LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
nature.com
nature.com
To me the most interesting part was everyone talking about potential consequences, uses, the order of magnitude improvements we’d see in certain costs or areas. Pumps, MRIs, power grids, chips, etc. Great reminder what materials science can do to some underlying economics.
There's this bizarre reaction I see from many where they see the excitement and curiosity and hopefulness as a form of error and source of embarrassment. When mixed with an open mind and reasonable skepticism, it's a powerful opportunity to get people engaged in imagining a different world.
I had all kinds of exciting conversations about what a validated, commercially viable LK-99 could produce. Why would I ever be inclined to feel that there's pie on my face now that we've got fairly strong evidence refuting the claims?
This is probably because people (i) were not aware that there had been many other hypes about RTSC before but less publicly visible all proved to be false, (ii) not being able to accurately judge the technical quality of the initial evidence, (iii) uncritically believing that the data in the initial preprints was proof for superconductivity because their authors said so.
While a convenient abstraction, it plays into our biases to notice and remember only some of the discourse.
Plus I don't think it's really relevant to what I'm saying given I'm not making a claim about how any specific individual or group reacted, but that it's odd when there's people who treat an optimistic outlook as an error.
An optimistic outlook without a semi-plausible basis that you can convincingly elaborate on, or link a vaguely credible source doing so, IS an error, at least going by HN norms.
It is just an attitude that values positive possibilities over fretting about negative possibilities.
Especially in cases where there is a small chance of a huge upside, relative to virtually no downside. We didn’t lose any superconductors. :)
I don’t recall anyone on HN erroneously declaring the material was definitely a new superconductor before subsequent evidence arrived at a consistent conclusion.
There is nothing wrong with optimism.
To clarify, I was referring to "An optimistic outlook" in terms of actual assertions/claims/etc. that are written down on-the-record in public.
Of course HN users can have the general abstract sentiment of optimism at anytime in their mind. I don't think there are any norms around internal sentiments.
For the scientists getting their hands on a breakthrough, the risk and reward was worth it, but for the public at large? No one should care until there are definite results.
The last few weeks with the LK-99 hype combined with the usual ChatGPT stories, I actually started feeling that maybe the site should be renamed Hype News.
> but that it's odd when there's people who treat an optimistic outlook as an error.
IMHO it’s best to treat any extraordinary claim as BS until proven otherwise as it’s very easy to concoct BS claims. If we take every one of them seriously, it will consume all of our attention and destroy the signal (actual facts) to noise (unproven claims) ratio on this site.
It's pretty standard to be skeptical of extraordinary, poorly supported scientific claims and you didn't have to be an expert to find out experts were fairly skeptical of this from the beginning and the reasons for their skepticism. The broad HN sentiment was at odds with what you could find elsewhere. This isn't a moral failing or anything, just a common mode of HN-like forums but to elevate it to some some sort of positive rather than a thing to be cautious about seems backwards.
What a shamefully foolish intellectual failure!
Mostly I saw actual physicists who had experience in the field being very skeptical, throwing a lot of cold water on the fire, and pointing out that the original authors looked like amateurs.
And then I saw a lot of people with zero experience in the field running around yelling about how they were out of touch, how this was a revolutionary new way that science would progress on twitter, out in the open, etc. People who were skeptical got called all kinds of names.
It didn't help that a lot of people on twitter pivoted from crypto-hype to AI-hype to LK99-hype pretty much on a dime.
There was also a lot of highly upvoted comments with the usual thoughtleadering style of "let me beak it down for your, here's the ELI5 of what is going on an what the implications will be..." followed by whatever they learned in the past 48 hours from plowing through wikipedia articles.
There could be a lesson here about listening very carefully to experts in the field when they give you their opinions. They often sound very highly biased, but there's usually very good reason for that. Once in a lifetime there's the event where some paradigm is overthrown and all the old scientists look a bit foolish because their instincts were to be skeptical -- but those instincts came through a lifetime of correctly being skeptical 999 times out of 1000 about wild claims in their field.
This could be a teachable moment that could inform people about climate change, coronavirus and other scientific claims. If you want to disagree with experts in the field you really need to get off your ass, get off twitter and the blogs, and go do the hard work of understanding what the scientists actually know by reading the articles that they publish. They're very often correct and their opinions hold more weight because they've literally spent their lifetime learning and thinking about this one thing. They didn't start learning about superconductivity / viruses / climate last week and you need to do better than some showerthought or wishful thinking that you think proves your viewpoint.
But we're not going to do that because its only been a few days and we've literally forgotten about how much flak scientists were getting on here over skepticism towards the initial claims.
And I had some of the most positively stupid arguments on here where people were trying to assert that scientific experts needed to express exactly zero bias because they were experts and held to a higher standard than the average moron with no experience who could argue whatever they liked. Engineering a rationale to be able to reject anyone with a strong opinion based on expertise in favor of strong opinions from randos on twitter.
I addressed why.
One of the things I look forward to in an HN discussion is the comments of people who can collate expert opinions on the subject and surface these kinds of points in a more ELI15 kind of way. But despite there being ~a week of LK-99 stories permanently on the front page, there wasn't much of that (a little on the initial thread, and virtually nothing for the next several days)--and it's not for lack of physicists commenting on the topic (in other forums)!
[1] I saw someone point out that, when you translate the units on the resistivity/temperature graph, it is a worse conductor than copper at room temperature, below its claimed critical temperature.
HN is full of subject matter experts on computing-- that is, software, and to a lesser extent, hardware-- beyond that it's a mixed bag at best. Even as an interface designer, I see so much confidently presented and totally bogus pseudo-expertise on art and design here that it's actually kind of funny, and that's much more closely related to software development than physics is. That BS sounds credible to other developers because it's in a developer's voice and trips on misconceptions common among developers. I suspect that's true with the other non-computing topics discussed here that I don't know enough about to give an expert opinion on.
As a long-time developer myself, I've been on both sides of assuming our astonishing intelligence and analytical capability can make up for lacking the requisite expertise. The mistake is expecting the HN crowd's musings about things outside of it's expertise to be more trustworthy than any other internet forum. If this were some physics subreddit or something like that, the criticism would make more sense. This is just people being excited by something a lot of other people were excited by.
I can tell you from first hand experience, much of the time subject matter experts are often downvoted into oblivion by the HN hive mind. To the point where you only see clueless people at the top.
Happens to me regularly when it comes to machine learning, neuroscience, education/university threads.
For example, people say crazy things about things like university admissions or grad student salaries. Never mind about ML where most of the information here is just wrong.
That’s why many started with dimagnetism indeed.
That’s definitely not true despite your attempts to gaslight us.
There was a dose of Dunning-Kruger, and some software engineers telling us how to science, but there was also a lot of engagement and interesting discussions with genuine experts. Overall I found it quite interesting to follow.
> uncritically believing that the data in the initial preprints was proof for superconductivity because their authors said so.
It had undertones of small team (in a private institution, no less) taking on the stodgy establishment, which is quite popular among some people here. The concepts are also not very difficult to grasp on surface, so a lot of people can form an opinion, however well founded.
People complain about peer review and scientific publisher as well. It is not difficult to see how this could push them to champion something that comes from arxiv.
rock music
During COVID there were multiple cases like this where a study got a lot of hype and discussion from non-experts and turned into "the science says X", when in fact the science was as of yet extremely unsettled. Sure enough, as the experts came to a consensus it rarely matched the public's initial perception, which led to a lot of confusion, conspiracy theories, and fingerpointing.
Science-as-spectator-sport is fun, but I worry about the impact it will have on society as a whole and on the execution of science in particular. How many research decisions will be influenced by the possibility of going viral? How many bad decisions will be made as a result of pressure from millions of non-experts who briefly become armchair X-ologists?
When science is done badly (which arguably shouldn't be considered science), which then leads the public to have elevated expectations, only then for science to be done right and disprove and reject the original "findings", public trust in science is ever so slightly damaged.
PR is something we cannot control -- and avoiding releasing results in a (semi-vain?) attempt to control PR arguably does more harm than releasing them does.
The sea makes waves as it will. We can moderate as much as we are able. I think the rest is simply a matter of accepting that things happen as they do out of our control. We can only truly impact ---- and even then, not necessarily guaranteed! D: ---- -- in some potentially very small part -- whatever sphere is around us, and I feel that that's a collective individual responsibility.
Journalists are going to write nonsense, hype-filled science articles. PR flacks are going to hype puff newswire blurbs. Why? Because that's what they're paid to do.
You can curse the existence of bad incentives, if you want annoying ideologues to call you a communist.
Or you can hire your own PR flacks. Because worrying about how people will react to what you're doing is PR, and going up against professionals without your own is like going to court without a lawyer.
Or you can just, you know, do science, accept that people suck sometimes, and get on with your life.
Having had some work get incredible attention, and other work not at all, I've experienced a small slice of the volatility of the web. My most popular, for example, tweet chain was a semi-technical vent I wrote over the course of 30 minutes after stewing about some semi-useless technical hype that no one seemed to be addressing the flaws in. I wrote it in a way that was more attention-grabbing somewhat than my more technical posts, put it out there, and shared it in a few places. It was pretty shallow, technically, I think, but I feel like it really had to be stated, since it sorta felt...really pretty obvious?
Two days later or so, my number of Twitter followers had over quadrupled.
I think humanity can be quite finicky sometimes (a more general statement, I don't think one could conclude that from the previous anecdote alone).
This is just another example of the media’s negative effect on society. Similarly, the media endlessly poring over every detail of the Ukraine war has likely made their job much more difficult because it damages the element of surprise.
The media originally began as something quite negative with what we called “yellow journalism.” Then for a century or so we saw a kind of golden age of journalism where newspapers had strong reputations to uphold but were fairly rewarded for it through ads and classifieds.
Now the media is back to yellow journalism (clickbait) and eroding the institutions of society.
How many worse decisions are made by people who can't read and won't learn about the nuances of a topic?
Ask L Ron Hubbard?
The willingness of the crowd to believe in counterfactual things is not constrained to science, and whatever damage/risk is posed by that is not new - as Galileo can attest.
Kinda buried the lede there. A lot of folks around here and in my own orbit were practicing the former while excluding the latter, or worse, were taking shots at people trying to inject some level of rationality into the conversation. Heck, some folks even went so far as to refer to those types of counterpoints/comments as just a "bizarre reaction"...
What the general public does not see it the regular flood of papers that pretend to change the world and that turn out to be bogus. So, from an insider point of view, the issue is that what we are supposed to avoid (crack pot theories becoming mainstream or getting too much traction) happened in a spectacular fashion. So a lot of people get excited about nothing and then end up distrusting the scientific process itself (“they don’t know what they’re doing”, “they make everything up”, “they write a lot of nonsense”, etc).
In this case, I think it turned out to be a good thing. People got excited, some of them thought about possible implication, others managed to pick up some notions of material science. The enthusiasm and activity from people trying to replicate and investigate the material was heart-warming. But yeah, it was bound to finish like that.
> Why would I ever be inclined to feel that there's pie on my face now that we've got fairly strong evidence refuting the claims?
You really, really don’t want to be seen as a crack pot when your funding and career depend on how external people evaluate your work. You also really, really don’t want to have to retract a paper because you’ve missed something obvious. Retraction is a traumatic process even if you are in good faith. This is sidestepped by releasing preprints (so no peer review and no risk of retraction). But at the same time this is a reason why outlandish preprints tend not to be taken too seriously. There is less incentives to get it right.
This should be taken in the context of room temperature superconductors being notorious physics vaporware along with practically useful advances in quantum computers and useful fusion. What these have in common is a sort of holy grail status, where it's obvious they'd be a revolutionary complete game changer. Not that any of these things are obviously impossible, there's just been so many instances of discoveries in these areas that have failed to replicate that there's inevitably a lot of eye rolling in physics when these types of findings are announced.
I feel like this line is doing a lot of lifting in your comment.
The problem is that as lay people we are completely unequipped to gauge a claim like this. I followed along on HN and there were plenty of posts by people who were giving LK-99 crazy odds of success, fueled in no small part by viral videos of outright hoaxes from pseudonymous "researchers."
It's fun, in a science fiction-y way, to speculate on what a material with the supposed properties might have meant for the world, but the degree of skepticism that should have been applied was lacking for many.
There's a tendency on HN and similar forums to devour new developments - almost a fanaticism about learning the newest/latest/best before the general public. But in this case, a truly extraordinary claim had been proposed, and it was even published without the researchers' consent. There was precious little reason to give it any attention at all at that phase.
If people had viewed LK-99's properties as "almost surely science fiction" all along, I could find myself agreeing with you, but that's really not how this played out. Sadly this event showed there's a market for hyping up weak claims that people will be poor at evaluating, and I guess we can probably expect more of them.
I don't see it as in any way an unique event, and also not unique for the enthusiasm seen on this site. The "believers" in most of the hypes typically aren't cured fast, as the article notes:
"While some commentators have pointed to the LK-99 saga as a model for reproducibility in science, others say that it’s an unusually swift resolution of a high-profile puzzle. "Often these things die this very slow death...""
I think the public reaction in this case is a symptom of a problem with our information ecosystem that extends beyond science. Just because something is fun to participate in in the moment doesn't mean it's not harmful to the underlying scientific/political/social process.
A significant reduction in room temperature resistance would still be incredible, even if it wasn't a "room temperature superconductor." Might still enable a lot of those "exciting conversations." Just not some binary yes/no computer holy grail.
