[HN Gopher] LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature s...
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LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor
Author : fofoz
Score : 466 points
Date : 2023-07-31 09:24 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (forums.spacebattles.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (forums.spacebattles.com)
| DrBazza wrote:
| I'm resigned to disappointment for this. It's the modern days
| Pons and Fleischmann.
|
| Hopefully the lack of confirmation so far is due to people
| checking, double checking and triple checking, along with a
| healthy dose of "we don't want to be tarred with the same brush".
| echelon wrote:
| Reminds me of EmDrive. That was such a tease and then utter
| disappointment.
|
| Hope LK-99 doesn't go the same way.
| zarzavat wrote:
| The similarities are only superficial. A reactionless drive
| would violate the most fundamental physical laws.
|
| Whereas room temperature/pressure superconductors are not
| believed to violate any physical law. If you asked "Will we
| find such a material this century?", the answer would be a
| solid maybe. Which end of the century, who knows.
|
| It's more like proofs of the Riemann Hypothesis. Most
| mathematicians believe that RH is probably true, or at least
| hope so, but any claimed proof is viewed with extreme
| suspicion merely because of the sheer number of false ones.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| It's not looking good so far. This team reproduced several
| variants of the formula, and none of them behaved in an
| interesting way:
| https://nitter.sneed.network/altryne/status/1686029047053090...
| pushkine wrote:
| I've only seen one picture of an alleged successful replication
| yet: https://twitter.com/iris_IGB/status/1685731177523449856
| Corrado wrote:
| Since Twitter is no longer allowing public access to posts, it
| would be better to not link to it. Or better yet, re-post the
| tweet somewhere else and link to that.
| bhaak wrote:
| They backpedaled on that and restricted it to single tweets.
|
| So if not logged in you can see a single tweet now but no
| longer threads.
| Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote:
| This is a very different experiment.
| Accujack wrote:
| The author has acknowledged that one as a fake.
| generalizations wrote:
| Where? I haven't seen that in her twitter feed.
| carabiner wrote:
| Argonne National Lab has synthesized LK-99 and is beginning
| analysis:
| https://twitter.com/BenShindel/status/1686115699779878912
| youknowone wrote:
| I translated a survey about LK-99 papers to English
|
| https://hackmd.io/DMjYGOJFRheZw5XZU8kqKg
| ggdG wrote:
| Thank you so much for this!
| babypuncher wrote:
| So how long before NileRed takes a crack at it?
| Havoc wrote:
| This is great. Much easier to tell what's going on than going by
| the chatter. Thanks
| KolenCh wrote:
| Off topic: any tool to have a quick summarization like this?
|
| ---
|
| The blog post is about the discovery of a purported room-
| temperature-and-pressure (RTP) superconductor, labeled "LK-99".
| The discovery was announced in two papers published on arxiv.org
| on July 22, 2023. The first paper, which was short and seemed
| hastily written, had three authors: Sukbae Lee, Ji-Hoon Kim, and
| Young-Wan Kwon. The second paper was more detailed and had six
| authors, with Young-Wan Kwon being removed from the author list.
|
| The LK-99 superconductor, originally synthesized in 1999, is
| claimed to have a critical temperature of 127degC, above the
| boiling point of water. The synthesis method is simple: finely
| grind and mix Lanarkite (Pb2(SO4)O) and Copper Phosphide (Cu3P)
| and bake it at 925degC in a vacuum chamber for a day.
|
| The discovery has sparked a mix of skepticism and curiosity
| online. Young-Wan Kwon, the removed author from the first paper,
| crashed a science conference to talk about the discovery, adding
| to the intrigue.
|
| The blog post also discusses the implications of a room-
| temperature superconductor, which could allow for things like an
| infinitely long power cable without loss, or a portable MRI
| scanner. It also provides a timeline of events and a list of
| ongoing replication efforts by various academic and private
| groups. The author emphasizes that scientific research is a
| gradual process, and the validity of the LK-99 superconductor is
| still being investigated.
| babelfish wrote:
| ChatGPT
| nicopappl wrote:
| The kagi universal summarizer has been pretty descent on my
| end. But I've only lightly tested it on two pages.
| ssijak wrote:
| For such an important discovery (if it is real), that seems it
| could be replicated in a few days, if I were the team that did
| the discovery, I would create a video recording of the whole
| process and all the measurements and share it with the textual
| article. It sounds like that would provide for an easier way to
| replicate plus more proofs of the discovery.
| bhouston wrote:
| The team that did the discovery seems disorganized and
| amateurish though, and with the multiple papers all submitted
| at the same time by competing factions, riff with infighting -
| but they stuck with a hunch for longer than anyone else and
| followed it doggedly. If it turns out to be true, it will be a
| great movie with an underdog making one of the biggest
| discoveries of the century.
| shepardrtc wrote:
| > but they stuck with a hunch for longer than anyone else and
| followed it doggedly
|
| That's an understatement.
| local_issues wrote:
| >discovery seems disorganized and amateurish though, and with
| the multiple papers all submitted at the same time by
| competing factions, riff with infighting - but they stuck
| with a hunch for longer than anyone else and followed it
| doggedly.
|
| Pretty good description of all of human history so far, to be
| fair
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Did you read some that said they were amturish or did you
| actually think that
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Their amateurishness and the infighting somehow makes me
| think this is legitimate.
| baq wrote:
| Was wondering why it doesn't sound surprising and then
| remembered that squid game is also Korean. Puzzles
| immediately fell into place.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| Saw some people hyping up markets where people are betting on
| prediction markets whether or not LK-99 will replicate. Can't
| help but feel like that money would be better spent just paying
| off some labs to actually try to replicate the process.
|
| The response I got from a predictions market enthusiast was that
| having a sufficiently large market would motivate people to
| attempt to have the process replicated and buy options on the
| outcome once they confirm their findings in order to cash out.
| Which gives me strong feelings of scamming the uninformed and
| gullible.
|
| As for comments on LK-99 itself, I don't understand why nobody
| has gotten their hands on an existing sample to verify that it's
| legitimate. Shouldn't the minimum requirements be a magnet and
| the material sample, to demonstrate it floating through the
| meissner effect?
| toth wrote:
| This type of instictive negative reaction to prediction markets
| is, unfortunately, common, but, I think, misguided.
|
| Prediction markets are one of the (or just, the?) best ways of
| aggregating knowledge from multiple sources and producing the
| best predictions. Having good legible predictions of impactful
| events such as LK-99 replication is extremely useful for
| society - it would be an invaluable input for a savvy policy
| maker for instance.
|
| What I think is silly is that vastly bigger amounts of money
| are put in betting markets for any mildly important sportsball
| game. Meanwhile, markets on LK99 replication, one of the most
| potentially important possibilities in the world right now have
| only on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars in them.
|
| And there is no scamming involved. If you are participating in
| a prediction market, either you have some reason you believe
| you know something the market does not or you should expect you
| are simply subsidizing those with better information. The
| latter is a perfectly reasonable thing to do - it's not easy
| for an average person to "pay off some lab", but if they
| provide liquidity to the prediction market they are giving an
| explicit subsidy for anyone that can answer the question.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > Prediction markets are one of the (or just, the?) best ways
| of aggregating knowledge from multiple sources and producing
| the best predictions.
|
| They would be true if people with most money and appetite for
| risk were also the most knowledgeable and smart.
|
| They are not. As you can easily tell from recent coverage of
| idiocy of even the richest people who have propensity for big
| bets.
|
| It has been researched and discovered that people with more
| money do not make smarter bets than those with far less. So
| at best, looking at prediction markets, gives you exactly as
| much knowledge as polling random people on the streets and
| asking them what would they bet on.
| danparsonson wrote:
| This exactly - the idea that a whole load of well informed
| people are driving a prediction market is about as
| realistic as saying that crypto investors are all experts
| in economics.
| social_quotient wrote:
| I agree with you and think it parallels the equity market a
| bit.
|
| Stock prices embody the market's collective knowledge,
| expectations, and emotions about a company's current and
| future value.
|
| And to your point if you are blindly investing or blindly
| buying via instruments like ETFs you can end up subsidizing
| those with more/better information.
| amelius wrote:
| Counterargument. Prediction markets could also be used to
| hedge.
|
| E.g. if you invest in technology around LK-99, and then use
| prediction market to prevent going bankrupt in case you were
| wrong.
|
| THUS: it doesn't mean that prediction markets give good
| predictions.
|
| By the way. Do you have some data on that? I.e., statistics
| of prediction markets being right vs wrong?
| twoodfin wrote:
| The hedge is still a signal of the degree of risk you
| ascribe to the possibility your technology won't work.
| amelius wrote:
| If I invest in technology (hoping it will work) but use
| the prediction market to hedge in case the technology
| won't work, how does that tell anyone watching the
| prediction market that people have net positive feelings
| about the technology?
| twoodfin wrote:
| If you were 100% confident you wouldn't hedge at all. If
| you're 80% confident you'd hedge less than if you were
| only 60% confident.
|
| This all translates into an price signal if the market is
| functioning and liquid.
| [deleted]
| amelius wrote:
| You should explain how this works then. How exactly do
| you derive a prediction from the price? Also if the
| people with deep knowledge of the technology use the
| prediction market for hedging, and all the "outsiders"
| use it for speculation, then the signal is disturbed
| anyway.
| throw0101a wrote:
| What do these prediction markets _produce_? Some people are
| saying "yes" and others are saying "no", and the answer is
| either "yes" or "no", but why bother spending money on
| _predicting_ when society can spend money on _replicating_
| it? Wouldn 't an actual replication attempt be more useful?
|
| > _The latter is a perfectly reasonable thing to do - it 's
| not easy for an average person to "pay off some lab", but if
| they provide liquidity to the prediction market they are
| giving an explicit subsidy for anyone that can answer the
| question._
|
| Is any of this liquidity going to actual (replication)
| research, because if it is not, again: what are these markets
| tangibly _producing_? Moving a bunch of numbers around a
| ledger does not seem very useful.
| killerstorm wrote:
| What do stock markets produce?
|
| The way resources are allocated is very important, but
| getting it optimal is very hard. Stock market is one of
| structures which helps to create long-term incentives to
| optimize resource allocation.
|
| You can directly see how it works if you compare market-
| based economies to e.g. a planned economy Soviet Union: a
| lot of goods produced by Soviet industry were not in
| demand, especially consumer goods. When Soviet Union was no
| more a lot of factories were closed because they were
| producing some utterly irrelevant shit.
|
| > Is any of this liquidity going to actual (replication)
| research, because if it is not, again: what are these
| markets tangibly producing?
|
| Many economic concepts work in practice only at scale. E.g.
| if there's a one-off $1000 incentive, it might not attract
| people capable of doing that. But if there's an opportunity
| to make $1000 every second, people might put an effort into
| taking that opportunity.
|
| Prediction markets create incentives to do particular
| stuff, as all markets do.
|
| If there was enough money at stake, it could definitely
| incentivize replication research.
|
| There are two scenarios.
|
| Scenario 1: Suppose you have a lab with all necessary
| equipment and materials. Normally you would use it for your
| own research (i.e. research new materials). But if there's
| e.g. $100M prediction market on replication of a particular
| result, you might consider redirecting it to replicating
| that research instead.
|
| If you do it before others, you can sell your replication
| proof to a hedge fund which will then get a position on
| prediction market before revealing the proof.
|
| Scenario 2: If there's enough money in replication markets,
| hedge funds might specifically fund laboratories which
| replicate stuff.
| fallingknife wrote:
| In what way would the people in the prediction markets fund
| a replication? That's not something that normal people just
| do. And if I wanted to do that, I don't even know how.
|
| And society doesn't spend money. People do.
| banannaise wrote:
| > What do these prediction markets _produce_?
|
| Vigorish.
| naasking wrote:
| > What do these prediction markets produce? Some people are
| saying "yes" and others are saying "no", and the answer is
| either "yes" or "no", but why bother spending money on
| predicting when society can spend money on replicating it?
| Wouldn't an actual replication attempt be more useful?
|
| They are producing predictions of future value. It's not
| clear when you're only considering a single case, but what
| if you only have enough money to fund two projects and you
| have 15 applicants? You could pay a panel of experts to
| evaluate them and now you can only fund one project, or you
| can exploit the prediction market and fund the projects
| that seem to have the best chance of success according to
| the crowd. So in effect, the crowd _is_ funding projects by
| freeing up funds that would otherwise go towards
| bureaucracy.
|
| The wisdom of the crowds works given a large and diverse
| sample of independent predictors. People who don't know
| anything will vote randomly so their votes effectively
| cancel each other out, but people who know more about a
| particular topic will be biased towards correct answers.
| tinco wrote:
| They're producing the wisdom of the crowd, which is a real
| and highly accurate piece of information. It's quite
| difficult and expensive to produce information as fast and
| reliable by other means. And they don't cost much, it's
| mostly money being moved around.
|
| edit: I interpreted it as asking wether prediction markets
| _in general_ produce value. In this specific case I 'm 100%
| with you, they're absolutely useless in predicting wether
| this finding is going to replicate or not.
|
| BTW probably 100% useless is going to be _better_ than
| trusting a single reply in a HN thread. Even averaging out
| a group of replies on HN is going to be pretty bad,
| probably worse than averaging out a group of replies on
| Reddit.
|
| The idea of wisdom of the crowd is based on the idea that
| knowledge about a topic (both false and true) is roughly
| normally distributed (as many things are in nature), so the
| averaged result of a large group of answers is likely to be
| close to the real answer, as long as there are no external
| factors pushing the whole distribution left or right.
|
| Also, the final result is not going to be the answer if
| it's gonna replicate, but more the odds of it replicating
| (i.e. the odds of a paper like this being legit). The odds
| could be 1 in a million, and it still wouldn't affect the
| reality of LK-99 being super conductive or not.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "They're producing the wisdom of the crowd, which is a
| real and highly accurate piece of information."
|
| I have strong doubts, that the wisdom of the crowd here
| is competent in judging whether a revolutionary new
| superconductor is real, or not.
| jonmumm wrote:
| what's an alternative that is better?
| throw0101b wrote:
| > _They 're producing the wisdom of the crowd, which is a
| real and highly accurate piece of information._
|
| Unless the group of people is not a crowd but rather a
| mob.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| The opinion of a crowd is generally useless in highly
| technical matters. The people betting on this stuff
| generally do not have the background to evaluate any
| claims appropriately, and just react to what other people
| (who they _believe_ to be more informed) are saying.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| So practically speaking, what can you do with the fact
| that X% of fans (because people betting are enthusiasts)
| think LK-99 will reproduce and Y% think it wont?
| tinco wrote:
| You assume _all_ the people betting are enthusiasts. The
| theory of prediction markets is that rational actors in
| the market will recognise that a portion of the betters
| is overhyped and adjust their bets to make use of their
| irrational behaviour.
|
| If the rational actors are actually effective at making
| such adjustments I don't know, I bet there's statistics
| out there on how well prediction markets correlate with
| reality.
|
| In any case, even if the market was perfect, it wouldn't
| tell us if LK-99 would reproduce, which I guess is the
| meat of your question. It would just tell us how likely
| it is that an experimental result made under those
| specific circumstances would reproduce. And what you
| could do with that information depends on what your
| answer to the question: "How would I be affected if LK-99
| would reproduce?" would be.
|
| If you're a big energy business leader, and you want to
| filter what topics to spend your valuable time on maybe
| you could set a rule that you only want spend time
| reading scientific papers that have >10% odds of being
| legit.
|
| More realistically though, I think things like prediction
| markets are mostly useful to traders who are trying to
| arbitrage things like resource markets. What's the price
| of copper going to do when this turns out to be true? You
| could adjust your futures based on that.
| gilleain wrote:
| Have you heard the one about the Emperor of China's nose?
|
| https://imaginatorium.org/stuff/nose.htm
|
| Basically, making an average of a large number of
| estimates of an unknown value will (of course) fail if
| most/none of the estimators have any idea of the actual
| value being estimated.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _most /none of the estimators have any idea of the
| actual value being estimated._
|
| A subtle distinction is _who_ is allowed to participate
| in a prediction market.
|
| "Everyone with $1" is a terrible answer, and produces the
| bad results people are pointing to.
|
| Financial markets avoid this because of their scale,
| where there's enough smart money to (usually) punish
| stupid money.
|
| Absent that scale, it's just stupid money muddling the
| decisions of smart money.
|
| Prediction markets with a knowledge barrier to entry
| would produce better results.
| gilleain wrote:
| How would you construct such a knowledge barrier? Another
| prediction market?
|
| Also, suggesting that there is such a thing as 'smart'
| money - presumably due to having more of it? - is
| amusing. As pointed out elsewhere in this discussion,
| there has been a lot of smart money acting particularly
| dumb over the last few years.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| A "Do you understand what superconductivity is?" or "Do
| you have a physics or engineering degree?" barrier?
|
| And the relevant question isn't whether 'smart' money
| does dumb things: it's whether 'smart' money does dumb
| things _less frequently_ than a random sample of money.
|
| No one is an oracle, and there are absolutely outlier
| events that specifically confound experts, but I can't
| believe that increased expertise is uncorrelated with
| increased accuracy.
| kritiko wrote:
| Tetlock's Superforecasters performed better than experts,
| though: >In the Good Judgment Project, "the top
| forecasters... performed about 30 percent better than the
| average for intelligence community analysts who could
| read intercepts and other secret data"
| tinco wrote:
| I don't think I've seen that before. But the article you
| linked doesn't make the conclusion you suggest at all,
| instead they pose a corrected value. If indeed no one
| estimating had no information at all, the average length
| of Chinese person's nose would be close to that corrected
| value.
|
| It's the same with this topic. You won't get an answer to
| the question "Is this particular paper true or not?" but
| you'll get an answer to the question "Are papers
| submitted under these circumstances making claims like
| this likely to be true?". The crowd will only answer the
| question they can answer. I think that's from "Thinking
| fast and slow".
| gilleain wrote:
| It's not well explained in the version I linked
| (apologies, I should have looked for a clearer version).
|
| The point of the story when I originally heard it is that
| no one has SEEN the Emperor's nose. So any statistical
| function (like averaging) of estimates is totally useless
| as they are all guesses.
|
| No one has seen 'papers submitted under these
| circumstances' so no amount of 'crowd wisdom' will make
| any difference.
|
| Also, as an aside the idea that 'the crowd will only
| answer the question they can answer' is ... bizarre.
| People will answer anything you ask them, and you have no
| way to know if they are just making it up.
| civilitty wrote:
| There is literally zero wisdom in the crowd about a brand
| new just discovered material that's only ever been
| produced by one small group _by definition._
|
| This market fetishism is out of control.
| naasking wrote:
| That's not correct. Condensed matter physicists will have
| a good handle on how plausible this is (but not certain).
| Other people will vote randomly so their votes cancel
| out, effectively leaving the final result as biased by
| the expert opinions. That's how the wisdom of the crowd
| works.
| discreteevent wrote:
| The opinion of a crowd is "real and highly accurate"? The
| opinion of crowds is frequently completely disconnected
| from reality. Crowds are often an amplifier of individual
| delusion. As for accuracy, the only thing the opinion of
| a crowd is accurate about is the opinion of that
| particular crowd (not even "the crowd" - look at election
| polling)
| naasking wrote:
| The wisdom of the crowds works given a large and diverse
| sample of independent predictors. People who don't know
| anything about a topic will vote randomly so their votes
| effectively cancel each other out, but people who know
| more about a particular topic will be biased towards
| correct answers.
| MLH6ft1 wrote:
| "They're producing the wisdom of the crowd"
|
| Yeah we saw how wise was the crowd's wisdom with crypto.
| Regnore wrote:
| This is correct - the overwhelming majority of people did
| not get involved with crypto. Even for people and
| companies who did most put a fraction of their money into
| it.
