't gone through peer review yet, but there's something interesting about the findings that are prompting labs to immediately try to replicate it.
Even if it is a real breakthrough, material synthesis of a new material in any lab, and doing so reproducibly, is tricky enough that I am absolutely not going to infer / conclude from, or pass any comment on any replication efforts this early into the process. Its going to be an iterative process - which means one has to start somewhere.
Some of the quoted folks come across (to me) as just peevish.
Derek Lowe [0] has a far more balanced take on it, IMO.
His article was discussed on HN a few days ago [1].
[0] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/room-temperature-s...
Guess it’s the price they pay to remain solvent in the clickbait age.
Really all anyone—Nature included—can say at this point is there’s something interesting going on. It may or may not be a super-conductor, but it’s certainly interesting.
They Heated Powdered Lanarkite And Copper Phosphide Crystals In A Vacuum-Sealed Tube At 1200K For 5‒20 Hours And You Won't Believe What Happened Next
Hold on to your hats, because this experiment is not for the faint of heart!
The Setup That Changed EVERYTHING!
In a lab that must be filled with geniuses, scientists placed powdered lanarkite and copper phosphide crystals in a vacuum-sealed tube and heated them to a scorching 1200K. They left it there, cooking and brewing for 5‒20 hours, and what happened next is something straight out of a sci-fi movie!
The Birth of a Miracle: RTSC!
The result? A Room-Temperature Superconductor (RTSC) that has the potential to revolutionize our entire world! Imagine limitless energy, ultra-fast transportation, and technology that seemed impossible until now!
But Wait, There's More!
This isn't just your everyday scientific breakthrough; this is a game-changer, a mind-bender, a reality-twister! Are you ready to live in a world where RTSCs are the norm? The possibilities are ENDLESS!
Why This Changes EVERYTHING!
Think of electric cars that charge in seconds, trains that float on air, and devices that never run out of juice! This isn't just a leap; it's a quantum jump into the future!
The Scientists Behind the MAGIC!
Who are these wizards of the lab, these alchemists of the modern age? We bet they're celebrating with champagne and confetti, knowing they've just turned the world upside down!
Want to Know More?
Dive into the nitty-gritty, the ins and outs, the secrets behind this jaw-dropping experiment that has everyone talking! The future is here, and it's wilder than you ever imagined!
Conclusion: Get Ready for a Brave New World!
This isn't science fiction; this is science FACT! The creation of an RTSC from powdered lanarkite and copper phosphide crystals isn't just a footnote in a textbook; it's a headline that's screaming, "The future is NOW!"
So buckle up, dear reader, because the world as you know it has just been SUPERCHARGED!
“OMG CRYSTALS AT 1200K! Will it EXPLODE?!?”
<insert pic of host with gobsmacked face looking at camera on a background of an explosion over some generic stock image of quartz>
Have you ever seen a Youtube video about someone reviewing a Tesla or comparing it to another car? The comments are always full of hostile and vitriolic remarks by people who are personally offended if the video suggests the cup holders on a Model 3 are less than perfection. For some reason, Tesla is surrounded by a cult of personality where it's not just a car, it's a lifestyle.
And bizarrely, something similar is happening with this funny floating rocks. Here we are, on HN, and people in this very thread are calling Nature (Nature!) an "online sensational clickbait magazine" because they want to believe the hype that the rock has properties that they only learned about from Wikipedia a few days prior (and only understood 5% of it, at that)
Is there reason to be excited? Hell yeah. Are all the different replication attempts super fascinating? Hell yeah. Could it be the real deal? It could!
But this has become some weird spectator sport, where you're either a believer or a skeptic, and if you're on a different side than I am then screw you, even if you are Nature.
Not far from the truth, talking as someone who is in the field. Unlike Science, which is published by AAAS, a non-profit, Nature is a for-profit publication. They have an incentive not to miss out on something huge so that they can retain their status as the place to go for big results, but this also means they have an incentive towards selecting more sensational research for publication. That doesn't mean that research published in Nature is bad--often it is excellent--and I'm sure their editorial staff sincerely try their best, but they often make quite bizarre editorial decisions (personal opinion).
That said, Nature attracts far more scrutiny than other journals because of their ability to make and break careers, so many people feel resentment towards them as a result. Not all criticism of Nature is entirely fair.
