[HN Gopher] LK-99 isn't a superconductor
___________________________________________________________________
LK-99 isn't a superconductor
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 1997 points
Date : 2023-08-16 16:17 UTC (1 days 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?
| dfasdfa32423 wrote:
| Could be true, but there will more tests for sure.
| 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
| vagab0nd wrote:
| Is it really sad though? On the surface it seems the society
| heavily incentivizes smart people to work on "less impactful"
| things. But if every smart person becomes a condensed-matter
| researcher then obviously we have a problem. So what's the
| right amount of people that should work on condensed matter
| physics? Who should decide on such amount? Currently the market
| decides. But maybe there's a better way?
| 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".
| vietvu wrote:
| When I told my wife about this, all she replied was how it's
| gonna be monopolized by big countries/big tech and our third
| world country like ours will never use it.
|
| It's a point, but well human need to push the limit, no matter
| what.
| onion2k wrote:
| _When I told my wife about this, all she replied was how it
| 's gonna be monopolized by big countries/big tech and our
| third world country like ours will never use it._
|
| The materials and hardware required to make LK-99 are within
| the reach of a high school. It's _really_ simple and doesn 't
| require anything more than a very hot oven (hotter than a
| domestic one, but still very common). If it'd turned out to
| be a real superconductor anyone who wanted to make it could
| have done.
| aslfjiasf wrote:
| I'm not sure about that. So many people had hard time
| synthesizing LK-99, and the original researchers said that
| even for themselves only 1 out of 10 attempts to create a
| material succeeded.
|
| The pure LK-99 crystals pictured in the article were
| obtained using more advanced technique: "Unlike previous
| synthesis attempts that relied on crucibles, the
| researchers used a technique called floating zone crystal
| growth that allowed them to avoid introducing sulfur into
| the reaction, eliminating the Cu2S impurities."
|
| But I agree that if there's money to be made, it will be
| available world wide quickly.
| science4sail wrote:
| "Never" is a strong word - smartphones were once monopolized
| by rich countries, but are now a worldwide phenomenon. Even
| explicitly-banned/controlled technologies like nuclear
| weapons managed to eventually diffuse around the world.
| vietvu wrote:
| Yes, it is never absolute. But I get her points, always
| mean majority. Like for her I am always late for dinner.
| The days that I was early does not count, even if it's like
| 20%.
| [deleted]
| banq wrote:
| she need GOD
| 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.
| [deleted]
| 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...
| stilwelldotdev wrote:
| Waiting for more labs to weigh in. Every scientist whose name we
| know was called an idiot by a room full of experts first.
| progrus wrote:
| [flagged]
| 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?
| mike00632 wrote:
| Some members of the LK-99 team published a claim of
| superconductivity and it included falsified data. Nature
| published it and had to retract it.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05294-9
|
| https://www.science.org/content/article/something-
| seriously-...
| fsh wrote:
| The paper with the falsified data is from an american team
| and has absolutely nothing to do with LK-99.
| 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.
| sanroot99 wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3hubvTsf3Y , reality check
| 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
| seewhydee wrote:
| Yes, I noticed that this article disproportionately quoted
| American scientists who played relatively minor roles in the
| replication efforts. I guess the reporter just found it more
| convenient to reach out to them for comments.
| 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]
| drcode wrote:
| Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
|
| Now, this extraordinary claim doesn't even have weak evidence
|
| I think pessimism is warranted at this point
| boobalyboo wrote:
| [flagged]
| vietvu wrote:
| It's a wild ride.
| johnchals wrote:
| [flagged]
| 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.
| akarve wrote:
| He's probably a *-sulfide or copper-* expert. Or maybe just a
| physical chemist that the press is ginning up. Actually, the
| latter. His page doesn't even mention copper or sulfide; and
| makes only one mention of conductors.
|
| https://chemistry.illinois.edu/jain
| 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?
| exmadscientist wrote:
| Honestly? His mannerisms was all we really needed. He was
| not well liked in his year, and that takes some doing to
| achieve these days. The smug "how could I be wrong" when
| he was, well, 26 orders of magnitude wrong, is special
| even by entitled scientist standards.
| ajani wrote:
| Yes, how we behave usually trumps how true/false our
| ideas are.
| 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
| exmadscientist wrote:
| My point is that this person _has_ baseline
| qualifications (Physics PhD!), was accepted by the media
| as "qualified" to be a blogger, and yet was still a
| complete god damned moron even in his own field of
| "specialization".
|
| It wouldn't have made such an impact except that he was
| getting paid to publicly write about this stuff, at the
| same time he was privately incompetent. A stellar example
| of the Gell-Mann Effect (aka Amnesia) if ever there was
| one.
| 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.
| shepardrtc wrote:
| Ad Hominem attacks like this are what make me follow people
| like Iris more. I've both published and peer-reviewed
| research, and I've seen some hot garbage come from
| academics.
| 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?
| selimthegrim wrote:
| "ethnically Soviet" she insisted IIRC
| 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]
| whatsakandr wrote:
| I think the big takeaway if something like this happens in the
| future is half float ain't a miesner effect. Makes me increasing
| skeptical of Taj Quantums claim to a super conductor.
| https://tajquantum.com/art-t2sc/
| [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.
| dekhn wrote:
| Negative experimental results are valid science (provided
| the experiment was run in a way that negative
| experimental results truly mean a high confidence that
| you demonstrated something isn't possible, which is
| actually quite challenging). I focus my criticism around
| science because I am an ex-scientist and my training had
| a fair amount of attention paid to not wasting your own
| time, or others time, with things that are almost
| certainly wrong. scientists have finite time, it's
| valuable, and are just as prone to chasing the new
| hotness as programmers.
|
| After all, the grad students still got together, got
| drunk, and partied- when they could have been in the lab.
| Not particularly fruitful, but I wouldn't criticize it.
| bacon_waffle wrote:
| > scientists have finite time, it's valuable, and are
| just as prone to chasing the new hotness as programmers.
|
| Yes, I agree. Scientist time is valuable for at least a
| couple reasons; science funding is a scarce resource, and
| trained scientists are scarce. I'd argue that those are
| related, and both could be helped by increasing
| interest/excitement/awareness toward science in the
| general public.
|
| If we were to sort people in to two beakers, "trained
| scientist" and "general public", I think the people who
| were excited about LK-99 and making "shitty examples" of
| it, would mostly go in the second one.
|
| (also, I 100% agree that "can't you just..." is one of
| the most irritating phrases in English)
| dekhn wrote:
| I have a different perspective on your statement "trained
| scientists are scarce .... both could be helped by
| increasing interest/excitement/awareness"...
|
| When I was a kid I read about DNA and genetic
| modification of organisms (this was back in the 80's when
| it was still fairly new) and decided to become a
| scientist to genetically modify humans using gene therapy
| as an alternative to standard pharmaceuticals. The
| articles I read suggested that if we just sequenced the
| human genome, and did a bit more research and applied
| computing, that gene therapy would be a viable solution.
| Biotech was undergoing a revolution at the time.
|
| Fast forward- I've finished grad school, postdoc, and am
| now a principal investigator at a national lab. I was a
| beneficiary of a massive growth in science funding during
| the Clinton era that ended right about the time I was
| looking for a faculty position. There are almost no
| faculty positions available, compared to the supply.
| Guess what? Real science doesn't look anything like what
| I thought. The majority of the time is spent writing
| grants and papers, your competitors are super-hardcore,
| it's really not a fun job and it gets in the way of work-
| life balance.
|
| And the entire area I wanted to work in, gene therapy,
| was almost entirely stopped for 20+ years due to the
| death of a single patient in a single trial
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Gelsinger). The
| risks of gene therapy had been greatly understated, and
| even today, the few gene therapies that do exist aren't
| great, and cost $$$. We hear constantly that human genome
| sequencing is going to revolutionize drug discovery- it
| didn't.
|
| So, I am not so sure that breathless articles about
| technologies that could reasonably have been anticipated
| not to work (like LK-99) to excite more people to sign up
| for science is really a good idea.
| 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.
| seewhydee wrote:
| I'd add that the 3-4 preprints that put the final nails in the
| coffin for LK-99 --- the ones that showed how ferromagnetic
| samples produce half-levitation, pointed out the Cu2S
| structural phase transition, explaining why the flat bands are
| not conducive to superconductivity, and the creation and
| characterization of a pure single crystal --- were all good
| showcases of scientific ingenuity.
|
| It was particularly impressive to see some groups putting
| together high-quality, publication-ready preprints from scratch
| in the span of a month. Especially crazy when you think about
| the shoddy original papers that the Korean group spent years
| working on...
| [deleted]
| calderknight wrote:
| >bash scientists who were supposedly trying to cover up their
| own incompetence by debunking the plucky researchers from a
| brave private institution
|
| Has this really been happening?
| 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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Means cheap enough to be mass produced, and available.
|
| But so are all our existing cables.
|
| > Laws of scaling, even a small percentage of power lost
| to resistence is a hige overall loss, the avoidance of
| which is desirable.
|
| We could cut those losses right now by making the
| existing cables thicker. But we don't.
|
| Even a cheap superconductor might not be used at all in
| electrical grids, because the benefit isn't worth the
| cost.
|
| > And as I said, this is only the simplest example.
|
| What are the better examples?
| usrbinbash wrote:
| >We could cut those losses right now by making the
| existing cables thicker. But we don't.
|
| If we could make cables superconducting simply by making
| them thicker, we wouldn't need superconductors.
|
| > What are the better examples?
|
| Microelectronics for a start. Resistence bleeds heat,
| heat buildup limits designs. A novel superconducting
| materials would allow us to make more efficient chips.
|
| As for further examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Te
| chnological_applications_of_...
| 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.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Costs are not just money. There is an environmental cost
| to making and installing things.
|
| Spending the same amount of money on green power
| generation would probably help the biosphere much more.
|
| > making eg. solar farms in remote locations suddenly
| feasible
|
| We can already get losses down to a couple percent per
| thousand kilometers. Those farms are already feasible.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > We can already get losses down to a couple percent per
| thousand kilometers.
|
| Yes, and if we could squeeze down these couple percent to
| a <1%, the same farm would be even better.
| breuleux wrote:
| > 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.
|
| That's far from clear. If our grids are 8-15% more
| efficient and the cost of electricity falls accordingly,
| it will boost demand and we may end up needing _more_
| power plants than we otherwise would have. If the goal is
| to reduce the consumption of a resource, making its
| consumption more efficient is often counterproductive
| (see [1,2,3]). Granted, if the alternative is burning
| fossil fuel then it 's a good thing! But once electricity
| becomes more economical than fossil fuels for all uses,
| making it even cheaper is not going to help the
| biosphere. And I think that's probably going to happen
| before we have a room temperature superconductor that can
| be used in power transmission.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazzoom%E2%80%93Brooke
| s_postu...
