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LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

nature.com

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Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#311

Post by maleldil »

dekhn wrote: post #268
imtringued wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How would room temperature superconductors lead to a post-scarcity society?

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#312

Post by kaba0 »

Waterluvian wrote: post #50
archepyx wrote: post #31

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…

Also, if anything this black-and-white view of the world is responsible for the bad outcomes associated with optimism in hyped science. If we could distance ourselves from the binary result/truth and simply engage with the topic without that weight, we would have much more productive discussions.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#313

Post by sneak »

lolinder wrote: post #76
Waterluvian wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 research decisions will be influenced by the possibility of going viral? How many bad decisions will be made as a result of pressure from millions of non-experts who briefly become armchair X-ologists?

Ask L Ron Hubbard?

The willingness of the crowd to believe in counterfactual things is not constrained to science, and whatever damage/risk is posed by that is not new - as Galileo can attest.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#314

Post by tsimionescu »

dekhn wrote: post #268
imtringued wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The point is that room temperature superconductors only matter if they have several other properties - they have to be ductile (easy to mold into wires), have good material resistance, maintain their superconductivity under high enough currents, and be cheap enough to produce.

A ceramic room-temperature superconductor, like LK-99 would have been, is not a promising material at all, since it's extremely costly to make wires out of it. And even if we found a way to do so, it might not have mattered at all if it only worked for the very low currents/voltages in the original tests.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#315

Post by pnt12 »

hgsgm wrote: post #264
KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the story might be more complicated than that, I remember reading that the "third party" was the one paying the bills for the experiment so pushing it out early and even publicly failing would've been preferable to getting it dragged out infinitely for an unlikely hope of it being successful.

This funder-rushed science exactly what created Doc Ock and the Green Goblin.

Now I'm even more disappointed in the outcome!

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#316

Post by belthesar »

93po wrote: post #291
jschveibinz wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sure, but there's a level of entry to the "challenge" call to action. When folks are saying "believe in the science", it also means to believe in the scientific method, which does include challenging observations and independently validating conclusions. A proper challenge requires coming up to the plate, proposing a challenging hypothesis to a given conclusion, and then going through the work required to test your hypothesis, documenting the inputs, the variables, and showcasing your outputs.

What this doesn't mean is the average human who does not like the conclusion producing a statement saying "I don't think that's real", or even going so far as to cite data which could appear to refute the conclusion, are producing a challenge to the conclusion. They're just stating an opinion. This isn't designed to be exclusionary, but to ensure that challengers are going through the effort that the producer of the conclusion did. If one is not willing to learn the problem space enough to reasonably challenge the effort, then that challenge is moot.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#317

Post by kergonath »

penjelly wrote: post #209
kergonath wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sentence still does not make sense because the superconductors in the LHC (though, rereading it a couple of times it is somewhat ambiguous) are not high temperature by any definition. Also, again, ceramic high-temperature superconductors are metallic, or they would not be conductors. “Ceramic” and “metallic” are not mutually exclusive in material sciences. There are lots of reasons to use more classical supercond…

can you make wires from cermets? Thats the point. we need a substance that is malleable(?) enough like copper wire that electrons can pass through. Pottery ceramic wont work like that.

> can you make wires from cermets?

Well, nobody mentioned cermets, or wires, and there are plenty of applications for superconductors beyond wires. Even so, we are perfectly able to make fibre optics cables with silica, which is a ceramic.

> we need a substance that is malleable(?) enough like copper wire that electrons can pass through.

Malleability (actually, ductility) has nothing to do with electric conductivity. It can be useful depending on the use case, but for example on a printed circuit you don’t care about that. Not everything is a dangling wire.

YBCO a ceramic superconductor, it is used in thin films that are deposited on metallic substrates in tapes and it works well. See figure 2 of the paper here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271637455_Dipole_Ma... .

Also, you might not realise this but pretty much nothing is malleable at liquid helium temperature.

> Pottery ceramic wont work like that.

Sigh. Ceramics are not pottery, and more than 99% of the time do not have anything to do with pottery. Ceramics are compounds that are not intermetallic, typically oxides, sulphides, nitrides, etc. Some are bendy (though generally less than metallic alloys), some are hard, some are electric conductors, some are not. They have very diverse sets of properties.

They are everywhere in the chips on the device you use, in its display, in the power plants that make electrons move so you can use it, in any lithium-ion battery, etc. I don’t think I can name one device that does not involve ceramics. Even a shovel, either in the form of a passive layer that makes it stainless, or in the form of rust on it. None of that has anything to do with pottery.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#318

Post by aklwiehjra »

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.

One of the few things I actually remember from undergrad was a presentation freshman year where some famous person said "almost all major leaps in engineering ability come from one of three things: economics of scale, something else (maybe new algorithm? not sure), or a new material that simply has better properties". I don't want to be a materials scientist, but that line got me very interested in materials science and gave me a lot of respect for it. If you find a new material that is 3x better than any other in some way, that unlocks entirely new doors.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#320

Post by ok123456 »

This shows that the properties that were observed aren't as a result of a pure single crystal. If the observed properties can be explained and controlled by dislocation dynamics or other mechanisms of the impurities, then it may still be of interest.
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