| andrepd wrote:
| >Prediction markets are one of the (or just, the?) best ways
| of aggregating knowledge from multiple sources and producing
| the best predictions.
|
| That's an extraordinary claim with zero evidence behind it.
| Do you have any evidence that "prediction markets" provide
| more accurate predictions than e.g. specialist surveys or
| other mechanisms? I don't see any empirical evidence nor any
| logical reason for that to be the case.
| Retric wrote:
| The issue is there's zero utility in aggregating knowledge on
| LK-99 as apposed to simply running these experiments. It's
| going to take weeks not decades for someone to replicate it.
|
| Markets are useful when people act more efficiently based on
| the information, but there's no efficiency to be gained here.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| > Having good legible predictions of impactful events such as
| LK-99 replication is extremely useful for society - it would
| be an invaluable input for a savvy policy maker for instance.
|
| How?
|
| Would it not be better for the "savvy" policy maker to JUST
| WAIT until this discovery is confirmed, definitively, by
| multiple legit research institutions? And even better, wait
| until it shows some promise of practical application? Policy,
| as we know it, almost never reacts within hours to anything,
| let alone a scientific discovery. What exactly can a policy
| maker even do with faster than hot-off-the-press knowledge
| about this stuff?
|
| Prediction markets are really just for people that hustle in
| markets or who are looking for a news scoop. There's nothing
| intrinsically wrong with that, though some might argue it
| contributes to needless volatility.
| zone411 wrote:
| For example, if I'm deciding right now whether to fund a
| mine for one of the materials needed to create this
| supposed superconductor, knowing how likely it is to be
| real helps me make a better decision or hedge my
| investment.
| tinco wrote:
| Not to take away from your point, but there is a better way
| than prediction markets, and that's careful objective
| research by non-experts (https://goodjudgment.com/).
|
| It's been shown that teams of such researchers consistently
| beat prediction markets on these sorts of topics. Anecdotal
| evidence suggests it might be that the presence of experts
| and cultural preconceptions corrupt prediction markets enough
| to diverge the result from the "wisdom of the crowd" effect.
| seppel wrote:
| > It's been shown that teams of such researchers
| consistently beat prediction markets on these sorts of
| topics.
|
| This sounds like free money.
| tinco wrote:
| Running prediction markets is probably more free money
| than that. Building and maintaining research teams like
| that is not easy or cheap, if it would be then Good
| Judgment Inc. would be rolling in cash.
|
| Edit for context: Good Judgement Inc. is a sort of
| consultancy firm formed based on the results of an
| experiment called "The good judgment project" where
| psychologists challenged a community to predict
| (geopolitical) events. By structuring it as a team based
| tournament they figured out a list of qualities/rules
| that would make an individual or theme very good at
| accurately predicting events. The teams that followed
| these rules outperformed prediction markets. Following
| the rules is basically a full time commitment.
|
| The list is here, go get your free money:
| https://goodjudgment.com/philip-tetlocks-10-commandments-
| of-...
| sgregnt wrote:
| > it has been shown ...
|
| Can you please share your sources?
| Turskarama wrote:
| LK-99 is a brand new material that almost nobody knows
| anything about. The market is not a knowledge aggregate, it
| is vibes based.
| japoco wrote:
| You are severely underestimating how good vibes from a lot
| of people are at giving good estimates.
| evgen wrote:
| They are actually only good if the members of that crowd
| have some sort of empirical experience with the problem
| they are being asked to solve. Guess the number of coins
| in a jar? People know coins and have experience packing
| things in a limited volume to the crowd has a hope of
| being wise. Guess an obscure materials science and
| physics result? Not a chance, the crowd is worthless.
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| > You are severely underestimating how good vibes from a
| lot of people are at giving good estimates
|
| Anyone else remembers how people were selling and buying
| doge coin at 70 cents based on good vibes? No? Ok.
| Turskarama wrote:
| There has to be _some_ level of knowledge to base it off
| though, this is just hope.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| How about this scenario:
|
| I am the PI of a laboratory. I buy up the market and
| (falsely) announce that I succeeded in replication. Sell and
| make profit. Then a couple of days later I announce that I
| made a terrible mistake.
|
| How do you prevent this scenario? I did nothing illegal, I
| just "not noticed the mistake I made".
| adastra22 wrote:
| This is illegal btw.
| aqme28 wrote:
| Or the opposite. I successfully replicate in my lab, but
| the price on Yes is high, so I make a post about how there
| definitely isn't superconductivity, buy up all the Yes, and
| then say "Woops I made a mistake. It really does
| superconduct."
|
| OP is downplaying the shenanigans that can go on here.
|
| The only way to prevent it is some sort of SEC insider
| trading or market manipulation laws.
| sgregnt wrote:
| The market already takes this possibility into account
| codethief wrote:
| I believe that falls under insider trading.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Conceptually, but not legally.
|
| Insider trading has a very specific definition, which
| does not apply here. In fact there are huge financial
| markets, like forex, where insider trading mostly doesn't
| apply.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| A version of that probably happened last night with Lk-99,
| the "Iris" replication claim.
|
| Why do think it's such a problem? Those are the risks of
| speculating and the market adjusted back downwards in very
| short order. If Iris was a manipulator the gains were
| minimal and fleeting.
|
| The anti-markets comments all over this are so unfortunate
| and misguided.
|
| By your own logic don't you just prove that a real lab is
| now potentially motivated to investigate and even
| replicate? If I'm working in a lab and it looks like it is
| working, why not let me place money on yes and speculate? I
| have excellent information.
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| But a fraud was perpetrated and the scammer got away. The
| markets are supposed to ignore that? Money was taken out
| of the market by a bad actor. If anything this encourages
| quick fraud over slow honesty.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| Markets don't ignore it, they learn from it. They don't
| need you or any authority to protect them.
|
| Edit: Understand that the scammer has to buy, then
| release the false information, and then sell. They only
| "scam" the buyers that don't critically assess this new
| information, such as it's provenance and quality. This
| means that over time only the best analysts survive and
| thrive. Smart speculators likely sold the spike, limiting
| the number of buyers the manipulator could find. This
| scenario is actually an argument FOR prediction markets.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > they learn from it
|
| And the lesson is that betting markets are a scam.
|
| But then you get people criticizing the ones telling you
| that lesson. Is it because newborn fools must be
| preserved until people can take their money?
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| How are betting markets a scam? They are remarkably
| useful, you can watch the LK-99 market now and you will
| know immediately as new information arrives.
| weard_beard wrote:
| The "replication" does not use the same methodology and
| the "scientist" is asking for bitcoin to post a video of
| the quantum locking effect.
|
| The existence of the market is encouraging literal scams.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| So what it's also encouraging real information.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, that's your claim.
|
| Somehow you expect people to act differently if that
| market wasn't there. Personally, I doubt a large number
| of those interested even know the market exists.
|
| Yet, scammers are deeply aware of betting markets. they
| seem to always be there, and even create new ones just so
| they can play.
| morelisp wrote:
| > They only "scam" the buyers that don't critically
| assess this new information
|
| Yes correct that is a scam, no scare quotes. A scam
| doesn't become less of scam because it worked or didn't
| work.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| So you feel governments should babysit prediction market
| speculators who can't evaluate information for
| themselves? Or wait that's too hard, so let's just ban
| them, well because ... fairness obviously.
|
| The issues are not problems as people make them out to
| be, you don't have an intrinsic right to not be scammed,
| or to take vacations, as nice as it sounds, those are
| just fantasy that leads to worse situations when
| attempting to make reality.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| The base prior (the market price) is that this will not
| replicate. This scenario is a way to make a quick buck
| claiming the opposite without doing any actual hard work.
|
| In regular markets you can't just say "we increased our
| sales 1000%" and a week later "oops, sorry, misplaced
| decimal dot". You can do that in prediction markets.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| If you are participating in a prediction market and
| blindly believe random claims, yes, you will lose your
| money. As you should.
|
| I don't understand what you think is different with other
| markets. Information must be assessed for it's accuracy
| and acted on by participants.
|
| In this case I'd even argue the prediction market helped
| focus attention and resulted in rapid counter analysis
| that questioned the claims.
|
| Perhaps without the LK-99 markets effects the false
| information would have had wider and longer reach? The
| losses of the unskilled participants are a perfectly
| acceptable cost and in fact beneficial in the long term.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| The reason regulation is introduced in every trading
| market is because scammers are killing the market. How
| long do you think an honest operator can survive in a
| market where 90% of participants are scammers? You talk
| about skilled participants. The way to have 100% skill is
| to manufacture an event.
|
| The history of financial markets is rich in examples.
|
| Or more recently, the endless supply of scamming in
| sports betting where athletes collude to fix games.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| I understand that is the common perception and an
| understandable one based on how the information on this
| topic is presented to the public. However it's likely not
| true, unregulated markets have boomed and provide many
| valuable services and information. I've personally heard
| an argument promoting even removal of insider trading
| laws and that markets would actually be fairer and more
| efficient without them.
| swader999 wrote:
| You would risk someone else of stature announcing against
| your position. There are also liquidity risks.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| Absolutely and people might be interested that in this case
| the prediction market for LK-99 is reacting in real time to
| new tweets from people trying to replicate. The "yes" spike
| to 32c yesterday was in response to a twitter account posting
| an image of a levitating grain in a tube. The credibility of
| that replication attempt was then evaluated by many and the
| market backed off afterwards.
|
| There is always a subtle anti-markets theme on many HN
| debates, likely from highly educated ans literate posters. I
| believe we still in this age simply don't provide proper
| education on the massive benefits that markets bring to so
| mang problems. They are literally the nervous system of our
| incredible global organic economy.
|
| In this case, why in world would you have something against
| prediction markets?
|
| Is it fascinating the risk of a nuclear weapon detonation by
| December 31st of 2023 is accessed to be around 9%?
|
| If anything we need to liberalize laws around prediction
| markets. Currently they are relagated to off shore and
| various backwaters. The CME should be listing tbese types of
| markets ideally and institutional money hiring top analytical
| talent would then participate.
| croes wrote:
| Because markets aren't nearly as clever as is always
| claimed.
|
| Lehmann Brothers anyone?
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| More like governments aren't as clever as claimed. The
| markets would have put all the bad actors out of business
| permanently and redistributed the resources (like shinny
| new buildings and engineers) to areas where they would
| better be utilized.
|
| Instead it was turned into an opportunity to launder
| money at planetary scale.
|
| This likely hints to why the truth about the benefits of
| brutally efficient free markets is distorted in
| education, it would require the teaching of the
| remarkable incompetence of collectivism and governments!
| which we know who won't like that.
| kibwen wrote:
| "Real capitalism has never been tried."
| eropple wrote:
| And, of course, cannot fail--only be failed.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Markets are perfectly capable of rewarding bad actors for
| a very long time. even if they eventually converge
| towards reality it's not something that you should assume
| about a market in any given situation (for one thing, a
| market is _only_ reflecting the opinions of others about
| a thing, not the reality of the thing. Even if you think
| the opinions are on average wrong you don 't make money
| by finding the reality, but by predicting when and how
| the opinions will change).
|
| I think markets are an extremely useful decision tool in
| a lot of circumstances but they do still have many
| failure modes which aren't related to not being 'free
| enough' (especially w.r.t. regulation it can in fact make
| markets more efficient as opposed to less, depending on
| the regulation and the market).
| fallingknife wrote:
| What system isn't capable of rewarding bad actors for a
| long time?
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Random allocation.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| Which then erases all information.
| sgt101 wrote:
| A perfect market would do this, but it would also suffer
| from other well documented problems.. the markets we have
| are very far from disinterested allocation optimization
| systems.
| croes wrote:
| Don't act like markets and government are independent
| entities. The markets influenced the government in their
| favor long before Lehmann brothers and they did the same
| afterwards.
|
| The markets you think of are as possible as working
| communism.
| cmilton wrote:
| At what cost though? Surely the wealthy will continue on
| like nothing ever happened while the rest of us are here
| holding the bag.
|
| Markets seem to benefit some much more than others. Not
| everyone wants to play this game.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| I was there and know all the details what happened and
| you nailed the key point, they used fear to have you
| believe what you wrote.
|
| I remember Paulson talking about how ATMs would fail. AIG
| won't pay it's policies. The US equities would crash even
| further. I hate to tell you but ALL lies, blatant
| "misinformation" as the new term is.
|
| They needed you to be terrified to save their own skins.
| Blackrock became the largest landlord in the country
| afterwards. The very companies that facilitated and
| promoted and literally caused the bubble and crash were
| rewarded.
|
| The waitress and mechanic couple with a baby who had
| carefully saved up $30K never got the opportunity to buy
| that house down the street from their parents for $90K at
| foreclosure from the bankrupt banks. Nope, Blackrock
| exchanged their bad paper, worth, 20c for $1 to your very
| government for new fresh cash, bought it instead at
| $120K, down from $150K.
|
| Go crony capitalism! Which isn't what markets are about.
| mcphage wrote:
| That's a pretty clever trick you got there. First you
| take all of the problems inherent to markets. And then
| you say "actually it's the government's job to fix that,
| and they're doing a terrible job"--which you then turn
| around and use as a justification for more markets and
| less government!
| aionaiodfgnio wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Prediction markets got Donald Trump wrong on the election
| night and Brexit too[0].
|
| Given such a huge failure why should we care what they say?
|
| [0]: https://archive.li/7m8s6
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| Weren't they still much better than what many media
| experts were forecasting? Iirc, CNN put Clinton at 97%.
| brookst wrote:
| Are you saying they are no better than chance? Or just
| that they are not 100% perfect?
|
| Because we should deeply care about any source of
| information that beats chance, _even if_ it is imperfect.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I mean that is two fucking big ones to get wrong, no?
|
| Would maybe be interesting to see some data to look back
| and see how correct they are in general, but to be
| practically useful it would have to be quite a lot better
| than chance.
| andrepd wrote:
| >Is it fascinating the risk of a nuclear weapon detonation
| by December 31st of 2023 is accessed to be around 9%?
|
| That tells you all you need to know, but probably not in
| the way you think.
| guru4consulting wrote:
| Agreed. Stock markets are very similar to prediction
| markets. They are priced based on future projections,
| technical feasibility and probability of achieving certain
| milestone, ability to reach market first, internal and
| external factors, etc. I don't see much difference between
| a prediction market and a stock market. Theoretically, we
| could allow both of them and treat them similar. But one
| major risk I see is that big players can influence it with
| big money and distort the reality. It becomes a casino,
| just like the current wall street. Right now, most of the
| participants in prediction markets are likely knowledgeable
| in the subject area, or even subject matter experts and
| it's probably better to leave it that way.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| "attempt to have the process replicated and buy options
| on the outcome once they confirm their findings in"
|
| This is called insider trading in stock markets and
| illegal. So your analogy breaks.
| peyton wrote:
| If some company claims to have discovered a way to make
| widget X and I make widget X at home and trade on that
| information, that's completely legal.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| fwiw there are very coherent economic arguments as to why
| insider trading should not be illegal and might be more
| "fair" with it permitted.
| gomox wrote:
| Re: nuclear weapon detonation, the implied probability of
| 9% (I take it source is: https://polymarket.com/event/will-
| a-nuclear-weapon-detonate-...) might be factoring in the
| premium for the insurance that participants that predict a
| detonation are interested in acquiring.
|
| Let's say that the real odds of detonation are 1% and that
| everyone participating in the market knows and agrees to
| this. You would expect the implied probability that the
| market produces to be 1%.
|
| But in practice, a nuclear detonation would be a highly
| disruptive event where the impact is hard to assess. This
| creates an asymmetry of interests. If you want to protect
| yourself financially from such an event, you would pay a
| premium for it (which in a prediction market implies
| placing a higher bet on "detonation will happen" than a
| perfect gambler). If you want to protect yourself from the
| event _not_ happening, you would also do the same, but no
| one really does that other than speculators.
|
| Similarly, you can sell tornado insurance to a lot of
| people, but very few people are interested in insuring that
| a tornado _will_ happen (maybe concrete bunker architect
| studios?). So the underlying prediction market would skew
| towards overestimating the likelihood of tornados.
| epivosism wrote:
| "Will a nuclear weapon be detonated (including tests and
| accidents) in 2023?" is at 18%
|
| https://manifold.markets/ACXBot/8-will-a-nuclear-weapon-
| be-d...
|
| There are some caveats in the description, and this is
| play money, but people on the site do take their profits
| seriously.
| gomox wrote:
| It seems to be too thinly traded to read much into it?
| From what I can see a $100 bet would make the implied
| probability of detonation 93%.
| epivosism wrote:
| yes, but then players would use their cash to bring it
| back to a reasonable number. That's why there are
| temporary blips on the site but markets which have at
| least 40-50 traders tend to stay where the whale
| consensus still is.
|
| I admit it's a weakness, but even play money markets
| generally do tend to track real-money ones where they
| exist. People on the site mostly take their profits
| seriously.
| sterlind wrote:
| _> Is it fascinating the risk of a nuclear weapon
| detonation by December 31st of 2023 is accessed to be
| around 9%?_
|
| If a nuke goes off, full-scale nuclear war becomes much
| more likely. In the event of nuclear apocalypse, your money
| will become worthless. So shouldn't that risk be
| undervalued?
| morelisp wrote:
| Looking past your "rah rah financialization" partisanship,
| one question:
|
| Why is a prediction market for replication per se more
| interesting than the existing market of all the public
| companies who would be enriched / wiped out based on the
| result?
|
| (Note that "well, the effect would be too small" flips just
| as easily around to, the smaller markets are obviously way
| too noisy given what people are actually getting away
| with...)
| zone411 wrote:
| > Why is a prediction market for replication per se more
| interesting than the existing market of all the public
| companies who would be enriched / wiped out based on the
| result?
|
| If you knew precisely which companies would gain or lose,
| how much relative to their stock price, and all these
| companies were liquid and public, then maybe you could
| make this comparison. Even then, there'd be plenty of
| noise from unrelated factors. So, it's pretty clear why a
| prediction market is superior.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| What are people getting away with exactly? Prediction
| markets more rapidly expose fraud and misinformation than
| without them.
|
| Generally the decision to list a market or contract is
| based on providing specific utility and information. They
| provide a better signal to noise and therefore provide
| risk management as well.
|
| The fact you believe markets are a "partisan" topic
| illustrates exactly the problem. They are objectively and
| scientifically an important and critical part of
| humanity, which isn't taught.
|
| As I've said elsewhere there reason is obvious as in
| teaching such facts and information will require
| simultaneously teach about how horrific and harmful
| governments have been, and we know who won't like that.
| morelisp wrote:
| Exposing fraud you created the environment for is not
| particularly interesting.
| jamilton wrote:
| I don't understand, how do prediction markets create the
| environment for fraud?