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect_(conserv
| ation)
| 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.
| barbegal wrote:
| So I can understand how having a phase change causes the material
| to have a critical temperature but why does it also have a
| critical current and a critical magnetic field. A simple phase
| change material wouldn't have a variable critical temperature
| dependent on current?
| 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.
| perth wrote:
| [flagged]
| curvx wrote:
| Oof!
|
| > 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.
| calderknight wrote:
| (note that this is a very different LK-99 to the one that is
| claimed to be a superconductor)
| 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
| Razengan wrote:
| Wait there is an actual Professor Moriarty?
| pininja wrote:
| As Philip points out, Sabine Hossenfelder's quick summary on
| LK-99 2 weeks ago punched large holes into this whole thing in
| less than 5 minutes. I wish media outlets presented skeptic
| viewpoints instead of just hype.. but that doesn't sell.
|
| LK99 - A new room temperature superconductor?
| https://youtu.be/RjzL9cS3VW8
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| Hossenfelder is just a cynic that critizises more or less
| everything that isn't her own work. She even tried to
| discredit LIGO a few years ago - not even using her own
| insight but merely by paraphrasing what a Danish group
| thought they had seen as error. This issue has been resolved
| since then and the Danes just misunderstood parts of the
| original paper.
| wesleywt wrote:
| This is not bad science. This is science working as intended.
| Claim followed by verification. I only wish other fields was
| this good.
| dalmo3 wrote:
| Yes, it's a victory for science (lowercase s, not The
| Science(tm)).
| 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.
| winwang wrote:
| What I care about more than "fell for it" is the general lack
| of patience and skepticism from us, the audience and the
| commenters. As commenters, we _are_ part of the media (i.e.
| social media). Usually, anything claiming itself a
| revolutionary discovery, especially in physics, has a strong
| undertone of crankery. For it to be included, even in a
| preprint, is a bit preposterous.
|
| It's not wrong to be excited, but there is a sort of fatigue
| which builds up, like the boy who cried wolf.
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| There is an cycle to these things.
|
| In the background you'll have heard older voices whisper
| warnings about the previous time.
|
| For the next ~10 to 20 years people will shout "Remember
| LK99" for every overly-grandiose severely-lacking scientific
| paper.
|
| Then a new paper will hit the right mix of attention-chasers
| and ignorance.
|
| I'll be there, just whispering warning.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| I haven't been cheering, but it would indeed herald a new
| age, if it turned out to be true.
| namuol wrote:
| I find it amusing how so many so-called skeptics seem to be
| unaware of the phenomenon of hindsight bias.
| [deleted]
| Eji1700 wrote:
| I find it amusing how many people like you didn't notice the
| large amount of people bringing up all the points that this
| video made on the first day, as justification for why they
| doubted the hell out of this claim.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| I think he meant this particular video, which was only
| published one day ago.
| Eji1700 wrote:
| I'm well aware, and it's purposefully ignoring that the
| video is not bringing up anything new, nor were the
| authors beliefs new. It's implying that they would not
| have come to the same conclusions when it's just not
| true.
| raynr wrote:
| I was deeply sceptical of LK-99 and simply chose not to
| comment on it in public on the internet because: (1)
| confirmation or contradiction will come soon enough, and (2)
| being sceptical, however measured, usually attracts
| accusations of being a negative, cynical naysayer, and I
| don't need that in my life.
| hgsgm wrote:
| Choosing to not comment is a vote for the status quo. We
| need your voice of reason and caution.
|
| Toxic positivity is poisoning our culture. We need
| antidote.
| 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.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| How is it a hoax? I haven't seen a serious article or video
| calling LK-99 a hoax, including this one. There were some
| faked reproductions from independent "researchers", but these
| weren't very trustworthy to begin with.
|
| There was some drama between the authors, the science was
| sloppy and the writing inappropriate, but AFAIK, no faked
| data, no secrecy, they gave away their recipe in a way that
| allowed for reproduction attempts, and a few weeks later, we
| have a convincing explanation. Stupidity, not malice.
| 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/
| laputan_machine wrote:
| You couldn't be more wrong. Getting people excited about
| possible technological advnacements is exactly the kind of
| thing we should be doing, we _used_ to do this, in the 50s up
| until the 90s the prospect of the future was exciting.
|
| What is the medias representation of the future now? A
| burning shithole, no future. It's depressing and not true. I
| enjoyed the few days of excitement, I want us to go back to
| having an optimistic outlook on the future of humanity.
| FullstakBlogger wrote:
| But there's nothing meaningful in the video. He just keeps
| reiterating how he thinks you should feel about the
| situation.
|
| He clearly doesn't think it's worth his time to understand
| anything about LK-99, its history, or its popularity. It
| seems like most anybody that watched the fireworks show is
| more informed than he is. So what's the video about?
|
| The same way he says "this isn't how science is done", you
| could say also say what he's doing isn't how peer review or
| journalism is done. What's not being addressed is that this
| kind of arrogance and appeal to authority is _EXACTLY_ what
| flat-earthers and the lot are rebelling against, and the
| solution is not to put up more walls.
|
| There are now potentially 10s or 100s of thousands of people
| who have seen how the sausage gets made, what kind of
| pitfalls there are, how measurements can lead to false
| conclusions, and mistakes can be made; and they're absolutely
| fascinated by it and want to learn how to do things better.
|
| "An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival
| as a free people."
|
| This doesn't mean that every individual needs to be an expert
| in every field. You only have to know so much about a given
| field and the processes within it to develop a degree of
| confidence in your perspective on who you can trust, and
| extend that trust to the people they trust.
|
| Mistrust in science is borne of ignorance, but not in the way
| that you think.
| seewhydee wrote:
| Yeah. I would argue that he displayed some bad science of
| his own. He kept harping on about how the LK-99 paper
| didn't show resistivity going down to exactly zero, but had
| a residual resistivity. But that is exactly what you would
| have seen with a mixed phase sample with some
| superconductor and some normal material. It took proper
| scientific detective work to distinguish the possibilities,
| not this kind of silly snark.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I didn't interpret his criticisms that way at all, and
| given that his criticisms with both the resistivity graph
| and the not-Meissner effect turned out to be exactly
| correct, I'd give him a bit more credit.
|
| As someone who remembers the original cold fusion debacle
| well, this felt exactly the same to me: announce a result
| with a ton of unnecessary hype and fanfare (I mean, the
| closing sentence in the paper was just absurd in my
| opinion) without first trying to (a) at least call up
| some experts in superconductivity to get their opinion,
| or at least (b) write a paper with less of a "new era for
| humanity" tone. This smelled 100% of these researchers
| chasing glory without a modicum of introspection. I
| thought the most important part of the video is where the
| professor said that scientists are taught that when they
| get weird results, their first instinct should absolutely
| be to question it: what could have gone wrong? how could
| my experimental setup have been flawed? These researchers
| showed none of that appropriate skepticism.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| What do you mean by "turned out" though?
|
| The video is published merely 1 day ago, when the
| consensus that "LK-99 isn't it" had already been formed,
| and these points have been long discussed by other
| scientists and random people on Internet long time ago.
|
| There is nothing newsworthy about these points; they're
| even borderline hindsight.
| 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.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| >media not so much in my eyes.
|
| The media is often wrong about many things. Sometimes due
| to ignorance. Others negligence. And occasionally its
| malicious. If anyone figures out how to fix that without
| destroying freedom of the press they should get a nobel.
| 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.
| wslack wrote:
| Got it - so the scientific community's reaction (trying
| to replicate) was ok but the initial authors messed up
| with their pre-print? That's fair.
| glenngillen wrote:
| While we're talking about things working as they should,
| even when frequently the opposite is true... what a
| wonderful discourse this was between two people
| disagreeing and then coming to find common ground. Thank
| you for providing such a great example to all of us.
| cush wrote:
| It's still important to disambiguate the curious optimists
| from swindlers and fraud scientists. There's nothing wrong
| with asking "what if?".
|
| Shaming laypeople and the media for not being scientifically
| literate enough to navigate quickly-releasing literature on
| quantum mechanics isn't good for science either. It stifles
| curiosity, and this kind of take is what hinders people from
| taking an interest in science in the first place. What's
| important is that as new information comes in, those same
| laypeople are willing to take in that new information, which
| is exactly what happened.
|
| Science isn't perfect and in this case, the process worked
| exactly as designed.
| seewhydee wrote:
| The video really rubbed me the wrong way. I guess it's a
| persona he's putting on for the YouTube channel, but that
| "tough minded skeptic" bit is way over the top. He spent all
| his time criticizing various problems with the LK-99 paper that
| were indeed problematic (and widely commented on elsewhere),
| but didn't necessarily falsify the claim (e.g. they might have
| come from having mixed phase samples).
|
| And he did not talk at all about the scientifically most
| interesting part of the affair, which was the clever
| investigation from multiple angles that finally unearthed the
| explanation. It's as though he just ran his mouth without
| reading the literature... which is not a very scientific thing
| to do, is it?
| laputan_machine wrote:
| Totally agree. I've watched that channel for a long time, and
| while he's always come across as arrogant, this video pushed
| me to unsubscribe.
| [deleted]
| 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.
| seewhydee wrote:
| No, they were not careful about their claims. Putting
| aside the drama around the arxiv postings, they had
| previously explicitly made the "discovered a room
| temperature ambient pressure superconductor" claim in a
| Korean language journal, in a 2020 submission to Nature
| that was rejected, and on multiple patent applications.
|
| There is no evidence of them doing interesting work,
| either. If reporting is to be believed, their company
| mostly does unrelated consulting odd-jobs for the
| chaebols, and this was a passion project for Lee and Kim.
| But you know what? I'm glad there are oddballs like this
| on the fringe of science. They're mostly harmless,
| occasionally entertaining, and maybe once in an epoch
| they might come up with something real.
| k2718281828y wrote:
| Founders- note, you just experienced a mini-bubble. It is good to
| learn from this because it has commonalities to other bubbles.
| Fortunately, the cost of this bubble was only time and attention.
| Unfortunately, time and attention are scarce and precious.
| woliveirajr wrote:
| > studies have shown that impurities in the material -- 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.
|
| So, make a material with impurities only? :-)
| 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.
| seewhydee wrote:
| The thing is that there are now multiple independent lines of
| investigation pointing to LK-99 not being a superconductor, and
| explaining away the original "smoking guns" offered by the
| authors.
|
| It's like we have a murder suspect, the murder weapon, and
| fingerprints lifted from the scene. At this point it could
| still be space aliens, but nobody in their right mind would
| treat that possibility seriously.
| gfodor wrote:
| These analogies aren't useful. Much of this process so far
| has relied upon a single point of failure not failing: that
| the paper contains the necessary information to replicate and
| describe the material. If that assumption is wrong, while
| some science will still remain valid, much of it would turn
| out to have been unindicative of the actual state of reality.
