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LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

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Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#91
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR), AKA Cold Fusion.

When someone mentions cold fusion, they are explicitly referencing a net energy-producing process that operates at room temperature. That isn't what you are referencing.

> Cold fusion is a hypothesized type of nuclear reaction that would occur at, or near, room temperature. Wikipedia

It works at near room temperature.

The goal of the reactor in the video is to produce isotopes. It does the job.

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#92

Saw some people hyping up markets where people are betting on prediction markets whether or not LK-99 will replicate. Can't help but feel like that money would be better spent just paying off some labs to actually try to replicate the process. The response I got from a predictions market enthusiast was that having a sufficiently large market would motivate people to attempt to have the process replicated and buy opti…

It's worse than that. If you've confirmed results, you now have an incentive not to publish your results, instead building up a market position on prediction markets for as long as possible.

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#94
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This type of instictive negative reaction to prediction markets is, unfortunately, common, but, I think, misguided. Prediction markets are one of the (or just, the?) best ways of aggregating knowledge from multiple sources and producing the best predictions. Having good legible predictions of impactful events such as LK-99 replication is extremely useful for society - it would be an invaluable input for a savvy polic…

How about this scenario: I am the PI of a laboratory. I buy up the market and (falsely) announce that I succeeded in replication. Sell and make profit. Then a couple of days later I announce that I made a terrible mistake. How do you prevent this scenario? I did nothing illegal, I just "not noticed the mistake I made".

A version of that probably happened last night with Lk-99, the “Iris” replication claim.

Why do think it’s such a problem? Those are the risks of speculating and the market adjusted back downwards in very short order. If Iris was a manipulator the gains were minimal and fleeting.

The anti-markets comments all over this are so unfortunate and misguided.

By your own logic don’t you just prove that a real lab is now potentially motivated to investigate and even replicate? If I’m working in a lab and it looks like it is working, why not let me place money on yes and speculate? I have excellent information.

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#95
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This type of instictive negative reaction to prediction markets is, unfortunately, common, but, I think, misguided. Prediction markets are one of the (or just, the?) best ways of aggregating knowledge from multiple sources and producing the best predictions. Having good legible predictions of impactful events such as LK-99 replication is extremely useful for society - it would be an invaluable input for a savvy polic…

How about this scenario: I am the PI of a laboratory. I buy up the market and (falsely) announce that I succeeded in replication. Sell and make profit. Then a couple of days later I announce that I made a terrible mistake. How do you prevent this scenario? I did nothing illegal, I just "not noticed the mistake I made".

You would risk someone else of stature announcing against your position. There are also liquidity risks.

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#96
post #90

I’m not an expert, but I’ve used superconductors (I believe YBCO) when I taught physics lab. We cooled samples down with liquid nitrogen and put them over a magnet. They levitate, but not like in the video that the Korean team released. True superconductors enjoy “flux pinning”, meaning wherever you put them on a magnet, they’ll freeze in that position (or move around an axis of constant flux.) In the LK-99 video tha…

Type-II super conductors may exhibit "flux pinning". Type-I super conductors do not.

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#97
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This type of instictive negative reaction to prediction markets is, unfortunately, common, but, I think, misguided. Prediction markets are one of the (or just, the?) best ways of aggregating knowledge from multiple sources and producing the best predictions. Having good legible predictions of impactful events such as LK-99 replication is extremely useful for society - it would be an invaluable input for a savvy polic…

Absolutely and people might be interested that in this case the prediction market for LK-99 is reacting in real time to new tweets from people trying to replicate. The “yes” spike to 32c yesterday was in response to a twitter account posting an image of a levitating grain in a tube. The credibility of that replication attempt was then evaluated by many and the market backed off afterwards. There is always a subtle an…

There is always a subtle anti-markets theme on many HN debates, likely from highly educated ans literate posters. I believe we still in this age simply don’t provide proper education on the massive benefits that markets bring to so mang problems

I think we are all too aware of markets and their benefits and disbenefits.

It's not clear why you think the "education" is missing only in one direction.

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#98
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do these prediction markets produce ? Some people are saying "yes" and others are saying "no", and the answer is either "yes" or "no", but why bother spending money on predicting when society can spend money on replicating it? Wouldn't an actual replication attempt be more useful? > The latter is a perfectly reasonable thing to do - it's not easy for an average person to "pay off some lab", but if they provide l…

They're producing the wisdom of the crowd, which is a real and highly accurate piece of information. It's quite difficult and expensive to produce information as fast and reliable by other means. And they don't cost much, it's mostly money being moved around. edit: I interpreted it as asking wether prediction markets in general produce value. In this specific case I'm 100% with you, they're absolutely useless in pred…

"They're producing the wisdom of the crowd"

Yeah we saw how wise was the crowd's wisdom with crypto.

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#99
post #52
post #38

It is interesting to see how much of the replication is done by the Chinese and how little is done by the Western countries. Is this the difference between the making-stuff-happen attitude and the sclerotic attitude?

Someone on Twitter spoke on this, so I cant' confirm its accuracy. They said that the reagents for this are usually made in China. As soon as this paper was published, labs in China bought out the reserves and they became hard to source in the West.

Weren't the raw materials lead, copper, sulfur and phosphorous or something like that? Seems hard to to buy out elements that are so common in industrial and chemical processes.

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#100
post #90

I’m not an expert, but I’ve used superconductors (I believe YBCO) when I taught physics lab. We cooled samples down with liquid nitrogen and put them over a magnet. They levitate, but not like in the video that the Korean team released. True superconductors enjoy “flux pinning”, meaning wherever you put them on a magnet, they’ll freeze in that position (or move around an axis of constant flux.) In the LK-99 video tha…

Many experts are indeed questioning the apparent lack of flux pinning and wonder if it's just strong diamagnetism.
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