[HN Gopher] LK-99 is an online sensation - but replication effor...
___________________________________________________________________
LK-99 is an online sensation - but replication efforts fall short
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 190 points
Date : 2023-08-04 16:02 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| golol wrote:
| Reads like a T-online article lol
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| The gestalt of LK-99 is ironic. It is both a sensation and
| (hopefully) an almost magical rock, and still "None of the
| studies provide direct evidence for any superconductivity in the
| material."
| ummonk wrote:
| This seems like a rather bad faith article. While there are
| certainly people overhyping LK-99 (and prediction markets seem to
| have a higher chance of success than one would expect), the
| general sentiment about the material I find online is that it's
| probably the cold fusion of our time. The hype is because of the
| potential groundbreaking results, and the fact that the material
| is unusual even if, as is most likely, it turns out not to be a
| room temperature superconductor.
|
| As for the videos, are the people posting these joke videos
| trying to imply that the videos we're seeing of partial
| levitation (including one put out by an actual Chinese lab) are
| fake? One can point out that the videos are likely merely
| evidence of really good diamagnetism without pretending they're
| hoaxes.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| LK-99, as a social phenomenon, is looking a lot like cold fusion
| with the added energy of social media.
| golol wrote:
| People are just having fun entertaining the very real possible
| and "believing". What's wrong with that? It is more interesting
| to just go ahead and say that they are 100% sure LK-99 is real
| whent here are no stakes. Having differentiated and uncertain
| opinions all the time gets boring.
| 2bitencryption wrote:
| What's even more interesting than the mysteries properties of
| LK-99 is the kind of response it's brought out. You even see it
| right here in HN.
|
| Have you ever seen a Youtube video about someone reviewing a
| Tesla or comparing it to another car? The comments are always
| full of hostile and vitriolic remarks by people who are
| _personally offended_ if the video suggests the cup holders on a
| Model 3 are less than perfection. For some reason, Tesla is
| surrounded by a cult of personality where it 's not just a car,
| it's a _lifestyle_.
|
| And bizarrely, something similar is happening with this funny
| floating rocks. Here we are, on HN, and people in this very
| thread are calling Nature ( _Nature!_ ) an "online sensational
| clickbait magazine" because they want to believe the hype that
| the rock has properties that they only learned about from
| Wikipedia a few days prior (and only understood 5% of it, at
| that)
|
| Is there reason to be excited? Hell yeah. Are all the different
| replication attempts super fascinating? Hell yeah. Could it be
| the real deal? It could!
|
| But this has become some weird spectator sport, where you're
| either a believer or a skeptic, and if you're on a different side
| than I am then _screw you_ , even if you are Nature.
| aydyn wrote:
| > For some reason, Tesla is surrounded by a cult of personality
| where it's not just a car, it's a lifestyle.
|
| You'd be remiss not to mention the much more virulent cult of
| anti-personality surrounding Tesla.
| Osmium wrote:
| > calling Nature (Nature!) an "online sensational clickbait
| magazine"
|
| Not far from the truth, talking as someone who is in the field.
| Unlike Science, which is published by AAAS, a non-profit,
| Nature is a for-profit publication. They have an incentive not
| to miss out on something huge so that they can retain their
| status as the place to go for big results, but this also means
| they have an incentive towards selecting more sensational
| research for publication. That doesn't mean that research
| published in Nature is bad--often it is excellent--and I'm sure
| their editorial staff sincerely try their best, but they often
| make quite bizarre editorial decisions (personal opinion).
|
| That said, Nature attracts far more scrutiny than other
| journals because of their ability to make and break careers, so
| many people feel resentment towards them as a result. Not all
| criticism of Nature is entirely fair.
|
| No comment on this particular story :)
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| > but they often make quite bizarre editorial decisions
| (personal opinion).
|
| Off-topic, but if this opinion you wrote wasn't yours, then
| who else's opinion were we to assume it would have been?
| alpineidyll3 wrote:
| ... I once had someone in publishing try to offer me nature
| acceptance in exchange for ... things. The outsized role of
| these journals in the scientific community when reviews could
| be done in the open is pretty messed up.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| Yeah, I was going to say. I've seen so many (usually
| legitimate) criticisms aimed at Nature dot com in the past
| year alone that I saw the domain immediately disregarded the
| possibility that this should affect my opinions one way or
| the other.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| >> calling Nature (Nature!) an "online sensational clickbait
| magazine"
|
| > Not far from the truth
|
| It's very far from the truth; nothing is perfect, but Nature
| isn't some SEO clickbait. This subthread shows that the
| reactionary takedowns of everything now even are taking down
| Nature, of course. They've already discredited much of
| science, and have a lot of blood on their hands (climate
| change and vaccines stand out).
| lyapunova wrote:
| I hate to say it, but I agree. Nature has outlived its
| "legit" branding by leaning too hard into the "product"
| realm. Most scientists don't want their fundamental work to
| be sold as a product unless it is a precursor to
| commercialization of their work. At that point, it becomes
| advertising rather than science.
|
| When I see Nature pubs, I tend to enjoy the aesthetics of the
| articles, but discount them a bit to account for the
| mainstream-ness.
| dmarchand90 wrote:
| The important thing to understand is that only the scientific
| publications in Nature matter. These articles are written by
| world-class scientists and are taken very seriously. In
| contrast, the journalism section is akin to any random
| newspaper. It is generally written by standard journalists
| and is intended for a mass audience.
| MPSimmons wrote:
| >It is generally written by standard journalists
|
| It may be, I don't know. This particular journalist has an
| undergraduate degree in Physics from Columbia -
| https://dangaristo.com/about/
|
| That's not exactly subject-matter expertise, but it's also
| not a standard journalist.
| ecshafer wrote:
| While an undergraduate degree in physics puts them above
| the average person, it's probably only slightly. The
| majority of undergraduate physics degrees do not touch on
| solid state physics or material sciences to this degree.
| It would be at best a single elective course. And even
| then in physics and the sciences the area of focus gets
| so specific I would be hesitant to trust even a graduate
| degree holder unless they went into that field.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Expertise aside I would argue that an undergraduate
| degree from a prestigious institution that pivoted to
| journalism is _worse_ in this era. They have been
| tokenized and given lots of unearned reputation from
| their credentials, which biases them to provide the
| rosiest narrative (which is what the science industrial
| complex wants), without the years of grinding work or
| cynicism from management of rocky rapids of fraud and
| overrepresenting work that at least a grad student had to
| deal with.
|
| That said, I actually believe lk-99 (let's be clear this
| is a belief, if strongly held) based on my personal
| experiences with scientific shenanigans.
| aydyn wrote:
| That should be the absolute bare minimum expertise for a
| journalist to report on a technical matter.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > intended for a mass audience
|
| Nature markets it to a mass audience? A mass audience reads
| Nature?
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Even if the hype over LK-99 comes to nothing it became
| evident to me several days ago that this research has
| likely changed scientific publishing permanently--and I'd
| almost bet on the fact if the research is confirmed.
|
| What made this a such a huge tech event with the world
| watching on was that the research was on a subject that has
| captured the imagination of both scientists and the lay
| public for many decades _and_ that it was posted on
| arxiv.org website which is open and copyright-free,
| similarly, we witnessed peer review processes also
| occurring out in the open and in public for all to see--and
| essentially in real time! Contrast this with the
| traditional tech journal process, _Nature, Science, IEEE
| Proceedings, The Lancet,_ etc. which takes months to
| publish, and is a closed process not to mention papers
| being the whim of editors who often reject them (and
| sometimes very significant ones at that).
|
| Irrespective of whatever outcome eventuates, the contrast
| between traditional, slow and now-very-expensive scientific
| publishing with that of this speedy, exciting, open and
| participatory model that's copyright-free will be obvious
| to everyone.
|
| Moreover, this is happening at a time when the traditional
| for-profit scientific publishing has come under enormous
| criticism with Elsevier and others milking the university
| and scientific establishments to breaking point and the
| rise of Sci-Hub as a countermeasure. Whilst academics have
| been aware of the problem for quite some time the general
| public has not. This research and how it played out on
| arxiv.org in just two weeks won't be forgotten easily.
|
| If I were a director of Elsevier and after witnessing
| what's happened in less than two weeks I'd be damn worried.
| jacquesm wrote:
| This puts Nature's position here as on display in TFA
| (they don't have to publish everything that is sent in)
| in a different light. There might be an element of sour
| grapes here, and if the research is validated then it
| will have a huge impact on them.
| dekhn wrote:
| This isn't "Nature's position". This is a freelance
| science writer's position, and they paid him for the
| article. Nature wouldn't even weigh in with a real
| editorial opinion at this point.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It is their name on the masthead. If they don't agree
| with it they shouldn't publish it. Doing this 'at arms
| length' allows them to have this under their banner while
| at the same time being able to say 'that wasn't us'.
| dekhn wrote:
| This is standard practice in journalism which is widely
| used.
|
| If you weren't so involved in the field, would you even
| care?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, I care. I've been a subscriber since the 80's,
| Nature, SA and the Lancet. I don't think any of them
| should pull a 'Ted-X'.
| dekhn wrote:
| I went through and reread the whole news article.
|
| There's nothing wrong with this article. I really don't
| see what you have to complain about. It's broadly
| factual, and roughly consistent with the mainstream
| opinion at this point: there is no smoking gun evidence
| of anything, and the noise being generated by social
| amateurs is making it hard to find the real signal from
| the small number of groups competent enough to make
| useful statements about this "discovery".