| sweezyjeezy wrote:
| But what about the alternative explanation for what the
| Korean team saw? Occam's razor is coming firmly down on one
| side here.
| xtracto wrote:
| You almost described the reaction of the "tech bros" when the
| Reiser murder happened: The number of gymnastics some people
| went through to justify Hans' actions(removing a seat in his
| car, buying books about crime investigation, blood on the
| car, etc, etc.) was comical.
| seewhydee wrote:
| It stands to reason that someone who can create his own
| file system can't possibly be guilty of murder.
| gilgoomesh wrote:
| The German team produced a crystal of pure LK-99 and tested it.
| From the article:
|
| > LK-99 is not a superconductor, but an insulator with a
| resistance in the millions of ohms
|
| And furthermore, the graphs from the original pre-print article
| are just graphs of the resistivity of Cu2S.
|
| It sounds like there's nearly zero chance of any further
| science here (beyond confirmation).
| gfodor wrote:
| "A crystal of pure LK-99" is an oxymoron, LK-99, the physical
| substance in Korea, is not a pure crystal.
| fouc wrote:
| Seems like there's a chance the preprint for LK-99 described
| the material wrongly, so it was not accurately replicated.
| postalrat wrote:
| A pure crystal of lk-99 is about as useful as a pure crystal
| of cake.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| The point is that the original team did _not_ produce a pure
| crystal, and impurities can be the source of novel properties
| in a material - you'll know it as "doping" in the
| semiconductor industry.
|
| Other comments from more informed people indicate it's
| unlikely that this will yield anything useful though.
| sweezyjeezy wrote:
| "So you're saying there's a chance?"... What you say is not
| incorrect, proving a negative here beyond all other possibility
| is hard. But I feel like for the lay person like me (us?), this
| matter should be considered resolved now. There's no point
| stretching hope and spending energy to follow it further.
| tw1984 wrote:
| Those Korean researchers who consistently refused to share
| samples now has the moral obligation to come out and explain what
| is really going on.
|
| I call it corruption - if you claim you have the sample that is a
| room temp supercondutor and you want the attention of the
| research community, how about just get some 3rd party to access
| your bloody sample? what we got was excuses after excuses.
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > to the point that when a company tried to make a metallic
| glass a couple of years ago (under the name Liquid Metal),
| it made quite a bit of noise.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidmetal
| willis936 wrote:
| That's fine but YBCO is a crystalline ceramic.
| kergonath wrote:
| Indeed. With a perovskite-related structure.
| saberdancer wrote:
| It misses the point.
|
| Ceramic "high-temp" ones are not used because they still
| operate at very low temperatures so you are not completely free
| of cooling requirements, they are just slightly lower.
|
| In that case it may make sense to use superconductor with
| better material properties in exchange for more cooling.
|
| A room temperature ambient pressure superconductor would remove
| the need for special cooling so it would be vastly better than
| current "high" temperature ones.
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > can you make wires from cermets?
|
| Yes, but the minimal bending radius would be far from
| impressive.
|
| > Thats the point. we need a substance that is
| malleable(?) enough like copper wire that electrons can
| pass through.
|
| So many assumptions here. Copper wire is but one form
| that is useful for energy transport. But superconductors
| don't need a lot of thickness and parallel layers of tape
| have enough flex in one dimension to be very useful.
| Usually they allow for complex routing by adding twists,
| like flatcable, but given the magnetic fields involved
| you don't want to do that in free space but firmly tied
| down to something (preferably something non-magnetic!).
|
| > Pottery ceramic wont work like that.
|
| Ceramics are a _vast_ class of materials, which includes
| pottery ceramics but also many others which have a very
| large range and diversity of properties. They are
| essentially a whole branch on the tree of materials
| science that range from Tungsten Carbide to diamond to
| ordinary clay and a whole raft of others.
| 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:
| I think this misconception stems from people thinking
| 'earthenware' or 'clay' when they hear 'ceramics'.
| MissingAFew wrote:
| If that's the point, then they are completely unqualified
| to be commenting.
| jacquesm wrote:
| This should not be downvoted.
| spiznnx wrote:
| you are (mostly) agreeing (except for precise definitions of
| metallic and ceramic). Their comment is unclear, but it means
|
| "In almost all applications of superconductors, they don't
| use high-temperature ones. [...] The ones [the
| superconductors] that see use in the LHC, for instance,
| aren't [high temperature superconductors]."
|
| It just has a sentence in the middle of it that confuses you
| into thinking their antecedents are "the HTSCs" and "ceramic"
| instead of "the SCs" and "HTSCs".
| 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?
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I did wonder if we suddenly could produce loads of room
| temperature super conductors if eventually we'd start to affect
| earth's magnetic field; I learned that super conductors basically
| force magnetic fields around them and do not allow them to pass
| through. If they started to be used everywhere from power lines
| to train lines to computer chips we might start to cause
| unintended consequences. Does anyone have an idea if this is a
| real concern?
| avidiax wrote:
| We already make so many magnetic fields that are at least
| locally stronger than the Earth's field.
| 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?
| nickelpro wrote:
| Novel for material science? Not really.
|
| Novel for social media of sensationalist scientific news?
| Perhaps.
| [deleted]
| svara wrote:
| All those "peer review must die and be replaced by a Twitter mob"
| comments sound even more stupid now, and yet it will be the same
| thing next round.
|
| This is leaving a really unpleasant aftertaste for me, seeing how
| dismissive this community got about the opinion and work of
| people with actual expertise, based mostly on repeating memes
| picked up from social media.
| [deleted]
| 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.
| leesec wrote:
| Not sure why this is presented as so conclusive, the sample they
| have exhibits none of the floating properties and the recipe is
| different. Of course testing whatever this is isn't a
| superconductor.
| calderknight wrote:
| Article fails to establish title's claim. Yeah the pure crystal
| isn't a superconductor - but guess what? the Koreans never
| claimed that substituting in copper atoms in a random fashion
| would work.
| ken47 wrote:
| You're stating something that _should_ be obvious. How are
| there so many software and software-adjacent people who take
| headlines at face value?
| 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?
| nwiswell wrote:
| Not novel. Very much the opposite. The article mentions that
| the original Cu2S resistivity measurements date from 1951.
| 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.
| calibas wrote:
| Yes, and I though the claim was that LK-99 was a type-I
| superconductor.
| nullc wrote:
| Ah. I wasn't aware that people were claiming that-- I guess
| it was an effort to explain why there was apparent
| diamagnetism but no clear demonstrations of flux pinning.
| 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.
| 8teapi wrote:
| I still think it's a room temperature and ambient pressure
| superconductor. I'm amazed at how bad Nature, Scientific American
| and the mainstream press are.
|
| Let's see.
| globular-toast wrote:
| What this really showed is just how pathetic our current
| situation is. We have a way of life that is unsustainable but
| instead of changing it we all pray that science will save us.
| LK99 was basically like the coming of Christ. Really sad to see
| so many intelligent people so eager to believe.
| 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.
| ayakang31415 wrote:
| I'm still going to wait for the final version of the paper that
| is being peer-reviewed for APL material publication
| wenyuanyu wrote:
| I'm inclined to think that LK et al might eventually decide to
| withdraw the submission themselves, or likely got rejected
| directly, given the various factors at play. Alternatively,
| they may continue to keep the arXiv pre-print updated with each
| round of revisions to transparently address issues raised by
| peer reviewers. However, based on the current situation and the
| rigorous standards of APL Materials, I find it challenging to
| envision this work being accepted for publication in that
| journal.
| 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.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| Party like it's LK-99!
| 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.
| timeon wrote:
| Now we are going to pay for that.
| RhodesianHunter wrote:
| We'd be paying had we not done it.
| 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]
| lost_tourist wrote:
| I was hopeful the first couple of days when it hit twitter but it
| became pretty obvious after that it just hopium and decided to
| wait for the paper. I wonder if they'll even bother to try and
| publish now...
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I think it's a fairly interesting story over all, and it feels
| like exactly how science should happen. We are humans and easily
| deluded. We fall easily for things we wish to be true. The
| fascinating story behind LK99 is incredibly human - including the
| rushing a preprint out to secure a noble prize by one of the
| researchers who was being excluded. The fascinating part to me
| was the fact engineers and scientists could on their own time try
| to replicate and did so in the open. People were excited and
| eager for it to be true and found hope in the ambiguity and
| excitement in the partial successes, and dreamed of what could
| be. Then, through careful analysis by experts who know their
| subjects well, we learned it was not the magic we dreamed it
| might be but a magic that we already knew about. A negative
| result of something so many people wished to be true is an
| ultimate victory of science, and to me more exciting than a
| positive result in many ways. It tells me we are on the right
| track on a great many things in the world, when it feels often we
| are on a wrong track on most things.
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| No, this was just bad science from the beginning. I've done
| experimental physics research and the way this team published
| their results and how sloppy everything looked is definitely
| not how science should happen, it's just a great way to ruin
| your reputation as a scientist (which the original authors
| thoroughly did). Every PhD student learns to e.g. include proof
| that an observed effect is not caused by a different mechanism
| than the one claimed (i.e. ferromagnetism instead of
| superconductivity), this is sorely lacking from the original
| publication. That paper would never have made it through peer
| review. The paper producing single crystal LK-99 and refuting
| the claims [1] is good science, read it and you'll immediately
| notice the differences in the quality of the text, the
| diagrams, presentation of methods, overall structure and
| conclusions.
|
| 1: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.06256
| PhazonJim wrote:
| > the way this team published their results
|
| The results weren't formally published.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I don't think you got my point. I didn't say their science
| was well done. I said science worked the way it's supposed to
| work. Science can't depend on everyone being flawless or
| above board, being unbiased, etc. the entire process - end to
| end - is built around the idea that we are all flawed, but
| through collaboration and rigor, we can see past the flaws to
| some deeper truth. That's a collective effort. It's perhaps
| easier when everything is done really really well. But it's
| more impressive when everything is off the rails.
| svara wrote:
| A lot of people, myself included, are disappointed about how
| "science happened" here and absolutely don't share the view
| that it should be like this.
|
| You're right that the system ultimately worked.
|
| But doing things "well" isn't just to win some aesthetics
| contest. It's essential precisely because, due to all our human
| flaws, it's too easy to delude yourself by doing sloppy work.
|
| In this case, doing sloppy work has won the authors
| international fame and attention -- an insult to all those who
| do their experiments properly.
|
| The LK-99 authors probably didn't do themselves any favors in
| the long run, but it is easy to think of examples where sloppy
| work leads to some quick social media wins, but the topic is
| not as sexy so ultimately isn't scrutinized in the same way.
|
| Social media clout is already playing a role in hiring
| decisions, and social media is only becoming more important. If
| they haven't already done so, it's just a matter of time before
| funding agencies factor it into their decisions.