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| Oh so fraudulent SC claims would have no better avenues
| without prediction markets? I'd argue they would have
| more and with more capacity not less!
| concordDance wrote:
| More directly about the actual issues policy makers care
| about, so you lose less info to confounders.
| morelisp wrote:
| Markets are perfect except when they don't capture
| "actual issues" and then you need different markets with
| different participants? How does this support market
| primacy?
| mellosouls wrote:
| _There is always a subtle anti-markets theme on many HN
| debates, likely from highly educated ans literate posters.
| I believe we still in this age simply don't provide proper
| education on the massive benefits that markets bring to so
| mang problems_
|
| I think we are all too aware of markets and their benefits
| _and_ disbenefits.
|
| It's not clear why you think the "education" is missing
| only in one direction.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| You don't observe a frequent knee jerk like anti-markets
| reaction from comments across HN?
|
| What are good examples of their "disbenefits"?
| Bluestrike2 wrote:
| Any number of the many, many, negative externalities[0],
| where market transactions are unable or unwilling to
| capture the often serious negative effects of an activity
| in its price, that have been documented and researched by
| economists over the years? Air pollution and greenhouse
| gases are just two of the biggest examples, with
| absolutely _massive_ external costs that are not captured
| in the price. There are even _positive externalities_
| with various activities where societal benefits can 't be
| captured in the price.
|
| Regulatory capture[1] and rent-seeking are also examples
| where markets can fail. There are plenty of others.
|
| Markets are just tools for the exchange of economic
| activity. Nothing more, nothing less. But as a society,
| we tend to ascribe all sorts of greater meaning to them
| that make it harder to recognize where they come up short
| and actually do something about it. If knee-jerk anti-
| market reactions are bad, then might I propose that knee-
| jerk _pro_ -market reactions are just as bad, insofar as
| they gloss over or outright ignore the negative aspects
| of markets as we've implemented them?
|
| Imagine a screwdriver. It does one job: turn a screw. If
| you have the right one, matched with the corresponding
| screw drive--let's just assume a Philips screw--at the
| right size, it does its job _perfectly_. But it 'll get
| less effective as the tip and screw sizes diverge. What
| about other screw drives? There are a bunch of types
| where a Philips will sort of fit, and you'll probably be
| able to turn the screw, albeit with more effort and a
| greater likelihood of camming out and damaging the screw
| or your screwdriver. A flat-head screwdriver gets used
| and abused in all _sorts_ of fun and interesting ways.
| You can use a flat-head screwdriver to pry open a can of
| paint, but an actual paint can opener is still less
| likely to distort or damage the lid or slip and injure
| you. At some point, you open the tool box and grab
| another tool. Maybe it 's another screwdriver, because
| you're turning another screw. Or maybe it's a different
| tool altogether, one designed for the specific task at
| hand.
|
| Markets aren't so different, if not quite as narrowly-
| defined as a screwdriver. They work well in some areas,
| less well in others, and in some, they simply can't
| function. All to varying degrees. Recognizing their
| failures and limitations allows us try and develop
| policies that address their worst parts while maintaining
| their more desirable parts.
|
| 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| For the record I believe I agree with you. However I view
| it as governments are the failure point in the issues you
| list, not markets. They have outright failed to address
| the negative externalities as they have been captured by
| private interests. In my opinion the entire financial
| system is captured and the regulations they tend to
| introduce are simply to allow the corrupt private
| entities further control.
|
| One neat part of anonymous online prediction markets
| using unregulated digital currencies is how they exist
| outside this crony capitalist system.
|
| It's not markets to blame. It's bad government!
| IX-103 wrote:
| Yes, the police are to blame for the rash of murders and
| arson is clearly the fire department's fault.
|
| It takes two to perform regulatory capture -- unless one
| of them can buy votes from lawmakers. And guess what the
| "market" found was most efficient?
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| And the politicians also buy votes from the people using
| redistribution policies. Seems we agree the government is
| the problem!
| mellosouls wrote:
| _You don't observe a frequent knee jerk like anti-markets
| reaction from comments across HN?_
|
| I find HN one of the most balanced online forums on most
| subjects.
|
| _What are good examples of their "disbenefits"?_
|
| The race to the bottom is all around us.
| concordDance wrote:
| > The race to the bottom is all around us.
|
| Isn't this more a side effect of corporations,
| advertising and corruption rather than markets
| themselves?
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| To some, they're the same thing.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| > The race to the bottom is all around us.
|
| You live in SF by chance?
|
| Because globally and historically that's absolutely not
| what the data says about markets.
| RedCondor wrote:
| Marketers take a lot of credit for achievements that
| don't belong to them.
|
| Take, for example, Hayek's rather more honest commentary
| on vacations and human rights generally:
|
| > _[The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights] is
| admittedly an attempt to fuse the rights of the Western
| liberal tradition with the altogether different concept
| deriving from the Marxist Russian Revolution. It adds to
| the list of the classical civil rights enumerated in its
| first twenty-one articles seven further guarantees
| intended to express the new 'social and economic rights'.
| (...) The conception of a 'universal right' which assures
| to the peasant, to the Eskimo, and presumably to the
| Abominable Snowman, 'periodic holidays with pay' shows
| the absurdity of the whole thing. (...) What are the
| consequences of the requirement that every one should
| have the right 'freely to participate in the cultural
| life of the community and to share in the scientific
| advances and its benefits'. (...) It is evident that all
| these 'rights' are based on the interpretation of society
| as a deliberately made organization by which everybody is
| employed. They could not be made universal within a
| system of rules of just conduct based on the conception
| of individual responsibility, and so require that the
| whole of society be converted into a single organization,
| that is, made totalitarian in the fullest sense of the
| word._
|
| https://redsails.org/concessions/
|
| The decay we witness today is simply the rollback of
| concessions copied from socialist states and artificially
| bolted onto capitalism to reduce socialist ferment. The
| consequences are predictable.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| I see. So this is about "the right" to take a vacation?
| What are you talking about and what am I? we seem to live
| in different realities. I can't even imagine somehow I
| would have a government "right" to take a vacation. Who
| is paying for it? I don't get it.
| RedCondor wrote:
| All so-called "capital returns" are in reality produced
| by working people, and therefore people get to
| democratically decide what they do with them, through
| whatever decision-making forms they politically choose
| and consent to organize themselves under.
|
| Insofar as there are disagreements, because capitalist
| "geniuses" don't think their riches should be subject to
| democracy, we have a struggle between socialism and
| capitalism.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| Except history shows us that in 100% of the cases that
| working people seize the production and allocate the
| gains they do a unbelievable bad job. Socialism is the
| single most failed idea in human history, yet we refuse
| to properly teach that in our education system. I suspect
| in the future it will be view a bit like refusing to
| teach other scientific subjects, like evolution.
|
| In reality a mob of people end up producing nothing
| without capitalists and markets. There is a joke that the
| IQ of a mob is roughly the highest IQ in the mob divided
| by the size of the mob.
| IX-103 wrote:
| Do you mean Communism instead of socialism above?
| Socialism has nothing to do with "seizing the means of
| production". For socialism it is sufficient to regulate
| private industries to achieve social good.
|
| And flavors of socialism are very successful so far. Most
| first-world countries (particularly in Western Europe)
| have adopted aspects of it and significantly improved
| individual quality of life compared to those countries
| who haven't.
|
| Nice strawman.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| Western europe is being left behind and it's politicians
| are getting nervous. Claims of higher quality of life are
| false information.
| RedCondor wrote:
| Cool joke.
|
| I encourage anyone on the fence between this libertarian
| and I to read the "Concessions" essay I linked up above.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > Socialism is the single most failed idea in human
| history, yet we refuse to properly teach that in our
| education system.
|
| Well... let's see until we have the capitalist end game
| before we draw that conclusion, there is a fair chance
| that it will make the failures of socialism look like a
| picnic.
|
| > I suspect in the future it will be view a bit like
| refusing to teach other scientific subjects, like
| evolution.
|
| Economic systems aren't science, they are just means of
| organizing large numbers of people in ways that are
| hopefully sensible. A system that maximizes for growth
| can work, for a while, but isn't long term sustainable.
| So depending on your horizon you may think it is a great
| idea or a terrible one. Markets aren't bad per-se, but
| they have the potential to lead to catastrophe and if you
| don't acknowledge that potential and deal with the risk
| then the chances of it happening increase.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| Refusing to view economic systems scientifically and
| quantifying objectively is a seriously big problem. Gotta
| stop the fairy tales.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The problem is that every economic system ever proposes
| is predicated on a bunch of assumptions that do not
| necessarily hold true over time. So you end up with a
| model that _may_ work for a while but that 's not how
| science works. Science extracts facts from observations
| using the scientific method. Social constructs - and
| social sciences of which economy is a branch -
| effectively model people and people are emphatically not
| as predictable as lab equipment and substances.
|
| So you will always end up with fiction dressed up in a
| scientific coat. It looks and talks like science but it
| really isn't. There are no testable hypothesis, there is
| a ton of politics and there will never be consensus.
| bazzargh wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annual_leave#Leave "Most
| countries have labour laws that mandate employers give a
| certain number of paid time-off days per year to
| workers." (it goes on to point out that the USA - with
| the exception of Maine and Nevada - is the outlier in
| western industrial nations in not having this)
|
| The "right" is also in the Universal Declaration of Human
| Rights and International Covenant on Economic, Social and
| Cultural Rights; see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_rest_and_leisure
|
| Ironically, a lot of this dates back to the Haymarket
| Riot in Chicago in May 1886 (over the eight-hour-day
| movement), which led to May Day being a worker's holiday
| in much of the world...but US politics meant they got an
| alternative holiday in September.
|
| As RedCondor points out, "who pays for it" has it
| backwards, companies gain value from the work of their
| employees, so effectively it is just giving back some of
| what they "pay" the company in labour.
| brookst wrote:
| Do you think you have a right to take breaks at work? To
| go to the bathroom? To a safe work environment?
|
| People aren't machines. We have a complicated social
| contract that says companies may employ labor so long as
| they meet certain requirements for safety, health, and
| treatment.
|
| It's not unreasonable to see time off as part of the
| deal. Who's paying for your bathroom breaks? Same answer.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Any system that is in control and doesn't actually manage
| to stop progress can make this claim, monarchies and
| socialist systems included. Capitalism is very good at
| maximizing the amount of money available for investment,
| so it probably is uniquely qualified to make a claim to
| be the best system for encouraging progress, but just as
| clearly it aggressively funnels technology down paths
| that are tuned for maximum value extraction and that's
| _not_ something I believe is good for society as a whole,
| or even progress on a long enough timescale.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| For what it's worth, not much, but me personal believe
| that you believe that without evidence and primary due to
| the propaganda governments have fed you to scapegoat the
| evil "capitalists" and markets as a way to deflect blame
| for serious problems away from themselves.
|
| Governments need to regulate to prevent harm, we all
| agree. Yet they claim it's the markets doing it! No,
| markets do what is most efficient and optimal given the
| rules they can operate within. Governments are the
| failure point for basically all the serious problems.
| Instead of making neutral evidence based rules as
| regulations, politicians tend to reach for redistribution
| to buy votes, which when combined with scapegoating
| markets, is a winning combination to remain in power.
| Unfortunately history shows, unambiguously, it's a losing
| combination for the society.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Funny, I think that you believe what you do without
| evidence primarily due to the propaganda spread by the
| wealthy elite that own and control the system and want to
| deflect blame for serious problems away from themselves
| by blaming the government.
|
| The private sector is bigger than the public sector, both
| in terms of dollar expenditure and in terms of political
| power. Politicians have to be vetted by rich people (the
| campaign finance process) before they are even _options_
| for election. If you 're wealthy enough to monetize
| policy changes, it's easy to lobby with positive net
| expected value, if not, it isn't. The whims of the
| wealthy are in the driver's seat, the will of the people
| is not.
|
| Quick exercise. Many people are confused about the social
| class they inhabit. Tax policy is the easiest way to
| demonstrate the actual reality, because whoever is in
| charge always decides that someone else should pay the
| taxes. Take out last year's 1040. I want you to look at 3
| lines: Line 1, what you earn from working, Line 7, what
| you earn from owning assets, and Line 9+3/4, your
| unrealized capital gains. Line 1 has high tax, Line 7 has
| low tax, and Line 9+3/4 has no tax. Who do you think
| decided these tax levels? Populists? Do you _feel_ in
| charge here?
|
| > markets do what is most efficient and optimal given the
| rules
|
| Markets don't maximize value in the colloquial sense, the
| value that they optimize is wealth-weighted. Feed a
| starving orphan? Zero market value because the orphan has
| no wealth to pay you. Merge up all the banks so they can
| load up on risk and arrange for bailouts when they go
| bust? Enormous market value because it makes rich
| investors richer, the single most weighted value in all
| the world. The market will ejaculate capital and
| connections all over this brilliant value-creating
| enterprise. Oh, and part of it will involve bribing
| public officials so you can even blame the government for
| allowing you to rob the plebs. Lol.
|
| Ok, so the markets don't do what people want, they do
| what wealth-weighted people want. What rich people want.
| Is that so bad? You and I still get enough weight in the
| process to live a decent life. Besides, Warren Buffet
| seems pretty humble and someone has to be diligent about
| the high level investment decisions, right? Well, here's
| the problem: financial assets are a moral hazard.
| Cynically, capitalism entitles rich people to get paid
| for being rich. Passive income is the ultimate luxury,
| the most valuable commodity, and rich people indulge
| exorbitantly. Even Warren Buffet. _Especially_ Warren
| Buffet. When his passive income streams are threatened,
| the happy investment grandpa turns into a nasty selfish
| asshole out to bust the balls of the people doing the
| real work at the companies he owns (seriously, look into
| the terms of the BNSF negotiations) because on the
| opposite side of a passive stream is (arguably) a stream
| of unreciprocated labor. The counterargument is that
| Labor Theory of Value is clearly bunk because there 's
| more to value than labor, but just as clearly there is
| moral hazard in letting someone who doesn't produce the
| surplus value decide what to do with the surplus value.
| Wouldn't they just stuff it in their pockets? Yes. That's
| literally what the stock market is. The entire private
| sector is organized explicitly for the purpose of
| stuffing pockets and everything else is merely an
| emergent consequence of that.
|
| Maybe that's ok. After all, every contract is
| individually agreed to, right? Problem: one side gets
| much more control over the rules of the game than the
| other, so consent is dubious. On the first day of
| business school they teach the prisoner's dilemma, where
| freedom to control the rules of a game trumps freedom to
| choose inside of a game. In theory, competition keeps
| businesses is check, but in practice businesses do
| everything they can to avoid competition, some
| successfully, so does it really?
|
| In any case, every system needs investment and investment
| is all about reducing consumption today (which rich
| people are in a unique position to do) in order to spend
| the money instead on a factory or a risky venture or
| something that is expected to make the world better
| tomorrow, returning a cut to the investor, rewarding
| success and punishing failure. This is good for everyone,
| right? Well, yes... when it plays out that way. But
| markets are amoral. They don't really know if you
| _created_ value or _extracted_ value and they don 't
| care. The money in your pocket doesn't care if you are a
| highway robber or robber baron or someone who worked hard
| for that money. As far as markets are concerned, "create
| problem, sell solution" is just as legitimate an
| enterprise as solving an actual preexisting problem.
| Better, even, because fundamental value creation is hard
| and you have to compete, while monopolization is all
| about not competing. What do the best performing market
| sectors over the last few decades have in common (health
| care, housing, and education)? Monopolized scarcity. Is
| this really best for society? You notice how business
| school tends to focus less on building a better product
| and more on building a better moat? They know what they
| are doing, and while it's the best strategy for them, is
| this really the best way to run society? By maximizing
| free money for the rich and observing that a somewhat
| functional society springs up as a side effect?
|
| Capitalism is great at growth and terrible at
| stewardship. It wins a land grab but it leaves behind a
| nasty class structure. Is it worth it? I have no idea. I
| just try to win. I'm a lot less certain than I used to
| be, though.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > Capitalism is great at growth and terrible at
| stewardship. It wins a land grab but it leaves behind a
| nasty class structure. Is it worth it? I have no idea. I
| just try to win. I'm a lot less certain than I used to
| be, though.
|
| I think we're roughly on the same page. The interesting
| part about capitalism is that it scales fantastically,
| for a while and as long as the bills aren't due you can
| improve your standard of living and those around you
| considerably. But some day those bills will be presented,
| it can be during your generation, your kids or two or
| three down the line. And that's when you find out about
| the stewardship component. But by then it is too late.
| It's a study in how local optimization can cause global
| catastrophe.
| hgomersall wrote:
| I really like this discussion because it's a rare example
| of things being discussed in real terms, where the
| financial considerations are secondary; actual power over
| real resources being wielded by the wealthy.
| jacquesm wrote:
| If you think about it in terms of resource consumption
| per capita over a lifetime then it gets a lot more
| difficult because now you have to divide all those
| resources across all of the humans that have lived and
| that will every live taking into account any kind of
| improvement on recycling. This is a really hard problem,
| the estimate is that right now about 7% of all that
| people that have every lived are alive, and that the
| total number of people have have ever lived is 117
| billion people. But because historically people would
| consume less than we do today there is a 'surplus' that
| we started to eat into at the beginnings of the
| industrial revolution. Now we're in debt to the future
| and those 'wealthy' people in your comment are over
| represented in terms of resource consumption but we're
| not that far behind when compared to say the people from
| 400 years ago.
|
| Extrapolating into the future then is probably going to
| show an even larger percentage of consumption per capita
| compared to the budget, and that at some point in time
| will result in a shortage. The people that will live
| through that will look back at us as the incredibly
| wasteful denizens of the 20th and 21st century that
| wasted resources on a scale that at that point in time
| probably will be criminal.
|
| Sustainability is more than just a nice slogan, it is
| sooner or later going to be our end-game and the earlier
| we start doing this for real the longer the species will
| exist and the more comfortable the members of the species
| will be.
| someplaceguy wrote:
| > it aggressively funnels technology down paths that are
| tuned for maximum value extraction
|
| In this context, if you start using the words "creation",
| "production" or even "availability" rather than
| "extraction", I think your perspective will change
| drastically.
| macintux wrote:
| The "bottom" is also subjective. I see small-town grocery
| stores everywhere in Indiana dying due to cheap Dollar
| General stores popping up next to them.
|
| So much for fresh fruit & vegetables, so much for the
| Amish bakeries that would distribute baked goods through
| the local groceries.
|
| But hey, cheaply-made goods from China are more widely
| available.
| someplaceguy wrote:
| Not every apparently negative aspect of changes caused by
| a market-driven process is actually an indication that
| those changes are negative as a whole.
|
| You should contemplate why the market caused resources to
| be allocated this way, instead of your preferred way, as
| usually the market allocates resources more efficiently
| than any single person could ever hope to achieve.
|
| It may turn out that the negative changes you perceived
| are more than balanced by other positive changes that you
| weren't able to perceive. In your example, the lives ot
| Chinese people who benefitted from those changes may have
| improved a lot more than whatever setbacks you may have
| experienced. Or maybe people around you can now buy
| things they couldn't afford before.
|
| That said, this is not always true, as markets don't take
| into account externalities.
|
| But still, we don't know of any system of global resource
| allocation better than letting markets do their job while
| governments try to control their externalities.
| kakwa_ wrote:
| Vast topic.
|
| Markets definitely have their issues.
|
| Here are a few:
|
| * The most obvious one is the fact it's an overhead, it
| doesn't produce goods or services by itself. That's not a
| major issue, but for example in the US ~5% (~7M of ~150M)
| of the workforce is dedicated to this overhead.
|
| * It's prone to internal instabilities. Too often, the
| markets disconnect from the underlying economic reality,
| sometimes with only mild effects (for example, that time
| petroleum prices went negative), sometimes with more
| serious ones (2008).
|
| * It can lead to overly quantitative views, ignoring the
| qualitative. It's the "metrics becoming the objective and
| thus compromising the value of the metric" (example: tech
| stock prices).
|
| * It over-emphasizes individual interests over the
| collective one (think for example: environmental issues &
| global warming).
|
| Markets definitely have their issues. But so far, the
| other systems we experimented with (planned economy) were
| even less able to cope with the incredibly difficult task
| of balancing an economy.
|
| Lastly, it is to be noted that we are not operating in a
| pure market economy.
|
| We are in an hybrid system where States (hopefully
| representing their people) definitely have a lot of say
| in economic matters and that's probably for the better.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| > Too often, the markets disconnect from the underlying
| economic reality, sometimes with only mild effects (for
| example, that time petroleum prices went negative)
|
| I may have misunderstood the situation at the time or am
| now misremembering it but I thought:
|
| Some crude futures were about to become deliverable,
| meaning people who had been speculating on the price and
| have no fundamental use for unrefined petroleum were
| going to receive it. Normally they sell the soon-
| delivering futures for some later-delivering futures and
| lose or make relatively small amounts of money in the
| difference.