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, and it serves no purpose other than to get Nature in
| the position where they can hedge their bets based on
| rejecting the article earlier and publishing this now
| just in case it eventually does work out. It's content
| free from Nature's audience perspective, nobody reading
| it will think 'hey wow, this is news to me', if they've
| been at all interested. So it must serve some other
| purpose because Nature doesn't just publish anything. I
| was wondering earlier why they would publish it and I
| think it isn't too farfetched to see this as a deliberate
| strategy to protect their interests. It's going to be
| interesting what happens on both sides of the fork: what
| they will do if after say 3 months there still isn't any
| very clear replication and when there is. For both of
| those they have positioned themselves well.
|
| What irks me about it is that it's been all of a week and
| yet Nature is already deprecating it _because the
| replication efforts fall short_. It would seem to me to
| be a little bit early for that, what did they expect? And
| sure, we can argue over whether it was nature or the
| writer that is the root cause here but someone with
| editorial control at Nature must have felt it was good
| enough to include, even though it is just premature meta
| commentary, not science news.
| dekhn wrote:
| Nature doesn't need to hedge its position.
|
| The article doesn't deprecate LK-99. The article is about
| the hype surrounding the announcement and its replication
| results, mainly, but not exclusively by, amateurs in
| other fields (who seem to have shown that they can make
| samples that have unconventional properties, but not
| necessarily superconducting).
|
| It's worth reading about a previous social media science
| debacle, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-
| light_neutrino_ano... where the observations of neutrinos
| being faster than light was eventually debugged to some
| simple hardware errors and naive analysis.
|
| "After the initial report of apparent superluminal
| velocities of neutrinos, most physicists in the field
| were quietly skeptical of the results, but prepared to
| adopt a wait-and-see approach. Experimental experts were
| aware of the complexity and difficulty of the
| measurement, so an extra unrecognized measurement error
| was still a real possibility, despite the care taken by
| the OPERA team"
| jacquesm wrote:
| No, but they _also_ don 't need to try to catch some of
| the hype while pretending to be immune to that hype.
| Clearly they feel the need to put LK-99 in at least one
| article title even if there is no news. That's not their
| normal standard for articles, at least not as far as I'm
| aware.
|
| I'm aware of quite a few other scientific debacles, some
| involving outright fraud, data fabrication and sometimes
| true believers that even convinced themselves. What is
| interesting about the Ranga Diaz episode is that it was
| Nature that published it:
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2801-z
|
| So their stance right now is understandable but also a
| bit self serving.
| cubefox wrote:
| That's an article by the News division of Nature, not a
| research article. The latter is what Nature is famous for, not
| the former.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| _> people in this very thread are calling Nature (Nature!) an
| "online sensational clickbait magazine" because they want to
| believe the hype_
|
| This article is not in Nature the academic journal. This is an
| opinion published in the news section of nature.com the
| website. Two entirely unrelated things.
|
| (I don't have a horse in this race)
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| LK-99 sensationalism and especially online sensationalism is an
| excellent example of everything that's bad about rapid
| communication and the attention economy. A huge number of
| people suddenly feel a need to have a hot take opinion on
| cutting edge superconductor research, apparently including
| nature authors. There's a false sense of urgency around trying
| to understand a possible discovery that even if true, wouldn't
| impact anyone's life for many years, and will probably never be
| relevant to an actual decision they have to make.
|
| Things will pan out or they won't. What's the rush to form an
| opinion and hop on a hype bandwagon. I'm probably just a
| curmudgeon, but the whole thing seems to be more about social
| signaling than anything else.
|
| Maybe I find it so distasteful because I think the hype and
| jumping to conclusions is antithetical to real science and
| understanding.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| So in regular one on one in person conversation, you can show
| your "presence" by uttering a simple "mmhmm" or "yeah" or "I
| understand" when someone is telling you something above your
| expertise. Humans like to be heard even if it's just an
| utterance. There's nothing like this online though. Imagine
| if we allowed posts on hackernews where you just say "cool"
| or "mmhmm". It adds no value to the conversation. So rather
| than being quiet and being silent or adding no perceived
| value to the convo, we come up with misguided opinions
| because "at least someone needs to hear me" is a thought that
| goes through our minds.
|
| I mean heck, I could have not written this post.
| mepian wrote:
| I thought that's what the upvotes are for.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Upvotes are for what you consider interesting or added
| value.
| fardo wrote:
| That seems to be their theoretical use, much like the
| downvote is theoretically supposed to be their inverse.
|
| In practice though, it seems that the users of most
| online communities seem to treat them as an "agree or
| disagree" button, with dissenting opinions typically
| being either forced out of a thread or languishing due to
| the upvote-downvote tug of war generally suppressing a
| comment's rankings.
| abracadaniel wrote:
| This is a more articulate description of something I've
| been thinking of for a while. Tweets, and maybe just
| internet comments in general, are like a stream of
| consciousness momentary thought response. Rarely is it a
| fully formed opinion, but instead it's an instantaneous
| opinion that might have left as quickly as it came. Someone
| insults my cup holders, and I kind of like my car, the cup
| holders are fine, but for an instant I feel slighted. Then
| I see they have so many upvotes, and their wrong opinion is
| being spread. Now it's my duty to inform the world of the
| quality of these cup holders, and defend my honor. They
| can't just be wrong, they have to be completely wrong, so
| out comes the exaggerated response. And then, as quickly as
| it came on, it's forgotten, and I don't even notice the
| next time I use the cup holders that they are kinda shit.
| Retric wrote:
| That's common, but it's also an artifact of how few
| topics people are experts in.
|
| The chances of two people on HN happening to both be
| experts in superconductors or even condensed matter
| physics / automotive design / ... is higher than normal.
| But there's a rapid drop off in expertise so most people
| commenting don't really understand the specifics.
|
| So, rather than people arguing about the tradeoffs of cup
| holder placement and material choices etc it just
| devolves into "Ug like tribe! Things good! Back off!"
| jacquesm wrote:
| With Tesla it seems to revolve around who has Tesla
| stock, who drives one, who doesn't and who doesn't have
| Tesla stock and then finally there is your personal
| attitude towards Elon Musk. That gives you an eight way
| fight with every faction behaving utterly predictable. I
| suggest we enumerate the factions and add them to our
| bios that way we can at least discount that factor.
| [deleted]
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think this is a really good analogy for exploring my
| emotions on the topic.
|
| There are people who make utterances because they want to
| show they are paying attention, and there are people who
| make them because they cant stand not being heard. To me,
| the latter is more distatsefull than the former.
|
| I think it is gross that in the attention economy, the
| drive for existential validation is reduced to posting
| "cool" to be seen, and clicking an upvote feels like being
| part of a conversation. In some sense they are, but it just
| a very streched and hollow manifestation of human
| interaction and participation.
|
| My likely arrogant and possibly hyprocirtical conceit that
| I think what I post into the void is more interesting and
| substantial than "cool". Still, that doesnt change my
| feeling on the subject.
| j_maffe wrote:
| I don't know why but this comment sort of unveiled to me how
| much useless hype I had for this topic. Of course you're
| right, it's just so easy to indeed get this sense of urgency,
| even though it's not really a good use of time (even for
| entertainment).
| majani wrote:
| This is just people understandably getting excited about a
| huge discovery. What type of people would we be if such
| moments didn't get us going?
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| > wouldn't impact anyone's life for many years
|
| Might not impact it hardly at all.
| mpsprd wrote:
| Something exciting is happening, of course people want be
| informed as it evolves.
|
| A similar example are election nights. People already voted,
| the result is in the box, we could simply wait and announce
| the result.
|
| But seeing the numbers rise like an ongoing fight is going on
| makes for a more entertaining evening!
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think politics would be a lot better if people treated it
| less as a source of emotional engagement or as a spectator
| sport.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I'm for fun, excitement, and curiosity.
|
| What turns me off is that once the shallow well of real
| information depleted, how quickly people switch to
| speculation, Hype, and attention seeking
| jacquesm wrote:
| You essentially want people to stop being people. We are
| for want of a better term meme machines and we pass on
| information that we find interesting, gives us hope or
| makes us feel better and we avoid the opposite because it
| eventually makes us feel worse.
| j_maffe wrote:
| Yes but we can try to be selective about what we treat as
| a meme. People have that ability, although it is
| diminishing with the speed of communication these day.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That is a very interesting observation. I've always
| likened it to the diminishing _cost_ of communication but
| your insight may well be the better one.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| j_maffe took the words out of my mouth.
|
| I would also say that in addition to diminishing cost and
| discretion, there are changing incentives/rewards
| structures with online communication.
| jacquesm wrote:
| _Maybe_. I think the point is valid but in the
| traditional media there is plenty of ways in which the
| incentives and rewards lead to pathological behavior,
| especially with TV but also with some forms of print.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| It's sad that the current assumption is that we have no
| power to change ourselves or our world. We're not
| machines, we are human beings, agents; we control what we
| do.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Collectively we have a lot of power, individually much
| less.
| zackees wrote:
| [flagged]
| moolcool wrote:
| > Things will pan out or they won't. What's the rush to form
| an opinion and hop on a hype bandwagon
|
| Because it's fun and exciting watching smart people from
| around the world collaborate/compete around an interesting
| and world-changing idea. It's cool and good that many people
| are invested and interested in science and technology.
| lamontcg wrote:
| The really smart people so far aren't barely saying
| anything about it.
|
| The people who have spent all their lives researching
| superconductors have yet to weigh in on this at all.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > The really smart people so far aren't barely saying
| anything about it.
|
| Publicly. But they are saying stuff and it isn't all
| negative but very, very carefully hedged and qualified.
| macinjosh wrote:
| OK, well the rest of us still have opinions and emotions and
| like to share them with other people, never mind your
| distaste. But thanks for sharing!
| kmac_ wrote:
| Sensationalism? No way, LK-99 will be part of the EmDrive! /s
| pickingdinner wrote:
| Nah, LK99 is still more interesting.
|
| There are always 3 sides. The 2 sides, plus the side making
| observations about the sides.
|
| Social media / internet environment just makes it so for
| everything. Over it.
| mpsprd wrote:
| Any pessimistic/cautious take on a subject bringing excitement
| and hope for the future is going to be criticized because
| people _want_ it to be true. This is just confirmation bias at
| play.
|
| Considering the hype, I actually find HN comments relatively
| cautious and patient, this is a pseudonymous internet forum
| after all.
| screye wrote:
| > calling Nature (Nature!) an "online sensational clickbait
| magazine"
|
| To be fair, Nature is considered a fairly 'sensational
| magazine' in the Computer Science world.
| valianteffort wrote:
| I think people are more annoyed than anything. No one really
| knows where this is going, signs are promising yet the number
| of obnoxious contrarians who are quick to dismiss the potential
| is high. They are far worse than people who really want to
| believe it's real.
| rvcdbn wrote:
| That's a super interesting point. I feel like it's getting at
| some deep personality trait around optimism/pessimism (or
| realism as the pessimists would say ;) so perhaps it's not
| surprising that it's so divisive.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| I think part of the cult-like fascination people have with LK99
| is the story behind it: two no-name scientists rejected by
| mainstream academia (one of them denied tenure) working away in
| the basement of some random building doggedly pursue an idea
| and pull off a miracle.
|
| It ties into the anti-mainstream, anti-institution sentiment
| prevalent online - that stuffy, tenured scientists couldn't
| accomplish what two randos pulled off with just grit and
| determination.
| fragmede wrote:
| With the third, having corporate backing, leaks the paper
| without the consent of the other two.
| Eji1700 wrote:
| LK-99 and the UFO hearings have just tanked my already low
| opinion of so many communities. I know that no matter the field
| or the training people are susceptible to being overly excited
| when they're ignorant on a subject, but god it bothers me how
| much trivial research (ESPECIALLY on the UFO issue) should at
| least temper expectations if not outright make people more
| skeptical.
|
| I figured places like HN would be better for that, although not
| much. Sure seems about the same as the rest of the web. It's
| just gossip rags for techy people.
|
| What kills me is that LK-99 might actually be a room temp
| superconductor, but that doesn't mean the straight out crazy
| beliefs and behaviors were.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > What kills me is that LK-99 might actually be a room temp
| superconductor, but that doesn't mean the straight out crazy
| beliefs and behaviors were.