|
| Performative show science designed to wow a mass public is
| exactly what we don't need.
|
| These things actually require real, deep study, talent, and
| tens of thousands of hours of hard work to do and assess
| properly. The people doing that need to be able to do their
| work in peace without needing to pander to crowds.
| laserbeam wrote:
| I disagree. The paper should never have been published. Science
| should not happen in the news with people making wild claims
| about non peer reviewed papers. More so about papers that were
| getting lots of negative public peer review in real time.
|
| The only reason this story has a happy ending is the authors
| included manufacturing instructions. But everything else about
| the paper is not a good model of how to publish (wild claims
| that you will revolutionise the world, the title, the bad
| graphs, the 2nd paper that was published with different
| authors...).
|
| The fact that papers get retracted is nothing new. Science as a
| field is already generally good at retractions. Science is
| generally bad at incentivising reproduction... But this case
| was extreme and not a good model. It should not require
| sensationalist news and dozens of labs to reproduce a paper
| that was failing peer review.
| nickelpro wrote:
| > The paper should never have been published.
|
| The paper wasn't published, despite the phrasing in the
| nature article. arXiv is effectively a moderated blog
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I think we disagree about what science is. Science isn't
| something that is a optimal condition process. It's a process
| resilient to human nature. Everything you hold up as a
| failure is in my mind a victory for science.
|
| The failures of science are the papers that are outright
| fraud and as such are cunningly crafted to deceive and it
| actually works, and we believe falsehoods to this day - which
| I think we agree on being the failure of science.
|
| This however was not. Yes the paper shouldn't have been
| published. But it was. Etc. As humans are wont to do. Science
| didn't happen in the news - excitement happened in the news.
| Human failures and bias reigned. Yet Science happened in the
| lab. That is victory.
|
| Yet, the fact there are failures in no way impugns the
| victories.
| tony69 wrote:
| Agree except on the peer review part. Peer review is a farce
| perpetrated by the journal industry, both of which are an
| unnecessary burden and tax on science. What "peer review"
| pretends to accomplish should happen after publication
| (comments or the sort).
| beowulfey wrote:
| None of this WAS published.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Wow, so in the end you _still_ think science is going to save
| us? We 're completely ignoring science every single day when we
| go about our thoroughly unsustainable lives. We only like
| science when it gives us more (like LK-99). We ignore it
| otherwise. There is no reason to believe science will give us
| anything more apart from simply wanting it to be true.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I don't know if anything will save us. I don't know that's
| the job of science regardless. But I believe when science
| works, it's amazing and starkly so in a world of so much
| broken.
| 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.
| al_be_back wrote:
| >> to me the most interesting part was everyone talking about
| potential consequences
|
| no need for a science paper for that, they should've written
| science fiction or created an educational documentary.
| 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?
| slily wrote:
| I don't know why you're implying that laymen are beneath
| discussing/speculating on scientific research, since during
| COVID plenty of bullshit was spread by the supposed experts
| too, which is what fueled distrust in the first place. It
| should be a lesson that people now take "Science" far too
| seriously, it has clearly turned into a religion for many
| with a hierarchy of authorities that must not be questioned
| (something like government propagandists > mainstream
| journal editors > scientists >>> the lowly sinful masses).
| I guess that's why the blunders of our health authorities
| are being conveniently forgotten or handwaved with paltry
| excuses today; they're above criticism, while it's
| "dangerous" if the proles commit the same mistakes.
| 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.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| PR is a euphemism for propaganda, popularized by Edward
| Bernays _as propaganda_ to promote the perception of
| American exceptionalism ( _propaganda is something the
| enemies of America do, here in America we do public
| relations instead!_ )
| 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.
| rrssh wrote:
| Strawmen attacks meet the minimum requirement of
| coherence, there's a connection to the statement being
| attacked. So like be grateful.
| 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.
| worrycue wrote:
| It's not about managing unknowns. It's about low
| information speculation taking up all the information
| bandwidth crowding out high information factual stuff.
| 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.
| Dan_Sylveste wrote:
| Magnetic monopoles would be nice
| 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.
| hcks wrote:
| Please explain the mechanism by which a short lived twitter
| craze among web developers will translate into increased
| "attention funding and research"
| 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| NB: there's a lesson here that holds for _nearly all_ of
| "news". Much of it is either early (partial, erroneous,
| speculative) accounts of something that's just occurred,
| speculation about something that _might_ occur, or blather
| about an event that 's scheduled and programmed and has
| little opportunity for real surprise (though of course that
| slim chance is played for all it's worth).
|
| If you step back and scan headlines a few days, or weeks, or
| years, after, you find that almost all of it comes to naught.
| (Not _absolutely_ all of it, there is some real news, and
| occasionally a story grips and /or surprises.)
|
| You can spare yourself a tremendous amount of cognitive and
| emotional strain and whiplash by waiting for the dust to
| settle. And possibly, cultivating a sense for what _might_
| actually be significant. (Early stories of a virus in a city
| I 'd never heard of in China growing at 10x a week caught my
| attention quickly, as one reasonably recent example.) It's
| possible to get caught with a normalcy bias, though being
| prepared to quickly revise your priors helps here.
|
| The LK-99 story reminded me a lot news that broke shortly
| after I'd first come online via the campus Unix network at
| uni: the Fleischmann-Pons cold fusion paper. There was a lot
| of excited discussion, and within a few days I had (courtesy
| of an FTP server --- this was not only pre-World Wide Web,
| but pre-Gopher, though we had Usenet) an ASCII-text version
| of the paper, something I excitedly wrote (via snail mail)
| home about. And ... after a few weeks ... it turned out to be
| nothing.
|
| Science, mostly, progresses relatively slowly. Big upsets are
| rare. Extravagent claims (in a hype-driven and grant-driven
| world) are increasingly prevalent (it was bad enough 35 years
| ago, it's worse now).
|
| So this time 'round, I scanned the headlines and some of the
| discussion, but mostly sat the story out.
|
| The generative-AI story (as another recent example) seems
| _more_ substantial but still somewhat frothy. Though I
| strongly do expect that far more capable AI techniques could
| well emerge quite suddenly and to profound effect.
|
| But when you recognise that a story is largely speculation,
| especially if it's defending a point of view (Business As
| Usual / status quo or New World Order / this changes
| everything, or many views lying betwixt and beyond) recongise
| many of them as strongly motivated and quite often weakly
| informed.
| 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 over
| 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. And that still
| wouldn't prove that no such thing exists. _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.
| havnagiggle wrote:
| Hopefully your explanation gave others reason to want to fund
| more material science research. There's nothing wrong with
| wanting something to succeed, and understanding the potential
| impacts is good motivation to keep going (while following the
| science process).
| 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.
| Dan_Sylveste wrote:
| > transmission losses are under 10% in modern grids
|
| Modern grids are designed to keep those losses down.
|
| If the losses weren't a factor the grids would be
| designed differently. Very differently. As in, North
| Africa would be so full of solar panels the generating
| fields would be visible from space.
| 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,
| while also agreeing with my unstated premise, and
| conditional language.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| My point, which I believe contradicts yours, is that it's
| perfectly plausible that 1000 years from now humanity
| knows about plenty of RTSCs and still chooses copper and
| aluminum for power transmission and sillicon for
| transistors etc, because none of the RTSCs are actually
| useful on an industrial scale - so RTSCs would not have
| any significant effect on the economy. Of course, the
| opposite is also perfectly plausible.
|
| I take your other comments to imply that finding one RTSC
| would prove or at least suggest that a path exists to
| some significant industrial usage of RTSCs down the line.
| I don't think that's correct, and I'm arguing about why I
| don't think that's correct. Of course, I may have
| misunderstood your comments.
| dekhn wrote:
| I fully agree that finding an existence proof of RTSC
| could also fail to achieve anything, and even not affect
| rent at all- absolutely zero change in the two world
| lines.
|
| Let me rewrite my original sentence that bothered people,
| so it's a bit clearer. Here's the original:
|
| """Room temp Superconductors, along with fusion, would
| affect the economy profoundly. What the exact effect on
| rent would be is hard to predict but under the "post-
| scarcity society" mental construct, having infinite
| energy at zero cost (amortized) would presumably make the
| price of housing change."""
|
| Change "would" to "could" in the first sentence to make
| it conditional. Add an additional sentence at the end
| pointing out that house prices are complex and many
| factors influence them, and another pointing out that
| while sometimes we can achieve a property in a material,
| but fail to realize its industrial potential".
|
| It does seem reasonable to posit that RTSCs, even if they
| failed to realize their industrial potential- could have
| an affect on rent. Rent is (to a zeroth order
| approximation) determined by a wide range of
| macroeconomic activities, and if we reordered our entire
| society around improving RTSCs, that could have indirect
| effect on the cost of housing.
|
| All of that was implicit in my original text- and I had
| hoped to make that clear- rather than making a strong
| statement like "rent will go down if RTSCs exist".
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Sure, if you change " RTSCs _would_ change economy
| forever " to "RTSCs _could_ change economy forever ", we
| are entirely in agreement.
| [deleted]
| cf141q5325 wrote:
| >Great reminder what materials science can do to some
| underlying economics.
|
| I had a similar experience when reading up on the history of
| gyroscopes recently. Its absolutely amazing to watch the
| advances and miniaturization from mechanical to optical to now
| micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS). Watching the giant
| machines from the space race first shrink, then get replaced by
| light traveling fiber optics to now vibrating bits of silicone.
| With the prices imploding as a result.
|
| Still havent fully grasped the implications of older
| lithography systems being now usable for electro, mechanical
| and optical applications. Especially as they seem to be quite
| affordable, especially with multi-project wafers. With open
| source project even getting chips for free via google.
| 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.
| Forgotthepass8 wrote:
| It also wouldn't change much in MRI (formally NMR) -- it's
| also very limited on other factors
| pbmonster wrote:
| I mean, both NMR spectrometers and medical MRI machines
| would be a hell of a lot less complex without the cryostat.
|
| If you remove that, those things become... really, just
| tubes wrapped in various coils connected to a software
| defined radio of average quality.
| Forgotthepass8 wrote:
| The hardware for RF and Gradients alone isn't that cheap
| was my thought
|
| Also you can't just write off the fringe field.
| laserbeam wrote:
| Also... The material was always a ceramic, and you can't do
| much with other ceramic superconductors either.
| Fatnino wrote:
| I think it would make MRI machines cheaper
| 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.
| KSteffensen wrote:
| A large part of the energy loss in electronics happens in
| switch-mode Buck-Boost DC-DC converters, as I understand it
| mainly due to internal resistance in the components used and
| due to the magnetic field not being directed enough to
| transfer 100% power between two inductors.
|
| Would a cheap room temperature superconductor bring any
| benefits here?
