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LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

nature.com

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Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#471

Post by EvgeniyZh »

OJFord wrote: post #363
EvgeniyZh wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Check that it actually superconducts

That's not trivial, because if it's known to be impure then you expect some resistance in your measurement, you already know it won't be 0R. And if you think it is pure and superconducting then how low does your test equipment go anyway? I'm not an expert in the field at all, but aiui that's why they would have been looking at what seem like roundabout tests etc. that don't seem like they're actually addressing what'…

Impurities shouldn't increase resistance unless you have no supercondting path between your probes. If you don't, other tests will be hardly conclusive either.

And yeah, you want the equipment sensitive enough to see that it is better than good metal like copper, which may be nontrivial in case your critical current is low.

After that, you can move on to other measurements

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#472

Post by duringmath »

carabiner wrote: post #464
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.

LLNL and Fermi did peer reviewed research on LK-99? Links?

They published followup papers on fusion ignition and strange muon behavior respectively.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#473

Post by anamexis »

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #455
svetb wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compar…

Aluminum vs Copper is not that simple. Aluminum has worse conductivity for the same area, but area is in no way fixed. And aluminum has actually better conductivity than copper for the same weight. You just have to make the cables a bit thicker.

I think the relevant metric here is conductivity for the same cost.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#474

Post by Accujack »

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.

It's not over yet, at least not definitively. Nature Magazine like every other source so far is basing its comments on the attempted replications using the leaked paper. It's considered fairly certain at this point that the paper was incomplete/not enough to duplicate the material.

The full paper with the original samples were reportedly sent to Korea University of Science and Technology for examination. That lab group has only so far verified the structure of the material, no word on whether they've replicated it or its actual properties based on replicated samples or the original samples.

Until we hear from them, everyone (including Nature) is just guessing.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#475

Post by havnagiggle »

xwdv wrote: post #135
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.

I disagree. I get pissed off when revolutionary scientific news is brought to me only to turn out to be some bogus crap. I don’t care about the replication and peer review process, it’s not fun, it’s banal. I would much rather have preferred to learn about LK-99 once it was confirmed to be a room temp superconductor, and if it wasn’t then I’d rather never hear about it. Now I have to walk back explanations I gave to…

Hopefully your explanation gave others reason to want to fund more material science research. There's nothing wrong with wanting something to succeed, and understanding the potential impacts is good motivation to keep going (while following the science process).

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#476

Post by bacon_waffle »

dekhn wrote: post #453
bacon_waffle wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Negative experimental results are valid science, aren't they? If you believe attention is a 0-sum game (I don't, but am trying to understand), why not focus criticism on those people spending time on any number of other pursuits that are even further from fruitful. It just seems like, for whatever your idea of "fruitful" is, there are entire industries and institutions that are focused on taking attention away from f…

Negative experimental results are valid science (provided the experiment was run in a way that negative experimental results truly mean a high confidence that you demonstrated something isn't possible, which is actually quite challenging). I focus my criticism around science because I am an ex-scientist and my training had a fair amount of attention paid to not wasting your own time, or others time, with things that…

> scientists have finite time, it's valuable, and are just as prone to chasing the new hotness as programmers.

Yes, I agree. Scientist time is valuable for at least a couple reasons; science funding is a scarce resource, and trained scientists are scarce. I'd argue that those are related, and both could be helped by increasing interest/excitement/awareness toward science in the general public.

If we were to sort people in to two beakers, "trained scientist" and "general public", I think the people who were excited about LK-99 and making "shitty examples" of it, would mostly go in the second one.

(also, I 100% agree that "can't you just..." is one of the most irritating phrases in English)

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#477

Post by mellosouls »

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.

Its kind of like a "nice/fun" flip-side of the anti-science internet experts we saw during covid, although I think the people at the forefront this time were genuinely pro-science and positively motivated.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#478

Post by MissingAFew »

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.

If that's the point, then they are completely unqualified to be commenting.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#479

Post by drcode »

sethbannon wrote: post #324

I felt like folks were getting too optimistic in the early days and now I feel folks are getting way to pessimistic. We don't know if any of these failed replication experiments actually made the same LK-99 the Korean team did. The only way of knowing for sure if LK-99 is a room temp superconductor is if outside labs test the samples the Korean team has made . It's entirely possible that the exact impurities in their…

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

Now, this extraordinary claim doesn't even have weak evidence

I think pessimism is warranted at this point

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#480

Post by ricardobeat »

ecf wrote: post #451
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

Loved the video. Also very annoyed with the general reception seen on HN like “well it was fun”. Unreal the authors had the audacity to add that last line proclaiming a new age for humankind. Even more unreal that news everywhere fell for it.

I haven’t been cheering, but it would indeed herald a new age, if it turned out to be true.
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