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LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

nature.com

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Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#241

Post by ShamelessC »

jklinger410 wrote: post #218

This was absolutely a fun and worthwhile experience for everyone involved. A lot of people got more interested in current materials science because of this. We watched a large community spring up out of nowhere to investigate a new discovery. It was really an incredible thing to witness, and I see only good things came of it. I can't really understand the sour grapes commenters in this thread. Not sure if they just w…

For me personally it is just general (mild) annoyance with a community that somewhat consistently likes to think it is smarter and better than others and which is then only ever willing to admit they were wrong in roundabout ways like "well this was all fun, anyone who thinks it was a waste of resources or what-have-you doesn't see how much impact it had".

You can see this wild speculation play out _commonly_ for lots of will-be fads like cryptocurrency, metaverse, prompt engineering, vector databases, "autoGPT"/langchain, GPT3/4 performance degradation, GPT4 architecture, and more.

People here dress it all up in well-written prose, citing their past experience at big tech or the ivy league, but at the end of the day much of it is as misinformed as a viral 4chan post. And then, as I said, there is very little postmortem from those same posters (although to be fair, I have seen several cryptocurrency people finally admit they were wrong).

edit:

For clarity, I am not encouraging a shame-based "admit you're wrong and I'm right!" attitude. That just results in more of the same but from the other side. I am merely condoning a healthy amount of humility and acceptance that it is _absolutely_ okay to be wrong, but that it is quite important to _admit_ it (if only to yourself) in fairly clear terms.

My frustrations are largely related to social media in general and the notion that scientists are gatekeeping seems to forget about the very real effects of misinformation. None of us like to realize it, but some people really have begun to take the word of internet comments over the word of credentialed takes and it is _ruining_ society in my opinion.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#242

Post by polishdude20 »

mgfist wrote: post #139
dralley wrote: post #41

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.

Yet we're all the better for it happening. Even for the original researchers - maybe it would've taken them another 10 years to get to a similar conclusion. Now, they can take the next step and not waste more time.

Seems like this followed the same rule of internet answers: Ask a question and you'll get crickets. Answer a question wrong and you'll get tonnes of people telling you the right answer.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#243

Post by gowld »

DonHopkins wrote: post #188
lolinder wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case, I think the excitement and hopefulness was not dangerous or wrong, but I do see a risk to this kind of preprint hype in other contexts. During COVID there were multiple cases like this where a study got a lot of hype and discussion from non-experts and turned into "the science says X", when in fact the science was as of yet extremely unsettled. Sure enough, as the experts came to a consensus it rarely m…

[flagged]

Mr Hopkins, you have earned tremendous respect for your work over the decades, and your passion for social justice is commendable, but there are better ways to channel it than into off-topic incivility and joking about killing people.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#244

Post by gumby »

I worried less as to whether LK-99 was a superconductor or not when I thought that the 'flat band' theory might hold water. That could have led to all sorts of interesting results, but alas it appears not to work after all.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#245

Post by floxy »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #230
iraqmtpizza wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, "not a superconductor" means that it can't superconduct at any temperature. Where is the evidence of that? Or it's just clickbait?

By that logic we might as well say that wood is a superconductor Nobody has tested it at 0.0000000000000K after all

One group claimed that their sample of LK-99 went superconducting at ~110K:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01192

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#246

Post by duringmath »

It was interesting seeing real peer reviewed science from accredited labs like LLNL and Fermi get brushed aside and almost dismissed while people were cheering on this LK-99 thing.

Not sure what to make of that but that's what I'll remember most about this debacle.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#247

Post by bogtog »

godelski wrote: post #163
transcriptase wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I mostly agree, but also I think it depends on how strong you are suggesting this and if you also acknowledge that there is high variance between domains as to the varian…

> I'd still trust the mostly-expert over the non-expert any day. The true-expert is often very hard to find tbh.

Right, you can always find somebody more expert than someone else. The level of specificity that some people expect for a variety of problems will leave only a dozen or so people in the world who can call themselves experts.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#248

Post by penjelly »

ShamelessC wrote: post #241
jklinger410 wrote: post #218

This was absolutely a fun and worthwhile experience for everyone involved. A lot of people got more interested in current materials science because of this. We watched a large community spring up out of nowhere to investigate a new discovery. It was really an incredible thing to witness, and I see only good things came of it. I can't really understand the sour grapes commenters in this thread. Not sure if they just w…

For me personally it is just general (mild) annoyance with a community that somewhat consistently likes to think it is smarter and better than others and which is then only ever willing to admit they were wrong in roundabout ways like "well this was all fun, anyone who thinks it was a waste of resources or what-have-you doesn't see how much impact it had". You can see this wild speculation play out _commonly_ for lot…

well said

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#249

Post by philomath_mn »

dkroy wrote: post #157

How did all of these labs in China end up replicating the results of the paper? Were they just not reputable labs?

Here is a list of replication attempts from another comment [0]. Looks like most of the replications were only on the weak levitation property, which could be explained by diamagnetism or impurities.

[0] https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/claims-of-room-tempe...

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#250

Post by asdfman123 »

babypuncher wrote: post #106
asdfman123 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In tech's case it's oftne just people manipulating the markets. X is the next big thing, X will revolutionize the world, invest everything in X. The people driving the hype cycle sell at the peak, make a quick buck, and move on to the next thing. Unfortunately, I think it's a key factor in driving the shitification of everything.

"AI" is going through this process at record pace. So far every money-making application I've seen for it has just made existing products worse by reducing the number of humans involved in production. Shittier artwork, shittier blog posts, even shittier recipes. At least with social media we had a few good years where everything was awesome and it felt like our lives were being enriched, not cheapened.

Some of the tech being pumped has a few useful applications, some of it has no useful applications.
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