[HN Gopher] Electronic Structure of LK-99
___________________________________________________________________
Electronic Structure of LK-99
Author : spekcular
Score : 519 points
Date : 2023-08-02 00:57 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| NotSuspicious wrote:
| One of the things that has most pissed me off about these papers
| is that VASP is proprietary and requires a license to use.
| montecarl wrote:
| Some context on VASP from someone who worked with it for about
| 10 years.
|
| VASP is a very common projector augmented wave (PAW) planewave
| DFT program in the solid state physics/chemistry community. I
| used it for about 10 years when I was doing computational
| chemistry. It is distributed as a tarball of FORTRAN90 files,
| so in some sense all researchers that use it have access to the
| source code. The research group I was in maintained a set of
| patches against the source code to implement additional
| functionality for transition state searches (useful for
| modeling solid state reactions).
|
| Opensource alternatives exist, but are not as widely accepted
| (or somehow as fast in my experience). GPAW[1] is one example.
| It is unfortunate that it is not an opensource program,
| however, among the large community of scientist with access to
| the software the source code is available and is well
| understood and accepted. It is more or less the defacto
| standard against which other solid state DFT programs are
| tested.
|
| [1] https://wiki.fysik.dtu.dk/gpaw
| stabbles wrote:
| How about Quantum Espresso [1] and CP2K [2]? They're both
| open source
|
| [1] https://www.quantum-espresso.org/ [2]
| https://www.cp2k.org/
| DC-3 wrote:
| For anyone else totally clueless about chemistry: According
| to Wikipedia DFT in this context stands for 'Density-
| functional theory' and not 'Discrete Fourier Transform' as I
| assumed given the references to waves.
| samhuk wrote:
| My ultimate take-away about LK-99 since the start has been that,
| even if it doesn't turn out to be a holy-grail or whatever, the
| novel ideas behind the material are incredibly interesting.
|
| The idea of causing tiny (~0.5%) crystal lattice shrinkage with
| cuprate percolation is a really interesting idea.
|
| So far, only huge pressures or very low temperatures (i.e.
| Physics) have been used to cause that shrinkage, therefore
| perhaps LK-99 could, at the least, mark the time that Physicists
| hold up their hands, admit that they have failed, and let the
| Chemists give it a shot.
|
| I'm slightly oversimplifying the situation, of course, and the
| disciplines of science cannot be so distinctly separated, but,
| y'know.
| evergreener wrote:
| Is there an intuitive explanation of why shrinkage of a
| material is beneficial for superconductivity. Naive question,
| particles physicist by training.
| jjk166 wrote:
| When a material shrinks, it can create immense internal
| stresses equivalent to what it would experience at extreme
| pressures. Compare to say a Prince Rupert's drop.
| samhuk wrote:
| This is how I explained LK-99 to a friend a couple days ago
| :P
| raducu wrote:
| That's very interesting! I remember a while ago I read
| about a room temperature superconductor... but it required
| enormous pressures.
| nuncanada wrote:
| I have a theory of superconductivity that also explains
| that, unfortunately this comment box is too small for me to
| explain it.
| computerfriend wrote:
| Physicists were by no means holding the chemists back.
| Condensed matter is full of chemists, it's the point at which
| the two subjects meet.
| adw wrote:
| I've published in computational solid state. My doctorate is,
| on paper, in earth sciences (mineral sciences!) and you're
| going to find all of the materials science department and a
| few engineers in the vicinity too. Solid-state is one of
| those five-way borders in the Benelux countries where
| everyone speaks three languages.
| bradfox2 wrote:
| My MSE dept was also colocated with mining engineering.
| Evolved from the metallurgy dept of a past era. We seemed
| to have a foot in manufacturing, computational materials,
| theory and chem lab.
| jhrmnn wrote:
| Condensed matter physics and materials chemistry certainly
| become inseparable in certain areas
| samhuk wrote:
| Indeed. The separation between "Chemistry" and "Physics"
| completely breaks down when you start dealing with electron
| behaviours.
|
| I've actually got a little tin-foil-hat pet theory that
| Chemistry is slowly dying as it approaches "completion" of
| its roots (macroscopic phenomena of matter), and is gradually
| being subsumed by Physics. To at least a silly layman like
| me, lots of bleeding-edge Chemistry nowadays reads like your
| average Physics, e.g. doing quantum simulations for protein
| folding, superconductors, etc.
|
| I'm probably just being silly though, right?
| xorbax wrote:
| Chemistry also covers nano/microscale. I'm not sure
| "macroscopic phenomena of matter" adequately describes it.
|
| Computational chemistry tends to be done in collaboratiin
| between specialists, especially after grad school. You also
| have to confirm things - you can compute whatever you like,
| but there's no way to know if your simulation reflects
| reality without confirmation.
|
| And in what way had physics has beaten chemistry in the
| case of LK99? They did a post-facto DFT calculation
| supporting the apparent results, which may or may not be
| real.
|
| It seems like an illustration of why chemistry is as robust
| as ever.
| adw wrote:
| The big software unification driving this has been
| chemists moving to the (post-)DFT methods the materials
| people had to use, even for some of their small molecule
| work. Oversimplifying wildly, a lot of small molecule
| chemistry is driven by medicine and they started caring a
| lot about, for example, ab-initio protein models...
|
| As many other people have said, there is no physics or
| chemistry in solid-state materials; most universities
| will have multiple groups in this area across three to
| five different departments (physics, chemistry, materials
| science, materials engineering, earth sciences).
|
| (The reason materials people were on DFT is that you need
| to simulate more atoms to model a material. Standard DFT
| methods scale as O(n^3) with system size, and there are
| linear-scaling methods like SIESTA and ONETEP; many
| computational chemistry methods like Configuration
| Interaction are much worse.)
| jacquesm wrote:
| You're not being silly at all. There is a joke about that:
|
| Sociology < psychology < biology < chemistry < physics <<
| math.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Chemistry has a ton of unsolved problems that are almost
| unbounded. The big fun one is trying to create the complete
| graph network of useful chemical reactions so that we can
| find paths of higher efficiency when making certain
| molecules.
|
| This compute hard problem will take the world's chemist to
| collaborate on a large scale because they don't have a
| great database built yet that can enable this.
| itsthecourier wrote:
| So theorically they agree with LK-99 reaching superconductivity?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Keep in mind that a theoretical model agreeing with possible
| superconductivity is a pretty weak signal. Even more a DFT one.
|
| Real models for superconductivity take a lot of work to create,
| it's not something people do for an unverified material, and
| it's not something you get out of DFT. That paper's agreement
| is more on the lines of "yeah, all superconductors are grey,
| and this thing is grey, it can be."
|
| But then, they talked about diamagnetism (graphite-like one, I
| imagine). Honestly, I have no idea how one could disprove
| (graphite-like) diamagnetism with that simulation, but
| disproving it is really good news.
| zeronullempty wrote:
| More specifically they agree with another similar paper from
| Stanford's Sinead Griffin
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16892
| westurner wrote:
| "Origin of correlated isolated flat bands in copper-
| substituted lead phosphate apatite" (2023)
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16892 :
|
| > Abstract: _A recent report of room temperature
| superconductivity at ambient pressure in Cu-substituted
| apatite (`LK99 ') has invigorated interest in the
| understanding of what materials and mechanisms can allow for
| high-temperature superconductivity. Here I perform density
| functional theory calculations on Cu-substituted lead
| phosphate apatite, identifying correlated isolated flat bands
| at the Fermi level, a common signature of high transition
| temperatures in already established families of
| superconductors. I elucidate the origins of these isolated
| bands as arising from a structural distortion induced by the
| Cu ions and a chiral charge density wave from the Pb lone
| pairs. These results suggest that a minimal two-band model
| can encompass much of the low-energy physics in this system.
| Finally, I discuss the implications of my results on possible
| superconductivity in Cu-doped apatite_
| raziel2701 wrote:
| Berkeley's Sinead Griffin.
| zeronullempty wrote:
| Whoops!
| jsnk wrote:
| I think she's working in a UC Berkeley Lab
| dekhn wrote:
| No, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, which is Up the Hill
| from Berkeley. They're run by the same underlying
| organization but are distinct (yet overlapping in many
| ways). LBL evolved out of the UC Berkeley Rad Lab, run by
| Earnest O. Lawrence (same name as the current lab). They do
| non-classified research.
|
| There is also Lawrence Livermore National Lab, which is
| nearby, but in Livermore. They do classified research in
| addition to non-classified. I suppose it's one of the two
| places they simulate nuclear weapons... errr, run large
| scale multi-physics combustion codes for stockpile
| stewardship.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| > I suppose it's one of the two places they simulate
| nuclear weapons... errr, run large scale multi-physics
| combustion codes for stockpile stewardship.
|
| Back in the '90s my friend (jokingly) lamented that they
| wouldn't let him try to play Everquest on their computer.
| ayakang31415 wrote:
| I am a PhD student in Physics, but I am no expert in condensed
| matter physics (I do research in computational NMR). Based on
| my experience with theorists and simulation researcher, I am a
| bit concerned with anchoring bias and the speed at which
| simulation papers are being published here. Then again, I don't
| know exactly what kind of research steps they follow to do
| their research.
| tnecniv wrote:
| There's an old saying that "simulations are bound to
| succeed," but also as an academic that has a working
| knowledge of statistical mechanics but is not a (condensed
| matter) physicist, from what I've read it seems folks are
| approaching this with healthy skepticism likely due to the
| drama around the development and release of the first paper.
|
| The simulation paper folks are talking about used what
| appeared to be an existing DFT simulation package. Now, DFT
| is an approximate theory used to render computation
| tractable, but to my understanding it is a popular and mature
| method. I was actually kind of impressed that they were able
| to reproduce results from the LK paper in simulation so
| quickly. While it's possible the speed led to a bug or error
| in the analysis, simulations often don't just magically work
| and can take a decent amount of parameter tuning --
| especially if the system being simulated has something tricky
| or exotic going on. The fact that they were able to get what
| appears to be an accurate simulation working quickly that
| also justifies the low yield rates has made me more
| cautiously optimistic than anything
| [deleted]
| abnry wrote:
| I don't know why anyone should be concerned about anything
| here, unless you want immediate confirmation.
|
| It's a process. Scientists will try to replicate and try to
| simulate and try to reason theoretically. They are bound to
| make mistakes but all of this can be critiqued and iterated
| on.
|
| Again, there's no problem unless you need immediate
| confirmation or you think chasing this idea is a waste of
| time.
|
| Enjoy the ride :)
| marricks wrote:
| > If doped such an electronic structure [LK-99] might support
| flat-band superconductivity or an correlation-enhanced
| electron-phonon mechanism, whereas a diamagnet without
| superconductivity appears to be rather at odds with our
| results.
|
| Sounds like it, if prepared right it could be a super conductor
| and would NOT be a diamagnet that would display the properties
| we saw in those videos.
| galleywest200 wrote:
| This could also explain why the original authors themselves
| say they can only make it successfully around 1/10 times. The
| stars need to align.
| appplication wrote:
| Do you have a source for the original authors making a
| statement on that?
| tnecniv wrote:
| That's not unsurprising when it comes to a lot of research.
| The bench scientists I know often struggle with yield rates
| and labs have special knowledge about their particular set
| up when it comes to getting stuff to work.
|
| Even in robotics (my area), if you are watching a video of
| a robot doing something cool, there's often a bunch of
| times they ran the same demo and it didn't work for some
| (often largely irrelevant to the main idea) reason. I also
| remember, in an undergrad analog circuits class, we had to
| build an amplifier on a breadboard with certain performance
| specs (e.g., a fairly high cut off frequency, etc.). This
| ended up being fairly difficult due to the tolerances in
| the components to which we had access and breadboard
| parasitics. I recall getting a non-trivial performance
| boost by swapping out a dozen 2n2222's until we found "a
| good one." The gray beard professor laughed and said that's
| an expected part of our practical education.
| thowieru2342343 wrote:
| Hail real-world, the destroyer of theory-nerd arrogance.
| cris007 wrote:
| I think that at least some parts of this material has
| superconductivity properties. That's why the videos shown have
| some very tiny speckles of the material showing the
| diamagnetism effects and just one anonymous video showing full
| levitation (type 2 superconductor property as I understood).
| dekhn wrote:
| yes, but if you reported 100 different substances reaching
| superconductivity, 100 theorists will publish papers
| demonstrating their model supports the observation...
| regardless of whether those substances actually reach
| superconductivity.
|
| (put another way: it's post-hoc)
| rsfern wrote:
| Sure it's post hoc, but these are ab initio calculations,
| there's not all that much wiggle room that you could make
| anything you like come out looking like a superconductor.
| Plus now I've seen three calculations with three different
| functionals and reasonable convergence criteria and they all
| find similar electronic structure
| dekhn wrote:
| Well, then why spend all this time searching in a lab?
| Instead, run a bunch of simulations until the compounds
| with properties you desire just sort of pop out as the top
| hits in your simulations?
|
| (I say this as somebody with a decade+ of experience
| running large ensembles of classical MD simulations, but
| not so much experience with inorganic DFT)
| montecarl wrote:
| Crystal structure prediction by itself is a very hard
| problem. Just given the chemical formula and asking "what
| is the most stable structure" is a global optimization
| problem. And this is just for one single composition. It
| isn't an easy global optimization problem either. You not
| only have to determine the unit cell vectors, the
| positions of the atoms in the unit cell, but also the
| number of atoms in the unit cell needed to represent the
| structure! Just because you are even given "Pb9Cu(PO4)6O"
| as the formula finding the most stable structure, let
| alone the superconducting non-minimum energy state is a
| huge undertaking. Now expand that to all of chemical
| space and you can see that it is not that easy!
|
| Edit: Also look at how long these (short pre-print) DFT
| articles are. These aren't simple calculations to
| interpret.
| ayakang31415 wrote:
| If you run a bunch of simulations to brute-force-find
| what you're looking for, you run into a problem of
| infinitely many things to simulate. It is better to use
| domain knowledge to eliminate things that don't work and
| narrow down things that would have high chance of working
| in theory to give some sort of directional guidance for
| your research.
| dekhn wrote:
| That domain knowledge wouldn't have suggested exploring
| this space for superconductivity.
|
| Turn the material science problem around: instead of
| looking for a substance that has a specific property,
| look at many substances until small amounts of any
| interesting property (young's modulus, etc) show up. By
| looking for "anything interesting" you are more likely to
| find _something of interesting_ (ideally, several
| somethings). And then you also know a starting place to
| begin optimiziation.
|
| (I'm not saying these things out of ignorance; this
| technique has worked well for me at times when I had
| exceptionally large amounts of CPU available to me, and
| it's also worked well in the drug industry, which has
| similar problems to material science.)
| ayakang31415 wrote:
| I think the first insight to pursue LK-99 by the
| researchers was from the deceased scholar from their
| graduate school (department chair I believe?). The
| material was already found in 1999, but they need to try
| different synthesis methods over 1,000 times for slightly
| different chemical compositions. I am not sure if there
| are simulation methods to do that, but it was definitely
| theoretical insight that first convinced their teacher to
| start, and the work made the pupils to believe in what
| they are pursing as far as apparent background stories
| are concerned.
| rsfern wrote:
| There are high throughput DFT projects (e.g., the
| materials project) but (1) the calculations are very
| computationally expensive and (2) the search space is
| really large. People are doing cool stuff with ML and
| generative models, but it's a pretty open research area
| still
|
| Also, at the end of the day, DFT is still an imperfect
| approximate model. Relative trends are generally more
| reliable than exact correspondence with experiment, and
| it can have system-specific systematic errors that are
| hard to account for in a high throughput setting
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| If the results don't match the theory, change the results!
| seewhydee wrote:
| They theoretically agree that the material's properties could
| be nice for making some kind of superconductor, but present no
| clear indication that it would/should be a room temperature
| superconductor. The critical temperature depends on stuff that
| can't be probed via such simulations (i.e., electron-electron
| interactions).
|
| From my understanding (I am not a superconductor person, but in
| an adjacent field), having flat bands at the Fermi level is not
| that rare. Such features appear in other materials that are
| evidently not superconductors, room temperature or otherwise.
| So the conclusions are more along the lines of "maybe it
| wouldn't be totally crazy", rather than "omg, we predict this
| material has astounding properties".
| dralley wrote:
| My understanding is that the "99" in LK-99 is the year it they
| first synthesized the material, i.e. 1999.
|
| Assuming this is all true, why is it just now coming to light?
