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LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

nature.com

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Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#141

Post by teraflop »

jliptzin wrote: post #107
empath-nirvana wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is that true for RTSCs? In the last month of this saga, every time I saw someone comment on some amazing new technology that RTSC would enable, another expert would chime in and explain why that’s not actually possible or feasible for various reasons. The only convincing gain I’ve seen is a ~10% drop in power transmission costs. But obviously this can’t be right because of how excited everyone gets about it.

If RTSCs turn out to be viable, they would reduce power transmission costs by maybe 10% for our current infrastructure. That's just because we don't build power lines over distances where the losses would be much greater than that, because it doesn't make sense.

But they would also enable new infrastructure beyond what is currently feasible, because we could transport power over much longer distances without any increased loss.

For example, you could transport solar power from the daylit side of the earth to the night side.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#142

Post by deaddodo »

lolinder wrote: post #93
darth_avocado wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It looks like he doesn't specialize exclusively in copper sulfide. His most cited works are to do with gold, and he has articles on a bunch of different materials: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=7WQhABIAAAAJ&hl=en...

Yeah, OP seems to be confusing expert knowledge in a field with exclusive knowledge in a field.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#143

Post by whoisthemachine »

transcriptase wrote: post #88
darth_avocado wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Also why she might believe this is an obvious confounding factor and it was clearly not obvious to the authors, or the rest of the world!

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#144

Post by BirAdam »

breuleux wrote: post #127
usrbinbash wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because a room-temp, amb-press superconductor, that can be made from readly available cheap materials, would be almost on par with the discovery of fire in terms of importance for our species technological capabilities. Even the simplest example of what that would mean is already amazing to our society: Imagine a power-grid that no longer loses power to electrical resistence in the wires.

> Imagine a power-grid that no longer loses power to electrical resistence in the wires. From what I can see the power loss is in the 8-15% range. It'd be awesome to save that, but it's not game changing, and you have to take into account the cost of replacing the wires.

Well, that's true, but there are also more important applications: reducing heat and power loss in chips, increasing the efficiency of electric motors, increasing the efficiency of electromagnets, decreasing charge times for batteries, and so on. I may not say as important as fire, but it would certainly be in the same league as the integrated circuit.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#145

Post by EvgeniyZh »

seiferteric wrote: post #84
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…

They didn't propose new class of superconductors. They conjectured that LK99 follows some 25-year-old theory from a paper written in Korean. Leaving alone the fact that the theory doesn't make much sense to me (at least the parts I managed to understand), there was no evidence in the LK-99 paper that this mechanism is indeed what makes LK99 superconductive (or more precisely that it is present in LK99).

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#146

Post by mgfist »

zephyrthenoble wrote: post #42
postalrat wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"but the hype only serves to obfuscate the truth" Is that true? Do you think the Koreans or anyone would have made more progress finding the truth without the hype?

Are you implying that people on Hacker News saying LK-99 is a superconductor helped the scientific community in some way?

The interest and intrigue around LK-99 made science cool. There will be all kinds of positive knock on effects of this - least of which is that we got down to the bottom of LK-99 years before it would've happened if the preprint never got published.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#147

Post by LordDragonfang »

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…

>“I was like, wait a minute, I know this temperature.”

This is an incredibly funny quote out of context, and the absurdity of it betrays an extreme domain expertise.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#148

Post by tuatoru »

brutusborn wrote: post #94
Eji1700 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I really like the video but I disagree with his prescription for peer review to increase trust in science. 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…

Your specific examples are of media wilfully misunderstanding what the science says in order to sensationalise, and get clicks. Get your science from the newspaper, get trash.

Ivermectin, for instance, has been on the World Health Organisation's list of essential medicines for a long time.

The replication crisis is a real thing, for sure.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHO_Model_List_of_Essential_Me...

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#150

Post by tamimio »

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…

100% agree, that’s the problem with social media and why I hate it.. you have people with 20% knowledge in the subject but with thousands of followers grifting on the topic, while the actual scientists (or subject matter experts) barely have any voice or influence, and results? Public opinion is being shaped by those idiots
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