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Honestly, I feel bad for the original authors, who were correctly holding out for stronger evidence but were forced into publishing early by the actions of a third party going behind their backs. I hope they don't experience undue blowback because of this.
I suspect the third party is the one that will mostly suffer the career consequences.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I find it perilous to treat an entire community as it if has one voice. Ie. "the HN discussion" as a singular entity with a singular binary state on its skepticism. Someone else could equally claim that the HN community was super pessimistic and skeptical about it, because I certainly saw a lot of that too! While a convenient abstraction, it plays into our biases to notice and remember only some of the discourse. Plu…
For the scientists getting their hands on a breakthrough, the risk and reward was worth it, but for the public at large? No one should care until there are definite results.
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.
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=7WQhABIAAAAJ&hl=en...
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
People don’t distrust scientists because there isn’t enough peer review or because of pre-prints failing to replicate, they distrust scientific institutions because scientific institutions often communicate their current best theory as the truth and pretend that they can ‘prove’ things true by way of ‘scientific consensus.’ Going against the consensus can ruin or limit your career.
Lots of examples: climate scientists making claims of ice free arctic by 2020, dietary science flip flopping on diet advice (fat and butter is bad, carbs are bad), covid vaccines being a silver bullet, ivermectin not being effective [1]. Add in problems in social ‘sciences’ like the Sokal affair, psychology replication crisis, mainstream economists failing to predict the GFC, definitions of foundational terms like “woman” changing, and you have a recipe for the general public not trusting academia or ‘scientific’ institutions in general. Science and academia in general is being polluted by politics and it is incentivising academics to exaggerate the accuracy of their knowledge.
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... I added the reference here because Ivermectin was a horrible case of politicising science: mainstream institutions called it an animal medicine with full knowledge it was safe for humans. And now there is a potential mechanism for its effect, it looks like it may have been effective after all. During the pandemic I heard many scientists laugh at people for considering it, all because an authority they trusted told them it was silly.
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,…
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…
What about L and K, the original scientists? Lots of speculation that LK-99 would be a career ending paper if it turned out that it wasn't a room temperature superconductor.
If 20 years of horsing around with a material that does not work did not end their careers, neither will this.
One of the good things that came out of this whole story: A very public demonstration, transported through mass and even social media channels, how empiricism and the principle of falsification work, and why they are the only known reliable process for generating knowledge.
No, mass and social media stopped paying attention days ago because Trump or Hawai'i or whatever. In a few years some might have a flashback, Google "what happened stupor conduct", and after a few sentences conclude science isn't really worth paying attention to after all.
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…