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Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

They first submitted a (rejected) paper to Nature about LK-99 in 2020, 3 years ago - that we know.

The 99 in the name comes from the date the lab was formed, 1999. Some sources suggest that they have been studying this exact material since 1999, although I don't think that is confirmed.

I think it's safe to assume that they would have been making it for at least 1-2 years before the rejected Nature paper, although potentially significantly longer than that.

So they have been making it somewhere between 4 and 24 years...

Looking at how small the fragments are that other lambs are creating, I assume it's taken them years to get to the point that they can make larger lumps of the stuff that have any sort of uniform structure.

They seem to have been trying to perfect it before publishing.

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According to Wikipedia, Q Centre was founded in 2008. LK-99 is called LK-99 because it was discovered in 1999, but they stopped working on it for the bigger chunk of the 21st century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99#Compound_name

Ah, my mistake. A 1999 discovery while plausible seems like a long time ago. I wander if it really is exactly the compound as they found back then.

The Korean press seems to indicate that's when their mentor professor passed away and asked them to continue research on a theory he had, they've been slogging away on it since.

I dont think it was a mere request. They also left money in their will to support further research from what I read.

It wasn't discovered in 99. That's when two of the researchers were in university and had a professor who had a theory that something like it could work. They took a good amount of time off from it while they worked at other jobs, before starting at their research center.

From the NYT source linked on the Wikipedia article:

> The name of the material comes from the initials of the surnames of two of the scientists — Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim — and the year 1999, when they say they first synthesized LK-99.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/03/science/lk-99-superconduc...

I guess it depends what you mean by LK-99. They didn't have any luck with their early batches and it wasn't until after an extended break in adjunct professorship and industry that they got back together. A happy accident happened where they bumped it part way through trying to synthesize it and they got a sample with some of the properties that kept them going. So in 99, they were just following the advice of their mentor who was a professor. The NYT coverage is misleading in that they weren't really sitting on room temperature and pressure superconductors for 20+ years.

Even then, them synthesizing some of it in '99 and then again in '22 or whenever doesn't really mean they've been making it for 23 years.

If I baked a cake once 23 years ago and once yesterday, I can't really say I've been baking for 23 years.

It is like playing the lottery or slot machine. You just keep trying one more time to see if you can hit the jackpot.

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