531–540 of 754 posts
My wife will be very happy. When I explained to her the potential if it truly was the breakthrough being reported, her first reaction was: "I hope we establish a government agency to regulate everything floating around because I don't want to get bumped into by random stuff".
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…
You're correct, and this highlights a problem I often see in discussions: "efficiency" just is a measure of benefit/cost. Without knowing the units of benefit and cost, people aren't making meaningful statements when they say "efficient". The important efficiency of transmission lines is capacity per dollar, not capacity per material, and no material requiring lab crystallization is going to be remotely competitive in capacity per dollar.
Just a reminder that’s not everything one can find in a paper (never mind a preprint) is true. The response from the community was great. Modellers doing some electronic structure calculations, synthesis experts trying to re-create the material, people doing all sorts of characterisation. The closest parallel I can think of is the faster-than-light neutrinos from a couple of years ago. Except that this time there wer…
It was particularly impressive to see some groups putting together high-quality, publication-ready preprints from scratch in the span of a month. Especially crazy when you think about the shoddy original papers that the Korean group spent years working on...
The substance produced from the paper isn't a superconductor. While extremely unlikely, there is still a chance that LK-99 is a superconductor, but the paper itself did not sufficiently describe the method needed to make it so as to replicate it properly. We will know the resolution to this once the sample from the original researchers is assessed by a third party, of which there are presently at least two to my unde…
The German team produced a crystal of pure LK-99 and tested it. From the article: > LK-99 is not a superconductor, but an insulator with a resistance in the millions of ohms And furthermore, the graphs from the original pre-print article are just graphs of the resistivity of Cu2S. It sounds like there's nearly zero chance of any further science here (beyond confirmation).
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Didn't they only get funding to horse around with that material several years ago?
Well, yes, but their prototype time machine let them put in more years per year than you'd expect. (Someone anonymously claimed they have a time machine on social media, so it must be true!) Seriously though, it sounds like the research group is doing interesting work, and also being careful about the claims they make (even if the internet hype cycle is not), so kudos to them.
There is no evidence of them doing interesting work, either. If reporting is to be believed, their company mostly does unrelated consulting odd-jobs for the chaebols, and this was a passion project for Lee and Kim. But you know what? I'm glad there are oddballs like this on the fringe of science. They're mostly harmless, occasionally entertaining, and maybe once in an epoch they might come up with something real.
> When copper oxide superconductors were discovered in 1986, researchers leapt to probe their properties. But nearly four decades later, there is still debate over the material’s superconducting mechanism, says Vishik. Efforts to explain LK-99 came readily. To me, the interesting take-away is that, right at the end. All too often we see peer-review as this slow, inching, excruciating process, particularly in social s…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing is that there are now multiple independent lines of investigation pointing to LK-99 not being a superconductor, and explaining away the original "smoking guns" offered by the authors. It's like we have a murder suspect, the murder weapon, and fingerprints lifted from the scene. At this point it could still be space aliens, but nobody in their right mind would treat that possibility seriously.
You almost described the reaction of the "tech bros" when the Reiser murder happened: The number of gymnastics some people went through to justify Hans' actions(removing a seat in his car, buying books about crime investigation, blood on the car, etc, etc.) was comical.
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
I find it amusing how so many so-called skeptics seem to be unaware of the phenomenon of hindsight bias.