|
| I've been trying _really hard_ to keep an even keel but your
| point is absolutely valid and I 'm in equal parts annoyed by
| people that categorically reject it and by people that
| blindly accept it. Science just doesn't work that way, you
| need to be patient and do the work. But I do _hope_ that it
| works out, and as a fall back position that it turns out that
| it works out as a superconductor but not one with practical
| use. Because that would still open the floodgates for the
| funding that would either create a RT(AP)S or rule out that
| one is possible to a very high degree of certainty.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| Why on earth is excitement such a nuisance to a certain
| faction of nerds?
| danem wrote:
| Maybe it's because I'm getting older, or maybe the users on HN
| have really changed, but having been an HN member for over 10
| years now, I cannot recall a time when it was so regularly
| swamped by people with an almost religious fervor about the
| topic du jour. Just in the last few months it was third-party
| reddit apps, and now this. In my eyes, the quality of
| conversation has degraded markedly with many comments more
| appropriate for Twitter (how many variations of "We're so
| back!!" must be posted?).
|
| Of course many people will disagree with me here, but I'd love
| to see mute functionality added to HN. If there's anything I've
| learned from Twitter, it's that when a forum gets big enough,
| proactively moderating _your own_ experience is essential to
| enjoying it and cut down on the noise.
| jacquesm wrote:
| An ignore list would already be pretty good (and I'm sure
| plenty of people would ignore me :) ). Wasn't there a plug-in
| for that at one point?
| xvector wrote:
| [flagged]
| mycologos wrote:
| I understand the sentiment, but I really want HN to stay as
| free as possible of this low-effort half-conscious meme way
| of speaking.
| jbreckmckye wrote:
| "The problem with pretending to be an idiot on the internet
| is that eventually you attract genuine idiots, who think
| themselves in good company"
| lyapunova wrote:
| Well...the way science is supposed to work is that everyone is
| an optimistic skeptic until something is known for certain.
| There is generally a correlation between higher PR effort and
| likelihood of falling short. This probably originates from
| incentive structures not aligning with being truthful and
| allowing work to speak for itself. So people have to drum up
| the excitement before it is warranted.
| zamalek wrote:
| The issue is that this article shouting "failure" is just as
| prematurely as the loyalists crying "success." Anger drives
| clicks and Nature knows that it's angering the loyalists,
| especially with outright falsehoods in the article:
|
| > graphene, frogs and pliers -- can exhibit similar magnetic
| behaviour.
|
| >
|
| > Frustrated by the atmosphere of hype, some scientists have
| taken to mimicking the levitation videos with everyday
| materials suspended by string and other props
|
| Why aren't the scientists levitating frogs above rare earth
| magnets to make fun of the videos? Because you need
| superconductor magnet, not a rare earth magnet, to do that.
| This is a blatant internal inconsistency, and shows that this
| article is garbage.
|
| Don't trust the loyalists, don't trust the sensationalists,
| trust science.
| jrockway wrote:
| This is just how humans are. You pick something you like and
| then you support it fully. Rewind time to 10,000 years ago or
| whatever. You're out distance-running animals to exhaustion,
| and your friend trips and breaks their leg. You stop the hunt
| and carry them back to your village. You go out tomorrow and
| hunt without them, and give them some of the food you caught
| anyway. Someone says "man this guy is lazy, let him starve!"
| They are ruthlessly taunted for going against the group. The
| broken leg guy recovers and society moves on. It didn't have to
| be that way. You could have watched someone break their leg and
| say "that sucks bro, enjoy dying" or you could have gone along
| with the "this guy is lazy, let him starve!" cries. Both are
| rational actions that many other species would take, but for
| humans, evolution didn't favor that. (Probably because an adult
| human is a pretty big sunk resource cost. 9 months of gestation
| to have 1 kid!)
|
| The end result is that we still have these instincts. We want
| to belong to a group to receive its protection if something
| goes wrong, and we want to support our group so the members
| know they're getting the protection they crave. The end result
| is that in a world without life or death consequences at every
| turn, we naturally apply this to shit that doesn't matter like
| rocks. Same brain, different problems.
|
| I'll also add, this is what science is. People say stuff. Other
| people test it. Everyone shares their results. Is there a
| better system?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > This is just how humans are.
|
| It's the choice you make; 'it's just how I am' is a weak
| defense. It's surprisingly trendy to say bad behavior is
| inevitable. Human's have been biologically the same for
| ~300,000 years, but our behavior has changed dramatically.
| Behavior in different places right now varies greatly.
|
| Also, is there factual or expert basis for this theory?
| EdSharkey wrote:
| Dopamine is a helluva drug. Get off social media!
| pyrale wrote:
| > (Nature!)
|
| I have no opinion on the topic of LK99, but the nature article
| posted is not from the world-famous peer-reviewed scientific
| review, it's from an affiliated science news article.
|
| You are right that there is a lot of hype around that topic,
| which isn't necessarily warranted, but people would also be
| right to point out that an article that transform the lack of
| certainty barely 10 days after the initial article into a
| reason for doubt is a bit of a clickbait.
|
| I'm all for scientists publishing early, but if the consequence
| is news organizations and the general public breathing down
| their necks, I can understand why they don't.
| foobar_______ wrote:
| Thank you for articulating this well. It really is such an odd
| world we live in nowadays.
| namuol wrote:
| There's a real kernel of truth to what you're saying but don't
| you think calling something a "cult" is a bit of a self-
| fulfilling prophecy? You're turning this into an "us vs them"
| thing when it never should have been one, by your own
| assessment. There's no better way to politicize something than
| to group people based on some reductive binary belief and
| generalize about said group.
| username332211 wrote:
| Your reasoning might as well be applied to the Church of
| Scientology or most Ponzi schemes. Calling those for what
| they are does make the members close ranks.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Or any other church, or any soccer team, political party or
| icecream flavor. Humans get invested in stuff, even to
| their own detriment.
| username332211 wrote:
| Of course, calling communities or groups cults makes them
| close ranks. The question raised is should you do it if
| they are indeed cults (or merely cult-ish).
| jacquesm wrote:
| That depends on your goals. I think Richard Dawkins is an
| excellent example of what can happen when you focus too
| much on the means and not enough on how you package the
| message, in the end you will see your goal become _more_
| distant rather than less.
| namuol wrote:
| Some things really are cults. I don't think that's what's
| going on here. Maybe there's some foul play in "prediction
| markets" and that kind of crap, but what you're suggesting
| with these comparisons is that this entire phenomenon is
| some deliberate ruse...
| username332211 wrote:
| Nothing I've said suggests deliberate ruse. It's entirely
| possible for a cult to be created completely honestly by
| people who believe in it. Most medieval heresies are an
| obvious example.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > Tesla is surrounded by a cult of personality
|
| At the risk of going off on a tangent, this is not at all
| unique to Tesla nor fans of the company. This happens to Apple
| fans, Google fans, etc. Someone likes something a lot, someone
| else comes along and is offended by the blind support and
| decides that they have to _hate_ it in order to bring balance
| to the world. Ta-da! Now we have two vitriolic groups of people
| calling the other side a cult or bunch of haters.
|
| Tesla stans are for sure annoying as hell. So are the haters,
| though. Equally bad, as far as I'm concerned, since neither
| side has any appreciation for nuance.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I think that begs the question. Tesla fans are far more
| intense and aggressive IME. The difference in degree is
| everything.
| Accujack wrote:
| This is how a lot of religions work, too.
| [deleted]
| firekvz wrote:
| despite all the bad things and random people using it for ego
| and stuff, its the best thing that can really happen to tech
| nowadays.
|
| With all the AI/chatgpt news, a bunch of people got involved in
| what you call "spectator sport", leading to a whole new set of
| opportunities and growth, people who would never touch a pc or
| new software related tech, got involved, others invested, other
| simple became consumers and every single bit of it its good for
| the market.
|
| Imagine you are a 15 y.o student right now browsing tiktok with
| no interest in chemistry whatsoever and suddenly you see a
| video about this superconductor and you get all hyped and next
| thing you know is that the student who had no interest on
| chemistry, now is passionate about it.
|
| If all the LK-99 thing is a fiasco, at least we can say that it
| somehow helped getting the attention of people who would
| actually keep investigating and maybe do find the actual
| superconductor we need. And this can be said about every
| subject like this.
|
| So yeah, I'm okay getting some random people having nonsense
| internet discussions.
| carabiner wrote:
| Exactly. It is obvious that the techbros are not cool-headed
| logicians systematically analyzing the foundations of
| knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally in their attack
| on truth and reality.
| jackmott42 wrote:
| Welcome to the internet?
| yorwba wrote:
| The article references two kinds of sources: arXiv posts, which
| get numbered footnotes; and posts on other websites, which get
| inline links. One of those links is allocated to some guy on
| Twitter making fun of unconfirmed levitation videos. There are
| no links to any of those videos.
|
| Clearly, the author considers scientists publishing videos of
| their work less deserving of attention than making fun of those
| scientists. I think that reflects badly on their character, and
| badly on nature.com for hosting it.
|
| (Also, an article published on 2023-08-04 should be able to
| refer to an arXiv post from 2023-08-03:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01516 even if they don't like citing
| videos.)
| starfallg wrote:
| Nature is a mainstream science publication which aims for a
| wide audience, so relatively speaking, it is definitely more
| sensationalist when compared to the top journals in the
| respective fields.
|
| Not to disagree with your point. Just that Nature is not a good
| example to illustrate it.
| acchow wrote:
| > and if you're on a different side than I am then screw you,
| even if you are Nature.
|
| Identity politics has metastasized everywhere.
| klohto wrote:
| I wanna smoke what the gatekeepers are smoking. "No, you don't
| understand science! It can come only from fancy journals. You
| cannot test the properties yourself!". Meanwhile Varda goes
| brrr.
| tekla wrote:
| Yes, years of training, education, and experience is now
| "gatekeeping"
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| You think years of training, education and experience don't
| occur outside fancy journals? You believe it's not
| "science" if it's not published in Nature? Wow.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Published findings fail to replicate all the time all
| over science. The responsible thing is to suspend
| judgement until it has been independently verified a few
| times, especially if it's a result from a field in which
| you are not up to date with the latest findings.
|
| I have a degree in theoretical physics and I feel I'm not
| qualified to judge this finding.
| tekla wrote:
| I will respond with your low quality response with
| another low quality response.
|
| > You think years of training, education and experience
| don't occur outside fancy journals?
|
| Literally nothing I said was about this.
|
| > You believe it's not "science" if it's not published in
| Nature? Wow.
|
| Also literally nothing I said was about this.