| magicalhippo wrote:
| For "normal" DC-DC converters it's the losses in the
| semiconductor switches and diodes that dominate[1], unless
| cheap inductors or capacitors are used.
|
| High-efficiency DC-DC converters often use a resonant tank
| circuit[1], which supports high-frequency operation and
| zero-current or zero-volt switching, which together
| significantly reduces switching losses.
|
| In such a circuit I imagine superconducting
| inductors/transformers and superconducting capacitors could
| be beneficial to improving efficiency further.
|
| Keep in mind though that resonant DC-DC converters can
| reach 98% (or higher) efficiency already[3] with current
| tech.
|
| [1]: https://www.analog.com/en/technical-articles/an-
| efficiency-p...
|
| [2]: https://www.monolithicpower.com/understanding-llc-
| operation-...
|
| [3]: https://ietresearch.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.104
| 9/iet-... (random example)
| 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.
| chias wrote:
| Silver is even more conductive than copper!
| dgoldstein0 wrote:
| And gold too.
|
| Very expensive to build anything sizable out of it
| RF_Savage wrote:
| Gold (2.44x10-8 O*m) is worse than copper (1.68x10-8
| O*m), but better than aluminium (2.82x10-8 O*m).
|
| It does have excellent anti-corrosion properties.
|
| I wonder what kinds of alloys we will see in the
| potential future with asteroid mining and thus
| comparatively cheap gold. Imagine replacing lead with
| gold in industrial applications. Or the stainless steels
| with a gold component in them.
| yetihehe wrote:
| Probably the most useful mtal from asteroid mining will
| be platinum for use in catalysts.
| 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.
| Roark66 wrote:
| Not only in desperate places. I heard last year (or the
| year before) someone stole few km of train wire in
| Germany. Although to this day some people think it was a
| Russian sabotage rather than genuine theft. Previously
| (for example in Poland) I used to hear about things like
| this all the time until maybe a decade ago.
| AlGrothendieck wrote:
| [flagged]
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| They steal buried copper cables in rural locations (UK)
| by attaching one end to a truck and driving off. Mostly
| seems to be communication lines.
| 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.
| SamBam wrote:
| That have to be kept cool with liquid nitrogen, so it
| would have to be pretty darn short.
| nathan_f77 wrote:
| I wonder if we can use these superconducters on
| spacecraft and probes. Maybe we can place superconducting
| links on the outer hull of a spacecraft heading to Mars,
| or a probe heading into outer space.
| krisoft wrote:
| But why? What is the problem you are trying to solve by
| placing superconducting links on the outer hull of
| spacecraft?
| RF_Savage wrote:
| Cooling them would still be a problem. The sunny side
| might not be the best place for them.
|
| They might find a niche in some instruments in probes,
| but for wiring it does not make sense. The rest of the
| probe electronics don't like being that cold.
| kergonath wrote:
| High-temperature ones can be cooler with liquid nitrogen.
| Standard ones, the ones most commonly used, require
| liquid helium.
| XorNot wrote:
| Actually no: they have to be insulated well. People
| forget that it doesn't actually take energy to stay cool,
| just to remove the heat. The issue is what's your heat
| gain from insulation inefficiency per length - and it
| does get better then thicker your cable gets, because
| volume increases more rapidly then surface area.
| klempner wrote:
| If you're dealing with usecases that need to be cooled
| anyway, you may well be better off with the tradeoff of
| needing liquid nitrogen cooling and better insulation in
| exchange for entirely eliminating resistive heat.
| 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.
| u320 wrote:
| In theory, we could have had a much better power grid
| with more transmission. The reasons we don't have nothing
| to do with the price of aluminium, or the resistive
| losses of it. It's just difficult to build large-scale
| infrastructure. Transmission projects typically spend
| longer in court than actually building them.
| Superconductors would not change a thing, unless it
| changed that.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| The pace of development of computing seems to have
| trained people to think in terms of "when" for science
| and engineering problems. The normal paradigm is to think
| in terms of "if," and that aligns well with most non-
| computing inventions.
|
| There is a good chance that they _never_ reach the
| exponential breakpoints that everyone likes to fantasize
| about.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Yeah. There's a lot of wishful thinking about science and
| sciencing up solutions to the world's problems --
| especially here. The fact is, most progress is slow, and
| even if there is progress, it's not necessarily
| economical in either financial or energy perspective.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| Aluminum vs Copper is not that simple. Aluminum has worse
| conductivity for the same area, but area is in no way
| fixed. And aluminum has actually better conductivity than
| copper for the same weight. You just have to make the
| cables a bit thicker.
| anamexis wrote:
| I think the relevant metric here is conductivity for the
| same cost.
| II2II wrote:
| It may come down to cost, but other physical properties
| enter the picture. For example: thermal expansion is an
| issue for overhead power lines, along with how ductile it
| is.
|
| In other cases it is more important to reduce resistance,
| not so much because of the power loss but because of what
| the power loss means: the generation of heat that may be
| difficult to remove.
|
| Of course you can get around those problems at extra
| cost, but it is more than a straight up comparison of the
| material cost of the conductor.
| TylerE wrote:
| A 2" diameter copper wire will have lower losses than a 1"
| diameter copper wire.
|
| Copper is expensive so over hundreds of miles you may not
| want that.
| 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.
| cf141q5325 wrote:
| >We frequently use aluminum wires with a higher thickness
| to make up for the lower conductivity as compared to
| copper.
|
| Aluminum wires even made it into residential housing when
| copper was expensive/rare.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminum_building_wiring
| stoobs wrote:
| Can confirm, my parents had an aluminium telephone line
| in the UK until it failed and had to be replaced. Moot
| point as it's replaced with a fibre optic cable now
| though.
| cf141q5325 wrote:
| The problem is with their usage as mains power. I think
| they are considered a fire hazard in older German homes.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| This is the curse of popular science websites hyping things
| up; most people, present company included, have no idea what
| the scientific language means - be it superconductivity, LHC
| results, or astronomic spectrography.
|
| So popular science wraps it in a "what you could do with it.
| maybe. possibly." Or what it means. And commenters have
| latched onto it, but a lot is said with an air of confidence,
| of just-so. "Oh uh, superconductors, conducting is passing
| electricity from one end to the next, super is like really
| good, uuh uh uh... I know, what about power lines from the
| Sahara to Europe so they can build solar collectors down
| there!"
|
| Same with exoplanets, the actual science is "yeah the
| luminosity of this star drops by 0.0003% at a cycle of 300
| days and we're getting some photons that indicate there may
| be hydrogen molecules", pop sci turns that into "EARTH-2
| TEEMING WITH LIFE DISCOVERED, GENERATION SHIP WHEN?"
| hardlianotion wrote:
| Funny you should mention the solar connectors and
| electricity interconnections. There is a Morocco -> UK
| interconnector project that is underway right now.
|
| https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/
| 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/
| DennisP wrote:
| REBCO is revolutionizing fusion reactors. Several companies
| are using it to build tokamaks with the same performance as
| ITER, but in a tenth the size.
|
| REBCO supports stronger magnetic fields, and conveniently,
| tokamak output scales with the fourth power of magnetic
| field strength.
| u320 wrote:
| REBCO was a bigger deal for fusion than LK99 would have
| been. We can't make tokamaks smaller, the magnetic forces
| would rip them apart.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > same performance as ITER, but in a tenth the size
|
| So instead of being 400 times the volume of a PWR with
| the same gross power output, they're just 40 times the
| volume. It's no panacea to the economic challenges facing
| fusion.
|
| The other way to get high volumetric power density is go
| with a configuration of higher beta, the ratio of plasma
| pressure to magnetic pressure (fusion power at a given
| magnetic field scales as beta^2). Helion isn't using
| superconductors at all.
| devilsAdv0cate wrote:
| [dead]
| kerkeslager wrote:
| > transmission lines are already pretty efficient and we
| already choose less efficient materials for cost
|
| You're correct, and this highlights a problem I often see in
| discussions: "efficiency" just is a measure of benefit/cost.
| Without knowing the units of benefit and cost, people aren't
| making meaningful statements when they say "efficient". The
| important efficiency of transmission lines is capacity per
| dollar, not capacity per material, and no material requiring
| lab crystallization is going to be remotely competitive in
| capacity per dollar.
| rubylark wrote:
| In this context, they are speaking of electrical
| efficiency, i.e. the amount of power lost to system
| impedance during transmission, not some abstract concept
| like effectivity. The efficiency of a transmission line is
| expressed as a ratio of power received at one end of the
| line over the power sent at the other.[1]
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_efficiency
| criley2 wrote:
| This is an absolutely disingenuous point that compares the
| cost of full-economy-of-scale tech to literal one off R&D
| prototypes.
|
| Maybe new technology made in a lab can one day _scale up_
| and compete against current low-cost high-scale solutions.
| Crazy idea, I know.
|
| However, trying to artificially limit all discussion about
| R&D and future tech by claiming "it's more expensive than
| fully scaled solutions" has got to be full luddism. This
| loom prototype is too expensive! I can hire a man for a
| shilling a day!
| benj111 wrote:
| Still isn't going to work.
|
| >material requiring lab crystallization
|
| How are you going to string a crystals between towers?
| The material properties are all wrong for this
| application.
| kergonath wrote:
| Aluminium and copper in cables _are_ crystals. The
| crystal bit is not the problem.
| benj111 wrote:
| I'm not sure of the correct scientific language here.
|
| As far as I'm aware this is a brittle /inflexible
| material so my point about the mechanical properties
| still stands.
|
| And when people refer to growing crystals, that generally
| refers to a particular kind of crystal. Ive never heard
| of anyone growing aluminium crystals, except if it's a
| compound, and then you get a crystal like we think of
| when we say crystals.
| kergonath wrote:
| > As far as I'm aware this is a brittle /inflexible
| material so my point about the mechanical properties
| still stands.
|
| Yes. You want them to be ductile (malleable, or that can
| be deformed permanently in less-technical language).
| Although they could also be flexible (meaning that they
| can deform, but go back to their natural shape if we stop
| applying a force), as in the case of fibre optics cables,
| which are actually not crystals but quite brittle.
|
| The interesting twist is that a solid pretty much has to
| be a crystal to be malleable. Almost all the metals you
| can think of are in their crystalline state.
|
| > And when people refer to growing crystals, that
| generally refers to a particular kind of crystal.
|
| I don't know. From my experience people equate crystals
| with shiny things without really thinking about it. But
| this _is_ HN, and we should try to be a bit better than a
| random person on the street. After all, most people don't
| know a web browser from an OS, but I would be ridiculed
| if I make that confusion here.
|
| It is a wonderful community where you are almost certain
| to discuss with some experts in pretty much any given
| field, it is a great opportunity to learn and grow.
