[HN Gopher] LK-99 isn't a superconductor
___________________________________________________________________
LK-99 isn't a superconductor
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 1093 points
Date : 2023-08-16 16:17 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| beders wrote:
| Well, maybe this is the beginning of another cold fusion story.
|
| Despite failures to reproduce the Pons/Fleischmann results, it
| spawned a whole new field: LENR which has very interesting yearly
| conferences.
| kergonath wrote:
| Not exactly. Cold fusion was contradicted by our knowledge of
| Physics at the time. Room-temperature superconductors are a
| field of active study, because even though we don't know one,
| we think they might exist and the industrial applications could
| be world-changing. The response was not "room-temperature
| superconductors cannot exist", as with cold fusion, but more
| "this sounds implausible and your preprint is dodgy;
| nevertheless we'll try to replicate it".
| 1-6 wrote:
| Once again, South Korea's academia overwhelms/overpromises but
| under-delivers.
|
| This is surely going to be a 'boy who cried wolf' moment for
| Korean schools.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| Yeah, stem cell capital of the world and all that.
| dmboyd wrote:
| On root-cause, I wonder if it's some variation or combination
| of "publish or perish" linked to failure averse political and
| cultural structures? I don't think the circumstances are unique
| to SK as you see similar effect globally where success is
| measured purely quantitatively (I.e X number of published
| papers for promotion, X% score on a test to avoid military
| service). One thing I can't get my head around is how the
| surrounding narrative was so bizarre. Particularly the "death
| bed dying wish". Is this a result of 20+ years of lead
| poisoning combined with aforementioned political issues?
| throwaway4220 wrote:
| " Derrick van Gennep, a former condensed-matter researcher at
| Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who now works in
| finance "
|
| This is always sad to see but I get it
| OJFord wrote:
| And I get why you say that, but also way more people want PhDs
| (or even to work in academic research) than the system
| supports.
|
| i.e. you have not only to resist the industry moneybags, but
| also defy odds anyway
|
| It's like being a former actor (of undisclosed repute) turned
| waiter if Hollywood A-list pay was not great (and B-list
| awful).
| philomath_mn wrote:
| Many such cases (most of the quants at my last job had PhDs in
| Physics or Chemistry)
| agrippanux wrote:
| My wife will be very happy.
|
| When I explained to her the potential if it truly was the
| breakthrough being reported, her first reaction was:
|
| "I hope we establish a government agency to regulate everything
| floating around because I don't want to get bumped into by random
| stuff".
| ok123456 wrote:
| This shows that the properties that were observed aren't as a
| result of a pure single crystal. If the observed properties can
| be explained and controlled by dislocation dynamics or other
| mechanisms of the impurities, then it may still be of interest.
| ACV001 wrote:
| imagine this - the government took over and covered up with "not
| working" theory. Maybe a key ingredient is missing which was not
| mentioned in the original paper.
| [deleted]
| Lockal wrote:
| I'm more upset that it was possible to successfully register a
| patent on the LK-99. On the one hand, patent services seem to be
| not obliged to check the workability of the patents, but on the
| other hand this is absolutely malicious activity, as it is a
| direct road to patent trolling and fraud on non-existent
| intellectual property.
| valine wrote:
| Good science takes time. Anyone making definitive claims,
| including this article, is full of it.
|
| LK-99 is probably not a super conductor, key word probably. It'll
| be definitive when the original samples have been independently
| tested.
| [deleted]
| dkroy wrote:
| How did all of these labs in China end up replicating the results
| of the paper? Were they just not reputable labs?
| philomath_mn wrote:
| Here is a list of replication attempts from another comment
| [0]. Looks like most of the replications were only on the weak
| levitation property, which could be explained by diamagnetism
| or impurities.
|
| [0] https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/claims-of-room-
| tempe...
| progrus wrote:
| One more try at the "no superconductor here, it's aliens, we
| swear" hoax before Trump does his counterattack on 8/21?
|
| This is getting ridiculous. And very entertaining.
| legohead wrote:
| Company that has already lied in the past lies again, and
| everyone eats it up, again...
|
| The internet has taught me to never trust material science
| advancements at face value. Batteries, solar power,
| superconductors, nanomaterials.. Even when they legit work, there
| is usually a straight forward reason why it just isn't feasible,
| and that is conveniently left out of the press release. I have to
| go to the HN comment section to get disappointed once again.
| lIl-IIIl wrote:
| "Company that has already lied in the past lies again, and
| everyone eats it up, again" - what are you referring to?
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Thats the first news that really torpedo this sc claim.(a Cooper
| sulphide expert recognizing the main claim of 104c of a
| resistance drop was in fact a know property of a non
| superconductor). It's too much of a coincidence plus the guy
| wouldn't lie.
| pbj1968 wrote:
| I still remember the flailing I got around here when I dared to
| mention South Korean labs have a long history of making bold
| claims.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| It's pretty wild that the scientific community can make such a
| judgement on a reasonably difficult to assess result in 2 weeks.
| This is not proper peer review (lower case p).
| shekispeaks wrote:
| They should have also included a quote from CISR an Indian lab
| that go there about the same time as many of the American labs
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.03544
| sethbannon wrote:
| I felt like folks were getting too optimistic in the early days
| and now I feel folks are getting way to pessimistic. We don't
| know if any of these failed replication experiments actually made
| the same LK-99 the Korean team did. The only way of knowing for
| sure if LK-99 is a room temp superconductor is if outside labs
| test _the samples the Korean team has made_. It 's entirely
| possible that the exact impurities in their material caused by
| their exact manufacturing process are required for
| superconducting properties to emerge. Seems like that will be
| done in the next few weeks. Still betting against it working but
| keeping my fingers crossed.
| [deleted]
| hospitalJail wrote:
| I love how quickly replication happened. This is science.
|
| Medicine/psychology/sociology and their inability to do
| replication is not science.
| LanceH wrote:
| No replication in medicine? It's biology and messy, but how
| many do you know with polio? Lots of science going on there.
| vecter wrote:
| _In their preprint, the Korean authors note one particular
| temperature at which LK-99's showed a tenfold drop in
| resistivity, from about 0.02 ohms per centimetre to 0.002 ohms
| per cm. "They were very precise about it. 104.8oC," says Prashant
| Jain, a chemist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
| "I was like, wait a minute, I know this temperature."
|
| The reaction that synthesizes LK-99 uses an unbalanced recipe:
| for every 1 part copper-doped lead phosphate crystal -- pure
| LK-99 -- it makes, it produces 17 parts copper and 5 parts
| sulfur. These leftovers lead to numerous impurities -- especially
| copper sulfide, which the Korean team reported in its sample.
|
| Jain, a copper-sulfide expert, remembered 104oC as the
| temperature at which Cu2S undergoes a phase transition if exposed
| to air. Below that temperature, Cu2S's resistivity drops
| dramatically -- a signal almost identical to LK-99's purported
| superconducting phase transition. "I was almost in disbelief that
| they missed it." Jain published a preprint on the important
| confounding effect on 7 August.
|
| [...]
|
| "That was the moment where I said, 'Well, obviously, that's what
| made them think this was a superconductor,'" says Fuhrer. "The
| nail in the coffin was this copper sulfide thing."_
|
| Science is hard. Kudos to everyone involved for trying to
| replicate it and figuring this puzzle out.
| djtango wrote:
| So they saw a large change in resistivity at 104C but what's
| not clear from this excerpt is why the Cu2S was a confounding
| factor, or isnt interesting.
|
| Is it that LK99 had impurities of Cu2S and the properties of
| Cu2S dominated but we already know things about Cu2S?
| masklinn wrote:
| Per the article, CU2S was well-characterised in the 50s.
|
| The CU2S was a confounding factor because 104C is where it
| undergoes phase changes, which drastically change _its_
| resistivity. So the change in resistivity was from the CU2S
| impurities, not the LK99 itself. As the tail end of the
| article notes, when researchers grew a completely pure
| crystal of LK99 they got a strong insulator (in the mega-
| ohms).
|
| And as a nearby commenter notes, neither 0.02 ohm-cm nor
| 0.002 ohm-cm is even a good conductor: typical conductor
| metals (gold, copper, silver, aluminum) are under 3e-6.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| > Jain, a copper-sulfide expert
|
| I would have never known that people are actual experts in one
| material. This is impressive.
| transcriptase wrote:
| Most PhDs are incredibly specific and don't necessary
| indicate broad knowledge of a field as a whole.
|
| Which is why you should be wary of "experts" making overly
| broad claims about topics within their field but far outside
| their area of expertise.
|
| Early on during Covid you would see postdoc infectious
| disease experts on every news channel 3 times daily giving
| their takes. Some of whom maybe took a 3000 level course in
| epidemiology when they were 21 and did their PhD on nematode
| infections in a single population of freshwater clams.
| Technically an infectious disease expert but I don't
| particularly care what they have to say about Covid over a
| random person on the street either.
| parker_mountain wrote:
| > Technically an infectious disease expert but I don't
| particularly care what they have to say about Covid over a
| random person on the street either.
|
| I would absolutely care more what they had to say over the
| rando, especially if they prefaced it with their level
| experience.
| madrox wrote:
| Depends on the grade they got in that 3000 course, though
| I tend to agree with you
| exmadscientist wrote:
| Yeah, uh, I wouldn't.
|
| There was a B- or C-list physics blogger a few years back
| whose graduate homework I used to grade. (I still
| remember this one, so that should tell you something.) He
| got very angry that I gave him zero credit for one
| particular question. But he:
|
| - did not use the standard/expected approach to this
| problem
|
| - did not explain what he was doing well enough for me to
| find him any partial credit (this is not easy!)
|
| - had a pile of impenetrable unnecessary very complex
| alien math that I wasn't going to try to cut through
| given that
|
| - his final answer was very, very wrong
|
| - in fact, it was wrong by _26 orders of magnitude_
|
| - and he didn't have the skill to notice something was
| wrong (and, yes, I was lenient with students who noticed
| final answers were weird even if they couldn't/didn't fix
| it up)
|
| - also, he was a major asshole (no surprise given that
| he's complaining about _this_ "indignity") who was
|
| - somehow still causing #MeToo problems in the 21st
| century despite being under 30 (seriously??)
|
| So if that's who gets held up as "authorities", even
| minor ones, forgive me if I don't listen too much. I'll
| choose who I trust.
| ajani wrote:
| Which point would be enough by itself for you to discount
| him totally?
| parker_mountain wrote:
| I didn't say authority, and I didn't say trust blindly. I
| just said I'd trust someone with baseline qualifications
| over a random (presumably unqualified) person. lmao
| godelski wrote:
| > Most PhDs are incredibly specific and don't necessary
| indicate broad knowledge of a field as a whole
|
| > Which is why you should be wary of "experts" making
| overly broad claims about topics within their field but far
| outside their area of expertise.
|
| I mostly agree, but also I think it depends on how strong
| you are suggesting this and if you also acknowledge that
| there is high variance between domains as to the variance
| within the distribution of knowledge. Your last sentence is
| where I really disagree. There is a big difference.
|
| But I think for the general person, there's 2 things of
| note: 1) just because you should be wary of an expert
| talking outside their niche (but inside their broader
| domain), doesn't mean that their opinion is equal to that
| of a layman. I'd still trust the mostly-expert over the
| non-expert any day. The true-expert is often very hard to
| find tbh. Look for nuance and you'll increase the
| likelihood of finding the expert. 2) It is easy to confuse
| expert talk with arrogance or pretentiousness. It is also
| easy to be that way when talking to a layman as the nature
| of those conversations will never be between peers, but
| more akin to a teacher and student. The two parties are not
| equal, but we're primed to treat any non-academic setting
| conversation as if we are. The experts often have serious
| doubts and are far more self-conscious than they appear.
| You just won't see that unless you're a peer and can speak
| the language, because experts are also specifically taught
| to defend their work and speak with confidence. Your hint
| is how they respond to critiques from other experts (but
| that's not easy to do accurately as there's probably a lot
| of nuance you aren't seeing and they are speaking a
| different language even if you understand all the words).
|
| Everyone should always be skeptical though. That's for
| certain. But I just want to make sure we don't turn
| knowledge into a binary setting: expert vs idiot. There's a
| lot in-between and that matters a lot.
| bogtog wrote:
| > I'd still trust the mostly-expert over the non-expert
| any day. The true-expert is often very hard to find tbh.
|
| Right, you can always find somebody more expert than
| someone else. The level of specificity that some people
| expect for a variety of problems will leave only a dozen
| or so people in the world who can call themselves
| experts.
| whoisthemachine wrote:
| Also why she might believe this is an obvious confounding
| factor and it was clearly not obvious to the authors, or
| the rest of the world!
| nvm0n2 wrote:
| https://www.quora.com/In-Tesla-and-SpaceX-how-much-of-the-
| te...
|
| _A number of years back I had an email from a bloke called
| Elon Musk. I was vaguely aware of who he was but not very.
|
| At the time I was the global expert in a very weird alloy
| (the market for it was perhaps 5 or 10 tonnes a year. A very
| weird and minority interest alloy). It was aluminium
| scandium, which the Russians had developed to compete with
| Nasa's use of aluminium lithium. In many ways a better alloy
| too. And, obviously, there were possible uses in rockets and
| so on (rather more in something like a Shuttle than in simple
| rockets though).
|
| OK, so I get this email and it asks me whether this aluminium
| scandium is worth it, will it make my rockets lighter, asks
| Musk. No, not really, it'll make them easier to weld but not
| lighter particularly. Which was pretty much the end of the
| exchange.
|
| So, when people ask me whether Musk does tech stuff I would
| have to say yes. Because he tracked down a one man company
| that knew the straight answer to the question he needed
| answering. OK, you might not think that is engineering,
| preferring to think of it as people using a slide rule to
| work it all out themselves. But finding the bloke who knows
| the answer and asking them is engineering to me - it's still
| getting to the right answer, isn't it?_
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >But finding the bloke who knows the answer and asking them
| is engineering to me - it's still getting to the right
| answer, isn't it?
|
| That's called management, not engineering.
| twic wrote:
| Scandium-aluminium alloy was popular for bicycle frames
| briefly in the 2000s. On-One made a frame wittily called
| the Scandal from it. I have a Scandal frame, but it's a
| second generation one where they dropped the scandium but
| kept the name!
| OJFord wrote:
| Well it doesn't preclude him being expert (or just doing
| work) in anything else?
|
| e.g. you might be a C++ expert, but also proficient in
| Python, and currently working professionally in Rust?
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Right but it's more like someone is an expert in the
| "async" method. You'd expect them to be expert in whatever
| language they're using, so the framing threw me off.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| The reality is that the real world is infinitely more
| complex than the toys we make in the software world.
| OJFord wrote:
| Yeah I get what you mean. Could just be a quirk of the
| reporting too - like you might write a lot of async
| python, comment on some hot topic case using that
| knowledge, GIL removal say, and then get labelled 'async
| functions expert Darth Avocado' when really you'd never
| think of yourself that way.
| lolinder wrote:
| It looks like he doesn't specialize exclusively in copper
| sulfide. His most cited works are to do with gold, and he has
| articles on a bunch of different materials:
|
| https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=7WQhABIAAAAJ&hl=en.
| ..
| deaddodo wrote:
| Yeah, OP seems to be confusing expert knowledge in a field
| with exclusive knowledge in a field.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Some fields are so advanced that people are expert in one
| single material in very specific settings. There are some
| really exotic things out there that are barely used/studied
| godelski wrote:
| Oh for sure. Expertise is exceptionally narrow. It's not a
| super low variance value, as there is spillover
| (physics/concepts/math/whatever share many similar
| principles), but most people __vastly__ underestimate the
| depth and complexity of any given topic, no matter how
| mundane and simple it may seem. I mean a good example is that
| you'll find books on o-rings, nails, screws, bolts, etc that
| are individually over a thousand pages. Hell, The Art of
| Electronics -- a book this community is probably more
| familiar with -- is a fucking godsend, but even being over 1k
| pages and generally a reference manual it is still lacking.
| Even if you get the second book (X Chapters) with an
| additional 500 pages!
|
| This is also why experts can often sniff one another out on
| online forums like this. There's a subtly to the language
| that is used which conveys an understanding of many deeper
| nuances than were a novice or even someone with a
| undergraduate would use to discuss a topic. There's a common
| misnomer that you don't understand something unless you can
| explain it to a layman (probably invented by a layman to
| justify their lack of understanding), but accuracy and
| complexity are tightly coupled. A concept with x% accuracy
| has a minimum of y complexity. But also knowing this can help
| you sniff out experts in fields you aren't also an expert in,
| but of course your classification accuracy drops since you
| are introducing more noise. Still, a useful guide if you're
| trying to figure out who to listen to. Obviously much easier
| said than done.
| morelisp wrote:
| He is likely an expert in many other materials too.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| One of my professors was an expert in the Helium-3 isotope.
| Spent a lot of time on the second excited state.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's some of the most interesting matter.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I work with people who have basically researched amorphous
| silicon for decades.
| kergonath wrote:
| Yeah. Not surprising. My Master's supervisor did, though he
| branched out after a while. I know people who've spent
| almost their entire career on iron.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Being that this is HN, I initially parsed 'iron' as
| 'hardware'...
| kergonath wrote:
| Well, there is some of it in most hardware :D
| dougmwne wrote:
| My partner's grandmother spent her entire career researching
| a single bacteria species and its reaction to a single
| environmental toxin.
| kergonath wrote:
| You have to (though in general we're expert on a couple of
| classes of compounds rather than just one). The literature is
| just too vast to follow otherwise. Particularly in
| fashionable fields with loads of funding like high-
| temperature superconductors, battery materials, PV materials,
| fuel cells, things like that.
| deepspace wrote:
| When I first saw the quoted resistivity, 0.002 ohms per cm, my
| thought was "this is not even a conductor, let alone a
| superconductor". 0.2 Ohms/m is several orders of magnitude less
| conductive than most metals, and solidly in the semiconductor
| range.
| rubberpoliceman wrote:
| Resistivity is measured in ohms * meter, so this may be a
| unit conversion issue...
| moffkalast wrote:
| Right? That's what's not clear to me either. If they got
| readings for superconductivity and Cu2S impurities were the
| cause then fantastic, Cu2S is the room temperature
| superconductor? Just get a load of that instead then.
|
| Or perhaps the way they measured the whole experiment was
| completely inane from the start if a simple conductor passes
| with flying colours. With that and them presenting
| ferromagnetism as the Messner effect makes me kind of
| question the competence of the entire analysis.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| >"I was like, wait a minute, I know this temperature."
|
| This is an incredibly funny quote out of context, and the
| absurdity of it betrays an extreme domain expertise.
| venusenvy47 wrote:
| It's almost like "I know Unix" from Jurassic Park, but not as
| silly.
| justincredible wrote:
| [dead]
| duskwuff wrote:
| There's probably plenty of "computer numbers" you'd recognize
| immediately.
|
| ("It stops working after 65,535 seconds? Wait a minute, I
| know that number.")
