Ask HN: Was LK-99 a bust, hoax, or did it finally work? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Was LK-99 a bust, hoax, or did it finally work?

9 pointssurume5 comments

I saw a lot of activity re LK-99, but all of a sudden it died down. I read a few science papers every few days and they went dark on the subject. So what is the status of it? Because of the quiet, I'm guessing it was a dud?

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Basically, it was a bust. No one who tried to replicate it got a room-temperate, ambient-pressure super-conductor. There were a few folks who got it to exhibit the diamagnetic properties that enable levitation, which was cool.

I think the original team got excited and it got pushed too early. It was a really brief, exciting moment though. It was neat to see research institutions and random people in their garages working to replicate it.

I am very pessimistic. For example Andrew McCalip at least found out his effects were because of a piece of iron contamination and thus ferrogmagnetism.

Here's the great Spacebattles forum list: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/claims-of-room-tempe...

There have been multiple credible debunks as of late, exx.:

* Sabine Hossenfelder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjzL9cS3VW8 update: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoKWourNJEs&t=875s

* Sixty Symbols: Bad Science and Room Temperature Superconductors https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl-AgmoZ5mo

* Thunderf00t: LK-99 BUSTED!!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3hubvTsf3Y

Especially the last two are utterly scathing, with Prof Moriarty in the Sixty Symbols video pointing out that the one measurement curve they show—shows nothing WRT superconductivity (because the scaling is wrong). Also, he says that the entire measurement has been done in a sloppy way, with way too few data points. Lastly, neither the sensationalist title of the paper nor its equally grandiose concluding remark instill trust.

Thunderf00t (aka Philip Mason) destroys the video of Two bit da Vinci about LK-99 for every. single. claim. the guy makes, and especially pointing out that the GAME changing!! Revolutionary!!! effects of having room-temperature superconductors are not that; you can read up on Wikipedia where they'll tell you that the 'high-temperature' (i.e. liquid nitrogen as opposed to liquid helium) superconductors have been looking for applications for decades, with little to show. Cooling is only part of the problem, both technically and cost-wise; one problem is that electric motors with superconductive coils suffer from instability problems, and superconductivity will abruptly end when there is too much current (to my understanding).

Both Moriarty and Mason demonstrate the diamagnetic hover effect with a thin plate of graphite, which is one of the possible causes for the hovering chunk of material seen in the LK-99 video; Moriarty rightly points out that with one end of that chunk in the air and one down on the magnet, it actually looks like this is a tiny magnet with the poles on the far ends of the materials. Neither ferromagnetic nor diamagnetic materials are new by any stretch; I imagine if you had a very strong diamagnetic material, that could be interesting for some moving parts in machines, but it won't change anything fundamental.

I've since come to the conclusions that the authors of the paper are completely delusional or frauds. They have apparently been working on this for 25 years (the 99 in LK-99 stands for year 1999); if they were out to conceive people one would think they would not have spent 25 years in a laboratory before coming out.

For a number of reasons LK-99 reminds me of the EM drive, for which I recommend to watch another of Thunderf00t's videos, EM Drive BUSTED!, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCAqDA8IfR4 . It's entertaining but also a little sad to see the inventor talk about it (right after the start of the video) as though the effect was real and will give us flying cars, fast transportation on Earth and to Mars, solve global warming and whatnot. Coincidentally this guy also had his moment of rapture in 1999 (as in, LK-99) and been working on it for many, many years. Judging from the filmed interviews, he's not a liar, just someone with two weaknesses—he can't believe he's not right in his beliefs and opinions, and, second, he had an utterly wonky crackpot idea. Now he's captured in the false belief that an EM drive (i.e. a metallic cavity that has photons bouncing around inside, otherwise known as an MTIAWBDOAKONIFE (a 'machine that is and will be devoid of any kind of net impulse, for ever', save for minuscule effects of excess heat at one end) could move things, and at scale (the thrust of existing models has been shown to be ridiculously small, especially when compared to energy input).

Thunderf00t is not a reliable source. Some of his videos are really good, especially those dealing with alkali metals. But the BUSTED videos often contain newbie mistakes, even when the busting is justified.

Sabine and Pr. Moriarty, a little more reliable, but both are pretty opinionated in a way that may affect their work. I enjoy their content a lot, in fact Sabine YouTube channel is one of my favorite science channels, but not enough for me to turn off my critical thinking.

I think you put the bar of reliability at an impossible height. Every human statement may become erroneous or incorrect when looked at with utmost rigor. It's like when physicians joke, "there are no healthy people, only people who haven't been diagnosed yet". Saying that Sabine and Moriarty are "a little more reliable" than the "not reliable" Thunderf00t makes me wonder to whom in the world of physics would you grant the predicate "reliable"? It goes without saying that sound skepticism has to be applied to all factual statements, but Prof. Moriarty "a little more reliable than not reliable"? Come on!

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