We thought Oppenheimer was the way to instill a love of physics to young people but turns out LK-99 was the way to winning people's hearts and minds to delve more into physics.
Don't understand how a movie largely about the psychological horrors of developing and using a nuclear weapons is being construed to be "pro physics" lol. If anything it's the opposite
One of the themes of the movie that gets repeated over and over is "these boneheads who draw equations on whiteboards but can't follow security rules are literally the most important people in the world."
From what I've gathered, the ingredients of LK99 are common but cooking the right way is difficult. Supposedly the team itself only gets it right 1 time in 10. There have also been a lot of complaints that the patents and papers are missing info you'd want to have when reproducing. So that's making it even harder to reproduce. The upshot tho is that the discoverers seem to be available for tips by email. All in all w…
>Supposedly the team itself only gets it right 1 time in 10.
So much speculation but I don’t see anyone asking this: Who has access to samples from the original lab? If synthesis hasn’t been cracked yet, wouldn’t the next-best thing be independent validation of the original samples?
Apparently that's what they're doing: https://twitter.com/condensed_the/status/1684960318718406656
>Odds for 2 (1) below have increased (decreased) exponentially
Can someone help me parse this? Is it referring to #2 or #1 in the quoted tweet? Have the odds increased or decreased?
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.
No. You're incentivized to build a market prosition on prediction markets, or sell your information to somebody who can. (E.g. if a lab has a replication proof it might partner with a trading firm to maximize their profit.) But there's definitely no incentive to do it "for as long as possible". E.g. once the trader gets into a favorable position, they are incentivized to reveal their information ASAP to be able to ta…
The amount of market position you (or someone you have sold the information to) can build up is limited by market liquidity / trade volumes.
Isn't it sufficient to have another lab confirm that the existing sample is a super conductor? Then we can all sprint to replication.
Yes, the fact that everyone is trying to replicate the process rather than validate the existing material is very weird. Replication is hard, validation is much easier. If they've had this material for years, just send some off to a few labs... People claiming unusual abilities/etc usually focus on a very difficult ceremony/situation/feeling/process rather than the outcome. Ghosts, spiritual experiences, etc. really…
>little focus on just showing us the actual alien ship wreckage, even though that'd be much easier, if it were true.
I don't believe in the current alien thing, but how exactly would it be easier for a whistleblower to steal the actual wreckage out of some secret lab? Compared to giving a testimony?
Apparently that's what they're doing: https://twitter.com/condensed_the/status/1684960318718406656
>Odds for 2 (1) below have increased (decreased) exponentially Can someone help me parse this? Is it referring to #2 or #1 in the quoted tweet? Have the odds increased or decreased?
Whether or not this turns out to be real the whole incident has been extremely entertaining, way more than I would have expected. Replication attempts being documented in real time on Twitter and livestreamed on Twitch, news about infighting and drama among the researchers who published the paper, constant fluxations in the betting markets as new news comes out. It's been a wild ride.
I was in college (and a physics major!) when cold fusion hit. Really similar vibe -- competing press conferences and publications, huge public excitement tempered by frowning disbelief from experts, a rush to replicate from many labs, with only occasional claims of success, all of which turned out to be errors. Still, I'm rooting for you, LK-99.
Oh man yeah, so many dedicated amateurs building calorimeters and learning that calorimetry is hard as hell to do right... all talking over UseNet. Fun days.
Apparently that's what they're doing: https://twitter.com/condensed_the/status/1684960318718406656
>Odds for 2 (1) below have increased (decreased) exponentially Can someone help me parse this? Is it referring to #2 or #1 in the quoted tweet? Have the odds increased or decreased?
Odds for option 2 have increased, odds for option 1 have decreased.
Apparently that's what they're doing: https://twitter.com/condensed_the/status/1684960318718406656
>Odds for 2 (1) below have increased (decreased) exponentially Can someone help me parse this? Is it referring to #2 or #1 in the quoted tweet? Have the odds increased or decreased?
This is a common pattern in academic writing, which compresses two sentences into one, like so:
> In sunny (cloudy) weather, the sky looks blue (gray).
So the sentence above means that odds for scenario 2 have increased, while odds for scenario 1 have decreased.
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?
Not that I agree with GP, but: Isaac Newton? Brian Josephson, certainly. Francis Crick. Werner Forssmann. Marie and Pierre Curie, the way they kept on working even when dying from radiation poisoning. Tycho Brahe (with the partying and the drunken pet elk). Pythagoras. Probably Paul Erdosz? And a good number of the people working on energetic materials research.
In what sense were any of them nut jobs? All of these were traditionally pedigreed scientists, doing groundbreaking research at their institutions, under their own names. I'm asking for a historical parallel of a researcher who published an earth-shattering result anonymously, from their home lab, in a field unrelated to their day job, on a random night off chilling and watching movies?