|
| We have a fun little situation where HN people, most of
| which barely know anything about superconductivity, or
| physics, or really anything outside of their webdev
| bubble, think that their random opinions on random news
| articles means anything. A 10 minute read of Wikipedia is
| now considered expertise. Obviously the random news
| article with low quality information is proof that room
| temp superconductivity is a real thing.
|
| It's the exact same feeling I have when I read HN talking
| about aviation, which I have a strong background in. It's
| pretty clear most HN people have absolutely no idea what
| they're talking about.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| The trick is to get good at identifying the people that
| are correct and ignoring the people that don't know what
| they are saying.
|
| It is hard, but once you can do that it is superior to
| listening to the experts only. The problem with people
| who are recognized as experts is that they have a high
| likelihood of wanting status and power. So while they may
| be experienced and smart their intentions may not be
| pure.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> The problem with people who are recognized as experts
| is that they have a high likelihood of wanting status and
| power._
|
| In order for this to have any useful predictive power,
| you have to also demonstrate that "the people who are
| correct" don't want status and power, and also that the
| set of people who are correct doesn't overlap with the
| set of experts.
| [deleted]
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > The trick is to get good at identifying the people that
| are correct and ignoring the people that don't know what
| they are saying.
|
| You need expertise yourself in order to do that.
| Otherwise you are easily misled.
|
| > The problem with people who are recognized as experts
| is that they have a high likelihood of wanting status and
| power. So while they may be experienced and smart their
| intentions may not be pure.
|
| Where do you get any information then? How do you get
| through your day?
|
| People can have various motives and still provide
| accurate information. The motives don't completely
| dominate them, they have other motives, and we can read
| critically.
|
| But if they lack expertise, they can't provide accurate
| information.
| rex_lupi wrote:
| And yet, even with all your "years of training, education
| and experience", the said for-profit publisher is writing
| such low- quality science journalism articles. It's been
| only weeks and the article in a maliciously dismissive tone
| suggests all the replication efforts are in vain and
| pointless. Is this expected behavior from scientists? I am
| well-aware of the very high publication standards of
| Nature. I don't care it's a for-profit business. I don't
| care if, in the end the studies disprove the hyped claims.
| All I'm saying is this kind of shoddy poor-quality stuff
| isnt something I expect from someone actually serious about
| real science
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| It's also ironic that a publication so concerned with
| _patience_ in science is _so quick_ to dismiss experiments
| "falling short." Like...it's been a week. Chill. This is the
| most public scientific enthusiasm that I've seen in years.
| Let people have fun. Experience wonder and magic and mystery
| and awe and failure. That's what science is about.
| drtgh wrote:
| The original team submitted a paper about LK99 to Nature in
| 2020, and it was rejected. The editorial may not be
| interested that other labs research the material,
| decreasing the number of verification trials.
| nofunsir wrote:
| After the last three years, I think there's plenty of that
| around to smoke.
| jbreckmckye wrote:
| There's been a few "over-eager" findings these last few
| years. Skepticism is warranted; if LK-99 is a superconductor
| it will still be one after six months' peer review.
| ecshafer wrote:
| I can't really think of any over eager findings in the past
| years. Plenty of fluffy university press releases and the
| perpetual 20 years from now. But this is the first
| fundamental breakthrough that has had any stick. Skepticism
| is always warranted but the other results like the
| university of Rochester superconductor was met with extreme
| skepticism at first (and has been shown to be warranted).
| Lk99 had the combination of big result, AND importantly
| "easily" testable, despite low yield rates.
| moolcool wrote:
| > if LK-99 is a superconductor it will still be one after
| six months' peer review
|
| You might as well never get excited about anything if
| that's your perspective. Watching the process happen in
| real time is fun and exciting.
| Eji1700 wrote:
| I do not mean this in a hostile way, but I fucking hate
| this take.
|
| There are plenty of people who get EXTREMELY excited when
| shit turns out to be true. There's this sterotype of
| boring serious people who never have fun and don't enjoy
| what everyone else is enjoying and it's just wrong.
|
| There are people in the industry who are going to go
| fucking nuts if this is true, but they're not dancing in
| the streets because this is the equivalent of "is katy
| perry pregnant? Our pictures maybe sorta show a bump!".
|
| To be clear, if that kind of gossip is your life, that's
| fine, but even then you're probably about to read a
| shitload of ill informed speculation based on suspicious
| evidence, with undeniable proof 3-6 months away. You've
| seen this thing literally hundreds of times before, and
| see nothing to be excited about because it's just noise.
| If there's a baby in 6 months, great, if not, "yeah
| maybe" is about the extent of the information.
|
| Science is done slow because you need to prove things.
| Even with this material being "easy" to replicate by the
| standards of the field, it still doesn't happen overnight
| (and to my amateur understanding in part because of a
| lack of detail).
|
| So while I can't speak for the person you're replying to,
| I can damn sure say I find nothing about this exciting
| (more embarrassing that so many people have turned this
| into a cult following, much like the cold fusion claims
| on steroids), and will be one of the first people to be
| extremely excited when we have confirmation.
|
| This is not "watching the process" happen. It is
| "speculating on the process at every single step no
| matter how suspicious because the process isn't fast
| enough for you"
| moolcool wrote:
| It's this kind of excitement of possibility that drives
| people to work on ideas like this in the first place.
| Thousands of people tuned into Andrew McCalip's twitch
| stream of an oven, just because of the possibility that
| something world-changing might come out. I'm sure lots of
| those viewers, many of them young people who are in the
| prime years of forming interests and career choices, have
| never even heard of superconductors before last week, and
| now are soaking up all the information they can on the
| topic. That's awesome.
|
| Was the hype leading up to the moon landing also a waste
| of time, just because it was just "gossip" until boots
| hit the surface? Such a joyless take.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| Yes, or it's another opportunity to procrastinate and
| waste time engaging in social media...
| jacquesm wrote:
| > I fucking hate this take
|
| But it is hostile. It also shows a lack of emotional
| control at least on par with the people that are openly
| enthusiastic and possibly much worse. At least they are
| having fun...
| rvnx wrote:
| The word speculation really applies when you see people
| betting on this.
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| > I do not mean this in a hostile way, but I fucking hate
| this take.
|
| The "fucking hate" kinda negates the first half of the
| sentence.
| cthalupa wrote:
| There's plenty of real scientists doing real science with
| this. It's pretty dismissive to talk about university
| labs full of PhDs posting preprints and videos and all of
| that and liken them to TMZ style reporting.
|
| People bring up the cold fusion stuff repeatedly, and
| that's also bizarre - Muon stuff aside, cold fusion
| wasn't thought to be possible under our understanding of
| physics when that craze happened. That's a lot of what
| was so weird about it. On the other hand, there's
| absolutely nothing in our understanding of physics that
| makes a RTAPS impossible.
|
| I would agree with the idea that not being excited about
| this at this point in time doesn't make you a curmudgeon.
| But saying "I do not mean this in a hostile way" doesn't
| mean much when you proceed to be hostile and disparaging
| towards people. The tone of your comment doesn't change
| at all if you replace "I do not mean this in a hostile
| way, but" with "You morons"
| lamontcg wrote:
| > Watching the process happen in real time is fun and
| exciting.
|
| YOU ARE NOT WATCHING THE PROCESS.
|
| The people who have spent their lives on superconductors
| and who have the expertise to replicate and conclusively
| evaluate these claims so far haven't said anything
| publicly. They are presumably busy doing the actual hard
| work.
|
| What you're doing is watching is a side show full of
| influencers on social media.
|
| I can open my rss feed for hep-ex today and read
| something like this:
|
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.01468.pdf
|
| Which is due ultimately to the work of over 1,000 people
| on the LHCb collaboration (two of them now deceased), but
| the conclusions are just "agrees with the standard model"
| so the result of the very good work done grinding away at
| the problem has no headline generating potential. Most of
| the people here fawning over the excitement of science
| done in the open wouldn't ever bother trying to read that
| kind of paper, and probably don't know that sharing
| physics preprints over the internet dates back to before
| the Web existed (and to before most of them existed).
| zarzavat wrote:
| This kind of hysterical reaction to people having fun is
| why I want LK99 to be true.
| astrange wrote:
| This is a demonstration that hard work isn't useful work,
| since the LHC is just spending infinite money on finding
| things we already knew.
| lamontcg wrote:
| > finding things we already knew.
|
| we didn't know that before it was published.
|
| we could have been sitting around now talking about
| breaking new experimental results from LHCb that call
| into question the standard model, you have to actually do
| the work to check. and you have to check a lot of
| unexciting results in order to find one which is
| groundbreaking (which is actually what the authors of the
| LK-99 paper claim to have done over decades before
| finding this one material).
| cthalupa wrote:
| Sure. No one reasonable is seeing this and deciding they
| need to go investing their life savings in whatever
| adjacent stocks they think will take off. Skepticism is
| fine.
|
| The Nature article is still weird in tone, though, since
| there's been plenty of interesting results that have been
| replicated. LK99 is a weird material, at the very least.
| That it's weird in a way that somewhat implies it could be
| an RTAPS makes it plenty interesting.
|
| I've seen a lot of discussion around LK99 in a bunch of
| different contexts, and the portion of people that are
| treating it like anything more than entertaining curiosity
| at this point is extremely low - so this article really
| reads as the authors being upset that other people are
| having fun in their domain. That's what comes across as
| gatekeeping.
|
| Or the concerns around "amateur" reproduction - who is
| trying to reproduce this without any understanding of how
| to operate the equipment or some understandings around
| basic chemistry and physics? These private reproductions
| are being done by engineers, chemists, physicists, etc. - I
| haven't seen anything to indicate that people with no
| business doing these experiments are rushing out there to
| try it.
|
| It's just a very strange to be written in the tone it is
| and make these points. It seems very divorced from the
| reality of the situation, which is basically a whole lot of
| people on twitter memeing "MAKE ROCK FLOAT"/"WE BACK"/"ITS
| SO OVER", people on more technical/science oriented forums
| having the sorts of discussions we see on HN, and most the
| population sitting around waiting to see if anything useful
| comes of this.
| yongjik wrote:
| The most bizarre is people who view this as a fight between
| underdog citizens and established big science, ignoring that
| the most useful commentaries and replication efforts are coming
| from universities and big science labs.
|
| (And no, a photo on Twitter of some unspecified speck
| levitating over an unspecified magnet-looking device posted by
| an unknown individual does not prove anything. If the topic was
| anything else, HN would've been filled with "Gah stupid non-
| technical people, when will they understand that you can't
| believe everything on the internet?")