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| Oh yeah, definitely. I almost included "December 31, 1969"
| as an example (wait a minute, I know that date!), but
| decided it wasn't arcane enough.
|
| I think a lot of IT/CS people have almost parasocial
| relationships with powers of two that seem very silly to
| outsiders.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| Iris, the fabled ethnicly Russian LK99 Homebrewer with the
| Catgirl Girlfriend, is not convinced :
|
| - "70% CuS impurity" are you sure you didn't grab the
| Chalcocite by accident?
|
| - There's no significant CuS in samples prepared at 925degC.
| There cannot be.
|
| - I tried forcefully introducing sulfide into pbo, it just.
| Doesn't work. Even at 600degC. PbS reduces lead in 2 PbO to
| 3Pb, leaving as SO2.
|
| https://twitter.com/iris_IGB/status/1691840478189384097?t=cB...
| dvt wrote:
| I really wish less people would give pseudo-anon accounts
| this much credence. Literally no good science has (ever?)
| been done on Twitter/X, it's mostly just stupid equivocating.
| Much thanks goes out to the actual scientists out there
| working in labs and publishing their findings.
|
| The academic/publishing process is _far_ from perfect already
| (conflicts of interest, funding, political pressure,
| institutional pressure, personal pride), now imagine throwing
| a "Catgirl Girlfriend" (that trolls on an anonymous social
| media account) into the mix.
|
| Free speech is fine, it's the listeners I have a problem
| with.
| not-my-account wrote:
| A 4chan user solved a 25yo combinatorics problem. If it can
| be done there why not twitter
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18292061
| dvt wrote:
| This is a bad counter-argument. What do you think is the
| overwhelming product of ranting and raving of anime-
| picture "scientists" on Twitter: scientific muddying of
| waters that confuse laypeople and promulgate
| disinformation, or actual theorem-solving?
| ugh123 wrote:
| Imagine if we could get all the materials science experts
| tucked away in a lab for a year working together with a large
| budget...
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| it took 1 weekend of developers and support staff, tucked
| away in a conference room, for overstock.com to accept crypto
| payments on their site.
|
| I think we can do better!
| otterley wrote:
| They'd be a juicy target for some kind of malfeasance. Never
| put all the experts in the same location!
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Their family would be miserable, their kids would swear to
| never become a material science expert, and they'd all be
| missing on the cross discussions with other fields and
| inspirations coming from outside the material science world ?
|
| Not really trying to be flippant, but that pretty much feels
| like a James Bond villain fantasy, and only a few select
| people would probably enjoy the setting.
|
| We kinda have a real world equivalent with people working on
| the LHC by the way.
| ugh123 wrote:
| Maybe someone with a billion dollars could re-locate them
| and their families onto some posh island all expenses paid.
| If Elon had instead invested 40B into this and other
| tactical science projects rather than dump it into Twitter,
| imagine the possibilities lol.
| tonycoco wrote:
| "70% CuS impurity"
| [deleted]
| koreanguy wrote:
| [dead]
| dekhn wrote:
| my only criticism is to the people who, without real background
| in the area, read the paper, thought the synthesis was "easy",
| raced to get the reagents only to realize that you can't easily
| order somet things without a prior relationship and trust with a
| chemical supplier, and then showed some antimagnetism in their
| shitty examples, without understanding that that phenomenon isn't
| conclusive evidence. It's sort of an example of the "why don't
| you just...." phenomenon where a noob tells an expert that
| solving a problem is easy...
|
| I guess I also criticize whomever published the original paper.
| They did just a bad enough job to get people excited, but experts
| pretty quickly noticed major flaws in the article which cast
| enough doubt to pretty much reject even attemptiong a
| replication.
|
| Well, i suppose to be fair, I should also criticize the theorists
| who came out and made crazy claims saying that theory supports
| this being a superconductor- Konerding's 27th law, amended, says:
| "Given a ridiculous experimental claim, there will always be at
| least 3 theorists who publish a paper saying that the theory
| supports the claim".
|
| Anybody who lived through Fleishman and Pons (and fusion in
| general) has learned to be highly skeptical, up front, and the
| expectation is that the publisher/author of the article has done
| an excellent job making their findings reproducible.
| acedTrex wrote:
| The original paper wasn't published, it was leaked
| bacon_waffle wrote:
| Why criticize? People spend their time and money on pointless
| pursuits all the time.
| dekhn wrote:
| My goal in criticism is to guide interested players towards
| more fruitful pursuits. I don't want to see invalid science
| sucking up all the attention and crowding out legitimate but
| boring science.
| bacon_waffle wrote:
| Negative experimental results are valid science, aren't
| they?
|
| If you believe attention is a 0-sum game (I don't, but am
| trying to understand), why not focus criticism on those
| people spending time on any number of other pursuits that
| are even further from fruitful. It just seems like, for
| whatever your idea of "fruitful" is, there are entire
| industries and institutions that are focused on taking
| attention away from fruitful pursuits.
| pistachiopro wrote:
| You can publish an article with a title like this and probably
| not end up embarrassed. Room temperature and pressure super
| conductors seem hard enough to find that chances are any given
| paper claiming to have found one will end up with a more mundane
| explanation. And I do think the information about the phase
| change of Cu2S is highly relevant, as it points at a way the
| original researches my have fooled themselves.
|
| The dismissal of the partial levitation as ferromagnetism, on the
| other hand, doesn't strike me as especially robust.
| Ferromagnetism explains the partial levitation of tiny fragments
| of material generated by people trying to reproduce LK-99. Very
| light and thin pieces of ferromagnetic material will align
| themselves with a magnetic field. For example, Andrew McCalip
| (who streamed himself attempting to reproduce the material in his
| rocket startup's lab) generated a partially levitating fragment
| and sent it into USC, where they determined it was ferromagnetic.
| But bulk pieces of ferromagnetic material will just stick to
| magnets (or if they are magnetized, they will stick to one side
| and be unstably repelled from the other).
|
| Ferromagnetism doesn't explain the levitation demonstrated in the
| videos put out by the original researches, though. Barring fraud,
| the most likely explanation for that kind of levitation is
| diamagnetism. The article mentions Derrick van Gennep recreating
| the partial levitation video with a chunk of pyrolytic graphite
| (one of the most diamagnetic materials we know of, other than
| superconductors), supergluing iron filings to a corner of it to
| anchor it to the magnet. The levitation in that video comes from
| diamagnetism, not ferromagnetism. LK-99 is primarily made of
| lead, not graphite, which is 5-10 times denser, so the
| diamagnetic effect must be at least that much stronger than pure
| pyrolytic graphite. The thing is, as the rest of the article
| points out, the supposed main constituents of LK-99 have now been
| extensively studied, and none of them appear to be especially
| diamagnetic, so something in those samples the original team
| recorded must be extremely diamagnetic to make up for it!
| floxy wrote:
| >so something in those samples the original team recorded must
| be extremely diamagnetic to make up for it!
|
| I wonder what would have happened if they would have pushed a
| paper out talking about anomalously high diamagnetism and
| skipped any mentions of superconducting. And let people
| speculate if it is a superconductor. I suppose we wouldn't be
| talking about it. But I hope that we see some group try to
| replicate the diamagnetic material properties.
| [deleted]
| BurningFrog wrote:
| OK, but I have a real good feeling about LK-100!
| zephyrthenoble wrote:
| Watching this unfold on HN has been eerily similar to watching
| r/UFOs whenever someone comes forward with "proof" of
| UFOs/coverups/whatever. I never want to rain on anyone's parade,
| as proof of ETs or room temperature superconductors would be
| great, but the hype only serves to obfuscate the truth. At this
| point, I'm prepped to disbelieve because of the obvious over-
| hyping.
|
| People want these things to be true so bad that they will twist
| every detail to fit the narrative they want. It would be funny,
| if it weren't so sad.
| postalrat wrote:
| "but the hype only serves to obfuscate the truth"
|
| Is that true? Do you think the Koreans or anyone would have
| made more progress finding the truth without the hype?
| zephyrthenoble wrote:
| Are you implying that people on Hacker News saying LK-99 is a
| superconductor helped the scientific community in some way?
| chpatrick wrote:
| Did it "obfuscate the truth"?
|
| The truth was only discovered because the hype made a lot
| of scientists investigate the material.
| malux85 wrote:
| Strawman argument - You are reducing the comment to "Hacker
| News" when thats not at all what they said, they said "The
| hype".
|
| For sure the hype caused a lot more focus on
| reproducability attempts than it would have got otherwise.
| mgfist wrote:
| The interest and intrigue around LK-99 made science cool.
| There will be all kinds of positive knock on effects of
| this - least of which is that we got down to the bottom of
| LK-99 years before it would've happened if the preprint
| never got published.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| Who on HN said that with enough confidence and credibility
| to do enough damage to the conversation such that it would
| be better had the conversation not happen at all?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Do you honestly believe HN discussing this had ANY affect
| on ANYONE?
| hindsightbias wrote:
| At least superconductors are a real thing.
| zephyrthenoble wrote:
| That's a fair point. Maybe people did react similarly, but
| the LK-99 hype was at the very least grounded in scientific
| methodology.
|
| I should keep that in perspective and be a little less harsh.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Eh, you should still be a little harsh, though.
|
| A common thread in a lot of these stories is people pushing
| the idea that The Authorities are not to be trusted. The
| government is lying to you about UFOs! The scientific
| establishment has been sitting on room temperature
| superconductors for 20 years!
|
| And sure, question authority.
|
| But also question the people telling you to question
| authority.
|
| Because contrarians are just _ripe_ for affinity fraud, and
| while most of that affinity fraud is centered around alt-
| med, the cultivation of a pervasive distrust of authority
| is part of what enables the scam.
| feralderyl wrote:
| Has anyone ever worked out a "proof" that a room
| temperature/ambient pressure superconductor can even be made?
| Like is there a formula or something that can be pointed to that
| says, according to everything we know its even possible?
| spott wrote:
| No. We don't understand superconductivity well enough to even
| attempt something like that.
|
| I think we can say that some of the _current_ superconductor
| mechanisms don't allow it at room temperature, but we don't
| have enough of an overarching theory of superconductivity to
| say something like that more generally.
| popilewiz wrote:
| [dead]
| JohnDeHope wrote:
| Which is more likely in our lifetime: aliens, or an ambient
| superconductor?
| mindcrime wrote:
| I'm going to vote for "ambient superconductor" even after this.
| At least we know superconductors actually exist at all, and the
| history of the field reflects incremental progress in terms of
| increasing the threshold temperature for superconductivity.
| With "aliens" we don't have much to go on at all, aside from
| vague Fermi-equation'esque appeals to "There must _be_ aliens
| because the universe is so big[1] " or whatever.
|
| [1]: I actually agree that it's very likely that alien life
| either has existed, does exist, or will exist _somewhere_ in
| the universe. My skepticism is towards the possibility of that
| life visiting Earth. And mostly for the exact same reason:
| because the universe is so damn big.
| kergonath wrote:
| Just a reminder that's not everything one can find in a paper
| (never mind a preprint) is true. The response from the community
| was great. Modellers doing some electronic structure
| calculations, synthesis experts trying to re-create the material,
| people doing all sorts of characterisation. The closest parallel
| I can think of is the faster-than-light neutrinos from a couple
| of years ago. Except that this time there were many teams and
| individuals all over the world trying to replicate the results.
| The material was supposedly easy to make, the reagents were quite
| easy to find, room-temperature conductivity measurements are not
| too difficult. There was a lot of enthusiasm and activity, which
| was really motivating.
|
| The fact that it could not be replicated is not surprising,
| considering the sloppiness of the original preprint. But still,
| it was a very public example of science in action.
|
| What was also interesting is the response from some corners of
| the Internet who were more than happy to bash scientists who were
| supposedly trying to cover up their own incompetence by debunking
| the plucky researchers from a brave private institution. Well,
| most often if something sounds too good to be true, that's
| because it is.
| [deleted]
| cynusx wrote:
| I'm curious (but not really qualified to understand) if the
| theoretical calculations on viable superconducting structures was
| a new insight on its own.
|
| If there is a theoretical model for ambient temperature
| superconductivity, then that should help us zoom in on potential
| materials that could be an actual superconductor someday?
| harha_ wrote:
| I don't understand how did LK-99 create such wuss in the first
| place.
| Knee_Pain wrote:
| [dead]
| usrbinbash wrote:
| Because a room-temp, amb-press superconductor, that can be made
| from readly available cheap materials, would be almost on par
| with the discovery of fire in terms of importance for our
| species technological capabilities.
|
| Even the simplest example of what that would mean is already
| amazing to our society: Imagine a power-grid that no longer
| loses power to electrical resistence in the wires.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Cheap doesn't mean free. We can already reduce resistance by
| piling in more cheap metal, but it becomes more effort than
| it's worth.
|
| And superconductors have limits on how much power they can
| carry.
|
| But most importantly, the power grid doesn't lose all that
| much to resistance. And you'd still lose power to
| transmission line capacitance against the ground.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > Cheap doesn't mean free
|
| Means cheap enough to be mass produced, and available.
|
| > But most importantly, the power grid doesn't lose all
| that much to resistance
|
| Laws of scaling, even a small percentage of power lost to
| resistence is a hige overall loss, the avoidance of which
| is desirable.
|
| And as I said, this is only the simplest example.
| breuleux wrote:
| > Imagine a power-grid that no longer loses power to
| electrical resistence in the wires.
|
| From what I can see the power loss is in the 8-15% range.
| It'd be awesome to save that, but it's not game changing, and
| you have to take into account the cost of replacing the
| wires.
| BirAdam wrote:
| Well, that's true, but there are also more important
| applications: reducing heat and power loss in chips,
| increasing the efficiency of electric motors, increasing
| the efficiency of electromagnets, decreasing charge times
| for batteries, and so on. I may not say as important as
| fire, but it would certainly be in the same league as the
| integrated circuit.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| The electromagnets are losing a notable amount to
| resistance in a way that superconducting could help. The
| chips and batteries are not.
|
| I don't know why people even bring up batteries. They're
| not going to make any difference to batteries that I'm
| aware of. In theory you could use superconducting coils
| as storage, but that's on the level of bulk capacitors,
| not batteries.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > It'd be awesome to save that, but it's not game changing
|
| An 8-15% increase in available electricity without any new
| power plants built isn't game changing?
|
| The ability to transport power over longer distances,
| making eg. solar farms in remote locations suddenly
| feasible projects isn't game changing?
|
| > and you have to take into account the cost of replacing
| the wires
|
| No I really don't have to, as we, as a species, seem to
| have money in abundance. What we do not have in abundance,
| is biospheres. We have exactly one of those, and if it's
| ruined, all the money won't help.
|
| The ability to suddenly boost the efficiency of our
| electrical grids by 8-15% would not solely solve the
| problems our species currently causes for itself, but it
| would help a ton.
| carabiner wrote:
| It was the techbros hyping it on twitter.
| morelisp wrote:
| People are desperate to turn everything into content-identity
| fodder. Hundreds of IFLS channels making "fans of science."
| Piles of WSB bros wanting to play some markets like they have a
| fucking clue what's going on. Crypto-AI idiots hoping to jump
| and pump the next thing. Men on the street with little context
| hearing "cheaper phones." Culture warriors saying it means we
| don't have to worry about global warming anymore.
|
| Nothing can just be itself anymore, it's all gotta be grist.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Hype boys once again btfo by establishment science.
| tamimio wrote:
| Thing is, hype boys are only looking for hypes, more clicks,
| more money, I remember seeing a barista suddenly became a
| scientist.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| And a chef become a military leader.
| [deleted]
| jauco wrote:
| (I am very much a layperson)
|
| So does this mean that the videos that showed LK-99 hovering but
| not rotating are fake? Or can you have that static hover effect
| without being a superconductor?
| stetrain wrote:
| > In the video, the same edge of the sample seemed to stick to
| the magnet, and it seemed delicately balanced. By contrast,
| superconductors that levitate over magnets can be spun and even
| held upside-down. "None of those behaviors look like what we
| see in the LK-99 videos," van Gennep says.
|
| > He thought LK-99's properties were more likely the result of
| ferromagnetism. So he constructed a pellet of compressed
| graphite shavings with iron filings glued to it. A video made
| by Van Gennep shows that his disc -- made of non-
| superconducting, ferromagnetic materials -- mimicked LK-99's
| behaviour.
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| That explains the half levitation
|
| A few videos came out of full levitation, but it's pretty
| certain they are fake
| TwoFactor wrote:
| While there's certainly a lot of evidence that its not a
| superconductor, no one can make the definitive statement that
| this article does without testing the original sample.
| terrib1e wrote:
| I was waiting for the first line of the article to be 'LK-99 is
| not a superconductor... It's an ultraconductor!'
|
| Alas, today is just not my day.
| DarkmSparks wrote:
| "The science is settled."
|
| Proceeds to quote a guy who studied chemistry at university and
| now works in finance.
|
| Now, Im not saying it is a superconductor. But please, don't
| insult my intelligence with garbage like that, I'm more inclined
| to believe that kind of reporting is evidence that serious
| scientists are not willing to go on record as saying it isn't.
| threeseed wrote:
| "The science is settled."
|
| - No idea what exactly the original replication process was.
|
| - Limited number of replication attempts globally.
|
| - No comments or samples analysed from the original authors.
| [deleted]
| sorenjan wrote:
| Sixty Symbols released a video about this yesterday, and in it
| professor Philip Moriarty is less than impressed with the whole
| ordeal. I haven't been paying attention, I'm too jaded and
| skeptical and assumed from the start that there was something
| wrong and much hype about nothing.
|
| Bad Science and Room Temperature Superconductors - Sixty Symbols:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl-AgmoZ5mo
| ecf wrote:
| Loved the video. Also very annoyed with the general reception
| seen on HN like "well it was fun". Unreal the authors had the
| audacity to add that last line proclaiming a new age for
| humankind. Even more unreal that news everywhere fell for it.
| penjelly wrote:
| everyone in this thread should watch this, instead of "the
| excitement was good for everyone" they might realize these
| hoaxes harm scientific integrity. The audacity of HN to state
| something is good, without listening to scientists give their
| take on it.
