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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

#581
post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we put this LARPing scam artist out of the conversation? They are setting up a bitcoin wallet to, "raise money" to post a video of their admitted non-replication (They didn't use the original replication steps at all), but still superconducting result using kitchen cookware? Also they spend more time promoting bizarre Soviet propaganda, furry porn, and LARPing than science. Please, can we stop taking this serious…

Who’s taking it seriously? It’s fantastic armchair entertainment.

>Who’s taking it seriously?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36941556

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36940398

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

#582

Earlier 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.

[dead]

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

#583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's highly suspicious. I guess they're banking on nobody having an enriched uranium 235 plate at hand to verify what happens if you do this without any LK99...

For me, this, and the combination with the name ("Quantum Energy Research Center") is another push in the direction of ignoring everything named "quantum" too often quacksalver territory Is this really their channel? Why do they only have 1 video, 8 subscribers, and why is the video unlisted?

you wouldn't expect a lot of subscribers to a channel with only unlisted videos, right? Some people use youtube solely for video publishing, and have zero or less interest in the social aspects of the site.

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

#584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The first time it demonstrated superconductivity they dropped the quartz tube it was in, cracking and accidentally oxidizing it at a specific point in the heating process and providing vibration that caused the formation of a crystal structure in the material. That's... not easily replicable.

I can't help but feel that is an awfully convenient story..

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

#585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

You make very interesting points, but I'm having some trouble understanding exactly what you mean. When you say that at some point in time there will be a shortage, what do you mean, exactly? A shortage of what? The way I understand capitalism is that shortages, in a sense, don't actually exist in free markets (except temporarily if there are unexpected disruptions), because capitalism is mostly a system of allocatin…

Resources are finite, they will eventually run out. All resources are finite except those that nature provides as part of its own sustainable cycle, everything else sooner or later comes to an end and the more of nature that we destroy the more we will have to provide ourselves. Resource availability has five stages: we don't have it because we can't get at it, we have access to it and we're actively getting it, getting it has become too expensive (you end up alternating between this one and the previous one for a while), we have to get it from our previous waste material because the original sources have all run out and finally we no longer have it in a form that we can get at it because it has become too dispersed.

Every resource that came as a gift with the 'bare' planet (before life began and exposed by various tectonic processes) follows these stages. So the more of nature we leave in one piece and the more we work in a sustainable manner (maximize recycling, for instance) the longer humanity will survive in a recognizable form. The only other way that I can think of is to go off-planet.

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

#586
post #470

Earlier 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.

Did you read some that said they were amturish or did you actually think that

They are not well polished academia types who publish a couple papers or more per year using their students. I have some friends who do that, they get multiple papers accepted at top conferences every year and make increment progress on a regular basis. These guys are completely against the type here. Off in their own lab with no publications in years, having trouble raising money to fund their research, shifting to part time, then bringing in collaborators merely to get money, their attempt at publication is a mess as a result. Yes, compared to normal academia, they are amateurs or at least idiosyncratic weirdos.

I'm rooting for them, do not get me wrong, but they are not normal academics.

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

#587
post #501

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

I was massively let down by Oppenheimer.

It’s 90% interpersonal/political drama (Including a bunch of unnecessary nudity thrown in for dramatic effect), a few token scenes with Albert Einstein, a 10 minute detonation with decent SFX, and a small fraction of real physics and engineering. If you’re actually interested in the Manhattan Project you’ll be way more inspired by a history channel documentary than anything in that movie.

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

#588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 policy maker for instance. How? Would it not be better for the "savvy" policy maker to JUST WAIT until this discovery is confirmed, definitively, by multiple legit research institutions? And even better, wait until it shows some promise of practical application?…

For example, if I'm deciding right now whether to fund a mine for one of the materials needed to create this supposed superconductor, knowing how likely it is to be real helps me make a better decision or hedge my investment.

Right, there's nothing wrong with that, but it's appropriate for someone who is hustling the market. Not a policy-maker. Even if it's a government doing the funding, a response time measured in hours doesn't really help anyone.

If anything, it is likely to introduce extreme volatility, jacking up prices because of speculation.

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

#589
post #568
post #501

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.

> We thought Oppenheimer was the way to instill a love of physics to young people The only person so far that I've seen publicly saying that is Sam Altman. Never crossed my mind that this could inspire people (albeit I haven't seen the movie). Same for the Turing movie, or the Hawking movie, none of them really made the work look that cool IMO.

I don't know about cool.

But the movie demonstrated how science, and even individual scientists, can have enormous practical impact, shed light on reality, and raise moral questions of the highest order.

That level of impact inspired me to aim at a science career when I was a student, before I found other pursuits more inspiring to me personally.

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

#590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Samurai sword making took what, a thousand years of trial and error? The forgers had no idea how making steel worked, they just found a way to make it work.

More interesting that they found a way to work with poor quality iron

I have repeatedly read that Japan has poor quality iron, but what exactly does that mean? Iron is an element, so all of the reserves were in an unfortunate oxide requiring sophisticated refining? Just low total abundance?
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