|
| > Ive never heard of anyone growing aluminium crystals
|
| If you've seen solid aluminium, then you've seen it as a
| crystal. It is pretty much impossible with common
| techniques to get non-crystalline solid aluminium.
|
| > except if it's a compound, and then you get a crystal
| like we think of when we say crystals.
|
| That's the thing, I don't know what you think of when you
| say "crystal". In actual fact, a crystal is a state of
| condensed matter in which atoms or ions are aligned in a
| 3-dimensional pattern that can be replicated to fill the
| space. In the case of aluminium, you can actually see how
| the atoms are arranged in a periodic way in articles such
| as this one (figure 3): https://www.researchgate.net/publ
| ication/323423565_Anomalous... . There are many other
| examples, and it is absolutely fascinating. We have the
| tools to count atoms and see the structure of the
| material!
|
| And it is undoubtedly a crystal.
| [deleted]
| kerkeslager wrote:
| > This is an absolutely disingenuous point that compares
| the cost of full-economy-of-scale tech to literal one off
| R&D prototypes.
|
| No, even at scale, materials that you can extract from
| ore are inherently going to be cheaper than materials you
| have to extract from three different ores and then
| crystallize, even in a manufacturing lab. These just
| aren't comparable processes, and no amount of scale is
| ever going to fix that.
|
| Instead of assuming I'm making a disingenuous point, you
| might have asked for clarification.
|
| That's setting aside the problems others have brought up,
| which is that the materials in question have other
| properties besides conductivity which make these
| materials inappropriate for transmission application.
| u320 wrote:
| No, switching from raw aluminium to an obscure
| synthesised compound is not going to be worth it for a
| few % efficieny gain. We've had centuries of "scale up"
| with copper and it's still not worth it.
| jboy55 wrote:
| I felt a similar way with the news of the fusion
| 'breakthrough' around 6 months ago. "Fusion power is here!
| All we need to do is engineering!".
|
| They achieved this fusion by creating a container of material
| that produced massive amounts of xrays when it was bombarded
| by a high powered laser. These xrays caused another
| container's surface to ablate at such a rate it compressed
| its interior to the point that fusion was achieved.
|
| However, this being a weapons lab, they created the
| experiment to model the secondary device in an H-Bomb. The
| secondary is theorized outside the Top Secret world to be a
| cylindrical tamper of (enriched?) uranium. One hypothesis in
| the public sphere, is its the primary device's Xrays that
| cause this to ablate at such a rate and that the inside is
| compressed to achieve fusion. The purpose of the fusion is
| primarily for the neutrons it generates, which are used to
| cause a massive amount of fission in the tamper, producing
| the majority of the energy. For example, if replace the
| uranium with another non-fissile material, and you have a
| "neutron bomb".
|
| The reason the breathless hype annoyed me is that at no point
| was usable energy the desire of the test. In fact, the test
| solely was to feed real world data back into the
| supercomputer models, so that we know how our existing
| stockpile of weapons would work or even perhaps to find
| optimizations. We know this mechanism of ablation causing
| fusion works, we've known for 60+ years, all we're doing is
| doing it in a lab.
|
| I'm not sure why there is this need to hype these events,
| like fusion or LK-99 so much. It seems that being a naysayer
| is reacted to as if the naysayers are explaining a magician's
| tricks. As if we don't hype these events the public will lose
| interest, or even our children will drop out of STEM careers.
| EthanHeilman wrote:
| > They achieved this fusion by creating a container of
| material that produced massive amounts of xrays when it was
| bombarded by a high powered laser. These xrays caused
| another container's surface to ablate at such a rate it
| compressed its interior to the point that fusion was
| achieved.
|
| You are telling me that a US weapons lab just announced a
| successful path to a laser triggered pure fusion bomb?
| Yikes!
|
| Not actually sure if it can be used to ignite more fusion
| fuel, but if they using this to test secondaries then it
| sounds like it might.
|
| I really hope we get fusion reactors before pure fusion
| bombs, as pure fusion bombs are going to be a nuclear non-
| proliferation nightmare. While it might not be easier to
| built pure fusion bombs than bombs with a fission trigger,
| controlling the precursors and knowledge is going to be
| very difficult.
|
| > "Fusion power is here! All we need to do is
| engineering!".
|
| I agree with this statement and it has been true of fusion
| since at least the early 2000s. Don't underestimate the
| difficulty of engineering. Safe fission breeder reactors
| are an engineering problem as well, one which humanity has
| largely abandoned due to repeated failures.
| jboy55 wrote:
| I think the most efficient means of delivering so much
| xrays that kilograms of material can fuse is with the
| primary stage of an hbomb, which is just an implosion
| fission bomb. I wouldn't be too worried about this test
| creating a new weapon.
|
| However... In the early 80s, the SDI initiative aimed to
| have orbiting satellites that utilized x-ray lasers to
| shoot down incoming warheads. The theory of these were
| you had h-bombs in orbit, with long cylinders of a
| material that would amplify the x-rays from the bomb.
| You'd point these at the incoming warheads and trigger
| the bomb and (chefs kiss) you have beams of xrays that
| would destroy warheads.
|
| One of the major reasons this was skuttled, was that the
| test they used to find a material they thought amplified
| xrays was flawed (see below).
|
| With the test-ban treaty, they weren't able to test any
| other materials. Now we have a facility that tests
| materials to amplify x-rays...
|
| Sidenote: The test was, explode a bomb in a tunnel, shut
| the tunnel down with explosives to trap the shockwave,
| then use the xrays to test materials to withstand x-rays
| as well as amplify them. Teller thought they had seen
| amplification and sold the military on the satellite
| idea. Another scientist, thought it was a secondary
| thermal effect on Oxygen. There is an interesting story
| about the back and forth, and the pressure to have
| another scientist lose his credentials for disagreeing
| with Teller, that is a good follow on to the Oppenheimer
| story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excalibur
| NovaDudely wrote:
| While I was very skeptical of the base claims of LK99
| (extrodinary evidence required), I did sort of fall a little
| bit for the hype of what this kind of material could be used
| for. Mostly in terms of computer clock rates and used in
| batteries. Turns out what seemed intuitive at first was mostly
| wrong.
|
| But then that is what happens a lot in various fields.
| Something that seems obvious isn't done because those that
| actually know the field can explain all the details you didn't
| know. Anyone here in programming have had that battle with
| upper management...
|
| Hey lesson learned in this case. Don't always assume you have a
| grasp of all the details.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I'd settle for regular evidence: a nice paper from a
| reputable lab that replicates the findings of the original
| team. Extraordinary evidence would be required for non
| standard model physics or aliens or something like that.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Serious question: why is extraordinary evidence required?
| Room temperature superconductivity doesn't break any (known)
| laws of physics, doesn't introduce new particles or fields,
| etc, doesn't require an unprecedentedly sensitive instrument
| (like LIGO/VIRGO)...
|
| There's a lot of modern physics, chemistry, biology that is
| uncritically accepted which I think deserves a somewhat
| higher bar of skepticism than RTSC
| 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.
| knodi123 wrote:
| > the excitement and amount of replication on this paper was
| pretty fun to witness and experience
|
| I understand a lot of people were more cautious and jaded, but
| this was my first go-round on the science news hype-mobile. I
| was really, really excited! It was a real emotional
| rollercoaster (if you imagine a rollercoaster that takes a
| couple of weeks to get anywhere).
| 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!"
| Galacta7 wrote:
| (Or more likely) Live audience: "Ohmmmmmm!"
| 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.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >I hope people will walk away from this experience with a
| better understanding of how science works
|
| I don't think this was at all what this saga was about.
| People essentially turned a physics experiment into social
| media drama and science had nothing to do with it.
|
| I also don't think the 'academic incentrive structure' has
| fallen out of alignment with the actual goals of science,
| despite the fact that people keep saying it, and in
| particular not in condensed matter physics.
|
| If anything this whole thing showed two things: 1. Science
| works fine, 2. Please keep it to the actual scientists
| instead of turning it into yet another discipline dragged on
| Twitter. I know it's an unfashonable thing to say these days,
| but 99.9% of people have literally nothing to contribute to a
| debate about bleeding edge physics research, despite that
| apparenly everyone feels entitled to have an opinion on it.
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I saw people become enamored with a Russian anime cat girl on
| twitter.
|
| This was vapid, consumptive entertainment. Which is perfectly
| fine, let's just not pretend it's better than the bachelor
| because science. Replace Chad had a date on love island with
| Anime cat girl did the science things, and that's about where
| we're at.
| 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.
| godelski wrote:
| > Did it though?
|
| Yes. Science is about more than producing novel ideas. A
| lot more.
|
| > Nobody published this, which is good, right?
|
| People did publish it, and many responses. They published
| on Arxiv. I think you are misunderstanding what papers are.
| Papers are simply a communication method between domain
| experts. The purpose of journals is to improve distribution
| and to provide a signal to help experts sift through the
| (possibly) large number of work. But you need question if
| they are accomplishing the goals. Do they provide more
| access than arxiv? Certainly no, arxiv is about as
| accessible as it comes. Do they provide better distribution
| than other modes? (colleagues, google scholar, semantic
| scholar, Twitter, etc) This is debatable and likely depends
| on your domain. Do they provide a useful signal to other
| experts? Also arguable and depends on your field. I'd say
| that the more papers/yr in your field, the weaker the
| signal. THEN you need to ask if these benefits outweigh the
| costs. That's both monetary costs from governments,
| corporations, and universities as well as the time costs to
| format the papers for the specified venue, deal with the
| back and forth with reviewers, and being a reviewer
| yourself. After you have considered the costs and benefits
| you can answer if these venues are good for science.
|
| > Max Planck Institute gave the most conclusive answer,
|
| Via "preprint"
|
| > And now, Mr. L and Mr. K will not receive funding for
| this material, because it decisively failed to publish,
| which is also good?
|
| Indeterminate. Science is noisy. You're wandering around in
| the dark. All we know is that they failed. But >90% of
| research results in failure. What is a better question is
| if their work advanced scientific knowledge. Which it looks
| like it did.
|
| > I don't know. It sounds like the academic incentive
| structure worked really well here.
|
| I'm what you think the academic goals are, which we need to
| know before you can determine if the incentives are
| aligned. For some added ethos, I'll reference Peter
| Higgs[0]
|
| [0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-
| higgs-...
| 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.
| Nurbek-F wrote:
| I told my brother too, the point is he doesn't even remember
| anymore or care. Most people are, until they see it in a real
| application
| 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.
| Accujack wrote:
| It's not over yet, at least not definitively. Nature Magazine
| like every other source so far is basing its comments on the
| attempted replications using the leaked paper. It's considered
| fairly certain at this point that the paper was incomplete/not
| enough to duplicate the material.
|
| The full paper with the original samples were reportedly sent
| to Korea University of Science and Technology for examination.
| That lab group has only so far verified the structure of the
| material, no word on whether they've replicated it or its
| actual properties based on replicated samples or the original
| samples.