| Did they just not know what they had? (I have not been following
| this closely, maybe this has already been explained)
| lt wrote:
| As I've read it, the first lead to the material was 99.
|
| 2018 They got funding to research it further,
|
| 2020 was a first attempt of publication at Nature that was
| retracted, further improvements were made until 22/23 were two
| patents were filled, then suddenly 10 days ago Kwon, one of the
| co-researchers jumped the gun publishing a paper with the
| details, on one hand fearing a leak of someone else publishing
| first as that was too simple to replicate, on the other hand
| excluding everyone else from the paper and only listing him and
| Lee/Kim (LK) as authors as a Nobel prize can only be shared by
| three people. 2.5hrs later LK published again listing other 5
| authors but him.
| TheBigSalad wrote:
| So... He leaked and claimed it was because he feared someone
| else would do it before him?
| arriu wrote:
| Im sure I'm not the only person thinking 24 years is way too
| long for such an important advancement.
|
| Huge respect for those in this field or others that don't
| give up after so many years. Thank you
| xorbax wrote:
| 24 years is nothing in the scale of the universe
|
| If it increases entropy as much as many suspect and it only
| took 1/3 of a couple humans' lives to open that phase
| space, the Universe has done what it wanted - to hasten
| heat-death.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| Interesting angle -- but if heat death were possible it
| would have happened by now.
| cthalupa wrote:
| Huh? Heat death of the universe is going to take an
| incomprehensibly large amount of time. Like, 10^106
| years.
|
| The universe is A LOT younger than that.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| As Hawking once explained, "Since events before the Big
| Bang have no observational consequences, one may as well
| cut them out of the theory, and say that time began at
| the Big Bang." When cosmologists talk about the universe
| and its age, it seems to me, as a non-cosmologist, that
| they're using terms of art related to their models.
|
| Hawking's explanation deduces that if the observable
| universe expanded from a singularity, we would be unable
| to meaningfully theorize what happened before then, since
| it would be beyond any form of observation to test the
| theory. Therefore, a scientific model rooted in
| observation can describe nothing earlier than the Big
| Bang.
|
| However, not everything unseen is untrue. If a
| singularity were to form somewhere in Andromeda tomorrow
| -- in all likelihood, one will -- we will still have
| existed today.
|
| Edit: The initial comment was meant as a lighthearted
| reply to the universe personification, but I ended up
| sensing a need to explain the reasoning.
| xorbax wrote:
| It's not "personification", it's the universe tending
| toward entropy increasing overall. I don't think I've
| heard anyone claim that heat death "should have happened"
| as an argument against it, or what it's supposed to mean
| in reference to the original post.
|
| There _is_ a singularity in Andromeda, so I don 't know
| why one forming matters
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Please read up on heat death before continuing to share
| baseless information.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe
| Sargos wrote:
| Kwon is humanities' hero for leaking this knowledge to the
| world
| cooper_ganglia wrote:
| Ultimately I'm glad that the research has seen the light,
| since I'm of the personal persuasion that there is no
| single scrap of science that should ever be done in the
| dark. All research, in a perfect world, would be entirely
| public and freely and easily accessible.
|
| With that being said, I'm not sure if leaking a paper and
| selfishly putting your name on it and excluding others so
| that you win a Nobel Prize doesn't exactly seem "heroic".
| Certainly beneficial for mankind, but it seems like a self-
| serving action.
| zarzavat wrote:
| The means justify the end. For all we know Lee and Kim
| would have sat on this for another year or more. I think
| that's very understandable and I can't fault them for
| wanting to be certain, given all the nasty things people
| have been saying about them, but the leak has clearly
| served humanity better than keeping it under wraps.
| yetihehe wrote:
| > but the leak has clearly served humanity better than
| keeping it under wraps.
|
| Yeah, advancing human knowledge serves humanity, but
| unfortunately not really those who are advancing that
| knowledge. Those with money will just use your invention
| and make more money, you will have a pat on the back. I
| wish it was more balanced, we would have a lot of
| inventions sooner and implemented faster.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| There are various timelines on HN and elsewhere but it boils
| down to essentially they saw some blips on sample measurements
| that they assumed were errors. But the head of their lab
| thought differently and as he was dying asked his former
| students to reinvestigate it. They secured funding in 2018 but
| it was a bumpy road with personality conflicts etc.
| scythe wrote:
| >Assuming this is all true, why is it just now coming to light?
| Did they just not know what they had?
|
| This is why the calculations by Sinead Griffin looked so
| interesting to me: they suggest that the superconductivity
| depends on an unconventional substitution pattern that might
| not (in fact should not) occur in most samples of Cu-doped lead
| apatite. So the active structure was only present in tiny
| quantities, requiring a long period of trial-and-error
| optimization.
|
| Again, this is far from proof, but I thought it was at least
| very curious to have some theory that explains not just a
| mechanism for superconductivity but _also_ why the samples seem
| to teeter on the edge of superconductivity so frustratingly.
|
| The replies to my previous post (
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36958419 ) suggesting that
| flat bands appear simply because copper doesn't belong in that
| lattice seem inconsistent with the fact that a flat band was
| not observed when copper substituted at the wrong type of
| lattice site. If flat bands appear merely because of the
| unpaired copper electron, they should appear when it is
| substituted only at Pb {2} sites, but they don't. The
| appearance of this band structure plus the observance of
| diamagnetism just takes us from happenstance to coincidence, so
| we need one more to conclude it is enemy action.
|
| FWIW I don't work in condensed matter physics but I have taken
| the classes at grad level a few years back. I also should
| really be doing other things, but this is probably the most fun
| scientific news cycle since 'Oumuamua at least. (COVID doesn't
| count as "fun".)
| alexose wrote:
| > but also why the samples seem to teeter on the edge of
| superconductivity so frustratingly.
|
| Interesting! The uneven chunk shown in the original video was
| probably the best specimen they had after decades of
| attempts.
|
| When I first saw it, my first thought was, "geez, why not at
| least try to make it uniform"...
| erulabs wrote:
| I'm very much a layman, but my understanding is that LK-99
| itself is not necessarily a superconductor. It's
| polycrystalline which means it's a very uneven material - not
| all LK-99 is the same. They both didn't know it was what it was
| and also couldn't nail down the procedure for consistently
| making it so that it has the superconductor properties. It took
| a long time to get the resources required to investigate this
| far - the scientists had their own lives and careers and didn't
| get back to this particular investigation until recently.
| jvm___ wrote:
| Uniformed opinion.
|
| It takes a week to bake/whatever a test sample. Which is why
| this is playing out so "slowly".
|
| So, they had an idea and have been baking/testing/refining
| samples for decades. Science and funding takes a while.
|
| What idea they started with and why they kept at it for 20
| years is beyond me, that's a long time to chase an idea of you
| didn't have results or a hint that your idea would work. Maybe
| they had a weird sample that came from some other process in
| 1999 and have spent the intermediate time convincing funding
| people and doing the repetitive lab work required to get it to
| this point.
| mptest wrote:
| Speaks to a supreme confidence in the theory, surely? I'm a
| layman but imagine everyone is going to want to hear every
| wild idea these guys could think up if this works out. They
| might have been sitting on this for 20 years? Probably why
| I'm not, but If I were any vc person I'd be busting down
| their door trying to give them all my money
| yetihehe wrote:
| How would you find such researchers if they didn't have
| plausible real-world results yet? I have a theory for new
| high performance heat engine which I developed over 15
| years already, but I don't think anyone would give me ANY
| money for making a prototype (which may not work in
| reality), so I have to somehow do it in the limited time
| after working two jobs (I had to earn enough to have a home
| with a proper garage). Do you have any tips for someone
| like me?
| mptest wrote:
| >have any tips Unfortunately I don't. You raise a really
| good point though lol. Everyone's idea might seem good as
| these guys' to probably even experts in the domain
| itself. I have been profoundly lucky from my spawn point
| to my current career so I can't give any earnest advice
| about that. I did briefly work at a semiconductor startup
| company that similarly had a "crazy brilliant" research
| idea and did find some funding. It didn't go great.
|
| Like I said, there's a reason I'm not in charge of any VC
| stuff and I largely don't invest myself lol.
|
| I wish you the best of luck with your invention though,
| please never give up and never stop dreaming. People like
| you even if you never produce it push us ALL forward.
| Thanks for what you do
| fragmede wrote:
| Get involved with your local community of makers, get
| them intrigued by your idea and its potential, connect
| with people that will help you build it. Patent it, and
| then raise funds via the Internet to try and build it.
| Seek out local VCs. I know that's a lot to ask, on top of
| two jobs, but I didn't organize our economy.
| yetihehe wrote:
| Thanks for reply, I appreciate it a lot.
|
| > Get involved with your local community of makers, get
| them intrigued by your idea and its potential, connect
| with people that will help you build it.
|
| This will prevent me from patenting it. I can also make
| first prototype myself, I've started last year, will try
| to finish this year. Funding would just let me drop one
| job and make it faster.
|
| > Patent it, and then raise funds via the Internet to try
| and build it. Seek out local VCs. I know that's a lot to
| ask, on top of two jobs, but I didn't organize our
| economy.
|
| I don't have enough money for patenting something that
| might not work. That's why I need to make a prototype.
| That prototype will be MUCH cheaper than a proper patent
| but takes some time which I also don't have too much (but
| working on it slowly). When I'm sure it works, I already
| have enough connections to make it actually happen.
|
| At this moment, funding my prototype would just benefit
| humanity with earlier knowledge of whether it works, so
| of course no one sane will fund it, that's the sad
| reality with human priorities.
|
| > I know that's a lot to ask, on top of two jobs, but I
| didn't organize our economy.
|
| Yeah, I've only asked for tips just in case you have
| some, I don't blame you or anything. Thank you!
|
| This thread also describes WHY those LK-99 researchers
| sat on their invention for so long, they just couldn't
| find enough people interested in their material.
|
| Of course I could just publish my idea, but it's possible
| that no one would be interested in this and I would like
| to have some money from this to pursue some other ideas
| without begging people for support.
| xorbax wrote:
| I think I'd ask you what I'd ask L/K - _why_ do you think
| it works?
|
| They're experimentalists: they didn't find the material
| from first principles, they appear to have made it and
| decided to continue.
|
| So did you make the engine and notice it's efficiency, or
| did you find it using first principles where no one else
| did?
| yetihehe wrote:
| > So did you make the engine and notice it's efficiency,
| or did you find it using first principles where no one
| else did?
|
| I found it from first principles, I still don't know why
| no one else thought about it, but it requires sort of
| splitting and reversing a normal stirling engine inside-
| out. Since then I've found several attempts at going in
| that directions which I took, but no one connected all
| those pieces yet as far as I know. This doesn't require
| any advanced materials, just a new configuration of
| existing inventions. For 15 years I've thought why it
| should not work, but I can't find a flaw in my reasoning,
| so now I need to verify it with actual working machine,
| because I know I still might be wrong. If I'm right -
| this will change energy generation and storage (no more
| steam turbines and will replace PV panels). If I'm wrong
| - someone will potentially lose about $10k.
| sterlind wrote:
| why can't that someone be you? if you've saved up enough
| for a home with a garage, can't you further save another
| $10k?
| yetihehe wrote:
| Right now that money would just mean that I can drop
| second job and do it in a month. Because I can't drop it
| currently, prototype will just take probably until the
| end of year, maybe a little later. But I already have
| everything needed gathered (electronic equipment and
| "ECU" parts, most of the required materials and some of
| 3d printed parts cad designs already done), now I only
| need time to manufacture what needs to be done pretty
| much manually. I don't need any more money for actual
| finishing, but thanks for suggestions.
| r2_pilot wrote:
| I suggest designing it in CAD and possibly sending it to
| be metal 3d-printed, which would be cheaper than a whole
| garage(I feel your pain on not having space... my carport
| is currently saturated with my business's equipment and
| I'd really like to build a proper workshop). In addition
| to less metal shavings around, you'll have access to
| different geometry which may help your design.
| yetihehe wrote:
| This prototype won't require any 3d-printed metal for
| now, mostly 3d-printed plastic and some easily made at
| home metal parts. I already have some cad designs, I have
| a garage AND dedicated workshop and enough equipment and
| parts to finish this, but only thing lacking currently is
| time (I need two jobs until at least end of this year,
| then it will be better). But thanks for suggestions.
|
| I don't want to whine or excuse myself, I only give an
| example of why some inventions take a long time to mature
| into working design. I _will_ make this, just not in a
| month of real time.
| xorbax wrote:
| I have the same thought: "25 years? Why the _fuck_. Buy a new
| salt and publish a fucking paper. "
|
| I suppose they saw something favorable in that 99 sample and
| nobody else knew. The vagaries of chemical synthesis helped.
|
| But it doesn't seem like they could have had a _worse_ sample
| than what they fucking have now, while getting data that made
| them waste a quarter-century.
|
| As much as people hype and have 'reproduced' it, I...dunno.
| If it's real, the autobiography will be worth an expensive
| translation.
| anhner wrote:
| wild assumption, but maybe they accidentally made a small
| sample of high grade LK-99 back in 1999 that displayed the
| superconductor properties, and they had difficulty replicating.
| Maybe they spent all these years refining the process
| UberFly wrote:
| Several commenters here have mentioned demonstration videos. Does
| anyone have a link(s) to these? Many thanks.
| pakyr wrote:
| Try the sources column in this[0] table. You can expand the
| notes for each entry to read more. There's also this one[1]
| that's on the front page right now, though its provenance is
| questionable.
|
| [0]https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/claims-of-room-
| tempe...
|
| [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36964107
| UberFly wrote:
| Thank you for the reply. This is helpful.
| djangelic wrote:
| I believe this blog post has a breakdown of all the updates and
| the twitter posts with the videos:
| https://eirifu.wordpress.com/2023/07/30/lk-99-superconductor...
| westurner wrote:
| "Electronic structure of the putative room-temperature
| superconductor [ Pb_9 Cu( PO_4)_6 O ]" (2023)
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.00676 :
|
| > _A recent paper [Lee {\em et al.}, J. Korean Cryt. Growth
| Cryst. Techn. {\bf 33}, 61 (2023)] provides some experimental
| indications that Pb10-xCux(PO4)6O with x[?]1, coined LK-99, might
| be a room-temperature superconductor at ambient pressure. Our
| density-functional theory calculations show lattice parameters
| and a volume contraction with x -- very similar to experiment.
| The DFT electronic structure shows Cu2+ in a 3d9 configuration
| with two extremely flat Cu bands crossing the Fermi energy. This
| puts Pb9Cu(PO4)6O in an ultra-correlated regime and suggests
| that, without doping, it is a Mott or charge transfer insulator.
| If doped such an electronic structure might support flat-band
| superconductivity or an correlation-enhanced electron-phonon
| mechanism, whereas a diamagnet without superconductivity appears
| to be rather at odds with our results._
|
| Superconductivity:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconductivity
|
| Superconductor classification:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconductor_classification
|
| Room-temperature superconductor:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room-temperature_superconducto...
|
| Diamagnetism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamagnetism
| qiqitori wrote:
| The material containing lead is very unfortunate. I have no
| doubts that (if it indeed turns out to be a superconductor)
| humans will use it anyway in any context where it provides even a
| slight benefit (cf. just in the lead department: leaded gasoline,
| leaded solder, etc.).
| redox99 wrote:
| Lead solder is mostly ok. Arguably lead free solder has been
| much more damaging for the environment because of all the
| e-waste it created.
| qiqitori wrote:
| > lead free solder has been much more damaging for the
| environment because of all the e-waste it created.
|
| We're getting quite off-topic here (I guess I should have
| used different examples), but I would be interested where you
| got that information from. Most consumer electronics devices
| do not break prematurely, and especially not due to soldering
| issues. Source: I buy most electronics second-hand, I
| regularly repair electronics RoHS and not RoHS, I use lead-
| free solder and occasionally leaded solder, I watch a bunch
| of Youtube videos by other people who repair a bunch of
| electronics, just for fun. (You'll always (and easily) find
| someone who knows more than me, and it's entirely possible
| that you do.)
|
| Most consumer electronics devices are retired because their
| owners got something shinier, or if "broken", it's the
| battery, display, or some important connector. If something
| is "actually" broken, it's usually due to power ICs,
| capacitors, fuses. (You could of course argue that some
| broken connectors are a case of a soldering issue, but yeah,
| it's not like I haven't seen broken connectors that were
| actually soldered using leaded solder, so things can get kind
| of muddy there)
| scrlk wrote:
| Back in the 00s, the transition to lead free solder was
| blamed for the high failure rate of BGA packages found in
| consoles and GPUs.