No comment on this particular story :)
What made this a such a huge tech event with the world watching on was that the research was on a subject that has captured the imagination of both scientists and the lay public for many decades and that it was posted on arxiv.org website which is open and copyright-free, similarly, we witnessed peer review processes also occurring out in the open and in public for all to see—and essentially in real time! Contrast this with the traditional tech journal process, Nature, Science, IEEE Proceedings, The Lancet, etc. which takes months to publish, and is a closed process not to mention papers being the whim of editors who often reject them (and sometimes very significant ones at that).
Irrespective of whatever outcome eventuates, the contrast between traditional, slow and now-very-expensive scientific publishing with that of this speedy, exciting, open and participatory model that's copyright-free will be obvious to everyone.
Moreover, this is happening at a time when the traditional for-profit scientific publishing has come under enormous criticism with Elsevier and others milking the university and scientific establishments to breaking point and the rise of Sci-Hub as a countermeasure. Whilst academics have been aware of the problem for quite some time the general public has not. This research and how it played out on arxiv.org in just two weeks won't be forgotten easily.
If I were a director of Elsevier and after witnessing what's happened in less than two weeks I'd be damn worried.
The lay public becomes far too overinvolved.
Content on arvix is copyrighted by the authors, who then choose one of the available licenses to allow redistribution under (mostly CC ones).
It may be, I don't know. This particular journalist has an undergraduate degree in Physics from Columbia - https://dangaristo.com/about/
That's not exactly subject-matter expertise, but it's also not a standard journalist.
Nature markets it to a mass audience? A mass audience reads Nature?
When I see Nature pubs, I tend to enjoy the aesthetics of the articles, but discount them a bit to account for the mainstream-ness.
> Not far from the truth
It's very far from the truth; nothing is perfect, but Nature isn't some SEO clickbait. This subthread shows that the reactionary takedowns of everything now even are taking down Nature, of course. They've already discredited much of science, and have a lot of blood on their hands (climate change and vaccines stand out).
Off-topic, but if this opinion you wrote wasn’t yours, then who else’s opinion were we to assume it would have been?
Things will pan out or they won't. What's the rush to form an opinion and hop on a hype bandwagon. I'm probably just a curmudgeon, but the whole thing seems to be more about social signaling than anything else.
Maybe I find it so distasteful because I think the hype and jumping to conclusions is antithetical to real science and understanding.
I mean heck, I could have not written this post.
There are people who make utterances because they want to show they are paying attention, and there are people who make them because they cant stand not being heard. To me, the latter is more distatsefull than the former.
I think it is gross that in the attention economy, the drive for existential validation is reduced to posting "cool" to be seen, and clicking an upvote feels like being part of a conversation. In some sense they are, but it just a very streched and hollow manifestation of human interaction and participation.
My likely arrogant and possibly hyprocirtical conceit that I think what I post into the void is more interesting and substantial than "cool". Still, that doesnt change my feeling on the subject.
Because it's fun and exciting watching smart people from around the world collaborate/compete around an interesting and world-changing idea. It's cool and good that many people are invested and interested in science and technology.
The people who have spent all their lives researching superconductors have yet to weigh in on this at all.
Publicly. But they are saying stuff and it isn't all negative but very, very carefully hedged and qualified.
What I think is weird is the need to feel that you as an individual are part of the action or moment, and insert yourself into it. It's kind of like the person who watches the football game on TV and thinks that their personal ritual and enthusiasm will change the outcome.
It's weird that people feel an urgent need need to converge on an opinion about superconductivity experiments as if there opinion will shape the future outcome and make it so
A similar example are election nights. People already voted, the result is in the box, we could simply wait and announce the result.
But seeing the numbers rise like an ongoing fight is going on makes for a more entertaining evening!
Don't get me wrong, I'm for fun, excitement, and curiosity.
What turns me off is that once the shallow well of real information depleted, how quickly people switch to speculation, Hype, and attention seeking
But this
> A huge number of people suddenly feel a need to have a hot take opinion on cutting edge superconductor research, apparently including nature authors.
I don’t understand. People are going to share their thoughts. Most wont be experts. So what? Is someone supposed to stop this? Are no one but experts supposed to care? Or try and make sense of it?
And based on this I do not think that they felt the urgency to choose an opinion. At least they didn't choose between "yes" and "no".
As for twitter and reddit I personally didn't bother to look what happens there. I see here on HN people who reduces the issue to a question is it a real thing, ignoring issues like the rules of science dictating what must be done before science can reach a conclusion. I believe it is much worse on reddit, where people generally have less insight into how science works as a social institution.