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| porcoda wrote:
| I wouldn't call it a hoax - it was largely a very overstated
| result that didn't stand up to deeper scrutiny. That isn't
| really harmful. The primary issue I have with this, and many
| related things in recent years, is people outside the
| community of working scientists treating "X was posted on the
| arXiv" as "X was published". This tends to lead to people
| assuming that since it appears on that site and has the
| layout of a regular paper that it somehow has legitimacy. We
| saw this over and over and over during the peak of the
| pandemic, even seeing regular news sources writing articles
| where the only source material was some random recently
| posted arXiv paper. I don't think I ever saw corrections
| published in the cases when those preprints proved to be
| bogus. The arXiv is extremely useful, but lots of people
| outside the community of working scientists don't seem to
| understand how to weight what people post there.
|
| As for the "audacity of HN" - this site is a very bizarre
| mixture of a relatively small number of working scientists, a
| lot of people without much scientific background who are very
| interested in science, and get-rich-quick startup types who
| are sniffing around for the next breakthrough they can turn
| into money. That mix leads to weird dynamics when it comes to
| how scientific activities get discussed.
| rubidium wrote:
| Best as we can tell, it wasn't a hoax. It was a poorly
| understood experiment (and perhaps premature arxiv preprint).
| It's very similar to the "faster than speed of light" puzzle
| from a few years back. It doesn't harm scientific integrity.
| It reveals that science is by nature an exploratory process
| where what we know today is subject to change in light of new
| data and theory.
|
| As a PhD physics scientist with a familiarity with this area,
| I'm glad this got the attention it did and showed science
| working "as it should".
| Affric wrote:
| I like Phil but around the table this morning with a few
| working/publishing scientists they all disagreed with his
| assertion that this paper has done more harm than good.
|
| Consensus was that this would lead to more people interested
| in the field and what actually does work.
|
| There's heaps of sloppy science out there. There are massive
| structural issues in how science is done.
|
| There's obviously not enough money or prestige in condensed
| matter physics if Phil thinks this is a bad hoax and it's bad
| for Science.
|
| Within the space of a month this was resolved. It wasn't even
| published. Go to pharma, medicine, vet, ag and you will see
| hoaxes that last years. Reviewers who don't have any relevant
| knowledge. Journals which won't retract until you threaten to
| sue them. Universities that will take no disciplinary action
| against hoaxers at all. LK-99 was almost debunked in a single
| media cycle.
|
| The people who have taken this to reduce the credibility of
| science rather than these fallible humans who succumbed to
| their impulse for fame didn't give science any credibility in
| the first place.
|
| EDIT: shout out to our favourite website retraction watch.
| Anything you read there remember, that's science working and
| some Scientist somewhere who likes being right has vanquished
| their enemy in the academy. https://retractionwatch.com/
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > instead of "the excitement was good for everyone" they
| might realize these hoaxes harm scientific integrity.
|
| Totally disagree. If anything, this whole episode (debacle?)
| reinforced the fact that _science works_ and the process
| played out exactly how the scientific process _should_ work:
|
| 1. First, the paper was originally posted on arxiv, meaning
| it was a pre-print and didn't go through any peer review. So
| the vast majority of comments I saw on it was "Wow, this
| would be really cool, _if it turns out to be true_. "
|
| 2. Immediately many labs around the world started trying to
| replicate the results. And very quickly there were some
| negative results that came back.
|
| 3. The thing that I think is so cool is not only did negative
| results come back, but from TFA people now have a very good
| understanding of _why_ the initial analysis was incorrect.
| That 's great science.
|
| One may argue that this was really a failure in media
| communication vs. the actual underlying science, but if
| anything it teaches appropriate skepticism, _especially_ when
| a report is initially published, without peer review, without
| yet being replicated, that ends with the sentence "We
| believe that our new development will be a brand-new
| historical event that opens a new era for humankind."
| penjelly wrote:
| good points. I can agree to that. However, I do think
| something did break down and I think your assessment below
| is more accurate than my initial take.
|
| > One may argue that this was really a failure in media
| communication vs. the actual underlying science
|
| the scientific process and scientists here are innocent,
| media not so much in my eyes.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Yeah, I think Professor Moriarty in the video comes to a
| similar conclusion - he does say "in that sense is
| science working", and goes on to lament the problems with
| misinformation in the social media age. I can definitely
| sympathize with the frustration of scientists having to
| deal with so much social media bullshit, and people who
| so confidently believe "My ignorance is as equal as your
| hard work and experience."
|
| That said, I really loved that Sixty Symbols video for a
| couple reasons:
|
| 1. First, Moriarty was pretty much exactly spot on in his
| skepticism: the reduction in resistivity is _not_ the
| behavior you 'd expect to see in a superconductor (turned
| out to be due to copper sulfide impurities), and that the
| floating in a magnet behavior is not that surprising and
| could be due to diamagnetism.
|
| 2. I wasn't previously that familiar with diamagnetism
| beyond a vague "I remember hearing about that", so this
| whole thing led me known the wikipedia rabbit hole to
| find out about diamagnetism which was really interesting
| to me.
|
| 3. Professor Moriarty explains "this is not how you do
| science" (bad science by over-hyped press release is at
| least as old as cold fusion) and gives very good advice
| on how you _should_ do good science in an age of Arxiv.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| What about L and K, the original scientists? Lots of speculation
| that LK-99 would be a career ending paper if it turned out that
| it wasn't a room temperature superconductor.
| jcarrano wrote:
| If 20 years of horsing around with a material that does not
| work did not end their careers, neither will this.
| throw-ru-938 wrote:
| Didn't they only get funding to horse around with that
| material several years ago?
| hedora wrote:
| Well, yes, but their prototype time machine let them put in
| more years per year than you'd expect.
|
| (Someone anonymously claimed they have a time machine on
| social media, so it must be true!)
|
| Seriously though, it sounds like the research group is
| doing interesting work, and also being careful about the
| claims they make (even if the internet hype cycle is not),
| so kudos to them.
| gfodor wrote:
| The substance produced from the paper isn't a superconductor.
| While extremely unlikely, there is still a chance that LK-99 is a
| superconductor, but the paper itself did not sufficiently
| describe the method needed to make it so as to replicate it
| properly. We will know the resolution to this once the sample
| from the original researchers is assessed by a third party, of
| which there are presently at least two to my understanding doing
| this right now.
| Moomoomoo309 wrote:
| I found Thunderf00t's video on LK-99 to be funny because he
| pointed out something no one else did: In almost all applications
| of superconductors, they don't use high-temperature ones for one
| simple reason: Material properties. Most high-temp
| superconductors (including LK-99, he was assuming it was one,
| since he's not qualified to say one way or the other) are a
| ceramic. The ones that see use in the LHC, for instance, aren't.
| They're metallic, so you can form them into the shape you need
| without having to manufacture it in that shape to begin with,
| since you'd need another superconductor to join pieces like glue,
| which we don't have. That alone doomed LK-99 to the department of
| "cool, but not super useful", since most of the really
| interesting uses were for large things, not small ones.
| reportingsjr wrote:
| The current generation of mass manufactured high temperature
| superconducting tape is based on YBCO, which is a crystalline
| material (presumably what is meant here when saying ceramic).
| So the argument that superconductors need to be
| metallic/malleable to be useful doesn't really make a lot of
| sense.
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| YBCO isn't really used for anything. MRI machines use
| metallic NbTi even though it requires liquid helium because
| YBCO is too brittle and can't handle large currents.
| kergonath wrote:
| > presumably what is meant here when saying ceramic
|
| Probably not. Being crystalline and being a ceramic are
| completely unrelated. Standard superconductors like niobium-
| tin and niobium-titanium are crystalline metals
| (intermetallic alloys). The vast majority of metals are
| crystalline, to the point that when a company tried to make a
| metallic glass a couple of years ago (under the name Liquid
| Metal), it made quite a bit of noise.
| willis936 wrote:
| That's fine but YBCO is a crystalline ceramic.
| kergonath wrote:
| Indeed. With a perovskite-related structure.
| seiferteric wrote:
| I thought it was a poor point. The paper proposed a new
| mechanism for the superconductivity, which would have been a
| bigger deal than this specific formulation (lk-99). If it were
| true, it would be a new class of superconductors which I would
| think this would lead to development of new formulations that
| perhaps had better properties. Plus as others have said,
| superconductor material can and is deposited on tapes (see
| ReBCO) to make it usable.
| EvgeniyZh wrote:
| They didn't propose new class of superconductors. They
| conjectured that LK99 follows some 25-year-old theory from a
| paper written in Korean. Leaving alone the fact that the
| theory doesn't make much sense to me (at least the parts I
| managed to understand), there was no evidence in the LK-99
| paper that this mechanism is indeed what makes LK99
| superconductive (or more precisely that it is present in
| LK99).
| floxy wrote:
| The existing high temperature superconductors in production are
| also ceramics. They just deposit thin layers on another
| substrate and then you get flexible tapes. When you hear
| "second generation" HTS tapes, that is what people are
| referring to. AMSC and SuperPower crank it out by the mile.
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=superconducting+tape&iax=im...
| anabab wrote:
| Why can't regular conductors be used as such glue? i.e. you mix
| the ceramic superconductor powder into, say, molten copper, and
| make the wires out of the mix. The result would be copper wires
| with bits of superconductor in it. The result won't be
| superconducting per se, but should have less resistance than
| pure non-superconducting material which might be useful for
| certain applications.
| redox99 wrote:
| Thunderfoot is more focused on being a contrarian than being
| accurate and unbiased. See sibling comments that explain why it
| being a ceramic isn't that relevant.
| penjelly wrote:
| yeah thunderfoots video really dismissed a lot of the hopes i
| had, and im glad for it.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| The problem, which is often the case with Thunderf00t, is that
| he is missing the forest for the trees. No one who knows
| anything was thinking of using LK-99 for serious applications.
| The specs of LK-99 where just too shit. What it would have been
| is a start shot for understanding the effect and creating more
| useful materials based on the same underlying physical process.
| fluoridation wrote:
| Thunderf00t's point, though, is that LK-99 is not novel in
| its material category. High temperature superconductors that
| are hard and brittle already existed. What would be
| interesting would be a malleable high temperature
| semiconductor, because then you can make it into cables.
| postalrat wrote:
| Sounds like Thunderf00t doomed himself to be wrong no
| matter what happens to lk-99.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| a superconductor at 100+ degrees celsius and ambient
| pressures doesn't exist as of now. anything even
| approaching that would be earth shattering. Even if they
| are ceramic.
| willis936 wrote:
| There is nothing remotely close to the category of "stp
| superconductor". This is quite obvious when looking at a
| plot of critical limits of known superconductors.
| kergonath wrote:
| > Most high-temp superconductors (including LK-99, he was
| assuming it was one, since he's not qualified to say one way or
| the other) are a ceramic. The ones that see use in the LHC, for
| instance, aren't.
|
| Aren't the LHC magnets niobium-titanium? Those aren't high
| temperature superconductors. Though it is indeed a metal under
| any definition. The rule of thumb is that high-temperature
| superconductors can be cooled by liquid nitrogen alone. This is
| not the case of the LHC magnets, which also have a liquid
| helium cooling loop.
|
| > They're metallic, so you can form them into the shape you
| need without having to manufacture it in that shape to begin
| with, since you'd need another superconductor to join pieces
| like glue, which we don't have.
|
| The term "metallic" is unhelpful because often in material
| science it just means an electronic conductor (a material with
| a non-zero density of states at the Fermi level). Under that
| definition, some ceramics are metallic, and the opposite of
| "metallic" is "insulator", or sometimes "semi-conductor".
|
| YBCO, which is probably the most used high-temperature
| superconductor, is an oxyde, so a ceramic, but still an
| electronic (super)conductor, so metallic. The fact that it's an
| oxyde does not prevent its use, notably in spherical tokamaks.
|
| So I don't know the person you're referencing but their
| background work on the subject seems less than adequate, from
| what you say.
| putnambr wrote:
| Did you skip over "In almost all applications of
| superconductors, they don't use high-temperature ones for one
| simple reason: Material properties."
|
| They're saying that LHC does not use a ceramic, and therefore
| high-temperature, superconductor; instead they use metallic
| (cooled) superconductors because they can be molded.
| kergonath wrote:
| The sentence still does not make sense because the
| superconductors in the LHC (though, rereading it a couple
| of times it is somewhat ambiguous) are not high temperature
| by any definition. Also, again, ceramic high-temperature
| superconductors are metallic, or they would not be
| conductors. "Ceramic" and "metallic" are not mutually
| exclusive in material sciences.
|
| There are lots of reasons to use more classical
| superconductors in the LHC, just as in ITER. Some are
| design and engineering issues, as you mention. Another one
| is that the tapes we use for YBCO were not a practical
| thing when the LHC was designed. But now they are (though
| they haven't been used in such a large scale) and you can
| bet that they'll jump at any opportunity to get rid of the
| helium loop and take advantage of the stronger magnetic
| fields you can get with YBCO.
| penjelly wrote:
| can you make wires from cermets? Thats the point. we need
| a substance that is malleable(?) enough like copper wire
| that electrons can pass through. Pottery ceramic wont
| work like that.
| kergonath wrote:
| > can you make wires from cermets?
|
| Well, nobody mentioned cermets, or wires, and there are
| plenty of applications for superconductors beyond wires.
| Even so, we are perfectly able to make fibre optics
| cables with silica, which is a ceramic.
|
| > we need a substance that is malleable(?) enough like
| copper wire that electrons can pass through.
|
| Malleability (actually, ductility) has nothing to do with
| electric conductivity. It can be useful depending on the
| use case, but for example on a printed circuit you don't
| care about that. Not everything is a dangling wire.
|
| YBCO a ceramic superconductor, it is used in thin films
| that are deposited on metallic substrates in tapes and it
| works well. See figure 2 of the paper here: https://www.r
| esearchgate.net/publication/271637455_Dipole_Ma... .
|
| Also, you might not realise this but pretty much nothing
| is malleable at liquid helium temperature.
|
| > Pottery ceramic wont work like that.
|
| Sigh. Ceramics are not pottery, and more than 99% of the
| time do not have anything to do with pottery. Ceramics
| are compounds that are not intermetallic, typically
| oxides, sulphides, nitrides, etc. Some are bendy (though
| generally less than metallic alloys), some are hard, some
| are electric conductors, some are not. They have very
| diverse sets of properties.
|
| They are everywhere in the chips on the device you use,
| in its display, in the power plants that make electrons
| move so you can use it, in any lithium-ion battery, etc.
| I don't think I can name one device that does not involve
| ceramics. Even a shovel, either in the form of a passive
| layer that makes it stainless, or in the form of rust on
| it. None of that has anything to do with pottery.
| jacquesm wrote:
| This should not be downvoted.
| scythe wrote:
| >In almost all applications of superconductors, they don't use
| high-temperature ones for one simple reason: Material
| properties.
|
| The problem is that this is not true anymore. It was true when
| I was in high school. Modern methods of manufacturing cuprate
| superconductors have been applied to the largest-scale
| projects:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holbrook_Superconductor_Projec...
|
| https://publikationen.bibliothek.kit.edu/1000075557/4402937
|
| https://indico.cern.ch/event/775529/contributions/3309887/at...
| qayxc wrote:
| All these use metallic (or ceramic-like with metallic
| properties) super conductors, though. That was the point: the
| material properties. If it's not metallic or exhibiting
| metallic-like properties (e.g. BSCCO), the practical
| usefulness is limited.
| ianburrell wrote:
| Lots of superconductors aren't very good superconductors. They
| have a low critical magnetic field which limits the current
| they can carry and the magnetic field they can produce.
|
| The liquid helium cooled niobium-titanium can make strong field
| and is easy to produce. The RBCOs superconductors, YBCO is the
| main one, are liquid nitrogen cooled and make even higher
| magnetic fields. It sounds like it took a while to figure out
| how make them in bulk.
|
| YBCO superconductors are going to be revolution but will take
| time for the older systems to disappear. Good example is ITER,
| which was designed for liquid helium magnets cause nothing else
| was practical at the time. The SPARC tokamak from MIT uses YBCO
| magnets which means it can be smaller, higher field, and
| cheaper cooling.
| samstave wrote:
| Can one make a micro-fluidic-slurry that is pumped through a tube
| surrounded by a C style cup of magnets.
|
| The slurry is passed through super cooling nodes to keep it at
| sub temp.
|
| and an a reverse C shape coupler is the drive - so you draw the
| lead/push the lead but you can maintain the coolant in a much
| more pulsed way?
|
| Middle out.
|
| C meets C in the CC (but with mirrors)((and magnets)) [Assume you
| have never evaluated how a roller-coaster works]
| chmod600 wrote:
| If the video showed ferromagnetism, which parts of the material
| and/or impurities are ferromagnetic enough for that to happen?
|
| If none, does that mean scientific fraud (e.g. adding an impurity
| intentionally), or is there another credible explanation?
| choeger wrote:
| What an amazing time we live in. It took weeks for the world to
| investigate this "discovery". Weeks. Not months, years, or
| decades.
|
| We will see spectacular results from this kind of global
| scientific collaboration. I am confident that there will be an
| actual scientific breakthrough confirmed like this report got
| debunked.
| [deleted]
| hinkley wrote:
| Was anything novel discovered in this material? Is there some
| more boring application waiting in the wings?
| rvz wrote:
| This only proves that you shouldn't believe such random
| 'breakthroughs' on the internet, these days.
|
| What a shame, but the attention seeking and hype clearly worked
| and duped many here. Even though they won't admit that they fell
| for the hype.
|
| Be a bit skeptical next time.
| philomath_mn wrote:
| > hype clearly worked and duped many here
|
| What was the benefit to those doing the hype? What was the harm
| to those being "duped"?
|
| I certainly went through periods of waxing and waning belief,
| but now that the dust is settled I don't think I am any worse
| for the wear.