|
| One of the theories at the time was that the poor thermal
| design of these devices (the most notable example being the
| Xbox 360) lead to cracks in the solder balls after repeated
| thermal cycling.
| robocat wrote:
| > poor thermal design
|
| Also tin whiskers are a definite problem.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=lead-
| free+whiskers&tbm=isch
|
| https://www.analog.com/en/technical-articles/tin-
| whiskers-ar...
| willis936 wrote:
| This point downplays just how many hazardous materials are
| around us at all times. Yes, heavy metal exposure is bad and we
| did some really stupid things with lead last century. We still
| use lead acid batteries everywhere and it is not causing
| dementia or leeching into groundwater. The materials don't
| matter, how they are handled does.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| Once room temp superconductivity is shown to be possible, I bet
| we'll find non-lead materials that can do it too.
| ajuc wrote:
| It's one thing to use toxic materials in water pipes, fuel or
| painting your walls with it.
|
| It's completely different thing to use them in devices that are
| enclosed and that you never interact with directly, like
| motors, batteries, electronic components or wires. And in fact
| we're using lead in car batteries and it's not a problem.
|
| BTW most heavy metals are toxic, including copper. It's just
| less readily absorbed and accumulated in our bodies.
| nemo44x wrote:
| 2023 will go down as a miracle year not unlike 1905. Between AI,
| this, and... what's next?
| seydor wrote:
| Superconducting AI. No more pesky Azure datacenters, finally
| put chatgpt4 in your watch
| tavavex wrote:
| I'm missing a lot of historical context, so - what exactly
| happened in 1905? Was there a myriad of major scientific
| discoveries?
| fragmede wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1905_in_science
| fouc wrote:
| > Over four months, March through June 1905, Albert Einstein
| produced four papers that revolutionized science. One
| explained how to measure the size of molecules in a liquid, a
| second posited how to determine their movement, and a third
| described how light comes in packets called photons--the
| foundation of quantum physics and the idea that eventually
| won him the Nobel Prize. A fourth paper introduced special
| relativity, leading physicists to reconsider notions of space
| and time that had sufficed since the dawn of civilization.
| Then, a few months later, almost as an afterthought, Einstein
| pointed out in a fifth paper that matter and energy can be
| interchangeable at the atomic level specifically, that E=mc2,
| the scientific basis of nuclear energy and the most famous
| mathematical equation in history.
|
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-year-of-
| al...
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Perhaps SpaceX Starship orbital launch, to really tie things
| together.
| mrleinad wrote:
| Next is that UFOs are real
| morkalork wrote:
| USAF has had LK-99 for 20 years and the UFOs are just
| sightings of them testing levitation engines.
| cristoperb wrote:
| LK-99, as its name suggests, was discovered 24 years ago.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Unidentified Flying Objects are absolutely real, though the
| newer cool kid term is UAP.
|
| (From the internet: _UAP stands for "unidentified anomalous
| phenomena."_)
|
| It's flying saucers carrying aliens from another planet
| that's controversial and up for debate.
| Narretz wrote:
| I thought UAP stands for "unidentified aerial/aerospace
| phenomenon". Anyway it's better than UFO because it primes
| you for the fact that many "UFOs" are not flying at all.
| Many are stars, lights of all kinds, or artifacts of the
| the recording equipment.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I thought so too. I googled it and came up with the above
| quote but didn't provide the link.
|
| Happy to be corrected if someone has a good source they
| can cite.
|
| It is a better term overall and also lacks the baggage of
| being used colloquially to mean "aliens."
| 1over137 wrote:
| >It's flying saucers carrying aliens from another planet
| that's controversial and up for debate.
|
| Which is what "UFO" means to 99% of people.
| themoonisachees wrote:
| But it's not what it means to the united states
| government when it announced it had seen UFOs, which is
| the point of discussion
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I hate seeing it used that way on HN though because it
| actively undermines meaty discussion of objective data
| and promotes the treatment of articles about objective
| data as click-bait, like it's the "hot sheets" of _Men in
| Black_ -- like HN is a place to take seriously the
| wildest conspiracy theories with no real basis.
| coldpie wrote:
| > It's flying saucers carrying aliens from another planet
| that's controversial and up for debate.
|
| No, it isn't. There's some people out there stuck down in a
| conspiracy hole, but there is no real debate.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| There's technically still time for Starship to have a go at
| another test flight, so there's still time to add "Cheap
| reusable access to space" to "proto-AGI" and "RT
| Superconductors".
| cyberax wrote:
| I'm hoping for practical Li-Air batteries. Or at least cheap
| solid-state Li-Ion batteries.
|
| Pretty please?...
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Blockchain blockchain blockchain blockchain
| umeshunni wrote:
| The year we realized that Crypto was all a fraud
| senttoschool wrote:
| We realized that a long time ago. I first realized it in
| 2017. But a lot of people need to learn the lesson. Some
| people know it's all fraud but are in it to game it.
| bluecoconut wrote:
| I got my PhD studying band structure of high-tc superconductors
| (experimentalist, ARPES). These Cu d-d interactions right at the
| fermi energy give me huge hope. Feels very familiar to other
| superconductors (re: all the cuprates). (Note: I specifically
| worked in a lab that was measuring a lot of the d-wave character
| / gap-energies of various superconductors)
|
| All in all, I'm now much more bullish on LK-99 being real
| superconductivity after seeing multiple different labs compute
| similar band structures. The video of multiple directions of
| magnet showing some levitation also inspires a lot of hope.
| jurgenaut23 wrote:
| Beyond the raw scientific excitement, can you explain how this
| would affect mankind (positively and, of course, perhaps
| negatively)?
| xvector wrote:
| Impact of superconductors:
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1685088625187495936.html
| itsoktocry wrote:
| "1970: Superconducting trains to go from New York to LA in
| 20 minutes!"
|
| 50+ years later the US has how many high speed trains, of
| any kind?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I guess that's partially missing the point. The main
| benefit of a superconducting maglev is that it's cheaper
| to build than a on-rails high-speed train. Specially on
| problematic terrain (what I understand includes every
| possible East/West route on the US).
| u320 wrote:
| Why would it be cheaper? The actual rails is a pretty
| small part of constructing high speed rail, isn't it?
| Especially on problematic terrain.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Because maglev trains can make stronger curves and climb
| steeper hills.
| xvector wrote:
| Energy usage and passenger bandwidth could be a reason
| [deleted]
| kuschku wrote:
| Well, Shanghai has some, Japan is building some, and if
| this discovery is real, Germany might as well revive
| their Transrapid project (which built the shanghai one).
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| This is probably the most stupid question to ask, but while
| were are still trying to confirm superconductivity instead of
| understanding its precise mechanism of operation, why the focus
| on levitation on band structure to confirm the news instead of
| just "yep this chunk has actually zero Ohms"?
| pjc50 wrote:
| "zero ohms" is very tricky to measure because of contact
| resistance: your probes aren't superconducting, and the thin
| contact surface between your probes and the metal itself
| isn't superconducting either.
|
| Whereas the Meissner effect is unique to superconductors. It
| just has to be distinguished from diamagnetism, and there are
| materials which are strongly diamagnetic but not
| superconductors.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Because the levitation thing works with tiny fragments too
| whereas the 'zero Ohms' measurement only works when you have
| enough of it to form a long enough wire of it that you could
| tell the difference between 0 and 0.000001. Measuring very
| small resistances is usually done by letting a known current
| run through them and then to measure the voltage across the
| sample using known resistance leads. For a superconductor
| that has a tiny available sample which is already conductive
| even if it is not superconducting is fraught with error and
| may well give you the wrong answer due to a tiny measuring
| error.
|
| But the Meissner effect is a unique signature of a
| diamagnetic material and will provide you some evidence even
| if the sample is tiny. So I understand why they have not yet
| resorted to other measurements, if there is no Meissner
| effect you don't need to continue with the hard work of
| trying to make a wire (which may well be a serious challenge
| for this stuff, the yield will have to come up significantly
| before that's a real possibility).
|
| hth
| cyberax wrote:
| Build a loop out of a superconductor, induce a current in it,
| and then measure the resulting magnetic field after a couple
| of minutes.
|
| If the field is still there, then you have a superconductor.
| norturnn wrote:
| [dead]
| Baeocystin wrote:
| Serious question- I saw the original video, where once they
| stopped waving the magnet around and held it near the sheet of
| LK-99, it looked to me like it stayed at a specific standoff
| distance, with no decay.
|
| Assuming no videographic trickery, what else could it be, other
| than the Meissner effect?
| oxfordmale wrote:
| The Meissner effect requires a temperature transition in the
| diamagnetic behaviour. As you increase the temperature, you
| would expect a sharp drop with the material falling back on
| the magnet, and then levitating again once the temperature
| drops.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, if you know the upper boundary for the temperature up
| to which the material stays superconducting. But that's a
| bit of a problem: this material is claimed to be
| superconducting to very high temperatures. It just _could_
| be that it isn 't all that easy to reach a temperature
| where this stuff stops being superconducting. In fact I see
| no particular reason in physics why it would have to stay
| below the temperature at which the material disintegrates.
| So maybe that part of the effects is simply a reflection of
| the fact that these superconductors that work well below
| zero are in fact exactly there _because_ they require a
| cold environment and once you find one that doesn 't that
| whole aspect goes away, it could stay diamagnetic all the
| way up to its melting point.
| oceanghost wrote:
| A diamagnetic material.
|
| "In simple terms, diamagnetic materials are substances that
| are usually repelled by a magnetic field. Electrons in an
| atom revolve around the nucleus, and thus possess orbital
| angular momentum. The resultant magnetic momentum in an atom
| of the diamagnetic material is zero."
| Baeocystin wrote:
| Am I correct in my understanding that being capable of
| self-levitation would be an unusually strong example of the
| diamagnetic effect?
| tavavex wrote:
| From what I heard, it would. This kind of diamagnetism
| would be strong enough to be potentially interesting in
| other applications and research, if it turns out not to
| be a superconductor.
| nine_k wrote:
| Would still be useful for maglev, I assume?
| ajnin wrote:
| Not over a single dipole magnet. The "shape" of the field
| wouldn't make it stable, you'd need to add other magnets
| or a piece of string to stabilise. As I understand stable
| levitation over a dipole magnet is indicative of flux
| pinning which is a property exclusive to type II
| superconductors.
| lucubratory wrote:
| Yes, if this material is diamagnetic without being a
| superconductor it is by far the strongest such material
| we've ever found. 15x stronger than pyrolitic graphite.
| whatshisface wrote:
| I think ChatGPT wrote that because it is nonsense.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| So happy to hear this. I've been hoping for some sort of
| breakthrough ever since I first encountered footage of magnets
| falling through Cu tubes at an extremely leisurely pace.
| redrobein wrote:
| Any conductive material for the tube will have a similar
| effect. It isn't specific to copper.
|
| The moving magnet induces a current in the tube which in turn
| creates the magnetic field that interacts with the magnet.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| Not _any_ conductive material, obviously won't work won't
| work, nor magnetic steel / stainless steel alloys.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| I meant: obviously iron won't work.
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| Could you elaborate why iron pipes wouldn't work?
| andrewflnr wrote:
| The magnet would try to stick to the side of the pipe
| through "normal" magnetism.
| soligern wrote:
| Eddy currents
| sjcsjc wrote:
| "Eddies," said Ford, "in the space-time continuum."
|
| "Ah," nodded Arthur, "is he? Is he?"
| dekhn wrote:
| If you haven't seen it, levitating frogs are also quite
| wonderful. https://slate.com/business/2014/05/nobel-prize-in-
| physics-an...
|
| An Ig Nobel AND a Nobel. That's quite the achievement.
| cpeterso wrote:
| That article was a great story! Thanks for sharing.
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| I think we're being trolled. Or trawled. Not sure which, yet.
| But the mention of Salvatore Cezar Pais in the patent should be
| enough to put this to bed for serious folks.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36967333
|
| In case you aren't familiar with the man's work, here are some
| highlights of his discoveries over the last decade:
|
| Conditional possibility of spacecraft propulsion at
| superluminal speeds
|
| High frequency gravitational waves-induced propulsion
|
| Piezoelectricity-induced room temperature superconductor
|
| Craft using an inertial mass reduction device
|
| On the Existence of the Superforce-the possible fundamental
| Force of Unification
|
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=7%2C39&q=Sal...
|
| I can't wait for my cheap antigrav FTL iron man suit to arrive
| next year.
| dcgudeman wrote:
| I wonder why more people aren't talking about this
| nwoli wrote:
| A lot of wishful thinking around these corners
| yreg wrote:
| Because it's irrelevant. Patents are supposed to mention
| other prior patents. Whether those are rubbish or not.
| nwoli wrote:
| Would be pretty funny if this guy actually published a
| breakthrough that worked all of a sudden
| bl_valance wrote:
| I thought the inclusion of Pais' patents was more along the
| lines of, here is a patent related to our work, rather than
| we sourced tech from it.
| varjag wrote:
| I wouldn't read too much into this. You have to address prior
| art when it is found in patent examination as a part of
| application process, no matter how bogus it is.
| martinclayton wrote:
| It looks like the citation of the Pais patent was added by
| the examiner, rather than by the applicants. Does that make
| any difference in your view?
| dasudasu wrote:
| Cited patents are added by the examiner. Source: I have
| several patents.
| kitd wrote:
| _Source: I have several parents_
|
| Ahem :)
|
| Though it may depend on what the patents are for!
| jjk166 wrote:
| If something is prior art, you need to include it, regardless
| of the source. Even fictional descriptions of technologies
| can be prior art. For example, Samsung used 2001 A Space
| Odyssey as prior art to invalidate Apple's patent on ipad-
| like tablets.
| jpmattia wrote:
| > _These Cu d-d interactions right at the fermi energy give me
| huge hope. Feels very familiar to other superconductors (re:
| all the cuprates)._
|
| As someone who is versed in semiconductor band structures but
| not superconductor band structures: What is it about Cu d-d
| interactions that causes the superconductivity?
|
| Degenerate energies in semiconductors don't give rise to
| electron pairing, so I'm a bit out to sea with the proposed
| mechanism here.
| bluecoconut wrote:
| To be honest, this is a hunch thing more than a I can teach
| and explain it thing. To me it's just "a lot of the same
| stories" that are told about cuprates, and less of a "I can
| explain the mechanism".
|
| Roughly, one of the "properties" that shows up with these
| materials is that the 3d orbitals of coper atoms are involved
| in forming the bands near the fermi level. Couple that with
| the fun story of Cu electron configuration being [Ar] 3d^10
| 4s^1, which suggests that spin-effects are "at play" with
| these electrons near their filling levels. Combine that with
| the spin-character properties of cuprate paring (eg. s-wave
| vs. d-wave superconductors, (d-wave for BSCCO for instance)).
| All together it lends itself to a nice spin-orbit coupled
| band "setup" at the fermi energy that I have a hunch somehow
| backs the underlying mechanism of these d-wave
| superconductors. Fully admit, there's some leaps there in the
| raw logic -- if I could fully explain it I probably would
| still be in the field, haha.
|
| I'll note: I've been out of the field for ~8 years, but a
| quick google search led to some more recent papers [1][2]
| working through plausible explanations based on some of these
| copper d orbital shenanigans.
|
| [1] https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paper
| id=... [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.11664 (d-p, but
| includes the Cu d-orbital and also specifically states "We
| also show that the effect of the nearest-neighbor d-d Coulomb
| interaction Vdd is actually quite important for the stability
| of superconductivity and phase competition.")
| faraggi wrote:
| Any plans on going back to your field with these
| discoveries?
| loxias wrote:
| > To be honest, this is a hunch thing more than a I can
| teach and explain it thing...
|
| Chiming in, not just you. :) I very briefly studied
| materials science a few decades ago and I'm 0% surprised
| that a potential breakthrough involves, of course,
| cuprates.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Very cool explanation, I didn't understand a word you said
| overnight5349 wrote:
| I really wish I'd went into physics in school. This all
| sounds _deeply_ fascinating, but I just barely understand
| the top level of what you 're explaining.
| jpmattia wrote:
| > _To me it 's just "a lot of the same stories" that are
| told about cuprates, and less of a "I can explain the
| mechanism"._
|
| Fair enough, and thanks for the readout. I realized after
| posting I essentially demanded an explanation as to why the
| cuprates are high-Tc, which is probably its own Nobel
| prize.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The internet is one of those places where if you are
| wrong, someone might well write a Nobel-worthy response
| just to win the argument.