> Maybe I find it so distasteful because I think the hype and jumping to conclusions is antithetical to real science and understanding.
People have a lot of fun generating and watching videos of different levitating objects. They have a lot of fun arguing about these videos. It has nothing to do with science, though they can believe otherwise. I'm ok with that. It is better then when they choose an other topic to agrue. Something from social or political issues is much worser.
I then had to give him a rundown of things that would need to happen before there ever could be a widespread adoption of the material in common household wiring. First it needs to replicate, then a lot of research has to happen on the properties, then manufacturing processes have to be explored and created, suitable insulator materials have to be found, the price point of the sold wire has to be low enough, ...
Hope for a better future is a good thing, but WHY does it always have to come in the form of technological silver bullets these days? Because then we don't have to change our way of living?
Don't get me wrong, a room temperature, ambient pressure superconductor would be revolutionary and (provided it can be manufactured and used without a ton of hassle) it would transform the world. But it would still probably take two decades and there are so many other fronts on which we as a humanity have failed.
Two decades is a lot of time. Transistors or airplanes got to a useful form much faster, in a less wealthy world with many fewer engineers.
https://twitter.com/gbrl_dick/status/1685811395273830401?t=z...
Might not impact it hardly at all.
The Nature article is still weird in tone, though, since there's been plenty of interesting results that have been replicated. LK99 is a weird material, at the very least. That it's weird in a way that somewhat implies it could be an RTAPS makes it plenty interesting.
I've seen a lot of discussion around LK99 in a bunch of different contexts, and the portion of people that are treating it like anything more than entertaining curiosity at this point is extremely low - so this article really reads as the authors being upset that other people are having fun in their domain. That's what comes across as gatekeeping.
Or the concerns around "amateur" reproduction - who is trying to reproduce this without any understanding of how to operate the equipment or some understandings around basic chemistry and physics? These private reproductions are being done by engineers, chemists, physicists, etc. - I haven't seen anything to indicate that people with no business doing these experiments are rushing out there to try it.
It's just a very strange to be written in the tone it is and make these points. It seems very divorced from the reality of the situation, which is basically a whole lot of people on twitter memeing "MAKE ROCK FLOAT"/"WE BACK"/"ITS SO OVER", people on more technical/science oriented forums having the sorts of discussions we see on HN, and most the population sitting around waiting to see if anything useful comes of this.
You might as well never get excited about anything if that's your perspective. Watching the process happen in real time is fun and exciting.
(And no, a photo on Twitter of some unspecified speck levitating over an unspecified magnet-looking device posted by an unknown individual does not prove anything. If the topic was anything else, HN would've been filled with "Gah stupid non-technical people, when will they understand that you can't believe everything on the internet?")
But let's just for the moment go back 112 years when your average laboratory was less well equipped than today's lab of mid sized university and people were doing groundbreaking research all over the place. Including superconduction. So we are all less likely to believe the 'underdog citizens' because anything they can do the labs can do that much better. But the underdog citizens apparently excel at marketing themselves, rather than that they excel at science and replication is something they are sometimes quite good at (Nile Red for instance is in that category). So as long as they aren't doing original science I think we maybe should lump them into the 'preponderance of evidence' class and if enough of those unknown individuals all report consistent results then it may count for something, more so if you know one of them yourself and are allowed to inspect the results. But for a global audience it shouldn't hold as much weight as a replication by a well known university with a good reputation, especially if they supply samples for others to test. (Because I think with this substance testing it properly is a lot easier (while still challenging) than manufacturing it properly.)
It's as if it were custom designed for people who believe their technical/scientific genius is overlooked, who are crying out for some validation.
By and large, we are technically skilled people who work in a field where we're wage-slaves for stanford educated billionaire MBA types whose "big idea" that the media drools and fawns over is "a juice-maker, but, like, netflix... somehow" - no wonder we feel like engineers and scientists are this put-upon class with a massive victim complex.
> graphene, frogs and pliers — can exhibit similar magnetic behaviour.
>
> Frustrated by the atmosphere of hype, some scientists have taken to mimicking the levitation videos with everyday materials suspended by string and other props
Why aren't the scientists levitating frogs above rare earth magnets to make fun of the videos? Because you need superconductor magnet, not a rare earth magnet, to do that. This is a blatant internal inconsistency, and shows that this article is garbage.
