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Comment by rahkiin | Hacker News Reader

Rome was not build in a day. Let’s not expect scientists to do so after a draft publication.

It is true, yet I can't reconcile the fact the overall excitement and optimism this generates, vs. the lukewarm and skepticism towards news about advance in other hard problems such as fusion, battery, self-driving, space exploration, cancer treatment, Alzheimer treatment.

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?

There's a lot of people in here arguing like there's some significant faction of people that truly believe we've got enough proof that we have an RTAPS and are somehow negatively impacting their life because of it.

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"

Makes sense, on the other hand, the recipe is apparently fairly simple, so why would it be so hard to replicate?

so simple that original authors fail 9 out of 10 times it seems

The steps are simple, but it seems to be quite finicky and there are almost sure to be sensitive to important factors that we don’t have clarity on yet. If it turns out to be definitively shown to be real

Simple is not synonymous with easy.

The unit cell apparently has:

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.

I guess whoever figures out a reliable process for scaling up production gets a second nobel prize?

or just billions upon billions of dollars.

I should patent a process then figure out the details later, or sue anyone who does.

Thankfully the patent system isn't that broken.

It seems to be, so far, a stocastic process in such that they don't now what's causing it in the 1/10 times it works afaict.

Because if it is superconducting they only have tiny tiny superconducting chunks in a much larger sample that isn't. A couple of superconducting grains of sand in a rock, basically. Separate them out, try to test them on their own while ignoring all the rock parts, well that's difficult.

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.

It's too simple - it's simplistic. It doesn't control for some (yet unknown) things that make it fail or succeed, which makes it hard to replicate.

It's posts like this that make me think of Roosevelt's Man in the Arena speech. It's easy for folks on the sidelines to criticize and say "what's so hard?" It's for the best who the folks rolling up their sleeves, doing the hard work don't see/hear it. There are tons of teams working at this from multiple angles, both trying to prove and disprove it.

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.

The recipe for Shakespeare is English, paper and a pen.

The recipe IS easy... Relatively, it's just not reliable/high yield

I am a material scientist. Everyday, I see failed attempts to replicate samples. Slightly different compositions, slightly different heat treatments, subtle differences in crystallographic texture or the arrangement of inclusions that unexpectedly change the properties of your material in mysterious ways.

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.

YES! This is exactly my experience. Even if I do stuff myself it is often very hard to get to consistency, there are almost always more variables in play than the ones that I'm initially aware of. I've seen seasoned pros driven to despair by things that 'worked in the lab' but that they could not replicate outside of it for want of a simple oversight. Sometimes the line between success and failure is hair-thin, you can be almost there and never realize it.

I dunno, but if it's so simple, why don't you try and then let us know if it's actually easy or not, as well as the results you get!

It is simple as in doesn't require expensive materials or tools or a particularly long process. It can nevertheless be tricky to execute correctly and depend on luck

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