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LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

nature.com

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Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#281

Post by chongli »

okamiueru wrote: post #165
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…

I think this kind of excitement followed up with "wasn't anything after all" is both dangerous and wrong. When science is done badly (which arguably shouldn't be considered science), which then leads the public to have elevated expectations, only then for science to be done right and disprove and reject the original "findings", public trust in science is ever so slightly damaged.

public trust in science is ever so slightly damaged

This is just another example of the media’s negative effect on society. Similarly, the media endlessly poring over every detail of the Ukraine war has likely made their job much more difficult because it damages the element of surprise.

The media originally began as something quite negative with what we called “yellow journalism.” Then for a century or so we saw a kind of golden age of journalism where newspapers had strong reputations to uphold but were fairly rewarded for it through ads and classifieds.

Now the media is back to yellow journalism (clickbait) and eroding the institutions of society.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#282

Post by gus_massa »

penjelly wrote: post #194
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.

disagree, the excitement led nowhere. We already have high temp superconductors so even if it was real these applications can/are already handled. Its not harmless either, people invested time, money, and effort. its great to be excited for real science discoveries but hoaxes are not good, and can potentially cripple, crush the industry thats actually developing these things.

A researcher wasting his/her time in a promising result is business as usual. An important part of the work is to read papers and decide if they are promising enough to try to informaly replicate them and extend them.

There are a lot of details to consider. Does it makes sense? Who published it? Did that team has a gopd track record? Where was it published? Did somepne else used the paper as a base for a new paper? How long/much would it take to try?

Only after that, researches decide to try it or just send it to the paper bin.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#283

Post by bandyaboot »

> in particular, copper sulfide — were responsible for the sharp drops in electrical resistivity and partial levitation over a magnet, which looked similar to properties exhibited by superconductors.

Is this effect novel and/or potentially useful as a material?

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#284

Post by timeon »

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…

News cycle? Maybe if you count Twitter as tabloid.

When the hype came people here were asking: 'why western labs and traditional media are so passive?'. Then Nature came with article telling people to calm down. People here called Nature and peer reviews to be in decline.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#285

Post by platz »

scythe wrote: post #221
MBCook wrote: post #187

So is LK-99 still something that may be useful in some other way due to some confirmed property? Or was all this just a mistake, from a usefulness perspective. It was fun to watch, nice to get hope of something so cool, and good to see the scientific process in action. But is there any reason to keep researching LK-99 over some other random compound?

One of the papers that argued that LK-99's levitation was due to mixed diamagnetism and weak ferromagnetism also assigned it a very strong diamagnetism: -2•10^-4, which would make it the second-strongest such material known, beating out bismuth. Probably not that useful, but interesting if confirmed. I read some of the papers linked in this article, but they use different units and don't identify a diamagnetic suscep…

But, a lot of those studies weren't using pure LK-99 but samples with lots of copper sulfide mixed in.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#286

Post by timeon »

Permit wrote: post #72
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…

> Well I'm kinda glad I missed this whole news cycle What negative effects would you have suffered if you had not missed this news cycle?

Time wasted. I have not missed this cycle. All posts and discussions I have read were pointless at best - toxic at worst.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#287

Post by light_hue_1 »

jcranmer wrote: post #167
chefandy wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jeez— it's almost like few people around here are physicists, consider physicists credible on their specialty, saw physicists excited by the potential, and get excited by exciting things. What a shamefully foolish intellectual failure!

As noted by the sibling comment, the physicists (especially those who specialized in superconductor research!) were the ones who were the most skeptical of the announcement, partially because claims of room-temperature superconductors are actually relatively common, and partially because the evidence in the paper was just atrociously bad [1]. One of the things I look forward to in an HN discussion is the comments of…

> One of the things I look forward to in an HN discussion is the comments of people who can collate expert opinions on the subject and surface these kinds of points in a more ELI15 kind of way.

I can tell you from first hand experience, much of the time subject matter experts are often downvoted into oblivion by the HN hive mind. To the point where you only see clueless people at the top.

Happens to me regularly when it comes to machine learning, neuroscience, education/university threads.

For example, people say crazy things about things like university admissions or grad student salaries. Never mind about ML where most of the information here is just wrong.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#288

Post by floxy »

flatline wrote: post #270
floxy wrote: post #265

So it sounds like the purple crystal isn't repelled by magnets. So what part of the samples was causing the magnetic properties? Or are we saying that all of those videos and images were faked?

Says it right there: CuS. You should read the whole thing, it’s really well-written and thorough.

The Cu₂S was responsible for the temperature dependent resistivity measurement caused by a phase change at 104 °C, not the magnet properties. If you have some more information on the ferromagnetic properties of copper sulfides, I'd like to learn more.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#289

Post by bilater »

polishdude20 wrote: post #242
mgfist wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

omg I love this

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#290

Post by tysam_and »

fragmede wrote: post #278
tysam_and wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're conflating PR with the science underneath. PR is something we cannot control -- and avoiding releasing results in a (semi-vain?) attempt to control PR arguably does more harm than releasing them does. The sea makes waves as it will. We can moderate as much as we are able. I think the rest is simply a matter of accepting that things happen as they do out of our control. We can only truly impact ---- and…

PR stands for public relations. Like, it literally is about controlling what the public does with releases. It's not total absolute control, but PR firms can work wonders. The university press office can take a paper and exaggerate the claims to try to make the university look better, or at least, not highlight that testing was done in mice, for example.

That is technically true, though in practice the definition I believe has expanded to include "general news and press coverage of XYZ", which is how I'm phrasing it here.

Having had some work get incredible attention, and other work not at all, I've experienced a small slice of the volatility of the web. My most popular, for example, tweet chain was a semi-technical vent I wrote over the course of 30 minutes after stewing about some semi-useless technical hype that no one seemed to be addressing the flaws in. I wrote it in a way that was more attention-grabbing somewhat than my more technical posts, put it out there, and shared it in a few places. It was pretty shallow, technically, I think, but I feel like it really had to be stated, since it sorta felt...really pretty obvious?

Two days later or so, my number of Twitter followers had over quadrupled.

I think humanity can be quite finicky sometimes (a more general statement, I don't think one could conclude that from the previous anecdote alone).

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