Also, big effect was scientists went "Whoa. There's a whole mode/regime of resistance change we never really looked at." The modeling papers that came out almost immediately were really interesting. Might still have cool applications.
Sitcom's live studio audience: "Awwwwwww!"
Also, you can't solve the most important economic problems through technology anyway. How is a superconductor going to decrease your rent?
Modern grids are designed to keep those losses down.
If the losses weren't a factor the grids would be designed differently. Very differently. As in, North Africa would be so full of solar panels the generating fields would be visible from space.
A ceramic room-temperature superconductor, like LK-99 would have been, is not a promising material at all, since it's extremely costly to make wires out of it. And even if we found a way to do so, it might not have mattered at all if it only worked for the very low currents/voltages in the original tests.
See the history of glass optimization- hundreds of years of poking around with terrible quality glass, then a revolution during the Schott era, to modern day Gorilla Glass. Or silicon- the initial transistor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Replica-of-first-transist...) was not something you could shove into a missile, that took 15 years to develop. To today's modern ICs which approach the atomic limits of semiconductor manufacturing.
The hope is that the initial RTSCs will follow a similar path, obvious there no guarantee
RTSCs are not like cold fusion - as far as we know, they should be possible, so finding one would not upend science in some huge way. If the ones we find don't also happen to have all the other interesting properties we need, then they may never have any significant impact at all. This is what seems to be missed.
If LK-99 had been an RTSC, it should still not have been major news outside materials science research, since it wouldn't have had any direct impact on the economy, nor any predictable pathway to one. Some other future discovery, if it ever happened, would have been the one that actually mattered. That potential future discovery may have built on the current work, but whether it would be 1 year down the line or 10 or 100 or never would not be knowable.
I take your other comments to imply that finding one RTSC would prove or at least suggest that a path exists to some significant industrial usage of RTSCs down the line. I don't think that's correct, and I'm arguing about why I don't think that's correct. Of course, I may have misunderstood your comments.
Let me rewrite my original sentence that bothered people, so it's a bit clearer. Here's the original:
"""Room temp Superconductors, along with fusion, would affect the economy profoundly. What the exact effect on rent would be is hard to predict but under the "post-scarcity society" mental construct, having infinite energy at zero cost (amortized) would presumably make the price of housing change."""
Change "would" to "could" in the first sentence to make it conditional. Add an additional sentence at the end pointing out that house prices are complex and many factors influence them, and another pointing out that while sometimes we can achieve a property in a material, but fail to realize its industrial potential".
It does seem reasonable to posit that RTSCs, even if they failed to realize their industrial potential- could have an affect on rent. Rent is (to a zeroth order approximation) determined by a wide range of macroeconomic activities, and if we reordered our entire society around improving RTSCs, that could have indirect effect on the cost of housing.
All of that was implicit in my original text- and I had hoped to make that clear- rather than making a strong statement like "rent will go down if RTSCs exist".
All that said, there's also a case for saving all that energy by seeking out skeptical points of view. See thunderf00t's video from 5 days ago: https://youtu.be/p3hubvTsf3Y
All in all, I appreciate that so many people are enthusiastic about one thing in particular: replicating results. So many people will take a press release or an academic paper at face value. But the real value is in replicating the results.
My long term pessimism comes partly from the fact that I know what is behind the magical technologies that are supposed to save us, which is why I am very skeptical about them. I am also very doubtful about our ability to make the right decisions in difficult times and under severe constraints. But hey, I do have a cool, interesting, and enjoyable job.
That’s great.
Now I have to walk back explanations I gave to various people and explain LK-99 actually isn’t special at all. I will look like a god damn idiot.
The whole time LK-99 was in the news, we were wringing our hands about potential uses and the impact it would have on our world. For once it seemed maybe there was hope that we’d see exciting times again with exponential advances in technology. That dream has now been thoroughly eradicated.
By the time a true room temp superconductor comes out, it probably won’t be in our lifetimes.
Is it the idea that there might be something great happening, and that we might get the chance to live in exciting times? I could see people wanting to believe in that opportunity.
Pride isn’t a good look or smell.
Try humility instead. You may not like to eat humble pie, but others love to watch that.
Also, perhaps some introspection would give nuance to why being wrong bothers you so much.
This is also a great opportunity to demonstrate your understanding on how difficult the scientific process is to your friends.
Telling your friends you have changed your mind on everything you told them earlier because of new evidence should be something you take pride in. Because only true scientists change their minds, and even discard their most cherished theories, based on new evidence.
Y'know those stories on Reddit about people's awful childhoods, like "I needed the toilet in a shop and my parents told me to be quiet, and then when I pissed myself, my dad dragged me outside and beat me for 'embarrassing him'"? Have you noticed the dad comes out of the story looking bad for prioritising his image? Saying "I don't want to tell this to people because then _I_ will look bad" already makes you look bad.
I told my dad LK-99 isn't a superconductor and he said "that's a shame, oh well, exciting while it lasted".
There is a lesson there: do not make definitive statements about something that is uncertain. There are a lot of interesting things to say about this material along the lines of “it would be cool if it worked, then we could do x or y” while still making clear that this is tentative.
> The whole time LK-99 was in the news, we were wringing our hands about potential uses and the impact it would have on our world. For once it seemed maybe there was hope that we’d see exciting times again with exponential advances in technology. That dream has now been thoroughly eradicated.
Some people did. The materials scientists I know were mostly skeptical with a hint of cynicism or optimism, depending on the individual.
> By the time a true room temp superconductor comes out, it probably won’t be in our lifetimes.
It is difficult to say. We barely understand what makes a material a superconductor. This understanding will improve, and we will do some more systematic studies. Or it might show up in some completely unrelated project, just by chance. It is very difficult to say when this might happen. All we can say is that so far we don’t think that room-temperature superconductors are a physical impossibility. So at least there is hope.
Maybe, but I have immensely more respect for someone who can just admit they were wrong compared to someone who bends over backwards to justify their incorrectness.
And that's just LK-99. You could easily be just as mistaken about other things. If you start confusing possibles with absolutes things get messy really quickly.
> By the time a true room temp superconductor comes out, it probably won’t be in our lifetimes.
It could happen tomorrow, next week, next year, within the next 500 years or later or even never at all. And that still wouldn't prove that no such thing exists. We just do not know.
If you step back and scan headlines a few days, or weeks, or years, after, you find that almost all of it comes to naught. (Not absolutely all of it, there is some real news, and occasionally a story grips and/or surprises.)
You can spare yourself a tremendous amount of cognitive and emotional strain and whiplash by waiting for the dust to settle. And possibly, cultivating a sense for what might actually be significant. (Early stories of a virus in a city I'd never heard of in China growing at 10x a week caught my attention quickly, as one reasonably recent example.) It's possible to get caught with a normalcy bias, though being prepared to quickly revise your priors helps here.
The LK-99 story reminded me a lot news that broke shortly after I'd first come online via the campus Unix network at uni: the Fleischmann–Pons cold fusion paper. There was a lot of excited discussion, and within a few days I had (courtesy of an FTP server --- this was not only pre-World Wide Web, but pre-Gopher, though we had Usenet) an ASCII-text version of the paper, something I excitedly wrote (via snail mail) home about. And ... after a few weeks ... it turned out to be nothing.
Science, mostly, progresses relatively slowly. Big upsets are rare. Extravagent claims (in a hype-driven and grant-driven world) are increasingly prevalent (it was bad enough 35 years ago, it's worse now).
So this time 'round, I scanned the headlines and some of the discussion, but mostly sat the story out.
The generative-AI story (as another recent example) seems more substantial but still somewhat frothy. Though I strongly do expect that far more capable AI techniques could well emerge quite suddenly and to profound effect.
But when you recognise that a story is largely speculation, especially if it's defending a point of view (Business As Usual / status quo or New World Order / this changes everything, or many views lying betwixt and beyond) recongise many of them as strongly motivated and quite often weakly informed.
Are these properties still useful? If something can levitate without being a superconductor it is already useful for a LOT of things.
It is not that useful. Electromagnets are used when we need something like that at scale, such as in maglev trains. Permanent magnets have their uses, but we have plenty of others that are as strong as this, and plenty of others that are much stronger than this. I suppose we will investigate it’s properties and we might find something interesting, but almost certainly not because of its magnetic properties.
I was really elated to see how people were so interested and getting to see what peer review in science actually looks like. How in the real world it is done outside of journals and conferences, which people frequently give the misnomer "peer review." I hope people will walk away from this experience with a better understanding of how science works and why replication is such a critical aspect of it. Because the truth is that our academic incentive structure has generally fallen out of alignment with the actual goals of science.
But it might also be worth noting that often reproduction happens behind the scene. People point to big works like that which comes out of CERN, LIGO, or other massive projects and state that such works cannot be replicated. But actually those have high rates of replication, which is why there are hundreds of authors on the work.
For LK-99, people got to see a lot of what is typically done by grad students who never tell the public what they did (or even their community). That the communication between scientists is happening through preprints, email, twitter, and other methods that are not journal publications. Because science happens faster than the journal cycle. Most scientists are reading preprints, and letting the work dictate the signal of validity long before a journal can.
But what I was alluding to, which you might have picked up on, is that the reward system we have in place ("publish or perish", h-index, journals, etc) are misaligned as they do not reward this cornerstone of science -- replication -- (typically discourages is) unless there are credible claims of breakthroughs of the highest kind. Maybe we should rethink this system, and I hope that the timing of this along with the other discussions of academic fraud can help people to question the system and metrics that we use to evaluate, and ask if they are actually aligned with the original goals.
Did it though? Nobody published this, which is good, right? And then Max Planck Institute gave the most conclusive answer, and they're the most prestigious replicator-to-be mentioned, so that also sounds good right?. And now, Mr. L and Mr. K will not receive funding for this material, because it decisively failed to publish, which is also good?
I don't know. It sounds like the academic incentive structure worked really well here.
Yes. Science is about more than producing novel ideas. A lot more.
> Nobody published this, which is good, right?
People did publish it, and many responses. They published on Arxiv. I think you are misunderstanding what papers are. Papers are simply a communication method between domain experts. The purpose of journals is to improve distribution and to provide a signal to help experts sift through the (possibly) large number of work. But you need question if they are accomplishing the goals. Do they provide more access than arxiv? Certainly no, arxiv is about as accessible as it comes. Do they provide better distribution than other modes? (colleagues, google scholar, semantic scholar, Twitter, etc) This is debatable and likely depends on your domain. Do they provide a useful signal to other experts? Also arguable and depends on your field. I'd say that the more papers/yr in your field, the weaker the signal. THEN you need to ask if these benefits outweigh the costs. That's both monetary costs from governments, corporations, and universities as well as the time costs to format the papers for the specified venue, deal with the back and forth with reviewers, and being a reviewer yourself. After you have considered the costs and benefits you can answer if these venues are good for science.
> Max Planck Institute gave the most conclusive answer,
Via "preprint"
> And now, Mr. L and Mr. K will not receive funding for this material, because it decisively failed to publish, which is also good?
Indeterminate. Science is noisy. You're wandering around in the dark. All we know is that they failed. But >90% of research results in failure. What is a better question is if their work advanced scientific knowledge. Which it looks like it did.
> I don't know. It sounds like the academic incentive structure worked really well here.
I'm what you think the academic goals are, which we need to know before you can determine if the incentives are aligned. For some added ethos, I'll reference Peter Higgs[0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...
I don't think this was at all what this saga was about. People essentially turned a physics experiment into social media drama and science had nothing to do with it.
I also don't think the 'academic incentrive structure' has fallen out of alignment with the actual goals of science, despite the fact that people keep saying it, and in particular not in condensed matter physics.
If anything this whole thing showed two things: 1. Science works fine, 2. Please keep it to the actual scientists instead of turning it into yet another discipline dragged on Twitter. I know it's an unfashonable thing to say these days, but 99.9% of people have literally nothing to contribute to a debate about bleeding edge physics research, despite that apparenly everyone feels entitled to have an opinion on it.
I saw people become enamored with a Russian anime cat girl on twitter.
This was vapid, consumptive entertainment. Which is perfectly fine, let's just not pretend it's better than the bachelor because science. Replace Chad had a date on love island with Anime cat girl did the science things, and that's about where we're at.
When I was young, I wanted tu buy a blue LED but it was too expensive. Now I have white LEDs everywhere.
Laser pointers are nice too.
its great to be excited for real science discoveries but hoaxes are not good, and can potentially cripple, crush the industry thats actually developing these things.
There are a lot of details to consider. Does it makes sense? Who published it? Did that team has a gopd track record? Where was it published? Did somepne else used the paper as a base for a new paper? How long/much would it take to try?
Only after that, researches decide to try it or just send it to the paper bin.
There's absolutely no evidence of a hoax. The original authors were sloppy and overeager, not malicious.
Reckon so, but if they believed they were on the brink of a great discovery and thought they could be beaten to it at any moment, then it's understandable.
> I am not so convinced of our ignorance by the things that are, and whose reason is unknown to us, than by those that are not, and whose reason we find. This means that not only do we not have the principles that lead to the truth, but that we also have others that accommodate the false very well.
Bernard Le Bouyer de Fontenelle, Histoire des Oracles 1687. Translated with Deepl.
This whole process has been super healthy and similar challenges are important and needed for everything published, not just this particular research area.
I might be out in left field, but I read so often that researchers are running out of ideas. What’s wrong with getting a PhD for challenging something already published? It is incredibly valuable to society.