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's a tricky one. Yes, it doesn't prove anything. But if
| that same person would show you a battery and an electric
| light and the fact that the one can power the other you'd
| have no qualms about saying that that video is real and proof
| of the existence of electricity because you've already
| accepted that as a fact and any evidence that confirms it can
| safely be added to the huge pile that already exists.
|
| But let's just for the moment go back 112 years when your
| average laboratory was less well equipped than today's lab of
| mid sized university and people were doing groundbreaking
| research all over the place. Including superconduction. So we
| are all less likely to believe the 'underdog citizens'
| because anything they can do the labs can do that much
| better. But the underdog citizens apparently excel at
| marketing themselves, rather than that they excel at science
| and replication is something they are sometimes quite good at
| (Nile Red for instance is in that category). So as long as
| they aren't doing _original science_ I think we maybe should
| lump them into the 'preponderance of evidence' class and if
| enough of those unknown individuals all report consistent
| results then it may count for something, more so if you know
| one of them yourself and are allowed to inspect the results.
| But for a global audience it shouldn't hold as much weight as
| a replication by a well known university with a good
| reputation, especially if they supply samples for others to
| test. (Because I think with this substance testing it
| properly is a lot easier (while still challenging) than
| manufacturing it properly.)
| yongjik wrote:
| Thanks for the thoughtful response. You put it much better
| than I did.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I see those youtubers for the most part as well meaning
| science popularizers, I can't get my kids to read books
| about the history of science but they'll watch videos
| about all kinds of interesting stuff all day long if I
| let them. So they do serve a role and if that's all they
| contribute then I'm fine with that. But I would come down
| harshly on anybody that would fake it just for clicks or
| that would interfere with actual science by spouting
| unsupported bullshit (this happened a lot during the
| pandemic).
| yongjik wrote:
| I think it's a matter of priors. If a Youtuber shows,
| say, how to make non-Newtonian fluid from starch, then
| it's much easier to accept it at face value, because we
| already _know_ such a thing exists, and what would they
| gain by faking it.
|
| On the other hand, if another one shows room-temperature
| superconductor which may or may not actually exist, then
| (1) we don't know if it's true yet, and (2) it's pretty
| obvious why someone may want to fake it to get their five
| minutes of internet fame.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Sure serious amateurs can do serious science too. However,
| I have less reason to believe in their results, a priori,
| because the internet is full of cranks, while University
| Lab's have proportionally few. So a claim from a lab
| becomes an extraordinary claim from some rando on twitter,
| and thus the rando needs to provide extraordinary evidence.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That looks like a solid and defensible position to me.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| This is a good problem.
|
| Better to see LK-99 hype in TikTok/YouTube feeds than celebrity
| gossip or Musk's impulse tweets or whatever. The more science
| goes around, the better.
| jbreckmckye wrote:
| It is very strange and there must be a deeper reason. I don't
| know if this is
|
| - Retail shareholders doing grassroots PR
|
| - Some kind of "magical technologism", belief that the rapid
| technical gains of the 20th century are the natural state of
| things; unwillingness to accept that future improvements in
| material science, computer science, chemical science will be
| more marginal
|
| - Shallow press coverage and overenthusiastic fans who have a
| disproportionate impact on online discourse
|
| Or maybe all three?
| DC-3 wrote:
| Simply the desire to live in interesting times.
| kortex wrote:
| I think it's in no small part because the news has been so
| dire for the past few years: pandemic, war in Ukraine,
| possibility of nuclear escalation, China licking lips at
| Taiwan, climate change, economy.
|
| Then some news comes along also coincidentally with other
| weird fun news (UAPs) that's not bad in any ways, and may
| revolutionize society. Of course they are gonna run with it.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| It isn't strange or unique at all. We live in times where
| people feel they need to have a position on everything. A
| strongly held belief. A stand. And people feel they need to
| adopt it early and then make every piece of information fit
| that selection.
|
| It is destructive. We see it on every topic now, even
| entirely banal things.
|
| To go back a couple of decades, I remember a high school
| History teacher bizarre asking the class if they were for or
| against abortion of all things...it was a very strange class
| where he was riffing and we were talking about commonly held
| positions through time. He asked me and I answered that I
| didn't know enough about the topic, hadn't really thought
| about it enough, and don't really feel in a position where I
| should have a stance on it. He laughed and called me a fence-
| sitter and said I took the coward position. This was a
| profound experience for me, and it comes to mind in many
| situations like this.
|
| The whole LK-99 thing looks super neat. I don't have the
| knowledge, time or inclination to have my ego wrapped in a
| position on it, and there's absolutely no value or utility in
| me picking a position, either. I read the updates and it'll
| turn out however it turns out.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, this polarization is really annoying, it also blinds
| people because they become too invested in their own team
| to still change their position given additional evidence.
| FloorEgg wrote:
| Maybe there is some major strategic investment deal being
| negotiated to develop advanced chip fab and it's in someone's
| interest to confuse the strategy with a potential paradigm
| shift on the horizon.
| stormfather wrote:
| Unwillingness to accept? What evidence do you have that the
| 20th century was the inflection point in intellectual
| progress? We have many more brains with much more free time
| now, not to mention pocket supercomputers, the internet and
| AI assistance. I expect the pace of discover to increase if
| anything. Maybe you're just suffering from your perspective
| of being alive right now, like all those kids on youtube who
| say past music was so good, because they see a highly
| filtered and compressed version of the past.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Have you ever seen a Youtube video about someone reviewing a
| Tesla or comparing it to another car? The comments are always
| full of hostile and vitriolic remarks by people who are
| personally offended
|
| So how do you think we can improve that? It's a very serious
| question - the anger and mis/disinformation on the Internet is
| doing great harm, has killed millions and may do far more (via
| vaccine and climate change disinformation, to start).
| cm2012 wrote:
| You see this on HN often when advertising comes up. There's a
| large group of people ideologically against it.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Rightly so! ;)
| ianai wrote:
| Actually it's great. Sure it's annoying when people take things
| too far. But society sorely lacks for interest in science and
| in general things that make us all better off. I say bring on
| the enthusiasm and just remind people of the importance of
| being polite and kind towards one another or at least not mean.
|
| A huge win would be this signaling interest in things that make
| the world better. Basic research and such rely on public
| funding and we'd all be better off with more funding going to
| address such problems than the other places funds go.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| When it becomes a spectator sport, it's not longer interest
| in science, it's just wanting to be part of an in-group.
| Science includes rationality and that's sorely lacking in
| most of the discourse around LK-99. The average commentary
| has as much in common with science as the recent unfounded
| and unsupported hype around UAPs.
| ianai wrote:
| It's not about reaching everyone. It's about not turning
| people off and attracting the otherwise predisposed. It
| only takes one sour comment to make the fud spread.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| I would've thought HN would be the last place where
| rational skepticism and trust in the scientific method
| would be confused for "FUD" (a term which has apparently
| lost all meaning).
| chriskanan wrote:
| The author of the article is a freelance science journalist not
| really an expert in this space, so I think it is reasonably
| appropriate to be dismissive of their perspective since they
| aren't a researcher in this space and probably cherry picked
| the evidence they wanted for their story.
|
| I'm excited by the potential of LK-99 and I wouldn't be
| surprised if it turned out to be a red herring, but I'll wait
| for the scientific community to sort it out versus paying
| attention to a non-expert journalist who is weighing in so
| strongly on the matter this early in the game.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > Here we are, on HN, and people in this very thread are
| calling Nature (Nature!) an "online sensational clickbait
| magazine" because they want to believe the hype that the rock
| has properties that they only learned about from Wikipedia a
| few days prior (and only understood 5% of it, at that)
|
| I did not consider this article to be a particularly great
| sample for inclusion in a new standard of quality. Nature puts
| out fantastic stuff but this really isn't it, and if anything
| it surprises me that they would publish it. At the same time I
| agree with you about the spectator sport angle, that's highly
| annoying, both from the 'naysayers' _and_ the 'fanatics'.
| deepnotderp wrote:
| I mean the Nature article is basically just the opinions of a
| bunch of experts.
|
| It's not to say LK-99 is real, but the Nature article
| contributes 0 extra information
| dekhn wrote:
| Nature isn't clickbait, but it is not the best journal when it
| comes to accurately reporting the truth. As we used to joke in
| grad school, Nature was a great journal to publish the hottest
| incorrect results, or to write op-eds that influenced old
| scientists in England.
|
| At the same time I find the incredible enthusiasm and desire to
| extrapolate the simplest reports into powerful narratives (as a
| subset of HN people discussing LK-99 do) very depressing. I
| guess everybody has to go through t heir own Pons and
| Fleischman or Jessie Gelsinger moments before they understand
| just how much hype there is in next-gen science.
| throwanem wrote:
| > But this has become some weird spectator sport, where you're
| either a believer or a skeptic, and if you're on a different
| side than I am then screw you, even if you are Nature.
|
| Welcome to the Internet in 2023...
| viscanti wrote:
| Well the whole argument feels kind of clickbait and premature.
| Arguing that replication efforts fall short, after less than a
| week of attempts, feels pretty weird. Why even weigh in on
| things right now if you're Nature? How many of their best
| papers have been replicated so quickly (it is approaching zero)
| or conclusively. It shouldn't be a surprise that the fastest
| pre-release papers that are attempting to replicate it, are
| mostly from labs looking for publicity or from people who are
| just excited. Research teams that need more time for a rigorous
| replication effort are still working and likely will be for
| awhile. This is a silly thing for Nature to talk about and it
| makes them look like they're going the clickbait route to take
| advantage of the hype around floating rocks.
| akasakahakada wrote:
| This article is like what a high school student would write for
| their essay: quote some dudes' speech without actually explaining
| anything and call it a day. Those speeches are my proofs because
| they say so. Room temperature superconductor is useless because
| someboby said that on twitter! Seriously every argument in this
| article is flawed.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Replication seem pretty successful to me, 3-4 labs has made the
| same effect. Nature sound salty they are not really involved in
| anyway now that results are displayed on social media rather than
| through journals
| knbrlo wrote:
| When publications put out things like this it reminds me of why I
| can't trust them. They're writing this article for clicks and
| attention and to feed that side of society that constantly pulls
| us down about what's not possible while the publication makes
| money from taking the other side of a issue. It's plain
| corruption.
| psychphysic wrote:
| Mainstream science: we need to get the public excited about
| science.
|
| Also mainstream science: no stop talking about us!!
|
| What's the bfd? This isn't IV bleach for COVID... So what if
| tiktokers are suddenly talking about the quirks of BCS?
|
| Nature is just bitter imo because they passed on an article that
| the public was fascinated by because as the authors put it
| "trauma".
|
| They are reacting just like all the publishers who passed on JK
| Rowling because no one wants to read a fantasy book a girl wrote.
|
| This is like YouTube telling people not to watch Cobra Kai on
| Netflix because they passed on it.
| rex_lupi wrote:
| Nature is now just whining cuz one arxiv publication got
| everyone excited. That's what it feels like after reading this
| poor quality article published by nature
| Eji1700 wrote:
| It's because people aren't excited about the science. They're
| excited about the speculation, the gossip, and the potential
| result. That is literally antithetical to the entire process of
| proper science, and the exact kind of behavior/mentality that
| most scientists hate due to how it warps things like funding.
