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Comment by arpowers | Hacker News Reader

My main concern: Where are the original authors and why are they not helping people synthesize the replications?

According to Wikipedia:

> On 3 August 2023, the Korean LK-99 Verification Committee requested a high-quality sample from the original research team. However, the team responded that they would only provide the sample once the review process of their paper, potentially submitted to APL Materials, is completed. This process is expected to take several weeks or months.

These sort of answers do not inspire confidence. That looks like a play for time, why would they connect those two, it's clear they have priority locked in if the sample works out, the peer review of their paper is secondary to the questions of whether or not it is the real deal or not.

> These sort of answers do not inspire confidence.

I'm not anything close to a Materials Engineer, but at least in the (very different) fields in which I've published, it's very standard to not share material (e.g.: plasmids, bacteria, code, or datasets) until you've published.

Pre-prints rarely have code or data available if the authors intend to publish elsewhere (again, in my field).

Ok, that may well be the explanation then. As long as those samples don't go missing...

The whole point is for the samples to not go missing because they will likely need them in rounds of review.

Time for what though? Eventually the world is gonna need to see the samples or we’re just going to assume they never created it to begin with and move on.

I’m not in a big rush, we’ve made it this far without RTSCs.

I am not in material science, but how does sharing a sample of the material not part of the paper review? Anyone can write a paper about things they did to make a material X, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. If I am a top tier material science journal, I would not want to publish a phony SC because I waited to verify their sample.

That's exactly what they say they're doing. They submitted the final paper and the sample(s) to APL for review.

I don't think they have other samples to hand out.

They haven't actually published yet officially... the only papers everyone has their hands on (and which all the replications are based on) were leaked.

So, they're following the process... they've submitted the paper and sample for examination and they're waiting for those results before publishing.

From what I've heard, the chief of the Korean Society of Superconductivity and Cryogenics had personally called LK-99 out as a hoax - which might have been justifiable, given evidences, but it might explain the reluctance by the LK-99 team.

(Assuming the inventors of LK-99 believe it's real, they could be thinking "Why should I give you the honor of being the first outsider to verify the sample, when we could ask anyone else?")

I think we should be careful to throw provocative words like hoax around.

There is no official statement from Korean Society of Superconductivity and Cryogenics saying it is a hoax only that they are still waiting for a sample from the original scientists.

At this point we don't know (a) whether LK-99 is a RT superconductor and if it isn't (b) whether it was simply an error in their research or a conspiracy amongst the scientists to commit fraud. Until we definitively know both I don't see why people should be slandered.

There were a couple of unofficial statements from the Chair of KSSC though. He is now known as the "Mr. Bahahaha" in the Korean internet because he initially dismissed a mail from Q-Center wrongly sent to him by starting his Facebook post---now removed---with "Bahahaha, the era of room-temperature superconductivity is here. Ambient pressure too! Shouldn't my fortune get better?" (translation mine).

The team believes they have made the world's first room temperature superconductor, and they submit the paper to APL Materials (Impact Factor 6.6)?

That's a good question and there is a lot of speculation about that but ultimately we just do not know. There is a whole tree that you can set up to track their reasons, the big branch at the beginning is labeled 'it doesn't work' (which obviously is a bit short on the confirming side, it may still have a 'fraud' and a 'true believers' branch but that's academic) and then from the other branch you get branches which may be labeled as 'they don't know how they did it' and so on.

They weren't ready to publish and then got forced into the lime light by a member of their team going rogue. We should give them some benefit of the doubt due to the circumstances, even if LK-99 turns out not to be a SC, they didn't choose to publish.

Oh I definitely do give them the benefit of the doubt. Regardless of what is going on as long as it eventually works as advertised it's all fine and as long as their samples don't go missing they have a way out that's pretty easy.

Let's hope the growing mountain of evidence against original author claims causes them to move quicker with providing samples to bonafide labs and disclosing the full details of their manufacturing process.

What evidence?

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. They haven't even officially released their final version of the paper, and a whole bunch of people who don't have full access to their data being unable to replicate their material well enough to convince the world doesn't reflect at all on the validity of their work.

If the people to whom they have submitted their paper, data, and samples can't replicate it, that will mean something else.

> Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Actually it is when labs all around the world are trying to generate evidence and failing

Then the atom bomb was - for a time - disproven.

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