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LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

nature.com

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Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#411

Post by porcoda »

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.

I wouldn't call it a hoax - it was largely a very overstated result that didn't stand up to deeper scrutiny. That isn't really harmful. The primary issue I have with this, and many related things in recent years, is people outside the community of working scientists treating "X was posted on the arXiv" as "X was published". This tends to lead to people assuming that since it appears on that site and has the layout of a regular paper that it somehow has legitimacy. We saw this over and over and over during the peak of the pandemic, even seeing regular news sources writing articles where the only source material was some random recently posted arXiv paper. I don't think I ever saw corrections published in the cases when those preprints proved to be bogus. The arXiv is extremely useful, but lots of people outside the community of working scientists don't seem to understand how to weight what people post there.

As for the "audacity of HN" - this site is a very bizarre mixture of a relatively small number of working scientists, a lot of people without much scientific background who are very interested in science, and get-rich-quick startup types who are sniffing around for the next breakthrough they can turn into money. That mix leads to weird dynamics when it comes to how scientific activities get discussed.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#412

Post by svetb »

drdeca wrote: post #400
hunson_abadeer wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I had heard the parts about "probably wouldn't be a big deal for CPU performance" and "probably wouldn't be great for energy storage", but I hadn't heard the point about "we use less efficient materials for power grid transmission than we could, because of costs". I suppose I didn't expect that we necessarily had like, the "absolute most efficient that could be made" (if that is something substantially more complicat…

Am not the author of that comment, but the fact that comes to mind is that aluminum is used for virtually all transmission and distribution lines - for price reasons - even though copper has better conductivity.

If we did discover a room-temperature superconductor, I suspect it would be a while before the cost to produce it in the bulk quantities required for electrical transmission are economically attractive compared to what’s already available.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#414

Post by feralderyl »

Has anyone ever worked out a "proof" that a room temperature/ambient pressure superconductor can even be made? Like is there a formula or something that can be pointed to that says, according to everything we know its even possible?

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#415

Post by usrbinbash »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #111
usrbinbash wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because a room-temp, amb-press superconductor, that can be made from readly available cheap materials, would be almost on par with the discovery of fire in terms of importance for our species technological capabilities. Even the simplest example of what that would mean is already amazing to our society: Imagine a power-grid that no longer loses power to electrical resistence in the wires.

Cheap doesn't mean free. We can already reduce resistance by piling in more cheap metal, but it becomes more effort than it's worth. And superconductors have limits on how much power they can carry. But most importantly, the power grid doesn't lose all that much to resistance. And you'd still lose power to transmission line capacitance against the ground.

> Cheap doesn't mean free

Means cheap enough to be mass produced, and available.

> But most importantly, the power grid doesn't lose all that much to resistance

Laws of scaling, even a small percentage of power lost to resistence is a hige overall loss, the avoidance of which is desirable.

And as I said, this is only the simplest example.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#416

Post by Affric »

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.

I like Phil but around the table this morning with a few working/publishing scientists they all disagreed with his assertion that this paper has done more harm than good.

Consensus was that this would lead to more people interested in the field and what actually does work.

There’s heaps of sloppy science out there. There are massive structural issues in how science is done.

There’s obviously not enough money or prestige in condensed matter physics if Phil thinks this is a bad hoax and it’s bad for Science.

Within the space of a month this was resolved. It wasn’t even published. Go to pharma, medicine, vet, ag and you will see hoaxes that last years. Reviewers who don’t have any relevant knowledge. Journals which won’t retract until you threaten to sue them. Universities that will take no disciplinary action against hoaxers at all. LK-99 was almost debunked in a single media cycle.

The people who have taken this to reduce the credibility of science rather than these fallible humans who succumbed to their impulse for fame didn’t give science any credibility in the first place.

EDIT: shout out to our favourite website retraction watch. Anything you read there remember, that’s science working and some Scientist somewhere who likes being right has vanquished their enemy in the academy. https://retractionwatch.com/

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#417

Post by cwillu »

psychphysic wrote: post #149

I've quite enjoyed this story and it's resolution. It does seem that the doomsayers who predicted the Earth would stop spinning because of lay public speculating about LK-99 were wrong. The system works. Yay!

It's mildly amusing to see the commentary elsewhere that this whole event proves they were _right_ that the lay public speculating is somehow harmful.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#418

Post by MobiusHorizons »

drdeca wrote: post #400
hunson_abadeer wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I had heard the parts about "probably wouldn't be a big deal for CPU performance" and "probably wouldn't be great for energy storage", but I hadn't heard the point about "we use less efficient materials for power grid transmission than we could, because of costs". I suppose I didn't expect that we necessarily had like, the "absolute most efficient that could be made" (if that is something substantially more complicat…

We frequently use aluminum wires with a higher thickness to make up for the lower conductivity as compared to copper. It’s not as simple as cost vs performance though, as aluminum is substantially less dense than copper. Gold and silver are also better conductors than copper, but of course are very expensive, and still have resistance. Zero resistance may be with it on some cases. For instance in projects that currently use high voltage dc it may be worth it due to safety and complexity wins, but that all would depend on how hard (expense and complexity) the superconductor is to deploy.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#419

Post by chrononaut »

duringmath wrote: post #246

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.

That's what I most remember too from this.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#420

Post by dekhn »

bacon_waffle wrote: post #398
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…

Why criticize? People spend their time and money on pointless pursuits all the time.

My goal in criticism is to guide interested players towards more fruitful pursuits. I don't want to see invalid science sucking up all the attention and crowding out legitimate but boring science.
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