What this doesn't mean is the average human who does not like the conclusion producing a statement saying "I don't think that's real", or even going so far as to cite data which could appear to refute the conclusion, are producing a challenge to the conclusion. They're just stating an opinion. This isn't designed to be exclusionary, but to ensure that challengers are going through the effort that the producer of the conclusion did. If one is not willing to learn the problem space enough to reasonably challenge the effort, then that challenge is moot.
note: i don't deny climate science but like any science there are ways to challenge it
Tone matters and your tone matches up really well with someone trying to “gotcha” the people around them, which is obnoxious.
> i don't deny climate science but like any science there are ways to challenge it
Not successfully.
Never?
> "Try challenging evolutionary biology, even in a valid way, and see how popular it is".
All crackpots think they're under siege and that their ideas are unfairly dismissed. Their ideas are "valid" (because they say so), so why are those ideas being dismissed without due consideration? You hear the same rhetoric from anti-vaxxers, creationists and climate change doubters.
The problem is a lack of perspective. Crackpots of all stripes don't know that they're crackpots. To them, their distorted thought patterns aren't distorted.
Or maybe I should just defer to how Isaac Asimov put it: "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"
> Try challenging climate science, even in a valid way, and see how popular it is on reddit or HN or twitter.
It is an attitude that is a hallmark of cranks of all forms who think they've pierced the veil, but almost inevitably they have fallen for some distorted thinking that they can't see beyond due to the limitations of being trapped in their own head and echo chamber.
I would add that logical fallacies like ad hominem are only useful up to a point. In the real world, once a group of people advance N obviously false arguments, they will lose credibility and their N+1th argument will be treated less seriously. I don't think the N+1th argument should ever be entirely ignored, but these people can't expect to be up on a podium presenting to a climatology conference if they have a long history of advancing ludicrous and/or dishonest arguments and have no deep expertise in the domain.
And labeling groups who disagree with them as “heretics”, “crazies”, “cranks”, etc is how the orthodoxy censors — as they’ve done for thousands of years.
That the orthodoxy seeks to censors dissent rather than address it, particularly when ignoring their own ridiculous members (eg, Al Gore and Greta Thunberg making absurd statements), is why trust in institutions has collapsed. Institutions now routinely engage in obviously dumb ideas because they censor their critics and then run off a metaphorical cliff.
In allowing themselves to censor and demean “cranks”, orthodox institutions have rotted badly — both from the perspective of delivering quality results and from the perspective of driving effective policy change.
It's also how you accurately describe people who actually are cranks, such as creationists, flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, and so on. That these labels can sometimes be wrongly weaponized doesn't mean that such descriptions aren't also sometimes accurate and helpful.
It's useful to have a unifying descriptive label because it reflects the fact that all these groups of people are similar in one important way: they think there exists an orthodoxy that are stifling any questioning of an official narrative. When, in reality, this "orthodoxy" are simply a group of people who know more about the topic than you, and who view the crank in the same way that you view flat earthers. As people with distorted thinking who have advanced an argument that is entirely void of merit.
> That the orthodoxy seeks to censors dissent rather than address it
How do you think biologists should deal with the claims of creationists? That's not a rhetorical question. There are many, many groups with a grievance against the "orthodoxy", who harbour perceptions of being ignored/censored Do you think creationists are unfairly treated by biologists? Or do you think biologists are correct to ignore them? If you think biologists are correct in doing so, doesn't that violate the principles you've outlined?
> (eg, Al Gore and Greta Thunberg making absurd statements)
Climate activists != climatologists.
For the record - I personally agree with the findings of bodies like the IPCC. But I am not sure there is more than the aforementioned faith and some more indicators backing me up on that.
I believe it should be the same rule of thumb we are accustomed to using elsewhere.
If we have a computer security question, we will defer to the people who have dedicated 30 years of their life to mastering computer security. Whatever their opinion is, it's statistically more likely to be correct than whatever opinion I have after 2 weeks of "research". Likewise for astronomy, neurosurgery, being a pilot, and any other complicated area of study. I can't fly a plane, I can't operate the LHC, and I don't know anything about vaccines, so in all of these areas I need to outsource my opinions, to an extent, to the people that know these things better than everyone else. It's not perfect, and we can call that imperfection faith, but I can't think of a better approach.
Here are two biologists that might not agree with your statement. https://www.youtube.com/@DarkHorsePod/
People are probably downvoting you because you're coming across as either contrarian at best or bad-faith at worst. Surely you realize this.
I just believe that there is a tremendous amount of pressure (financial and otherwise) to publish, there is academic pressure to toe the line on popular theories, and humans are fallible.
This is most likely the same for climate science as it is for medical research or any scientific field.
Has it, though?
The South Korean paper claimed to have found "The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor". It took a month for researchers around the world to essentially debunk this.
Science works by peer review, yes, but that should have never been a claim to begin with. They were blinded by excitement of the results and eager to publish the paper, instead of being conservative and making sure they got everything right.
Now it's clear that they missed several key aspects that seem trivial in retrospect. It's just sloppy science.
Sure, this caused much excitement in science nerds everywhere, and the media got more ad impressions, but overall I wouldn't qualify this particular event as "super healthy".
Coincidentally, or not, this[1] is currently on the front page.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333487946_Over-opti...
As I understand it the paper was a leaked preprint. Which means they didn't "claim" anything, but were distributing it to get peer review and feedback before publishing.
LK-99 would have interesting applications, known and unknown, but we have a pretty good understanding of superconductors based on 100 years of practical research, and I find this kind of instant punditry pretty tiresome.
Which seems ideal to me. Very educational.
I hope that those that got dashed (and observed the dashing) take a step back the next time something from "FuturistSuperScienceNews.com" or whatever pops up touting a revolutionary XYZ. Those sites are like 99% trash that train their readers to distrust science when their clickbate articles don't pan out. If I were conspiracy minded, I'd swear they exist to build out a mistrust in institutions.
REBCO supports stronger magnetic fields, and conveniently, tokamak output scales with the fourth power of magnetic field strength.
So instead of being 400 times the volume of a PWR with the same gross power output, they're just 40 times the volume. It's no panacea to the economic challenges facing fusion.
The other way to get high volumetric power density is go with a configuration of higher beta, the ratio of plasma pressure to magnetic pressure (fusion power at a given magnetic field scales as beta^2). Helion isn't using superconductors at all.
I suppose I didn't expect that we necessarily had like, the "absolute most efficient that could be made" (if that is something substantially more complicated at a materials-science level than "some simple-to-make-alloy"), but I hadn't imagined that it was a substantial difference. (I think I had imagined that they were... copper wires with like, surrounding metal tubes, or something? I hadn't thought much about it.)
Could you either say, or give my a search term I should look up in order to read, a little more about the trade-off being made between materials cost and efficiency of transmission lines?
Super conductors are superconductive to a point. Once that point is crossed they turn into regular conductors. (I've seen ~1A cited. For context, EVs charge at around 500A).
To make them useful for power transmission, you'd have to up the voltage to insane levels to avoid collapsing the field.
The AmpaCity project in Essen, Germany, gives insights about the implementation details, as the involved parties were required to publish their work.
https://www.enargus.de/pub/bscw.cgi/?op=enargus.eps2&q=%2201...
for the specific aspect under discussion, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology report is of interest:
https://www.tib.eu/de/suchen/id/TIBKAT:872231372/Ampacity-10...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yttrium_barium_copper_oxide#/m...
[1] https://www.amsc.com/comed-and-amsc-announce-successful-inte...
If we did discover a room-temperature superconductor, I suspect it would be a while before the cost to produce it in the bulk quantities required for electrical transmission are economically attractive compared to what’s already available.
Communication/low voltage is a different matter of course.
They might find a niche in some instruments in probes, but for wiring it does not make sense. The rest of the probe electronics don't like being that cold.
Note that there is no guarantee that that would ever happen. Electrical resistance is not the only thing you need for something to be an economically efficient power line. While superconductors are by definition excellent in terms of electrical resistance, there is nothing to guarantee that they wouldn't be too brittle, or too heavy, or too hard to mould into the required shape, or simply require materials that are too rare on Earth. And all of these would not be things that can just be worked around with better production processes or smart engineering - they would be fundamental limitations of the specific material, just like the low temperature requirements of currently known superconductors will never be improved with more research.
So this isn't a matter of when they would reach the point of being better economically, it's also very much a matter of if they would ever reach that point. Hopefully, we'll get lucky one day and find a material that is superconducting at room temperature and above, that is study and light and easy to make into wires and made out of abundantly available elements. LK-99 certainly wasn't most of these things. Even if it had been superconducting, it wasn't a good candidate for any of the other properties we want anyway, so it likely wouldn't have been much better than other known materials for most applications.
There is a good chance that they never reach the exponential breakpoints that everyone likes to fantasize about.
In other cases it is more important to reduce resistance, not so much because of the power loss but because of what the power loss means: the generation of heat that may be difficult to remove.
Of course you can get around those problems at extra cost, but it is more than a straight up comparison of the material cost of the conductor.
Very expensive to build anything sizable out of it
It does have excellent anti-corrosion properties.
I wonder what kinds of alloys we will see in the potential future with asteroid mining and thus comparatively cheap gold. Imagine replacing lead with gold in industrial applications. Or the stainless steels with a gold component in them.
My guess is the main application will be for space missions that find it cheaper to carry mining/manufacturing equipment rather than all the materials they need. Even that seems potentially a ways off. I suppose we could mine asteroids for science sooner, but that's quite a bit different than any mission plan which includes mining as a part of the required logistics. Maybe if there's some materials needed for extending life support capabilities? But still I'd have to wonder why not just take the extra supplies with you.
Maybe a moon or Mars base could change some calculus. As I suspect the break even point of such a plan may require lots of use of any such equipment.
Aluminum wires even made it into residential housing when copper was expensive/rare. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminum_building_wiring
Copper is expensive so over hundreds of miles you may not want that.
Can you point me in the direction to learn more about this?
You're correct, and this highlights a problem I often see in discussions: "efficiency" just is a measure of benefit/cost. Without knowing the units of benefit and cost, people aren't making meaningful statements when they say "efficient". The important efficiency of transmission lines is capacity per dollar, not capacity per material, and no material requiring lab crystallization is going to be remotely competitive in capacity per dollar.
Maybe new technology made in a lab can one day scale up and compete against current low-cost high-scale solutions. Crazy idea, I know.
However, trying to artificially limit all discussion about R&D and future tech by claiming "it's more expensive than fully scaled solutions" has got to be full luddism. This loom prototype is too expensive! I can hire a man for a shilling a day!
>material requiring lab crystallization
How are you going to string a crystals between towers? The material properties are all wrong for this application.
As far as I'm aware this is a brittle /inflexible material so my point about the mechanical properties still stands.
And when people refer to growing crystals, that generally refers to a particular kind of crystal. Ive never heard of anyone growing aluminium crystals, except if it's a compound, and then you get a crystal like we think of when we say crystals.
Yes. You want them to be ductile (malleable, or that can be deformed permanently in less-technical language). Although they could also be flexible (meaning that they can deform, but go back to their natural shape if we stop applying a force), as in the case of fibre optics cables, which are actually not crystals but quite brittle.
The interesting twist is that a solid pretty much has to be a crystal to be malleable. Almost all the metals you can think of are in their crystalline state.
> And when people refer to growing crystals, that generally refers to a particular kind of crystal.
I don’t know. From my experience people equate crystals with shiny things without really thinking about it. But this is HN, and we should try to be a bit better than a random person on the street. After all, most people don’t know a web browser from an OS, but I would be ridiculed if I make that confusion here.
It is a wonderful community where you are almost certain to discuss with some experts in pretty much any given field, it is a great opportunity to learn and grow.
> Ive never heard of anyone growing aluminium crystals
If you’ve seen solid aluminium, then you’ve seen it as a crystal. It is pretty much impossible with common techniques to get non-crystalline solid aluminium.
> except if it's a compound, and then you get a crystal like we think of when we say crystals.
That’s the thing, I don’t know what you think of when you say “crystal”. In actual fact, a crystal is a state of condensed matter in which atoms or ions are aligned in a 3-dimensional pattern that can be replicated to fill the space. In the case of aluminium, you can actually see how the atoms are arranged in a periodic way in articles such as this one (figure 3): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323423565_Anomalous... . There are many other examples, and it is absolutely fascinating. We have the tools to count atoms and see the structure of the material!
And it is undoubtedly a crystal.
A ceramic?
I'm happy to accept that internet explorer isn't an OS, but it would be nice to know what terminology you would find acceptable.
I am not blaming you, I know the knowledge of the general population of this sort of things is not great and you cannot know it before some tells you. A whole bunch of new age scams would completely fall apart if most people actually knew what a crystal is and where we can find them.
They are not ceramics because this is used for compounds with elements such as oxygen or nitrogen, which is not applicable here. Aluminium oxide, Al2O3, which used in sapphire "glass" in watches, is a ceramic that contains aluminium.
No, you're just the one pedantically enforcing a definition that's irrelevant to the conversation at large.
You aren't holding up your end of the conversation. Being a good listener means putting some effort into understanding what people are trying to say even if they get terminology a bit wrong. Jumping in to correct people on minor misuses of terminology doesn't show you're smart, it shows that you care more about correcting them than about their ideas.
I mean, cool, good to know copper and aluminum are crystalline metals, but the point here is that they're ductile and LK-99 isn't--you can't make wires out of LK-99. Arguing that copper and aluminum are crystals isn't adding to the conversation, it's just missing the point.
> No, you're just the one pedantically enforcing a definition that's irrelevant to the conversation at large.
