Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 754 posts

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#81

Post by imtringued »

thinkingkong wrote: post #2

It’s disappointing news but the excitement and amount of replication on this paper was pretty fun to witness and experience. To me the most interesting part was everyone talking about potential consequences, uses, the order of magnitude improvements we’d see in certain costs or areas. Pumps, MRIs, power grids, chips, etc. Great reminder what materials science can do to some underlying economics.

I don't know what you are talking about. This material was never going to revolutionize anything even if it was a superconductor. What you call fun to witness was to me just another episode of "Mat Ferrell's Undecided" except on HN.

Also, you can't solve the most important economic problems through technology anyway. How is a superconductor going to decrease your rent?

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#82

Post by otterley »

ugh123 wrote: post #70
vecter wrote: post #14

In their preprint, the Korean authors note one particular temperature at which LK-99’s showed a tenfold drop in resistivity, from about 0.02 ohms per centimetre to 0.002 ohms per cm. “They were very precise about it. 104.8ºC,” says Prashant Jain, a chemist at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. “I was like, wait a minute, I know this temperature.” The reaction that synthesizes LK-99 uses an unbalanced recipe…

Imagine if we could get all the materials science experts tucked away in a lab for a year working together with a large budget...

They'd be a juicy target for some kind of malfeasance. Never put all the experts in the same location!

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#83

Post by empath-nirvana »

chubot wrote: post #5

Well I'm kinda glad I missed this whole news cycle IMO this phenomenon seems to be kind of an artifact of modern media -- I feel like in the old days, peers would have settled it among themselves, and we would have never heard about it The same thing happens in tech -- there is a lot of stuff that people talk about, that ends up being worth ignoring ... I always bring up that whole news cycle in 2017 about a potentia…

Room temperature superconductivity, like quantum computing, fusion power, and em drives, and other similar "magic" technologies, have one thing in common, which is that the potential consequences of their existence are positive, substantial, and relatively easy to explain and to comprehend, while the difficulties preventing those technologies from seeing the light of day are complex, difficult, and a "bummer" to hear about.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#84

Post by seiferteric »

Moomoomoo309 wrote: post #25

I found Thunderf00t's video on LK-99 to be funny because he pointed out something no one else did: In almost all applications of superconductors, they don't use high-temperature ones for one simple reason: Material properties. Most high-temp superconductors (including LK-99, he was assuming it was one, since he's not qualified to say one way or the other) are a ceramic. The ones that see use in the LHC, for instance,…

I thought it was a poor point. The paper proposed a new mechanism for the superconductivity, which would have been a bigger deal than this specific formulation (lk-99). If it were true, it would be a new class of superconductors which I would think this would lead to development of new formulations that perhaps had better properties. Plus as others have said, superconductor material can and is deposited on tapes (see ReBCO) to make it usable.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#85

Post by addisonl »

archepyx wrote: post #31
Waterluvian wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed! There's this bizarre reaction I see from many where they see the excitement and curiosity and hopefulness as a form of error and source of embarrassment. When mixed with an open mind and reasonable skepticism, it's a powerful opportunity to get people engaged in imagining a different world. I had all kinds of exciting conversations about what a validated, commercially viable LK-99 could produce. Why would I e…

HN discussion did not particlarly have "reasonable skepticism". This is probably because people (i) were not aware that there had been many other hypes about RTSC before but less publicly visible all proved to be false, (ii) not being able to accurately judge the technical quality of the initial evidence, (iii) uncritically believing that the data in the initial preprints was proof for superconductivity because their…

> HN discussion did not particlarly have "reasonable skepticism".