|
| It's not like this was a garden variety pump-and-dump or
| anything like that.
| MBCook wrote:
| So is LK-99 still something that may be useful in some other way
| due to some confirmed property?
|
| Or was all this just a mistake, from a usefulness perspective.
|
| It was fun to watch, nice to get hope of something so cool, and
| good to see the scientific process in action.
|
| But is there any reason to keep researching LK-99 over some other
| random compound?
| scythe wrote:
| One of the papers that argued that LK-99's levitation was due
| to mixed diamagnetism and weak ferromagnetism also assigned it
| a very strong diamagnetism: -2*10^-4, which would make it the
| second-strongest such material known, beating out bismuth.
| Probably not that useful, but interesting if confirmed.
|
| I read some of the papers linked in this article, but they use
| different units and don't identify a diamagnetic susceptibility
| in the way that I'm used to, so I'm not sure if that was
| confirmed (and I have stuff to do).
| platz wrote:
| But, a lot of those studies weren't using pure LK-99 but
| samples with lots of copper sulfide mixed in.
| scythe wrote:
| Copper sulfide's diamagnetism is not that high. It would be
| notable if it were. So that isn't a possible explanation.
| Cu2S was suggested as a culprit for the observed
| conductivity changes.
|
| The preprint reporting the high value of diamagnetism is
| here:
|
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.03110.pdf
|
| >The subtracted diamagnetic susceptibility is larger than
| that of Bismuth and water but smaller than that of
| Pyrolytic carbon (page 3, bottom left)
| bandyaboot wrote:
| > in particular, copper sulfide -- were responsible for the sharp
| drops in electrical resistivity and partial levitation over a
| magnet, which looked similar to properties exhibited by
| superconductors.
|
| Is this effect novel and/or potentially useful as a material?
| calibas wrote:
| > By contrast, superconductors that levitate over magnets can be
| spun and even held upside-down. "None of those behaviors look
| like what we see in the LK-99 videos," van Gennep says.
|
| Aren't they confusing Type-I and Type-II superconductors?
| nullc wrote:
| hm? "superconductors that levitate over magnets" == type-II,
| type-II can be spun and held upside-down.
| vondur wrote:
| Gotta love that one of the scientists quoted in the article now
| works in the finance field. Probably pays a bit more than a
| research scientist.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| I would like to remind/point out how many people on here were
| bashing on American scientists for failing to replicate this in
| the first few days when labs around the world were confirming
| replication- saying they had lost their touch, and are no longer
| relevant.
| lamontcg wrote:
| Yeah that was one of the worst hottakes.
|
| Then getting called racist over having the opinion that the
| original authors sounded like amateurs.
|
| Then seeing that briefly turn on a dime and the Beijing
| University preprint being instantly discredited in favor of
| "wait for western institutions to weigh in".
| LanceH wrote:
| I assume the apologies for calling skeptics racists will be
| going out shortly.
| devilsAdv0cate wrote:
| [dead]
| zuminator wrote:
| A good time to remind everyone that for almost 2 decades now it's
| been determined that the majority of published scientific
| findings are wrong. [0][1] Including possibly even the very
| determination that the majority of published scientific findings
| are wrong.[2] ([3])
|
| So, if that's the case, when a new result comes out, the
| appropriate reaction is to assume there's a better than average
| likelihood it will be refuted. And honestly that's what makes
| science great. Unlike with some other fields of human endeavor,
| it is possible to firmly refute bad science. And often learn
| something new in the process.
|
| [0]
| https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
| [1] https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-
| statistics... [2]
| https://replicationindex.com/2019/01/15/ioannidis-2005-was-w...
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epimenides_paradox
| [deleted]
| psychphysic wrote:
| I've quite enjoyed this story and it's resolution.
|
| It does seem that the doomsayers who predicted the Earth would
| stop spinning because of lay public speculating about LK-99 were
| wrong. The system works. Yay!
| cwillu wrote:
| It's mildly amusing to see the commentary elsewhere that this
| whole event proves they were _right_ that the lay public
| speculating is somehow harmful.
| gumby wrote:
| I worried less as to whether LK-99 was a superconductor or not
| when I thought that the 'flat band' theory might hold water. That
| could have led to all sorts of interesting results, but alas it
| appears not to work after all.
| jokoon wrote:
| This type of story is fueled by techno-optimists who want to
| believe that humans can always "figure out" the universe and take
| advantage of the laws of physics to master their environment.
|
| I don't understand where this belief comes from, but to think
| that research + time = innovation is really ignorant of how
| technology works. It seems it's really rooted in prophetic or
| religious way to look at technology.
|
| Cornucopianism is a really better word for it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornucopianism
| RhodesianHunter wrote:
| >I don't understand where this belief comes from
|
| Probably the last 100 or so years where we have largely done
| exactly that.
| jabedude wrote:
| > I don't understand where this belief comes from
|
| For me it comes from a survey of the previous 2 millennia of
| human history and witnessing constant technological
| advancements that produce higher and higher standards of living
| [deleted]
| Larrikin wrote:
| Do you really think we have figured it all out and all the
| current research is pointless? Or did you just want to post
| that Wikipedia article?
| KyleBerezin wrote:
| History has had many groundbreaking discoveries. It seems
| foolish to assume that is over. There will be more ground
| breaking discoveries, and there will be more iterative
| discoveries. People are so interested in room temp
| superconductors and stable fusion, because they CAN exist, and
| likely will exist.
|
| 'High' temperature super conductors were only recently
| discovered, and only a couple of years ago lanthanum
| decahydride was shown to transition at -10F. It seems odd to me
| to assume that this hurdle isn't going to be overcome, and even
| stranger to disparage others for thinking so.
| poopbutt7 wrote:
| Agreed. They're such sheep, it's embarrassing. One day they'll
| acknowledge our obvious superiority.
| eutropia wrote:
| > Separated from impurities, LK-99 is not a superconductor, but
| an insulator with a resistance in the millions of ohms -- too
| high to run a standard conductivity test.
|
| Not quite a superinsulator, but ironic.
| [deleted]
| thinkingkong wrote:
| It's disappointing news but the excitement and amount of
| replication on this paper was pretty fun to witness and
| experience.
|
| To me the most interesting part was everyone talking about
| potential consequences, uses, the order of magnitude improvements
| we'd see in certain costs or areas. Pumps, MRIs, power grids,
| chips, etc. Great reminder what materials science can do to some
| underlying economics.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Agreed!
|
| There's this bizarre reaction I see from many where they see
| the excitement and curiosity and hopefulness as a form of error
| and source of embarrassment. When mixed with an open mind and
| reasonable skepticism, it's a powerful opportunity to get
| people engaged in imagining a different world.
|
| I had all kinds of exciting conversations about what a
| validated, commercially viable LK-99 could produce. Why would I
| ever be inclined to feel that there's pie on my face now that
| we've got fairly strong evidence refuting the claims?
| lolinder wrote:
| In this case, I think the excitement and hopefulness was not
| dangerous or wrong, but I do see a risk to this kind of
| preprint hype in other contexts.
|
| During COVID there were multiple cases like this where a
| study got a lot of hype and discussion from non-experts and
| turned into "the science says X", when in fact the science
| was as of yet extremely unsettled. Sure enough, as the
| experts came to a consensus it rarely matched the public's
| initial perception, which led to a lot of confusion,
| conspiracy theories, and fingerpointing.
|
| Science-as-spectator-sport is fun, but I worry about the
| impact it will have on society as a whole and on the
| execution of science in particular. How many research
| decisions will be influenced by the possibility of going
| viral? How many bad decisions will be made as a result of
| pressure from millions of non-experts who briefly become
| armchair X-ologists?
| okamiueru wrote:
| I think this kind of excitement followed up with "wasn't
| anything after all" is both dangerous and wrong.
|
| When science is done badly (which arguably shouldn't be
| considered science), which then leads the public to have
| elevated expectations, only then for science to be done
| right and disprove and reject the original "findings",
| public trust in science is ever so slightly damaged.
| tysam_and wrote:
| I think you're conflating PR with the science underneath.
|
| PR is something we cannot control -- and avoiding
| releasing results in a (semi-vain?) attempt to control PR
| arguably does more harm than releasing them does.
|
| The sea makes waves as it will. We can moderate as much
| as we are able. I think the rest is simply a matter of
| accepting that things happen as they do out of our
| control. We can only truly impact ---- and even then, not
| necessarily guaranteed! D: ---- -- in some potentially
| very small part -- whatever sphere is around us, and I
| feel that that's a collective individual responsibility.
| fragmede wrote:
| PR stands for public relations. Like, it _literally_ is
| about controlling what the public does with releases. It
| 's not total absolute control, but PR firms can work
| wonders. The university press office can take a paper and
| exaggerate the claims to try to make the university look
| better, or at least, not highlight that testing was done
| in mice, for example.
| tysam_and wrote:
| That is technically true, though in practice the
| definition I believe has expanded to include "general
| news and press coverage of XYZ", which is how I'm
| phrasing it here.
|
| Having had some work get incredible attention, and other
| work not at all, I've experienced a small slice of the
| volatility of the web. My most popular, for example,
| tweet chain was a semi-technical vent I wrote over the
| course of 30 minutes after stewing about some semi-
| useless technical hype that no one seemed to be
| addressing the flaws in. I wrote it in a way that was
| more attention-grabbing somewhat than my more technical
| posts, put it out there, and shared it in a few places.
| It was pretty shallow, technically, I think, but I feel
| like it really had to be stated, since it sorta
| felt...really pretty obvious?
|
| Two days later or so, my number of Twitter followers had
| over quadrupled.
|
| I think humanity can be quite finicky sometimes (a more
| general statement, I don't think one could conclude that
| from the previous anecdote alone).
| _jal wrote:
| Furthermore, preemptively reacting to expected third-
| party behaviors is doomed.
|
| Journalists are going to write nonsense, hype-filled
| science articles. PR flacks are going to hype puff
| newswire blurbs. Why? Because that's what they're paid to
| do.
|
| You can curse the existence of bad incentives, if you
| want annoying ideologues to call you a communist.
|
| Or you can hire your own PR flacks. Because worrying
| about how people will react to what you're doing is PR,
| and going up against professionals without your own is
| like going to court without a lawyer.
|
| Or you can just, you know, do science, accept that people
| suck sometimes, and get on with your life.
| chongli wrote:
| _public trust in science is ever so slightly damaged_
|
| This is just another example of the media's negative
| effect on society. Similarly, the media endlessly poring
| over every detail of the Ukraine war has likely made
| their job much more difficult because it damages the
| element of surprise.
|
| The media originally began as something quite negative
| with what we called "yellow journalism." Then for a
| century or so we saw a kind of golden age of journalism
| where newspapers had strong reputations to uphold but
| were fairly rewarded for it through ads and classifieds.
|
| Now the media is back to yellow journalism (clickbait)
| and eroding the institutions of society.
| creato wrote:
| I don't think you can blame the media for this one. I
| heard very little to nothing about LK-99 from the news or
| the regular people in my life. But I heard a _ton_ about
| it from my "tech" friends that spend a lot of time on
| Twitter, and HN.
| cogman10 wrote:
| The issue mostly comes from the current yellow journalism
| state of science news sites. It's a game of telephone
| where the further you get from the paper, the more
| details are missing and hyped. Often times losing the
| very essence of what was discovered.
| fragmede wrote:
| Have we been so throughly baked into anti-intellectualism
| that people who can read, and use that _advanced_ skill on
| Wikipedia, along with the other skill of critical thinking,
| are to be denigrated as "armchair X-ologists"? I know our
| country's rallying cry is "Math is hard, let's go
| shopping", but not all of us have bought into that anti-
| science, anti-knowledge, anti-being-smart-at-all attitude.
| Thanks to a lot of hard work by a lot of very clever and
| motivated people, we have humanity's knowledge at our
| fingertips, and we're supposed to _not use it_? Just
| proudly stand up and say "I refuse to learn new things!"
|
| How many worse decisions are made by people who can't read
| and won't learn about the nuances of a topic?
| lolinder wrote:
| You're attacking a very elaborate straw man constructed
| around a single phrase in my comment. I didn't say what
| you think I said.
| sneak wrote:
| > _How many research decisions will be influenced by the
| possibility of going viral? How many bad decisions will be
| made as a result of pressure from millions of non-experts
| who briefly become armchair X-ologists?_
|
| Ask L Ron Hubbard?
|
| The willingness of the crowd to believe in counterfactual
| things is not constrained to science, and whatever
| damage/risk is posed by that is not new - as Galileo can
| attest.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| [flagged]
| gowld wrote:
| Mr Hopkins, you have earned tremendous respect for your
| work over the decades, and your passion for social
| justice is commendable, but there are better ways to
| channel it than into off-topic incivility and joking
| about killing people.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| My only gripe was the VCs declaring superconductivity without
| any evidence. They're so quick to follow the heard and jump
| on trends that they do zero diligence in just waiting to see
| if something is legitimate or not. People being hopefully and
| discussing possible solutions is not a problem. But VCs
| declaring that it's the future and you're falling behind if
| you're not working on it is the problem.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| > There's this bizarre reaction I see from many where they
| see the excitement and curiosity and hopefulness as a form of
| error and source of embarrassment. When mixed with an open
| mind and reasonable skepticism...
|
| Kinda buried the lede there. A lot of folks around here and
| in my own orbit were practicing the former while excluding
| the latter, or worse, were taking shots at people trying to
| inject some level of rationality into the conversation. Heck,
| some folks even went so far as to refer to those types of
| counterpoints/comments as just a "bizarre reaction"...
| araes wrote:
| Another point is: It's properties might still be interesting
| (possibly amazing, just not a superconductor).
|
| A significant reduction in room temperature resistance would
| still be incredible, even if it wasn't a "room temperature
| superconductor." Might still enable a lot of those "exciting
| conversations." Just not some binary yes/no computer holy
| grail.
|
| Also, big effect was scientists went "Whoa. There's a whole
| mode/regime of resistance change we never really looked at."
| The modeling papers that came out almost immediately were
| really interesting. Might still have cool applications.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > There's this bizarre reaction I see from many where they
| see the excitement and curiosity and hopefulness as a form of
| error and source of embarrassment. When mixed with an open
| mind and reasonable skepticism, it's a powerful opportunity
| to get people engaged in imagining a different world.
|
| This should be taken in the context of room temperature
| superconductors being _notorious_ physics vaporware along
| with practically useful advances in quantum computers and
| useful fusion. What these have in common is a sort of holy
| grail status, where it 's obvious they'd be a revolutionary
| complete game changer. Not that any of these things are
| obviously impossible, there's just been so many instances of
| discoveries in these areas that have failed to replicate that
| there's inevitably a lot of eye rolling in physics when these
| types of findings are announced.
| fasterik wrote:
| Excitement and curiosity about science is a good thing, but
| hyping up dubious claims and low quality research is not. I
| don't know who to blame in this case; I'm not sure whether
| it's the researchers, science journalism, social media
| dynamics, or a combination of all those things. But it
| doesn't seem healthy to have the general public incentivizing
| scientists to rush out early results with sensationalist
| claims. Real science takes years to validate results and a
| lot of that happens behind closed doors, as it should.
|
| I think the public reaction in this case is a symptom of a
| problem with our information ecosystem that extends beyond
| science. Just because something is fun to participate in in
| the moment doesn't mean it's not harmful to the underlying
| scientific/political/social process.
| [deleted]
| archepyx wrote:
| HN discussion did not particlarly have "reasonable
| skepticism".
|
| This is probably because people (i) were not aware that there
| had been many other hypes about RTSC before but less publicly
| visible all proved to be false, (ii) not being able to
| accurately judge the technical quality of the initial
| evidence, (iii) uncritically believing that the data in the
| initial preprints was proof for superconductivity because
| their authors said so.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I find it perilous to treat an entire community as it if
| has one voice. Ie. "the HN discussion" as a singular entity
| with a singular binary state on its skepticism. Someone
| else could equally claim that the HN community was super
| pessimistic and skeptical about it, because I certainly saw
| a lot of that too!
|
| While a convenient abstraction, it plays into our biases to
| notice and remember only some of the discourse.
|
| Plus I don't think it's really relevant to what I'm saying
| given I'm not making a claim about how any specific
| individual or group reacted, but that it's odd when there's
| people who treat an optimistic outlook as an error.
| pvg wrote:
| _it 's odd when there's people who treat an optimistic
| outlook as an error._
|
| It's pretty standard to be skeptical of extraordinary,
| poorly supported scientific claims and you didn't have to
| be an expert to find out experts were fairly skeptical of
| this from the beginning and the reasons for their
| skepticism. The broad HN sentiment was at odds with what
| you could find elsewhere. This isn't a moral failing or
| anything, just a common mode of HN-like forums but to
| elevate it to some some sort of positive rather than a
| thing to be cautious about seems backwards.
| imtringued wrote:
| This superconductor material was the literal definition
| of something you forget about and then get pleasantly
| surprised (not excited) about once it is replicated.
|
| For the scientists getting their hands on a breakthrough,
| the risk and reward was worth it, but for the public at
| large? No one should care until there are definite
| results.
| worrycue wrote:
| The excitable people are certainly "loud" though.
|
| The last few weeks with the LK-99 hype combined with the
| usual ChatGPT stories, I actually started feeling that
| maybe the site should be renamed Hype News.
|
| > but that it's odd when there's people who treat an
| optimistic outlook as an error.
|
| IMHO it's best to treat any extraordinary claim as BS
| until proven otherwise as it's very easy to concoct BS
| claims. If we take every one of them seriously, it will
| consume all of our attention and destroy the signal
| (actual facts) to noise (unproven claims) ratio on this
| site.
| kaba0 wrote:
| I am perfectly capable of managing, simply unknowns, it
| doesn't have to have an actual boolean value. Treating it
| as bullshit is not the correct approach - sure, there is
| a healthy amount of skepticism, realism to have, but
| while RTSC is a too nice to be true goal, it is not
| fundamentally against any known laws, I would retain my
| bullshit behavior to faster than light travel, the daily
| tesla-free-energy-for-the-world, etc. kind of low-effort
| ones, and even in their case would hold a tiny 0.001%
| chance of my skepticism being wrong.