I am not enforcing anything. How could I, anyway? I am pointing out an error in terminology. It is far from irrelevant, all the threads about that subject are full of misinterpretations and misunderstandings. One of the reason for that is that scientific articles use the jargon of the field, which can deviate from how certain words are used in our daily lives.
> You aren't holding up your end of the conversation. Being a good listener means putting some effort into understanding what people are trying to say even if they get terminology a bit wrong. Jumping in to correct people on minor misuses of terminology doesn't show you're smart, it shows that you care more about correcting them than about their ideas.
It is not a small vocabulary issue. This stuff is fundamental materials science and you cannot understand anything about this subject if you are confused about this. Again, this thread is full of people who are confused because they don’t understand some words in the same way as the writer. Crystalline and amorphous materials have very different properties as far as conductivity is concerned. The crystalline aspect is fundamental.
> I mean, cool, good to know copper and aluminum are crystalline metals, but the point here is that they're ductile and LK-99 isn't--you can't make wires out of LK-99. Arguing that copper and aluminum are crystals isn't adding to the conversation, it's just missing the point.
What is missing the point is that we know how to make wires with brittle materials. Prime examples are silica in fibre optics and YBCO in superconducting tape. And yes, whether they are crystalline or not is very important for both of them.
No, even at scale, materials that you can extract from ore are inherently going to be cheaper than materials you have to extract from three different ores and then crystallize, even in a manufacturing lab. These just aren't comparable processes, and no amount of scale is ever going to fix that.
Instead of assuming I'm making a disingenuous point, you might have asked for clarification.
That's setting aside the problems others have brought up, which is that the materials in question have other properties besides conductivity which make these materials inappropriate for transmission application.
As with all toy models being applied to the real world, there are important factors to model in that aren't immediately obvious.
If you remove that, those things become... really, just tubes wrapped in various coils connected to a software defined radio of average quality.
Also you can't just write off the fringe field.
Would a cheap room temperature superconductor bring any benefits here?
High-efficiency DC-DC converters often use a resonant tank circuit[1], which supports high-frequency operation and zero-current or zero-volt switching, which together significantly reduces switching losses.
In such a circuit I imagine superconducting inductors/transformers and superconducting capacitors could be beneficial to improving efficiency further.
Keep in mind though that resonant DC-DC converters can reach 98% (or higher) efficiency already[3] with current tech.
[1]: https://www.analog.com/en/technical-articles/an-efficiency-p...
[2]: https://www.monolithicpower.com/understanding-llc-operation-...
[3]: https://ietresearch.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1049/iet-... (random example)
So popular science wraps it in a "what you could do with it. maybe. possibly." Or what it means. And commenters have latched onto it, but a lot is said with an air of confidence, of just-so. "Oh uh, superconductors, conducting is passing electricity from one end to the next, super is like really good, uuh uh uh... I know, what about power lines from the Sahara to Europe so they can build solar collectors down there!"
Same with exoplanets, the actual science is "yeah the luminosity of this star drops by 0.0003% at a cycle of 300 days and we're getting some photons that indicate there may be hydrogen molecules", pop sci turns that into "EARTH-2 TEEMING WITH LIFE DISCOVERED, GENERATION SHIP WHEN?"
They achieved this fusion by creating a container of material that produced massive amounts of xrays when it was bombarded by a high powered laser. These xrays caused another container's surface to ablate at such a rate it compressed its interior to the point that fusion was achieved.
However, this being a weapons lab, they created the experiment to model the secondary device in an H-Bomb. The secondary is theorized outside the Top Secret world to be a cylindrical tamper of (enriched?) uranium. One hypothesis in the public sphere, is its the primary device's Xrays that cause this to ablate at such a rate and that the inside is compressed to achieve fusion. The purpose of the fusion is primarily for the neutrons it generates, which are used to cause a massive amount of fission in the tamper, producing the majority of the energy. For example, if replace the uranium with another non-fissile material, and you have a "neutron bomb".
The reason the breathless hype annoyed me is that at no point was usable energy the desire of the test. In fact, the test solely was to feed real world data back into the supercomputer models, so that we know how our existing stockpile of weapons would work or even perhaps to find optimizations. We know this mechanism of ablation causing fusion works, we've known for 60+ years, all we're doing is doing it in a lab.
I'm not sure why there is this need to hype these events, like fusion or LK-99 so much. It seems that being a naysayer is reacted to as if the naysayers are explaining a magician's tricks. As if we don't hype these events the public will lose interest, or even our children will drop out of STEM careers.
You are telling me that a US weapons lab just announced a successful path to a laser triggered pure fusion bomb? Yikes!
Not actually sure if it can be used to ignite more fusion fuel, but if they using this to test secondaries then it sounds like it might.
I really hope we get fusion reactors before pure fusion bombs, as pure fusion bombs are going to be a nuclear non-proliferation nightmare. While it might not be easier to built pure fusion bombs than bombs with a fission trigger, controlling the precursors and knowledge is going to be very difficult.
> "Fusion power is here! All we need to do is engineering!".
I agree with this statement and it has been true of fusion since at least the early 2000s. Don't underestimate the difficulty of engineering. Safe fission breeder reactors are an engineering problem as well, one which humanity has largely abandoned due to repeated failures.
However... In the early 80s, the SDI initiative aimed to have orbiting satellites that utilized x-ray lasers to shoot down incoming warheads. The theory of these were you had h-bombs in orbit, with long cylinders of a material that would amplify the x-rays from the bomb. You'd point these at the incoming warheads and trigger the bomb and (chefs kiss) you have beams of xrays that would destroy warheads.
One of the major reasons this was skuttled, was that the test they used to find a material they thought amplified xrays was flawed (see below).
With the test-ban treaty, they weren't able to test any other materials. Now we have a facility that tests materials to amplify x-rays...
Sidenote: The test was, explode a bomb in a tunnel, shut the tunnel down with explosives to trap the shockwave, then use the xrays to test materials to withstand x-rays as well as amplify them. Teller thought they had seen amplification and sold the military on the satellite idea. Another scientist, thought it was a secondary thermal effect on Oxygen. There is an interesting story about the back and forth, and the pressure to have another scientist lose his credentials for disagreeing with Teller, that is a good follow on to the Oppenheimer story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excalibur
I agree with you, if you have fission triggers, you aren't going to want to use lasers. At least with today's lasers.
> I wouldn't be too worried about this test creating a new weapon.
My concern is that NNP has focused on controlling access to fissionable material, so potentially this is a path to h-bomb that doesn't require fissionable material. As lasers get better, secondaries that don't use controlled fission materials become a risk. At what point does the world start having to worry about controlling access to lasers? How does this impact the future research and funding of lasers?
Additionally if you can test h-bombs without tests. This also makes it easier to develop and test a h-bomb without revealing you have an h-bomb. Typically nuclear weapons tests are detectable via seismographs.
Just economics? :-))
Materials science is practically <<civilization>>.
The Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age.
The other axes are: energy production, transportation improvements. But even those frequently come from materials science. The steam engine needed mass production of high quality steel, etc.
It’s a fun exercise, but it’s fantastical thinking.
I understand a lot of people were more cautious and jaded, but this was my first go-round on the science news hype-mobile. I was really, really excited! It was a real emotional rollercoaster (if you imagine a rollercoaster that takes a couple of weeks to get anywhere).
The full paper with the original samples were reportedly sent to Korea University of Science and Technology for examination. That lab group has only so far verified the structure of the material, no word on whether they've replicated it or its actual properties based on replicated samples or the original samples.
Until we hear from them, everyone (including Nature) is just guessing.
We're talking about condensed matter physics here, arxiv needs zero exposure in this field. It is extremely common to publish on arxiv first and only then begin the process of submitting the same manuscript to be published (and peer reviewed) in a journal.
And while there are still some authors that skip over publishing pre-prints at all, there's no serious arxiv competitor if you do decide to publish pre-prints. It is a de-facto monopoly in this field.
But then that is what happens a lot in various fields. Something that seems obvious isn't done because those that actually know the field can explain all the details you didn't know. Anyone here in programming have had that battle with upper management...
Hey lesson learned in this case. Don't always assume you have a grasp of all the details.
There's a lot of modern physics, chemistry, biology that is uncritically accepted which I think deserves a somewhat higher bar of skepticism than RTSC
Soon after the other researchers realized and published a 6-author paper only hours after.
What a drama.
I had a similar experience when reading up on the history of gyroscopes recently. Its absolutely amazing to watch the advances and miniaturization from mechanical to optical to now micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS). Watching the giant machines from the space race first shrink, then get replaced by light traveling fiber optics to now vibrating bits of silicone. With the prices imploding as a result.
Still havent fully grasped the implications of older lithography systems being now usable for electro, mechanical and optical applications. Especially as they seem to be quite affordable, especially with multi-project wafers. With open source project even getting chips for free via google.
no need for a science paper for that, they should've written science fiction or created an educational documentary.
Bad Science and Room Temperature Superconductors - Sixty Symbols: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl-AgmoZ5mo
Totally disagree. If anything, this whole episode (debacle?) reinforced the fact that science works and the process played out exactly how the scientific process should work:
1. First, the paper was originally posted on arxiv, meaning it was a pre-print and didn't go through any peer review. So the vast majority of comments I saw on it was "Wow, this would be really cool, if it turns out to be true."
2. Immediately many labs around the world started trying to replicate the results. And very quickly there were some negative results that came back.
3. The thing that I think is so cool is not only did negative results come back, but from TFA people now have a very good understanding of why the initial analysis was incorrect. That's great science.
One may argue that this was really a failure in media communication vs. the actual underlying science, but if anything it teaches appropriate skepticism, especially when a report is initially published, without peer review, without yet being replicated, that ends with the sentence "We believe that our new development will be a brand-new historical event that opens a new era for humankind."
> One may argue that this was really a failure in media communication vs. the actual underlying science
the scientific process and scientists here are innocent, media not so much in my eyes.
That said, I really loved that Sixty Symbols video for a couple reasons:
1. First, Moriarty was pretty much exactly spot on in his skepticism: the reduction in resistivity is not the behavior you'd expect to see in a superconductor (turned out to be due to copper sulfide impurities), and that the floating in a magnet behavior is not that surprising and could be due to diamagnetism.
2. I wasn't previously that familiar with diamagnetism beyond a vague "I remember hearing about that", so this whole thing led me known the wikipedia rabbit hole to find out about diamagnetism which was really interesting to me.
3. Professor Moriarty explains "this is not how you do science" (bad science by over-hyped press release is at least as old as cold fusion) and gives very good advice on how you should do good science in an age of Arxiv.
The media is often wrong about many things. Sometimes due to ignorance. Others negligence. And occasionally its malicious. If anyone figures out how to fix that without destroying freedom of the press they should get a nobel.
https://www.google.com/search?q=lk-99&sca_esv=557962971&biw=...
As a PhD physics scientist with a familiarity with this area, I’m glad this got the attention it did and showed science working “as it should”.
As for the "audacity of HN" - this site is a very bizarre mixture of a relatively small number of working scientists, a lot of people without much scientific background who are very interested in science, and get-rich-quick startup types who are sniffing around for the next breakthrough they can turn into money. That mix leads to weird dynamics when it comes to how scientific activities get discussed.
Consensus was that this would lead to more people interested in the field and what actually does work.
There’s heaps of sloppy science out there. There are massive structural issues in how science is done.
There’s obviously not enough money or prestige in condensed matter physics if Phil thinks this is a bad hoax and it’s bad for Science.
Within the space of a month this was resolved. It wasn’t even published. Go to pharma, medicine, vet, ag and you will see hoaxes that last years. Reviewers who don’t have any relevant knowledge. Journals which won’t retract until you threaten to sue them. Universities that will take no disciplinary action against hoaxers at all. LK-99 was almost debunked in a single media cycle.
The people who have taken this to reduce the credibility of science rather than these fallible humans who succumbed to their impulse for fame didn’t give science any credibility in the first place.
EDIT: shout out to our favourite website retraction watch. Anything you read there remember, that’s science working and some Scientist somewhere who likes being right has vanquished their enemy in the academy. https://retractionwatch.com/
He clearly doesn't think it's worth his time to understand anything about LK-99, its history, or its popularity. It seems like most anybody that watched the fireworks show is more informed than he is. So what's the video about?
The same way he says "this isn't how science is done", you could say also say what he's doing isn't how peer review or journalism is done. What's not being addressed is that this kind of arrogance and appeal to authority is EXACTLY what flat-earthers and the lot are rebelling against, and the solution is not to put up more walls.
There are now potentially 10s or 100s of thousands of people who have seen how the sausage gets made, what kind of pitfalls there are, how measurements can lead to false conclusions, and mistakes can be made; and they're absolutely fascinated by it and want to learn how to do things better.
"An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people."
This doesn't mean that every individual needs to be an expert in every field. You only have to know so much about a given field and the processes within it to develop a degree of confidence in your perspective on who you can trust, and extend that trust to the people they trust.
Mistrust in science is borne of ignorance, but not in the way that you think.
As someone who remembers the original cold fusion debacle well, this felt exactly the same to me: announce a result with a ton of unnecessary hype and fanfare (I mean, the closing sentence in the paper was just absurd in my opinion) without first trying to (a) at least call up some experts in superconductivity to get their opinion, or at least (b) write a paper with less of a "new era for humanity" tone. This smelled 100% of these researchers chasing glory without a modicum of introspection. I thought the most important part of the video is where the professor said that scientists are taught that when they get weird results, their first instinct should absolutely be to question it: what could have gone wrong? how could my experimental setup have been flawed? These researchers showed none of that appropriate skepticism.