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/how-an-anonymous-4chan-post-
| help...
| cynusx wrote:
| Nice one, reading that post makes me wonder if the proof
| could be furthered when considering parallels from
| compression algorithms.
|
| Compression algorithms detect recurring blocks and remove
| them with a special symbol and I think the shortest path
| would be uncompressable with compression algorithms.
| [deleted]
| weinzierl wrote:
| This is probably a very stupid question, but why is simply
| measuring resistance not enough to conclusively prove that it
| is a superconductor. I mean, isn't zero resistance the defining
| property?
| OJFord wrote:
| I think if it was actually zero it would be? The issue I
| think is impurity/defects in the manufactured samples, so
| there's non-superconducting bits in addition to the allegedly
| superconducting bits.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Because materials interfaces create weird effects.
|
| You would use metals as your leads and create Josephson-
| junctions-like interfaces.
|
| Basically the abrupt change in electron mobility across
| materials can cause knock on effects that dominate what you
| are trying to measure.
|
| Interfacial engineering is one term in materials science that
| implements best practices for dealing with such challenges.
| vrotaru wrote:
| Well, I guess, that are islands of superconductivity and
| normal conductivity in the same sample.
|
| This gives a low resistance and diamagnetism which is used as
| proxy to real superconductivity.
|
| I may be wrong though.
| baq wrote:
| Measuring zero resistance turns out to be quite difficult
| because your measuring apparatus tends to have some
| resistance in itself.
|
| Perhaps heating it up while it levitates would be a better
| idea. Put the magnet in an oven together with the sample and
| bake?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Magnets have an annoying tendency to stop working when they
| are heated.
|
| And it's ridiculous that I'm saying that on the context of
| testing a superconductor. But well, here we are.
| archontes wrote:
| You could always use an electromagnet.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Yes, but that's quite a bit of extra complication on an
| experiment of some material that was announced into the
| world last Friday.
|
| I do expect people to fully characterize it eventually.
| jacquesm wrote:
| A superconducting one?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Indeed, that statement would have been really funny just
| a few weeks ago. Now you're going to have to wonder
| whether the magnet or the superconductor will fail first.
|
| Neo magnet fabrication is fascinating by the way, the
| somewhat magnetized blanks are not all that impressive
| from a magnetic field strength point of view, but then
| you zap them with a strong enough field and they then
| suddenly are the best thing since sliced bread.
|
| This technique was first developed for 'regular' ceramic
| magnets.
|
| https://idealmagnetsolutions.com/knowledge-base/how-
| neodymiu...
|
| An uncoated magnet will oxidize very fast, so you always
| have to ensure that the coating on any magnets you use is
| perfect or the magnet will surely fail.
| rvnx wrote:
| Just guessing: I would say not enough because the sample is
| extremely small and there is chance that the electrons jump
| from each sides of the probes, skipping the sample ? (like a
| short-circuit) + the fact that the probes themselves are not
| superconductor, so there is a natural accepted tolerance in
| the measures (claimed to be due to the probes)
| mianos wrote:
| If the video is to be believed, the samples shown are huge
| compared to a, trivial to make, pulled or cut platinum wire
| probe. You could just put it on a plate in an SPM and
| measure it.
|
| So many questions. I assume this is all possible but they
| are focussing on one thing at a time to duplicate the
| results, if possible.
| SamPatt wrote:
| Thanks for your input.
|
| What would you need to see to say "I am 100% convinced this is
| / isn't real"?
|
| And how long would you expect it will be before that occurs?
| bluecoconut wrote:
| I'd probably approach 90% confidence with ~2-3 different
| measurements from different labs showing similar stories.
| Select from the grab bag of possible experiments that could
| all collaborate and provide consistency in their stories:
| specifically things like measuring the critical current,
| critical magnetic field, high quality electrical resistance
| in various ways (lots of transport), STM measurements of
| gaps, ARPES measurements of gaps, XRD showing crystal
| structures are what we expect that matches the DFT, a study
| on the domain sizes/effects (since this is relying on a
| substition at the right place, necessarily I suspect that
| there will be domain effects / "doping" style things... so
| how those play out in terms of purity and quality of results
| will be interesting). There will be a lot to study and
| characterize, and every extra measurement that is consistent
| rapidly increases that confidence. I'd say I'd get to "100%"
| (as close as someone could be) after ~10-20 papers across
| many different labs and measurements. I'd hope we'd get there
| in ~3-6 months.
|
| What I'm actually even slightly more excited about is "what
| comes next" -- not the market part, but the "fast follow
| science". For instance, in the few years after LCBO and LSCO
| were found (TC~30K) we quickly found YBCO and BSCCO
| (Tc~130K). I would expect that we'll find a whole class of
| these materials with substitution tricks that possibly work,
| and there will be a whole slew of options for "going to
| market" with the technology. The door this opens is what is
| more exciting than the specifics of LK-99 itself in my
| opinion.
|
| Estimating times, after the fast follow science (0.5-2 years
| optimistically?) we will hopefully have the actual "we're all
| convinced this is real, and the technology can start to be
| applied in real devices". Specifically, after everyone is
| pretty clear on a lot of the material properties and ways to
| reproducibly make high-quality crystals, so consistency is
| clear on measurements... then begins the cycles on how to
| manufacture high enough quality material at scale that it can
| actually be applied. (specifically, these materials (assuming
| they're like YCBO/BSCCO) are superconducting crystals that
| have grains, alignment issues, are physically brittle, have
| homogeneity issues, etc.) While each solvable, these are all
| real engineering and material challenges that increase cost
| to manufacture, and all of this will probably take time
| before we suddenly get wide-scale products that use this
| (this is all assuming it's real, haha, there's still plenty
| of reason to be skeptical).
| xorbax wrote:
| I think a funded and forward-thinking lab with enough
| postdocs would be trying to grind out a version replacing
| lead with gold, per the DFT calculations
|
| Few will remember the million replications, but whoever
| describes a _novel_ version - even if it 's no better -
| will find themselves on equal footing for helping to
| understand what's happening
| SamPatt wrote:
| Thanks for your thoughts!
| RandomBK wrote:
| I'm not a scientist, but personally I expect I'll have two
| "wow, this is really happening" moments:
|
| (1) When there's peer-reviewed replication from a group of
| reputable labs.
|
| (2) When I see the classic superconductor-on-magnetic-track
| demo, but without liquid nitrogen.
| fragmede wrote:
| https://nitter.net/lereguy/status/1686363900651151360 is no
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPqEEZa2Gis but it's on the
| way there!
| DeIonizedPlasma wrote:
| The nitter video could literally be a piece of iron, even
| a ferromagnetic object will turn like that under the
| presence of a magnet. It certainly isn't proof that the
| thing they have there is NOT a superconductor, but you
| can't use that video as evidence of anything.
| cthalupa wrote:
| Iron and ferromagnetic objects would not react that way.
| The key to this showing diamagnetism is the fact that the
| same points are repelled in the same way regardless of
| the orientation of the magnet. If it was ferromagnetic,
| you could have it stand up on it's tip in one polarity
| and stand up on another portion of the object in the
| other polarity, but you couldn't make it stand up on it's
| tip both times.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Waiting for Applied Science (the YouTuber) to make some in
| his lab.
| eco wrote:
| I think he might be working on it. On Twitter he teased a
| homemade device for making very fine powder for, say,
| superconductors.
|
| Here's his video of making YBCO for anyone that hasn't seen
| it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLFaa6RPJIU
| lucideer wrote:
| For anyone interested in this topic, there's a thread on Twitter
| that's been garnering some attention:
| https://nitter.net/Errorreporrt/status/1685835688216821760
| yreg wrote:
| Could we please stop giving attention to the obnoxious
| anonymous Russian troll who's only proof is a photo of a spec
| of dust in a syringe, who says she 'didnt follow the paper
| beause she immediately invented a better way to make a room
| temp superconductor', who says she 'doesnt care about
| superconductors' and keeps tweeting USSR propaganda?
|
| I really don't get how she keeps getting recommended in these
| hacker news threads as an interesting source.
| lucideer wrote:
| Not sure if you're implying she's cooked up a few crucibles
| at home purely for internet attention (nor what the relevance
| of her political views are here), but regardless the thread
| is interesting either way as it's generating lot of general
| interest in replication. This is perhaps a better link: https
| ://eirifu.wordpress.com/2023/07/30/lk-99-superconductor...
| yreg wrote:
| One doesn't need to cook several crucibles to create the
| photos that were posted.
|
| The views are relevant because you are directing people to
| that account.
|
| What exactly is interesting in that thread? It's just
| cringe talk about 'weapons grade autism' unless I'm missing
| something.
| sampo wrote:
| > a thread on Twitter
|
| If you are not logged in to Twitter, Twitter doesn't show the
| thread, just the first post alone. But you can use nitter.net,
| if you don't want to log in to Twitter:
| https://nitter.net/Errorreporrt/status/1685835688216821760
| lucideer wrote:
| Thank you! Edited & will try use in future.
| arookery wrote:
| Super exciting moment, seeing scientists actively exploring the
| superconducting properties of LK-99.
| chaorew wrote:
| oh, I don't believe it. At present, it is very likely that it is
| purely theoretical, and there is still a long time before it can
| be applied.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The most interesting phenomenon revealed so far is that the room-
| temperature superconductor people and the generative-LLMs-are-God
| people draw on the same limited global pool of credulity, such
| that HN cannot be flooded with both ChatGPT worship and
| superconductor speculation at the same time.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Jeffbee in the 1947 edition: The most interesting phenomenon
| revealed so far is that the solid state electronics people and
| the rocket fanatics people draw on the same limited global pool
| of credulity, such that TinkererNews cannot be flooded with
| both transistor worship and moon travel speculation at the same
| time.
|
| Seriously: if it doesn't interest you, you could simply refrain
| from commenting and even reading. This stuff is the bleeding
| edge of tech and if you consider everybody active in these
| fields or talking about it to be starry eyed children then you
| should re-calibrate your sense of what these scientific
| discoveries are likely to cause further downstream. The idea
| here is to find some balance, it's perfectly ok to discuss a
| new discovery and to consider the implications on the caveat
| that it might not pan out. But superconductors already exist,
| there is no reason in physics why an arbitrary temperature cut-
| off is going to limit them from existing at room temperature,
| if you look at the trend since superconductivity was first
| observed there is a steady increase which with ever smaller
| margin of error predicts a breakthrough somewhere around 2030.
| It arrived a bit early, but it - apparently - did arrive, and
| if true will lead to a revolution in power transmission. And if
| it isn't true then we'll just drop it and hope for the next
| round, but I suspect that even if it isn't true there are going
| to be a lot of labs wondering if they can salvage at least some
| knowledge gained during all the scrutiny of this particular
| attempt.
|
| Similar trends can be observed rectro-actively for practical
| solar panels, micro electronics, powered flight and so on. All
| had their skeptics, sometimes unreasonable skeptics and all
| were proven eventually wrong an those inventions transformed
| our world and are still transforming our world. You see a
| stupid silly black fleck floating over a magnet and wonder what
| the big deal is. I see a glimpse of an alternative future that
| has a lot of potential implications for how we live.
| keepamovin wrote:
| That's funny too, but I think you can do both. You can be
| interested, but also make fun of it. I have a suspicion, that
| in the long term, being able to keep it light and make fun of
| the serious work that you do actually assists your longevity,
| resilience, creativity and productivity in working on it.
|
| It may not be true, but some amount of keeping it light
| definitely works for me. I mean I love taking myself
| seriously too. And some amount of doing that I think is
| necessary. I guess I just don't wanna put all my eggs in one
| strategic-approach basket, you know? People are complex! :)
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _Similar trends can be observed rectro-actively for
| practical solar panels, micro electronics, powered flight and
| so on. All had their skeptics_
|
| Isn't this textbook survivorship bias?
|
| On the grand scale, I bet the skeptics have a much better
| record than the optimists.
| jacquesm wrote:
| No, those are just the examples I used to make the point
| that in some cases those discoveries are real and do
| transform our world. It would be pointless to show that
| there are also cases where that wasn't true because it is
| boringly obvious. Speculation, by nature will sometimes be
| wrong. But _sometimes_ it will be on the money and the
| people that were stuck in default skepticism until there is
| ironclad proof are simply resorting to unfounded
| speculation themselves, some proof is better than none, and
| we seem to have at least some proof. Science is _always_
| going to be at risk of its theories and purported
| discoveries not panning out, whether it is bicycle
| mechanics, highly educated people or Einstein himself. And
| in all of those cases there were things they said or did
| that didn 't work out. And in all of those cases they did
| amazing stuff that transformed our world as well. I for one
| would rather be cheerleading them then to be cheerleading
| the skeptics, because if we all were that skeptical we'd
| still be living in caves and hitting each other over the
| head with clubs for scraps of meat.
|
| Progress, and working on progress is inherently risky. But
| by the time actual progress seems to have arrived
| speculation on how true it is and what the impact will be
| if it is true is perfectly valid and those that would
| rather engage in shouting everything down are technically
| off topic and I personally find it annoying. Not quite as
| annoying as crank science but still.
|
| On that subject: there is still a non-zero chance this is a
| hoax but that chance is rapidly diminishing, there is a
| very large chance that this whole discovery will not be
| immediately practical and that it will still take a ton of
| work and funding to unlock its true potential. The skeptic
| would rather not spend that money and would rather avoid
| the work, it's a cop-out, and a cheap and easy one at that,
| and it's exactly why the skeptics have the better track
| record: progress is hard. But not impossible so let's see
| what comes out but let's not give up hope that progress is
| still possible, especially not when it seems that progress
| is being made.
|
| My initial skepticism was high (this isn't the first room
| temperature superconductor claim), then as I read the paper
| and checked some stuff my conclusion was that this _could_
| be the real thing but the numbers are such that it isn 't a
| practical superconductor just yet. That confidence has
| since gone up a bit but I still would not bet that this
| material as discovered right now has huge industrial
| applications. But _if_ it is true then I am somewhat
| optimistic that it opens the door to lots of new research
| and that research may well pay off (or not, time will
| tell).
| mpixel wrote:
| I think it's equally wrong to compare this whole thing to
| solar panels and whatnot.
|
| That said, in general, 9 out of 10 things that are very
| promising will ultimately fail, and there's nothing wrong
| with discussing or following all 10, the 1 will work, and
| it'll be great.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I think we're all horribly burned out by pop-science. How
| many battery "breakthroughs" have we seen on here? Meanwhile
| what actually works is incremental improvement in lithium
| battery manufacturing.
|
| The 1947 Golden Age SF is interesting because the "rocket
| fanatics" peaked in 1969 and humans haven't gone back to the
| moon, let alone conquered space. While the transistor
| succeeded to an extent nobody imagined due to the magic of
| compounding improvements.
|
| > You see a stupid silly black fleck floating over a magnet
|
| Meanwhile over in the AI "optimism" channel people are
| telling us that AI will be able to produce videos of anything
| that are indistinguishable from reality, and that we should
| all learn never to believe video evidence again.
|
| I'm still very much in the "don't know" camp on the
| superconductor, but what I _do_ know is that it 's not worth
| getting excited until we know it's real.
| feoren wrote:
| > Meanwhile over in the AI "optimism" channel people are
| telling us ...
|
| I'm not sure why this line of reasoning is so prevalent.
| Someone says "There's strong evidence for A" and the reply
| is "yes but someone who is not currently in the
| conversation also said there was strong evidence for B and
| that is _wrong!_ Therefore you are _silly_ for believing in
| A! " What? We're not supposed to be optimistic when we see
| strong evidence for a breakthrough in a phenomenon we
| already knew existed, because _someone else_ believes
| _something else_!? Because some other person believes in
| ghosts and psychic powers, no one is allowed to believe
| anything? These are _different people_ making _different
| claims_! It 's insanity.
| pjc50 wrote:
| My argument was that the _video_ evidence is not strong,
| because it's poor quality and videos are easy to fake,
| while also linking this to another piece of techno-
| optimism which has made it easier to fake videos.
| cthalupa wrote:
| And that's why you shouldn't particularly believe videos
| without providence.