Don't trust the loyalists, don't trust the sensationalists, trust science.
I'm excited by the potential of LK-99 and I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be a red herring, but I'll wait for the scientific community to sort it out versus paying attention to a non-expert journalist who is weighing in so strongly on the matter this early in the game.
At the risk of going off on a tangent, this is not at all unique to Tesla nor fans of the company. This happens to Apple fans, Google fans, etc. Someone likes something a lot, someone else comes along and is offended by the blind support and decides that they have to hate it in order to bring balance to the world. Ta-da! Now we have two vitriolic groups of people calling the other side a cult or bunch of haters.
Tesla stans are for sure annoying as hell. So are the haters, though. Equally bad, as far as I'm concerned, since neither side has any appreciation for nuance.
Have you ever been to Reddit? I think you’ll find a whole new world (or landfill?) there.
The end result is that we still have these instincts. We want to belong to a group to receive its protection if something goes wrong, and we want to support our group so the members know they're getting the protection they crave. The end result is that in a world without life or death consequences at every turn, we naturally apply this to shit that doesn't matter like rocks. Same brain, different problems.
I'll also add, this is what science is. People say stuff. Other people test it. Everyone shares their results. Is there a better system?
It's the choice you make; 'it's just how I am' is a weak defense. It's surprisingly trendy to say bad behavior is inevitable. Human's have been biologically the same for ~300,000 years, but our behavior has changed dramatically. Behavior in different places right now varies greatly.
Also, is there factual or expert basis for this theory?
This article is not in Nature the academic journal. This is an opinion published in the news section of nature.com the website. Two entirely unrelated things.
(I don't have a horse in this race)
Clearly, the author considers scientists publishing videos of their work less deserving of attention than making fun of those scientists. I think that reflects badly on their character, and badly on nature.com for hosting it.
(Also, an article published on 2023-08-04 should be able to refer to an arXiv post from 2023-08-03: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01516 even if they don't like citing videos.)
At the same time I find the incredible enthusiasm and desire to extrapolate the simplest reports into powerful narratives (as a subset of HN people discussing LK-99 do) very depressing. I guess everybody has to go through t heir own Pons and Fleischman or Jessie Gelsinger moments before they understand just how much hype there is in next-gen science.
Of course many people will disagree with me here, but I'd love to see mute functionality added to HN. If there's anything I've learned from Twitter, it's that when a forum gets big enough, proactively moderating your own experience is essential to enjoying it and cut down on the noise.
Better to see LK-99 hype in TikTok/YouTube feeds than celebrity gossip or Musk's impulse tweets or whatever. The more science goes around, the better.
With all the AI/chatgpt news, a bunch of people got involved in what you call "spectator sport", leading to a whole new set of opportunities and growth, people who would never touch a pc or new software related tech, got involved, others invested, other simple became consumers and every single bit of it its good for the market.
Imagine you are a 15 y.o student right now browsing tiktok with no interest in chemistry whatsoever and suddenly you see a video about this superconductor and you get all hyped and next thing you know is that the student who had no interest on chemistry, now is passionate about it.
If all the LK-99 thing is a fiasco, at least we can say that it somehow helped getting the attention of people who would actually keep investigating and maybe do find the actual superconductor we need. And this can be said about every subject like this.
So yeah, I'm okay getting some random people having nonsense internet discussions.
- Retail shareholders doing grassroots PR
- Some kind of "magical technologism", belief that the rapid technical gains of the 20th century are the natural state of things; unwillingness to accept that future improvements in material science, computer science, chemical science will be more marginal
- Shallow press coverage and overenthusiastic fans who have a disproportionate impact on online discourse
Or maybe all three?
It is destructive. We see it on every topic now, even entirely banal things.
To go back a couple of decades, I remember a high school History teacher bizarre asking the class if they were for or against abortion of all things...it was a very strange class where he was riffing and we were talking about commonly held positions through time. He asked me and I answered that I didn't know enough about the topic, hadn't really thought about it enough, and don't really feel in a position where I should have a stance on it. He laughed and called me a fence-sitter and said I took the coward position. This was a profound experience for me, and it comes to mind in many situations like this.
The whole LK-99 thing looks super neat. I don't have the knowledge, time or inclination to have my ego wrapped in a position on it, and there's absolutely no value or utility in me picking a position, either. I read the updates and it'll turn out however it turns out.
