Earlier quoted context omitted.
And Nature is still trying to whitewash its own reputation for publishing a very high visibility paper on superconduction that they had to retract.
What paper was that?
LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
681–690 of 754 posts
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#682I think it’s a fairly interesting story over all, and it feels like exactly how science should happen. We are humans and easily deluded. We fall easily for things we wish to be true. The fascinating story behind LK99 is incredibly human - including the rushing a preprint out to secure a noble prize by one of the researchers who was being excluded. The fascinating part to me was the fact engineers and scientists could…
No, this was just bad science from the beginning. I've done experimental physics research and the way this team published their results and how sloppy everything looked is definitely not how science should happen, it's just a great way to ruin your reputation as a scientist (which the original authors thoroughly did). Every PhD student learns to e.g. include proof that an observed effect is not caused by a different…
> the way this team published their results
The results weren't formally published.
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#683Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still isn't going to work. >material requiring lab crystallization How are you going to string a crystals between towers? The material properties are all wrong for this application.
Aluminium and copper in cables are crystals. The crystal bit is not the problem.
I'm not sure of the correct scientific language here.
As far as I'm aware this is a brittle /inflexible material so my point about the mechanical properties still stands.
And when people refer to growing crystals, that generally refers to a particular kind of crystal. Ive never heard of anyone growing aluminium crystals, except if it's a compound, and then you get a crystal like we think of when we say crystals.
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#684> "They were very precise about it. 104.8ºC," says Prashant Jain, a chemist at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. "I was like, wait a minute, I know this temperature."
Their favorite radio station in IL? 104.8 KCRF, all phase transitions, all the time.
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#685Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it amusing how so many so-called skeptics seem to be unaware of the phenomenon of hindsight bias.
I was deeply sceptical of LK-99 and simply chose not to comment on it in public on the internet because: (1) confirmation or contradiction will come soon enough, and (2) being sceptical, however measured, usually attracts accusations of being a negative, cynical naysayer, and I don't need that in my life.
Choosing to not comment is a vote for the status quo. We need your voice of reason and caution.
Toxic positivity is poisoning our culture. We need antidote.
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#686> studies have shown that impurities in the material — in particular, copper sulfide — were responsible for the sharp drops in electrical resistivity and partial levitation over a magnet, which looked similar to properties exhibited by superconductors.
So, make a material with impurities only? :-)
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#687Unbelieveble the effort invested in demonstrating that LK-99 is not a superconductor.
Humans work like crazy when the oportunity arises to ridiculize others. If only...
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#688Earlier quoted context omitted.
> transmission lines are already pretty efficient and we already choose less efficient materials for cost 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…
This is an absolutely disingenuous point that compares the cost of full-economy-of-scale tech to literal one off R&D prototypes. Maybe new technology made in a lab can one day scale up and compete against current low-cost high-scale solutions. Crazy idea, I know. However, trying to artificially limit all discussion about R&D and future tech by claiming "it's more expensive than fully scaled solutions" has got to be f…
> This is an absolutely disingenuous point that compares the cost of full-economy-of-scale tech to literal one off R&D prototypes.
No, even at scale, materials that you can extract from ore are inherently going to be cheaper than materials you have to extract from three different ores and then crystallize, even in a manufacturing lab. These just aren't comparable processes, and no amount of scale is ever going to fix that.
Instead of assuming I'm making a disingenuous point, you might have asked for clarification.
That's setting aside the problems others have brought up, which is that the materials in question have other properties besides conductivity which make these materials inappropriate for transmission application.
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#689Article fails to establish title's claim. Yeah the pure crystal isn't a superconductor - but guess what? the Koreans never claimed that substituting in copper atoms in a random fashion would work.
You're stating something that should be obvious. How are there so many software and software-adjacent people who take headlines at face value?
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#690Unbelieveble the effort invested in demonstrating that LK-99 is not a superconductor. Humans work like crazy when the oportunity arises to ridiculize others. If only...
So in your view a bunch of scientists got together and produced an enormous effort for the purpose of ridiculing other scientists? It wasn't perhaps because of an opportunity to significantly change the world?