The video is published merely 1 day ago, when the consensus that "LK-99 isn't it" had already been formed, and these points have been long discussed by other scientists and random people on Internet long time ago.
There is nothing newsworthy about these points; they're even borderline hindsight.
Shaming laypeople and the media for not being scientifically literate enough to navigate quickly-releasing literature on quantum mechanics isn’t good for science either. It stifles curiosity, and this kind of take is what hinders people from taking an interest in science in the first place. What’s important is that as new information comes in, those same laypeople are willing to take in that new information, which is exactly what happened.
Science isn’t perfect and in this case, the process worked exactly as designed.
What is the medias representation of the future now? A burning shithole, no future. It's depressing and not true. I enjoyed the few days of excitement, I want us to go back to having an optimistic outlook on the future of humanity.
Humans are the greatest adaptors to a given environment, even if the climate catastrophising ends up being true, we will survive.
How to be really optimistic?
Get away from the news, social media. Spend more time on hobbbies, family and friends. Do something for your community.
These things will make you happier
There was some drama between the authors, the science was sloppy and the writing inappropriate, but AFAIK, no faked data, no secrecy, they gave away their recipe in a way that allowed for reproduction attempts, and a few weeks later, we have a convincing explanation. Stupidity, not malice.
It's not wrong to be excited, but there is a sort of fatigue which builds up, like the boy who cried wolf.
In the background you'll have heard older voices whisper warnings about the previous time.
For the next ~10 to 20 years people will shout "Remember LK99" for every overly-grandiose severely-lacking scientific paper.
Then a new paper will hit the right mix of attention-chasers and ignorance.
I'll be there, just whispering warning.
And he did not talk at all about the scientifically most interesting part of the affair, which was the clever investigation from multiple angles that finally unearthed the explanation. It's as though he just ran his mouth without reading the literature... which is not a very scientific thing to do, is it?
Toxic positivity is poisoning our culture. We need antidote.
LK99 - A new room temperature superconductor? https://youtu.be/RjzL9cS3VW8
https://www.google.com/search?q=lk-99&sca_esv=557962971&biw=...
The only reason this story has a happy ending is the authors included manufacturing instructions. But everything else about the paper is not a good model of how to publish (wild claims that you will revolutionise the world, the title, the bad graphs, the 2nd paper that was published with different authors...).
The fact that papers get retracted is nothing new. Science as a field is already generally good at retractions. Science is generally bad at incentivising reproduction... But this case was extreme and not a good model. It should not require sensationalist news and dozens of labs to reproduce a paper that was failing peer review.
The paper wasn't published, despite the phrasing in the nature article. arXiv is effectively a moderated blog
The failures of science are the papers that are outright fraud and as such are cunningly crafted to deceive and it actually works, and we believe falsehoods to this day - which I think we agree on being the failure of science.
This however was not. Yes the paper shouldn’t have been published. But it was. Etc. As humans are wont to do. Science didn’t happen in the news - excitement happened in the news. Human failures and bias reigned. Yet Science happened in the lab. That is victory.
Yet, the fact there are failures in no way impugns the victories.
The results weren't formally published.
You're right that the system ultimately worked.
But doing things "well" isn't just to win some aesthetics contest. It's essential precisely because, due to all our human flaws, it's too easy to delude yourself by doing sloppy work.
In this case, doing sloppy work has won the authors international fame and attention -- an insult to all those who do their experiments properly.
The LK-99 authors probably didn't do themselves any favors in the long run, but it is easy to think of examples where sloppy work leads to some quick social media wins, but the topic is not as sexy so ultimately isn't scrutinized in the same way.
Social media clout is already playing a role in hiring decisions, and social media is only becoming more important. If they haven't already done so, it's just a matter of time before funding agencies factor it into their decisions.
Performative show science designed to wow a mass public is exactly what we don't need.
These things actually require real, deep study, talent, and tens of thousands of hours of hard work to do and assess properly. The people doing that need to be able to do their work in peace without needing to pander to crowds.
When I explained to her the potential if it truly was the breakthrough being reported, her first reaction was:
"I hope we establish a government agency to regulate everything floating around because I don't want to get bumped into by random stuff".
It's a point, but well human need to push the limit, no matter what.
The materials and hardware required to make LK-99 are within the reach of a high school. It's really simple and doesn't require anything more than a very hot oven (hotter than a domestic one, but still very common). If it'd turned out to be a real superconductor anyone who wanted to make it could have done.
The pure LK-99 crystals pictured in the article were obtained using more advanced technique: "Unlike previous synthesis attempts that relied on crucibles, the researchers used a technique called floating zone crystal growth that allowed them to avoid introducing sulfur into the reaction, eliminating the Cu2S impurities."
But I agree that if there's money to be made, it will be available world wide quickly.
Probably not. Being crystalline and being a ceramic are completely unrelated. Standard superconductors like niobium-tin and niobium-titanium are crystalline metals (intermetallic alloys). The vast majority of metals are crystalline, to the point that when a company tried to make a metallic glass a couple of years ago (under the name Liquid Metal), it made quite a bit of noise.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=superconducting+tape&iax=im...
Aren’t the LHC magnets niobium-titanium? Those aren’t high temperature superconductors. Though it is indeed a metal under any definition. The rule of thumb is that high-temperature superconductors can be cooled by liquid nitrogen alone. This is not the case of the LHC magnets, which also have a liquid helium cooling loop.
> They're metallic, so you can form them into the shape you need without having to manufacture it in that shape to begin with, since you'd need another superconductor to join pieces like glue, which we don't have.
The term “metallic” is unhelpful because often in material science it just means an electronic conductor (a material with a non-zero density of states at the Fermi level). Under that definition, some ceramics are metallic, and the opposite of “metallic” is “insulator”, or sometimes “semi-conductor”.
YBCO, which is probably the most used high-temperature superconductor, is an oxyde, so a ceramic, but still an electronic (super)conductor, so metallic. The fact that it’s an oxyde does not prevent its use, notably in spherical tokamaks.
So I don’t know the person you’re referencing but their background work on the subject seems less than adequate, from what you say.
They're saying that LHC does not use a ceramic, and therefore high-temperature, superconductor; instead they use metallic (cooled) superconductors because they can be molded.
There are lots of reasons to use more classical superconductors in the LHC, just as in ITER. Some are design and engineering issues, as you mention. Another one is that the tapes we use for YBCO were not a practical thing when the LHC was designed. But now they are (though they haven’t been used in such a large scale) and you can bet that they’ll jump at any opportunity to get rid of the helium loop and take advantage of the stronger magnetic fields you can get with YBCO.
Well, nobody mentioned cermets, or wires, and there are plenty of applications for superconductors beyond wires. Even so, we are perfectly able to make fibre optics cables with silica, which is a ceramic.
> we need a substance that is malleable(?) enough like copper wire that electrons can pass through.
Malleability (actually, ductility) has nothing to do with electric conductivity. It can be useful depending on the use case, but for example on a printed circuit you don’t care about that. Not everything is a dangling wire.
YBCO a ceramic superconductor, it is used in thin films that are deposited on metallic substrates in tapes and it works well. See figure 2 of the paper here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271637455_Dipole_Ma... .
Also, you might not realise this but pretty much nothing is malleable at liquid helium temperature.
> Pottery ceramic wont work like that.
Sigh. Ceramics are not pottery, and more than 99% of the time do not have anything to do with pottery. Ceramics are compounds that are not intermetallic, typically oxides, sulphides, nitrides, etc. Some are bendy (though generally less than metallic alloys), some are hard, some are electric conductors, some are not. They have very diverse sets of properties.
They are everywhere in the chips on the device you use, in its display, in the power plants that make electrons move so you can use it, in any lithium-ion battery, etc. I don’t think I can name one device that does not involve ceramics. Even a shovel, either in the form of a passive layer that makes it stainless, or in the form of rust on it. None of that has anything to do with pottery.
Yes, but the minimal bending radius would be far from impressive.
> Thats the point. we need a substance that is malleable(?) enough like copper wire that electrons can pass through.
So many assumptions here. Copper wire is but one form that is useful for energy transport. But superconductors don't need a lot of thickness and parallel layers of tape have enough flex in one dimension to be very useful. Usually they allow for complex routing by adding twists, like flatcable, but given the magnetic fields involved you don't want to do that in free space but firmly tied down to something (preferably something non-magnetic!).
> Pottery ceramic wont work like that.
Ceramics are a vast class of materials, which includes pottery ceramics but also many others which have a very large range and diversity of properties. They are essentially a whole branch on the tree of materials science that range from Tungsten Carbide to diamond to ordinary clay and a whole raft of others.
"In almost all applications of superconductors, they don't use high-temperature ones. [...] The ones [the superconductors] that see use in the LHC, for instance, aren't [high temperature superconductors]."
It just has a sentence in the middle of it that confuses you into thinking their antecedents are "the HTSCs" and "ceramic" instead of "the SCs" and "HTSCs".
The liquid helium cooled niobium-titanium can make strong field and is easy to produce. The RBCOs superconductors, YBCO is the main one, are liquid nitrogen cooled and make even higher magnetic fields. It sounds like it took a while to figure out how make them in bulk.
YBCO superconductors are going to be revolution but will take time for the older systems to disappear. Good example is ITER, which was designed for liquid helium magnets cause nothing else was practical at the time. The SPARC tokamak from MIT uses YBCO magnets which means it can be smaller, higher field, and cheaper cooling.
The problem is that this is not true anymore. It was true when I was in high school. Modern methods of manufacturing cuprate superconductors have been applied to the largest-scale projects:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holbrook_Superconductor_Projec...
https://publikationen.bibliothek.kit.edu/1000075557/4402937
https://indico.cern.ch/event/775529/contributions/3309887/at...
Ceramic "high-temp" ones are not used because they still operate at very low temperatures so you are not completely free of cooling requirements, they are just slightly lower.
In that case it may make sense to use superconductor with better material properties in exchange for more cooling.
A room temperature ambient pressure superconductor would remove the need for special cooling so it would be vastly better than current "high" temperature ones.
> LK-99 is not a superconductor, but an insulator with a resistance in the millions of ohms
And furthermore, the graphs from the original pre-print article are just graphs of the resistivity of Cu2S.
It sounds like there's nearly zero chance of any further science here (beyond confirmation).
Other comments from more informed people indicate it’s unlikely that this will yield anything useful though.
It's like we have a murder suspect, the murder weapon, and fingerprints lifted from the scene. At this point it could still be space aliens, but nobody in their right mind would treat that possibility seriously.
Not sure what to make of that but that's what I'll remember most about this debacle.
Or was all this just a mistake, from a usefulness perspective.
It was fun to watch, nice to get hope of something so cool, and good to see the scientific process in action.
But is there any reason to keep researching LK-99 over some other random compound?
I read some of the papers linked in this article, but they use different units and don't identify a diamagnetic susceptibility in the way that I'm used to, so I'm not sure if that was confirmed (and I have stuff to do).
The preprint reporting the high value of diamagnetism is here:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.03110.pdf
>The subtracted diamagnetic susceptibility is larger than that of Bismuth and water but smaller than that of Pyrolytic carbon (page 3, bottom left)
This is always sad to see but I get it
i.e. you have not only to resist the industry moneybags, but also defy odds anyway
It's like being a former actor (of undisclosed repute) turned waiter if Hollywood A-list pay was not great (and B-list awful).
Nobody has tested it at 0.0000000000000K after all
It'd be cool to find it was superconducting at a temperature near that high though. That'd still be one of the best high temperature superconductors we've found.
And science isn't about saying wood isn't a superconductor because it's impractical to test. That's not a result. You may be getting science confused with engineering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_resistivity_and_con...
So it sounds like the leak was in fact a positive and that overall rewarding people with nobel prizes is detrimental to science.
edit: it's OK to make mistakes. If science focused on EXPERIMENTING instead of trying to be the arbiter of truth on how the world is, we'd progress much farther. Maybe there is a reason why it seems physics has been stuck for the past 50+ years... maybe it is a shift in culture, driven social media, the fear of being wrong, of being shamed by the collective, of using the improper labels, etc. that is holding everyone back.
Their favorite radio station in IL? 104.8 KCRF, all phase transitions, all the time.
The fact that it could not be replicated is not surprising, considering the sloppiness of the original preprint. But still, it was a very public example of science in action.
What was also interesting is the response from some corners of the Internet who were more than happy to bash scientists who were supposedly trying to cover up their own incompetence by debunking the plucky researchers from a brave private institution. Well, most often if something sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is.
Has this really been happening?
It was particularly impressive to see some groups putting together high-quality, publication-ready preprints from scratch in the span of a month. Especially crazy when you think about the shoddy original papers that the Korean group spent years working on...
Is this effect novel and/or potentially useful as a material?
[0] https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/claims-of-room-tempe...
(Someone anonymously claimed they have a time machine on social media, so it must be true!)
Seriously though, it sounds like the research group is doing interesting work, and also being careful about the claims they make (even if the internet hype cycle is not), so kudos to them.
There is no evidence of them doing interesting work, either. If reporting is to be believed, their company mostly does unrelated consulting odd-jobs for the chaebols, and this was a passion project for Lee and Kim. But you know what? I'm glad there are oddballs like this on the fringe of science. They're mostly harmless, occasionally entertaining, and maybe once in an epoch they might come up with something real.
It’s been so cool to see all of the replication studies, people talking about the latest news and all of that. Kind of a peek behind the scientific curtain to see all of the work that goes into confirming claims.