| archepyx wrote:
| Optimistic outlook without reasonable skepticism is
| probably at least something you should not strive to
| achieve.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Also, if anything this black-and-white view of the world
| is responsible for the bad outcomes associated with
| optimism in hyped science. If we could distance ourselves
| from the binary result/truth and simply engage with the
| topic without that weight, we would have much more
| productive discussions.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| > Plus I don't think it's really relevant to what I'm
| saying given I'm not making a claim about how any
| specific individual or group reacted, but that it's odd
| when there's people who treat an optimistic outlook as an
| error.
|
| An optimistic outlook without a semi-plausible basis that
| you can convincingly elaborate on, or link a vaguely
| credible source doing so, IS an error, at least going by
| HN norms.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Optimism isn't gullibility!
|
| It is just an attitude that values positive possibilities
| over fretting about negative possibilities.
|
| Especially in cases where there is a small chance of a
| huge upside, relative to virtually no downside. We didn't
| lose any superconductors. :)
|
| I don't recall anyone on HN _erroneously_ declaring the
| material was definitely a new superconductor before
| subsequent evidence arrived at a consistent conclusion.
|
| There is nothing wrong with optimism.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Perhaps you misunderstood?
|
| To clarify, I was referring to "An optimistic outlook" in
| terms of actual assertions/claims/etc. that are written
| down on-the-record in public.
|
| Of course HN users can have the general abstract
| sentiment of optimism at anytime in their mind. I don't
| think there are any norms around internal sentiments.
| kergonath wrote:
| > HN discussion did not particlarly have "reasonable
| skepticism"
|
| There was a dose of Dunning-Kruger, and some software
| engineers telling us how to science, but there was also a
| lot of engagement and interesting discussions with genuine
| experts. Overall I found it quite interesting to follow.
|
| > uncritically believing that the data in the initial
| preprints was proof for superconductivity because their
| authors said so.
|
| It had undertones of small team (in a private institution,
| no less) taking on the stodgy establishment, which is quite
| popular among some people here. The concepts are also not
| very difficult to grasp on surface, so a lot of people can
| form an opinion, however well founded.
|
| People complain about peer review and scientific publisher
| as well. It is not difficult to see how this could push
| them to champion something that comes from arxiv.
| addisonl wrote:
| > HN discussion did not particlarly have "reasonable
| skepticism".
|
| That's definitely not true despite your attempts to
| gaslight us.
| csours wrote:
| And the people most likely to join the discussion were the
| most enthusiastic. It's hard to talk sense when people are
| excited. See also crypto.
| javajosh wrote:
| I feel that I had reasonable skepticism based on the
| consequences to the scientists if they turned out to be
| wrong. Korea is not known to be a particularly forgiving or
| understanding culture, and I suspect that all of these men
| will be working at a fast food restaurant soon.
| chefandy wrote:
| Jeez-- it's almost like few people around here are
| physicists, consider physicists credible on their
| specialty, saw physicists excited by the potential, and get
| excited by exciting things.
|
| What a _shamefully foolish_ intellectual failure!
| lamontcg wrote:
| > saw physicists excited by the potential,
|
| Mostly I saw actual physicists who had experience in the
| field being very skeptical, throwing a lot of cold water
| on the fire, and pointing out that the original authors
| looked like amateurs.
|
| And then I saw a lot of people with zero experience in
| the field running around yelling about how they were out
| of touch, how this was a revolutionary new way that
| science would progress on twitter, out in the open, etc.
| People who were skeptical got called all kinds of names.
|
| It didn't help that a lot of people on twitter pivoted
| from crypto-hype to AI-hype to LK99-hype pretty much on a
| dime.
|
| There was also a lot of highly upvoted comments with the
| usual thoughtleadering style of "let me beak it down for
| your, here's the ELI5 of what is going on an what the
| implications will be..." followed by whatever they
| learned in the past 48 hours from plowing through
| wikipedia articles.
|
| There could be a lesson here about listening very
| carefully to experts in the field when they give you
| their opinions. They often sound very highly biased, but
| there's usually very good reason for that. Once in a
| lifetime there's the event where some paradigm is
| overthrown and all the old scientists look a bit foolish
| because their instincts were to be skeptical -- but those
| instincts came through a lifetime of correctly being
| skeptical 999 times out of 1000 about wild claims in
| their field.
|
| This could be a teachable moment that could inform people
| about climate change, coronavirus and other scientific
| claims. If you want to disagree with experts in the field
| you really need to get off your ass, get off twitter and
| the blogs, and go do the hard work of understanding what
| the scientists actually know by reading the articles that
| they publish. They're very often correct and their
| opinions hold more weight because they've literally spent
| their lifetime learning and thinking about this one
| thing. They didn't start learning about superconductivity
| / viruses / climate last week and you need to do better
| than some showerthought or wishful thinking that you
| think proves your viewpoint.
|
| But we're not going to do that because its only been a
| few days and we've literally forgotten about how much
| flak scientists were getting on here over skepticism
| towards the initial claims.
|
| And I had some of the most positively stupid arguments on
| here where people were trying to assert that scientific
| experts needed to express exactly zero bias because they
| were experts and held to a higher standard than the
| average moron with no experience who could argue whatever
| they liked. Engineering a rationale to be able to reject
| anyone with a strong opinion based on expertise in favor
| of strong opinions from randos on twitter.
| chefandy wrote:
| So... who cares? Why should laypeople be expected to
| engage in that much analysis solely to _avoid
| excitement?_ These aren 't policy makers. No lives were
| lost. Only keystrokes were wasted... and, calling them
| _wasted_ is probably too harsh. Lots of people learned
| what a cool thing this would be if it happened, are
| disappointed that this isn 't it, and might even be a
| little more interested in physics going forward. Why are
| you so emotionally invested in saying _" told ya so"_?
| lamontcg wrote:
| > This could be a teachable moment that could inform
| people about climate change, coronavirus and other
| scientific claims...
|
| I addressed why.
| chefandy wrote:
| Imagining that attention to this somehow displaces
| attention those things is beyond dubious. You could pick
| literally any popular topic and level the same exact
| criticism.
| jcranmer wrote:
| As noted by the sibling comment, the physicists
| (especially those who specialized in superconductor
| research!) were the ones who were the most skeptical of
| the announcement, partially because claims of room-
| temperature superconductors are actually relatively
| common, and partially because the evidence in the paper
| was just atrociously bad [1].
|
| One of the things I look forward to in an HN discussion
| is the comments of people who can collate expert opinions
| on the subject and surface these kinds of points in a
| more ELI15 kind of way. But despite there being ~a week
| of LK-99 stories permanently on the front page, there
| wasn't much of that (a little on the initial thread, and
| virtually nothing for the next several days)--and it's
| not for lack of physicists commenting on the topic (in
| other forums)!
|
| [1] I saw someone point out that, when you translate the
| units on the resistivity/temperature graph, it is a worse
| conductor than copper at room temperature, below its
| claimed critical temperature.
| chefandy wrote:
| > One of the things I look forward to in an HN discussion
| is the comments of people who can collate expert opinions
| on the subject and surface these kinds of points in a
| more ELI15 kind of way.
|
| HN is full of subject matter experts on computing-- that
| is, software, and to a lesser extent, hardware-- beyond
| that it's a mixed bag at best. Even as an _interface
| designer_ , I see so much confidently presented and
| totally bogus pseudo-expertise on art and design here
| that it's actually kind of funny, and that's much more
| closely related to software development than physics is.
| That BS sounds credible to other developers because it's
| in a developer's voice and trips on misconceptions common
| among developers. I suspect that's true with the other
| non-computing topics discussed here that I don't know
| enough about to give an expert opinion on.
|
| As a long-time developer myself, I've been on both sides
| of assuming our _astonishing intelligence and analytical
| capability_ can make up for lacking the requisite
| expertise. The mistake is expecting the HN crowd 's
| musings about things outside of it's expertise to be more
| trustworthy than any other internet forum. If this were
| some physics subreddit or something like that, the
| criticism would make more sense. This is just people
| being excited by something a lot of other people were
| excited by.
| kaba0 wrote:
| I have no qualms one way or another, but afaik
| conductivity in small samples is insanely hard to
| properly measure even when the synthesis process is more
| deterministic/efficient.
|
| That's why many started with dimagnetism indeed.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| > One of the things I look forward to in an HN discussion
| is the comments of people who can collate expert opinions
| on the subject and surface these kinds of points in a
| more ELI15 kind of way.
|
| I can tell you from first hand experience, much of the
| time subject matter experts are often downvoted into
| oblivion by the HN hive mind. To the point where you only
| see clueless people at the top.
|
| Happens to me regularly when it comes to machine
| learning, neuroscience, education/university threads.
|
| For example, people say crazy things about things like
| university admissions or grad student salaries. Never
| mind about ML where most of the information here is just
| wrong.
| yongjik wrote:
| On the flip side, there was a lot of what I'd call, hmm,
| "unreasonable" skepticism. If I had a dime every time
| someone said "This is fake because Korean culture (blah
| blah armchair sociology)" ...
| plorg wrote:
| HN demonstrated its common ability to surface prolific
| posters who identify as autodidacts and appear to have gone
| on a Wikipedia binge this morning, but who nonetheless
| speak with a confidence that until now may only have been
| demonstrated by ChatGPT.
| morelisp wrote:
| The absolute worst part is that some of these guys,
| especially the younger (e.g. fresh grad through ~30)
| ones, do this in person! I was out drinking with some
| colleagues a few months ago and I said something offhand
| in a normal human conversation about wanting to learn
| more about X, and one guy pulls out his phone and just
| starts reading me the Wikipedia article about X.
| plorg wrote:
| I could personally take or leave live readings of
| Wikipedia. I wouldn't do it, but I have also gone on my
| share of solo wiki binges. There's no problem with
| learning about things. The thing that bothers me is a
| room full of people with shallow knowledge of a subject
| who talk over anybody else. I think it's fine to care
| about things, but I need other people to be able to tune
| their volume to their level of knowledge and
| understanding, which you really can't do if you think you
| know everything.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| To understand the skeptic's perspective: imagine watching
| people excitedly discussing a sighting of bigfoot.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| > _When mixed with an open mind and reasonable skepticism, it
| 's a powerful opportunity to get people engaged in imagining
| a different world._
|
| I feel like this line is doing a lot of lifting in your
| comment.
|
| The problem is that as lay people we are completely
| unequipped to gauge a claim like this. I followed along on HN
| and there were plenty of posts by people who were giving
| LK-99 crazy odds of success, fueled in no small part by viral
| videos of outright hoaxes from pseudonymous "researchers."
|
| It's fun, in a science fiction-y way, to speculate on what a
| material with the supposed properties might have meant for
| the world, but the degree of skepticism that _should_ have
| been applied was lacking for many.
|
| There's a tendency on HN and similar forums to devour new
| developments - almost a fanaticism about learning the
| newest/latest/best before the general public. But in this
| case, a truly extraordinary claim had been proposed, and it
| was even published without the researchers' consent. There
| was precious little reason to give it any attention at all at
| that phase.
|
| If people had viewed LK-99's properties as "almost surely
| science fiction" all along, I could find myself agreeing with
| you, but that's really not how this played out. Sadly this
| event showed there's a market for hyping up weak claims that
| people will be poor at evaluating, and I guess we can
| probably expect more of them.
| acqq wrote:
| > Sadly this event showed there's a market for hyping up
| weak claims that people will be poor at evaluating
|
| I don't see it as in any way an unique event, and also not
| unique for the enthusiasm seen on this site. The
| "believers" in most of the hypes typically aren't cured
| fast, as the article notes:
|
| "While some commentators have pointed to the LK-99 saga as
| a model for reproducibility in science, others say that
| it's an unusually swift resolution of a high-profile
| puzzle. "Often these things die this very slow death...""
| ummonk wrote:
| What's "crazy odds of success" to you?
| hackerlight wrote:
| The tone here on HN was very similar to the tone of a lot
| of credible physicists. Just because it _turned out_ to be
| not superconducting doesn 't mean that the people you are
| criticising were wrong to think what they thought given the
| available information at the time.
| SanderNL wrote:
| In a world where true dreamers are often sidelined, where the
| embrace of change is met with resistance, and where society
| prioritizes incremental economic evolution over the visions
| of genuine pioneers, we find ourselves amidst signs and
| patterns all too indicative of a ... culture in decline!
|
| _rock music_
| kergonath wrote:
| > There's this bizarre reaction I see from many where they
| see the excitement and curiosity and hopefulness as a form of
| error and source of embarrassment.
|
| What the general public does not see it the regular flood of
| papers that pretend to change the world and that turn out to
| be bogus. So, from an insider point of view, the issue is
| that what we are supposed to avoid (crack pot theories
| becoming mainstream or getting too much traction) happened in
| a spectacular fashion. So a lot of people get excited about
| nothing and then end up distrusting the scientific process
| itself ("they don't know what they're doing", "they make
| everything up", "they write a lot of nonsense", etc).
|
| In this case, I think it turned out to be a good thing.
| People got excited, some of them thought about possible
| implication, others managed to pick up some notions of
| material science. The enthusiasm and activity from people
| trying to replicate and investigate the material was heart-
| warming. But yeah, it was bound to finish like that.
|
| > Why would I ever be inclined to feel that there's pie on my
| face now that we've got fairly strong evidence refuting the
| claims?
|
| You really, really don't want to be seen as a crack pot when
| your funding and career depend on how external people
| evaluate your work. You also really, really don't want to
| have to retract a paper because you've missed something
| obvious. Retraction is a traumatic process even if you are in
| good faith. This is sidestepped by releasing preprints (so no
| peer review and no risk of retraction). But at the same time
| this is a reason why outlandish preprints tend not to be
| taken too seriously. There is less incentives to get it
| right.
| dheera wrote:
| > were responsible for the sharp drops in electrical
| resistivity and partial levitation over a magnet
|
| Are these properties still useful? If something can levitate
| without being a superconductor it is already useful for a LOT
| of things.
| penjelly wrote:
| diamagnetic material exist, and no theyre not nearly as
| useful as a superconductor with 0 resistance.
| dheera wrote:
| Diamagnetic levitation is extremely weak, which makes it
| much less practically useful, and also reduces its
| entertainment value (if you can levitate things 2 cm above
| the surface the 2 billion children in the world will be all
| over the stuff; the 1-2 mm you can get with bismuth
| diamagnetism isn't particularly impressive.
| hgsgm wrote:
| I don't know all these subtleties, but maglev trains are
| awesome.
| kergonath wrote:
| Maglev trains do not use diamagnetism or this kind of
| permanent magnets. They use electromagnets and sometimes
| much stronger rare-earth magnets, which are much more
| convenient and effective. Some of them do use
| superconductors, though, AFAIK.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Not really, what really matters is what weight it can
| actually support. Most of these materials can barely levitate
| a few grams - way below any kind of useful application except
| for maybe gimmicky toys.
| kergonath wrote:
| > If something can levitate without being a superconductor it
| is already useful for a LOT of things.
|
| It is not that useful. Electromagnets are used when we need
| something like that at scale, such as in maglev trains.
| Permanent magnets have their uses, but we have plenty of
| others that are as strong as this, and plenty of others that
| are much stronger than this. I suppose we will investigate
| it's properties and we might find something interesting, but
| almost certainly not because of its magnetic properties.
| baron816 wrote:
| It was kind of like thinking about winning the lottery--the fun
| is in the fantasy of it.
| slashdev wrote:
| I think it's fair to say that even as a failure, it's likely to
| stimulate much more attention, funding, and research in the
| area of high temperature superconductors going forward.
|
| That's great.
| xwdv wrote:
| I disagree. I get pissed off when revolutionary scientific news
| is brought to me only to turn out to be some bogus crap. I
| don't care about the replication and peer review process, it's
| not fun, it's banal. I would much rather have preferred to
| learn about LK-99 once it was confirmed to be a room temp
| superconductor, and if it wasn't then I'd rather never hear
| about it.
|
| Now I have to walk back explanations I gave to various people
| and explain LK-99 actually isn't special at all. I will look
| like a god damn idiot.
|
| The whole time LK-99 was in the news, we were wringing our
| hands about potential uses and the impact it would have on our
| world. For once it seemed maybe there was hope that we'd see
| exciting times again with exponential advances in technology.
| That dream has now been thoroughly eradicated.
|
| By the time a true room temp superconductor comes out, it
| probably won't be in our lifetimes.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > Now I have to walk back explanations I gave to various
| people and explain LK-99 actually isn't special at all. I
| will look like a god damn idiot.
|
| Maybe, but I have immensely more respect for someone who can
| just admit they were wrong compared to someone who bends of
| backwards to justify their incorrectness.
| kergonath wrote:
| > Now I have to walk back explanations I gave to various
| people and explain LK-99 actually isn't special at all. I
| will look like a god damn idiot.
|
| There is a lesson there: do not make definitive statements
| about something that is uncertain. There are a lot of
| interesting things to say about this material along the lines
| of "it would be cool if it worked, then we could do x or y"
| while still making clear that this is tentative.
|
| > The whole time LK-99 was in the news, we were wringing our
| hands about potential uses and the impact it would have on
| our world. For once it seemed maybe there was hope that we'd
| see exciting times again with exponential advances in
| technology. That dream has now been thoroughly eradicated.
|
| Some people did. The materials scientists I know were mostly
| skeptical with a hint of cynicism or optimism, depending on
| the individual.
|
| > By the time a true room temp superconductor comes out, it
| probably won't be in our lifetimes.
|
| It is difficult to say. We barely understand what makes a
| material a superconductor. This understanding will improve,
| and we will do some more systematic studies. Or it might show
| up in some completely unrelated project, just by chance. It
| is very difficult to say when this might happen. All we can
| say is that so far we don't think that room-temperature
| superconductors are a physical impossibility. So at least
| there is hope.
| hirsin wrote:
| It sounds like you were explaining it to people before it was
| confirmed - why did you do that? I don't really grok the
| emotional connection you seem to be talking about - how does
| someone pin their mental state so much on something like this
| (unconfirmed research)?
|
| Is it the idea that there might be something great happening,
| and that we might get the chance to live in exciting times? I
| could see people wanting to believe in that opportunity.
