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LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

nature.com

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Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#381

Post by morelisp »

plorg wrote: post #217
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…

HN demonstrated its common ability to surface prolific posters who identify as autodidacts and appear to have gone on a Wikipedia binge this morning, but who nonetheless speak with a confidence that until now may only have been demonstrated by ChatGPT.

The absolute worst part is that some of these guys, especially the younger (e.g. fresh grad through ~30) ones, do this in person! I was out drinking with some colleagues a few months ago and I said something offhand in a normal human conversation about wanting to learn more about X, and one guy pulls out his phone and just starts reading me the Wikipedia article about X.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#382

Post by kergonath »

beders wrote: post #370

Well, maybe this is the beginning of another cold fusion story. Despite failures to reproduce the Pons/Fleischmann results, it spawned a whole new field: LENR which has very interesting yearly conferences.

Not exactly. Cold fusion was contradicted by our knowledge of Physics at the time. Room-temperature superconductors are a field of active study, because even though we don’t know one, we think they might exist and the industrial applications could be world-changing. The response was not “room-temperature superconductors cannot exist”, as with cold fusion, but more “this sounds implausible and your preprint is dodgy; nevertheless we’ll try to replicate it”.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#383

Post by raphlinus »

hunson_abadeer wrote: post #378
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.

This is precisely what put me off in these discussions. Not the idea that we might have found a room-temperature superconductor - that part was exciting. It's the part where people confidently talked about its applications without realizing that they probably wouldn't revolutionize CPU performance (Josephson junctions don't seem to work well as non-cryogenic temperatures for reasons unrelated to superconductivity), p…

Amen. When someone does the math and adds up the winners and losers in all this, one clear winner will be this video from Asianometry, entitled The History of Superconductors (Before LK-99)[1]. It only lightly touched on LK-99 itself, but did an excellent job going through the actual science-based history of superconductors, covering in particular detail previous hype waves. A major point is that the YBCO superconductors, while an amazing scientific discovery, haven't had revolutionary applications, and have only lightly displaced lower temperature (niobium-titanium metal alloy) superconductors in applications requiring generating strong magnetic fields, including MRI machines. For the curious, [2] goes into considerable detail on potential applications and challenges for HTSC in MRI.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUczYHyOhLM

[2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5472374/

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#384

Post by jokoon »

This type of story is fueled by techno-optimists who want to believe that humans can always "figure out" the universe and take advantage of the laws of physics to master their environment.

I don't understand where this belief comes from, but to think that research + time = innovation is really ignorant of how technology works. It seems it's really rooted in prophetic or religious way to look at technology.

Cornucopianism is a really better word for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornucopianism

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#385

Post by justincredible »

venusenvy47 wrote: post #199
LordDragonfang wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>“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's almost like "I know Unix" from Jurassic Park, but not as silly.

[dead]

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#386

Post by hackerlight »

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?

Not too long ago, a creationist would have sarcastically asked "Does this extend to biology too?", and gone away thinking they had made an actual argument.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#387

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

penjelly wrote: post #263
sorenjan wrote: post #237

Sixty Symbols released a video about this yesterday, and in it professor Philip Moriarty is less than impressed with the whole ordeal. I haven't been paying attention, I'm too jaded and skeptical and assumed from the start that there was something wrong and much hype about nothing. Bad Science and Room Temperature Superconductors - Sixty Symbols: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl-AgmoZ5mo

everyone in this thread should watch this, instead of "the excitement was good for everyone" they might realize these hoaxes harm scientific integrity. The audacity of HN to state something is good, without listening to scientists give their take on it.

> instead of "the excitement was good for everyone" they might realize these hoaxes harm scientific integrity.

Totally disagree. If anything, this whole episode (debacle?) reinforced the fact that science works and the process played out exactly how the scientific process should work:

1. First, the paper was originally posted on arxiv, meaning it was a pre-print and didn't go through any peer review. So the vast majority of comments I saw on it was "Wow, this would be really cool, if it turns out to be true."

2. Immediately many labs around the world started trying to replicate the results. And very quickly there were some negative results that came back.

3. The thing that I think is so cool is not only did negative results come back, but from TFA people now have a very good understanding of why the initial analysis was incorrect. That's great science.

One may argue that this was really a failure in media communication vs. the actual underlying science, but if anything it teaches appropriate skepticism, especially when a report is initially published, without peer review, without yet being replicated, that ends with the sentence "We believe that our new development will be a brand-new historical event that opens a new era for humankind."

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#388

Post by hackerlight »

JeremyNT wrote: post #211
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…

> When mixed with an open mind and reasonable skepticism, it's a powerful opportunity to get people engaged in imagining a different world. I feel like this line is doing a lot of lifting in your comment. The problem is that as lay people we are completely unequipped to gauge a claim like this. I followed along on HN and there were plenty of posts by people who were giving LK-99 crazy odds of success, fueled in no sm…

The tone here on HN was very similar to the tone of a lot of credible physicists. Just because it turned out to be not superconducting doesn't mean that the people you are criticising were wrong to think what they thought given the available information at the time.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#389

Post by 93po »

hackerlight wrote: post #386
93po wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this extend to climate change science too?

Not too long ago, a creationist would have sarcastically asked "Does this extend to biology too?", and gone away thinking they had made an actual argument.

Try challenging climate science, even in a valid way, and see how popular it is on reddit or HN or twitter. Even my above comment now has a negative score which sort of proves my point.

note: i don't deny climate science but like any science there are ways to challenge it

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#390

Post by acedTrex »

dekhn wrote: post #332

my only criticism is to the people who, without real background in the area, read the paper, thought the synthesis was "easy", raced to get the reagents only to realize that you can't easily order somet things without a prior relationship and trust with a chemical supplier, and then showed some antimagnetism in their shitty examples, without understanding that that phenomenon isn't conclusive evidence. It's sort of a…

The original paper wasn't published, it was leaked
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