It does seem that the doomsayers who predicted the Earth would stop spinning because of lay public speculating about LK-99 were wrong. The system works. Yay!
Novel for social media of sensationalist scientific news? Perhaps.
If none, does that mean scientific fraud (e.g. adding an impurity intentionally), or is there another credible explanation?
The dismissal of the partial levitation as ferromagnetism, on the other hand, doesn't strike me as especially robust. Ferromagnetism explains the partial levitation of tiny fragments of material generated by people trying to reproduce LK-99. Very light and thin pieces of ferromagnetic material will align themselves with a magnetic field. For example, Andrew McCalip (who streamed himself attempting to reproduce the material in his rocket startup's lab) generated a partially levitating fragment and sent it into USC, where they determined it was ferromagnetic. But bulk pieces of ferromagnetic material will just stick to magnets (or if they are magnetized, they will stick to one side and be unstably repelled from the other).
Ferromagnetism doesn't explain the levitation demonstrated in the videos put out by the original researches, though. Barring fraud, the most likely explanation for that kind of levitation is diamagnetism. The article mentions Derrick van Gennep recreating the partial levitation video with a chunk of pyrolytic graphite (one of the most diamagnetic materials we know of, other than superconductors), supergluing iron filings to a corner of it to anchor it to the magnet. The levitation in that video comes from diamagnetism, not ferromagnetism. LK-99 is primarily made of lead, not graphite, which is 5-10 times denser, so the diamagnetic effect must be at least that much stronger than pure pyrolytic graphite. The thing is, as the rest of the article points out, the supposed main constituents of LK-99 have now been extensively studied, and none of them appear to be especially diamagnetic, so something in those samples the original team recorded must be extremely diamagnetic to make up for it!
I wonder what would have happened if they would have pushed a paper out talking about anomalously high diamagnetism and skipped any mentions of superconducting. And let people speculate if it is a superconductor. I suppose we wouldn't be talking about it. But I hope that we see some group try to replicate the diamagnetic material properties.
If there is a theoretical model for ambient temperature superconductivity, then that should help us zoom in on potential materials that could be an actual superconductor someday?
To me, the interesting take-away is that, right at the end. All too often we see peer-review as this slow, inching, excruciating process, particularly in social sciences where it's a de-facto afterthought. It was great to see science chugging ferociously away like a (somewhat!) well-oiled machine, such as the electronic analysis via slightly different methods (e.g. DFT) and the material synthesis efforts by the Argonne NL and Max Planck Institute.
Farewell for now, RTSC.
Side-note: Pure LK-99 is visually beautiful! Who would-a known from those crumbly grey flakes, huh?
It overlaps with a sizable majority of the HN readerbase.
Not the mass media of grocery store checkout aisle magazines.
Only? Math, logic, arts, etc aren't knowledge?
What this episode has shown is that people don't know what they are talking about. Especially the ones cheerleading on the science's side.
Math and logic are as much subjected to falsification as physics or biology. Mathematicians write proofs, and their peers try to find flaws in them.
> arts, etc aren't knowledge?
I am obviously talking about scientific knowledge, and in that regard: No, they aren't. The study of art can be scientific, and is as subjected to empiricism and falsification as everything else. Art in itself however isn't.
If humanity forgot all the works of Mozart and Schubert, it would be a very sad day, but society would still function. If humanity forgot how to make steel, or had to rediscover the fourier transformation, we would have a problem.
No they are not.
> Mathematicians write proofs, and their peers try to find flaws in them.
There is a difference between checking whether a proof has flaws and running experiment to falsify a theory. In other words, when a proof has no flaws ( aka has been proven ), it's proven forever. Once euclid proved that there are an infinite amount of prime numbers, that's it. Nobody tries to falsify his claim because it's already been proven. Also, mathematicians checking for flaws in proofs is not empiricism. Go learn what empiricism means first before making absurd assertions.
Not only do you not know what science is, you don't even know what math is, you don't know what empiricism is.
> I am obviously talking about scientific knowledge
Then what's your nonsense about 'Math and logic are as much subjected to falsification as physics or biology.' Do you know what a syllogism is? How about modus ponens? Implication?
> If humanity forgot all the works of Mozart and Schubert, it would be a very sad day, but society would still function. If humanity forgot how to make steel, or had to rediscover the fourier transformation, we would have a problem.
If humanity forgot language, laws, government, etc, society would crumble as well.
Or are you going to pretend that language, laws, government, history, etc are now part of science.
Lots of interesting nitty gritty details. Also raises an interesting point about how lot of labs trying to reproduce LK99 are probably not doing it correctly.
So does this mean that the videos that showed LK-99 hovering but not rotating are fake? Or can you have that static hover effect without being a superconductor?
> He thought LK-99’s properties were more likely the result of ferromagnetism. So he constructed a pellet of compressed graphite shavings with iron filings glued to it. A video made by Van Gennep shows that his disc — made of non-superconducting, ferromagnetic materials — mimicked LK-99’s behaviour.
A few videos came out of full levitation, but it's pretty certain they are fake
I call it corruption - if you claim you have the sample that is a room temp supercondutor and you want the attention of the research community, how about just get some 3rd party to access your bloody sample? what we got was excuses after excuses.
Alas, today is just not my day.
The slurry is passed through super cooling nodes to keep it at sub temp.
and an a reverse C shape coupler is the drive - so you draw the lead/push the lead but you can maintain the coolant in a much more pulsed way?
Middle out.
C meets C in the CC (but with mirrors)((and magnets)) [Assume you have never evaluated how a roller-coaster works]
So, make a material with impurities only? :-)
Neo-Lamarckian Midwife Toads
Polywater
Cold Fusion
Schön's Single Molecule Organic Transistors
Cloned human stem cells
Faster-than-light Neutrinos
Let’s see.
> LK-99 is not a superconductor, but an insulator with a resistance in the millions of ohms — too high to run a standard conductivity test.
Now, this extraordinary claim doesn't even have weak evidence
I think pessimism is warranted at this point
Medicine/psychology/sociology and their inability to do replication is not science.
The internet has taught me to never trust material science advancements at face value. Batteries, solar power, superconductors, nanomaterials.. Even when they legit work, there is usually a straight forward reason why it just isn't feasible, and that is conveniently left out of the press release. I have to go to the HN comment section to get disappointed once again.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05294-9
https://www.science.org/content/article/something-seriously-...
Then getting called racist over having the opinion that the original authors sounded like amateurs.
Then seeing that briefly turn on a dime and the Beijing University preprint being instantly discredited in favor of "wait for western institutions to weigh in".
What a shame, but the attention seeking and hype clearly worked and duped many here. Even though they won't admit that they fell for the hype.
Be a bit skeptical next time.
What was the benefit to those doing the hype? What was the harm to those being "duped"?
I certainly went through periods of waxing and waning belief, but now that the dust is settled I don't think I am any worse for the wear.
It's not like this was a garden variety pump-and-dump or anything like that.
I think we can say that some of the current superconductor mechanisms don’t allow it at room temperature, but we don’t have enough of an overarching theory of superconductivity to say something like that more generally.
Aren't they confusing Type-I and Type-II superconductors?
Despite failures to reproduce the Pons/Fleischmann results, it spawned a whole new field: LENR which has very interesting yearly conferences.
Nevertheless, a piece of ferromagnetic material which has a permanent remanent magnetization (which is possible only for a subset of the ferromagnetic materials) when put on a magnet may take a position close to vertical, with one edge pressed on the magnet.
It is very easy to verify if this is what you see by moving the piece of material to the other pole of the magnet, where it must take a reversed position, with the other edge pressed on the magnet.
A diamagnetic material will be equally repelled by both poles of the magnet, so moving it between the poles will not change its behavior.
A soft ferromagnetic material, like iron, will be equally attracted by both poles of the magnet.
The explanations that iron impurities could be present in quantities so great as to form some unknown iron compounds with high coercivity and some unknown experimental circumstances could magnetize permanently the samples, are not significantly more credible than the claims that room-temperature superconductors do exist.
In any case, anyone who has made some samples can verify easily whether they are ferromagnetic or diamagnetic. It would be more credible that someone has made fake claims, than that they have mistaken a ferromagnetic material for a diamagnetic material.
Given that it's so easy for the experimenter to verify, you are saying that the most credible explanation is scientific fraud?
One person sees the opportunity it creating a hype train and gets a few buddies on board. Loads up on $1 calls for something they feel could be the next meme stock, like AMSC. Options start to load up on 7/18, just a few days before the 7/22 original drop on arxiv. You get the 7/22 drop and then uploads of grainy videos start to show up. Bank a few million in options contracts as the price of AMSC doubles overnight. Other people see the hype train leaving the station and start their own, using the same strategy.
It's how you end up with a dozen potato quality videos and very specific information attached to the comment threads, "This is going to be HUGE for quantum computing @IonQ_Inc if true."
We have seen these types of market manipulation scams in the past. This was the first time we've seen someone use something like arxiv to do this. Brilliant idea, really. We will see more in the future no doubt.
You can absolutely dismiss the opinions of anyone who acted excited about it.
[1]: I actually agree that it's very likely that alien life either has existed, does exist, or will exist somewhere in the universe. My skepticism is towards the possibility of that life visiting Earth. And mostly for the exact same reason: because the universe is so damn big.
People want these things to be true so bad that they will twist every detail to fit the narrative they want. It would be funny, if it weren't so sad.
Is that true? Do you think the Koreans or anyone would have made more progress finding the truth without the hype?
The truth was only discovered because the hype made a lot of scientists investigate the material.
For sure the hype caused a lot more focus on reproducability attempts than it would have got otherwise.
I should keep that in perspective and be a little less harsh.
A common thread in a lot of these stories is people pushing the idea that The Authorities are not to be trusted. The government is lying to you about UFOs! The scientific establishment has been sitting on room temperature superconductors for 20 years!
And sure, question authority.
But also question the people telling you to question authority.
Because contrarians are just ripe for affinity fraud, and while most of that affinity fraud is centered around alt-med, the cultivation of a pervasive distrust of authority is part of what enables the scam.
The reaction that synthesizes LK-99 uses an unbalanced recipe: for every 1 part copper-doped lead phosphate crystal — pure LK-99 — it makes, it produces 17 parts copper and 5 parts sulfur. These leftovers lead to numerous impurities — especially copper sulfide, which the Korean team reported in its sample.
Jain, a copper-sulfide expert, remembered 104ºC as the temperature at which Cu2S undergoes a phase transition if exposed to air. Below that temperature, Cu2S’s resistivity drops dramatically — a signal almost identical to LK-99’s purported superconducting phase transition. “I was almost in disbelief that they missed it.” Jain published a preprint on the important confounding effect on 7 August.
[...]
“That was the moment where I said, ‘Well, obviously, that’s what made them think this was a superconductor,’” says Fuhrer. “The nail in the coffin was this copper sulfide thing.”
Science is hard. Kudos to everyone involved for trying to replicate it and figuring this puzzle out.
I would have never known that people are actual experts in one material. This is impressive.
Which is why you should be wary of “experts” making overly broad claims about topics within their field but far outside their area of expertise.
Early on during Covid you would see postdoc infectious disease experts on every news channel 3 times daily giving their takes. Some of whom maybe took a 3000 level course in epidemiology when they were 21 and did their PhD on nematode infections in a single population of freshwater clams. Technically an infectious disease expert but I don’t particularly care what they have to say about Covid over a random person on the street either.
I would absolutely care more what they had to say over the rando, especially if they prefaced it with their level experience.
There was a B- or C-list physics blogger a few years back whose graduate homework I used to grade. (I still remember this one, so that should tell you something.) He got very angry that I gave him zero credit for one particular question. But he:
- did not use the standard/expected approach to this problem
- did not explain what he was doing well enough for me to find him any partial credit (this is not easy!)
- had a pile of impenetrable unnecessary very complex alien math that I wasn't going to try to cut through given that
- his final answer was very, very wrong
- in fact, it was wrong by 26 orders of magnitude
- and he didn't have the skill to notice something was wrong (and, yes, I was lenient with students who noticed final answers were weird even if they couldn't/didn't fix it up)
- also, he was a major asshole (no surprise given that he's complaining about this "indignity") who was
- somehow still causing #MeToo problems in the 21st century despite being under 30 (seriously??)
So if that's who gets held up as "authorities", even minor ones, forgive me if I don't listen too much. I'll choose who I trust.
It wouldn't have made such an impact except that he was getting paid to publicly write about this stuff, at the same time he was privately incompetent. A stellar example of the Gell-Mann Effect (aka Amnesia) if ever there was one.
> Which is why you should be wary of “experts” making overly broad claims about topics within their field but far outside their area of expertise.
I mostly agree, but also I think it depends on how strong you are suggesting this and if you also acknowledge that there is high variance between domains as to the variance within the distribution of knowledge. Your last sentence is where I really disagree. There is a big difference.
But I think for the general person, there's 2 things of note: 1) just because you should be wary of an expert talking outside their niche (but inside their broader domain), doesn't mean that their opinion is equal to that of a layman. I'd still trust the mostly-expert over the non-expert any day. The true-expert is often very hard to find tbh. Look for nuance and you'll increase the likelihood of finding the expert. 2) It is easy to confuse expert talk with arrogance or pretentiousness. It is also easy to be that way when talking to a layman as the nature of those conversations will never be between peers, but more akin to a teacher and student. The two parties are not equal, but we're primed to treat any non-academic setting conversation as if we are. The experts often have serious doubts and are far more self-conscious than they appear. You just won't see that unless you're a peer and can speak the language, because experts are also specifically taught to defend their work and speak with confidence. Your hint is how they respond to critiques from other experts (but that's not easy to do accurately as there's probably a lot of nuance you aren't seeing and they are speaking a different language even if you understand all the words).