|
| But there was no one to sell to, because COVID had
| reduced processing capacity and demand for gasoline. So
| all these traders who had no use for crude were about to
| be stuck with it. It's a noxious, volatile, dangerous
| chemical that requires special handling.
|
| As the date approached it became important to find
| somewhere to _put _ the stuff, so much so that traders
| were paying people to take it off their hands. Which
| seems like a very elegant mechanism?
|
| Like, I don't want crude oil at my house. I'm not gonna
| worry much about the price to get it taken away,
| probably.
|
| And at that moment the market was paying for someone to
| take the crude, meaning anyone who could bring additional
| storage or processing capacity online very quickly was
| delivering something valuable.
| kakwa_ wrote:
| Yes, that's what's happened.
|
| I was using this example to illustrate the disconnect
| between the market (which was trading oil like some
| immaterial stuff) and reality (oil is definitely a
| product you need to store properly, plus oil storage is
| not infinite).
|
| In fairness, because it occurred during COVID, i.e. a
| really abnormal situation, this is a bit of a weak
| example.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Markets definitely have their issues. But so far, the
| other systems we experimented with (planned economy) were
| even less able to cope with the incredibly difficult task
| of balancing an economy.
|
| The worst issue that the Soviets and other attempts at
| central planning failed to account for was flexibility
| and buffer. Say a natural disaster hits and you need an
| extra amount of concrete for reconstruction, but all the
| concrete production was already allocated for something
| else and the plan is considered sacrosanct. Or some
| innovation (e.g. refrigerators, cars, washing machines)
| proves to be way more popular than expected, but there is
| no way to adapt the plan, and so you had to wait years
| for a Trabant car.
|
| Ironically, Western-style "free markets" eventually
| converged towards the same issue with the unholy
| invention of "just in time" manufacturing. Both
| capitalism and communism sought to eradicate
| "inefficiencies" and destabilized their entire foundation
| doing so.
| kakwa_ wrote:
| To extend, interesting read on the subject of the soviet
| economy:
|
| https://chris-said.io/2016/05/11/optimizing-things-in-
| the-us...
|
| HN discussions:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14515225
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25084479
| kybernetikos wrote:
| I would describe myself as cautiously pro market, but I
| think it's hard to deny that they are effective
| externality seeking machines. If there is any way of
| providing a benefit while finding a way to impose the
| cost diffusely, you can bet that the market will find it.
| Market based systems guarantee that costs will be hidden
| and imposed on those who don't receive the benefit to the
| maximum extent possible given physics and law.
|
| On top of that, it's interesting that we only use the
| market concept at the meta level. Vanishingly few of the
| businesses that compete in the marketplace are
| _internally_ arranged on market principles. Instead they
| follow bureaucratic and oligarchic principles internally.
| And when the survival of the state is on the line because
| of war, we don 't trust markets to allocate resources to
| get important things built quickly - rather the state
| takes power to directly cause some things to be built and
| other things not to be.
|
| Although the market gets praised for being good at
| allocation of capital, I would say it's good in the way
| evolution is good at finding things that can survive. It
| might find great solutions that a planned process
| wouldn't, but it'll take a long time and a lot of things
| will die in the process.
| nvm0n1 wrote:
| Isn't military work mostly done by private contractors?
| It's not like the USAF actually owns and operates its own
| plane factories.
|
| Some companies do approximate market operations
| internally, any company that has a notion of internal
| billing or where teams talk about internal customers is
| to some extent like this.
|
| Companies not using market principles internally isn't a
| strike against markets, if you believe Coase's theory of
| the firm i.e. companies form at the break even point on
| transaction costs
| eropple wrote:
| _> What are good examples of their "disbenefits"?_
|
| Overwhelmingly unaddressed externalities.
| sterlind wrote:
| Prediction markets seem blessedly free of externalities
| though, compared to, say, the energy market (CO2) or
| textiles (child labor, sweatshops.)
|
| except for incentivizing action to tilt the odds, which
| is weirdly amoral. if you bet on a bad thing happening,
| you can cash in by making it happen yourself.
| Regnore wrote:
| Feeding gambling addictions is the one big externality
| that comes to mind.
| someplaceguy wrote:
| > except for incentivizing action to tilt the odds, which
| is weirdly amoral.
|
| It depends on what's at stake. One example is predicting
| someone's death.
|
| > if you bet on a bad thing happening, you can cash in by
| making it happen yourself.
|
| Yes, and that could be a huge problem, don't you think?
| It creates an incentive for a bad thing happening that
| wouldn't exist otherwise.
|
| I say this as someone who is in huge favor of markets but
| also hates their externalities.
| ajuc wrote:
| Child labor.
|
| Slave trade.
|
| Sweatshops.
|
| 1000 different environmental catastrophes.
|
| You know, the reasons we have regulation. We had markets
| FIRST, then we got regulation on top of that, and we
| never looked back.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| All of those things, including environmental
| catastrophes, existed for millennia before Adam Smith
| came along.
| ajuc wrote:
| So did markets.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| Absolutely government's fundamental role in human society
| is regulating against harm.
|
| But somehow the narrative is markets are "bad", they
| obviously aren't as they seek out information and
| efficiency, which is a good thing. Markets are the one's
| you should thank for telling you child labor, slaves, and
| sweatshops are a problem, and the environment issue, so
| you pressured your government to regulate those issues.
| Without free markets the alternative would be the
| government doing all those horrible things, which btw
| they certain used to.
|
| People are mixed up, the primary problem is government
| failure to regulate and be transparent. It's very
| difficult for governments to admit they create the
| problems so academics and politicians find the boggy man
| of markets.
|
| Kennedy understands this topic well and while it's
| unlikely he will win, I deeply hope he can somehow.
|
| We need more markets for more things with clear and clean
| regulations build based on empirical evidence and
| scientific and not created by lobbyists involved in
| regulatory capture.
| ajuc wrote:
| > But somehow the narrative is markets are "bad"
|
| The mainstream opinion is "markets are ok as long as they
| are well regulated".
|
| The only narrative that is trying to compete with that
| with any success is "markets are perfect without any
| regulation". Which provokes the rebuttal you refer to.
|
| I've yet to see anybody claiming seriously that "markets
| are inherently bad and can't be saved". Even in communism
| there were markets, as abysmal as that system was (and I
| lived in a communist country for 6 years).
|
| If our markets right now were regulated enough - we
| wouldn't have global warming problems. Clearly there's a
| lot of externalities that aren't priced-in. So - there's
| too much market and too little regulation.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| We likely actually agree.
|
| The issue is politicians tend to push redistribution and
| direct action of the government over rules and
| regulations.
| supazek wrote:
| Child labor has been a thing since well before any market
| ever existed. Slavery has always existed and was made
| obsolete not due to some new moral prerogative but
| because it couldn't compete with new labor saving
| devices. Sweatshops are basically the same as slavery and
| mostly exist in places which have not fully accepted free
| markets or where the value placed on human life is
| shockingly low. They can only obtain workers because
| their economy is absolutely unbalanced - there is no
| reason to believe a market wouldn't fix that eventually.
| Regarding environmental catastrophes, that seems to be a
| result of technological advancement more so than
| "markets", but markets are the thing that is most
| probably going to bring the third world out of poverty
| and make them actually care about it.
|
| The only reason people like us are able to sit and argue
| on HN is because we aren't worried about finding dinner
| for our 8 kids tonight. We live privileged lives. By
| demonizing the very thing that allowed us to move past
| these things you are basically attempting to pull up the
| ladder so no other unfortunate people can come up after
| you
| renlo wrote:
| > If you are participating in a prediction market, either you
| have some reason you believe you know something the market
| does not or you should expect you are simply subsidizing
| those with better information.
|
| Sometimes people just vote for "their team", similar to a
| sportsball fan placing a large bet on their favorite team
| winning, without any insider knowledge. I've seen it a couple
| of times on PredictIt for the more contentious predictions
| (presidential election being one, control of the house /
| senate, etc). While in the end those with better information
| will usually come out on top, in those kinds of markets the
| favored prediction doesn't align well with the data.
| andrepd wrote:
| It's like they say, when all you have is a hammer...
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's not all that different from how the financial crisis
| came to be: derivatives on top of bad loans. Here it is bad
| bets on top of a possible phenomenon that probably none of the
| participants in the bets have any insight in.
| fallingknife wrote:
| The bets were never the issue. The leverage in the banking
| system was. The bad bets were just the spark that lit it. The
| prediction markets are not leveraged
| sudosysgen wrote:
| No reason why they wouldn't become leveraged.
| beowulfey wrote:
| A few things:
|
| * the paper wasn't ready, and internal drama is what led to it
| being released
|
| * I've read that the process of making it is quite difficult.
| There probably are not many samples out there in the world
|
| Basically, it wasn't ready for primetime, but I believe it's
| close
| TrailMixRaisin wrote:
| The topic on how hard or easy it is to replicate seems to be
| as fast changing as other information. The first time I read
| about it, it was deemed to be super easy as all you needed
| are the two base materials and a vacuum furnace. But with all
| the drama involved I would not be surprised if the process is
| actually very complicated.
| qingcharles wrote:
| The paper is _vague_ unfortunately. Here are some of the
| questions Andrew McCalip has (and he is fairly far along
| the path of actually making LK99):
|
| Precursors:
|
| *What level of purity is required for the precursor
| materials?
|
| *Are there any necessary preparatory steps for the
| precursors just before use?
|
| *What are the required particle sizes for the precursor
| materials?
|
| Thermal steps:
|
| *What is the environment (air or vacuum) for the Lanarkite
| reaction?
|
| *What are the temperature ramp-up and ramp-down rates for
| all three reactions?
|
| *Are there any thermal annealing steps involved?
|
| *How sensitive is LK99 to the duration of the final 925degC
| step?
|
| Results:
|
| *Could you elaborate on the observed differences between
| the bulk material and the thin film?
|
| *Does the bulk material share the same composition as the
| thin film?
|
| *How repeatable is the prescribed recipe, is SC behavior
| stochastic across samples?
|
| *Could you provide details on the equipment used, setup
| photos, and procedures employed to measure the critical
| current in response to an applied magnetic field, as seen
| in figure 8 of paper 3?
|
| Thin film deposition:
|
| *What type of glass substrate was used in the vapor
| deposition process for the thin film?
|
| *Could the exact set-point temperatures of the tungsten
| boat be provided, instead of ranges? (e.g., 550 to 900 ,
| 900 to 2000 )
|
| *In patent figure 22, from which region was the resistivity
| value taken? The light gray or the dark gray area?
|
| https://twitter.com/andrewmccalip/status/168589172267568742
| 4
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| The stock market is no different, there's inequality in access
| to information there too.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| > buy options on the outcome once they confirm their findings
| in order to cash out
|
| What stops that being textbook insider trading?
| incrudible wrote:
| Just making a bet does not really spend the money, it will just
| change hands, presumably from the less informed to the more
| informed, who should be able to eventually spend it more
| wisely. As far as forcing the outcome, _if_ it turns out to be
| possible, but the market got it all wrong, there is your
| incentive to give it a shot regardless.
| justinclift wrote:
| > making a bet does not really spend the money, it will just
| change hands
|
| Pretty sure most people would call the money changing hands
| "spending" that money.
| [deleted]
| barelyauser wrote:
| Yes, but the original post means "spending" as "making good
| use of if" or "putting it to a productive end". People
| betting money has very little effect on the world. But
| consider the case where I pay you to be idle for an hour. I
| destroyed 1 hour of your labor, you got paid but we are not
| in any shape or form richer because of it. Or consider
| people attending a charity event. They pay to attend, then
| spent 1 hour having fun. After the event, they will have to
| in fact labor to provide the charity when the fund raising
| event starts to spent its money. There is no cheating
| nature.
| amelius wrote:
| > Shouldn't the minimum requirements be a magnet and the
| material sample, to demonstrate it floating through the
| meissner effect?
|
| The minimum requirements should be that it doesn't heat up when
| you send a large current through it.
| cptaj wrote:
| The worst part is that those market people are delusional
| enough to believe what they say.
| yreg wrote:
| Are there any prediction markets where you can bet money on
| this?
|
| I thought people talked only about Moneyfold, which is just a
| game. (You cannot take money out of it, although you can use it
| to make a charity donation.)
|
| I suspect that people on actual real money market would make
| different predictions to Manifold.
| yorwba wrote:
| Polymarket uses real money, I think
| https://polymarket.com/event/is-the-room-temp-
| superconductor...
| eurleif wrote:
| https://polymarket.com/event/is-the-room-temp-
| superconductor...
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I like that that website seems to use just smallish penny
| amounts, no big betting amounts. And that it's a simple
| formula; if you're right, you win $1 per share, if you
| lose, you get nothing. There's one about whether Trump wins
| the election with everyone voting 'no', so the winners will
| gain fractions of pennies on their bet. But if he does win,
| those voting 'yes' can gain 99% of their bet.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| The concept isn't bad but the problem with these markets
| isn't necessarily the amounts played, rather it's how
| they're resolved. What exactly counts as 'event has
| happened' and 'event has not happened'? I think
| Polymarket uses some kind of oracle1 to establish the
| outcomes. What I know for sure is that there have been a
| couple of cases of fraudulently set up markets already,
| so anyone who wants to bet has to really understand the
| conditions before jumping in, even if they're very sure
| about the outcome.
|
| Again, I think it's a cool concept but I'd advice people
| to stay away from touching these until there's a solution
| for that problem. The small amounts people are betting
| are likely a reflection of this problem, because it's
| hard to understand if the setup is trustworthy.
|
| 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain_oracle
| jamilton wrote:
| There's been at least one badly mis-resolved market on
| Polymarket, too.
| ummonk wrote:
| It's worse than that. If you've confirmed results, you now have
| an incentive not to publish your results, instead building up a
| market position on prediction markets for as long as possible.
| killerstorm wrote:
| No. You're incentivized to build a market prosition on
| prediction markets, or sell your information to somebody who
| can. (E.g. if a lab has a replication proof it might partner
| with a trading firm to maximize their profit.)
|
| But there's definitely no incentive to do it "for as long as
| possible". E.g. once the trader gets into a favorable
| position, they are incentivized to reveal their information
| ASAP to be able to take profit.
| kulahan wrote:
| I was absolutely certain I saw a photo of LK-99 floating over
| (partially, part of it was still touching) a magnet. Of course,
| this proves nothing as it's a photo, but I have this memory of
| seeing it, so maybe someone else saw it in some official
| capacity.
| r2_pilot wrote:
| This is purported to be a video of what you saw a photo of:
| https://sciencecast.org/casts/suc384jly50n
| cubefox wrote:
| Note that real prediction markets with money are currently
| illegal in the US because of some legacy law. So Polymarket
| (currently the major prediction market I believe) is only
| usable outside the US anyway.
|
| Currently the only US alternative is play money. Manifold and
| Metaculus use this system. Metaculus doesn't really use play
| "money", but a non-zero-sum system to award points for more
| accurate predictions. It's in both cases a game and an exercise
| in checking how well-calibrated your beliefs about the future
| are.
|
| And here is the canonical FAQ on prediction markets, and the
| social/policy benefits they could have:
|
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/prediction-market-faq
| jamilton wrote:
| Kalshi is a real money prediction market that's (only) legal
| in the US. No market on LK-99 though.
| cubefox wrote:
| From the FAQ:
|
| > Kalshi can only ask a few specific regulator-approved
| questions; the limits are so harsh that they're not even
| allowed to predict elections
| ssijak wrote:
| This twitter handle contains some interesting back story
| investigation https://twitter.com/8teAPi
| junon wrote:
| Where? I just see bandwagoning from a shitpost account.
| ssijak wrote:
| start here then go to comments for branching out
| https://twitter.com/8teAPi/status/1685960703658860544
| drtgh wrote:
| nitter link
| https://nitter.net/8teAPi/status/1685960703658860544
| hobofan wrote:
| > interesting back story investigation
|
| No! As stated in their reply to this, you should assume that
| everything that account writes is fiction.
|
| They said that they were essentially trying to write a The Big
| Short-style screenplay in real time as the story unfolds. To do
| that, they link to actual newsworthy tweets and "fill it in
| with realistic stereotypes".
|
| It's a shame that this account is one of the most responsive
| aggregators of new developments, as I find their real-time
| fictionalization incredibly irresponsible.
| code51 wrote:
| Damn, why is nobody talking more about the theory of it?
|
| What I see to ponder:
|
| - (1970, brinkman, rice) "application of gutzwiller's variational
| method to the metal-insulator transition"
|
| - (2001, hyun-tak kim) "extension of the brinkman-rice picture
| and the mott transition"
|
| - (2002, hyun-tak kim) "extended brinkman-rice picture and its
| application to high-Tc superconductors"
|
| - (2021, hyun-tak kim) "Room-temperature-superconducting Tc
| driven by electron correlation"
|
| even briefly reading relevant research (other than these papers)
| says even if a group could not replicate lk99 at first try,
| there's more to it. cooking the right way should be insanely
| difficult because this is a probabilistic event after all. should
| not be happening homogenously and should not be happening in a
| wide-band of parameters. I think the groups will eventually reach
| a narrow range of parameters to replicate but will take a lot of
| effort.
| dkqmduems wrote:
| The brinkman paper is interesting, but the others are a bit too
| hand wavy.
| [deleted]
| koreanguy wrote:
| [dead]
| throwaway849755 wrote:
| Is there any HN effect by which enough contrary early opinion
| here could increase the odds of eventual triumph?
|
| On the chance that there is, I will do my part:
|
| _In mice._
| twic wrote:
| No synthesis. Less critical current than YBCO. Lame.
| stevehawk wrote:
| oh god i understood this reference. we love you cmdrtaco
| moffkalast wrote:
| The naysayers say nay.
| ggm wrote:
| Morphic Resonance theory
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake
| heliophobicdude wrote:
| I've been live following this thread:
|
| https://twitter.com/iris_igb/status/1685731177523449856
| andersa wrote:
| This thread is super frustrating. The person posting it does
| not at all seem interested in actually demonstrating the effect
| works... how can you have such a sample and only post this one
| image which could easily be created by gluing a pebble to the
| glass? Where's the video of it in action!
|
| I want this material to be real so badly.
| Rzor wrote:
| We all do, andersa. We all do. I can feel the disappointment
| brewing. Deep down, I'm almost ready for the archetypal
| "measurement error".
| asimpletune wrote:
| To be fair a video could also be faked and they explain why
| they're not doing videos and that if you want a replication
| just wait for the big labs.
| yreg wrote:
| I think it's an obvious fake, the account is trolling on
| multiple fronts.
| 7373737373 wrote:
| Agreed, if they are unwilling or unable to demonstrate it
| well, why even bother, why waste viewer's time and attention?
|
| A bad/unconvincing/incomplete demonstration is
| indistinguishable from a scam
|
| If they want to show and distribute the capital-T Truth, they
| need to take their ego out of the equation
| Davidzheng wrote:
| lol they're just having fun let them be. She's not trying
| to claim anything
| fullstackchris wrote:
| gotta say, this is slowly looking like a giant nothing burger
| code51 wrote:
| We thought Oppenheimer was the way to instill a love of physics
| to young people but turns out LK-99 was the way to winning
| people's hearts and minds to delve more into physics.
| legi0nary wrote:
| Don't understand how a movie largely about the psychological
| horrors of developing and using a nuclear weapons is being
| construed to be "pro physics" lol. If anything it's the
| opposite
| Freedom2 wrote:
| Yeah, it sounds like GP hasn't even seen the movie, the
| themes conveyed are quite clear.