|
| Science is the process. It's taking your time, proving your
| work, and most importantly, replicating your results.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| You don't get to have public interest in science without
| public interest in science drama and gossip. Humans being
| what they are, it's unreasonable for you to expect otherwise.
| There is not a single topic for which the public has an
| interest in the thing but no interest in the gossip and drama
| surrounding that thing.
| fragmede wrote:
| Is the gossip about LG's involvement and the leaked-ness of
| the paper and the death bed dying breath parts really taking
| center stage here? I've come across that stuff but the focus
| of the excitement really seems to be on "will it replicate".
| devnullbrain wrote:
| >the exact kind of behavior/mentality that most scientists
| hate due to how it warps things like funding
|
| I'd be more sympathetic to this had scientists not done such
| a terrible job of distributing the funding my taxes pay for
| moolcool wrote:
| > It's because people aren't excited about the science.
| They're excited about the speculation, the gossip, and the
| potential result
|
| I think you could argue that the initial spark of intuition--
| the thing that makes you go "huh. Let me look into this more"
| before gathering evidence and peer review, is one of the most
| important steps of "the science"
| tromp wrote:
| > that a compound of copper, lead, phosphorus and oxygen, dubbed
| LK-99, is a superconductor at ambient pressure and temperatures
| above 127 degC (400 Kelvin).
|
| No; it's claimed to superconduct at temperatures up to 127 degC.
| They didn't perform tests above 127 degC.
| mbauman wrote:
| > They didn't perform tests above that temperature.
|
| Right, exactly, they're claiming that Tc is above 127degC. The
| claim is that it's a superconductor at (some) temperatures even
| higher than what was tested. It's also still a superconductor
| at temperatures below.
| areoform wrote:
| > LK-99's purported superconductivity drew immediate scrutiny
| from scientists. "My first impression was 'no.'" says Inna
| Vishik, a condensed matter experimentalist at the University of
| California, Davis. "These 'Unidentified Superconducting Objects',
| as they're sometimes called, reliably show up on the arXiv.
| There's a new one every year or so." Advances in
| superconductivity are often touted for their potential practical
| impact on technologies such as computer chips and maglev trains,
| but Vishik points out that such excitement might be misplaced.
| Historically, progress in superconductivity has had tremendous
| benefits for basic science, but little in the way of everyday
| applications. There's no guarantee a material that is a room-
| temperature superconductor would be of practical use, Vishik
| says.
|
| As someone who loves Nature, I would like to commit a dash of
| heresy. A manufacturable, room temperature superconductor with a
| low current density wouldn't lead to maglevs, but it would
| _revolutionize_ the world. It would be one of the starkest
| turning points in human history.
|
| Most of the heat generated by a CPU is generated shuttling
| electrons back and forth. A superconductor instantly changes the
| calculus and, depending on whom you ask, makes processors 500x
| more efficient. And that's just the start.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_computing
|
| The before/after is so stark that it's really hard to game out
| all of the consequences, but it's quite obvious that it instantly
| changes the cost of running these massive AI models as well as
| the cost of doing highly detailed FEM simulations.
|
| Even if some of the properties are replicated, the strangeness of
| this material puts us on track to that world. It's incredible
| what it could be. I'm extremely excited!
| mercutio2 wrote:
| Most of the heat generated in a CPU is voltage turning on and
| off, not current flowing continuously.
|
| Superconductors do not have zero inductance.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > it's quite obvious that it instantly changes the cost of
| running these massive AI models as well as the cost of doing
| highly detailed FEM simulations.
|
| This seems pretty overstated. Developing the tooling to build
| chips takes years, there is good reason to think that even if
| this material does revolutionize chip efficiencies, it will be
| years at least before we start producing those chips and
| probably years more before that production scales to fully
| supplant the existing production infrastructure.
| fullstackchris wrote:
| haha, now even nature has to have a commentary. a bit
| hypocritical title eh?
| noahlt wrote:
| > many materials -- including graphene, frogs and pliers -- can
| exhibit similar magnetic behaviour.
|
| I'm sorry, FROGS!?
|
| I looked this up and it's very fun:
| https://www.ru.nl/hfml/research/levitation-explained/diamagn...
| adw wrote:
| Yes, resulting in Andre Geim
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andre_Geim) having the best
| possible scientific resume:
|
| - the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize for frog levitation:
|
| - the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on graphene.
| michael_nielsen wrote:
| There's a great video of a frog (and several other items)
| floating in a strong magnetic field, from 1997:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlJsVqc0ywM&ab_channel=APArc...
|
| Lots of objects are diamagnetic, including human beings, and
| can potentially be made to float in a strong magnetic field.
| rahkiin wrote:
| Rome was not build in a day. Let's not expect scientists to do so
| after a draft publication.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Makes sense, on the other hand, the recipe is apparently fairly
| simple, so why would it be so hard to replicate?
| _joel wrote:
| It seems to be, so far, a stocastic process in such that they
| don't now what's causing it in the 1/10 times it works
| afaict.
| golol wrote:
| It is simple as in doesn't require expensive materials or
| tools or a particularly long process. It can nevertheless be
| tricky to execute correctly and depend on luck
| sophacles wrote:
| I dunno, but if it's so simple, why don't you try and then
| let us know if it's actually easy or not, as well as the
| results you get!
| ssijak wrote:
| so simple that original authors fail 9 out of 10 times it
| seems
| someotherperson wrote:
| The recipe for Shakespeare is English, paper and a pen.
| yiyus wrote:
| I am a material scientist. Everyday, I see failed attempts to
| replicate samples. Slightly different compositions, slightly
| different heat treatments, subtle differences in
| crystallographic texture or the arrangement of inclusions
| that unexpectedly change the properties of your material in
| mysterious ways.
|
| And I know nothing about superconductors, I am talking about
| steel, a material that we have worked with for centuries,
| it's in the first chapter of every textbook and is
| practically everywhere.
|
| Things are hard.
| traverseda wrote:
| Because if it is superconducting they only have tiny tiny
| superconducting chunks in a much larger sample that isn't. A
| couple of superconducting grains of sand in a rock,
| basically. Separate them out, try to test them on their own
| while ignoring all the rock parts, well that's difficult.
|
| I suspect that what they actually have is some incredibly
| tiny superconducting crystals suspended on a material that is
| almost identical except for the placement of a few atoms.
| Very hard to work with.
|
| Or it's just a regular diamagenetic material.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| It's too simple - it's simplistic. It doesn't control for
| some (yet unknown) things that make it fail or succeed, which
| makes it hard to replicate.
| rsfern wrote:
| The steps are simple, but it seems to be quite finicky and
| there are almost sure to be sensitive to important factors
| that we don't have clarity on yet. If it turns out to be
| definitively shown to be real
| stusmall wrote:
| It's posts like this that make me think of Roosevelt's Man in
| the Arena speech. It's easy for folks on the sidelines to
| criticize and say "what's so hard?" It's for the best who the
| folks rolling up their sleeves, doing the hard work don't
| see/hear it. There are tons of teams working at this from
| multiple angles, both trying to prove and disprove it.
|
| It's only been a few days! The fact that cutting edge science
| from a pre-release version of a paper isn't going perfectly
| doesn't mean much. Give them time. Eventually we will have
| more solid answer.
| Lewton wrote:
| The recipe IS easy... Relatively, it's just not reliable/high
| yield
| tnecniv wrote:
| Simple is not synonymous with easy.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The unit cell apparently has:
|
| 1 Copper atom 25 oxygen atoms 6 Phosphorous atoms 9 lead
| atoms
|
| There are many ways to arrange these constituents.
|
| It's hard to create the environment where they want to go
| exactly where you hope over a large volume. Sometimes this
| level of precision requires atomic control of layer growth
| and extreme temperature management. That's why the methods
| list days between steps to get the atoms diffusing, and
| that's for a few micrograms of material.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| I guess whoever figures out a reliable process for scaling
| up production gets a second nobel prize?
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| or just billions upon billions of dollars.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| I should patent a process then figure out the details
| later, or sue anyone who does.
| relativ575 wrote:
| It is true, yet I can't reconcile the fact the overall
| excitement and optimism this generates, vs. the lukewarm and
| skepticism towards news about advance in other hard problems
| such as fusion, battery, self-driving, space exploration,
| cancer treatment, Alzheimer treatment.
|
| I get that disappointment in the past make people jaded.
| Weren't there false hope in superconductor as well? Or are
| people here too young to have experienced that?
| cthalupa wrote:
| There's a lot of people in here arguing like there's some
| significant faction of people that truly believe we've got
| enough proof that we have an RTAPS and are somehow negatively
| impacting their life because of it.
|
| I'm excited enough about this that I've read about 3500 HN
| comments on the subject over the past few days. I've talked
| about it with friends of various levels of science literacy.
| I've seen it come up in various discords, IRC channels, etc.
|
| And... I'm not seeing any real amount of people doing that.
| The twitter crowd is largely people just memeposting with
| "FLOAT THE ROCK!", places like HN have a bit more technical
| discussion about it, lots of other places it comes up in
| conversation and people shrug and go "huh that might be cool
| hope it works out tell me in 6 months"
|
| But even as someone with enough free time this week to read
| all these comments and engage in the discussion so much, it's
| not like I'm sitting here expecting 15 years from now we'll
| all be living in a superconductor wonderland. If I had to
| make a bet one way or the other, I'd probably bet it won't
| be. But that doesn't mean this whole thing isn't fun and
| entertaining.
|
| We've got some potentially world altering thing that is
| potentially real, and replicating it is easy enough that we
| have engineers and scientists all over the world doing it in
| public. Most of these kind of things require lots of funding,
| labs with advanced tools, access to exotic materials, etc.
| Instead, this time, we get to watch it on Twitter, Bilibili,
| etc.
|
| It's possible for people to recognize that this is a
| potentially world altering discovery and be hyped about the
| process and visibility we have in it, as well as realize that
| the most likely outcome at this point is "LK99 does some
| weird diamagnetic stuff that looks cool but probably isn't
| actually an RTAPS"
| [deleted]
| agnosticmantis wrote:
| > ... despite the fact that many materials -- including graphene,
| frogs and pliers -- can exhibit similar magnetic behaviour.
|
| This is a dishonest argument. Frogs and pliers don't levitate on
| a typical magnet in ambient conditions, so you can't say the
| behavior is 'similar' just because 'everything levitates in a
| strong enough magnetic field'. If your measuring stick can't
| distinguish these two significantly different behaviors, it's a
| useless measuring stick.
|
| Also, more generally, the logic of science is statistics, not
| Boolean logic. We all know that
|
| [(p --> q) and q]
|
| doesn't logically imply p, but still observing q makes p more
| likely when thinking probabilistically.
|
| Overall I found the article to be very dismissive of weak
| evidence and also shortsighted when considering the potential
| applications that we can't think of right now (even if those are
| not the typical hoped-for applications like efficient power
| transmission).