Then some news comes along also coincidentally with other weird fun news (UAPs) that's not bad in any ways, and may revolutionize society. Of course they are gonna run with it.
I figured places like HN would be better for that, although not much. Sure seems about the same as the rest of the web. It's just gossip rags for techy people.
What kills me is that LK-99 might actually be a room temp superconductor, but that doesn't mean the straight out crazy beliefs and behaviors were.
I've been trying really hard to keep an even keel but your point is absolutely valid and I'm in equal parts annoyed by people that categorically reject it and by people that blindly accept it. Science just doesn't work that way, you need to be patient and do the work. But I do hope that it works out, and as a fall back position that it turns out that it works out as a superconductor but not one with practical use. Because that would still open the floodgates for the funding that would either create a RT(AP)S or rule out that one is possible to a very high degree of certainty.
I have no opinion on the topic of LK99, but the nature article posted is not from the world-famous peer-reviewed scientific review, it's from an affiliated science news article.
You are right that there is a lot of hype around that topic, which isn't necessarily warranted, but people would also be right to point out that an article that transform the lack of certainty barely 10 days after the initial article into a reason for doubt is a bit of a clickbait.
I'm all for scientists publishing early, but if the consequence is news organizations and the general public breathing down their necks, I can understand why they don't.
I did not consider this article to be a particularly great sample for inclusion in a new standard of quality. Nature puts out fantastic stuff but this really isn't it, and if anything it surprises me that they would publish it. At the same time I agree with you about the spectator sport angle, that's highly annoying, both from the 'naysayers' and the 'fanatics'.
To be fair, Nature is considered a fairly 'sensational magazine' in the Computer Science world.
You'd be remiss not to mention the much more virulent cult of anti-personality surrounding Tesla.
Recently, though, it seems that the pendulum has swung and Tesla haters are far more vocal than the fans.
Anyway, whereas brand allegiance in buying a car is somewhat based in emotional tribalism (modern cars are mostly quite good regardless of brand), the same cannot be said about physical phenomena. With cars, there are decades of car advertisements that appeal to emotions but there have been no ads about superconductors.
It’s not to say LK-99 is real, but the Nature article contributes 0 extra information
This was especially fun in the early COVID days when it was just data and outbreak tracking. Then it.. well you know.
Science is basically just attempting to delay that calcification, but it happens regardless.
It's been fun learning about this. And I believe it is important and I'm happy people are sharing results mostly without serious bias. So far.
You’re doing the same thing they’re doing. Talking about what a small vocal minority does and then declaring it as representative of a majority. For every person doing as you describe there’s a similar number of people who make it their life mission to attack anything related to Tesla.
The mainstream press is absolutely guilty of clickbaiting this one - instead of lazy "falls short" sorts of headlines, I expect them to talk about the "race to replicate" with infographics showing all the efforts, breaking down what partial-replication means, applications for LK99 depending on what properties its provien to have, and so on.
(i.e. there's plenty of great news to mine here)
It ties into the anti-mainstream, anti-institution sentiment prevalent online - that stuffy, tenured scientists couldn’t accomplish what two randos pulled off with just grit and determination.
Considering the hype, I actually find HN comments relatively cautious and patient, this is a pseudonymous internet forum after all.
Welcome to the Internet in 2023...
A huge win would be this signaling interest in things that make the world better. Basic research and such rely on public funding and we’d all be better off with more funding going to address such problems than the other places funds go.
As if physical reality was something that needs to be defended online and the replication won't turn out well if you didn't scold user asshonker3000 foe not believing enough.
And this happened even here on HN, I truly start to loose whatever little faith I had left for humanity.
Uh no? Usually it’s a comment like this at the top and the thread is full of irrational Tesla hate.
This is a spectator sport. We aren’t specialists, are we? We are enthusiasts. This is like complaining we are excited about space travel of any kind.
Not to disagree with your point. Just that Nature is not a good example to illustrate it.
For most of my adult life, any newspaper article that quotes a PhD has reliably been about how we're all fucked.
There are always 3 sides. The 2 sides, plus the side making observations about the sides.
Social media / internet environment just makes it so for everything. Over it.
Identity politics has metastasized everywhere.
So how do you think we can improve that? It's a very serious question - the anger and mis/disinformation on the Internet is doing great harm, has killed millions and may do far more (via vaccine and climate change disinformation, to start).
[1] You’re Not Going to Superconduct At Room Temperature