| penjelly wrote:
| we already live in exciting times. I wouldnt blame someone
| for explaining an idea that the scientists themselves came
| forward and claimed it as a valid result either. Blind
| optimism is NOT good in my opinion even if intentions are
| good
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _Now I have to walk back explanations I gave to various
| people and explain LK-99 actually isn't special at all. I
| will look like a god damn idiot._ "
|
| Y'know those stories on Reddit about people's awful
| childhoods, like "I needed the toilet in a shop and my
| parents told me to be quiet, and then when I pissed myself,
| my dad dragged me outside and beat me for 'embarrassing
| him'"? Have you noticed the dad comes out of the story
| looking bad for prioritising his image? Saying "I don't want
| to tell this to people because then _I_ will look bad"
| already makes you look bad.
|
| I told my dad LK-99 isn't a superconductor and he said
| "that's a shame, oh well, exciting while it lasted".
| jacquesm wrote:
| > Now I have to walk back explanations I gave to various
| people and explain LK-99 actually isn't special at all. I
| will look like a god damn idiot.
|
| And that's just LK-99. You could easily be _just_ as mistaken
| about other things. If you start confusing possibles with
| absolutes things get messy really quickly.
|
| > By the time a true room temp superconductor comes out, it
| probably won't be in our lifetimes.
|
| It could happen tomorrow, next week, next year, within the
| next 500 years or later or even never at all. _We just do not
| know._
| DirkH wrote:
| You've learnt a lesson and grown from it. There's no reason
| to blame others for your own actions.
|
| This is also a great opportunity to demonstrate your
| understanding on how difficult the scientific process is to
| your friends.
|
| Telling your friends you have changed your mind on everything
| you told them earlier because of new evidence should be
| something you take pride in. Because only true scientists
| change their minds, and even discard their most cherished
| theories, based on new evidence.
| imchillyb wrote:
| > I will look like a god damn idiot.
|
| Pride isn't a good look or smell.
|
| Try humility instead. You may not like to eat humble pie, but
| others love to watch that.
|
| Also, perhaps some introspection would give nuance to why
| being wrong bothers you so much.
| imtringued wrote:
| I don't know what you are talking about. This material was
| never going to revolutionize anything even if it was a
| superconductor. What you call fun to witness was to me just
| another episode of "Mat Ferrell's Undecided" except on HN.
|
| Also, you can't solve the most important economic problems
| through technology anyway. How is a superconductor going to
| decrease your rent?
| dekhn wrote:
| Room temp Superconductors, along with fusion, would affect
| the economy profoundly. What the exact effect on rent would
| be is hard to predict but under the "post-scarcity society"
| mental construct, having infinite energy at zero cost
| (amortized) would presumably make the price of housing
| change.
| consilient wrote:
| Room temperature superconductors would not give us zero-
| cost energy any time soon. Even if one had a high enough
| critical current to be used in transmission lines (which is
| not a given), transmission losses are under 10% in modern
| grids.
| maleldil wrote:
| How would room temperature superconductors lead to a post-
| scarcity society?
| dekhn wrote:
| makes it easy to deliver power from huge centralized
| fusion reactors to the edge. It is neither sufficient,
| nor necessary, but could be a useful thing to have.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The point is that room temperature superconductors only
| matter if they have several other properties - they have to
| be ductile (easy to mold into wires), have good material
| resistance, maintain their superconductivity under high
| enough currents, and be cheap enough to produce.
|
| A ceramic room-temperature superconductor, like LK-99 would
| have been, is not a promising material at all, since it's
| extremely costly to make wires out of it. And even if we
| found a way to do so, it might not have mattered at all if
| it only worked for the very low currents/voltages in the
| original tests.
| dekhn wrote:
| I was talking about a hypothetical RTSC that was amenable
| to industrial scale, not LK-99. Even so, merely knowing
| that RTSC with poor properties existed, would lead to
| massive search of the nearby (and other) spaces for
| better properties.
|
| See the history of glass optimization- hundreds of years
| of poking around with terrible quality glass, then a
| revolution during the Schott era, to modern day Gorilla
| Glass. Or silicon- the initial transistor
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Replica-of-first-
| transist...) was not something you could shove into a
| missile, that took 15 years to develop. To today's modern
| ICs which approach the atomic limits of semiconductor
| manufacturing.
|
| The hope is that the initial RTSCs will follow a similar
| path, obvious there no guarantee
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Still, if LK-99 had turned out to be an RTSC, that
| wouldn't necessarily take us any closer to an industrial-
| grade RTSC. It could just as well be a false lead, an
| interesting material with some niche applications that
| would remain more of a curiosity than anything.
|
| RTSCs are not like cold fusion - as far as we know, they
| should be possible, so finding one would not upend
| science in some huge way. If the ones we find don't also
| happen to have all the other interesting properties we
| need, then they may never have any significant impact at
| all. This is what seems to be missed.
|
| If LK-99 had been an RTSC, it should still not have been
| major news outside materials science research, since it
| wouldn't have had any direct impact on the economy, nor
| any predictable pathway to one. Some other future
| discovery, if it ever happened, would have been the one
| that actually mattered. That potential future discovery
| may have built on the current work, but whether it would
| be 1 year down the line or 10 or 100 or never would not
| be knowable.
| dekhn wrote:
| It's like you're arguing with somebody different from me,
| who said something entirely different from what I said.
| [deleted]
| hunson_abadeer wrote:
| This is precisely what put me off in these discussions. Not the
| idea that we might have found a room-temperature superconductor
| - that part was exciting. It's the part where people
| confidently talked about its applications without realizing
| that they probably wouldn't revolutionize CPU performance
| (Josephson junctions don't seem to work well as non-cryogenic
| temperatures for reasons unrelated to superconductivity), power
| grid transmission (transmission lines are already pretty
| efficient and we already choose _less_ efficient materials for
| cost), or energy storage (LK-99 would likely have a fairly
| modest current limit before it stops superconducting).
|
| LK-99 would have interesting applications, known and unknown,
| but we have a pretty good understanding of superconductors
| based on 100 years of practical research, and I find this kind
| of instant punditry pretty tiresome.
| floxy wrote:
| >Josephson junctions don't seem to work well as non-cryogenic
| temperatures for reasons unrelated to superconductivity
|
| Can you point me in the direction to learn more about this?
| trzy wrote:
| Accelerationism has become a religion for many people working
| in tech. Social media is teaming with John the Baptists
| heralding the next messiah.
| burnished wrote:
| Interesting, from what I saw a lot of people got informed on
| why those overly confident predictions were drek - I don't
| know that I have seen a claim go unchallenged.
|
| Which seems ideal to me. Very educational.
| cogman10 wrote:
| It was like stomping out weeds and it wasn't always well
| received.
|
| I hope that those that got dashed (and observed the
| dashing) take a step back the next time something from
| "FuturistSuperScienceNews.com" or whatever pops up touting
| a revolutionary XYZ. Those sites are like 99% trash that
| train their readers to distrust science when their
| clickbate articles don't pan out. If I were conspiracy
| minded, I'd swear they exist to build out a mistrust in
| institutions.
| drdeca wrote:
| I had heard the parts about "probably wouldn't be a big deal
| for CPU performance" and "probably wouldn't be great for
| energy storage", but I hadn't heard the point about "we use
| less efficient materials for power grid transmission than we
| could, because of costs".
|
| I suppose I didn't expect that we necessarily had like, the
| "absolute most efficient that could be made" (if that is
| something substantially more complicated at a materials-
| science level than "some simple-to-make-alloy"), but I hadn't
| imagined that it was a substantial difference. (I think I had
| imagined that they were... copper wires with like,
| surrounding metal tubes, or something? I hadn't thought much
| about it.)
|
| Could you either say, or give my a search term I should look
| up in order to read, a little more about the trade-off being
| made between materials cost and efficiency of transmission
| lines?
| cogman10 wrote:
| The crux of the problem for superconductors used as power
| delivery is the "critical field" problem. [1]
|
| Super conductors are superconductive to a point. Once that
| point is crossed they turn into regular conductors. (I've
| seen ~1A cited. For context, EVs charge at around 500A).
|
| To make them useful for power transmission, you'd have to
| up the voltage to insane levels to avoid collapsing the
| field.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_field
| Eduard wrote:
| or just go the straightforward way and use several
| transmissions in parallel, as it is already done for
| existing superconducting lines in production.
|
| The AmpaCity project in Essen, Germany, gives insights
| about the implementation details, as the involved parties
| were required to publish their work.
|
| https://www.enargus.de/pub/bscw.cgi/?op=enargus.eps2&q=%2
| 201...
|
| for the specific aspect under discussion, the Karlsruhe
| Institute of Technology report is of interest:
|
| https://www.tib.eu/de/suchen/id/TIBKAT:872231372/Ampacity
| -10...
| floxy wrote:
| Superconductors have a critical current _density_ (Ampere
| /m^2) that varies with temperature and external magnetic
| field[0]. So if you want more current, you need to use a
| bigger wire (and/or make it cooler). YBCO HTS tapes have
| enough current density for power transmission[1].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yttrium_barium_copper_o
| xide#/m...
|
| [1] https://www.amsc.com/comed-and-amsc-announce-
| successful-inte...
| svetb wrote:
| Am not the author of that comment, but the fact that comes
| to mind is that aluminum is used for virtually all
| transmission and distribution lines - for price reasons -
| even though copper has better conductivity.
|
| If we did discover a room-temperature superconductor, I
| suspect it would be a while before the cost to produce it
| in the bulk quantities required for electrical transmission
| are economically attractive compared to what's already
| available.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| In some desperate places, people would cut down aluminum
| power lines and sell them to scrapyards for some quick
| buck. But _copper_ power lines? Those would be in a
| similar danger in many more places.
| elihu wrote:
| Aluminum vs copper is a good example. Another is that we
| already do use superconducting transmission lines in a
| few places. We could do more of that, but presumably it's
| expensive to install and/or maintain otherwise we'd be
| using it everywhere. I'm not sure what the longest or
| highest capacity superconducting links currently in
| existence are.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > it would be a while before the cost to produce it in
| the bulk quantities required for electrical transmission
| are economically attractive compared to what's already
| available.
|
| Note that there is no guarantee that that would ever
| happen. Electrical resistance is not the only thing you
| need for something to be an economically efficient power
| line. While superconductors are by definition excellent
| in terms of electrical resistance, there is nothing to
| guarantee that they wouldn't be too brittle, or too
| heavy, or too hard to mould into the required shape, or
| simply require materials that are too rare on Earth. And
| all of these would not be things that can just be worked
| around with better production processes or smart
| engineering - they would be fundamental limitations of
| the specific material, just like the low temperature
| requirements of currently known superconductors will
| never be improved with more research.
|
| So this isn't a matter of _when_ they would reach the
| point of being better economically, it 's also very much
| a matter of _if_ they would ever reach that point.
| Hopefully, we 'll get lucky one day and find a material
| that is superconducting at room temperature and above,
| that is study and light and easy to make into wires and
| made out of abundantly available elements. LK-99
| certainly wasn't most of these things. Even if it had
| been superconducting, it wasn't a good candidate for any
| of the other properties we want anyway, so it likely
| wouldn't have been much better than other known materials
| for most applications.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| We frequently use aluminum wires with a higher thickness to
| make up for the lower conductivity as compared to copper.
| It's not as simple as cost vs performance though, as
| aluminum is substantially less dense than copper. Gold and
| silver are also better conductors than copper, but of
| course are very expensive, and still have resistance. Zero
| resistance may be with it on some cases. For instance in
| projects that currently use high voltage dc it may be worth
| it due to safety and complexity wins, but that all would
| depend on how hard (expense and complexity) the
| superconductor is to deploy.
| raphlinus wrote:
| Amen. When someone does the math and adds up the winners and
| losers in all this, one clear winner will be this video from
| Asianometry, entitled The History of Superconductors (Before
| LK-99)[1]. It only lightly touched on LK-99 itself, but did
| an excellent job going through the actual science-based
| history of superconductors, covering in particular detail
| previous hype waves. A major point is that the YBCO
| superconductors, while an amazing scientific discovery,
| haven't had revolutionary applications, and have only lightly
| displaced lower temperature (niobium-titanium metal alloy)
| superconductors in applications requiring generating strong
| magnetic fields, including MRI machines. For the curious, [2]
| goes into considerable detail on potential applications and
| challenges for HTSC in MRI.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUczYHyOhLM
|
| [2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5472374/
| devilsAdv0cate wrote:
| [dead]
| oreilles wrote:
| > [...] There was nothing missing from so many beautiful works,
| except that it was true that the tooth was made of gold. When a
| goldsmith had examined it, it was found to be gold leaf applied
| to the tooth with great skill; but books were written before
| the goldsmith was consulted.
|
| > I am not so convinced of our ignorance by the things that
| are, and whose reason is unknown to us, than by those that are
| not, and whose reason we find. This means that not only do we
| not have the principles that lead to the truth, but that we
| also have others that accommodate the false very well.
|
| Bernard Le Bouyer de Fontenelle, Histoire des Oracles 1687.
| Translated with Deepl.
| MiguelHudnandez wrote:
| I enjoy the optimistic takes as well. I think it's really fun
| to imagine incredible new materials that change our baseline
| capabilities in design and manufacturing.
|
| All that said, there's also a case for saving all that energy
| by seeking out skeptical points of view. See thunderf00t's
| video from 5 days ago: https://youtu.be/p3hubvTsf3Y
|
| All in all, I appreciate that so many people are enthusiastic
| about one thing in particular: replicating results. So many
| people will take a press release or an academic paper at face
| value. But the real value is in replicating the results.
| gus_massa wrote:
| The analysis in the video is good, like most of his videos.
| But I hope someone makes a roge tldwthunderf00t channel, that
| cut all the parts he repeats and when he laugh of people. A
| video with the same content and 1/2 of the length would be
| better.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| The real superconductors were the friends we made along the
| way.
| [deleted]
| SilasX wrote:
| "Don't you guys get it? We _did_ find a room-temperature
| superconductor! It was _us_ -- conducting _teamwork_ , with
| no resistance."
|
| Sitcom's live studio audience: "Awwwwwww!"
| gabagaul wrote:
| [flagged]
| godelski wrote:
| > but the excitement and amount of replication on this paper
| was pretty fun to witness and experience.
|
| I was really elated to see how people were so interested and
| getting to see what peer review in science actually looks like.
| How in the real world it is done outside of journals and
| conferences, which people frequently give the misnomer "peer
| review." I hope people will walk away from this experience with
| a better understanding of how science works and why replication
| is such a critical aspect of it. Because the truth is that our
| academic incentive structure has generally fallen out of
| alignment with the actual goals of science.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > Because the truth is that our academic incentive structure
| has generally fallen out of alignment with the actual goals
| of science.
|
| Did it though? Nobody published this, which is good, right?
| And then Max Planck Institute gave the most conclusive
| answer, and they're the most prestigious replicator-to-be
| mentioned, so that also sounds good right?. And now, Mr. L
| and Mr. K will not receive funding for this material, because
| it decisively failed to publish, which is also good?
|
| I don't know. It sounds like the academic incentive structure
| worked really well here.
| freedomben wrote:
| Unfortunately I don't think we got "to see what peer review
| in science actually looks like" because this was such an
| unusual deal. The amount of interest and excitement gave us
| the ideal amount of peer review/reproduction. For the vast
| majority of things nobody even _tries_ to reproduce it, and
| many of the publishers don 't even provide the tools needed
| to do so.
| godelski wrote:
| Yeah, I agree that for the vast majority of things most
| people don't try. Or at least publicly demonstrate that
| they tried (key phrasing). But it is also silly to think
| that 3-5 people sitting at a desk reading a summary of work
| can validate said work. Really they can only invalidate or
| specify that it is indeterminate, but neither of these are
| validation. Which that's a key difference from the general
| public understanding of "peer review" (meaning journal
| publication).
|
| But it might also be worth noting that often reproduction
| happens behind the scene. People point to big works like
| that which comes out of CERN, LIGO, or other massive
| projects and state that such works cannot be replicated.
| But actually those have high rates of replication, which is
| why there are hundreds of authors on the work.
|
| For LK-99, people got to see a lot of what is typically
| done by grad students who never tell the public what they
| did (or even their community). That the communication
| between scientists is happening through preprints, email,
| twitter, and other methods that are not journal
| publications. Because science happens faster than the
| journal cycle. Most scientists are reading preprints, and
| letting the work dictate the signal of validity long before
| a journal can.
|
| But what I was alluding to, which you might have picked up
| on, is that the reward system we have in place ("publish or
| perish", h-index, journals, etc) are misaligned as they do
| not reward this cornerstone of science -- replication --
| (typically discourages is) unless there are credible claims
| of breakthroughs of the highest kind. Maybe we should
| rethink this system, and I hope that the timing of this
| along with the other discussions of academic fraud can help
| people to question the system and metrics that we use to
| evaluate, and ask if they are actually aligned with the
| original goals.
| amelius wrote:
| This invention almost saved our generation. I mean, our parents
| invented radar, semiconductors, nuclear energy, etc. For us
| it's back to building social media, adtech, and similar
| "technology", I guess.
| oblio wrote:
| > Great reminder what materials science can do to some
| underlying economics.
|
| Just economics? :-))
|
| Materials science is practically <<civilization>>.
|
| The Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age.
|
| The other axes are: energy production, transportation
| improvements. But even those frequently come from materials
| science. The steam engine needed mass production of high
| quality steel, etc.
| baby wrote:
| +1. I'm wondering how many people will become physicist due to
| this wave of exciting news :) we're not getting superconductors
| today, but we might get less "oh my god the earth is doomed
| humans are horrible" and more "I'm optimistic about the future
| of the human race"
| kergonath wrote:
| As a practising material physicist, I am _very_ enthusiastic
| about the progress of knowledge in my field and human
| curiosity and ingenuity, and also _very_ pessimistic about
| the outlook for our various civilisations and appalled by
| human carelessness, shortsightedness, and selfishness.
|
| My long term pessimism comes partly from the fact that I know
| what is behind the magical technologies that are supposed to
| save us, which is why I am very skeptical about them. I am
| also very doubtful about our ability to make the right
| decisions in difficult times and under severe constraints.
| But hey, I do have a cool, interesting, and enjoyable job.
| aklwiehjra wrote:
| One of the few things I actually remember from undergrad was a
| presentation freshman year where some famous person said
| "almost all major leaps in engineering ability come from one of
| three things: economics of scale, something else (maybe new
| algorithm? not sure), or a new material that simply has better
| properties". I don't want to be a materials scientist, but that
| line got me very interested in materials science and gave me a
| lot of respect for it. If you find a new material that is 3x
| better than any other in some way, that unlocks entirely new
| doors.