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| The logic of science is logic. Statistics is used to provide
| confidence intervals.
| spxtr wrote:
| Do you disagree with ET Jaynes then?
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Did anyone notice the description for the image at the top of the
| article? My understanding is that this description is nonsense,
| but I am an amateur and would love some clarification:
|
| "A superconducting magnet is cooled by liquid nitrogen, producing
| a strong magnetic field that causes the magnet to levitate."
|
| Like superconductors don't float because they're a "strong
| magnet" they float because they reject all magnetic fields beyond
| the London depth and this somehow leads to levitation. Right??
| rizzaxc wrote:
| SC requires a critical temperature, so the "cooling" part
| leading to the "producing" part is correct
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Is the producing part correct? My understanding is that once
| cooled they reject magnetic fields, not produce them.
| According to wikipedia:
|
| "The Meissner effect (or Meissner-Ochsenfeld effect) is the
| expulsion of a magnetic field from a superconductor during
| its transition to the superconducting state when it is cooled
| below the critical temperature. This expulsion will repel a
| nearby magnet."
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meissner_effect
| SomeRndName11 wrote:
| Nature is not the same magazine it used to be. After the
| "Proximal Origins" paper especially.
| onychomys wrote:
| That wasn't published in Nature, but in Nature Medicine, a
| separate journal.
| SomeRndName11 wrote:
| Is it really an important distinction? They are owned and run
| by the same people - Springer Nature.
| merman wrote:
| "The first attempts to replicate LK-99, reported in the past
| days, have not improved the material's prospects. " This to me is
| sort of a summary of Nature's position.
|
| Reframing- there is no reason to change from the default position
| of skepticism - that the material is uninteresting.
|
| If you ignore the viral hype, and only pay attention to the
| replication attempts: They have been rushed. They lack rigor.
| Still, the summation of their findings is reason to think there
| is something very interesting going on with this material.
|
| I do see some manic hysteria. I understand the urge to push back
| on that. It's smart to advise people to maintain skepticism. But
| if you do not think that the replication attempts are an
| indication that there is something there, I think it's because
| you have some sort of error in reasoning.
| Lewton wrote:
| I do not think that the argument is that the material is
| -uninteresting-, there's just plenty of reasons to believe it
| might not be a superconductor
| emtel wrote:
| There seems to be a group of people who have appointed themselves
| the science police. If you are excited about a tantalizing
| phenomenon that has yet to withstand expert scrutiny, you can
| expect to hear from them!
|
| I do not understand this mentality. There is no conflict between
| these two statements:
|
| - LK99 cannot be considered a proven superconductor until there
| have been multiple replications that withstand expert scrutiny.
|
| - The evidence that is freely available on twitter and elsewhere
| right now is worth getting excited about.
|
| Look, this isn't like Covid, where at least there is some public
| interest served by a skeptical approach to treatments. At least
| for the next six months or so, LK99 is an almost purely
| scientific topic with almost no wider implications.
|
| But people love to clutch their pearls - I have read twitter
| commentators claiming they are concerned that amateur replicators
| may get lead poisoning! Lead, while dangerous, is not polonium or
| something - there are plenty of reasons people choose to tolerate
| some exposure (recreational shooting, civil aviation,
| fishing...), all of which I would consider less compelling that
| what may be the biggest scientific breakthrough in decades. I do
| not think people are truly concerned about lead exposure, I think
| they want people to "stay in their lanes". An attitude that I
| find detestable.
|
| The fact that such a (possible) enormous breakthrough is within
| the reach of chemistry amateurs is wonderful! Everybody who has
| the equipment, knowledge, and inclination to attempt a
| replication should do so, and if you do, I hope you will post
| videos online so I can cheer you on.
| influxmoment wrote:
| The science police want to keep their authority. Evidence on
| Twitter isn't real evidence unless it had been endorsed by the
| science police
| ecshafer wrote:
| I am very bullish on LK99, but it is of course with the caveat
| that it needs replication. I am not seeing anyone not saying
| that. One of the big exciting things about it has been that
| there HAS been some replication, between simulations and
| science. This article is too incredulous and does get a bit of
| "science police" feel.
|
| In the 1800s people were often inventing and researching in
| their garage labs, we need more amateur science not less.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| The only downside is disappointment after great excitement, and
| the animosity it can create towards the field's viability.
| emtel wrote:
| I think we are witnessing that animosity right now, and if I
| understand correctly, it seems to be the result of
| (allegedly) fraudulent claims that people got excited about,
| e.g. Ranga Dias.
|
| But I have seen absolutely no evidence that anybody is acting
| in bad faith here, and so I see no reason to treat this the
| way we ought to treat fraud.
| [deleted]
| jacquesm wrote:
| That depends on how it all crashes. If it was fraud, then
| yes. But there are ways in which it can crash that would
| result in more funding to rule out spurious or transient
| effects that by themselves suggest interesting areas of
| research.
|
| But yes, the chance of a 'superconductivity winter' is
| definitely there. What surprises me is how this whole thing
| has blown up. People that would not be able to tell a copper
| wire from an aluminum one are talking about superconductors.
| That really gets me, why the sudden massive interest?
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I think there is a number of reasons this blew up, but I
| think the biggest one is the lack of good news.
|
| We all see weirder weather than we used to and man made
| climate change is implicated.
|
| War in Ukraine.
|
| Tensions with China.
|
| Political turmoil in the U.S. with small minorities driving
| the news cycle with crazy talk.
|
| We just got through COVID, and hopefully end of the
| inflation scare.
|
| Housing prices suck the hope out of most on a daily basis.
|
| Suddenly, a miracle material seems to appear that could
| change the game at so many levels, not owned by one
| corporation or country. And its a magnet, and everyone
| loves magnets....its the one things we've all experienced
| that feels like magic...and that magic was going to save
| us.
|
| So yeah. That's my diagnosis.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Interesting, there may be something to your observation.
| It also explains why you get these 'fireman rescues cat'
| news articles, even when there is plenty of other news,
| most of it very negative. And guess what then gets talked
| about.
| emtel wrote:
| > People that would not be able to tell a copper wire from
| an aluminum one are talking about superconductors
|
| i know this was hyperbole, but I think the fact that it is
| almost certainly false is important.
|
| I think the reason that people are so excited is that you
| can learn the basic facts about superconductivity in a few
| hours on wikipedia. The basics are not that complicated:
| Superconductors have zero resistance below a critical
| temperature, are diamagnetic due to induced eddy currents
| that cancel out magnetic fields, and the high temperature
| ones exhibit "flux pinning" where magnetic field lines can
| get stuck at defects in the material, leading to stable
| levitation.
|
| Having learned all this over the past week, I certainly
| don't consider myself an expert. I'm well aware I don't
| know 10% of what a first year physics grad student probably
| knows. But it's enough to follow along, and ask basic
| questions. Its _okay_ for people to do this even if they
| aren't remotely qualified to make final judgments about
| LK99.
|
| To me it seems no more improper than someone talking
| excitedly about the rocket equation or orbital mechanics
| even though they don't have an aerospace degree.
|
| As for why the sudden massive interest? Why wouldn't there
| be massive interest? Its a huge potential breakthrough,
| with multiple claimed reproductions already, and, most
| astonishingly, it could have been discovered (though not
| understood) in the 19th century! Maybe even earlier! Of
| course the fact that something so basic was just lying
| around waiting to be found is generating interest!
| jacquesm wrote:
| > The basics are not that complicated
|
| I know what you're getting at but your list isn't the
| 'basics', those are the symptoms. It's like saying you
| understand the basics about cancer because tumors grow
| and people die. It doesn't even begin to scratch the
| surface and it certainly isn't the basics, it is just the
| part that laypeople (myself included) see when looking
| from the outside in.
|
| The 'basics' not being so simple is exactly why the
| search for conveniently usable superconductors is an
| ongoing thing after a century. Copper wire was solved on
| the day we needed it, and even if it would not have
| worked we would have had a whole bunch of fall back
| materials available.
| emtel wrote:
| I didn't say "the basics of superconductor theory" I said
| "the basic facts about superconductors", and I stand by
| my claim that those facts are enough to form an opinion
| about LK99 that is "above the noise floor", if you will.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Ermm, no, that was a literal quote, as you can see from
| your own comment halfway up the page.
|
| And those bits aren't nearly enough to form an opinion
| about LK99, it may be enough to form an opinion about
| what the appearance of a generic, cheap room temperature
| super conductor might do for the world from a lay persons
| perpective. But it doesn't say _anything_ about LK99.
| moh_maya wrote:
| Its a bit surprising to see a journal like nature effectively
| whine about replication efforts falling short in what's likely a
| very temperamental, context / environment influenced synthesis
| process of a new composition. Its not going to work immediately.
|
| Even if it is a real breakthrough, material synthesis of a new
| material in any lab, and doing so reproducibly, is tricky enough
| that I am absolutely not going to infer / conclude from, or pass
| any comment on any replication efforts this early into the
| process. Its going to be an iterative process - which means one
| has to start somewhere.
|
| Some of the quoted folks come across (to me) as just peevish.
|
| Derek Lowe [0] has a far more balanced take on it, IMO.
|
| His article was discussed on HN a few days ago [1].
|
| [0] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/room-
| temperature-s...
