Since someone blamed "Soviet fan fiction" in which I did take a part (oops) [1], let's make my opinions explicit. I'm very sure at the moment:
- That the publish of two arXiv papers was accidental and the second paper was only published to claim the proper authorship, thus the exact publish date was never controllable.
- That top-tier Chinese universities do use Bilibili to post early results. This makes very hard to dismiss all Bilibili videos, though probably most would be.
- That you can produce something like the floating rock as seen in the original videos with a synthesis method similar to the paper states.
- That the synthesis method has an extreme variability depending on parameters. No single reproduced LK-99 samples are same.
- Thus, that Q-Center did make something according to this synthesis method as well, but that is probably different to other reproduced samples.
I'm cautiously positive that:
- That LK-99 is not a deliberate fraud. The most probable possibility at the moment is therefore an honest but misguided mistake. I still reserve a nonzero but not large probability (5%) that this is indeed novel to superconductivity.
- That LK-99 indeed has some peculiar properties when synthesis parameters are controlled right. The large variability does suggest singularities in the middle and Q-Center might somehow have gotten the jackpot.
- That at least some authors (notably Hyun-Tak Kim) are clearly distinguishing the superconductivity and superconductor [2]. In the other words, they are aware that LK-99 (supposedly) exhibits superconductivity but might not be considered as a superconductor.
- That there is a Russian group of scientists that claim some relevant knowledge and feel uneasy about the apparent dismissal of it. This might be the most controversial point I like to make, and my relative confidence partly comes from private information (like, I have verified the credential of Iris privately) so you don't have to completely trust me on this.
- That the research group has not settled on a single theoretical explanation. This is probably why all LK-99 papers were different from each other in theory, and also why Young-Wan Kwon became "disgruntled" as Hyun-Tak Kim might have been his substitute.
- That the late professor Tong-Seek Chair is indeed a madman, regardless of the veracity of his theory.
I have suspicions that:
- That the paper is intentionally vague about the synthesis method. This method is notably different from what their international patent describes, and this is AFAIK typical in the material science. Probably the paper describes a low-yield and low-quality but easy method, and their trade secret is an efficient process.
- That Russian scientists and possibly LK-99 folks do have some theory that describes LK-99 better. I had to slightly weaken this point in the previous article because the actual difference was very unclear to me and other proofreaders (we have discovered this during the rewrite to avoid apparent misreadings). I now suspect that there is no actual theoretical difference but different paradigms may have resulted in different blindspots. So the "acceptance" of theory without paradigm may be seen as the fake acceptance to them, possibly explaining their sentiments.
- That China realized this possibility as well and wanted to maximize their leverage, explaining why China universities go crazy about this.
- Therefore, under these assumptions, that Q-Center's apparently suspicious behavior can be fully explained.
I believe all of them needed me no advanced physics knowledge to derive. Any questions about those points are welcomed.
[1] See the original reply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36996337 and the current version https://hackmd.io/@lifthrasiir/lk-99-prehistory for the context.
[2] https://hackmd.io/@sanxiyn/seize-interview