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| Regardless if LK-99 is truly a Room-Temperature Superconductor or
| not, only 112 years passed since Heike Kamerlingh Onnes
| discovered superconductivity on April 8, 1911, 4 PM [1] [2]:
| resistance not futile, but "practically zero". The first loaf of
| sliced bread was sold commercially on July 7, 1928 [3]. The rate
| of progress is astonishing.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heike_Kamerlingh_Onnes#Superco...
|
| [2] 2010, "The discovery of superconductivity",
| https://www.ilorentz.org/history/cold/DelftKes_HKO_PT.pdf
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Frederick_Rohwedder
| ccity88 wrote:
| Iris Alexandra's twitter is especially enthralling. Seems like so
| much discoveries and innovation happens from computer science to
| physics, chemistry and biology all from people with anime profile
| pictures.
| Accujack wrote:
| She's acknowledged her results were a hoax at this point.
| jabedude wrote:
| Where? Saying something like this should be accompanied with
| proof
| generalizations wrote:
| I haven't seen any such acknowledgement in her twitter feed?
| justinjlynn wrote:
| > anime profile pictures
|
| Either that or furry ones. Amusing apparent correlation.
| WaffleIronMaker wrote:
| Highlighting this tweet in particular:
|
| > Here's a chunk of pyrolytic graphite on the same magnet with
| the same stick. Even with less density and more surface normal
| to field.... It doesn't lift off. If it's diamagnetism it's a
| fucking absurdly strong one
|
| https://twitter.com/iris_IGB/status/1685804254718459904
|
| Her findings, and suggestions of manufacturing process
| improvements, are very interesting.
| psychphysic wrote:
| Seems silly to compare to that absolute chunk of pyrplytic
| graphite. Shouldn't it be a similar size spec?
| jiggawatts wrote:
| AFAIK the chunk will levitate irrespective of size up to
| some maximum. Diamagnetism is a property of the material,
| not the shape.
| herculity275 wrote:
| There's a certain subset of people on the intersection of high
| IQ, high-functioning ASD and LGBT that produces a lot of high
| impact activity in STEM fields.
| twic wrote:
| I think there's also an aspect of doing it and presenting it
| in an unusually attention-grabbing way.
| slily wrote:
| I heard from a psychologist that homosexuality is associated
| with higher creativity (possibly explaining why it wasn't
| eliminated through evolution/natural selection). That seems
| true in art anyway, but I am not sure if in science the
| flamboyant online profiles simply make them more memorable
| characters or if the association holds.
| XorNot wrote:
| Well I mean at this point, if I think I'm sitting on a big
| discovery the _first_ thing I 'm doing is changing my avatar
| to an anime one.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| High-functioning LGBT for sure
| willy_k wrote:
| Do you have a point or did you just feel like inserting
| your homophobia?
| nonethewiser wrote:
| What homophobia?
| zamalek wrote:
| LGBT is not strongly correlated to diminished executive
| function.
| guywhocodes wrote:
| I hope we get a video from Iris proving it's not glued to the
| support, if they were able to produce a levitating grain that's
| amazing. Regardless if superconducting or not.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| That's a small enough sample that static electricity alone
| could explain the "levitation".
| bhaak wrote:
| https://twitter.com/iris_IGB for those looking for the account.
|
| I'm watching all of this unfold as an unknowledgeable
| bystander. I'm at a loss for half of the technical terms and
| have no clue how many of those people are just LARPing.
|
| But the positive energy of this all is very refreshing. This is
| what the internet was made for and I'm glad I can take part of
| it even if only by contributing moral support.
| chunkyslink wrote:
| Please can someone explain this to me ?
| jerojero wrote:
| There is a lab in South Korea that claims to have
| discovered/developed superconductor that works at room (and
| higher) temperatures.
|
| This kind of discovery would be worth a Nobel prize and would
| probably give us access to a whole range of new/improved
| technologies in the future.
|
| All of this happened maybe 10 or so days ago, so other labs are
| trying to replicate the procedure to verify that the claims are
| legit, as I said, this would be a huge discovery so it has
| generated a lot of excitement everywhere in the world.
| dom96 wrote:
| I feel like I am out of the loop on this one. But everything I am
| seeing makes me skeptical, can anyone explain why I should be
| excited about this being anything more than just a fake paper?
| [deleted]
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Multiple authors instead of a single quack. Former leader (now
| sadly deceased) was a respected superconducting material
| researcher. They ran the essential tests, albeit not very well.
| They were at it for years in silence, and it was only after
| this current material's synthesis that they were tripping over
| each other to publish, with the apparent firm belief that they
| were onto a Nobel Prize level discovery. The theory they
| proposed -- while perhaps wrong -- also makes intuitive sense.
|
| Cold fusion had many of those elements also, but the difference
| is that superconductivity is easier to verify.
|
| Many people like the overall concept of using doped crystals to
| produce compressed or stretched lattices, which seem to be one
| of the enablers for superconductivity.
|
| Compare with cold fusion, where there was no reasonable theory
| to explain how the palladium lattice would bring hydrogen
| nuclei close together.
| pipo234 wrote:
| tldr; no successful experiment outside original labs reproduces
| the results.
|
| Fingers crossed...
| yreg wrote:
| OTOH only one lab announced a failure and they say they haven't
| followed the recipe.
|
| Fingers crossed...
| jboggan wrote:
| This live crowdsourced approach is a far better way to test and
| refine hypotheses than peer review and the current state of
| science journals.
| danbruc wrote:
| Only as long as the experiments are reasonably simple. There
| are probably still some things requiring only simple
| experiments to be discovered, but most of the low hanging fruit
| has probably already been consumed by a couple of centuries of
| experimentation and scientific progress.
| constantcrying wrote:
| The single most famous mathematical result this century
| (solution ofthe Poincare conjecture) was verified by
| consensus after the claimed proof was published to arxiv.
| danbruc wrote:
| Which falls into the category where I said it would be
| possible - you don't have to bring your own Hadron collider
| but only your brain in order to check whether the proof is
| correct. Admittedly not any brain will do, so in a sense
| you still need some specialized equipment.
| mjfl wrote:
| requires a really significant result in order to demand
| widespread effort in to replicate.
| oldgradstudent wrote:
| That's how it has always been done.
|
| During the 1989 cold fusion fiasco, the findings were announced
| in a press conference, pre-prints were circulated in the
| community, and many groups attempted to reproduce the results.
|
| The first publication came weeks later.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion
| FriedPickles wrote:
| Everybody's talking about reproducing the material which is
| great, but will take time. Why don't the authors supply their
| existing material to an independent lab for earlier confirmation?
| Vicinity9635 wrote:
| Devil's advocate: If the existing material and the process to
| make it can't be replicated, who really cares? Well, aside from
| the people who might deserve a Nobel. The rest of the world
| doesn't because we can't all share it like some kind of magical
| medallion.
| cthalupa wrote:
| I'm on the "Probably a nothingburger" side of things but just
| getting confirmation that it is possible and some
| understanding of what the process involved is is a massive
| jump for science.
|
| If it's actually superconducting we've got a wide variety of
| ways to inspect what LK99 actually is that will shed a whole
| lot of light on how to create more of it, or more of a
| similar superconductor. It'll be one of the most important
| scientific achievements in our lifetimes regardless of
| whether or not it can be replicated with the process in the
| paper.
| psychphysic wrote:
| If they really believe they have the only sample they won't let
| it out of their sight most likely.
|
| It'll be superconducting tomorrow if it's really
| superconducting today.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Is that necessarily true?
|
| I'm 200% not a physicist, but it is possible that during
| transit, minor bumps / temperature changes / ionizing
| radiation / oscillating E-M fields could screw up the
| material in a way that matters?
| foven wrote:
| Not necessarily true. Complex compounds can be susceptible to
| oxidisation and generally decay and degrade over time.
| keenmaster wrote:
| This was my thinking as well.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Whether or not this turns out to be real the whole incident has
| been extremely entertaining, way more than I would have expected.
| Replication attempts being documented in real time on Twitter and
| livestreamed on Twitch, news about infighting and drama among the
| researchers who published the paper, constant fluxations in the
| betting markets as new news comes out. It's been a wild ride.
| robterrell wrote:
| I was in college (and a physics major!) when cold fusion hit.
| Really similar vibe -- competing press conferences and
| publications, huge public excitement tempered by frowning
| disbelief from experts, a rush to replicate from many labs,
| with only occasional claims of success, all of which turned out
| to be errors. Still, I'm rooting for you, LK-99.
| echelon wrote:
| It's a lot like the EmDrive incident, except replication
| attempts are easier.
|
| Both are strange discoveries that are poised to change the
| world as we know it.
|
| Hopefully this one turns out, unlike the EmDrive.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| This is the best state of affairs sum up at the moment and my
| favorite plot line is the soil scientist.
|
| https://twitter.com/8teAPi/status/1685960703658860544?s=19
| baq wrote:
| > She posts her kitchen chemistry process over the weekend,
| at arrives at 2 confirmed Meissner effect levitation
| stones, beating all other public teams. She posts the pics
| on Twitter and begins to indulge in her favorite hobby,
| insulting the intelligence of westerners.
|
| Editorialized, but quite close.
|
| The original thread is one of the best on Twitter. The
| character of the Soviet anime lesbian kitchen chemist
| dropping some amazing lines in between posting pics of
| casually cooking a superconductor is just chef's kiss. I
| don't even need it to be true, got my money's worth.
| foven wrote:
| Can we stop promoting this ateapie loonie. Every post they
| made is so thick with narrative it is completely divorced
| from reality.
| weard_beard wrote:
| Can we put this LARPing scam artist out of the
| conversation? They are setting up a bitcoin wallet to,
| "raise money" to post a video of their admitted non-
| replication (They didn't use the original replication steps
| at all), but still superconducting result using kitchen
| cookware?
|
| Also they spend more time promoting bizarre Soviet
| propaganda, furry porn, and LARPing than science.
|
| Please, can we stop taking this seriously?
| Accujack wrote:
| She's also begging on twitter for people to stop
| attacking her since it's "getting to" her loved ones.
| pja wrote:
| Who's taking it seriously? It's fantastic armchair
| entertainment.
| m463 wrote:
| or the e-cat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| You might be excited about ivo quantum drive that is going to
| be tested in space, NET October
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| That's a drive with which your exact position becomes
| uncertain so... you might be there already.
| [deleted]
| baq wrote:
| The good old improbability drive.
| nine_k wrote:
| Traveling on a spaceship like that, always know where
| your towel is.
| foobarian wrote:
| It may be unfair to compare to EmDrive; that was not possible
| under current physics frameworks, while there is no such
| obvious restriction for superconductors.
| BryanLegend wrote:
| EmDrive was supposed to work better with Superconductors!
| adad95 wrote:
| I already completed forgotten about EMDrive.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The social event is similar. But the experiment is nothing
| alike.
|
| The EmDrive was hard to replicate because it was a tiny
| reported signal in an ocean of noise.
| chaorace wrote:
| The neat thing is that -- whether or not LK-99 is a hoax -- the
| public will have engaged with real scientists doing real
| science in a rather personal capacity. It's novel and
| interesting to be able to tune into the materials science
| equivalent of live-coding.
| m00dy wrote:
| welcome to the new world...It is fast, efficient and very
| interesting...
| bananapub wrote:
| it's not fast or efficient - the authors appear to think they
| invented a very easy to make room temperature/pressure
| superconductor far over a year ago, and then announced it in
| a truly silly way with no clear data and no samples.
| local_issues wrote:
| Materials going from concept -> public testing in less than
| 200 years is fucking shocking in the scale of human
| history.
|
| When did the Chinese invent gunpowder? What about the
| discovery of uranium? The rate of attention span decrease
| is much greater than the still shocking increase in rate of
| discoveries.
| pengaru wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| aqme28 wrote:
| Been following this very closely. Seems like the one takeaway is
| that whatever material this is, it's interesting. It's also
| difficult to synthesize in bulk, which is a shame because
| superconductivity is not easy to observe in non-bulk materials
| (think: powder).
|
| Note: I have a physics degree and a little bit of condensed
| matter experience, but nothing like anyone actually working in
| the field. Just some graduate courses and a bit of lab work
| experience.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Yup, and the "preprint" (which doesn't have a number of
| controls in the process) leaves a lot to be desired, so the
| "real" paper will presumably have some of this worked out.
|
| I expect things like the cooling rate (which affects crystal
| growth) and oxidation will both have variability in them.
| justinclift wrote:
| Is there's no sintering or other process that could fuse the
| power together into a solid? (obviously without destroying its
| useful properties)
| Panzer04 wrote:
| Assuming LK99 is legitimate, my hope is that the principles
| that make it work are more broadly applicable - and with that,
| refined production processes or newer alloys can be found.
| Simply knowing that it's possible would lead to a huge amount
| of research immediately focusing on this kind of thing.
|
| There's nothing more revolutionary than a discovery of a new
| class of materials. After all, we often name eras throughout
| our history after them :) (Stone age, etc)
| ant6n wrote:
| > There's nothing more revolutionary than a discovery of a
| new class of materials. After all, we often name eras
| throughout our history after them :) (Stone age, etc)
|
| I wonder what was involved in the discovery of stone.
| bluerooibos wrote:
| 2023, the beginning of the... Room Temperature
| Superconductor Age!
| Qworg wrote:
| The RTS Age has a good ring to it.
| tudorw wrote:
| hitting each other with every other available substance?
| DrScientist wrote:
| I think the Ice age came before the stone age - can't
| imagine those tools lasted very long - so Stone tools would
| have been a big advance :-)
| ljf wrote:
| Ice ages tools : https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-
| earth/frozen-poop-kn...
| justinclift wrote:
| Being in the wrong place, at the wrong time. ;)
| [deleted]
| civilitty wrote:
| _> I wonder what was involved in the discovery of stone._
|
| Mostly archaic humans hitting rocks against each other
| until they notice that flint knapping [1] creates a sharp
| edge.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapping
| Eduard wrote:
| _The CuO25P6Pb9 Age_
| vmilner wrote:
| Evolution of enough intelligence to use stone as a club, or
| make an edge on flint for cutting?
| empiko wrote:
| A rigorous peer review by graduate students.
| aurizon wrote:
| I see the potential for a Far Side cartoon in that...
| kfarr wrote:
| "Ooga ooga peer review..."
| marcusverus wrote:
| Abstract: Our rigorous dialectic treatment shows that
| stone, while well suited for the smashing open of certain
| types of nut, is not well suited for any other purpose.
| Advocates from the more radical fringes of the tribe who
| suggest stone may be employed in varied areas such as
| warfare or even homebuilding(?!), are herein put in their
| proper place.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| There are many different types of stones, and techniques
| for shaping them became progressively more sophisticated
| over time.
|
| With instruction, it would probably take you less than an
| hour to learn how to make the types of simple chopping
| stones that human ancestors used 1 million years ago.
| However, it takes much more considerable time and skill to
| learn how to make the types of stone tools humans were
| using 100k years ago. You get the sense that each group of
| ancient humans probably had an old expert toolmaker who
| passed on the trade to the next generation.
| Retric wrote:
| It just occurred to me that this might relate to why
| people get near sighted with age. An old tool maker may
| no longer be as productive in hunting and gathering but
| instead masters his or her craft thus aiding the tribe.
| wddkcs wrote:
| Evolution caught using planned obsolescence
| VierScar wrote:
| Why is it hard to make in bulk? I thought the chemicals were
| easy and cheap to obtain, and then you bake it at a high temp?
|
| What makes it difficult?
| carabiner wrote:
| There's a chemist who gave a breakdown with what's known so
| far: https://twitter.com/Robert_Palgrave/status/1684615867726
| 7988...
|
| It's not clear exactly what compound constitutes "LK-99"
| because the equations in the papers are unbalanced and the
| synthesis is ill defined. What they say they got doesn't make
| sense for how they say they got it. Most likely it's a
| mixture of compounds, any of which could be producing the
| alleged superconducting phenomena.
| aqme28 wrote:
| I don't have really any expertise here but it looks like it
| bakes into a powder pretty much every time. Sure you get
| LK-99, but you can't measure superconductivity in a powder
| since it's a bulk property.
| beowulfey wrote:
| The variables that lead to its formation are not all
| accounted for yet. The process is understood, but it doesn't
| always work. So there must be something missing every now and
| then.
| aydyn wrote:
| So they have a batch of the material as proof, but no idea
| how to exactly reproduce it?
|
| That would be a wild story if true.
| Accujack wrote:
| >So they have a batch of the material as proof, but no
| idea how to exactly reproduce it?
|
| No, _we_ don 't know how to reproduce it, with "we" being
| everyone not on the South Korean team.
|
| The papers everyone is trying to work from to replicate
| this are the "leaked" arXiv papers. That actual peer
| reviewed paper is still in process, and presumably that
| one includes more information on how to replicate the
| material.
| kraussvonespy wrote:
| Could the material need to be "seeded" by the proper
| polymorph?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearing_polymorphs
| tomatotomato37 wrote:
| Given the sheer amount of samples material scientists may
| produce I imagine accidentally hitting your target
| characteristic through impurities rather than direct
| formula may happen more often then they care to admit.
| That being said even if they haven't actually narrowed
| down on the exact formula knowing it can even happen in
| the first place is a major discovery
| weard_beard wrote:
| The theory is the crystal structure induced by oxidation
| and vibration is responsible for the superconducting
| effect. They literally dropped and cracked the quartz
| ampoule by accident and produced the sample.
|
| Its not enough to produce the material itself, it seems
| it is an emergent property of the structure and formation
| of the material similar to piezoelectric effect?