|
| However, we have videos being posted by PhDs at
| universities and their students. The stakes are quite a
| bit higher if it turns out they were faking these videos
| - and will be quite readily apparent. This is easy enough
| to synthesize that there are hundreds of labs in the
| world working on replicating it. You'd be found out to be
| a fraud, fast, and for what reason? Twitter likes and
| retweets for a few weeks? Why would you ruin your career
| over that?
| johnthewise wrote:
| Agreed. I find shallow skepticism to be very sad way of
| thinking. If the stakes are not high, i.e. you are not
| putting your life savings into it, why don't you allow
| your imagination to be entertained for a brief of time?
| If it turns out to be a fluke, so what, maybe we'll get
| there next time. Yeah, bunch of videos from researchers
| could be fake but are they so likely to be fake that you
| won't allow yourself to imagine a little bit? Every
| poster on this thread might be a LLM, it's technically
| possible, but are they really?
| shawnz wrote:
| > I think we're all horribly burned out by pop-science.
|
| Speak for yourself, I'm happy to lend my positivity to
| people who think they might be close to breakthroughs even
| if they are unlikely moonshots, and you better believe I'll
| be maximally hyping up my own work if I ever feel like I am
| close to some kind of breakthrough too. That's part of the
| fun of being a living thing in this weird physical
| universe.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Exactly. I find myself a _lot_ more engaged by people
| working on trying to get room temperature
| superconductivity checked off than by people figuring out
| how to do A /B testing on unsuspecting consumers to
| increase the number of ads that are clicked.
| imtringued wrote:
| How about an ORM that isn't as bad as Hibernate :(
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| Despite the the "strictly no jesting on the super serious
| hacker news" rule, I think it was just a joke. I wouldn't let
| it get to you too much. I thought it was pretty funny.
| swat535 wrote:
| Honestly I don't find those kind of comments particularly
| valuable on HN. It derails the topic from a meaningful
| discussion and the whole thing devolves into a Reddit troll
| fest. All you need to do is glimpse at the replies it
| spawned to confirm it. This is why I assume it was heavily
| downvoted.
| fragmede wrote:
| Given that I only have to go down to the eighth item on the
| front page to get to a story about LLMs (past three stories
| about superconductors) are you so sure about that?
| philosopher1234 wrote:
| The biggest threat to Bitcoin wasn't apt criticism. It was a
| nexter bigger thing.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Like Theranos, the secret ingredient turned out to be fraud,
| and the big threat is jail.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| Bitcoin was really 'done' 10 years ago. It does what it does
| and there really isn't much more to it. People tried to keep
| the hype going with DAO's, earn programs, smart contracts,
| NFT's, etc.. but crypto was already done before 'web3' even
| started.
| julianeon wrote:
| Give it a few days, and some dumbass story like "I asked
| ChatGPT about the Meissner effect and the answer blew my mind"
| will start trending. See you in the comments!
| poopbutt7 wrote:
| [flagged]
| civilitty wrote:
| You're seeing a lull in ChatGPT-specific posts but there are
| two LLM posts [1][2] on the front page as I write this
| (compared to three LK99 posts).
|
| There does not seem to be any conservation of credulity going
| on here.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36958731
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36958175
| johncalvinyoung wrote:
| As someone strongly in the first camp and not the second, this
| feels like a very odd observation. I despise generative LLMs
| and avoid using them at every opportunity. I'm also spending
| all my free time this week perusing arxiv preprints and Twitter
| threads. Make of my datum what you will. :)
| bratbag wrote:
| Seems a bit foolish to leave that space on your toolbelt
| empty.
| serf wrote:
| > I despise generative LLMs and avoid using them at every
| opportunity.
|
| why? it's just a tool.
|
| despise how it was released, how it was trained, the people
| that operate it , whatever, but I can't really understand why
| someone would 'despise' a wrench -- even if it was used
| really poorly and produced by a shady company with a
| checkered past.
| jjahdhnmko wrote:
| [dead]
| fragmede wrote:
| Same concept as blood money. To be dramatic, if the wrench
| was made with ore from a mine where your father worked, and
| he was killed and the ore was stolen, would you do business
| with the company that hired the mercenaries that killed
| him? Would you buy a wrench from them? if one fell into
| your hands, would you use it? It's just a wrench, after
| all, but you can see why somebody might have strong
| feelings about it, even if you ultimately disagree with
| them.
| fragmede wrote:
| Ouch, downvoted hard. If anyone would like to say why,
| I'm all ears!
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Most tech throughout history was built during wars and
| rough circumstances. With this mindset almost nothing
| should be used.
| johncalvinyoung wrote:
| In rough order of priority (highest to lowest):
|
| a) I do not believe that it produces useful-quality results
| for almost any of my use cases (Even if other concerns were
| addressed, I don't want to generate buggy code I then have
| to debug).
|
| b) I believe many if not necessarily all generative AI
| models were trained unethically on copyrighted data
|
| c) I am worried about the legal & copyright implications of
| using the tool to produce work products for my employer
|
| d) I am concerned about the societal implications of the
| tool's existence, and how it's producing sub-human-scale
| work for (nearly) free, thereby eroding the market for a
| lot of human-produced output.
|
| e) I dislike the amplified volume of low-quality content
| online over the last few months.
|
| f) I'm not a fan of OpenAI as a business or a potential
| monopoly
| sheepscreek wrote:
| On a related note: I am deeply disappointed by how OpenAI has
| managed to continually dumb down ChatGPT. I'm sure the shortage
| of NVIDIA H100s and the demand for their APIs shooting through
| the roof has something to do with it. Perhaps they've switched
| to a quantized model? Who knows.
|
| And yes, LLaMA 2 is awesome. Progress is being made. But it's
| slowed down. The novelty's worn off. Now we're lacking some
| fundamental plumbing to reach a useful AGI.
|
| If anyone cares, Bard is proving to be way more useful these
| days. Especially for research work. And Claude is bar none for
| document analysis.
| dogcomplex wrote:
| What makes you think we're lacking fundamental plumbing? I am
| personally still quite convinced it will simply take a bit of
| time and development to plug in the current AI into
| sufficient self-testing structures (basically the next
| versions of AutoGPT) and let it run long enough to map out an
| entire domain with accurate measurements. Seems more like
| just a matter of time and a bit of funding - but mostly
| inevitable and very straightforward. It doesn't even really
| take GPT4 quality levels to do - that's just a bonus.
|
| https://twitter.com/fablesimulation/status/16813529041528504.
| .. These guys seem to be on the leading edge there - making
| self-referential character-driven narratives where agents
| talk to each other and build the collective world
| understanding, all through a South Park Westworld lol
| sheepscreek wrote:
| I completely agree with you. I failed to articulate it
| well.
|
| Like the current top HN post suggests
| (https://eugeneyan.com/writing/llm-patterns/), we're still
| discovering patterns that work well with LLMs.
|
| That said, anecdotally - they already excel at being logic
| engines. Capable of filling in the gaps between
| instructions. Using their worldly knowledge or "common
| sense" to do so.
|
| But ever so often, they'll miss an important bit. And I
| have to be quite involved to catch that. Kinda defeats the
| purpose. Here, I think we can benefit from supervisor LLMs.
| A second layer, whose sole job is to ensure the output
| quality. A QA bot - essentially.
| dogcomplex wrote:
| Yeah with their own QA from a variety of different
| personas/perspectives/concerns/contexts I reckon you'll
| get a very decent accuracy - or at least self-assessment
| of inaccuracy. All these can ever do is propagate the
| data they know so far to the context/prompt you desire,
| but I don't see obvious limits there. And GPT4 is already
| a superb conversation partner as smart as nearly any
| person - so it's really like piecing experts together. If
| we run into any fundamental limitations from piecing
| these all together, it's gonna be the same limit that any
| group of humans trying to make a coherent/consistent
| organization of knowledge encounters, I think.
|
| Coincidentally, that appears to be how GPT4 was made -
| apparently it's actually about 8 personas with designated
| roles running GPT3.5 trained together ("Panel of
| experts"? there's an AI name for the technique). Makes
| you wonder how far that one trick scales.
|
| (P.S. great link. Gah - another long read on the todo
| list)
| refulgentis wrote:
| It's not dumber. You can verify this on their models with any
| prompt you ran at 0.0 when it first came out, I did. It's the
| exact same model run the same exact way. They've repeatedly
| confirmed this.
| xtracto wrote:
| Ooh I have some nice book chapter summaries that ChatGPT
| generated for me when it first came out. I got them in a
| Google doc.
|
| If you ask GPT to give you the same thing now, it wont , no
| matter how hard you try.
|
| That's like hard evidence for me that they've dumbed it
| down.
| sheepscreek wrote:
| They confirmed the API still ran the same base model. But
| there was no mention of ChatGPT the service. I was
| referring to the latter above.
| WithinReason wrote:
| It is and it's documented:
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.09009
| refulgentis wrote:
| A) its wrong and caused a lot of hand wringing about
| Arxiv and undergrads B) Not my claim, those are two
| different models
| minimaxir wrote:
| The ChatGPT webapp is not the same workflow as the ChatGPT
| API.
| girvo wrote:
| > It's not dumber
|
| So I absolutely agree with this. And yet this meme
| persists. I wonder what's creating the feeling that it's
| "dumber" in so many? Perhaps they're just noticing the
| limits that always existed previously? I'm not sure, and am
| interested in others thoughts on it.
| sheepscreek wrote:
| ChatGPT as in the paid subscription hosted by OpenAI. Its
| quality has deteriorated. It will miss the simplest
| details in the prompt and hallucinate a lot. I've only
| noticed this before on models with lesser parameters.
|
| In comparison, Bard and Claude are getting better with
| time.
| larperdoodle wrote:
| They've added a lot of safety features. Knowing very
| little about LLMs, I would assume these prepended prompts
| are using up a chunk of the limited "attention" the
| transformer has
| uejfiweun wrote:
| Hey, who knows, it could just be a scaling issue. (The
| history of NNs would lend credence to this theory). In which
| case, if this room temperature superconductor stuff is legit,
| then maybe we're about to experience a major compute power
| leap that could result in AGI sooner than we think.
| refulgentis wrote:
| There isn't a singular group of people (if you will, a They)
| fulfilling this criteria.
|
| I don't understand why it's worth being bitter about something
| so joyful and fundamentally human in realtime.
| rel2thr wrote:
| Theres some crossover. Isn't this exactly what a rogue super AI
| would do first?
|
| - run some simulations and discover a superconductor
|
| - then write up a paper on it ( the paper has some gaps but
| humans take it and run with it)
|
| - human technology and computing power rapidly accelerates.
|
| - the rogue AI's powers increase exponentially
| BasedAnon wrote:
| people forget that AI was already in control of the markets
| since 2014 at least. it's bootstrapping
| cooper_ganglia wrote:
| Having played through Portal 2 again recently, it's like the
| equivalent of GlaDOS scheming to take back over the Aperture
| Science Facility while she's only getting 1.1 Volts from the
| potato.
| mjan22640 wrote:
| The oneshot or short session manner in which AI are typically
| used does not have a rogue potential.
|
| The AI would need to have a virtually unreachable goal, and
| run in an endless loop, to be able to drift its goals to be
| at odds with humanity.
| bratbag wrote:
| As you say it, I'm tempted to try it.
|
| Doubt I'm the first.
| SamPatt wrote:
| The least interesting phenomenon revealed so far is that HN is
| split into a group who are entertained by watching and
| discussing emerging tech / science news, and a second group who
| are entertained by disparaging the first.
|
| I enjoy watching floating rocks and talking to computers.
| Valgrim wrote:
| Same with me, it gives me the same feeling of "Living in a
| science fiction world" that I once felt when cell phones or
| Google maps came out.
|
| Of course even tough I still use both profusely every day,
| the feeling of novelty wore out. I expect the same will
| happen with this.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| In an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation a redshirt
| used a tricorder to check the weather and said they would
| have to beam up soon because a storm was approaching.
|
| At the time I thought to myself: "Bah, that's never
| happening, it's pure fantasy!"
|
| A few years later I told some friends we'd have to pack up
| our picnic because according to the weather radar app on my
| phone we had about 7 minutes until we got drenched... no
| wait... 6 minutes.
|
| 5m:30s later we were standing under shelter watching the
| storm front rolling in, and I remembered that Star Trek
| scene.
|
| We live in the future.
| thefurdrake wrote:
| We basically have tricorders, especially if you consider
| all the fancy things you can attach to them, like flir IR
| cameras.
|
| I think we've almost EXCEEDED star trek in that area.
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| I want a programmable hypospray. I'd be real popular at
| parties.
| NovaDudely wrote:
| There was a line from the movie 'Ted', that film about a
| child's stuffed bear coming to life. It was something along
| the lines of "No matter how special and amazing something
| is, eventually people get bored of it and move onto
| something else."
|
| It will probably be like this for us. The children will
| just take it for granted as they grow up with it, we will
| be endlessly amazed by it.
| forward-slashed wrote:
| To see the real value of something, take it away. Humans
| are greedy (mathematically) creatures, so there's no
| point in mulling over assets which are secure. The awe is
| the exploration phase of a piece of technology, but the
| remaining value is still valuable.
| [deleted]
| hgomersall wrote:
| I spent most of my youth through the 80s and 90s thinking
| technology was a bit shit. Computers worked until they
| ground to a halt with lots of whirring and crunching; we
| had enormous flat TVs that had terrible pictures; you could
| store an album of music just about if you jumped through
| annoying hoops to write it to a disc; MP3 appeared and
| disappointed because flash memory was limited to 16MB at a
| sensible price... Then slowly but surely the future
| happened, until it was suddenly apparent that technology
| was now outstripping our imagination in many areas. The
| problem we have now is that society is way behind where it
| needs to be to make proper use of the tech we have, whilst
| other areas are woefully underserved by tech at all. We
| simultaneously have an abundance of tech and not enough
| engineers to roll it out (whilst struggling with the
| societal implications of some aspects). Exciting times
| indeed.
| SergeAx wrote:
| It seems to me that the second group is also entertained by
| discussing money, tech salaries in particular.
| NovaDudely wrote:
| I would say I am in both worlds. Not too excited about a lot
| developments in computer tech, but mostly because there is a
| lot of hype on technology that tends be impressive BUT misses
| the mark on the bold claims.
|
| But with this LK99 stuff, there is not much room for vague
| wiggle room. The requirements are very clearly defined and if
| they do it. It is done! It isn't a case of "if in 5 years and
| $X billion we may be able to produce this stuff", it is a
| case of they showing a working material.
|
| It is hard not to be excited for this!
| tavavex wrote:
| Exact opposite for me - with stuff like AI tech, I'm a lot
| more familiar with the subject matter than the happenings
| in the material sciences, so it allows me to be more
| confidently optimistic about computer-related advancements.
| Even if my education is still insufficient to grasp the
| full extent of new tech, I can at least try to understand
| it conceptually.
|
| On the other hand, the LK-99 news seem very promising, but
| a lot of professionals in the field are still iffy, and
| everyone who's interested in emerging tech is left
| searching for breadcrumbs and talking to other enthusiasts.
| It's likely that we won't know if this is a dud or a world-
| changing discovery for several weeks to months...
|
| I've been trying to be as cautious as possible when looking
| at the recent news, but it's difficult to not be cautiously
| optimistic about at least some things.
| NovaDudely wrote:
| That is pretty cool, I mean, I do get the excitement of
| the technology of things like AI - I fall more in line
| with the philosophers or "but what does it really all
| mean". I'm not sure if what I do is useful at all other
| than a mental toy to play with. It is more that some
| folks act like it is the end of all work, others say it
| is the end of humanity itself - the reality is definitely
| in the middle there!
|
| When it comes to this stuff there is a fine line between
| pessimist and optimist. Too optimistic and you will be
| left disappointed. To pessimistic and you risk being
| labelled a loom smashing luddite.
|
| I always appreciate those that see the bright future,
| they will push the technology forward regardless of what
| others say, but that can also be the path to ruin - as
| they say, the road to hell is paved with good deeds. It
| seems as though, we do not know if something is good or
| not until it is done.
|
| Like with the LK99 news, what it is delivered everything
| promised. Could this just be the next step of the rebound
| effect, and we just feed into our base desires and
| consume even more of everything? It is possible, but we
| probably won't know until it is well in the rear view
| mirror.
|
| Interesting times ahead.
| r00fus wrote:
| Skepticism is a survival skill. That said, I'd be happy
| to be wrong in this case!
| fouc wrote:
| > a lot of professionals in the field are still iffy
|
| That seems like a strange perception. I'm seeing the
| opposite.