|
| Until we hear from them, everyone (including Nature) is just
| guessing.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Of course there's some sour grapes in Nature's article, as
| arxiv.org has had the best exposure it's likely to get in
| years. The more that publish there, the fewer who publish
| behind firewalls, etc. For starters, Nature's reprints are
| hellishly expensive.
| jacquesm wrote:
| And Nature is still trying to whitewash its own reputation
| for publishing a very high visibility paper on
| superconduction that they had to retract.
| pasttense01 wrote:
| What paper was that?
| jacquesm wrote:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05294-9
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Right, thanks, I forgot about that.
| pbmonster wrote:
| > arxiv.org has had the best exposure it's likely to get in
| years. The more that publish there, the fewer who publish
| behind firewalls
|
| We're talking about condensed matter physics here, arxiv
| needs zero exposure in this field. It is extremely common
| to publish on arxiv first and only then begin the process
| of submitting the same manuscript to be published (and peer
| reviewed) in a journal.
|
| And while there are still some authors that skip over
| publishing pre-prints at all, there's no serious arxiv
| competitor if you do decide to publish pre-prints. It is a
| de-facto monopoly in this field.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| True, but it's given the site more exposure in the
| general sense, it's now quoted by outlets that probably
| hadn't heard of it before this 'excitement'. (That can
| only help in the long run, one day Elbakyan mightn't need
| to do what she does.)
| ergocoder wrote:
| The most interesting part is one of the researchers believed it
| was Nobel's prize worthy, went rogue, and submitted a paper
| with only 3 authors to claim the credit of this invention.
| Coincidentally, Nobel's prize only awards at max 3 people.
|
| Soon after the other researchers realized and published a
| 6-author paper only hours after.
|
| What a drama.
| michelb wrote:
| Yes, this really showed me what a great deal of science is
| nowadays. Backstabbing to publish, get credit/funding,
| rinse/repeat, so you can continue to marginally exist. Would
| be nice if we could just return to do actual science, for,
| you know, science and the advancement of our species.
| 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.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" The original authors were sloppy and overeager, not
| malicious"_
|
| Reckon so, but if they believed they were on the brink of a
| great discovery and thought they could be beaten to it at
| any moment, then it's understandable.
| 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
| mike_d wrote:
| > The South Korean paper claimed
|
| As I understand it the paper was a leaked preprint. Which
| means they didn't "claim" anything, but were distributing
| it to get peer review and feedback before publishing.
| jschveibinz wrote:
| I believe it is the pressure to publish. The number of
| papers published has grown exponentially and it is reported
| that the quality of research has decreased.
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333487946_Over-
| opti...
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/533147a
| 93po wrote:
| Does this extend to climate change science too?
| salty_biscuits wrote:
| Yes.
| jschveibinz wrote:
| I would say yes, but not for political reasons, which I pay
| zero attention to.
|
| I just believe that there is a tremendous amount of
| pressure (financial and otherwise) to publish, there is
| academic pressure to toe the line on popular theories, and
| humans are fallible.
|
| This is most likely the same for climate science as it is
| for medical research or any scientific field.
| 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
| rewgs wrote:
| People are "against" challenging climate science because
| a) it is extremely mature and the broad strokes as well
| as most of the fine strokes are overwhelmingly settled
| and have been for decades, and b) challenge implies a
| delay, which is not something we can afford; this tactic
| is often used by people engaging in bad faith, using the
| guise of "challenge" to discredit the science.
|
| People are probably downvoting you because you're coming
| across as either contrarian at best or bad-faith at
| worst. Surely you realize this.
| hackerlight wrote:
| Again, this sounds an awful lot like the creationist
| rhetoric a few decades ago.
|
| > "Try challenging evolutionary biology, even in a valid
| way, and see how popular it is".
|
| All crackpots think they're under siege and that their
| ideas are unfairly dismissed. Their ideas are "valid"
| (because they say so), so why are those ideas being
| dismissed without due consideration? You hear the same
| rhetoric from anti-vaxxers, creationists and climate
| change doubters.
|
| The problem is a lack of perspective. Crackpots of all
| stripes don't know that they're crackpots. To them, their
| distorted thought patterns aren't distorted.
| thewanderer1983 wrote:
| > "Try challenging evolutionary biology, even in a valid
| way, and see how popular it is".
|
| Here are two biologists that might not agree with your
| statement. https://www.youtube.com/@DarkHorsePod/
| zmgsabst wrote:
| Calling groups "crazy" to dismiss their arguments is a
| classic _ad hominem_.
| [deleted]
| kibwen wrote:
| At the same time, it's a common mistake to believe that
| any argument that anyone is capable of making is
| automatically as valid as any other argument. Some
| arguments are simply more valid than others; there's no
| use in humoring people just because they think their
| unfounded opinion is as valid as any other.
|
| Or maybe I should just defer to how Isaac Asimov put it:
| "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and
| there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism
| has been a constant thread winding its way through our
| political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion
| that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good
| as your knowledge.'"
| hackerlight wrote:
| I'm not dismissing any particular argument. I'm
| dismissing the attitude espoused in comments like this:
|
| > Try challenging climate science, even in a valid way,
| and see how popular it is on reddit or HN or twitter.
|
| It is an attitude that is a hallmark of cranks of all
| forms who think they've pierced the veil, but almost
| inevitably they have fallen for some distorted thinking
| that they can't see beyond due to the limitations of
| being trapped in their own head and echo chamber.
|
| I would add that logical fallacies like _ad hominem_ are
| only useful up to a point. In the real world, once a
| group of people advance N obviously false arguments, they
| will lose credibility and their N+1th argument will be
| treated less seriously. I don 't think the N+1th argument
| should ever be entirely ignored, but these people can't
| expect to be up on a podium presenting to a climatology
| conference if they have a long history of advancing
| ludicrous and/or dishonest arguments and have no deep
| expertise in the domain.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| > It is an attitude that is a hallmark of cranks of all
| forms who think they've pierced the vale
|
| And labeling groups who disagree with them as "heretics",
| "crazies", "cranks", etc is how the orthodoxy censors --
| as they've done for thousands of years.
|
| That the orthodoxy seeks to censors dissent rather than
| address it, particularly when ignoring their own
| ridiculous members (eg, Al Gore and Greta Thunberg making
| absurd statements), is why trust in institutions has
| collapsed. Institutions now routinely engage in obviously
| dumb ideas because they censor their critics and then run
| off a metaphorical cliff.
|
| In allowing themselves to censor and demean "cranks",
| orthodox institutions have rotted badly -- both from the
| perspective of delivering quality results and from the
| perspective of driving effective policy change.
| hackerlight wrote:
| > And labeling groups who disagree with them as
| "heretics", "crazies", "cranks", etc is how the orthodoxy
| censors
|
| It's also how you accurately describe people who
| _actually are_ cranks, such as creationists, flat
| earthers, anti-vaxxers, and so on. That these labels can
| sometimes be wrongly weaponized doesn 't mean that such
| descriptions aren't also sometimes accurate and helpful.
|
| It's useful to have a unifying descriptive label because
| it reflects the fact that all these groups of people are
| similar in one important way: they think there exists an
| orthodoxy that are stifling any questioning of an
| official narrative. When, in reality, this "orthodoxy"
| are simply a group of people who know more about the
| topic than you, and who view the crank in the same way
| that you view flat earthers. As people with distorted
| thinking who have advanced an argument that is entirely
| void of merit.
|
| > That the orthodoxy seeks to censors dissent rather than
| address it
|
| How do you think biologists should deal with the claims
| of creationists? That's not a rhetorical question. There
| are many, many groups with a grievance against the
| "orthodoxy", who harbour perceptions of being
| ignored/censored Do you think creationists are unfairly
| treated by biologists? Or do you think biologists are
| correct to ignore them? If you think biologists are
| correct in doing so, doesn't that violate the principles
| you've outlined?
|
| > (eg, Al Gore and Greta Thunberg making absurd
| statements)
|
| Climate activists != climatologists.
| generic92034 wrote:
| I mostly agree with your take. But I think considering
| that 99.999...% of the population are not climate
| scientists, it is still a valid question based on what
| they are declaring differing opinions as invalid and
| theirs as correct. Is that not based mostly on faith,
| next to some superficial indicators like "majority of
| scientists", etc.?
|
| For the record - I personally agree with the findings of
| bodies like the IPCC. But I am not sure there is more
| than the aforementioned faith and some more indicators
| backing me up on that.
| hackerlight wrote:
| > Is that not based mostly on faith, next to some
| superficial indicators like "majority of scientists",
| etc.?
|
| I believe it should be the same rule of thumb we are
| accustomed to using elsewhere.
|
| If we have a computer security question, we will defer to
| the people who have dedicated 30 years of their life to
| mastering computer security. Whatever their opinion is,
| it's statistically more likely to be correct than
| whatever opinion I have after 2 weeks of "research".
| Likewise for astronomy, neurosurgery, being a pilot, and
| any other complicated area of study. I can't fly a plane,
| I can't operate the LHC, and I don't know anything about
| vaccines, so in all of these areas I need to outsource my
| opinions, to an extent, to the people that know these
| things better than everyone else. It's not perfect, and
| we can call that imperfection _faith_ , but I can't think
| of a better approach.
| KSteffensen wrote:
| The problem here is that it is much easier to create
| bullshit than it is to refute it. At some point you have
| to stop addressing the points of people who have
| repeatedly been incorrect, because there are better uses
| of your time.
| p_j_w wrote:
| > Even my above comment now has a negative score which
| sort of proves my point.
|
| Tone matters and your tone matches up really well with
| someone trying to "gotcha" the people around them, which
| is obnoxious.
|
| > i don't deny climate science but like any science there
| are ways to challenge it
|
| Not successfully.
| parineum wrote:
| > Not successfully.
|
| Never?
| 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!
| nologic01 wrote:
| We _do_ have a "superconductor" but its not the one we wanted.
| It is the best description for the behavior of online (social)
| media: no longer exhibits any resistance and the tiniest spark
| leads to amplification and a system meltdown.
|
| These collective hysterias are a combination of people desperate
| for technological solutions to (typically) social problems and a
| system that eagerly exploits that for the benefit of a few.
|
| Of course there are countless mysteries still remaining to be
| uncovered in materials science, just like there is an infinity of
| algorithmic advances to be made in processing information.
|
| But the more important invention of all might be to find the
| checks and balances, feedback loops and regulators that will
| prevent people from behaving like panicked apes. At best this
| uncontrolled lemming instinct of ours is a huge waste of time. At
| worst it undermines society and our welfare.
| [deleted]
| 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.
| EvgeniyZh wrote:
| Impurities shouldn't increase resistance unless you have
| no supercondting path between your probes. If you don't,
| other tests will be hardly conclusive either.