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36957678
| [deleted]
| photonerd wrote:
| Natures op-ed articles are very low quality pop-sci trash,
| unfortunately. It's made all the more galling because their
| long form in-depth content is still _great_.
|
| Guess it's the price they pay to remain solvent in the
| clickbait age.
|
| Really all anyone--Nature included--can say at this point is
| there's _something_ interesting going on. It may or may not be
| a super-conductor, but it's certainly interesting.
| objektif wrote:
| [flagged]
| macawfish wrote:
| It's been like that since forever. A lot of scientists are so
| terrified to come across as disrespectful of orthodoxy that
| they'd never publicly entertain unconventional ideas. The
| risks of shaming, name-calling ("crackpot",
| "pseudoscientist", "quack", "fraud", "idiot", "fool") and
| funding loss constantly loom for a lot of people. And let's
| not pretend this doesn't have everything to do with money and
| politics. People and institutions deeply invested in, and
| cushioned by, status quo norms have every incentive to get
| nervous about disruption.
|
| I have to admit: I get some satisfaction watching naysayer
| rationalists get it wrong time and time again. Grumpy, mean
| people who can't see the big picture for ass but make
| categorical, reductionist big picture claims (e.g. about
| impossibilities) under the guise of rationalism, they're
| quite often just wrong, because the map is not the territory.
| The longer you cling to a crusty old map, the more likely it
| is that eventually you'll get lost, though you might never
| admit it to yourself.
|
| Then there are the people who carefully balance their
| skepticism with open minded curiosity and a sense of
| imagination, who are interested and engaged in the social
| exchange of ideas and perspectives. They're often more quiet,
| less attention seeking, less worried about determining who's
| "wrong" and who's "right".
|
| That's why I enjoy Quanta magazine. They profile all kinds of
| people doing real, interesting, groundbreaking work, people
| who aren't sitting around playing clout games. They tell
| stories about the collaborative relationships that make
| science possible.
| casey2 wrote:
| And then there's the 99.9% of people who completely ignore
| the "crusty old map" of science and get scammed by grifters
| selling them a brand-new fantasy map every other week.
|
| You don't have the right to be curious about anything until
| you have at least glanced at the real map. And you deserve
| to be shamed as a crackpot, pseudoscientist, quack and
| fraud if you are.
| macawfish wrote:
| "The right to be curious"? "The real map"? We clearly
| have very different worldviews.
| rex_lupi wrote:
| After going through the article, I'm absolutely surprised that
| one can publish such low effort (oped) articles on nature.com;
| perhaps lazy me should also give it a shot. Didn't care to
| check the author's credentials: if he is sort of a big name guy
| so Nature didn't bother with quality control.
| v3ss0n wrote:
| Nature is an online sensational clickbait magazine for a decade
| zaebal wrote:
| extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
| mrd3v0 wrote:
| Could you please elaborate further?
| lordnacho wrote:
| I don't know what to think. Wasn't there an article earlier today
| showing the video of the speck of LK-99 standing up in the tube?
|
| Also, why does the chunk in the image levitate in a stable
| manner? As in, why doesn't it slide off to one side, like it
| would if you just tried to balance two north ends of a magnet on
| each other?
| serf wrote:
| >Also, why does the chunk in the image levitate in a stable
| manner?
|
| I don't know what this new thing is, but isn't
| 'locking'/'pinning' a known characteristic of superconductors
| otherwise?
|
| that's the whole point of the 'train track' demo they do with
| cold superconductors for college kids.
| [deleted]
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Meissner effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meissner_effect
| lordnacho wrote:
| Yes but why does expelling the magnetic field make it hover
| stably instead of just falling out of the side of the field
| it's in?
| bhattid wrote:
| When a superconductor interacts with a magnetic field,
| currents generate at the surface of the superconductor that
| will produce their own magnetic field, which cancels the
| external one. The superconductor doesn't fall out to the
| sides because the field gets cancelled and there's no net
| force acting on the conductor.
|
| There can still be torque (i.e. rotations) for type I
| superconductors, and type II superconductors when they're
| fully superconducting. I'm not familiar with how the
| specific dynamics work though - I'm guessing it's related
| to gravity?
| bazodedo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_pinning
| space_fountain wrote:
| I think that for true hovering demos the trick is to cool
| the super conductor to below its critical point while it's
| already inside the magnetic field. Then any way you move it
| will immediately induce a reacting current in the
| superconductor that will move it back into place. Exactly
| the same place since it's a super conductor and has 0
| resistance. I think in these demos though it is the fact
| that one side is heavier and dragging that's leading it to
| stay in place
| robinduckett wrote:
| My laymen's interpretation is that superconductors
| perfectly expel the magnetic field without distorting the
| field and so can sit in a position that is effectively
| locked and held in position. I could be completely wrong
| however.
| bhattid wrote:
| There's a noticeable distortion of the magnetic field
| near the superconductor. It's this distortion that keeps
| the superconductor stable - it's caused currents that
| appear on the surface which match and cancel* the
| surrounding field.
|
| *some of the magnetic field penetrates onto the surface
| of the superconductor, but internally, there's 0 magnetic
| field within the superconductor.
| zrezzed wrote:
| Afaik, your intuition is basically right! A superconductor
| exhibiting only the Meissner effect won't hover ("pin").
|
| It's a defect (where small amounts of the field _aren 't_
| expelled) that allows for the pinning to happen:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type-
| II_superconductor#Flux_pi...
| antirez wrote:
| This looks like a very odd statement:
|
| "There's no guarantee a material that is a room-temperature
| superconductor would be of practical use, Vishik says."
| WitCanStain wrote:
| Could be extremely expensive or impractical to produce at
| scale, could be extremely brittle, etc.
| mbauman wrote:
| I don't think it's too hard to imagine that other
| characteristics of the material could indeed get in the way of
| practical applications -- perhaps brittle-ness or difficulty of
| manufacture or challenges in making it in the appropriate forms
| or ...
| bunnie wrote:
| Perhaps a charitable interpretation of that statement is "there
| are years of work to go from a proof of concept to a usable
| product". Even if LK-99 is some kind of a superconductor, there
| are a whole host of daunting technical issues that will need to
| be solved. For example: how do we get the yield up? How to turn
| it into a wire? If the material is not ductile, how to form the
| wire into a useful shape? How to reliably couple to the wire?
| How does the material age over time and and humidity? How to
| deposit and pattern it as a thin film?
|
| We have a lot of arrows in our quiver to shoot at these
| problems -- I would be optimistic that the promising
| applications of a room temperature superconductor would attract
| plenty of investment and talent. On the other hand, I imagine
| it may take years or even decades before we have answers to
| these hard questions. As the quote says, "there's no guarantee"
| that we can solve them, because right now we know so little
| about the properties of the material at this time. Of course,
| that is no reason to throw in the towel right now!
| [deleted]
| deepspace wrote:
| FTA: "Evan Zalys-Geller, a condensed matter physicist at the
| Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, says that the
| resistance measurement wasn't sensitive enough to distinguish
| between a zero resistance superconductor or a low-resistance
| metal like copper."
|
| I have little knowledge of the field, but as an EE, I would have
| thought that making sure that you are actually able to measure
| the effect you are trying to prove would be step zero in an
| experimental setup, no?
| distortionfield wrote:
| From what in understood, the sharp drop in resistivity was
| consistent enough to mark as the change to superconduction
| dekhn wrote:
| People overestimate their ability to run high quality
| scientific experiments. I think a perfect example was the claim
| of faster than light neutrinos
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-
| light_neutrino_ano...). it was experimental error. CERN sent a
| team of smart EE/physics folks to debug it quickly. This is
| consistent with my estimate that 90% of all physics labs aren't
| capable of building, running, and interpreting state-of-the-art
| scientific measurement and discovery.
| Janicc wrote:
| Didn't the indian team have a big chunky rock of LK-99?
| Considering that the majority of researchers can at most create a
| tiny grain of it where there's still parts of it that aren't
| levitating, the conclusion to me is that their findings are
| largely useless.
| moultano wrote:
| Why does the tone of this sound just like the January 2020
| articles saying "weird nerds on twitter freaked out about viruses
| in china when they should be worried about the flu?"
| none_to_remain wrote:
| The same "no evidence" line was used about airborne COVID-19
| transmission the whole time that evidence mounted it was
| airborne.
| distortionfield wrote:
| Yeah, this article has all the smacking of major news players
| with egg on their face. Like that front page of a magazine with
| Jeff Bezos on it mocking him for starting AWS.
| woah wrote:
| "VCs are washing their hands"
| stainablesteel wrote:
| this seems click-baity
|
| but i'm glad about that, because it means communication on other
| platforms are more effective at sharing results than an outdated
| publishing system that drains people of their livelihood
| oivey wrote:
| This Nature article claimed that two of the Chinese labs
| attempting replication provided XRD measurements that didn't at
| all match what the Korean lab had. I'm not a pro in this field,
| but XRD gives you insight into the crystalline structure of
| materials. That suggests that whatever they made might not even
| be LK-99. I suppose the difference could be other contamination?
|
| Is my understanding right? If so, slightly shocking that these
| replication attempts are garnering so much visibility.
| consumer451 wrote:
| Speaking of which, here is a new video with Varda - some US
| engineers who just replicated a bit. Live stream ended 5 minutes
| ago, not sure how long the video will stay up:
|
| _LK-99 with Varda - This Week in Startups [live video]_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37002618
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1o88seNB-w
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| The original team has been working on it for 24 years (that's
| what the 99 in the name refers to). Everyone who expected a clean
| replication in a week was deluding themselves.
| bbatsell wrote:
| There were people complaining in earlier threads that bigger
| publications haven't been reporting on LK-99 -- this article is a
| perfect distillation of why. It is already significantly
| outdated, missing out on multiple interesting findings that were
| posted yesterday which would almost certainly have resulted in a
| much different piece had they been available when it was reported
| out and sources asked for comment.
| ghughes wrote:
| Notably:
|
| _Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic
| levitation of LK-99_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36994214
|
| _Andrew McCalip demonstrates synthesis of LK99_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36997821
| Lewton wrote:
| Notably, neither provided any extra evidence that LK-99 is a
| superconductor
| rendang wrote:
| They provided evidence that reduces the likelihood of total
| fraud/fabrication on the part of the original researchers,
| though.
| Lewton wrote:
| Agreed! But I think total fraud was already ruled out
| once the reports from chinese labs reproducing it came
| out
| Verdex wrote:
| I'm absolutely ready to be disappointed by LK-99. Some sort of
| fraud, some sort of experimental error, something interesting
| that's still not a real superconductor, a real superconductor
| but a quirk of the material means that it'll never scale past
| being a parlor trick, whatever.
|
| However, Nature weighing in that way feels premature to me.
| It's been what ... 2 weeks? If that? Somehow it just feels that
| something as momentous as a plausible room temperature
| superconductor should take a bit more time to rule out as a
| fake. Unless there's some pretty blatant fraud involved where
| they're literally levitating it with a string.
|
| Nature feels like the sort of publication where their job is to
| have the final say after all of the dust has settled.
| Participating in hot takes with a negative conclusion just
| feels like they're hedging their bets. If it turns out to be
| false then they can say that they were right at the beginning.
| If it turns out to be true, then everyone will be so excited
| that they'll forget about anything nature came out with.
|
| Meanwhile, wikipedia feels like it has pretty objective
| reporting on things that are actually happening more or less as
| they're happening. It just doesn't have a narrative to go along
| with it.
| whycome wrote:
| The simulation is just testing the release. They haven't
| decided whether or not to make it real yet. There's a lot of
| bureaucracy involved. Even doing this initial test caused a
| lot of debate as it's deemed too early. If it launches, it
| requires a lot of updates on the backend to expand.
| Lewton wrote:
| I severely doubt the nature article would look much different
| if written today
| meindnoch wrote:
| Nature seems pretty salty about this whole thing circumventing
| prestigious journals like theirs :D
| [deleted]
| b800h wrote:
| This is it. This episode is the beginning of science moving
| away from journals altogether.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| This is the most fun hot take.
|
| I still think it won't be replicated, but on the off chance
| we've got the real deal on our hands, science publication will
| have changed forever and this article will have aged very
| poorly.
| [deleted]
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