Everyone should always be skeptical though. That's for certain. But I just want to make sure we don't turn knowledge into a binary setting: expert vs idiot. There's a lot in-between and that matters a lot.
Right, you can always find somebody more expert than someone else. The level of specificity that some people expect for a variety of problems will leave only a dozen or so people in the world who can call themselves experts.
e.g. you might be a C++ expert, but also proficient in Python, and currently working professionally in Rust?
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=7WQhABIAAAAJ&hl=en...
This is also why experts can often sniff one another out on online forums like this. There's a subtly to the language that is used which conveys an understanding of many deeper nuances than were a novice or even someone with a undergraduate would use to discuss a topic. There's a common misnomer that you don't understand something unless you can explain it to a layman (probably invented by a layman to justify their lack of understanding), but accuracy and complexity are tightly coupled. A concept with x% accuracy has a minimum of y complexity. But also knowing this can help you sniff out experts in fields you aren't also an expert in, but of course your classification accuracy drops since you are introducing more noise. Still, a useful guide if you're trying to figure out who to listen to. Obviously much easier said than done.
A number of years back I had an email from a bloke called Elon Musk. I was vaguely aware of who he was but not very.
At the time I was the global expert in a very weird alloy (the market for it was perhaps 5 or 10 tonnes a year. A very weird and minority interest alloy). It was aluminium scandium, which the Russians had developed to compete with Nasa’s use of aluminium lithium. In many ways a better alloy too. And, obviously, there were possible uses in rockets and so on (rather more in something like a Shuttle than in simple rockets though).
OK, so I get this email and it asks me whether this aluminium scandium is worth it, will it make my rockets lighter, asks Musk. No, not really, it’ll make them easier to weld but not lighter particularly. Which was pretty much the end of the exchange.
So, when people ask me whether Musk does tech stuff I would have to say yes. Because he tracked down a one man company that knew the straight answer to the question he needed answering. OK, you might not think that is engineering, preferring to think of it as people using a slide rule to work it all out themselves. But finding the bloke who knows the answer and asking them is engineering to me - it’s still getting to the right answer, isn’t it?
That's called management, not engineering.
Not really trying to be flippant, but that pretty much feels like a James Bond villain fantasy, and only a few select people would probably enjoy the setting.
We kinda have a real world equivalent with people working on the LHC by the way.
I think we can do better!
Is it that LK99 had impurities of Cu2S and the properties of Cu2S dominated but we already know things about Cu2S?
The CU2S was a confounding factor because 104C is where it undergoes phase changes, which drastically change its resistivity. So the change in resistivity was from the CU2S impurities, not the LK99 itself. As the tail end of the article notes, when researchers grew a completely pure crystal of LK99 they got a strong insulator (in the mega-ohms).
And as a nearby commenter notes, neither 0.02 ohm-cm nor 0.002 ohm-cm is even a good conductor: typical conductor metals (gold, copper, silver, aluminum) are under 3e-6.
This is an incredibly funny quote out of context, and the absurdity of it betrays an extreme domain expertise.
("It stops working after 65,535 seconds? Wait a minute, I know that number.")
I think a lot of IT/CS people have almost parasocial relationships with powers of two that seem very silly to outsiders.
Or perhaps the way they measured the whole experiment was completely inane from the start if a simple conductor passes with flying colours. With that and them presenting ferromagnetism as the Messner effect makes me kind of question the competence of the entire analysis.
- "70% CuS impurity" are you sure you didn't grab the Chalcocite by accident?
- There's no significant CuS in samples prepared at 925°C. There cannot be.
- I tried forcefully introducing sulfide into pbo, it just. Doesn't work. Even at 600°C. PbS reduces lead in 2 PbO to 3Pb, leaving as SO2.
https://twitter.com/iris_IGB/status/1691840478189384097?t=cB...
The academic/publishing process is far from perfect already (conflicts of interest, funding, political pressure, institutional pressure, personal pride), now imagine throwing a "Catgirl Girlfriend" (that trolls on an anonymous social media account) into the mix.
Free speech is fine, it's the listeners I have a problem with.
I know of a 3D graphics format interop workgroup at an official Standard Setting Organization where some of the main contributors are MAdjDuckSauce type handles and its caused no lack of backflipping through hoops to get their input codified because of ISO 9000 prescribed forms that still want your employer organization's fax number listed.
In fact, how this whole story played out on arXiv is a great example of the power of all hands on deck crowdsourced global fact checking in the broad noisy open realtime light of day. More claims should be subject to this kind of wide net scrutiny not less.
(*Correction to post above it should read "ethnically Soviet" as pointed out below)
It was really an incredible thing to witness, and I see only good things came of it.
I can't really understand the sour grapes commenters in this thread. Not sure if they just want to feel smarter/better than everyone else who went along for this ride, or if they really hold the belief that the best science should be gate-kept in universities and not discussed in a wider context.
Strong get off my lawn energy.
You can see this wild speculation play out _commonly_ for lots of will-be fads like cryptocurrency, metaverse, prompt engineering, vector databases, "autoGPT"/langchain, GPT3/4 performance degradation, GPT4 architecture, and more.
People here dress it all up in well-written prose, citing their past experience at big tech or the ivy league, but at the end of the day much of it is as misinformed as a viral 4chan post. And then, as I said, there is very little postmortem from those same posters (although to be fair, I have seen several cryptocurrency people finally admit they were wrong).
edit:
For clarity, I am not encouraging a shame-based "admit you're wrong and I'm right!" attitude. That just results in more of the same but from the other side. I am merely condoning a healthy amount of humility and acceptance that it is _absolutely_ okay to be wrong, but that it is quite important to _admit_ it (if only to yourself) in fairly clear terms.
My frustrations are largely related to social media in general and the notion that scientists are gatekeeping seems to forget about the very real effects of misinformation. None of us like to realize it, but some people really have begun to take the word of internet comments over the word of credentialed takes and it is _ruining_ society in my opinion.
This isn't my first rodeo. I've seen this show before.
Now, one of these times, we're going to get a secondary confirmation and then things will get really exciting! Until there's such a secondary confirmation, I'm going to remain a curious sceptic.
Jade is the color of experience and age.
That said, this is a fairly general forum and (mostly) for entertainment purposes right?
You can gauge the trustworthiness yourself here: https://x.com/dangaristo?s=21&t=lI9nNO9bkbL1YKFrdIw_Tg
If one is up to date with sc news, this article should not affect their beliefs.
But maybe some people are happy that they can share an article from Nature to convince their friends.
I hope they don't experience undue blowback because of this.
Even the simplest example of what that would mean is already amazing to our society: Imagine a power-grid that no longer loses power to electrical resistence in the wires.
And superconductors have limits on how much power they can carry.
But most importantly, the power grid doesn't lose all that much to resistance. And you'd still lose power to transmission line capacitance against the ground.
Means cheap enough to be mass produced, and available.
> But most importantly, the power grid doesn't lose all that much to resistance
Laws of scaling, even a small percentage of power lost to resistence is a hige overall loss, the avoidance of which is desirable.
And as I said, this is only the simplest example.
But so are all our existing cables.
> Laws of scaling, even a small percentage of power lost to resistence is a hige overall loss, the avoidance of which is desirable.
We could cut those losses right now by making the existing cables thicker. But we don't.
Even a cheap superconductor might not be used at all in electrical grids, because the benefit isn't worth the cost.
> And as I said, this is only the simplest example.
What are the better examples?
If we could make cables superconducting simply by making them thicker, we wouldn't need superconductors.
> What are the better examples?
Microelectronics for a start. Resistence bleeds heat, heat buildup limits designs. A novel superconducting materials would allow us to make more efficient chips.
As for further examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_applications_of_...
From what I can see the power loss is in the 8-15% range. It'd be awesome to save that, but it's not game changing, and you have to take into account the cost of replacing the wires.
I don't know why people even bring up batteries. They're not going to make any difference to batteries that I'm aware of. In theory you could use superconducting coils as storage, but that's on the level of bulk capacitors, not batteries.
An 8-15% increase in available electricity without any new power plants built isn't game changing?
The ability to transport power over longer distances, making eg. solar farms in remote locations suddenly feasible projects isn't game changing?
> and you have to take into account the cost of replacing the wires
No I really don't have to, as we, as a species, seem to have money in abundance. What we do not have in abundance, is biospheres. We have exactly one of those, and if it's ruined, all the money won't help.
The ability to suddenly boost the efficiency of our electrical grids by 8-15% would not solely solve the problems our species currently causes for itself, but it would help a ton.
Spending the same amount of money on green power generation would probably help the biosphere much more.
> making eg. solar farms in remote locations suddenly feasible
We can already get losses down to a couple percent per thousand kilometers. Those farms are already feasible.
Yes, and if we could squeeze down these couple percent to a <1%, the same farm would be even better.
That's far from clear. If our grids are 8-15% more efficient and the cost of electricity falls accordingly, it will boost demand and we may end up needing more power plants than we otherwise would have. If the goal is to reduce the consumption of a resource, making its consumption more efficient is often counterproductive (see [1,2,3]). Granted, if the alternative is burning fossil fuel then it's a good thing! But once electricity becomes more economical than fossil fuels for all uses, making it even cheaper is not going to help the biosphere. And I think that's probably going to happen before we have a room temperature superconductor that can be used in power transmission.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazzoom%E2%80%93Brookes_postu...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect_(conservation)
Nothing can just be itself anymore, it's all gotta be grist.
LK-99 is probably not a super conductor, key word probably. It’ll be definitive when the original samples have been independently tested.
These collective hysterias are a combination of people desperate for technological solutions to (typically) social problems and a system that eagerly exploits that for the benefit of a few.
Of course there are countless mysteries still remaining to be uncovered in materials science, just like there is an infinity of algorithmic advances to be made in processing information.
But the more important invention of all might be to find the checks and balances, feedback loops and regulators that will prevent people from behaving like panicked apes. At best this uncontrolled lemming instinct of ours is a huge waste of time. At worst it undermines society and our welfare.
IMO this phenomenon seems to be kind of an artifact of modern media -- I feel like in the old days, peers would have settled it among themselves, and we would have never heard about it
The same thing happens in tech -- there is a lot of stuff that people talk about, that ends up being worth ignoring
...
I always bring up that whole news cycle in 2017 about a potential war with North Korea. How many people spent time and energy on that, and how do they feel about that now? Media is adversarial
Do you know how much of that is worth to the world with knock-on effects? Maybe there were future material scientists sitting in the room with their parents listening to the discussion? I feel like that's equally as important as peer review/replication.
You can't win.
I don’t think this is about pleasing “these people”, but about recognizing which attitudes are useful and which are not. Encountering some mix of all of the above is a product of the diversity of people involved in the conversation, and not necessarily “these people” wanting it both ways.
Maybe I went amiss, maybe I need perspective, but I don't see why a consideration for a re-frame is necessary if one still gets their point across; albeit maybe with more "passion" than necessary.
You are claiming that it's the same group of people holding incongruous viewpoints.
My point was that this is likely an illusion caused by the communication medium, i.e. "these people" represent a myriad of individual viewpoints, which may not align because I think "A" and you think "B". Not because I think "A" and "B".
To frame it in this way doesn't allow for a useful exploration of the issue. It casts aside an entire group instead of examining the roots of the problematic behavior. It also creates a straw man - the person who believes both things incongruously, when this person doesn't seem likely to exist, or at least seems likely that this is a rare stance.
> Saying, "You can't please these people about this" is essentially the same as saying "Their attitude about this is not useful"
These are saying very different things. One discards the entire person on the basis of a view you disagree with. This is a road to nowhere. The other allows an examination of the actual behavior, which is arguably far more important if there's a case to be made that someone should change their behavior.
"Oh, you're one of those people" gets you nowhere. "The problem with this line of thinking/attitude is that it limits the potential for public excitement and involvement with the process..." gives you and the person who disagree something to work with.
This isn't about being polite. This is about choosing whether the point is to explore the nature of the problem, or to complain about a group of people.
The issue is, what sort of gatekeeping, and how aligned is it with the desired effect? Even simply crudely throwing up all sorts of arbitrary obstacles (e.g. various forms of academic hazing) is sufficient to at least keep out people who aren't willing to put in some sort of effort. The problem is that has a lot of collateral damage - it also loses perfectly fine people whose only flaw is a low tolerance for institutionally imposed arbitrary obstacles. A perfect gatekeeping mechanism would exclude everyone who can't contribute while presenting minimal obstacles to those who can. I don't want to speculate here what that might look like, but it's not contradictory to want everyone to have access to science while simultaneously wanting ignorant loudmouths to be gently suppressed.
If I may mutilate a beloved Pixar film, "anyone can science". But not everyone can be a scientist. Everyone should just be given a chance.
Either way the best video I’ve seen on this whole thing, Abe why it’s endlessly frustrating, is this:
People were calling out the over hyping, the bad science, and the bad graph from day 1. The original scientists DIDN'T want to publish.
Almost all important discoveries have been made from PROPER science. If you have surprising results, you verify them. You verify your test results. You verify your methodology. You repeat the experiment.
How many important discoveries aren't found because they can't get funding/attention because "doing it right" is somehow seen as wrong now.
