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"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?
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> 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.
I don't know why people even bring up batteries. They're not going to make any difference to batteries that I'm aware of. In theory you could use superconducting coils as storage, but that's on the level of bulk capacitors, not batteries.
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> 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.
I could imagine an expert in this field having the opposite take as they almost certainly already knew the little bits of trivia that I picked up.
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.
> were responsible for the sharp drops in electrical resistivity and partial levitation over a magnet Are these properties still useful? If something can levitate without being a superconductor it is already useful for a LOT of things.
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> 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. I would absolutely care more what they had to say over the rando, especially if they prefaced it with their level experience.
Yeah, uh, I wouldn't. There was a B- or C-list physics blogger a few years back whose graduate homework I used to grade. (I still remember this one, so that should tell you something.) He got very angry that I gave him zero credit for one particular question. But he: - did not use the standard/expected approach to this problem - did not explain what he was doing well enough for me to find him any partial credit (this…
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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?
Room temp Superconductors, along with fusion, would affect the economy profoundly. What the exact effect on rent would be is hard to predict but under the "post-scarcity society" mental construct, having infinite energy at zero cost (amortized) would presumably make the price of housing change.
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On the bright side: when people say “believe in the science,” this is exactly what they should be thinking: challenge. This whole process has been super healthy and similar challenges are important and needed for everything published, not just this particular research area. I might be out in left field, but I read so often that researchers are running out of ideas. What’s wrong with getting a PhD for challenging some…
Does this extend to climate change science too?
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.
("It stops working after 65,535 seconds? Wait a minute, I know that number.")
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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…
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…
How many worse decisions are made by people who can't read and won't learn about the nuances of a topic?
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…