| tavavex wrote:
| When the news had first made the rounds several days ago,
| the overwhelming sentiment that I felt was "meh, this
| seems so unprofessional. Probably just another
| fabrication, like all the previous ones. I guess we might
| as well check just to be sure". Kind of an exaggeration,
| but this is what I took away then.
|
| Now that any data from third parties starts slowly
| dripping in, the perception seems to be changing to very
| cautious curiosity. No experts are putting their
| reputation on the line for what little information we
| have, but interest in this topic is definitely rising.
| Hence why I said they were 'iffy'.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| thefurdrake wrote:
| Sometimes it's so difficult to continue to feel positive
| about science news when there have been so many instances of
| false hope. Cautiously optimistic is the best position to be
| in, I think.
|
| That being said:
|
| I want the magical floating rocks to be real.
|
| I want the talky computer to be self aware and capable of
| genuine creation.
|
| I want the explanation for UAPs to be aliens.
|
| I want reactionless engine technology.
|
| I definitely still feel excited by things, but time has
| taught me to temper it.
| klysm wrote:
| And there's the third group that likes to comment on meta-hn
| behavior in a disparaging way
| ant6n wrote:
| Like you!
| klysm wrote:
| We're the group doing meta-meta commentary
| Eliezer wrote:
| And stop there.
| yreg wrote:
| What is your take on this? At what odds would you bet the
| material turns out to work as advertised? :)
| swalsh wrote:
| It's so hard not to be crazy excited about the future. The past
| few months are proving to be an absolute breakout for the
| literal human race.
|
| So far we've seen:
|
| 1. in Dec 2022 We saw a fusion breakthrough seeing a net gain
| in energy
|
| 2. In March GPT-4 was released, which seems to be a seminal
| breakthrough in AI, and maybe of our first glimpse in what
| could become an AGI.
|
| 3. In May we find out apparently our government has recovered
| alien technologies
|
| 4. Then in July room temp super conductors just drop
|
| Like this is the most insane period of time. Maybe the fusion
| technology doesn't scale, maybe GPT-5 doesn't scale, maybe the
| UAP thing was all a psyop, or a lie, maybe LK-99 doesn't turn
| out. But there's so much to hope for!
| Accujack wrote:
| [flagged]
| peyton wrote:
| Bro you should really take a hard look at your media diet.
| It's not healthy to be posting about Trump executions on a
| superconductor characterization thread.
| throwaway69123 wrote:
| Cringe
| emptyfile wrote:
| [dead]
| bluescrn wrote:
| But at the same time, we may already be in the early stages
| of the collapse of western civilisation, with or without
| Russia/Ukraine escalating into WW3.
| jboy55 wrote:
| Regarding #1, it pains me to see so much hype about this
| feat.
|
| To restate it. We were able to simulate the implosion of the
| secondary stage of a thermonuclear device in a lab by the
| means of lasers, to the point that this simulation has ~
| 0.001% the efficiency of a real device.
|
| We also probably learned a lot about the amplification of
| x-rays by the casing material that would have been useful
| during the SDI days of the early 80s.
|
| tldr; It was a weapons test, by a weapons lab.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _It was a weapons test, by a weapons lab_
|
| Beyond a certain point, every energy system is a weapon
| first. Uncontrolled precedes controlled.
| jboy55 wrote:
| I'm not sure I follow, if I were to define "Energy
| System" as a system to create or utilize energy, I can
| think of a half dozen that never were weapons. Solar,
| Wind, Natural Gas, Coal, Hydro.
|
| If you define energy systems to mean _nuclear_ energy
| systems, then we only have one, which is fission.
|
| But in the end, this test was _specifically_ designed to
| test the nuclear weapons stockpile by feeding real data
| about implosions, by means of ablation by x-rays, back
| into the computer simulations that have been developed in
| the last couple of decades.
|
| In review, implosion by ablation of a material by x-rays
| is the mechanism speculated that the primary fission
| nuclear device triggers the secondary fusion device in an
| H-bomb. So, they are not trying to figure out how to
| produce power or even understand fusion, but they are
| modeling the characteristics of a specific part of a
| bomb, so they can know how to test a 50 year old h-bomb
| without setting one off.
| psmirnov wrote:
| Interestingly, controlled nuclear fission preceded the
| weapons tests (Chicago Pile 1), at least chronologically.
| jboy55 wrote:
| And that's the only "energy system", that I can think of,
| that is also part of a weapon.
| feoren wrote:
| From my perspective, LK-99 is by far the most likely to be an
| actual serious technological breakthrough. If it's real, it
| would be a breakthrough on the level of the discovery of
| electricity, the lens, the transistor, or the laser. One of
| those era-defining bottlenecks in the Civilization technology
| tree.
|
| GPT-4 is a nice iterative improvement over previous work, and
| a culmination of decades of research. It's not anywhere near
| an AGI and it's close to the limit of what we can accomplish
| with our current understanding of AI and our current
| availability of good data. We're near the top of the sigmoid
| curve on this one; new advances are going to come from
| specializing and integrating these models, not just making
| bigger ones.
|
| The fusion "breakthrough" is seriously underwhelming when you
| look at the total power in/out of the whole plant, not just a
| tiny tunnel-visioned window of the fusion reaction itself
| (ignoring power of magnetic confinement and the laser pulse),
| and even more when you think about how much tritium humanity
| has ever created. We're just not seeing what we need here and
| the net power output is still deeply in the negative.
|
| Lol aliens.
|
| My point, to both you and GP, is that it's quite possible to
| have very different levels of optimism for these recent
| revelations, and it's not hypocritical to do so. Details and
| context matter. Dozens of materials science Ph.D.s saying
| "holy shit this looks like the real deal guys" vs. one guy
| saying "someone told me there were hidden stocks of blinker
| fluid that I wasn't allowed to see" just does not engender
| the same confidence levels.
| naasking wrote:
| > It's not anywhere near an AGI
|
| Conjecture. We literally have no idea how far away from AGI
| we are, that's one of the dangers.
| feoren wrote:
| Ehh ... we kinda do. However sure you are that
| calculators aren't close to AGI, I'm only slightly less
| sure that one-word-at-a-time auto-completion networks
| aren't close either. Both can do things the other can't.
| LLMs are not strictly more powerful than a calculator.
| They cannot add two numbers together reliably.
|
| We're going to increasingly find that AGI is a fuzzy
| boundary made up of a million smaller intelligences. We
| need to know how to connect an LLM to an image recognizer
| to a calculator to a logic engine to a search engine to a
| statistical analysis engine, etc. etc. If you're looking
| for the actual AGI breakthrough, look out for some
| qualitatively new and interesting way to _connect_ these
| brains together.
| naasking wrote:
| > They cannot add two numbers together reliably.
|
| Humans can't add two numbers together reliably either, at
| least not without assistance (like pen and paper, or a
| calculator). We invented calculators exactly because
| humans are not innately good at such calculations, so I'm
| not sure what you think this proves.
|
| > If you're looking for the actual AGI breakthrough, look
| out for some qualitatively new and interesting way to
| connect these brains together.
|
| All of these are being and have been connected to LLMs
| now, to great effect. See RT-2, for example.
|
| Finally, I think you vastly overestimate human
| capabilities. LLMs are already superhuman in many tasks.
| Adding a "few more intelligences" where they currently
| fall down does not at all seem far off.
|
| This has been my experience so far: people underestimate
| the capabilities and rate of progress in machine
| intelligence, and they often significantly overestimate
| human capabilities to derive their estimates.
| Overestimating human specialness has a long history.
| taneq wrote:
| > close to the limit of what we can accomplish with our
| current understanding of AI and our current availability of
| good data
|
| Isn't this literally the definition of 'state of the art'?
| It's the best we can do with our current understanding and
| data. This doesn't seem like a convincing argument that
| current ML techniques are tapped out.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| No, what the GP is claiming is a theoretical end of line,
| where we would need some very innovative breakthrough to
| go further.
|
| Those tend to happen decades apart in a single field. And
| often the breakthroughs even come before the end of line
| does, so we jump a few decades.
|
| Now, the GP didn't put out the reasoning why he thinks
| so. Without further context, there's nothing there
| requiring you to agree.
| feoren wrote:
| Well said. I'd add that Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, also
| holds the same opinion. He has ulterior motives for
| everything he says, of course.
|
| Every incremental improvement in utility of these tools
| requires exponentially more parameters and training data.
| Compare GPT4's 1.76 trillion params to GPT3.5's 175
| million; nearly exactly 10x more. It's reasonable to say
| that getting the same relative improvement again will
| require another 10x parameters, and about 10x as much
| training data. GPT4 supposedly cost something like $20
| million to train, so we're talking $200 million. We're
| talking entire data centers here. And the bigger problem
| is that GPT4 was already basically trained on _the entire
| Internet_ (as far as we know). New information is being
| created all the time, but it will take many years --
| decades, even -- before we have 10x as much useful
| information on the internet. And more and more of that
| information is regurgitated hallucinations from GPT4
| itself and similar.
|
| I'm _not_ saying AI is ending -- there are lots of other
| avenues to explore. But I _am_ saying we 're hitting the
| limit of "just make it bigger" for LLMs.
| feoren wrote:
| > This doesn't seem like a convincing argument that
| current ML techniques are tapped out.
|
| Absolutely right, I wasn't very clear -- I don't believe
| "current ML techniques" are tapped out. I do believe that
| we're not going to see a GPT5 for several more years, and
| a GPT6 for another decade+ (or if we do, it will be
| branding, not anything significantly better). We're at
| the top of the sigmoid curve for the benefit of just
| making bigger and bigger LLMs.
| PuffinBlue wrote:
| Regarding fusion - have you seen Helion's approach? [0]
|
| It seems their approach removes many of the issues with
| Tokamak or Laser Pulsed fusion.
|
| It also reduces most of the feedstock issues with the two
| part fuel breeding approach.
|
| Their approach seems easier to be optimistic about.
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/_bDXXWQxK38
| deelowe wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vUPhsFoniw
|
| Be careful with real engineering. Many speculate he's
| doing paid content between this and spinlaunch.
| audunw wrote:
| While it's always good to be a bit skeptic, don't take
| this video at face value either. I'd argue that it has
| bigger issues than Real Engineerings video because it
| tries to come off as scientifically accurate, but may
| actually be deeply flawed. See comments on this Reddit
| post for some deep discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/f
| usion/comments/10g95m9/comment/j67...
|
| Real Engineering has a tone where - while I do think they
| usually keep a high standard - I don't assume that
| they're necessarily 100% correct or that the new
| technology they cover is necessarily viable. With both
| Spinlaunch and Helion I just came out of it with the
| feeling "cool, interesting, looks promising"
| JamisonM wrote:
| > 3. In May we find out apparently our government has
| recovered alien technologies
|
| This is a silly thing to include on the list since it doesn't
| seem to be true?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Thus proving the parent post's "credulity" point.
| xtracto wrote:
| What's up with that uh? I read about the swore statements
| during the depositions, and all the mainstream media news,
| but for some reason HN had radio silence.
|
| Is there something I missed that shows it's all
| shenanigans?
| emptyfile wrote:
| [dead]
| golol wrote:
| 100% chance the guy is just lieing for attention or
| because he is delusional. He said that UFOs could be
| coming from extra dimensions. He might as well say that
| the UFOs are coming from atlantis or the second circle of
| hell. It's just horseshit, plain as.
| yreg wrote:
| > UFOs could be coming from extra dimensions
|
| I somehow find this perhaps more believable than the
| alternatives of (1) civs out there having FTL and not
| colonizing the Galaxy to the degree that we would detect
| it or (2) them coming here at sublight speeds to do the
| described UFO things.
| golol wrote:
| I think the sad reality is that indeed (1) and (2) are
| extremely unlikely and that doesn't mean that extra
| dimensions is more likely. Extra dimensions is just even
| less likely.
| xorbax wrote:
| They (1) claim not to know what the craft are, which
| somebody told him contained (2) nonhuman biological
| whatever
|
| It could be a Chinese drone with rat-cell-on-a-chip
| inside it
|
| The guy's testimony was that somebody told him stuff and
| it seemed scary. Congress made a dog and pony show that a
| significant chunk of people attended.
|
| Parse the details, not the overarching fantasy.
|
| The government admitted to doing this in the 70s-90s to
| keep not-so-strange technology hidden behind The Strange.
| Trim with Occam.
|
| The ticTac videos aren't interesting if you look at the
| limitations of perspective and remember that Air Force
| pilots aren't supreme authorities for objectively
| assessing parallax and assigning airspeed to all moving
| objects while flying a fucking cracker attached to a
| rocket.
| tanseydavid wrote:
| >> and remember that Air Force pilots aren't supreme
| authorities for objectively assessing parallax and
| assigning airspeed to all moving objects while flying a
| fucking cracker attached to a rocket.
|
| They don't need to be "supreme authorities" on anything
| -- they have insane technology acting as their eyes and
| as their objective measuring and tracking systems.
| mannerheim wrote:
| The technology itself in the 'Go Fast' video shows the
| object isn't moving fast. The distance from the object
| and the direction of the camera are available in the
| video, and using this you can calculate the altitude and
| speed of the object in question.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLyEO0jNt6M
| postalrat wrote:
| You can calculate it to go many speeds depending on what
| assumptions are made. Just because mick west shows
| something is possible doesn't prove what's in the video.
| mannerheim wrote:
| 1) There's a range of speeds that are possible depending
| on what you assume the turning angle of the jet was. That
| range doesn't go anywhere close to the speed of sound.
|
| 2) The burden of proof is on those who make an
| extraordinary claim. There is a perfectly mundane
| explanation of the cause of apparently fast-moving object
| which is supported by available evidence. Even if that
| depends on some assumptions, you would have to
| demonstrate those assumptions to be false before a less
| likely alternative, i.e., that it was an extraterrestrial
| spacecraft, should be adopted.
| postalrat wrote:
| A perfectly mundane explanation isn't proof. There isn't
| enough evidence in this case to prove it one way or
| another. That should be acceptable but for many people it
| isn't.
| mannerheim wrote:
| When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not unicorns.
| postalrat wrote:
| Unless you can't see the horses. Then think horse
| spirits.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| In that situation, though,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot applies,
| as we can't _prove_ the negative.
| postalrat wrote:
| You are making the assertions here. You claim to know the
| speed of the object, the distance to it, the size, etc
| etc.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| No, the assertion being made is that there are mundane
| possibilities for each of those values that have not been
| ruled out by the data/video we have.
|
| To make the extraordinary claim more plausible, you have
| to _rule out_ the more mundane possibilities. _Prove_ it
| 's doing something unusual. Until then, "we can't prove
| it either way" doesn't mean there's a 50/50 chance.
| TuringTourist wrote:
| Sworn statements with no evidence don't merit much
| scrutiny. Especially when it comes to extraordinary
| claims.
| zarzavat wrote:
| Pics or it didn't happen. After years of claimed room
| temp superconductors people believed _this_ one because
| it had a video of a floating rock. Aliens are an even
| more extraordinary claim, I'm going to need multiple
| close up videos before I even start to care.
| oneshtein wrote:
| You can find many nice pictures of aliens on
| StableDiffusion channel on Reddit. You can also ask for
| video.
| qwertox wrote:
| "A friend of a friend told me, I swear".
| ewoodrich wrote:
| People say a lot of things in sworn testimony to
| Congress. It's a data point but not a particularly strong
| one.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| In this specific case, they were also pretty squirrely on
| the details.