People don’t distrust scientists because there isn’t enough peer review or because of pre-prints failing to replicate, they distrust scientific institutions because scientific institutions often communicate their current best theory as the truth and pretend that they can ‘prove’ things true by way of ‘scientific consensus.’ Going against the consensus can ruin or limit your career.
Lots of examples: climate scientists making claims of ice free arctic by 2020, dietary science flip flopping on diet advice (fat and butter is bad, carbs are bad), covid vaccines being a silver bullet, ivermectin not being effective [1]. Add in problems in social ‘sciences’ like the Sokal affair, psychology replication crisis, mainstream economists failing to predict the GFC, definitions of foundational terms like “woman” changing, and you have a recipe for the general public not trusting academia or ‘scientific’ institutions in general. Science and academia in general is being polluted by politics and it is incentivising academics to exaggerate the accuracy of their knowledge.
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... I added the reference here because Ivermectin was a horrible case of politicising science: mainstream institutions called it an animal medicine with full knowledge it was safe for humans. And now there is a potential mechanism for its effect, it looks like it may have been effective after all. During the pandemic I heard many scientists laugh at people for considering it, all because an authority they trusted told them it was silly.
Ivermectin, for instance, has been on the World Health Organisation's list of essential medicines for a long time.
The replication crisis is a real thing, for sure.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHO_Model_List_of_Essential_Me...
See the FDA’s advice on Ivermectin: https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/why-you-shoul...
“Ivermectin has not been shown to be safe or effective for these indications,” but fail to mention that there is no evidence that it is not safe for this particular indication. This implies it wasn’t banned for safety reasons. It was banned because many associated it with Trump and right wing conspiracy theories.
There was no science used to justify banning it to begin with, and we are now years later, with a potential mechanism for the benefit and it is still banned!
One more link to prove I’m not completely insane: the AMA and other mainstream medical bodies recommended not using it for Covid https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-aph...
It is acknowledged to be an official medicine for humans, not just an animal remedy as you claimed. Please keep to the point.
So although it wasn’t approved for Covid, it helped reduce harm because it allowed people to fight Covid without fighting a parasite simultaneously. But since it was ‘not known to have antiviral activity’ and trump said it worked well, it was banned.
It’s a disgrace that authorities have punished doctors who did the right thing and have now been vindicated. It is absurd to have to wait for an authority to approve something you have good evidence will help your patients.
This is why people have lost faith in health institutions. They make terrible decisions like this and then have the audacity to pontificate to the population.
It could also be the opposite: shiny result causes over investment in an area of tech which isn’t productive.
That’s what happened here—peers settled it among themselves.
> there is a lot of stuff that people talk about, that ends up being worth ignoring
Of course. The thing is, you never know whether it’s worth ignoring or not unless some people pay attention to it.
> How many people spent time and energy on that, and how do they feel about that now?
Pretty good that we didn’t go to war with North Korea?
> Media is adversarial
In some cases it’s adversarial, and in some cases it’s complicit. In that case specifically, sabre rattling was part of Trump’s negotiation tactics, and media playing up the possibility of war was his intention.
The people driving the hype cycle sell at the peak, make a quick buck, and move on to the next thing. Unfortunately, I think it's a key factor in driving the shitification of everything.
At least with social media we had a few good years where everything was awesome and it felt like our lives were being enriched, not cheapened.
To my understanding, these researchers had been working on this for decades and were confident what they had was good.
Once the information was leaked, the scientific community was roused, and came to consensus within days.
I think the contrast in those two timescales is noteworthy.
There's polywater from the 1960s.
N-rays in the 1900s (the first decade) made it to "spiritualists" and "crackpots and extremists" outside of academia, https://archive.org/details/flashofcathodera0000dahl/page/24... .
Giovanni Schiaparelli 1877 observation of "canali" on Mars captivated the public.
Schiaprelli points his telescope at Mars, and sees some faint squiggles. He suspects they’re something dried river beds, and calls them “channels”, like a river channel. Being Italian, he uses the Italian word, “canali”.
This word, being the same word used for “canal” in English, gets translated as “canal”. However in English, “canal” refers exclusively to an artificial construction, where as “channel” doesn’t have that distinction.
This framing now primes, people when looking at blurry faint marks on Mars. Someone tries to map the “canals” and either through an act of simplification/illustration, or psychological priming, connects dark regions (river deltas?) to each other via straight lines — perhaps the shape most evocative of artificiality.
And so it snowballs.
I don’t think the canal theory ever gained much traction. (It’s a wild idea!) Telescopes just weren’t good enough to consistently observe the channels, let alone see them well enough for a definitive answer. We had to wait for Mariner 4 for that.
I'm not sure what you mean by traction. I wanted to show examples of scientific disagreement which made it to the popular press, to argue that it's been happening for a long time.
Using one of the sources mentioned at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_canals lists several I found this 1902 textbook which suggests it did have traction among astronomers for at least a couple of years, though not general acceptance. Quoting https://archive.org/details/manualofastronom00younrich/page/... :
] These new markings are faint and very difficult to see, and for several years there was a strong suspicion that he was misled by some illusion, — in respect to their "gemination," at least, — which is still ascribed, by some very high authorities, to astigmatism in the eye of the observer or bad focusing of his telescope. Still, the weight of evidence at present favors the reality of the phenomena which Schiaparelli describes. Many observers, both in Europe and the United States, have confirmed his results, and they are now generally accepted, although some of the best, armed with very powerful telescopes, still fail to see the canals as anything but the merest shading
I say "couple of years" because there are several editions of that textbook! In 1904 at https://archive.org/details/atextbookgenera05youngoog/page/3... :
] [Schiaparelli's] observations have since been confirmed and added to by various eminent astronomers in Europe and America, especially by Perrotin at Nice and Lowell in Arizona. But others, equally eminent and apparently under equally favorable conditions, fail to see the reported features.
While in 1888 at https://archive.org/details/textbookofgenera00youn/page/346/...
] "If there is not some fallacy in the observation, the problem as to the nature of these canals, and the cause of their gemination, it is a very important and perplexing one. It is hoped that at the next favorable opposition in 1892 it may find its solution."
What negative effects would you have suffered if you had not missed this news cycle?
I could imagine an expert in this field having the opposite take as they almost certainly already knew the little bits of trivia that I picked up.
But they would also enable new infrastructure beyond what is currently feasible, because we could transport power over much longer distances without any increased loss.
For example, you could transport solar power from the daylit side of the earth to the night side.
The electricity grid has losses of about 30 percent, so a fully superconducting grid could increase delivered power by about 43 percent, not an order of magnitude more.
More compact MRI machines would be nice to have, certainly, but wouldn't materially change mortality.
What else is there?
The point is that at a certain level, a quantifiable increase in efficiency causes a qualitative change in capabilities.
Transmission lines are priced per kilometre. Superconducting transmission will almost certainly cost more than vanilla SCAW (steel cored aluminum wire), and you still have to pay for pylons, bridges, and/or directional drilling over land, or for laying if on the sea bed.
Return on capital employed drives investment decisions. With the cost of PV, wind, and storage falling rapidly, and the efficiency of PV rising, the numbers are starting to fall out in favour of overbuilding supply near demand (in Siberia, to take your example), not building long transmission lines.
No one lives in Siberia anyway, to a first approximation. No market, no investment.
And then there are tons of counter examples: "no way Russia will invade Ukraine", "Hitler will stop at Poland", etc. then the opposite happens. How do those people feel? Did they dismiss the stories warning of imminent conflict as adversarial media hysteria?
Expecting people to correctly follow a news story or not based on an unknown future outcome is impossible.
If you can consistently bat above .500 in predicting the news, there's a lot of money to be made in prediction markets.
When the hype came people here were asking: 'why western labs and traditional media are so passive?'. Then Nature came with article telling people to calm down. People here called Nature and peer reviews to be in decline.
Proceeds to quote a guy who studied chemistry at university and now works in finance.
Now, Im not saying it is a superconductor. But please, don't insult my intelligence with garbage like that, I'm more inclined to believe that kind of reporting is evidence that serious scientists are not willing to go on record as saying it isn't.
- No idea what exactly the original replication process was.
- Limited number of replication attempts globally.
- No comments or samples analysed from the original authors.
This is leaving a really unpleasant aftertaste for me, seeing how dismissive this community got about the opinion and work of people with actual expertise, based mostly on repeating memes picked up from social media.
So, if that's the case, when a new result comes out, the appropriate reaction is to assume there's a better than average likelihood it will be refuted. And honestly that's what makes science great. Unlike with some other fields of human endeavor, it is possible to firmly refute bad science. And often learn something new in the process.
[0] https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo... [1] https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-statistics... [2] https://replicationindex.com/2019/01/15/ioannidis-2005-was-w... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epimenides_paradox
We will see spectacular results from this kind of global scientific collaboration. I am confident that there will be an actual scientific breakthrough confirmed like this report got debunked.
Not quite a superinsulator, but ironic.
A team going down the checklist would either demonstrate one of
1. They performed the step in the checklist and provide the corresponding sufficient/exhaustive evidence of having done so.
2. An explanation as to why that step is not applicable allowing them to skip said step.
An afterthought:
3. The following will not always be possible for any given experiment. However, the LK-99 experiment used cheap materials and a relatively straightforward process to create the material (from my readings of what others have said), I think the scientists in question should have attempted to reproduce the results of their experiment and document the number of successful attempts versus total attempts.
Is there no analogue in the physical sciences?
I'm not an expert in the field at all, but aiui that's why they would have been looking at what seem like roundabout tests etc. that don't seem like they're actually addressing what's interesting.
And yeah, you want the equipment sensitive enough to see that it is better than good metal like copper, which may be nontrivial in case your critical current is low.
After that, you can move on to other measurements
- has a striking drop in resistivity during a temperature change — a property published in 1951 as a property of copper sulfide
- has some ferromagnetic properties — enough to be tipped up in a magnetic field but not to levitate
I'm still interested int hat, as it seems like it could be quite useful and the LK-99 material is not especially hard to produce.
I don't understand where this belief comes from, but to think that research + time = innovation is really ignorant of how technology works. It seems it's really rooted in prophetic or religious way to look at technology.
Cornucopianism is a really better word for it.
Probably the last 100 or so years where we have largely done exactly that.
For me it comes from a survey of the previous 2 millennia of human history and witnessing constant technological advancements that produce higher and higher standards of living
Out of the 10 that have had anything resembling civilization.
Out of the 100 since "humans" began to walk the earth.
So which condition, exactly, is the anomaly? :)
'High' temperature super conductors were only recently discovered, and only a couple of years ago lanthanum decahydride was shown to transition at -10F. It seems odd to me to assume that this hurdle isn't going to be overcome, and even stranger to disparage others for thinking so.
I guess I also criticize whomever published the original paper. They did just a bad enough job to get people excited, but experts pretty quickly noticed major flaws in the article which cast enough doubt to pretty much reject even attemptiong a replication.
Well, i suppose to be fair, I should also criticize the theorists who came out and made crazy claims saying that theory supports this being a superconductor- Konerding's 27th law, amended, says: "Given a ridiculous experimental claim, there will always be at least 3 theorists who publish a paper saying that the theory supports the claim".
Anybody who lived through Fleishman and Pons (and fusion in general) has learned to be highly skeptical, up front, and the expectation is that the publisher/author of the article has done an excellent job making their findings reproducible.
If you believe attention is a 0-sum game (I don't, but am trying to understand), why not focus criticism on those people spending time on any number of other pursuits that are even further from fruitful. It just seems like, for whatever your idea of "fruitful" is, there are entire industries and institutions that are focused on taking attention away from fruitful pursuits.
After all, the grad students still got together, got drunk, and partied- when they could have been in the lab. Not particularly fruitful, but I wouldn't criticize it.
Yes, I agree. Scientist time is valuable for at least a couple reasons; science funding is a scarce resource, and trained scientists are scarce. I'd argue that those are related, and both could be helped by increasing interest/excitement/awareness toward science in the general public.
If we were to sort people in to two beakers, "trained scientist" and "general public", I think the people who were excited about LK-99 and making "shitty examples" of it, would mostly go in the second one.
(also, I 100% agree that "can't you just..." is one of the most irritating phrases in English)
When I was a kid I read about DNA and genetic modification of organisms (this was back in the 80's when it was still fairly new) and decided to become a scientist to genetically modify humans using gene therapy as an alternative to standard pharmaceuticals. The articles I read suggested that if we just sequenced the human genome, and did a bit more research and applied computing, that gene therapy would be a viable solution. Biotech was undergoing a revolution at the time.
Fast forward- I've finished grad school, postdoc, and am now a principal investigator at a national lab. I was a beneficiary of a massive growth in science funding during the Clinton era that ended right about the time I was looking for a faculty position. There are almost no faculty positions available, compared to the supply. Guess what? Real science doesn't look anything like what I thought. The majority of the time is spent writing grants and papers, your competitors are super-hardcore, it's really not a fun job and it gets in the way of work-life balance.
And the entire area I wanted to work in, gene therapy, was almost entirely stopped for 20+ years due to the death of a single patient in a single trial (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Gelsinger). The risks of gene therapy had been greatly understated, and even today, the few gene therapies that do exist aren't great, and cost $$$. We hear constantly that human genome sequencing is going to revolutionize drug discovery- it didn't.
So, I am not so sure that breathless articles about technologies that could reasonably have been anticipated not to work (like LK-99) to excite more people to sign up for science is really a good idea.
This is surely going to be a 'boy who cried wolf' moment for Korean schools.