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Comment by bbatsell | Hacker News Reader

There were people complaining in earlier threads that bigger publications haven't been reporting on LK-99 — this article is a perfect distillation of why. It is already significantly outdated, missing out on multiple interesting findings that were posted yesterday which would almost certainly have resulted in a much different piece had they been available when it was reported out and sources asked for comment.

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I'm absolutely ready to be disappointed by LK-99. Some sort of fraud, some sort of experimental error, something interesting that's still not a real superconductor, a real superconductor but a quirk of the material means that it'll never scale past being a parlor trick, whatever.

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.

The simulation is just testing the release. They haven't decided whether or not to make it real yet. There's a lot of bureaucracy involved. Even doing this initial test caused a lot of debate as it's deemed too early. If it launches, it requires a lot of updates on the backend to expand.

> If it turns out to be true, then everyone will be so excited that they'll forget about anything nature came out with.

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.

Notably:

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

Notably, neither provided any extra evidence that LK-99 is a superconductor

They provided evidence that reduces the likelihood of total fraud/fabrication on the part of the original researchers, though.

Agreed! But I think total fraud was already ruled out once the reports from chinese labs reproducing it came out

And the nature.com author didn't cite those reports.

I severely doubt the nature article would look much different if written today

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