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/are-5-memorable
| -mo...
|
| > Asked by Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., how such a
| program is funded, Grusch claimed that the effort is
| "above congressional oversight" and bankrolled by a
| "misappropriation of funds."
|
| > "Does that mean that there is money in the budget that
| is set to go to a program but it doesn't and it goes to
| something else?," Moskowitz asked.
|
| > "Yes. I have specific knowledge of that," Grusch said,
| though he did not provide more details, claiming the
| information remains classified.
|
| The chances of "we have aliens" being unclassified, but
| the exact _details_ being classified... is fairly slim.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| Been following the topic for many years.
|
| TLDR is, we need to wait and see for real evidence to be
| revealed. It may well be all true.
| seydor wrote:
| Therefore proved that credulity is a conserved quantity, and HN
| is now searching for the underlying symmetry
| keepamovin wrote:
| Lol thank you. That's hilarious.
|
| Also, I think it kind of sucks that all that UFO reverse
| engineering didn't yield a high temperature superconductor
| before this... but I guess what can you expect when you
| sequester away all your materials, silo your research and in
| effect keep your neural network of nodes (as scientists) really
| small.
|
| This open shit, as flawed and maybe annoying as it is to some
| people, I think it's a much better model of science. It'd be
| great to see some UFO/UFO tech breakthroughs happen like this
| too.
| mjan22640 wrote:
| The object in the IR Tic-Tac video is colder than the
| environment. High current supraconductivity will perhaps
| always require a low temperature.
| JMill wrote:
| Perhaps, but the reverse engineering efforts you mention may
| have already led to incredible breakthroughs over the past
| few decades. Lasers, integrated circuits, Kevlar, fiber
| optics, and more technologies were said to have been seeded
| among the research community based on recovered UAP
| components. This is based on Army Colonel Philip Corso's
| account in his memoir, "The Day After Roswell". [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After_Roswell
| keepamovin wrote:
| I know that. I used to believe that too. I really wanted to
| believe all the SSP stuff (Corey Goode, David Wilcock, et
| al).
|
| However, my view is now that all of the talk over advanced
| tech has actually been a propaganda/influence/information-
| warfare campaign to:
|
| 1) assert that gov/corp is in control when it's in fact
| not; pretend it's not at all challenged by superior
| species, not at all ignorant of 1000s-of-years-more-
| advanced-tech
|
| 2) cover up the ignorance, powerlessness and failure to
| make progress on RE crash materials, an embarrassing secret
| that seriously dents their mandate to rule
|
| 3) provide cover for the cover-up to continue in secret,
| trying to buy themselves "just a bit more time", "maybe the
| next crash is the one we'll finally crack it"
|
| It's much easier to engineer a narrative (something the US
| is absolutely world-class fantastic at), than it is to
| engineer understanding and tech from advanced civilizations
| possibly millions of years advanced from us, while
| operating in oppressive secrecy.
|
| This is not an attack on the US, they're just the most
| prominent. All countries have failed with this broken,
| deceptive, but understandably flawed and human strategy.
|
| It's a controversial view because it flies in the face of
| decades of this influence campaign.
|
| In short I believe that all "military insiders" coming
| forward to say they saw military successfully using/making
| UFO tech are liars part of this campaign. That includes,
| especially, Greer.^1
|
| I think the current push is much more truthful--so far. It
| was said a couple times by Grusch and others that we may
| not have made progress. And suggested that the push is
| designed to get it out into the open where people can study
| it and make progress.
|
| I don't think that noble and sensible push will win
| however. Folks inside the coverup will likely see this as
| just another "pressure release valve" we need to satisfy
| the public enough, let them work off some steam, then we
| can either: A) undermine it and discourage them from
| pursuing in future; or, B) we can let it all go away, and
| in the background scare lawmakers in the same way we've
| done for decades (show some evidence of something that
| frightens them, or is a national security threat, or
| personally intimidate them) and they'll do whatever we say.
|
| One reason I have for believing this current push will lose
| is because the main bobbleheads in charge of getting it
| out: Knapp, Coulthart, Corbell and Zabel are changing their
| tune and now making noises in support of continued coverup.
| In ^0 and in a recent video by Pope:
|
| - Nick Pope: folks aren't ready
|
| - Zabel: fuck disclosure, just need confirmation
|
| - Corbell: confirmation has already happened
|
| - Ross & Knapp: secrets must be kept
|
| I sure as hell hope not, but when you look at who we're up
| against: the secretkeepers have been doing this for nearly
| a century, and they've always won, and they believe they're
| right. To them this is probably a storm in a teacup, and it
| will take more than some grandstanding (good, but
| ultimately weak) politicians, and a bit of skeptical public
| interest, to blow the lid off.
|
| I think if people want information they should try to
| contact ET themselves and figure it out for themselves. You
| can't count on the corporation to come through for you, and
| the government is captured by the corporation. That much is
| clear.
|
| Treating gov/corp as a trusted intermediary/priest class
| who have access to "divine knowledge", and then desperately
| waiting for them like a "good dog" for treats, is just
| reinforcing the power dynamic of gov/corp control over
| citizen-subjects that itself is challenged by the awareness
| of ETs; and begging for such treats from such actors, when
| all they've done in the past is lied to and abused the
| public in this way, is a false hope and a flawed strategy.
|
| I think the true way to fuck with the secrecy system is to
| cut out the middleman, rather than hoping a continuously-
| proving-itself-to-not-give-a-shit-about-the-public system
| is going to become benevolent and "evolve itself".
|
| For insiders, it probably all makes perfect sense, and
| seems completely necessary and ethical. They have been and,
| until the technology's developed, will remain in, a
| constant state of war-time clandestine secrecy, with spies
| and traitors to that being executed essentially, and
| sophisticated counterintelligence operations continuously
| ongoing.
|
| The war is over the most and only significant asymmetric
| advantage ever discovered by humanity. Successful
| acquisition and deployability would mean instant world
| domination, or so it's assumed. Compromise of this goal is,
| understandably to insiders, inconceivable and impossible.
| They are convinced that "losing" will mean the end of the
| world.
|
| If I've been able to convince you of this, even a fraction,
| imagine how easy it is for insiders to convince themselves
| of this everyday. And imagine people that sure, that
| convinced they're right, ever going against anything they
| know, and revealing it? Not going to happen. The more we
| push, the harder they'll hold on and resist, sure of their
| goal. Like a dog a big stick.
|
| For outsiders, it makes no sense at all. Essentially, to
| regular people today, these folks are stuck in a WWII
| mindset. Talking to them with their obsessive
| preoccupations with secrecy and war, would be comical and
| impossible for regular people to understand. Maybe they're
| right. Or maybe we are. No one will ever know, as long as
| the wall between both sides remains in place.
|
| As long as this cover-up exists, the only thing we'll get
| is leaks and deliberate counterintelligence. I think Grusch
| is the former, and perhaps, he was merely the recipient of
| the latter. Who knows.
|
| The saddest part for me is witnessing the degradation of
| American democracy, where the government is held hostage by
| a select group while simultaneously blamed for the secrecy,
| forming a perfect smoke screen. In this war, our
| governments are merely puppets, used as a shield by these
| clandestine groups, and the people, consequently, are left
| powerless. This silent surrender to covert entities
| significantly diminishes the credibility of our rulers.
|
| 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2xSFMkmWg4
|
| 1: A difficulty is a lot of what they say is true, mixed in
| with the lies that we have made any progress on
| understanding or re-creating, alien UFO technology at all.
| When the reality is we have no progress understanding or
| re-creating it at all. So contrary to what all these people
| say, we have no anti gravity, no advance energy or
| propulsion, we have no advanced medicine or med beds.
| However, the truth about consciousness assisted technology
| and telepathic contact and inter/extra dimensionality, and
| the existence of illegal beyond-black unacknowledged
| special access programs, and so on is mixed in with his
| lies. That mix is classic disinfo I guess.
| mjan22640 wrote:
| Regarding ET specifically, it could be a species from
| Earth that became intelligent before humans did, it does
| not need to be extraterestrial. The assumption that we
| have good knowledge of Earth is incorrect, especially the
| deep ocean.
| keepamovin wrote:
| Agree, it could. It would make sense if they lived in the
| ocean or underground, as the surface has many
| instabilities (weather, tectonics, solar radiation,
| impacts ~~ not to mention crazy upright apes).
|
| Interdimensional aspect could be Earth from an alternate
| timeline, such as where the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg)
| extinction event did not occur, and reptilians not
| mammals evolved into an upright "humanoid" species that
| developed civilization millions of years ago. These
| interdimensional reptilian humanoids (from an Earth
| literally "overlaid" on our world) could be in a war with
| our timeline/dimension for some interdimensionally-scarce
| resource, and perhaps they are what religions call
| "demons" and perhaps their version of Earth is, to us as
| co-combatants in this interdimensional war, what is
| known, because of our ignorance and for want of better
| understanding, as "hell".
|
| Perhaps, sometimes when someone sees an "alien" or a
| "UFO" or a "ghost" they are just lucking into a naturally
| occurring transient random portal between dimensions, and
| when those things suddenly "vanish" it just means that
| portal closed/the conditions that gave rise to it
| subsided.
|
| "They" could also be refugee species, advanced
| civilizations that came to Earth millions to hundreds of
| millions of years ago (perhaps multiple races/waves over
| many millions of years) and temporarily resided here
| after some cataclysm or disaster beset their
| civilization, before moving on. Some stragglers may
| maintain outposts on Earth for whatever reason.
|
| They could also be multiple different groups, or what is
| made to look like multiple different groups, by a single
| giant sentience, in order to confuse us, as it draws it
| plans against us, aiming to turns us all into puppet
| bodies for its individuated vectored-in experience, in a
| perversion-by-demiurge of the pattern of the "one
| infinite creator" having an individual human experience
| through all of us. It's conceivable that a sentence with
| enough power would want to emulate that, and be capable
| of slowly genetically engineering us toward tuning into
| its frequency, rather than that of our spiritual soul's,
| essentially making its domain a giant SimCity and all of
| us its grotesque avatars, running on automatic when not
| inhabited by its consciousness.
|
| Or perhaps our entire universe, is actually a 30 light-
| year wide sphere, with the remaining galaxies beyond that
| projected from the "real world" onto its surface,
| created, specifically by a universal cosmic civilization
| that spans the entire future (to us) universe, in real
| time (200 billion years advanced from where we think we
| are), in order to re-create a significant period from
| history. What if we are the conscious inhabitants of a
| historical re-creation, a diorama, if you will. A kind of
| grotesque and cruel, Westworld type of universe, which,
| tho not a simulation, is artificial, and preserved only
| as a sort of tourist attraction, and for historical study
| and other purposes as befit a universal cosmic
| civilization that developed from, among many other such
| worlds, us, from 200 billion years in the past. And what
| if some of the UFOs and non humans we encounter are
| simply the "parks and recreation" staff, and maintenance
| workers in this vast historical recreation.
| zargon wrote:
| If those were novels I might read some of them.
| distortionfield wrote:
| I've seen several tweets implying the gubberment is rushing
| out RTAPS to "cover up" the alien stuff
| keepamovin wrote:
| What is RTAPS? I tried searching but got a bunch of
| conflicting acronyms!
| pkaye wrote:
| Maybe some related to a NASA project?
|
| https://sierralobo.com/portfolio-item/rtaps2/
| distortionfield wrote:
| Sorry, room temperature ambient pressure superconductors.
| keepamovin wrote:
| That's a cool theory, I think that thought (that this
| wasn't a coincidental discovery) crossed my mind too, but
| I didn't pursue it. Interesting that you've seen
| rumblings of this! It could very well be true. Funny that
| it comes from Korea, although according to Coulthart
| that's the location a giant structure was built around an
| immovable alien artefact -- that could be true, too! But
| in that case let's see some proof! :)
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| They rushed it out by... publishing a paper in a korean
| journal two decades ago?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| And having it verified by a couple of Chinese labs.
|
| Overall, that's not a common thing for the US government
| to do. It must be hiding something very important. /s
| xeonmc wrote:
| Well "aliens" can be interpreted in different ways...
| sagarpatil wrote:
| Guilty. I'm obsessed with LLM and LK-99. And in the past, was
| attracted crypto and NFT(which was a bubble)
| lm28469 wrote:
| It's one more brick in the hype cycle wall next month it'll be
| something
|
| Panem et circenses
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| And together, these two phenomena have just sucked all the
| energy out of the crypto excitation mode.
| dylan604 wrote:
| You think all of the news about crypto fraud might have a
| chilling effect on the excitation?
| dogcomplex wrote:
| lol same as it ever was
| dylan604 wrote:
| not really. before, fraud claims were from the non-
| believers. now, the fraud claims are from the SEC and
| other government agencies. one can be swatted away with
| clever tweets, er, xes (what are tweets called now?), the
| other sees people going to jail.
| bratbag wrote:
| Tweets are now Xcretions.
| raducu wrote:
| I've been completely out of the loop, but please tell me
| it's USDT?
| dogcomplex wrote:
| still plenty of frauds either way, just bigger scale.
|
| Would be nice if they all get locked up, and/or
| decentralized regulation/vetting networks arise
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Nope.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Web 3.0 was so exciting with btc at 64k
| drak0n1c wrote:
| If thanks to those technologies new hyper-efficient compute
| and network hardware becomes the norm, and there is no
| meaningful difference between decentralized hosting and
| centralized hosting of services/apps/games, crypto will
| likely see renewed interest.
|
| People are still unhappy with the decisions of single IP
| owners controlling the platforms and games they use on a
| daily basis. Decentralized ledger technology, whether
| blockchain or not, offers an alternative.
| robocat wrote:
| The credulity exclusion principle (philosophistimicated)
| dekhn wrote:
| the singularity isn't going to implement itself, you know.
| cantrevealname wrote:
| The next breakthrough we need is with fusion technology. With
| unlimited fusion energy, room temperature superconductivity,
| and (soon) artificial general intelligence, the singularity
| won't be long off.
| Turskarama wrote:
| Careful with this logic, the same thing could have (and
| pretty much was) said 50 years ago about fission and
| microchips.
| boppo1 wrote:
| What fusion breakthrough is needed that isn't
| superconductors?
| IX-103 wrote:
| Computational electrodynamics.
|
| We need to design better geometries for reactors so that
| we can channel the plasma flow to better improve
| containment while quickly removing wastes from the highly
| compressed energetic region where fusion mostly occurs.
| If we could do that, then that mostly solves the issues
| from reactor degradation and significantly improves
| efficiency.
|
| The trouble is that at such high energy levels the plasma
| flow is relatively chaotic so high fidelity models are
| required to predict the behavior accurately.
| Gud wrote:
| Is this really a requirement, or a nice to have kind of
| thing? Commonwealth Fusion Systems are using a pretty
| basic design and seem pretty confident it will work
| cthalupa wrote:
| It's one of the biggest ones.
|
| My understanding is that there are still some others that
| need to be figured out, like "The physical structure
| holding the thing getting the everloving shit bombarded
| out of it by high energy neutrons and causing it to
| degrade and fail over time"
| AS04 wrote:
| Fusion would be massively boosted by having room-
| temperature superconductivity anyways.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, if there is a breakthrough that puts us closer to
| fusion, it's room-temperature superconductors.
| dekhn wrote:
| Yes, a combination of fusion, superconductivity, and AGI
| would indeed be transformative. It's hard to anticipate
| what the results would look like.
|
| Good reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale then follow
| it up with a bit of 1993,
| https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html and
| https://web.pa.msu.edu/people/yang/RFeynman_plentySpace.pdf
|
| (oh, huh, I just noticed that There's Plenty of Room at the
| Bottom starts with a reference to the discovery of
| superconduction)
| wredue wrote:
| We're nowhere near AGI dude, even with several
| breakthroughs.
|
| AI today is a glorified search algorithm.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| That doesn't mesh with the daily insights I gain from
| asking GPT-4 novel questions and receiving answers that
| integrate a much wider knowledge corpus that I have in my
| head.
|
| You can argue all language is a form of search, but that
| is missing completely what transformer models are
| bringing to the table, and not just within language.
| robocat wrote:
| Injecting random noise into your brain and finding
| intelligent connections says you are smart.
|
| Your comment says nothing about whether we are "near
| AGI", only that we find images within Rorschach blobs (as
| a metaphor for GPT4 generated text).
| soulofmischief wrote:
| The context of my comment should make it clear that I am
| responding to this
|
| > AI today is a glorified search algorithm.
|
| and not the comment about AGI, given as that is a
| pedantic argument I have no wish engaging in.
|
| > only that we find images within Rorschach blobs
|
| I'm sorry, I'm not sure you understand what GPT-4 offers.
| Things like generating novel code to solve a novel
| problem are not finding "images within Rorschach blobs".
| I think you should sit down with the technology and
| explore with a more open mind.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I hate to break it to you, but your brain is also just a
| glorified search engine.
| catchnear4321 wrote:
| not with that attitude it isn't
| [deleted]
| samhuk wrote:
| I have to unfortunately agree with the sibling comment
| (although it was a little too verbose for its point).
|
| If, to you, the most interesting thing about LK99 and the
| developments thereof is tweets and internet forum drama about
| it, then that speaks more about you than anything to do with
| anything else.
|
| If you don't have anything to add to the conversation, then
| just don't add?