That’s definitely not true despite your attempts to gaslight us.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#86

Post by goku12 »

Eji1700 wrote: post #10
chubot wrote: post #5

Well I'm kinda glad I missed this whole news cycle IMO this phenomenon seems to be kind of an artifact of modern media -- I feel like in the old days, peers would have settled it among themselves, and we would have never heard about it The same thing happens in tech -- there is a lot of stuff that people talk about, that ends up being worth ignoring ... I always bring up that whole news cycle in 2017 about a potentia…

We had similar nonsense with r the EM Drive and cold fusion so this isn’t that new. Either way the best video I’ve seen on this whole thing, Abe why it’s endlessly frustrating, is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl-AgmoZ5mo

It's easy call those claims nonsense in retrospect. However, many important discoveries were made from equally fantastic observations. We would have missed a lot if we brushed them aside cynically. The only way to know for sure is to test the claim scientifically. As the LK99 saga has shown, even incredible claims must be discussed and tested in public. This is one episode where the media hype did work - though the result was disappointing. Well! That's the price you pay for progress.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#87

Post by BaseballPhysics »

Waterluvian wrote: post #11
thinkingkong wrote: post #2

It’s disappointing news but the excitement and amount of replication on this paper was pretty fun to witness and experience. To me the most interesting part was everyone talking about potential consequences, uses, the order of magnitude improvements we’d see in certain costs or areas. Pumps, MRIs, power grids, chips, etc. Great reminder what materials science can do to some underlying economics.

Agreed! There's this bizarre reaction I see from many where they see the excitement and curiosity and hopefulness as a form of error and source of embarrassment. When mixed with an open mind and reasonable skepticism, it's a powerful opportunity to get people engaged in imagining a different world. I had all kinds of exciting conversations about what a validated, commercially viable LK-99 could produce. Why would I e…

> There's this bizarre reaction I see from many where they see the excitement and curiosity and hopefulness as a form of error and source of embarrassment. When mixed with an open mind and reasonable skepticism...

Kinda buried the lede there. A lot of folks around here and in my own orbit were practicing the former while excluding the latter, or worse, were taking shots at people trying to inject some level of rationality into the conversation. Heck, some folks even went so far as to refer to those types of counterpoints/comments as just a "bizarre reaction"...

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#88

Post by transcriptase »

darth_avocado wrote: post #51
vecter wrote: post #14

In their preprint, the Korean authors note one particular temperature at which LK-99’s showed a tenfold drop in resistivity, from about 0.02 ohms per centimetre to 0.002 ohms per cm. “They were very precise about it. 104.8ºC,” says Prashant Jain, a chemist at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. “I was like, wait a minute, I know this temperature.” The reaction that synthesizes LK-99 uses an unbalanced recipe…

> Jain, a copper-sulfide expert I would have never known that people are actual experts in one material. This is impressive.

Most PhDs are incredibly specific and don’t necessary indicate broad knowledge of a field as a whole.

Which is why you should be wary of “experts” making overly broad claims about topics within their field but far outside their area of expertise.

Early on during Covid you would see postdoc infectious disease experts on every news channel 3 times daily giving their takes. Some of whom maybe took a 3000 level course in epidemiology when they were 21 and did their PhD on nematode infections in a single population of freshwater clams. Technically an infectious disease expert but I don’t particularly care what they have to say about Covid over a random person on the street either.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#89

Post by Tijdreiziger »

kergonath wrote: post #77
mensetmanusman wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work with people who have basically researched amorphous silicon for decades.

Yeah. Not surprising. My Master’s supervisor did, though he branched out after a while. I know people who’ve spent almost their entire career on iron.

Being that this is HN, I initially parsed ‘iron’ as ‘hardware’…

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#90

Post by OJFord »

darth_avocado wrote: post #51
vecter wrote: post #14

In their preprint, the Korean authors note one particular temperature at which LK-99’s showed a tenfold drop in resistivity, from about 0.02 ohms per centimetre to 0.002 ohms per cm. “They were very precise about it. 104.8ºC,” says Prashant Jain, a chemist at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. “I was like, wait a minute, I know this temperature.” The reaction that synthesizes LK-99 uses an unbalanced recipe…

> Jain, a copper-sulfide expert I would have never known that people are actual experts in one material. This is impressive.

Well it doesn't preclude him being expert (or just doing work) in anything else?

e.g. you might be a C++ expert, but also proficient in Python, and currently working professionally in Rust?

Post reply on HN