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Not that crazy. Steel was the same at first.
|
| Wild guess is that the dopant that creates wells doesn't
| always end up where it should. The paper that claimed
| superconductivity in layers of graphene at very
| particular angles also seems to be very sensitive. A
| similar one claimed graphene with alkanes was observed to
| superconduct. Perhapes whatever impure hydrocarbon they
| were using held the sheets at the perfect angle. All the
| quantum wells these things are claiming to rely on seem
| terribly difficult to arrange perfectly enough to work
| consistently. Assuming any of them ever did.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Samurai sword making took what, a thousand years of trial
| and error? The forgers had no idea how making steel
| worked, they just found a way to make it work.
| flamedoge wrote:
| More interesting that they found a way to work with poor
| quality iron
| tialaramex wrote:
| No indeed. Lots of this in our history. You can't do most
| of electronics without semiconductors. But, if you have
| no idea what's going on you can make some rudimentary
| electronics experiments work - unreliably - without
| knowing that - e.g. the "Cat's whisker" crystal radio
| technology. The reason this actually works is because
| it's a semiconductor, but since you don't know what those
| are yet, you just know if you fiddle about with a fine
| wire and certain types of crystal, sometimes it does what
| you wanted, and if it doesn't keep fiddling with it until
| it does.
|
| I'd imagine early history of sugar products is the same.
| Today you can precisely control the temperatures and so
| you can engineer getting exactly the desired products
| from sugar, but if you're not so good at either measuring
| or keeping careful control of temperature, you get...
| something. It's sugar so in most cases it's delicious
| anyway, but if you wanted fudge but you've made toffee
| you may be disappointed. With practice you can "eyeball"
| it without better equipment, like the cat's whisker, but
| with better equipment an idiot with no experience can
| make it do what they wanted because the numbers were
| correct.
| [deleted]
| maxerickson wrote:
| If it was well understood what made it difficult, odds are it
| would be improving fast.
| drbaba wrote:
| Note that "bulk" in this context means a single large chunk,
| not a large quanitity.
| weard_beard wrote:
| The first time it demonstrated superconductivity they dropped
| the quartz tube it was in, cracking and accidentally
| oxidizing it at a specific point in the heating process and
| providing vibration that caused the formation of a crystal
| structure in the material.
|
| That's... not easily replicable.
| xxpor wrote:
| I hope this doesn't end up like a physics equivalent to
| Fermat's Last Theorem
| bluGill wrote:
| That would be better than the physics equivalent of cold
| fusion (which seemed promising at first, but turns out to
| not exist - at least so far). Only time will tell, though
| if it really is, but so difficult to replicate that we
| need a few hundred years it may as well never exist for
| purposes of our lifetime.
| TillE wrote:
| Assuming that replications fail but they really do have
| samples of a superconductor that can be thoroughly
| examined, this is still fantastic.
|
| Once we know the exact structure, the problem of
| synthesis is very solvable.
| jansan wrote:
| > It's also difficult to synthesize in bulk
|
| Is there any hard limitation that prevents synthesizing in
| bulk? If not, I would not worry about this at the moment and if
| it proves to be a material with desirable properties just leave
| it up to the engineers who will hopefully find a suitable
| production process.
| aqme28 wrote:
| There's not really such a thing as superconductivity for a
| fine powder, so people are having trouble determining if this
| material even superconducts.
|
| edit to clarify: Bulk here refers to having a single chunk of
| the material, and does not refer to the total quantity. Some
| physical properties only exist or only surface in chunks of
| material, not in the powder form.
| XorNot wrote:
| Conversely, the tape-type high temperature superconductors
| are generally made with a colloidal deposition process -
| which is based on a powder as a starter material.
|
| Assuming this is real, that would be the obvious process by
| which to try and build useful conductors and magnets - it
| also suggests a refinement process (passing it over a
| magnet would quantum lock superconducting grains and let
| the rest slide off).
| dsign wrote:
| My two-cents from my armchair spaceship: I thought we had solved
| quantum mechanics! If this material is real, why can't somebody
| run a computer code and calculate its theoretical
| conductivity/resistance? Did I suffer all that childhood trauma
| with wave functions to now, in my forties, have to learn it was
| all smoke and mirrors?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Oh, Quantum mechanics is completely characterized. We have
| complete theoretical modeling of chemistry and most electric
| phenomenon.
|
| But you just try solving the equations our models create.
|
| A computer can certainly simulate this material, on the CS
| theoretical sense, where all computers are the same and time
| and memory are both infinite.
| oneshtein wrote:
| Currently, Cold Fusion used in small scale isotope breeders for
| medical purposes. One 2kWt breeder with CF can replace 100kWt
| traditional breeding plant.
| ggm wrote:
| Cite please. I think you've mistaken neutron feed sourced
| medical imaging radionuclide from low energy research reactions
| for cold fusion e.g. https://www.itnonline.com/content/fda-
| approves-additional-mo...
|
| _NorthStar produces non-uranium based Mo-99 in collaboration
| with its manufacturing partner, the University of Missouri
| Research Reactor (MURR), in Columbia, Mo., using neutron
| capture technology._
| oneshtein wrote:
| See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtfUeip4vyA&t=335s
| [deleted]
| ggm wrote:
| That's not "cold fusion" that's low energy fusion. It
| explicitly has surplus neutrons and radioactivity.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_electrostatic_conf
| i...
|
| It's energy consuming. It's just lower energy than other
| methods, and it's emphatically not cold fusion.
| oneshtein wrote:
| Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR), AKA Cold Fusion.
| tomrod wrote:
| When someone mentions cold fusion, they are explicitly
| referencing a net energy-producing process that operates
| at room temperature. That isn't what you are referencing.
| oneshtein wrote:
| > Cold fusion is a hypothesized type of nuclear reaction
| that would occur at, or near, room temperature. Wikipedia
|
| It works at near room temperature.
|
| The goal of the reactor in the video is to produce
| isotopes. It does the job.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It can not ever produce net energy in this setting, so
| no, it doesn't do the job.
|
| It is in a room, but the temperature inside that vessel
| is anywhere north of 35,000 C. Unless you have a very hot
| room that isn't 'room temperature' by any stretch of the
| definition. Note that room temperature is about the
| temperature of the _process_ not the temperature of the
| building containing that process.
| oneshtein wrote:
| 35kK in this reactor is much closer to room temperature
| than 150MK in ITER, isn't?
| MayeulC wrote:
| Look, call 35K cold if you want. It's relatively easy to
| make some fusion at home [1] at even colder temperatures.
| However, the real issue here is __producing__ energy
| (edit: more than you put in). This has never been done in
| a sustained way (H-bombs produce net energy, there were
| some promising inertial confinement and tokamak results
| recently, but never for sustained periods of time).
|
| And in the chain, it's pointed out quite clearly that
| everybody understands "cold fusion" as referring to "net
| positive energy".
|
| [1]: https://fusor.net/board/index.php
| oneshtein wrote:
| I am old enough to remember "The Storm in a Glass". Back
| then, there was a discussion about excessive heat,
| because the scientific community doubted the possibility
| of nuclear fusion reactions at such low temperatures and
| energy costs. My own hypotheses were: a) the reaction is
| caused by cosmic radiation (muons), and the deuterium
| filled lattice only amplifies natural high-energy cosmic
| radiation; b) the reaction occurs through contamination
| of samples with radioactive materials, and the matrix
| only amplifies natural decay reactions; c) cracks in the
| material create resonance with alternating electric
| current, and as a result, a natural particle accelerator
| is formed.
|
| In the video, researches use lattice to boosts fusor
| performance by few orders of magnitude. Why you think
| that they cannot boost it further?
| jacquesm wrote:
| > Why you think that they cannot boost it further?
|
| That's not how this works. Why do you think it _can_?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Sure, but that's fine and expected since you don't need a
| sufficient fusion density for net energy.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I'm not saying it is 35K, I'm saying it is _at least_ 35K
| and probably much higher.
|
| Whether it is closer to room temperature or not is not
| relevant, when someone says 'room temperature' they are
| talking about 21 degrees Celsius plus or minus a couple,
| not above the temperature where any kind of solid matter
| exists. Even tungsten, which melts at 3422 degrees C and
| boils at the magic number of 5555 C is just vapor at that
| point. Closer isn't relevant, at all.
| oneshtein wrote:
| As you can see, the apparatus didn't evaporate while
| working, so, probably, temperature is much lower.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Ordinary fusion reactors don't melt either, despite even
| hotter temperatures, so I don't think you're making the
| point that you think you are.
| [deleted]
| jacquesm wrote:
| It didn't evaporate because it is constructed carefully
| not to, but that doesn't mean it isn't blazing hot, just
| like the gas burner on your stove can be made out of
| aluminum which would be melted by the flame if it ever
| became mis-aligned.
|
| But that doesn't mean the flame has a temperature lower
| than the melting point of aluminum, it just means that
| whoever designed it knew enough to ensure that the
| aluminum is never exposed to more than that it can handle
| _in spite_ of being in close proximity to something that
| is able to melt it instantly. The biggest factors there
| are flame shape, stand-off and cooling effect of the gas
| supply itself.
|
| Note that when you casually write 'plasma' that you are
| talking about material that is so hot that it has shed
| all of its electrons, it is _just_ the nuclei that you
| 're looking at and if it so much as touches anything at
| all it will waltz right through it as if it isn't there.
| See also: plasma cutters[1] for a nice demonstration of
| what happens when you use these facts to your advantage.
| But for things like plasma based fusion they are a very
| tricky problem because you have to maintain the plasma
| while simultaneously extracting energy from it.
|
| The device shown in the video is very, very nice and well
| engineered, it is amazing that they got it work as well
| as they did with such simplicity but the process is
| eminently unsuitable for energy generation as far as I
| understand this stuff, keeping the plasma stable and
| cooling the whole thing uses many kilowatts. It's an
| improvement over a linear accelerator or a tokamak for
| the production of short lived nucleotides it is not an
| energy generating device.
|
| [1] Plasma cutters _also_ don 't instantly disintegrate
| the cutting tip, that's because they blow copious air
| through the nozzle to keep the hot plasma away from the
| tip itself and to direct it onto the workpiece that you
| are cutting. But woe to you if your air pressure
| unexpectedly drops.
| oneshtein wrote:
| Although the plasma cutter creates extremely hot flames,
| it operates at room temperature and does not require
| powerful radiation protection, except for protective
| goggles, and it is easy to turn on and off. This sets it
| apart from the blast furnace. Similarly, a cold reactor
| may require a source of high-energy particles with very
| high temperatures to start, but they operate at room
| temperature, are easily turned on and off, and cannot be
| used to create a bomb. Note that heat is the _problem_
| for an isotope breeder because the reactor will require
| more powerful cooling. It 's not designed to generate
| heat or electricity. This doesn't mean that it's not
| possible to create a cold reactor that generates a lot of
| heat, but it also doesn't mean that such a reactor will
| be economically viable. We don't know.
|
| I mean that it is time to stop stigmatizing Cold Nuclear
| Fusion because a reactor for isotope breeding could have
| been created 30 years ago, saving many thousands of
| lives. The hating of Cold Fusion has cost many people
| their lives. It would be better to allocate a small
| fraction of a budget for other nuclear power plants and
| direct them towards CF, because the cost of CF iteration
| is orders of magnitude lower, and a few million dollars
| or euros could significantly advance science.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Can you explain why you continue to say things that make
| no sense after it has been pointed out to you multiple
| times by multiple people? It's a bit strange, normally
| you'd realize your mistake and adapt, but you seem to
| persist in purposefully misunderstanding what it means
| when people talk about 'room temperature fusion'.
|
| Let me spell it out once more and then as far as I'm
| concerned we're done here. Room temperature as a
| qualifier for a process means that the _entire process_
| operates at room temperature. Boiling an egg does not
| take place at room temperature, even if it takes place in
| a room. Superconduction - for now - does not take place
| at room temperature but far below it (this may change
| shortly, the jury is still out on that). Plasma, aka the
| fourth state of matter can in very extreme cases be
| created at low temperatures but we 're talking about a
| couple of nuclei worth at best (
| https://www.livescience.com/64422-plasma-cooled-with-
| lasers.... ) but normally only does so at thousands of
| degrees.
|
| This means that the term 'room temperature' simply does
| not apply.
|
| > This doesn't mean that it's not possible to create a
| cold reactor that generates a lot of heat
|
| You _really_ should read that sentence again. Cancel out
| the double negative and see if it makes sense to you.
|
| > The hating of Cold Fusion has cost many people their
| lives.
|
| This is complete nonsense.
|
| > It would be better to allocate a small fraction of a
| budget for other nuclear power plants and direct them
| towards CF, because the cost of CF iteration is orders of
| magnitude lower, and a few million dollars or euros could
| significantly advance science.
|
| Science budgets are limited and tend to be directed to
| areas that are suspected to be fruitful. This makes it
| hard to get funding for what is - charitably - called
| crank science (or, more precisely, pathological science),
| which includes cold fusion. If you are a strong believer
| in the concept you should fund it yourself rather than to
| put the burden of your beliefs on others.
| oneshtein wrote:
| Temperature is statistics. Our bodies are penetrated by
| high-energy cosmic rays, but they do not change the room
| temperature. Cosmic muons can accelerate tens of
| thousands of nuclear fusion reactions in a deuterium-
| filled lattice, melting the metal, but it does not change
| the room temperature a lot. So, at what temperature do
| these reactions occur? On one hand, high energies are
| required to overcome the Coulomb barrier, and on the
| other hand, the reaction does not require heating of
| materials to 1MK or higher.
|
| I have used the term Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (low
| relative to High Energy Nuclear Reactions in
| thermonuclear fusion). LENR allows for the creation of a
| cold fusion reactor, that can be started at room
| temperature and operated at low temperature, unlike
| thermonuclear fusion reactor. Please, see the difference
| between <<nuclear reactions>> and a <<nuclear reactor>>.
|
| > You really should read that sentence again. Cancel out
| the double negative and see if it makes sense to you.
|
| Not a native speaker. It makes perfect sense in my native
| language. :-/
|
| > This is complete nonsense.
|
| I mean that delay or absence of medical treatment caused
| lot of premature deaths in these 30 years. Progress saves
| lives. Delaying of progress reverses the process.
|
| > Science budgets are limited and tend to be directed to
| areas that are suspected to be fruitful. This makes it
| hard to get funding for what is - charitably - called
| crank science, which includes cold fusion.
|
| As you see, private capital is not afraid about loss of
| scientific reputation. IMHO, it will easier to get
| funding for LENR reactors when they break the ice. I was
| unable to find a funding for similar idea before the war.
|
| > If you are a strong believer in the concept you should
| fund it yourself rather than to put the burden of your
| beliefs on others.
|
| I will try that after the war. However, I may pursuit a
| different goal - a bluster (photon streams with watts of
| energy per single photon), to kick Russian drones out
| from the sky.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > Temperature is statistics.
|
| Temperature is a measure of the kinetic energy of the
| molecules in a substance, a measure of velocity.
|
| > Our bodies are penetrated by high-energy cosmic rays,
| but they do not change the room temperature.
|
| They in fact do. Every time a high-energy cosmic ray
| interacts with a particle in the room the room
| temperature goes up. The chances of that happening are
| small because from the perspective of such a ray space is
| very much empty. But some substances (such as water) are
| pretty good at absorbing those rays and that's part of
| the reason why hard radiation is risky for organisms.
|
| > So, at what temperature do these reactions occur?
|
| Those reactions, when they occur are more like traffic
| accidents. The impact results in the transfer of kinetic
| energy and will result in a 'shower' of particles
| emitting from the point of impact and some of those
| particles in turn will fragment (but slightly later).
| They will typically spray out from the impact point.
| Cloudchamber photographs can show you in nice detail what
| such interactions look like. So the question at which
| temperature those reactions occur doesn't really have
| meaning, each particle has it's own velocity and the end
| result is some photons emitted by the electrons of the
| excited particles and probably some new particles (think
| of them as fragments spraying out from a traffic
| accident).
|
| > Cosmic muons can accelerate tens of thousands of
| nuclear fusion reactions in a deuterium-filled lattice,
| melting the metal, but it does not change the room
| temperature a lot.
|
| I can't parse any of this. But you're going to have to
| trust me on the physics of electostatic confinement
| fusors: the losses are such that there is no known path
| to producing net energy through that method. You _can_
| fuse nuclei, and your link above is interesting but it
| doesn 't change the fundaments at all, it is an
| optimization and a good one but it doesn't get you closer
| to 'net out' any more than being able to run the 100
| meters in 5 seconds would get you closer to breaking the
| lightspeed barrier, or like how piling up bricks gets you
| closer to the moon with every brick but you will never
| get there.
|
| > So, at what temperature do these reactions occur?
|
| This is again not a very meaningful question, the answer
| is 'much higher than room temperature'. The interesting
| question would be: does it produce more energy than you
| put in and if not can it be improved so that it does and
| I'm afraid the answer is simply 'no'.
|
| > LENR allows for the creation of a cold fusion reactor,
| that can be started at room temperature and operated at
| low temperature, unlike thermonuclear fusion reactor.
|
| That's a novel interpretation of the words 'cold fusion',
| and uses 'low temperature' in a way that I'm not
| comfortable with, even if it stops short of getting into
| the millions of degrees.
|
| > I mean that delay or absence of medical treatment
| caused lot of premature deaths in these 30 years.
| Progress saves lives. Delaying of progress reverses the
| process.
|
| Nobody is delaying progress. Well, maybe except for those
| that would siphon off budget from legit science to pursue
| their pet fringe science subjects.
|
| > As you see, private capital is not afraid about loss of
| scientific reputation.
|
| And that's perfectly fine. Whoever manages to do this in
| their garage will win a Nobel anyway. But if you don't
| have an advanced physics degree the chances of you
| discovering a novel principle for fusion that leads to
| net energy out on your table top are nil, and if you _do_
| have that degree you are probably not much better off. If
| there was so much as a theoretical path to net energy out
| fusion that does not require many billions of $ you can
| bet that there would be people all over it, in fact I
| would wager that we would have already found it.
|
| > IMHO, it will easier to get funding for LENR reactors
| when they break the ice.
|
| Possible, but not likely, see above bit about breaking
| the speed of light.
|
| > I was unable to find a funding for similar idea before
| the war.
|
| That's not surprising, really. Investors tend to evaluate
| the risks.
|
| > However, I may pursuit a different goal - a bluster
| (photon streams with watts of energy per single photon),
| to kick Russian drones out from the sky.
|
| I wish you all the best with that. But do be aware that a
| single photon carries no more than 10^-19 Joules and that
| Watts are a measure of power, not of energy...). This
| makes me suspect that you know a lot less about this
| stuff than the confidence with which you present yourself
| warrants.
| jjk166 wrote:
| It doesn't work anywhere near room temperature. Fusors
| operate at 10-30 keV, which is about 100 Million to 300
| Million C. The plasma is extremely low density so there
| is very little power to heat things, and thus these units
| can safely run on a table top, but the temperature of the
| ions is enormous.
| oneshtein wrote:
| You are right, nuclear reactions requires enough enormous
| energy to overcome the barrier OR a heavy particles
| (muon). However, fusor works at room temperature. It
| doesn't require preheating to 150MK to start operation,
| like ITER do.
| jjk166 wrote:
| No, the Fusor does not work at room temperature, the same
| electric coils that contain the ions also heat the ions.
| It actually runs substantially hotter than ITER.
| tomrod wrote:
| Aye, it produces neutron isotopes, but not at room
| temperature and not with a net excess of energy.
|
| It's the difference between going on a Sunday walk and a
| Monday commute. Yes, technically, your body is physically
| moving places, but the similarities don't extend much
| beyond that point nor would we encourage mistaking one
| for the other.
| oneshtein wrote:
| 35 thousand Kelvin in a "cold" nuclear fusion reactor is
| much closer to room temperature than the temperature in a
| "hot" nuclear fusion reactor. Both types of reactors do
| not produce excess energy, but the cold reactor has
| already found application while the hot reactor will be
| ready in 25 years. Which kind of reactor is hoax?
| jacquesm wrote:
| The cold reactor fuses nuclei by virtue of _energy input_
| , the other tries to extract energy from a fusion
| reaction larger than its input. On a complexity level
| you're looking at 1:10000 difference or worse.
| oneshtein wrote:
| Cold Fusion doesn't work because we are exchanging high-
| energy particles, which are expensive to produce, for low
| grade heat in bulk of material.
|
| If we will have cheap source of muons, we can change
| equation. We can drop a tiny bit of Nickel lattice filled
| with Deuterium, and then strike it with muons from all
| angles, to create implosion. This will allow us to create
| tiny blast of hot plasma, which is much easier to extract
| energy from.
|
| Sadly, we have no such cheap source of muons, AFAIK.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > If we will have cheap source of muons, we can change
| equation.
|
| You can make them but the cost in energy is exactly the
| problem: you will be spending money on energy to make
| muons at a considerable loss due to the inefficient ways
| in which we know how to make them (proton beams, which
| require a huge amount of energy to create), resulting in
| an insignificant number of particles. If your goal is to
| get net energy out it would be good to keep an eye on
| process efficiency from the beginning. Starting off with
| a billion to one or so conversion loss for step one
| raises the bar for the subsequent steps considerably.
|
| > Sadly, we have no such cheap source of muons, AFAIK.
|
| Indeed we do not, and that's pretty logical.
| tomrod wrote:
| This one, specifically.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion#Response_and_fa
| llo...
| dang wrote:
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36940489.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Stone Age
|
| Bronze Age
|
| Iron Age
|
| LK-99 Age
|
| (source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36869209)
| bhaak wrote:
| No silicon age and plastics age?
| antupis wrote:
| Stone Age
|
| Bronze Age
|
| Iron Age
|
| I would add Steel Age here
|
| LK-99 Age
| askvictor wrote:
| Given that human flight and putting things in space rely on
| Aluminium, I think that's worth a mention too.
| tetrep wrote:
| And the beverage can! While it seems mundane it's extremely
| effective at what it does and it's actually recyclable
| (unlike most things).
|
| I think a silicon age would be appropriate too.