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| how about a 3rd group that is skeptical but not angry ? :) Am I
| bad that I'm waiting on oak ridge/los
| alamos/NASA/ONL/university of texas at austin to repro?
| carabiner wrote:
| More DFT? Haven't we concluded that has little predictive power?
| chc4 wrote:
| More people saying it sounds feasibly like it could be a
| superconductor is great, but agreed -
| https://nitter.net/MichaelSFuhrer/status/1686267690770739200
| and similar threads by actual experts in the field have
| outlined that DFT studies ignore a lot of variables that need
| to line up for superconductivity, in harsh contrast to techbros
| on Twitter claiming they're proof of the next thousand year
| golden era.
| carabiner wrote:
| Yeah the techbros have been the worst. Coffee guy went from
| saying the first DFT paper should deserve a Nobel to, "it's
| not a strong signal of anything" in 12 hours. WTF. All the
| actual scientists have been rock steady at, "it is probably
| not going to replicate," especially CMTC.
|
| Techbro speculation on physics should be considered harmful.
| cthalupa wrote:
| >All the actual scientists have been rock steady at, "it is
| probably not going to replicate," especially CMTC.
|
| Sinead Griffin isn't an actual scientist?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin%C3%A9ad_Griffin
|
| Plenty of real scientists are excited by the DFT results
| while cautioning they are merely supporting evidence and
| not conclusive evidence.
| xorbax wrote:
| If DFT agrees with reality, it's fine
|
| If it produces unphysical nonsense, you can always say
| "You should have considered _xyz_! "
|
| Computational chemistry inherently cannot consider
| everything we understand about chemistry or physics or
| consider beyond certain scales, so its accuracy and
| precision are limited. You have to constrain the space
| properly, which makes people a little dismissive.
| Zpalmtree wrote:
| > tech bro speculation on physics should be considered
| harmful
|
| why?
| carabiner wrote:
| Unfounded hype is bad and they're usually low-key trying
| to gain attention for their failing startups.
| peyton wrote:
| Some of the tech bros are actually into technology
| though.
| objektif wrote:
| CMTC comes of as a whiny little POS tbh. They have the
| exact opposite of the attitude I would have expected from a
| scientist. In their first thread regarding this topic they
| were almost flat out belittling the og authors. WTF.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Because CMTC has high theory standards and the authors,
| to put it charitably, didn't
| objektif wrote:
| This is the one from the all infamous University of
| Maryland correct? lol.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| They may have been throwing a bit of shade around lately
| but they are by and large reputable scientists barring
| whatever SDS's past MA announcement involvement was. It's
| more than just him there.
| objektif wrote:
| I do not (almost everyone else too) associate "reputable
| scientist" with University of Maryland. So they should
| show a bit of humility.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Show me where on the doll they touched you.
| objektif wrote:
| Hey no need to get sensitive about it. I am seriously
| saying University of Maryland (chuckle) is just not
| enough for bragging rights. Do not worry may he when you
| grow up you will end up in an ivy.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I don't have anything to do with them and I went to
| Caltech.
| semajian wrote:
| Thanks for linking someone who knows what he's talking about,
| very painful to see these DFT papers overhyped as some kind
| of proof... It proves almost nothing
| rtpg wrote:
| What does DFT prove beyond the pedantic "it proves what it
| proves"? Or rather, does it not heavily lean towards some
| reality?
| tnecniv wrote:
| I'd be interested in seeing a source on that. My understanding
| was that it was a powerful and popular computational tool. The
| theory is approximate but approximate theories can still be
| quite useful if the approximation is a good one.
| semajian wrote:
| It's basically an open secret, no one really believes DFT has
| much predictive power in strongly correlated systems (where
| relevant electrons cannot be treated as independent). It's
| not useless, but DFT calculations require many arbitrary
| choices and are hardly "first principles" in a meaningful
| way.
| opticfluorine wrote:
| The LBNL DFT paper isn't claiming to have modeled the
| strong correlations. Rather, they observe a specific
| feature of the band structure (flat bands crossing the
| Fermi level formed from d-orbitals) that have also appeared
| in DFT calculations of other high-temp superconductors and
| are considered a signature of those materials. In the other
| high-Tc materials, the calculations are consistent with
| experiment, and so the unexpected appearance of these bands
| in the reported crystal structure is seen as a signal of
| "hey, if this turns out to be real, we can explain it with
| current physics." That's something that previous fraudulent
| claims of room temperature ambient pressure superconductors
| (University of Rochester group) couldn't do.
|
| The other interesting conclusion of the LBNL paper is that
| the low-energy physics of the electronic structure can be
| effectively modeled by a two-level effective Hamiltonian.
| This is a common pathway to bridging the gap between DFT
| calculations and theoretical understanding of strong
| correlations.
|
| None of the serious scientists are saying "hey, look, DFT
| predicted it so it's true." Rather, it doesn't rule it out,
| and it suggests that it could be understood with our
| current physics. That's significant in itself.
| tnecniv wrote:
| From my understanding of DFT that makes sense but it seems
| like in that case you are using the wrong tool. Approximate
| theories are good when the approximations are good. If your
| phenomena is strongly correlated, throwing out those
| correlations is bad.
|
| I have no idea if the use of DFT here is appropriate or
| not.
| adastra22 wrote:
| DFT is generally good for well characterized phenomenon.
| Superconductivity is a bit of an edge case, really dependent
| on quantum effects that you need ab-initio quantum mechanics
| simulations to predict.
| appplication wrote:
| This ongoing research saga pretty much the most excited I've been
| about anything since before Covid. It feels like the science
| equivalent of watching your favorite sports team on an epic rise
| towards winning a world championship.
|
| Even if this turns out to flop, I hope history remembers the
| original authors favorably. They really did find something that
| by all accounts could plausibly be a room temp superconductor.
| And of course this seems to have turned over quite a stone.
| Peripheral research as a result of this will likely continue for
| years, even if superconductivity is disproven.
| vesinisa wrote:
| Just curious, how did you find Covid "exciting"? Making lots of
| money on the bear market?
| pjc50 wrote:
| mRNA vaccines are a huge discovery, not quite as powerful as
| room temperature superconductors but still up there in terms
| of impact on humanity. And encountered a very different kind
| of skepticism while ultimately turning out to be not only
| real but widely deployed with great speed.
| pests wrote:
| Haven't mRNA vaccines been in development for over a decade
| though?
| jlokier wrote:
| LK-99 has been in development for longer, 24 years, if
| you believe a quote copied in many current articles and
| below. You may have heard before, "it takes years of work
| to become an overnight success..."
|
| _> Lee & Kim had been working on the material on and
| off since Kim was in graduate school in 1999 (LK-99
| geddit?). Lee never makes tenure and is still stuck as an
| adjunct professor 19 years later. Kim goes off to work in
| battery materials for a decade plus. 2018 - they get
| funding from industry for another go at it._
| jacquesm wrote:
| Assuming it's all true what I like about their story is
| that they've basically been doing a guided brute force of
| candidates rather than to just sit around and theorize
| they got their hands dirty in a way that really impresses
| me.
| appplication wrote:
| Perhaps poorly worded, I meant since _before_. During Covid I
| lost a lot of zest for life, felt like I went to sleep in my
| 20s and woke up an old man.
| tnecniv wrote:
| I identify with that. It didn't help that around the end of
| Covid I went through a terrible break up and all my grad
| school friends finished their degrees and moved while I was
| still working on mine.
|
| It felt like I went to the bathroom at a party and came
| back to an empty room and I had to stay and clean up. I
| knew I'd be done in a year or two, so it felt weird to try
| and find a new social group when I was on short time, but
| boy was the end of my PhD a slog in part due to feeling
| disconnected socially.
| cooper_ganglia wrote:
| I can relate to both comments. Covid really sapped the
| life out of me. Some relationships broke down during
| isolation, I lost friends, my fiancee left, I felt stuck
| in a job that I hated... The research into LLMs and
| diffusion models started to wake me up, but this
| superconductor research has, for some reason, really
| awoken something in me. I feel excited about the future-
| _my future!_ - for the first time in a while. My zest for
| life is back in full force, I feel like myself again, and
| I've been very excitedly telling everyone I know!
| orangepurple wrote:
| You need to continue down this path and find something
| meaningful to you that you had a hand in making directly,
| not merely by association. It is related to the power
| process described in paragraphs 33-37 on
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
| srv/national/longterm/unab...
| appplication wrote:
| That's a tough run. Even if it's a silly reason, any
| excuse to be whimsically excited about life is a good
| one.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Hang in there, that's how life is, sometimes you're up,
| sometimes you're down but there will almost always be
| something interesting waiting for you in the future that
| makes you forget the miserable time that came before.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| I felt the same, but I also feel like it was the perfect
| (least bad) time in my life for it to happen. I can't
| imagine being in the middle of High School or University
| during Covid - those kids got the absolute worst end of the
| deal. I was also recently single, and counted my days
| feeling grateful I was not living with my ex when the
| pandemic hit.
| TuringTourist wrote:
| Once in a lifetime events tend to be "Exciting" to people,
| watching history unfold so to speak. The excitement comes
| from the awareness of this fact, and the fact that it might
| never be seen again.
| aqme28 wrote:
| "May you live in interesting times."
| jdiff wrote:
| He didn't say "since COVID" but "since before COVID." COVID
| isn't the exciting event, it's an arbitrary landmark.
| vesinisa wrote:
| OP edited their wording after my inquiry to add the word
| "before". Although I am sorry for the misunderstanding, it
| seems to have generated some interesting conversation.
| groby_b wrote:
| Emotionally, it was horrible. Societally, it was depressing
| to see that we'll never be able to tackle any true large
| problems, we can't even agree on wearing a piece of paper to
| protect fellow humans.
|
| But scientifically? Yeah, I'll go with "exciting". The field
| seemed to move at a tremendous speed, or at least that's how
| it looked to me as an outsider.
|
| Sequencing within less than a week, extremely rapid movement
| on the mRNA front (and really, the whole vaccination field -
| 200 candidates in 9 months), revamped understanding of
| aerosol transmission, leaps in rapid modelling, tremendous
| progress in terms of test development, growth in
| international collaboration, progress in the (public)
| understanding of chronic diseases, scaling up of wastewater
| monitoring, ...
|
| Definitely exciting.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _But scientifically? Yeah, I 'll go with "exciting". The
| field seemed to move at a tremendous speed, or at least
| that's how it looked to me as an outsider._
|
| The practical science may have been exciting. Unfortunately
| "The Science" has been forever tainted thanks to secrets,
| tight-lips, mis-direction and "just trust us".
|
| I think Covid was a net-negative for science.
| groby_b wrote:
| You're referring to politics. The science was pretty
| clear the entire time.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Science served us well enough that we're all still
| commenting here. It's the prevention paradox all over
| again, if science had not done its work you'd be in a
| much better position to appreciate the difference that it
| - and healthcare - made but then you might not have made
| it at all... science definitely did not let us down.
|
| Who did let us down: the people that were making things
| worse from day #1 by stirring the pot against science.
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| > Who did let us down: the people that were making things
| worse from day #1 by stirring the pot against science.
|
| What is the solution to this?
|
| The framing seems way too simplistic to ever be useful.
| It makes it seem as though there was just the Good side
| that had all the answers all along, and the Bad side who
| just needed to do what the Good side said.
|
| In reality, it all came down to "who do you trust to both
| have your best interests at heart and to also be
| competent enough to achieve those best interests".
|
| Turns out those aren't easy questions, and that people
| are naturally going to arrive at different answers for
| all sorts of reasons, and I think very few of them look
| like "boo science".
| jacquesm wrote:
| There is no solution to this other than massive
| investment in education. And that isn't going to happen
| in our current world.
| fragmede wrote:
| Country? Yes. World? I'm not so sure.
| groby_b wrote:
| "It makes it seem as though there was just the Good side
| that had all the answers all along"
|
| That, right there, is where so many people went wrong and
| what was blatantly exploited by grifters up and down the
| chain. The side of science didn't "have answers all
| along", but it was willing to learn and change.
|
| And no, it wasn't "boo science". It was, to a large
| extent, political maneuvering using science as a
| convenient scape goat, because whenever science learned,
| it got turned into a "see, they don't know either". And,
| of course, with a large helping of grifters making money
| off the ensuing confusion.
|
| In reality, it came down to seeing who was willing to
| change their mind in the face of new evidence, and it was
| a pretty clear signal. (It was not noise free,
| absolutely, but it was not extremely hard to read, either
| - _if_ folks had a basic amount of scientific education.
| There 's your solution, too)
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| > The side of science didn't "have answers all along",
| but it was willing to learn and change.
|
| This is the framing that I disagree with. There is no
| "the side of science". There are only people making
| assertions.
|
| Some of those people were practicing the scientific
| method competently and in good faith, some of those
| people were doing nothing of the sort, and from here in
| the cheap seats we just had to do our best to decide who
| was who.
|
| Some people like to think everyone should have trusted
| who they themselves decided to trust. I think this is
| unreasonable, but also unsurprising.
| [deleted]
| IshKebab wrote:
| When lockdown first happened it was exciting. Nothing like
| that has happened in most people's lifetimes.
|
| Of course it for tedious very quickly, but I remember going
| to the park and people being told not to sit on benches by
| police on horseback. How is that not crazy and sort of
| exciting?
| dekhn wrote:
| Pons & Fleischman was exciting for about 3 days. Some folks
| kept looking for decades after.
| hliyan wrote:
| I felt like it lasted much longer. Of course, this was pre
| Internet days, so I read it in papers and watched on TV
| poopbutt7 wrote:
| Agreed- after the Pons & Fleischman debacle 34 years ago,
| it's pretty pathetic to watch people get excited about such
| obvious scams. They'll never learn.
| cthalupa wrote:
| CF wasn't something that was possible under our
| understanding of physics at the time. Room temp ambient
| pressure superconductors are perfectly possible under our
| understanding of physics.
|
| Comparing the two is silly.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Super conductors exist. Room temperature net out fusion
| does not exist, and may never exist, and there are no known
| pathways in physics that would lead to it. Super conductors
| do not require any new physics, they require a material
| that may or may not exist but given the steady progression
| in the temperature range over which superconductivity has
| been observed there is a good chance that it exists, we
| just haven't found it yet.
|
| Note that the 'room temperature' thing is a human
| requirement, and not one grounded in physics of
| conductivity per se, and that we started around 3 Kelvin
| (or -270 degrees Celsius)
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/superconductors-
| t...
|
| To 200K or -70 Celsius) degrees for the latest _confirmed_
| superconductor:
|
| https://physicsworld.com/a/hydrogen-sulphide-is-warmest-
| ever...
|
| In about 100 years. That is on average a two degree per
| year increase over that period. But the rate of improvement
| isn't linear and the closer you get to zero the bigger the
| market is and so the larger the amount of funding available
| to search for the bit that will close the gap.
|
| This is why we will likely have room temperature
| superconductors somewhere in the near future, assuming it
| doesn't already exist. Obviously there is no guarantee that
| anything that hasn't been discovered yet exists. But in
| this case, given the arbitrariness of the boundaries set
| and the fact that those are mostly dictated by chance
| conditions on planet Earth (if we were living on the dark
| side of the moon we'd already have room temperature
| superconductivity...).
| hcks wrote:
| This is sad man. You're getting excited at manufactured hype on
| twitter
| orangepurple wrote:
| Most people are powerless to do anything so they associate
| themselves with movements to feel as if they are part of
| something meaningful
| soVeryTired wrote:
| I think it's the videos of levitating samples that people are
| getting excited about. At this point it's either outright
| fraud (unlikely), an interesting materials science discovery
| that isn't superconductivity (most likely IMO), or
| superconductivity itself (still unlikely, but the balance of
| evidence is shifting).
|
| If it happens to be the latter, it's a huge scientific leap
| forward.
| Xeamek wrote:
| On the contrary.
|
| Should he rather be excited about hype manufactured by
| entertainment or sport companies? Cause that's much more
| common.
| aqme28 wrote:
| What makes this hype "manufactured"? I've been very hyped as
| well ever since I read the arxiv.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Well it isn't peer reviewed for one.
|
| I don't think people that are a little skeptical are being
| negative they are just being realistic. We've experienced
| things like this before and some of the hallmarks of the
| ones that let us down are there in this one.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathological_science
| gizmondo wrote:
| It has been peer reviewed - lots of scientists reviewed
| the paper, found various problems, some are trying to
| replicate it with varying success so far, some are
| looking for theoretical explanation. This is the essence
| of science, not sending it to some journal that just
| mails the article to the small subset of the same
| scientists and gather their replies.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
| lea900 wrote:
| [flagged]
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