I’m just curious as a layman, why aren’t the paper authors helping in this race whatsoever? It seems a lot of folks are guessing on the recipe. I haven’t seen any communication from the LK from LK99. Seems like radio silence
LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor
491–500 of 659 posts
Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Capitalism is great at growth and terrible at stewardship. It wins a land grab but it leaves behind a nasty class structure. Is it worth it? I have no idea. I just try to win. I'm a lot less certain than I used to be, though. I think we're roughly on the same page. The interesting part about capitalism is that it scales fantastically, for a while and as long as the bills aren't due you can improve your standard of…
I really like this discussion because it's a rare example of things being discussed in real terms, where the financial considerations are secondary; actual power over real resources being wielded by the wealthy.
If you think about it in terms of resource consumption per capita over a lifetime then it gets a lot more difficult because now you have to divide all those resources across all of the humans that have lived and that will every live taking into account any kind of improvement on recycling. This is a really hard problem, the estimate is that right now about 7% of all that people that have every lived are alive, and that the total number of people have have ever lived is 117 billion people. But because historically people would consume less than we do today there is a 'surplus' that we started to eat into at the beginnings of the industrial revolution. Now we're in debt to the future and those 'wealthy' people in your comment are over represented in terms of resource consumption but we're not that far behind when compared to say the people from 400 years ago.
Extrapolating into the future then is probably going to show an even larger percentage of consumption per capita compared to the budget, and that at some point in time will result in a shortage. The people that will live through that will look back at us as the incredibly wasteful denizens of the 20th and 21st century that wasted resources on a scale that at that point in time probably will be criminal.
Sustainability is more than just a nice slogan, it is sooner or later going to be our end-game and the earlier we start doing this for real the longer the species will exist and the more comfortable the members of the species will be.
Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor
#493Been following this very closely. Seems like the one takeaway is that whatever material this is, it's interesting. It's also difficult to synthesize in bulk, which is a shame because superconductivity is not easy to observe in non-bulk materials (think: powder). Note: I have a physics degree and a little bit of condensed matter experience, but nothing like anyone actually working in the field. Just some graduate cour…
Why is it hard to make in bulk? I thought the chemicals were easy and cheap to obtain, and then you bake it at a high temp? What makes it difficult?
There's a chemist who gave a breakdown with what's known so far: https://twitter.com/Robert_Palgrave/status/16846158677267988...
It's not clear exactly what compound constitutes "LK-99" because the equations in the papers are unbalanced and the synthesis is ill defined. What they say they got doesn't make sense for how they say they got it. Most likely it's a mixture of compounds, any of which could be producing the alleged superconducting phenomena.
Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor
#494Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hope this doesn't end up like a physics equivalent to Fermat's Last Theorem
That would be better than the physics equivalent of cold fusion (which seemed promising at first, but turns out to not exist - at least so far). Only time will tell, though if it really is, but so difficult to replicate that we need a few hundred years it may as well never exist for purposes of our lifetime.
Assuming that replications fail but they really do have samples of a superconductor that can be thoroughly examined, this is still fantastic.
Once we know the exact structure, the problem of synthesis is very solvable.
Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor
#495Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don’t observe a frequent knee jerk like anti-markets reaction from comments across HN? What are good examples of their “disbenefits”?
I would describe myself as cautiously pro market, but I think it's hard to deny that they are effective externality seeking machines. If there is any way of providing a benefit while finding a way to impose the cost diffusely, you can bet that the market will find it. Market based systems guarantee that costs will be hidden and imposed on those who don't receive the benefit to the maximum extent possible given physic…
Isn't military work mostly done by private contractors? It's not like the USAF actually owns and operates its own plane factories.
Some companies do approximate market operations internally, any company that has a notion of internal billing or where teams talk about internal customers is to some extent like this.
Companies not using market principles internally isn't a strike against markets, if you believe Coase's theory of the firm i.e. companies form at the break even point on transaction costs
Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor
#496Earlier quoted context omitted.
Assuming LK99 is legitimate, my hope is that the principles that make it work are more broadly applicable - and with that, refined production processes or newer alloys can be found. Simply knowing that it's possible would lead to a huge amount of research immediately focusing on this kind of thing. There's nothing more revolutionary than a discovery of a new class of materials. After all, we often name eras throughou…
> There's nothing more revolutionary than a discovery of a new class of materials. After all, we often name eras throughout our history after them :) (Stone age, etc) I wonder what was involved in the discovery of stone.
The CuO25P6Pb9 Age
Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I don't do videos of things I intend to be writing a text from. Ever. It's bad tone. I hate when it happens to me, and I don't want anyone to share this fate" Ah, yes. The good old incoherent "here's why I can't do something totally normal" excuse. Looking through their tweet history, they're an insufferable and toxic troll.
This makes it more believable not less. History is littered with nut jobs achieving. The wilder the story the more credibility I give it. Within bounds. Universe is optimised for entertainment and irony
Can you give an example? I'm struggling to think of historical comparisons. I suppose I can think of a couple of "unlikely" achievers:
- Ramanujan: if he lived today, I could imagine him tweeting some awesome infinite series, which could be verified easily by other mathematicians.
- ...maybe Tesla? But he had a solid track record of invention before becoming a nut job.
But who else?
Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "replication" does not use the same methodology and the "scientist" is asking for bitcoin to post a video of the quantum locking effect. The existence of the market is encouraging literal scams.
So what it’s also encouraging real information.
Well, that's your claim.
Somehow you expect people to act differently if that market wasn't there. Personally, I doubt a large number of those interested even know the market exists.
Yet, scammers are deeply aware of betting markets. they seem to always be there, and even create new ones just so they can play.
Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
The team that did the discovery seems disorganized and amateurish though, and with the multiple papers all submitted at the same time by competing factions, riff with infighting - but they stuck with a hunch for longer than anyone else and followed it doggedly. If it turns out to be true, it will be a great movie with an underdog making one of the biggest discoveries of the century.
Their amateurishness and the infighting somehow makes me think this is legitimate.
Was wondering why it doesn’t sound surprising and then remembered that squid game is also Korean. Puzzles immediately fell into place.
Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor
#500Damn, why is nobody talking more about the theory of it?
What I see to ponder:
- (1970, brinkman, rice) "application of gutzwiller's variational method to the metal-insulator transition"
- (2001, hyun-tak kim) "extension of the brinkman-rice picture and the mott transition"
- (2002, hyun-tak kim) "extended brinkman-rice picture and its application to high-Tc superconductors"
- (2021, hyun-tak kim) "Room-temperature-superconducting Tc driven by electron correlation"
even briefly reading relevant research (other than these papers) says even if a group could not replicate lk99 at first try, there's more to it. cooking the right way should be insanely difficult because this is a probabilistic event after all. should not be happening homogenously and should not be happening in a wide-band of parameters. I think the groups will eventually reach a narrow range of parameters to replicate but will take a lot of effort.