| antupis wrote:
| I was thinking steel reinforced concrete but yeah Aluminium
| or Silicon would fit here also.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Silicon?
| Phelinofist wrote:
| Don't forget the plastics age...
| acjacobson wrote:
| And Silicon after Steel
| Maken wrote:
| Do not forget the Carbon Fiber age.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| Okay, I think I've got it.
|
| Stone Age
|
| Bronze Age
|
| Iron Age
|
| Steel Age (1800 - 1940. The development of mass-produced
| steel of high quality, and its widespread adoption and use in
| construction and by industry.)
|
| Aluminum Age (1940 - 1965. Tremendous growth in the
| aeronautical and space industries, enabled by the futuristic
| light alloy.)
|
| Plastics Age (1965 - 1985. Ubiquitization of lightweight,
| durable plastics in all forms of consumer goods and media.
| The M-16 "plastic rifle" and the polycarbonate compact disc
| are symbolic of this era.)
|
| Silicon Age (1985 - 2023. The age of computers in everything,
| the internet, "smart" devices, gig economy, etc.)
|
| LK-99 Age (2023 - ??. Could end next week, could last a
| while. Nobody knows.)
| m3kw9 wrote:
| This some big leap type world changing stuff if it's true. I
| wonder how gas prices would fall if this is true
| syndicatedjelly wrote:
| I hope people work on something more interesting than making
| gas prices go down slightly
| andersa wrote:
| Gas powered vehicles would be obsolete.
| empiko wrote:
| It is interesting to see how much of the replication is done by
| the Chinese and how little is done by the Western countries. Is
| this the difference between the making-stuff-happen attitude and
| the sclerotic attitude?
| nonethewiser wrote:
| In one of the notes it says
|
| > Red phosphorus cannot be obtained on short notice from a new
| customer in the USA due to DEA restrictions
| TillE wrote:
| "From a new customer" is the key phrase. This is only a
| serious issue for amateurs, not for real established labs.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| It's definitely a serious issue for amateurs or new
| entrants in general but I think it's conceivable that a
| capable and legitimate institution might want to or
| otherwise be able to run the experiment, but they just
| didnt happen to have red phosphorus.
| mlyle wrote:
| Yes, but they won't be a new customer to chemical
| suppliers. If they've ever bought anything DEA List I
| before (like iodine) they can just pay a few hundred
| bucks and get a few hundred grams in a couple of days.
| empiko wrote:
| Isn't that also a part of the same sclerosis?
| staticautomatic wrote:
| So we just need some fireworks companies to get after
| reproducing it, then?
| dekhn wrote:
| The US was a hotbed of scientific quackery at the same time it
| was developing its leading position in the physical sciences
| (~hundred plus years ago). So, let's just wait 100 years and
| see how many of these "replications" are really just fooling
| themselves (and others).
| hobofan wrote:
| I doubt the table is representative of actual replication
| efforts going on, as according to some tweets, suppliers
| everywhere are out of precursors due to a large amount of
| orders. I would guess that there are many labs that started
| trying to replicate as a side-project with an attitude of "if
| it replicates we'll go public, if not, we don't, as we don't
| want to spend a lot of efforts on retries".
|
| Based on that trying to connect that to wider cultural
| innovation trends seems quite far-fetched.
| h2odragon wrote:
| In the West, people are feverishly writing papers about how
| this invention will worsen Climate change, cause cancer, and
| about the social justice implications of the inventor's
| ancestry.
|
| We don't do "mix things up and cook them" type science anymore,
| we just tell others how they're supposed to think of the
| results of those efforts.
| dang wrote:
| " _Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents._ "
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| aqme28 wrote:
| Someone on Twitter spoke on this, so I cant' confirm its
| accuracy. They said that the reagents for this are usually made
| in China. As soon as this paper was published, labs in China
| bought out the reserves and they became hard to source in the
| West.
| perlgeek wrote:
| Weren't the raw materials lead, copper, sulfur and
| phosphorous or something like that? Seems hard to to buy out
| elements that are so common in industrial and chemical
| processes.
| aqme28 wrote:
| Those are the raw atomic elements, which are not the
| products you just put into your oven.
| mlyle wrote:
| There's nothing exotic in there that you can't just buy
| from Spectrum Chemical (though they need to know you and
| that you're not likely to be making methamphetamine).
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| namuol wrote:
| So much speculation but I don't see anyone asking this: Who has
| access to samples from the original lab? If synthesis hasn't been
| cracked yet, wouldn't the next-best thing be independent
| validation of the original samples?
| asynchronous wrote:
| I love being excited about science and research again.
|
| These are the kinds of things I truly enjoy seeing in HN.
| alecst wrote:
| I'm not an expert, but I've used superconductors (I believe YBCO)
| when I taught physics lab. We cooled samples down with liquid
| nitrogen and put them over a magnet. They levitate, but not like
| in the video that the Korean team released. True superconductors
| enjoy "flux pinning", meaning wherever you put them on a magnet,
| they'll freeze in that position (or move around an axis of
| constant flux.) In the LK-99 video that they released, they show
| that the sample is repelled by a magnet. This seems to contradict
| the HTS claim and wondered if I'm missing something because
| surely so many experts can't be this wrong.
|
| My background is in physics, but not superconductors.
| cnhajzwgz wrote:
| Many experts are indeed questioning the apparent lack of flux
| pinning and wonder if it's just strong diamagnetism.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| I think it would be easy to recognize diamagnetism vs
| Superconducting and thus these superconducter experts
| wouldn't embarrass themselves outing such papers
| aqme28 wrote:
| They claim that only a small part of that sample is
| superconducting, and that's why it shows that unusual behavior.
| dawnofdusk wrote:
| Type-II super conductors may exhibit "flux pinning". Type-I
| super conductors do not.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| > Type-II super conductors may exhibit "flux pinning"
|
| Type-II diamagnetism?
| alecst wrote:
| Cool thanks. Gonna read up a little on that.
|
| Edit: yea it's interesting. Believe it or not, I studied L-G
| theory in grad school, taught a lab about (type-II)
| superconductors, but had no idea that type-I superconductors
| didn't flux pin.
|
| Just leaving this here from Wikipedia:
|
| > The superconductor must be a type-II superconductor because
| type-I superconductors cannot be penetrated by magnetic
| fields. Some type-I superconductors can experience the
| effects of flux pinning if they are thin enough. If the
| material's thickness is comparable to the London penetration
| depth, the magnetic field can pass through the material.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_pinning
| adastra22 wrote:
| Also to follow up on your original point, this is a
| purported example of a _linear_ superconductor. There are
| parallel columnar lines of superconductivity inside the
| mineral, like a bundle of wires. No such thing has ever
| been demonstrated before, and it is unlikely to have macro
| properties like those you are familiar with.
|
| For example, flux pinning is (IIRC) due to circular
| currents induced in the superconductor. But how do you
| induce a circular current into a straight-line conductive
| wire with ~zero cross section?
| someplaceguy wrote:
| > If the material's thickness is comparable to the London
| penetration depth, the magnetic field can pass through the
| material.
|
| Indeed. A girl I was seeing told me the same once, but
| obviously things didn't work out between us...
| zarzavat wrote:
| As far as I understand it (not an expert on these things),
| flux pinning is caused by microscopic defects that allow the
| magnetic field to penetrate at certain points. An idealized
| superconductor that is perfectly uniform expels the magnetic
| field at all points and so would not display the effect, it
| would simply be diamagnetic. So it's mistaken and somewhat
| perverse to view the absence of flux pinning as proof that
| something is not a superconductor.
|
| In the case of LK99, the claim is that it does not show flux
| pinning because the sample is impure and not uniformly
| superconductive, i.e. it is not expelling the magnetic field
| _enough_.
| jamesmaniscalco wrote:
| No defects needed for flux penetration in a type-II
| superconductor. When the conference length is smaller than
| the penetration depth (up to a factor of sqrt(2)), flux
| vortices can nucleate as soon as the surface magnetic field
| gets above the lower critical field Bc1.
| jamesmaniscalco wrote:
| Sorry, that should say "coherence length".
| jacquesm wrote:
| That also explains - assuming it is all true - the lack of
| current through the sample.
| ChemSpider wrote:
| I am surprised that anyone still thinks this thing is legit. I
| mean, I wish it was true, but the publication, the approach and
| the infights in the team do not instill confidence.
|
| To me, it seems they can not recreate the "effect" themselves.
| Otherwise they would be shipping their samples around the world
| by now.
| wg0 wrote:
| Don't really get this extreme sensitivity to downvote. I mean -
| it seems what it seems. May be it seems really promising and
| trustworthy to some, good for them.
|
| That apart - it seems low hanging fruits in the nature are
| almost over. Scientific progress might not be as rapid and
| consistent as in past in coming decades especially when world
| seems to be heading towards multiple (avoidable) conflicts.
| Hakkin wrote:
| I'm not necessarily saying I believe it's real, I'm still on
| the fence, but if anything, the in-fighting for credit from the
| researchers almost makes it _more_ credible for me. Why would
| they be so desperate for credit if they knew their findings
| would be disproven in a week or two? It seems obvious they 're
| vying for a Nobel Prize. So at the very least, I believe the
| researchers believe what they published is true.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Could well be experimental error, and they are fighting over
| a false positive result.
| ChemSpider wrote:
| That is exactly my guess. I have been in the lab, and I
| know how easy it is to see something because you
| desperately want to see it...
| Eduard wrote:
| then reading about the many failed attempts of creating the
| first transistor will give you hope.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_transistor
| r0m4n0 wrote:
| I'm just curious as a layman, why aren't the paper authors
| helping in this race whatsoever? It seems a lot of folks are
| guessing on the recipe. I haven't seen any communication from the
| LK from LK99. Seems like radio silence
| ncann wrote:
| They are, if you follow the threads they are apparently quite
| available through email and has responded to quite a number of
| people. Though probably not everyone, given the amount of email
| that they must be receiving right now.
| psychphysic wrote:
| If they have this unicorn superconducter. Then they have it
| next week, and next year.
|
| And it's patented. There's no rush for them.
|
| If they are faking, then there's still no rush.
| [deleted]
| Eduard wrote:
| maybe NDA, maybe trade secret. commercialization is a valid
| reason not to be all too chatty
| WaffleIronMaker wrote:
| Note that the original table has been more recently updated:
| https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/claims-of-room-tempe...
| 7moritz7 wrote:
| So what is the wordpress post for?
| rcme wrote:
| Basically theft.
|
| > This is (initially) a copy of Guderian2nd's table on the
| discussion thread on Spacebattles with a bit of cleanup. I've
| rewritten most of the notes to be more concise as I track the
| updates myself, where I can.
| ot wrote:
| How is it theft? The original source is prominently cited,
| the author of the blog post is an active participant to the
| original discussion, the whole point of the post is to
| collect and summarize various sources in one place.
| rcme wrote:
| Usually copying someone else's work without permission is
| considered (intellectual property) theft.
|
| Also, this person just copied the initial work but isn't
| as committed to keeping things up to date. Much better to
| use the original source.
| tomrod wrote:
| Except in the case of citation.
| rcme wrote:
| No, citing who you copy doesn't remove copyright
| protection.
| swombat wrote:
| Go look up "fair use" under copyright laws.
| Symmetry wrote:
| I did, there's nothing about including a citation to the
| original making something fair use. Although if I cite
| some work using its title like so Person
| *et al*(2023). "The Unbearable Lightness of Tardigades",
| *Little Creatures*, 27, 100-110
|
| Then even though the title is really clever and creative
| copying it into my citation list is still fair use.
|
| EDIT: I guess you could argue that the absence or
| presence of a citation is a factor in the character of
| the use or the use's effect on the market value of the
| original with a straight face but it's very, very much
| not going to be either necessary or sufficient for either
| of those tests.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| IANAL, but copying this table in the way they did seems
| OK under US copyright law.
|
| In the US, _some_ compilations cannot be copyrighted and
| some can.
|
| Before a Supreme Court decision called Feist, copyright
| could be based on either "sweat of the brow" or
| creativity or both. Sweat of the brow is the work of
| taking data from original sources and putting it
| together. Creativity is something you add, like choosing
| what to include. (If I make a mere list of all
| restaurants at Disneyworld, that's sweat of the brow. If
| I make a list of the restaurants that are worth visiting,
| that's creative.)
|
| The Supreme Court decision was about one company copying
| another company's white pages phone book. (White pages
| are the simple name/number listings.) The court said
| sweat of the brow isn't enough. There must be some amount
| of creativity. It's a low bar, but it has to be there. So
| they said the white pages cannot be copyrighted, and
| copying the entire thing is allowed.
|
| About these LK-99 tables, the "Notes" and "Reliability of
| Claim" columns of the original table look creative to me.
| So I'd guess the table can be copyrighted. But the copy
| of the table didn't include those columns. It just
| included the factual data, and I think that's allowed.
|
| Sources:
|
| (1)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_compilation
|
| (2) https://www.copyright.gov/reports/db4.pdf (Sections
| IA and IB give the basic idea.)
| WaffleIronMaker wrote:
| The author apparently did not intend widespread readership:
|
| > Whoever is out there, please stop clicking my link. I used
| to get 10 views a day from Vtuber wannabes and it's now a
| weekday. I don't even consider it a good enough summary! I
| thought the 60 views yesterday on the post was good, and now
| it's a hundred times that! What. Is. Happening.
|
| > Seriously, this is weird. I already got two pingbacks from
| suspicious sites stealing my post. Joke's on them though, I'm
| constantly editing it when I have time.
|
| https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/claims-of-room-
| tempe...
| dang wrote:
| Ok, I guess we'd better switch to that from
| https://eirifu.wordpress.com/2023/07/30/lk-99-superconductor...
| (the submitted URL). Thanks!
| [deleted]
| wg0 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that by the end of this month we'll know that the
| discovery was either instrument, method, process or humam error.
| WizardClickBoy wrote:
| This month ends in about 10 hours depending on timezone, so
| they'd better get their skates on.
| alangibson wrote:
| From what I've gathered, the ingredients of LK99 are common but
| cooking the right way is difficult. Supposedly the team itself
| only gets it right 1 time in 10.
|
| There have also been a lot of complaints that the patents and
| papers are missing info you'd want to have when reproducing. So
| that's making it even harder to reproduce. The upshot tho is that
| the discoverers seem to be available for tips by email.
|
| All in all were going to have to wait more than a few days for
| reproduction it seems.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| [flagged]
| CrimsonRain wrote:
| People like you will crucify whoever finds cure for cancer and
| pat yourselves in the back
| koheripbal wrote:
| Is this comment serious?
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Inclusive of what?
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Could this be the new 4 minute mile? Will [humanity] evacuate on
| ourselves?
|
| Whatever this may be, it's exciting.
| aqme28 wrote:
| I don't know what you're trying to say, but to "evacuate on
| ourselves" means to shit ourselves.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| That is exactly what I intended to say.
|
| Everyone thought the 4 minute mile was impossible, until it
| was done, and then everyone started doing it. Had Roger
| Bannister had a cardiac arrest and evacuated on himself,
| people would have stopped trying for it.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFH0qcmw36Q
| zelos wrote:
| I've seen the 4 minute mile myth posted a lot around LK-99
| stories:
|
| https://www.scienceofrunning.com/2017/05/the-roger-bannister...
| dang wrote:
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36940487.
| Vicinity9635 wrote:
| here's a video I listened to
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLr95AFBRXI on it that delves
| relatively deep for anyone catching up (22m)
| asimpletune wrote:
| So, Russian anime cat girl seems to have cooked a sample and
| demonstrated some of the claimed properties, although she's
| explicit that it shouldn't be considered a "replication".
|
| https://twitter.com/iris_IGB/status/1685731177523449856
| dmitrybrant wrote:
| The "demonstration" is a photo of a single crumb of material
| inside a transparent pipette. It's claimed that the crumb is
| "levitating" inside the pipette, but what's stopping a random
| internet anon from _gluing_ a crumb onto a pipette and taking a
| picture of it?
|
| I don't know about you, but if I had just succeeded in
| replicating a literally history-making experiment, I would
| perhaps take a _video_ of it, and demonstrate how the crumb
| actually behaves without the support of the pipette.
| n2d4 wrote:
| _> but what's stopping a random internet anon from gluing a
| crumb onto a pipette and taking a picture of it?_
|
| Nothing, just like nothing would stop a random internet anon
| from faking a video of the same thing. Even if that existed,
| it still wouldn't be sufficient evidence (especially given
| this is a different synthesis than the one in the paper), it
| would just be much more overblown.
|
| Wait for lab reconstructions, or at the very least, this
| anon's writeup, instead of following a live twitter blog and
| then complaining that it's not conclusive.
|
| _> I don't do videos of things I intend to be writing a text
| from. Ever. It's bad tone. I hate when it happens to me, and
| I don't want anyone to share this fate._ _> I will put a
| GdPO4 bead and one of the good samples onto paper ships and
| film_ _> But it will be only After I will be sure I Got It,
| okay?_
|
| https://twitter.com/iris_IGB/status/1685930149739409408
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| "I don't do videos of things I intend to be writing a text
| from. Ever. It's bad tone. I hate when it happens to me,
| and I don't want anyone to share this fate"
|
| Ah, yes. The good old incoherent "here's why I can't do
| something totally normal" excuse.
|
| Looking through their tweet history, they're an
| insufferable and toxic troll.
| plutonorm wrote:
| This makes it more believable not less. History is
| littered with nut jobs achieving. The wilder the story
| the more credibility I give it. Within bounds. Universe
| is optimised for entertainment and irony
| bawolff wrote:
| That's pretty untrue. Its just that nobody remembers the
| crackpots that achieve nothing.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| History is littered even more by several orders of
| magnitudes with nut jobs achieving precisely zilch. If
| someone seems like a nut job, it's probably because
| they're actually a nut job, not some misunderstood
| genius.
| dmitrybrant wrote:
| Can you give an example? I'm struggling to think of
| historical comparisons. I suppose I can think of a couple
| of "unlikely" achievers:
|
| - Ramanujan: if he lived today, I could imagine him
| tweeting some awesome infinite series, which could be
| verified easily by other mathematicians.
|
| - ...maybe Tesla? But he had a solid track record of
| invention before becoming a nut job.
|
| But who else?
| ChrisClark wrote:
| They seem to block anyone that doesn't agree that the
| USSR, despite not existing anymore, is still pushing
| progress worldwide.
| practice9 wrote:
| The revisionist types are the worst and they are
| emboldened by the war.
|
| I'm amused people actually believed and retweeted
| whatever that troll posted.
| dmitrybrant wrote:
| Don't get me wrong, I want to believe (tm) as much as
| anyone, but this particular part of the story has a lot
| working against it:
|
| * This person is anonymous (account created in Apr 2023),
| so we don't know anything about their affiliation or
| credentials.
|
| * They do seem to have good knowledge of materials science
| (although I have no way to judge), but the rest of their
| twitter history, which is all we have to go on, doesn't
| inspire confidence.
|
| * This person decided to replicate this experiment on a
| whim, as a distraction (because they couldn't stream a
| movie that night, according their tweets), while serious
| labs around the world have been trying frantically for
| several days, without any results.
|
| * This person refuses to submit a video ("bad tone") or any
| additional footage of their achievement, despite it being
| the most unique and world-changing compound on the planet.
| whatshisface wrote:
| If 1000 people with geeky interests all try to make this
| stuff I would be surprised if one did not get lucky with
| the variations in their uncontrolled home lab environment
| and hit the perfect sequence for making a grain of it...
| unless the material does not exist; but honestly if you
| want to hear the opinion of some person on the internet,
| I think that it is real.
| dmitrybrant wrote:
| That may be true, but I'm not seeing 999 other people
| with geeky interests reporting their _failed_ attempts.
| We are, however, starting to see actual labs reporting
| negative results.
| floxy wrote:
| People getting excited over an oreo cookie crumb in a
| pipette? Wait till someone puts the oreo cookie wafer on an
| air hockey table for a fun levitation video.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| Is there any reason to believe their results? While their
| reproduction could definitely be legitimate, there are no
| credentials or affiliations mentioned on their bio, except for
| "molecular biologist" which typically means a skill set more
| oriented towards organic chemistry (as opposed to inorganic
| chemistry, which this is about), and neither have they posted
| any hints as to what their methods are.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| its always the people with an anime pfp that do the most godly
| shit
| cubefox wrote:
| Probably often people with autism.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I think it's what happens when you just stack all of your
| character points in intelligence.
|
| Smartest person I ever met is now some kind of non-binary fox
| person. An ivy league masters in math, does risk modeling for
| some mega insurance company, and lives in a kawaii fever
| dream while doing it.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| there are some weapons grade anons with 30 followers
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| If you could magically erase all anime from the world, the
| global tech industry would come to a grinding halt :)
| fanick wrote:
| nitter link
| https://nitter.net/iris_IGB/status/1685268812663271424#m
| zamalek wrote:
| > If it's a diamagnetism it's a fucking strong one
|
| That's a pretty good point.
| ThisIsMyAltFace wrote:
| By their own admission, they've messed with the prep and
| synthesis stages mentioned in the paper:
|
| https://nitter.net/iris_IGB/status/1685774956330635264#m
|
| Also, forgive me for taking this person's word with a massive
| grain of salt when they post stuff like this:
|
| https://nitter.net/iris_IGB/status/1686017042665582593#m
| mempko wrote:
| Sure, but what is this?
