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Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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