| penjelly wrote:
| disagree, the excitement led nowhere. We already have high temp
| superconductors so even if it was real these applications
| can/are already handled. Its not harmless either, people
| invested time, money, and effort.
|
| its great to be excited for real science discoveries but hoaxes
| are not good, and can potentially cripple, crush the industry
| thats actually developing these things.
| gus_massa wrote:
| A researcher wasting his/her time in a promising result is
| business as usual. An important part of the work is to read
| papers and decide if they are promising enough to try to
| informaly replicate them and extend them.
|
| There are a lot of details to consider. Does it makes sense?
| Who published it? Did that team has a gopd track record?
| Where was it published? Did somepne else used the paper as a
| base for a new paper? How long/much would it take to try?
|
| Only after that, researches decide to try it or just send it
| to the paper bin.
| consilient wrote:
| > its great to be excited for real science discoveries but
| hoaxes are not good,
|
| There's absolutely no evidence of a hoax. The original
| authors were sloppy and overeager, not malicious.
| jschveibinz wrote:
| On the bright side: when people say "believe in the science,"
| this is exactly what they should be thinking: challenge.
|
| This whole process has been super healthy and similar
| challenges are important and needed for everything published,
| not just this particular research area.
|
| I might be out in left field, but I read so often that
| researchers are running out of ideas. What's wrong with getting
| a PhD for challenging something already published? It is
| incredibly valuable to society.
| imiric wrote:
| > This whole process has been super healthy
|
| Has it, though?
|
| The South Korean paper claimed to have found "The First Room-
| Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor". It took a month
| for researchers around the world to essentially debunk this.
|
| Science works by peer review, yes, but that should have never
| been a claim to begin with. They were blinded by excitement
| of the results and eager to publish the paper, instead of
| being conservative and making sure they got everything right.
|
| Now it's clear that they missed several key aspects that seem
| trivial in retrospect. It's just sloppy science.
|
| Sure, this caused much excitement in science nerds
| everywhere, and the media got more ad impressions, but
| overall I wouldn't qualify this particular event as "super
| healthy".
|
| Coincidentally, or not, this[1] is currently on the front
| page.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37137405
| 93po wrote:
| Does this extend to climate change science too?
| salty_biscuits wrote:
| Yes.
| belthesar wrote:
| Sure, but there's a level of entry to the "challenge" call
| to action. When folks are saying "believe in the science",
| it also means to believe in the scientific method, which
| does include challenging observations and independently
| validating conclusions. A proper challenge requires coming
| up to the plate, proposing a challenging hypothesis to a
| given conclusion, and then going through the work required
| to test your hypothesis, documenting the inputs, the
| variables, and showcasing your outputs.
|
| What this doesn't mean is the average human who does not
| like the conclusion producing a statement saying "I don't
| think that's real", or even going so far as to cite data
| which could appear to refute the conclusion, are producing
| a challenge to the conclusion. They're just stating an
| opinion. This isn't designed to be exclusionary, but to
| ensure that challengers are going through the effort that
| the producer of the conclusion did. If one is not willing
| to learn the problem space enough to reasonably challenge
| the effort, then that challenge is moot.
| hackerlight wrote:
| Not too long ago, a creationist would have sarcastically
| asked "Does this extend to biology too?", and gone away
| thinking they had made an actual argument.
| 93po wrote:
| Try challenging climate science, even in a valid way, and
| see how popular it is on reddit or HN or twitter. Even my
| above comment now has a negative score which sort of
| proves my point.
|
| note: i don't deny climate science but like any science
| there are ways to challenge it
| xattt wrote:
| It sounds a lot like the thoughts that one might have before
| the draw for a large lottery jackpot.
|
| It's a fun exercise, but it's fantastical thinking.
| paxys wrote:
| [flagged]
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Agreed:
|
| > going viral on TikTok isn't the new peer review
|
| Not so sure:
|
| > science is still best done the old fashioned way
|
| It's not surprising that social networks designed to serve ads
| aren't outperforming scientific journals at deriving scientific
| consensus. But it would be interesting to see how the journals
| stack up to a social network that was designed for deriving
| scientific consensus.
| gataca wrote:
| > HN commenters who were incessantly bringing up the failed
| Western scientific and political order in a hundred threads
| about this
|
| This especially was simultaneously comical and cringe-worthy
| coolspot wrote:
| > -1 to (...) Russian anime cat girls
|
| Don't you dare!
| wayvey wrote:
| What are the practical implications of this?
| tareqak wrote:
| Perhaps scientists will create a checklist for performing
| experiments on potential superconductive materials with caveats
| and gotchas.
|
| A team going down the checklist would either demonstrate one of
|
| 1. They performed the step in the checklist and provide the
| corresponding sufficient/exhaustive evidence of having done so.
|
| 2. An explanation as to why that step is not applicable
| allowing them to skip said step.
|
| An afterthought:
|
| 3. The following will not always be possible for any given
| experiment. However, the LK-99 experiment used cheap materials
| and a relatively straightforward process to create the material
| (from my readings of what others have said), I think the
| scientists in question should have attempted to reproduce the
| results of their experiment and document the number of
| successful attempts versus total attempts.
| EvgeniyZh wrote:
| 1. Check that it actually superconducts
| OJFord wrote:
| That's not trivial, because if it's known to be impure then
| you expect some resistance in your measurement, you already
| know it won't be 0R. And if you think it is pure and
| superconducting then how low does your test equipment go
| anyway?
|
| I'm not an expert in the field at all, but aiui that's why
| they would have been looking at what seem like roundabout
| tests etc. that don't seem like they're actually addressing
| what's interesting.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| This is basic software/systems validation that's required in
| many industries (my experience being in life sciences, but
| have also seen this in aerospace).
|
| Is there no analogue in the physical sciences?
| neolefty wrote:
| We know why it fooled everybody, but AFAIK the material doesn't
| have any outstanding properties. With certain impurities and
| under certain conditions, it:
|
| - has a striking drop in resistivity during a temperature
| change -- a property published in 1951 as a property of copper
| sulfide
|
| - has some ferromagnetic properties -- enough to be tipped up
| in a magnetic field but not to levitate
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _some ferromagnetic properties_
|
| I'm still interested int hat, as it seems like it could be
| quite useful and the LK-99 material is not especially hard to
| produce.
| dtx1 wrote:
| Unfortunate news but i'm glad i was there for the ride.
| duringmath wrote:
| It was interesting seeing real peer reviewed science from
| accredited labs like LLNL and Fermi get brushed aside and almost
| dismissed while people were cheering on this LK-99 thing.
|
| Not sure what to make of that but that's what I'll remember most
| about this debacle.
| chrononaut wrote:
| That's what I most remember too from this.
| [deleted]
| chmod600 wrote:
| None of the earlier articles mentioned ferromagnetic levitation
| vs superconducting levitation and how to tell them apart.
| themagician wrote:
| Because all of the people publishing information about this
| were playing the options market. There was no need to actually
| educate anyone on anything. This was a scam. It worked.
|
| One person sees the opportunity it creating a hype train and
| gets a few buddies on board. Loads up on $1 calls for something
| they feel could be the next meme stock, like AMSC. Options
| start to load up on 7/18, just a few days before the 7/22
| original drop on arxiv. You get the 7/22 drop and then uploads
| of grainy videos start to show up. Bank a few million in
| options contracts as the price of AMSC doubles overnight. Other
| people see the hype train leaving the station and start their
| own, using the same strategy.
|
| It's how you end up with a dozen potato quality videos and very
| specific information attached to the comment threads, "This is
| going to be HUGE for quantum computing @IonQ_Inc if true."
|
| We have seen these types of market manipulation scams in the
| past. This was the first time we've seen someone use something
| like arxiv to do this. Brilliant idea, really. We will see more
| in the future no doubt.
| adrian_b wrote:
| There is no such thing as ferromagnetic levitation (i.e. there
| is no stable position).
|
| Nevertheless, a piece of ferromagnetic material which has a
| permanent remanent magnetization (which is possible only for a
| subset of the ferromagnetic materials) when put on a magnet may
| take a position close to vertical, with one edge pressed on the
| magnet.
|
| It is very easy to verify if this is what you see by moving the
| piece of material to the other pole of the magnet, where it
| must take a reversed position, with the other edge pressed on
| the magnet.
|
| A diamagnetic material will be equally repelled by both poles
| of the magnet, so moving it between the poles will not change
| its behavior.
|
| A soft ferromagnetic material, like iron, will be equally
| attracted by both poles of the magnet.
|
| The explanations that iron impurities could be present in
| quantities so great as to form some unknown iron compounds with
| high coercivity and some unknown experimental circumstances
| could magnetize permanently the samples, are not significantly
| more credible than the claims that room-temperature
| superconductors do exist.
|
| In any case, anyone who has made some samples can verify easily
| whether they are ferromagnetic or diamagnetic. It would be more
| credible that someone has made fake claims, than that they have
| mistaken a ferromagnetic material for a diamagnetic material.
| chmod600 wrote:
| Thank you for the informative reply.
|
| Given that it's so easy for the experimenter to verify, you
| are saying that the most credible explanation is scientific
| fraud?
| usrbinbash wrote:
| One of the good things that came out of this whole story: A very
| public demonstration, transported through mass and even social
| media channels, how empiricism and the principle of falsification
| work, and why they are the only known reliable process for
| generating knowledge.
| morelisp wrote:
| No, mass and social media stopped paying attention days ago
| because Trump or Hawai'i or whatever. In a few years some might
| have a flashback, Google "what happened stupor conduct", and
| after a few sentences conclude science isn't really worth
| paying attention to after all.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Stopping paying attention in the sense of "waiting for news"
| sense, sure.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| I would charitabily read the parent's comment as referring to
| the middle brow 'mass media' aimed at those moderately above
| average in terms of paying attention to these topics.
|
| It overlaps with a sizable majority of the HN readerbase.
|
| Not the mass media of grocery store checkout aisle magazines.
| morelisp wrote:
| We have wildly diverging views of the average HNer. I'm
| thinking the median is much closer to "Russian catgirl
| home-cook on X" than "studious reader of The Atlantic".
| [deleted]
| themagician wrote:
| The people who made millions off this saw something positive
| from it.
| arcticfox wrote:
| who made millions off of this?
| kitanata wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| iraqmtpizza wrote:
| I don't see how 0.002 ohms per cm could be confused with
| superconductivity. Is that not orders of magnitude too high? Or
| there are no instruments which can directly measure resistance
| more precisely?
| floxy wrote:
| The units for resistivity would be ohms*cm (Ohms times a
| length), not Ohms per cm. Then if you divide by the cross-
| sectional area of a sample, you would get the resistance per
| length.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_resistivity_and_con...
| deepspace wrote:
| Yes, I was typing faster than I was thinking. I should have
| said Resistivity instead of Resistance and ohms.m instead of
| ohms/m. My point is still valid, though.
| deepspace wrote:
| Yes, that was my first thought. There are absolutely
| instruments which can directly measure resistance down to 10E-8
| ohms/m or lower, and I would expect any lab doing research into
| superconductivity to at least have one of those.
| iraqmtpizza wrote:
| Also, "not a superconductor" means that it can't superconduct
| at any temperature. Where is the evidence of that? Or it's
| just clickbait?
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| By that logic we might as well say that wood is a
| superconductor
|
| Nobody has tested it at 0.0000000000000K after all
| iraqmtpizza wrote:
| Testing at 5 Kelvin is not hard. You don't have to take
| everything ultraliterally.
|
| And science isn't about saying wood isn't a
| superconductor because it's impractical to test. That's
| not a result. You may be getting science confused with
| engineering.
| floxy wrote:
| One group claimed that their sample of LK-99 went
| superconducting at ~110K:
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01192
| chubot wrote:
| Well I'm kinda glad I missed this whole news cycle
|
| IMO this phenomenon seems to be kind of an artifact of modern
| media -- I feel like in the old days, peers would have settled it
| among themselves, and we would have never heard about it
|
| The same thing happens in tech -- there is a lot of stuff that
| people talk about, that ends up being worth ignoring
|
| ...
|
| I always bring up that whole news cycle in 2017 about a potential
| war with North Korea. How many people spent time and energy on
| that, and how do they feel about that now? Media is adversarial
| Eji1700 wrote:
| We had similar nonsense with r the EM Drive and cold fusion so
| this isn't that new.
|
| Either way the best video I've seen on this whole thing, Abe
| why it's endlessly frustrating, is this:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl-AgmoZ5mo
| goku12 wrote:
| It's easy call those claims nonsense in retrospect. However,
| many important discoveries were made from equally fantastic
| observations. We would have missed a lot if we brushed them
| aside cynically. The only way to know for sure is to test the
| claim scientifically. As the LK99 saga has shown, even
| incredible claims must be discussed and tested in public.
| This is one episode where the media hype did work - though
| the result was disappointing. Well! That's the price you pay
| for progress.
| Eji1700 wrote:
| > It's easy call those claims nonsense in retrospect.
|
| People were calling out the over hyping, the bad science,
| and the bad graph from day 1. The original scientists
| DIDN'T want to publish.
|
| Almost all important discoveries have been made from PROPER
| science. If you have surprising results, you verify them.
| You verify your test results. You verify your methodology.
| You repeat the experiment.
|
| How many important discoveries aren't found because they
| can't get funding/attention because "doing it right" is
| somehow seen as wrong now.
| brutusborn wrote:
| I really like the video but I disagree with his prescription
| for peer review to increase trust in science.
|
| People don't distrust scientists because there isn't enough
| peer review or because of pre-prints failing to replicate,
| they distrust scientific institutions because scientific
| institutions often communicate their current best theory as
| the truth and pretend that they can 'prove' things true by
| way of 'scientific consensus.' Going against the consensus
| can ruin or limit your career.
|
| Lots of examples: climate scientists making claims of ice
| free arctic by 2020, dietary science flip flopping on diet
| advice (fat and butter is bad, carbs are bad), covid vaccines
| being a silver bullet, ivermectin not being effective [1].
| Add in problems in social 'sciences' like the Sokal affair,
| psychology replication crisis, mainstream economists failing
| to predict the GFC, definitions of foundational terms like
| "woman" changing, and you have a recipe for the general
| public not trusting academia or 'scientific' institutions in
| general. Science and academia in general is being polluted by
| politics and it is incentivising academics to exaggerate the
| accuracy of their knowledge.
|
| [1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarti
| cle... I added the reference here because Ivermectin was a
| horrible case of politicising science: mainstream
| institutions called it an animal medicine with full knowledge
| it was safe for humans. And now there is a potential
| mechanism for its effect, it looks like it may have been
| effective after all. During the pandemic I heard many
| scientists laugh at people for considering it, all because an
| authority they trusted told them it was silly.
| tuatoru wrote:
| Your specific examples are of media wilfully
| misunderstanding what the science says in order to
| sensationalise, and get clicks. Get your science from the
| newspaper, get trash.
|
| Ivermectin, for instance, has been on the World Health
| Organisation's list of essential medicines for a long time.
|
| The replication crisis is a real thing, for sure.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHO_Model_List_of_Essentia
| l_Me...
| brutusborn wrote:
| I don't think the media caused the psychology replication
| crisis. The media plays a part in all this, but the
| scientific institutions shouldn't crumble to media or
| political pressure.
|
| See the FDA's advice on Ivermectin:
| https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/why-you-
| shoul...
|
| "Ivermectin has not been shown to be safe or effective
| for these indications," but fail to mention that there is
| no evidence that it is not safe for this particular
| indication. This implies it wasn't banned for safety
| reasons. It was banned because many associated it with
| Trump and right wing conspiracy theories.
|
| There was no science used to justify banning it to begin
| with, and we are now years later, with a potential
| mechanism for the benefit and it is still banned!
|
| One more link to prove I'm not completely insane: the AMA
| and other mainstream medical bodies recommended not using
| it for Covid https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-
| releases/ama-aph...
| brutusborn wrote:
| I wonder if this is a net positive, since media hype would
| increase likelihood of future funding or investment, so the
| hype generates accelerated progress.
|
| It could also be the opposite: shiny result causes over
| investment in an area of tech which isn't productive.
| rgoulter wrote:
| > IMO this phenomenon seems to be kind of an artifact of modern
| media
|
| To my understanding, these researchers had been working on this
| for decades and were confident what they had was good.
|
| Once the information was leaked, the scientific community was
| roused, and came to consensus within days.
|
| I think the contrast in those two timescales is noteworthy.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| Room temperature superconductivity, like quantum computing,
| fusion power, and em drives, and other similar "magic"
| technologies, have one thing in common, which is that the
| potential consequences of their existence are positive,
| substantial, and relatively easy to explain and to comprehend,
| while the difficulties preventing those technologies from
| seeing the light of day are complex, difficult, and a "bummer"
| to hear about.
| tuatoru wrote:
| I'm struggling with the claimed consequences.
|
| The electricity grid has losses of about 30 percent, so a
| fully superconducting grid could increase delivered power by
| about 43 percent, not an order of magnitude more.
|
| More compact MRI machines would be nice to have, certainly,
| but wouldn't materially change mortality.
|
| What else is there?
| kbelder wrote:
| Our electrical grid has losses of 30 percent, even after
| being designed to minimize those losses. Superconductivity
| wouldn't simply remove those losses; it would remove that
| design constraint, enabling (for example) solar panels in
| the Sahara to power households in Siberia. It would mostly
| fix the power storage problem for renewables.
|
| The point is that at a certain level, a quantifiable
| increase in efficiency causes a qualitative change in
| capabilities.
| jliptzin wrote:
| Is that true for RTSCs? In the last month of this saga, every
| time I saw someone comment on some amazing new technology
| that RTSC would enable, another expert would chime in and
| explain why that's not actually possible or feasible for
| various reasons. The only convincing gain I've seen is a ~10%
| drop in power transmission costs. But obviously this can't be
| right because of how excited everyone gets about it.
| teraflop wrote:
| If RTSCs turn out to be viable, they would reduce power
| transmission costs by maybe 10% for our _current_
| infrastructure. That 's just because we don't build power
| lines over distances where the losses would be much greater
| than that, because it doesn't make sense.
|
| But they would also enable _new_ infrastructure beyond what
| is currently feasible, because we could transport power
| over much longer distances without any increased loss.
|
| For example, you could transport solar power from the
| daylit side of the earth to the night side.