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32047663
| WinstonSmith84 wrote:
| huh lol ... Well she obviously has the time to tweet a lot of
| sh*t while being much faster than any other team on earth.
| She alone from the USSR must still be the primary
| (progressive) power worldwide ... who knows ...
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| This is a race that I earnestly hope either someone wins quickly,
| or everyone loses... again rather quickly. For incredible claims
| you typically require incredible evidence, at the moment we're
| slightly better than hearsay but we've a long way to go get
| conclusive proof.
| m463 wrote:
| > everyone loses... again rather quickly
|
| that's the thing - if it is hard to manufacture and works maybe
| 1:10 tries, how can it lose quickly experimentally?
|
| In other words, what is a satisfactory proof that it doesn't
| work, apart from analyzing the original apparatus?
| nmwnmw wrote:
| Isn't it sufficient to have another lab confirm that the existing
| sample is a super conductor? Then we can all sprint to
| replication.
| bhouston wrote:
| Yeah, having another lab confirm the behavior and makeup of
| that sample would go a long way. I wonder why that isn't
| happening?
|
| Does anyone have an explanation on why no one is
| examining/validating the sample they already have?
| bananapub wrote:
| what are you talking about?
|
| the authors haven't given anyone a sample to inspect, so
| every other solid state physics lab in the world is instead
| trying to follow the notional recipe and test their own
| sample.
| bhouston wrote:
| > the authors haven't given anyone a sample to inspect
|
| Why not? It would help their case immensely, especially if
| replication is tricky.
| bluGill wrote:
| There are claims that they are going to share, but since
| it is fragile and they only have a few samples the
| logistics are tricky. They might not be telling the truth
| about sharing samples, but I'd wait a couple months
| before accusing them of lies. In fact if they share too
| quick I'd suspect it is so they can ship a box of dust
| and claim shipping damaged the only sample!
| moralestapia wrote:
| >I wonder why that isn't happening?
|
| Because it's been ~10 days since it was announced in a
| preprint article.
|
| The complexity and resources involved are much higher than
| "building websites with React", so, things happen on a
| different timescale.
| peyton wrote:
| I mean they already characterized it six ways to Sunday and
| posted a video of it levitating.
| bhouston wrote:
| Independent validation. Physical peer review.
|
| That basically helps rule out scammers or gross
| incompetence and ensures that even if initial attempts to
| replicate fail because of the complexity or lack of
| clarity, people keep trying.
| bluGill wrote:
| Any physicist can make up something that sounds reasonable
| to other physicists. With a little trick photography (or
| CGI!) you can make a video something levitating that looks
| like room temperature super conductors.
|
| Don't read the above as an accusation. Only a justification
| to wait until it is replicated.
| chaorace wrote:
| At the end of the day, materials science is still science. The
| institutional framework is optimized for a very specific
| process, so it's generally faster to let the process play out
| as usual rather than go and cut corners. Rest assured; there
| are a _lot_ of scientists out there! We can afford to let a few
| of them chase clouds once in a while.
|
| In any case... the creation process described in the original
| paper is relatively cheap and low-tech enough that labs will
| likely generate their own samples in less time than any
| procurement process would take.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| > the creation process described in the original paper is
| relatively cheap and low-tech enough that labs will likely
| generate their own samples in less time than any procurement
| process would take.
|
| But what if the probability of synthesis failure is very
| high? This seems to be the case given then "1000 experiments"
| history of the original scientists. If they have a golden
| sample that is at least extremely paramagnetic, that would be
| huge.
|
| And again... This is no ordinary claim. Everything in the
| procurement chain would be expedited. No sane lab would turn
| it down.
| epivosism wrote:
| Yes, the fact that everyone is trying to replicate the process
| rather than validate the existing material is very weird.
| Replication is hard, validation is much easier. If they've had
| this material for years, just send some off to a few labs...
|
| People claiming unusual abilities/etc usually focus on a very
| difficult ceremony/situation/feeling/process rather than the
| outcome. Ghosts, spiritual experiences, etc. really avoid the
| areas where they would be easily disproven - they prefer murky,
| unspecified criteria. This paper is full of unspecified
| details, and also doesn't provide samples. Of course, there is
| a story for why - the drama between the scientists, etc. There
| always is a reason. But at the end of the day, they're claiming
| something amazing, which if they would just _send a piece of
| the material to MIT_ this whole drama would be over. The longer
| the uncertainty lasts, the more suspicious it is that they
| haven't taken this path.
|
| It's the same with the recent US Government reports on alleged
| aliens. There is a lot of focus on rare, hard-to capture or
| reproduce events, and little focus on just showing us the
| actual alien ship wreckage, even though that'd be much easier,
| if it were true.
|
| I have made a play money market asking the same thing: "A
| physics lab will have received a package of the LK-99 material
| sent from the researchers by the end of August" [
| https://manifold.markets/StrayClimb/a-physics-lab-will-have-...
| ]
|
| Not many traders yet, 57% yes, too optimistic in my view.
| 7373737373 wrote:
| Agreed, why haven't hundreds of journalists with cameras
| lined up on the lab yet? Document everything, _film and
| publicize_ the floating sample, film the entire production
| process, have a press conference etc.
| n2d4 wrote:
| Why do you silently assume that samples aren't being shared
| around as we speak? CMTC of the University of Maryland stated
| that the authors are cooperating in regards to this
| https://twitter.com/condensed_the/status/1684960318718406656
|
| There's value in both validating existing samples and
| producing new ones.
| jerf wrote:
| I would find it very easy to believe that they produced
| something that is superconducting _but_ following their
| directions didn 't work. An unknown factor could very
| easily be involved. But proof that their sample is even
| "interesting" (it doesn't need to be "superconducting" in
| the strictest sense of the term to still be "interesting")
| would be enough to say "Hey, let's keep looking over here,
| we know there's _something_ to find! "
|
| Sometimes just knowing there's something to find at all is
| 90% of the battle. Many historical examples, in both
| science and non-science fields.
| epivosism wrote:
| Oh that would be great! Sorry if my assumption is mistaken.
| I'd love this to be real! I'm not just thinking about this
| last week, though - if the LK group had these samples for
| multiple years, it seems like they would have been able to
| share & convince at least one PhD to support them publicly.
| The fact that they haven't just seems weird! Sure, they
| were preparing the papers, etc. etc but you do have to
| balance that against the life they would have if they just
| published asap - wealthy, famous, respected, free, as well
| as the benefits to the entire world of letting this be
| known.
|
| Talk about a confusingly written tweet, though!
| [deleted]
| floxy wrote:
| >it seems like they would have been able to share &
| convince at least one PhD to support them publicly. The
| fact that they haven't just seems weird!
|
| Isn't that Hyun-Tak Kim of William & Mary?
|
| https://www.wm.edu/as/physics/people/researchfaculty/kim_
| h.p...
| [deleted]
| Lewton wrote:
| Allegedly, samples have already been sent out
| bitcurious wrote:
| Validation is good for the original team, replication is good
| for the new team.
| epivosism wrote:
| Interesting point, yes. Also, if LK-99 is real, there are
| may be some close or easy adjustments or improvements to it
| to produce other, new interesting materials, which a
| replicating lab would be set up to start exploring ASAP. So
| I can see their preference for that path.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Validation proves that the material exists, it doesn't prove
| that the specified process creates the material. A few
| samples are worthless if no one actually knows how to make
| more.
| Lewton wrote:
| > A few samples are worthless if no one actually knows how
| to make more.
|
| If the samples are actual RTSC, knowing that such a thing
| can actually exist is pretty far from worthless
| jjk166 wrote:
| Researchers were already working under the assumption
| such a thing can actually exist.
| postalrat wrote:
| What if I told you stimulating a universe like ours is
| also possible.
| dspillett wrote:
| That would support the existence of a material with the stated
| properties, which would be important on its own, but not that
| we can manufacture one. Why not prove both at once? Depending
| on the size of the sample produced, distributing it around
| several labs for independent testing may be impractical so you
| would still get this race as the sample was sent to one lab and
| the rest rush to try be first to reproduce the processes _and_
| test the result. Also transporting what could be a very
| valuable substance (maybe a fragile one, I 've not looked into
| it) as far as another lab with the relevant equipment, may be
| difficult/costly to arrange.
|
| Given the finding seems to have been rushed out, perhaps they
| did plan to send a sample (perhaps producing another
| themselves) to another lab for confirmation, but those plans
| have been overtaken by the interest as details slipped out
| earlier than they intended.
| andersa wrote:
| I'm really confused why everyone is claiming the replication
| would be easy. The paper specifies very large ranges for both
| times and temperatures that would take years to try all
| combinations, and ignores basically all of the details.
|
| The effect could be caused by some incredibly lucky
| contamination/impurities and then nobody would ever be able to
| reproduce it at all. Why not reverse engineer this one
| apparently working sample instead?
| buildsjets wrote:
| How do you know for sure that the existing sample was actually
| produced by the LK-99 process?
|
| Even if it was produced by the LK-99 process, how do you know
| if all of the required steps and conditions to achieve
| replication are adequately documented in the process? Reference
| the FOGBANK debacle.
| caturopath wrote:
| > How do you know for sure that the existing sample was
| actually produced by the LK-99 process?
|
| If you hand me a room temperature superconductor but your
| published recipe doesn't work for me, I'm about 95% as
| excited as I'd be if I had the right recipe.
| bananapub wrote:
| no one gives a shit at all about any of that if anyone shows
| up this week with a room temperature/pressure superconductor.
|
| whoever eventually does it gets a nobel prize and the front
| cover of whatever journal they pick, and then a chapter in
| the history of the 21st century.
| Larrikin wrote:
| What does it matter if the sample is a room temperature super
| conductor?
| nemo44x wrote:
| Sure but if you had in your hands a superconductive material
| at room temperature and ambient pressure you'd be pretty
| amazed. That's a lot of credibility right there.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| Why would that matter? It's not like they could just be
| taking an over-the-counter room temperature superconductor
| and passing it off as something they made. If the thing
| exists and someone can make it, the specific process doesn't
| matter (but also why would they make it, publish a fake
| process and then go through all this rigamarole?).
| gorlilla wrote:
| Grifting doesn't always make sense to those not in on the
| grift.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Huh?
| dcow wrote:
| Desperation? Momentary fame? To get funding to continue
| research? Any number of reasons humans do silly half-honest
| things...
|
| There are some plausible allegations that the authors were
| a struggling pair of researchers and essentially stole this
| research and published a sloppy half baked paper they knew
| would make waves.
| lolinder wrote:
| I think you're missing the point: there is no such thing
| yet as a room temperature superconductor. If they have
| such a thing, they made it. If they failed to document
| the process well, that's a separate issue from whether
| the sample they have actually is a superconductor at the
| temperatures described.
| dcow wrote:
| The data isn't good. They don't have such a thing. They
| think they have such a thing. What they think they have
| is certainly interesting and potentially world changing,
| but if this (or some other reason like infighting over
| credit) lead them to rush publication, you have to be
| ready for the conclusion that whatever they have isn't a
| superconductor as we know it.
| lolinder wrote:
| This subthread is discussing whether it makes sense to
| have another lab validate the existing sample before we
| even try to follow their steps. Neither I nor the person
| you're responding to are assuming that the sample is what
| they claim it is, we're simply arguing that it doesn't
| matter how it was obtained--it's either a room
| temperature superconductor or it isn't, and if the
| researchers failed to document the process well but still
| have a room temperature superconductor then we can move
| on from there. If it turns out that it isn't, then we
| saved ourselves a bunch of time trying to follow their
| instructions.
| dcow wrote:
| > but also why would they make it, publish a fake process
| and then go through all this rigamarole?
|
| This, from this subthread and directly from the comment I
| replied to, is what I was responding to. I don't think
| I've missed some obvious point. I think you just
| misunderstood which topic I was responding to.
| lolinder wrote:
| > > How do you know for sure that the existing sample was
| actually produced by the LK-99 process?
|
| > If the thing exists and someone can make it, the
| specific process doesn't matter (but also why would they
| make it, publish a fake process and then go through all
| this rigamarole?).
|
| You took one sentence out of context, reinterpreted it,
| then replied to your own reinterpretation. In the context
| of the full "if" sentence, it's pretty clear that OP was
| asking: "in the hypothetical situation where they did
| successfully create a superconductor, why publish an
| invalid process?"
|
| There are lots of possible answers to this question, but
| your answer was not addressing that question, it was
| answering the question "why would they lie about having
| created it?"
|
| Context matters, otherwise we'd all end up talking past
| each other all the time.
| dcow wrote:
| I didn't reinterpret anything and I don't think what you
| state as pretty clear is entirely clear to me (or I just
| didn't read into it as deeply). Anyway I simply responded
| with some reasons why one might publish a fake process
| and go through all the rigamarole. I probably should have
| quoted the sentence in my reply to avoid confusion.
| jjk166 wrote:
| > and someone can make it
|
| If the specified procedure is incorrect, then we can't make
| it. It doesn't need to be an elaborate con, it could just
| be a reasearcher misread a measurement, or recorded the
| wrong number, or their feedstock was contaminated.
| Replication ensures that the recipe includes the secret
| sauce that makes it actually work.
| lolinder wrote:
| I don't think they're arguing that no one should try to
| replicate the process of making it, just that it makes
| sense to have another lab test the sample that has
| already been created. If it is in fact what they claim it
| is, then the worst case scenario is that we have a repeat
| of FOGBANK[0] and have to reverse engineer it.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank
| jjk166 wrote:
| I'm not arguing that another lab shouldn't test the
| sample already created, just stating why replication is
| important. A FOGBANK situation is a very bad scenario.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Do we know they haven't? The published papers were rushed (due
| to rogue ex-team member publishing one unauthorized) and they
| maybe weren't ready.
|
| I've heard a rumor a team from MIT has travelled to Korea.
|
| Who knows right now.
| [deleted]
| once_inc wrote:
| I've heard those rumours as well, and also heard rumours that
| a sample was sent to a Chinese group.
| progrus wrote:
| There's some emerging evidence that it may be a new class of
| "1-d" superconducting material that only superconducts in
| certain places/directions. Will turn into big academic fight to
| redefine superconductivity if so, I think.
| progrus wrote:
| Importantly though, 1-d is all it needs to sound incredibly
| useful.
| est wrote:
| Why does China alone have so many reproduction attemps? I assumed
| it would be tried everywhere.
| orangepurple wrote:
| China has more people, more money to spend on research, more
| equipment, more manufacturing base, more STEM graduates, more
| everything, and all of that by huge margins.
| [deleted]
| senttoschool wrote:
| I'm not sure about the other claims but the most logical
| reasoning is that China has better supply chains and way more
| STEM graduates.
| Accujack wrote:
| China wants to gain a technological edge on all other
| countries. If they happen to be the first to turn a room
| temperature superconductor into usable commercial or military
| materials, then they'll have a huge military or economic
| advantage for some period of time.
| danbruc wrote:
| As I learned from the Dave's EEVBlog video [1], their
| demonstration video [2] says in the description that the material
| was deposited onto a copper plate which could probably explain
| the interaction with the magnet. And as I just noticed, the
| description has since been changed and now says >>The sample was
| thermally deposited on a enriched uranium 235 plate.<<
|
| EDIT: Correction, I got the link to the video saying deposited
| onto uranium [2] from [1] but that is not the actual link from
| their web page which is [3] and still says deposited onto copper.
| So someone on eevblog.com was having some fun.
|
| [1] https://www.eevblog.com/2023/07/31/eevblog-1555-korean-
| lk-99...
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-w2qc_BoEiU
|
| [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtVjGWpbE7k
| andersa wrote:
| That's highly suspicious. I guess they're banking on nobody
| having an enriched uranium 235 plate at hand to verify what
| happens if you do this without any LK99...
| bawolff wrote:
| Its not like nobody has ever investigated the magnetic
| properties of uranium. You could just look it up.
| 7373737373 wrote:
| For me, this, and the combination with the name ("Quantum
| Energy Research Center") is another push in the direction of
| ignoring everything named "quantum"
|
| too often quacksalver territory
|
| Is this really their channel? Why do they only have 1 video,
| 8 subscribers, and why is the video unlisted?
| n2d4 wrote:
| _> ignoring everything named "quantum"_
|
| This heuristic is probably a good one for non-scientific
| stuff but I'm not sure how accurate it is when we're
| looking at a group researching quantum effects
| godelski wrote:
| Can someone explain why you'd use the 235 isotope? I know there
| are different magnetic properties but it still seems an odd
| choice to use something that is highly controlled, difficult to
| produce, and rather dangerous. It seems like there would be far
| better choices unless you absolutely need that mass or they
| very weak valance electrons.
|
| And those videos being identical is also suspicious. [2]
| Uploaded 2 days ago, claims 235U substrate, is from @q-center,
| and created their youtube account in 2012. [3] is from
| @qcentre, uploaded 5 months ago, claims Cu substrate, and
| created their account in February. If it was the newer account
| posting the new video it would be easy to believe lost password
| or something but this reversing feels weird. It makes it feel
| like they changed the video description (but didn't edit the
| original to prevent history checking? But could have just
| uploaded a different video?) to combat the induced magnetic
| field as claim?
|
| But it feels like it gets even worse. [3] (older) is a 4k video
| while [2] is 720p. Just hiding detail? The material looks
| neither like copper nor uranium ceramic (very distinctive
| orange color), but that can just be the material which is
| claimed to be thin film deposited and that's believable. Maybe
| they're hiding the sample identification etching on the front?
| I'm not sure what those mean and it's very possibly arbitrary.
| But adds a level of suspicion.
| danbruc wrote:
| I just assumed the uranium one is a joke created after this
| story started by some third party and made to look like the
| original one, so I also did not look any deeper. But the
| channel being created in 2012 then makes no sense. Someone
| just sitting on that channel name? Or can you rename a
| YouTube channel?
| euazOn wrote:
| Yes you can rename, probably just trolling.
| willis936 wrote:
| "Their demonstration video" makes it sound like there is only
| one.
|
| No smug takedowns of the video that made the rounds first:
|
| https://sciencecast.org/casts/suc384jly50n
|
| The most people have been able to say is "it might be the most
| diamagnetic material anyone has ever seen by a remarkable
| amount".
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