|
| And yeah, you want the equipment sensitive enough to see
| that it is better than good metal like copper, which may
| be nontrivial in case your critical current is low.
|
| After that, you can move on to other measurements
| 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.
| dougSF70 wrote:
| Thank God, this means I can stop pretending to be a twitter
| expert on superconductivity.
| 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.
| mellosouls wrote:
| Its kind of like a "nice/fun" flip-side of the anti-science
| internet experts we saw during covid, although I think the
| people at the forefront this time were genuinely pro-science
| and positively motivated.
| winwang wrote:
| That's an interesting take. Crackpots and overhyped layman
| being a dual of anti-science. What would we call that? Well,
| I guess we'd normally talk about that stuff as science
| fiction.
| carabiner wrote:
| LLNL and Fermi did peer reviewed research on LK-99? Links?
| duringmath wrote:
| They published followup papers on fusion ignition and strange
| muon behavior respectively.
| carabiner wrote:
| Oh ok. Mainstream media reported on fusion ignition #2
| while (rightfully) ignoring LK-99. I think the takeaway
| here is just how bad techbros are at evaluating hard
| science.
| [deleted]
| hcks wrote:
| LK-99 was actually an amazing litmus test.
|
| You can absolutely dismiss the opinions of anyone who acted
| excited about it.
| gonzo wrote:
| > "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."
|
| Their favorite radio station in IL? 104.8 KCRF, all phase
| transitions, all the time.
| 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?
| CliffStoll wrote:
| N-Rays
|
| Neo-Lamarckian Midwife Toads
|
| Polywater
|
| Cold Fusion
|
| Schon's Single Molecule Organic Transistors
|
| Cloned human stem cells
|
| Faster-than-light Neutrinos
| pagutierrezn wrote:
| Unbelieveble the effort invested in demonstrating that LK-99 is
| not a superconductor. Humans work like crazy when the oportunity
| arises to ridiculize others. If only...
| accrual wrote:
| So in your view a bunch of scientists got together and produced
| an enormous effort for the purpose of ridiculing other
| scientists? It wasn't perhaps because of an opportunity to
| significantly change the world?
| yarrak wrote:
| Their entire career is over.
| 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.
| goodbyesf wrote:
| > how empiricism and the principle of falsification work, and
| why they are the only known reliable process for generating
| knowledge.
|
| Only? Math, logic, arts, etc aren't knowledge?
|
| What this episode has shown is that people don't know what they
| are talking about. Especially the ones cheerleading on the
| science's side.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > Only? Math, logic
|
| Math and logic are as much subjected to falsification as
| physics or biology. Mathematicians write proofs, and their
| peers try to find flaws in them.
|
| > arts, etc aren't knowledge?
|
| I am obviously talking about scientific knowledge, and in
| that regard: No, they aren't. The study of art can be
| scientific, and is as subjected to empiricism and
| falsification as everything else. Art in itself however
| isn't.
|
| If humanity forgot all the works of Mozart and Schubert, it
| would be a very sad day, but society would still function. If
| humanity forgot how to make steel, or had to rediscover the
| fourier transformation, we would have a problem.
| goodbyesf wrote:
| > Math and logic are as much subjected to falsification as
| physics or biology.
|
| No they are not.
|
| > Mathematicians write proofs, and their peers try to find
| flaws in them.
|
| There is a difference between checking whether a proof has
| flaws and running experiment to falsify a theory. In other
| words, when a proof has no flaws ( aka has been proven ),
| it's proven forever. Once euclid proved that there are an
| infinite amount of prime numbers, that's it. Nobody tries
| to falsify his claim because it's already been proven.
| Also, mathematicians checking for flaws in proofs is not
| empiricism. Go learn what empiricism means first before
| making absurd assertions.
|
| Not only do you not know what science is, you don't even
| know what math is, you don't know what empiricism is.
|
| > I am obviously talking about scientific knowledge
|
| Then what's your nonsense about 'Math and logic are as much
| subjected to falsification as physics or biology.' Do you
| know what a syllogism is? How about modus ponens?
| Implication?
|
| > If humanity forgot all the works of Mozart and Schubert,
| it would be a very sad day, but society would still
| function. If humanity forgot how to make steel, or had to
| rediscover the fourier transformation, we would have a
| problem.
|
| If humanity forgot language, laws, government, etc, society
| would crumble as well.
|
| Or are you going to pretend that language, laws,
| government, history, etc are now part of science.
| 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?
| themagician wrote:
| The people who bought tons of shares and options on AMSC on
| 7/18, just a four days before the original drop. Just look
| at the options chain and volume. It's outrageous.
| 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
| zamadatix wrote:
| The conclusion is a bit clearer: they think they observed
| what seemed like zero resistance at the temperature but
| they are unsure it was actually superconducting, hence
| the title being the measured resistivity instead of
| superconductivity directly. It's also possible (and far
| more likely IMO) them reaching the noise floor of the
| instrument was not the same as the sample actually having
| 0 resistance. Superconductors have a sharp dropoff at the
| critical temperature whereas their sample seemed to just
| continually have less resistance until the noise floor of
| the tool.
|
| It'd be cool to find it was superconducting at a
| temperature near that high though. That'd still be one of
| the best high temperature superconductors we've found.
| forward-slashed wrote:
| It's sad to see people accept the credibility of this article
| simply because it's from Nature. The author himself is a
| freelance science journalist (with no real expertise in the
| field), so this article is not worth any more of our attention
| than many twitter threads.
|
| You can gauge the trustworthiness yourself here:
| https://x.com/dangaristo?s=21&t=lI9nNO9bkbL1YKFrdIw_Tg
| puchatek wrote:
| It's quoting several researchers verbatim which gives a clear
| picture of the compound in question. At this point it would be
| a scandal if the quotes were made up or taken out of context. I
| don't see what is sad about people believing it. Do you go back
| to the source on every article you read online or in print?
| josefx wrote:
| So what about the sources he cites, are those also from
| freelance science journalists? Or are you going after the
| messenger because you can't attack the message?
| fsh wrote:
| I accept the credibility of the article because it is very well
| written (far above any twitter thread on the issue that I have
| seen), and it cites high-quality sources. In my experience, the
| news section of nature contains some of the best science
| journalism out there.
| wesleywt wrote:
| Do not judge for yourself because you are not a dense material
| scientist. Comments like these pose themselves as intelligent.
| But intelligent people know that they don't have the expertise
| to judge everything and do defer to experts in the field. And
| the experts currently are not able to replicate the findings.
| firtoz wrote:
| Is it right or is it wrong?
| forward-slashed wrote:
| I care about the process of determining truth. If one does
| expert deferral, then they should do so properly. Sadly
| Nature is expending their social capital as a scientific
| journal to pivot to a typical news organization.
|
| If one is up to date with sc news, this article should not
| affect their beliefs.
|
| But maybe some people are happy that they can share an
| article from Nature to convince their friends.
| Forgotthepass8 wrote:
| It is sad to see that even nature may be a victim of
| sociological decay.
| wesleywt wrote:
| What did Nature do wrong in this case. Be specific. And
| show us where the findings are replicated. That should be
| easy.
| fsh wrote:
| Nature has had a news section since 1869 [1]. There are
| many things to criticise about them, but the science
| journalism is not one of them.
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/nature/volumes/1/issues/2#News
| [deleted]
| 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...
| tuatoru wrote:
| Ivermectin is known to be an anthelminthic: it kills
| worms. That's what it's approved for. It is not known to
| have antiviral activity, so it's not approved for that
| use.
|
| It is acknowledged to be an official medicine for humans,
| not just an animal remedy as you claimed. Please keep to
| the point.
| 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.
| tuatoru wrote:
| Yeah, see, it wouldn't.
|
| Transmission lines are priced per kilometre.
| Superconducting transmission will almost certainly cost
| more than vanilla SCAW (steel cored aluminum wire), and
| you still have to pay for pylons, bridges, and/or
| directional drilling over land, or for laying if on the
| sea bed.
|
| Return on capital employed drives investment decisions.
| With the cost of PV, wind, and storage falling rapidly,
| and the efficiency of PV rising, the numbers are starting
| to fall out in favour of overbuilding supply near demand
| (in Siberia, to take your example), not building long
| transmission lines.
|
| No one lives in Siberia anyway, to a first approximation.
| No market, no investment.
| 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.
| jliptzin wrote:
| Interesting, thanks
| 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.
| timeon wrote:
| I'm also outsider. Glad that you have gained something.
| 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"?
| totorovirus wrote:
| As a Korean, I had a feeling this might unfold in this way. It's
| truly disheartening to witness Korean academia repeating a
| familiar pattern - this rush to make a splash globally, it's like
| history repeating itself. We remember back in 2009, when Dr. Woo
| Suk Hwang claimed the first successful human embryo cloning, only
| for it to unravel as a fraud (source:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/world/asia/27clone.html). With
| LK-99, I couldn't help but notice the same signs that triggered
| my skepticism back then. The tale is familiar - researchers
| hungry for funding, limited interaction with the global
| scientific community, and bold declarations of "innovation" that
| likely could have occurred despite less-than-ideal research
| conditions. Their bold claims to their break through resonates
| with the typical korean cinderella narrative - overcoming harsh
| conditions, through relentless determination to achieve the goal,
| just like we made such a rapid growth from basically ruins to
| OECD membership in less than a century. It is a common pattern in
| research proposals in korea to tout the patriotism of government
| officials in this manner. I see this incident as a extension of
| that research culture in korea. I too have enjoyed the hype and
| hoped it to be true but sadly it turned out to be another false
| pursuit for attention.
| [deleted]
| 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.
| zamadatix wrote:
| The varda shards found to be responsive to magnetic fields had
| trace amounts of iron impurity as well which was given as the
| expected reason in that case. Not sure about every other case
| of course.
| AltruisticGapHN wrote:
| I think the positive take here is "an unusually swift resolution
| of a high-profile puzzle".
|
| So it sounds like the leak was in fact a positive and that
| overall rewarding people with nobel prizes is detrimental to
| science.
|
| edit: it's OK to make mistakes. If science focused on
| EXPERIMENTING instead of trying to be the arbiter of truth on how
| the world is, we'd progress much farther. Maybe there is a reason
| why it seems physics has been stuck for the past 50+ years...
| maybe it is a shift in culture, driven social media, the fear of
| being wrong, of being shamed by the collective, of using the
| improper labels, etc. that is holding everyone back.
| 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]
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Still not explaining the levitation.
| 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?
| seewhydee wrote:
| That German lab should sell LK-99 crystals. I wouldn't mind
| buying a souvenir for this whole episode!
| challenger-derp wrote:
| I'd like to second this. Bonus points if a magnet were
| included so that the sample could be "levitated" over it.
| This is definitely a kind of novelty gift suitable for
| science-y and geeky friends.
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