| mempko wrote:
| It's better to miss news cycles, but at least this one was
| about exciting science instead of dreadful politics.
| penjelly wrote:
| this particular news cycle was the final straw for me using
| twitter. Its not worth 1-3day new cycle is 99% of claims are
| bs
| eesmith wrote:
| When are these old days? I remember cold fusion from the late
| 1980s.
|
| There's polywater from the 1960s.
|
| N-rays in the 1900s (the first decade) made it to
| "spiritualists" and "crackpots and extremists" outside of
| academia,
| https://archive.org/details/flashofcathodera0000dahl/page/24...
| .
|
| Giovanni Schiaparelli 1877 observation of "canali" on Mars
| captivated the public.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| The Martian canals are interesting misinformation phenomena.
| A phenomenon that we've seen repeated among the woo crowd.
|
| Schiaprelli points his telescope at Mars, and sees some faint
| squiggles. He suspects they're something dried river beds,
| and calls them "channels", like a river channel. Being
| Italian, he uses the Italian word, "canali".
|
| This word, being the same word used for "canal" in English,
| gets translated as "canal". However in English, "canal"
| refers exclusively to an artificial construction, where as
| "channel" doesn't have that distinction.
|
| This framing now primes, people when looking at blurry faint
| marks on Mars. Someone tries to map the "canals" and either
| through an act of simplification/illustration, or
| psychological priming, connects dark regions (river deltas?)
| to each other via straight lines -- perhaps the shape most
| evocative of artificiality.
|
| And so it snowballs.
|
| I don't think the canal theory ever gained much traction.
| (It's a wild idea!) Telescopes just weren't good enough to
| consistently observe the channels, let alone see them well
| enough for a definitive answer. We had to wait for Mariner 4
| for that.
| eesmith wrote:
| > I don't think the canal theory ever gained much traction.
|
| I'm not sure what you mean by traction. I wanted to show
| examples of scientific disagreement which made it to the
| popular press, to argue that it's been happening for a long
| time.
|
| Using one of the sources mentioned at
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_canals lists several
| I found this 1902 textbook which suggests it did have
| traction among astronomers for at least a couple of years,
| though not general acceptance. Quoting https://archive.org/
| details/manualofastronom00younrich/page/... :
|
| ] These new markings are faint and very difficult to see,
| and for several years there was a strong suspicion that he
| was misled by some illusion, -- in respect to their
| "gemination," at least, -- which is still ascribed, by some
| very high authorities, to astigmatism in the eye of the
| observer or bad focusing of his telescope. Still, the
| weight of evidence at present favors the reality of the
| phenomena which Schiaparelli describes. Many observers,
| both in Europe and the United States, have confirmed his
| results, and they are now generally accepted, although some
| of the best, armed with very powerful telescopes, still
| fail to see the canals as anything but the merest shading
|
| I say "couple of years" because there are several editions
| of that textbook! In 1904 at https://archive.org/details/at
| extbookgenera05youngoog/page/3... :
|
| ] [Schiaparelli's] observations have since been confirmed
| and added to by various eminent astronomers in Europe and
| America, especially by Perrotin at Nice and Lowell in
| Arizona. But others, equally eminent and apparently under
| equally favorable conditions, fail to see the reported
| features.
|
| While in 1888 at https://archive.org/details/textbookofgene
| ra00youn/page/346/...
|
| ] "If there is not some fallacy in the observation, the
| problem as to the nature of these canals, and the cause of
| their gemination, it is a very important and perplexing
| one. It is hoped that at the next favorable opposition in
| 1892 it may find its solution."
| creeble wrote:
| Oh man, there's goes my https://lk99.com community website!
| mcphage wrote:
| > MO this phenomenon seems to be kind of an artifact of modern
| media -- I feel like in the old days, peers would have settled
| it among themselves, and we would have never heard about it
|
| That's what happened here--peers settled it among themselves.
|
| > there is a lot of stuff that people talk about, that ends up
| being worth ignoring
|
| Of course. The thing is, you never know whether it's worth
| ignoring or not unless some people pay attention to it.
|
| > How many people spent time and energy on that, and how do
| they feel about that now?
|
| Pretty good that we didn't go to war with North Korea?
|
| > Media is adversarial
|
| In some cases it's adversarial, and in some cases it's
| complicit. In that case specifically, sabre rattling was part
| of Trump's negotiation tactics, and media playing up the
| possibility of war was his intention.
| babypuncher wrote:
| The larger media outlets were smart enough to stay away from
| the hype until there was more data available from replication
| efforts. Maybe they're learning? Everything I saw about LK-99
| before the last week or so was on HN or social media.
| timeon wrote:
| News cycle? Maybe if you count Twitter as tabloid.
|
| When the hype came people here were asking: 'why western labs
| and traditional media are so passive?'. Then Nature came with
| article telling people to calm down. People here called Nature
| and peer reviews to be in decline.
| awb wrote:
| > I always bring up that whole news cycle in 2017 about a
| potential war with North Korea. How many people spent time and
| energy on that, and how do they feel about that now? Media is
| adversarial
|
| And then there are tons of counter examples: "no way Russia
| will invade Ukraine", "Hitler will stop at Poland", etc. then
| the opposite happens. How do those people feel? Did they
| dismiss the stories warning of imminent conflict as adversarial
| media hysteria?
|
| Expecting people to correctly follow a news story or not based
| on an unknown future outcome is impossible.
|
| If you can consistently bat above .500 in predicting the news,
| there's a lot of money to be made in prediction markets.
| tamimio wrote:
| 100% agree, that's the problem with social media and why I hate
| it.. you have people with 20% knowledge in the subject but with
| thousands of followers grifting on the topic, while the actual
| scientists (or subject matter experts) barely have any voice or
| influence, and results? Public opinion is being shaped by those
| idiots
| [deleted]
| asdfman123 wrote:
| In tech's case it's oftne just people manipulating the markets.
| X is the next big thing, X will revolutionize the world, invest
| everything in X.
|
| The people driving the hype cycle sell at the peak, make a
| quick buck, and move on to the next thing. Unfortunately, I
| think it's a key factor in driving the shitification of
| everything.
| babypuncher wrote:
| "AI" is going through this process at record pace. So far
| every money-making application I've seen for it has just made
| existing products worse by reducing the number of humans
| involved in production. Shittier artwork, shittier blog
| posts, even shittier recipes.
|
| At least with social media we had a few good years where
| everything was awesome and it felt like our lives were being
| enriched, not cheapened.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| Some of the tech being pumped has a few useful
| applications, some of it has no useful applications.
| Permit wrote:
| > Well I'm kinda glad I missed this whole news cycle
|
| What negative effects would you have suffered if you had not
| missed this news cycle?
| timeon wrote:
| Time wasted. I have not missed this cycle. All posts and
| discussions I have read were pointless at best - toxic at
| worst.
| Permit wrote:
| Perhaps it's because I am a complete outsider to the field
| but I found the discussions interesting and learned many
| new things about materials science and superconductivity
| that I didn't know before.
|
| I could imagine an expert in this field having the opposite
| take as they almost certainly already knew the little bits
| of trivia that I picked up.
| RationPhantoms wrote:
| You're arguing for less transparency here? I think one of the
| side benefits to witnessing the LK-99 discussion is people from
| all walks (sure, Twitter/X isn't the end all/be-all of global
| communication) discussing/following/listening to actual science
| happen.
|
| Do you know how much of that is worth to the world with knock-
| on effects? Maybe there were future material scientists sitting
| in the room with their parents listening to the discussion? I
| feel like that's equally as important as peer
| review/replication.
| HaZeust wrote:
| You cannot please these people, simply put. These folks STILL
| want the ESSENCE of a shared respect and excitement from the
| common man for scientific progression - and these folks are
| the same people, mind you, that speak loudly on the ignorance
| of the cluster groups within the "anti-science" big tent. But
| when these same folks see a glimpse of collective curiosity
| for science and methodologies among a lot of people, they
| long for the days of opacity and "mature handling of
| scientific consensus". Which, ironically, was the path in
| which almost ALL scientific progressions that spawned anti-
| science sentiments had taken.
|
| You can't win.
| dTal wrote:
| Not-that-unpopular opinion: Some form of soft gatekeeping
| is required to keep a healthy signal/noise ratio, in a lot
| of contexts.
|
| The issue is, what sort of gatekeeping, and how aligned is
| it with the desired effect? Even simply crudely throwing up
| all sorts of arbitrary obstacles (e.g. various forms of
| academic hazing) is sufficient to at least keep out people
| who aren't willing to put in some sort of effort. The
| problem is that has a lot of collateral damage - it also
| loses perfectly fine people whose only flaw is a low
| tolerance for institutionally imposed arbitrary obstacles.
| A perfect gatekeeping mechanism would exclude everyone who
| can't contribute while presenting minimal obstacles to
| those who can. I don't want to speculate here what that
| might look like, but it's not contradictory to want
| everyone to have access to science while simultaneously
| wanting ignorant loudmouths to be gently suppressed.
|
| If I may mutilate a beloved Pixar film, "anyone can
| science". But not everyone can be a scientist. Everyone
| should just be given a chance.
| haswell wrote:
| I think a different way to frame this is that an Internet
| discussion will involve people with opinions across the
| spectrum.
|
| I don't think this is about pleasing "these people", but
| about recognizing which attitudes are useful and which are
| not. Encountering some mix of all of the above is a product
| of the diversity of people involved in the conversation,
| and not necessarily "these people" wanting it both ways.
| HaZeust wrote:
| My framing is fine, in my biased opinion. Saying, "You
| can't please these people about this" is essentially the
| same as saying "Their attitude about this is not useful"
| - though one might be more polite.
|
| Maybe I went amiss, maybe I need perspective, but I don't
| see why a consideration for a re-frame is necessary if
| one still gets their point across; albeit maybe with more
| "passion" than necessary.
| haswell wrote:
| > _These folks STILL want the ESSENCE of a shared respect
| and excitement...But when these same folks see a glimpse
| of collective curiosity...they long for the days of
| opacity and "mature handling of scientific consensus"_.
|
| You are claiming that it's the same group of people
| holding incongruous viewpoints.
|
| My point was that this is likely an illusion caused by
| the communication medium, i.e. "these people" represent a
| myriad of individual viewpoints, which may not align
| because I think "A" and you think "B". Not because I
| think "A" and "B".
|
| To frame it in this way doesn't allow for a useful
| exploration of the issue. It casts aside an entire group
| instead of examining the roots of the problematic
| behavior. It also creates a straw man - the person who
| believes both things incongruously, when this person
| doesn't seem likely to exist, or at least seems likely
| that this is a rare stance.
|
| > _Saying, "You can't please these people about this" is
| essentially the same as saying "Their attitude about this
| is not useful"_
|
| These are saying very different things. One discards the
| entire person on the basis of a view you disagree with.
| This is a road to nowhere. The other allows an
| examination of the actual behavior, which is arguably far
| more important if there's a case to be made that someone
| should _change_ their behavior.
|
| "Oh, you're one of _those people_ " gets you nowhere.
| "The problem with this line of thinking/attitude is that
| it limits the potential for public excitement and
| involvement with the process..." gives you and the person
| who disagree something to work with.
|
| This isn't about being polite. This is about choosing
| whether the point is to explore the nature of the
| problem, or to complain about a group of people.
| dralley wrote:
| Honestly, I feel bad for the original authors, who were
| _correctly_ holding out for stronger evidence but were forced
| into publishing early by the actions of a third party going
| behind their backs.
|
| I hope they don't experience undue blowback because of this.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| This gives them an out actually
| mgfist wrote:
| Yet we're all the better for it happening. Even for the
| original researchers - maybe it would've taken them another 10
| years to get to a similar conclusion. Now, they can take the
| next step and not waste more time.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| Seems like this followed the same rule of internet answers:
| Ask a question and you'll get crickets. Answer a question
| wrong and you'll get tonnes of people telling you the right
| answer.
| nannal wrote:
| Yeah, the power of Randlow's law cannot be understated.
| nbgoodall wrote:
| Eurgh I actually Googled that, well played.
| SebJansen wrote:
| yes, Steven's law has such utility
| explaininjs wrote:
| Do I read it correctly that doubling the amount of
| current through your fingers feels like 10x'ing it? If
| so... shocking.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevens's_power_law
| bilater wrote:
| omg I love this
| ignite wrote:
| This was great science. Hypothesis, test, and attempted
| confirmation. Too bad it's not superconducting, but the
| process worked the way it is supposed to.
| mi_lk wrote:
| I'm not aware of it, anything to read about the said third
| party?
| avereveard wrote:
| I wonder why it was so difficult for the original authors to
| get a pure sample, it's not like it took 10 years to create
| these larger crystsal.
| zulban wrote:
| I suspect the third party is the one that will mostly suffer
| the career consequences.
| Gud wrote:
| For sure! The original researchers showed remarkable
| restraint considering what they were potentially sitting on.
| Kudos to them!
| themagician wrote:
| The question is whether or not the original authors were pawns
| or part of the scam.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| I think the story might be more complicated than that, I
| remember reading that the "third party" was the one paying the
| bills for the experiment so pushing it out early and even
| publicly failing would've been preferable to getting it dragged
| out infinitely for an unlikely hope of it being successful.
| hgsgm wrote:
| This funder-rushed science exactly what created Doc Ock and
| the Green Goblin.
| gundamdoubleO wrote:
| They both had some pretty ground breaking technology to be
| fair
| pnt12 wrote:
| Now I'm even more disappointed in the outcome!
| hennell wrote:
| Is this the origin of "semi-magnetic-man"?
| floxy wrote:
| So it sounds like the purple crystal isn't repelled by magnets.
| So what part of the samples was causing the magnetic properties?
| Or are we saying that _all_ of those videos and images were
| faked?
| flatline wrote:
| Says it right there: CuS. You should read the whole thing, it's
| really well-written and thorough.
| floxy wrote:
| The Cu2S was responsible for the temperature dependent
| resistivity measurement caused by a phase change at 104 degC,
| not the magnet properties. If you have some more information
| on the ferromagnetic properties of copper sulfides, I'd like
| to learn more.
| graypegg wrote:
| You know what? I needed that saga. That was fun. I don't think
| I've been this interested in any research project since being a
| kid skimming thru popular science or something :)
|
| It's been so cool to see all of the replication studies, people
| talking about the latest news and all of that. Kind of a peek
| behind the scientific curtain to see all of the work that goes
| into confirming claims.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| jklinger410 wrote:
| This was absolutely a fun and worthwhile experience for everyone
| involved. A lot of people got more interested in current
| materials science because of this. We watched a large community
| spring up out of nowhere to investigate a new discovery.
|
| It was really an incredible thing to witness, and I see only good
| things came of it.
|
| I can't really understand the sour grapes commenters in this
| thread. Not sure if they just want to feel smarter/better than
| everyone else who went along for this ride, or if they really
| hold the belief that the best science should be gate-kept in
| universities and not discussed in a wider context.
|
| Strong get off my lawn energy.
| ShamelessC wrote:
| For me personally it is just general (mild) annoyance with a
| community that somewhat consistently likes to think it is
| smarter and better than others and which is then only ever
| willing to admit they were wrong in roundabout ways like "well
| this was all fun, anyone who thinks it was a waste of resources
| or what-have-you doesn't see how much impact it had".
|
| You can see this wild speculation play out _commonly_ for lots
| of will-be fads like cryptocurrency, metaverse, prompt
| engineering, vector databases, "autoGPT"/langchain, GPT3/4
| performance degradation, GPT4 architecture, and more.
|
| People here dress it all up in well-written prose, citing their
| past experience at big tech or the ivy league, but at the end
| of the day much of it is as misinformed as a viral 4chan post.
| And then, as I said, there is very little postmortem from those
| same posters (although to be fair, I have seen several
| cryptocurrency people finally admit they were wrong).
|
| edit:
|
| For clarity, I am not encouraging a shame-based "admit you're
| wrong and I'm right!" attitude. That just results in more of
| the same but from the other side. I am merely condoning a
| healthy amount of humility and acceptance that it is
| _absolutely_ okay to be wrong, but that it is quite important
| to _admit_ it (if only to yourself) in fairly clear terms.
|
| My frustrations are largely related to social media in general
| and the notion that scientists are gatekeeping seems to forget
| about the very real effects of misinformation. None of us like
| to realize it, but some people really have begun to take the
| word of internet comments over the word of credentialed takes
| and it is _ruining_ society in my opinion.
| taylodl wrote:
| Exactly, and when you tell people not to get ahead too far
| ahead of themselves and wait for secondary confirmation
| before we get all excited, you get downvoted.
|
| This isn't my first rodeo. I've seen this show before.
|
| Now, one of these times, we're going to get a secondary
| confirmation and then things will get _really_ exciting!
| Until there 's such a secondary confirmation, I'm going to
| remain a curious sceptic.
|
| Jade is the color of experience and age.
| SirYandi wrote:
| Who really knows _that_ much about anything though? Few
| people are experts in a given topic. Although I see your
| point, I suppose more people would be good to recognise that,
| especially about themselves.
|
| That said, this is a fairly general forum and (mostly) for
| entertainment purposes right?
| penjelly wrote:
| well said
| [deleted]
| alkibiades wrote:
| lol at those internet idiots boosting it. they will fall for
| anything. see: gamestop/crypto
| sdenton4 wrote:
| In summary, "Fucking magnets, how do they work?"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-agl0pOQfs
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| One time I was listening to that and the next thing that played
| was
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8
| [deleted]
| samhuk wrote:
| > When copper oxide superconductors were discovered in 1986,
| researchers leapt to probe their properties. But nearly four
| decades later, there is still debate over the material's
| superconducting mechanism, says Vishik. Efforts to explain LK-99
| came readily.
|
| To me, the interesting take-away is that, right at the end. All
| too often we see peer-review as this slow, inching,
| _excruciating_ process, particularly in social sciences where it
| 's a de-facto afterthought. It was great to see science chugging
| ferociously away like a (somewhat!) well-oiled machine, such as
| the electronic analysis via slightly different methods (e.g. DFT)
| and the material synthesis efforts by the Argonne NL and Max
| Planck Institute.
|
| Farewell for now, RTSC.
|
| Side-note: Pure LK-99 is visually _beautiful_! Who would-a known
| from those crumbly grey flakes, huh?
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(page generated 2023-08-16 23:00 UTC)