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LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

nature.com

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Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#101

Post by yongjik »

archepyx wrote: post #31
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…

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…

On the flip side, there was a lot of what I'd call, hmm, "unreasonable" skepticism. If I had a dime every time someone said "This is fake because Korean culture (blah blah armchair sociology)" ...

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#102

Post by MichaelZuo »

morelisp wrote: post #59
usrbinbash wrote: post #39

One of the good things that came out of this whole story: A very public demonstration, transported through mass and even social media channels, how empiricism and the principle of falsification work, and why they are the only known reliable process for generating knowledge.

No, mass and social media stopped paying attention days ago because Trump or Hawai'i or whatever. In a few years some might have a flashback, Google "what happened stupor conduct", and after a few sentences conclude science isn't really worth paying attention to after all.

I would charitabily read the parent's comment as referring to the middle brow 'mass media' aimed at those moderately above average in terms of paying attention to these topics.

It overlaps with a sizable majority of the HN readerbase.

Not the mass media of grocery store checkout aisle magazines.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#103

Post by makeitdouble »

ugh123 wrote: post #70
vecter wrote: post #14

In their preprint, the Korean authors note one particular temperature at which LK-99’s showed a tenfold drop in resistivity, from about 0.02 ohms per centimetre to 0.002 ohms per cm. “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.” The reaction that synthesizes LK-99 uses an unbalanced recipe…

Imagine if we could get all the materials science experts tucked away in a lab for a year working together with a large budget...

Their family would be miserable, their kids would swear to never become a material science expert, and they'd all be missing on the cross discussions with other fields and inspirations coming from outside the material science world ?

Not really trying to be flippant, but that pretty much feels like a James Bond villain fantasy, and only a few select people would probably enjoy the setting.

We kinda have a real world equivalent with people working on the LHC by the way.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#106

Post by babypuncher »

asdfman123 wrote: post #37
chubot wrote: post #5

Well I'm kinda glad I missed this whole news cycle IMO this phenomenon seems to be kind of an artifact of modern media -- I feel like in the old days, peers would have settled it among themselves, and we would have never heard about it The same thing happens in tech -- there is a lot of stuff that people talk about, that ends up being worth ignoring ... I always bring up that whole news cycle in 2017 about a potentia…

In tech's case it's oftne just people manipulating the markets. X is the next big thing, X will revolutionize the world, invest everything in X. The people driving the hype cycle sell at the peak, make a quick buck, and move on to the next thing. Unfortunately, I think it's a key factor in driving the shitification of everything.

"AI" is going through this process at record pace. So far every money-making application I've seen for it has just made existing products worse by reducing the number of humans involved in production. Shittier artwork, shittier blog posts, even shittier recipes.

At least with social media we had a few good years where everything was awesome and it felt like our lives were being enriched, not cheapened.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#107

Post by jliptzin »

empath-nirvana wrote: post #83
chubot wrote: post #5

Well I'm kinda glad I missed this whole news cycle IMO this phenomenon seems to be kind of an artifact of modern media -- I feel like in the old days, peers would have settled it among themselves, and we would have never heard about it The same thing happens in tech -- there is a lot of stuff that people talk about, that ends up being worth ignoring ... I always bring up that whole news cycle in 2017 about a potentia…

Room temperature superconductivity, like quantum computing, fusion power, and em drives, and other similar "magic" technologies, have one thing in common, which is that the potential consequences of their existence are positive, substantial, and relatively easy to explain and to comprehend, while the difficulties preventing those technologies from seeing the light of day are complex, difficult, and a "bummer" to hear…

Is that true for RTSCs? In the last month of this saga, every time I saw someone comment on some amazing new technology that RTSC would enable, another expert would chime in and explain why that’s not actually possible or feasible for various reasons. The only convincing gain I’ve seen is a ~10% drop in power transmission costs. But obviously this can’t be right because of how excited everyone gets about it.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#108

Post by morelisp »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #102
morelisp wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, mass and social media stopped paying attention days ago because Trump or Hawai'i or whatever. In a few years some might have a flashback, Google "what happened stupor conduct", and after a few sentences conclude science isn't really worth paying attention to after all.

I would charitabily read the parent's comment as referring to the middle brow 'mass media' aimed at those moderately above average in terms of paying attention to these topics. It overlaps with a sizable majority of the HN readerbase. Not the mass media of grocery store checkout aisle magazines.

We have wildly diverging views of the average HNer. I'm thinking the median is much closer to "Russian catgirl home-cook on X" than "studious reader of The Atlantic".

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#109

Post by kergonath »

Waterluvian wrote: post #11
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.

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…

> 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.

What the general public does not see it the regular flood of papers that pretend to change the world and that turn out to be bogus. So, from an insider point of view, the issue is that what we are supposed to avoid (crack pot theories becoming mainstream or getting too much traction) happened in a spectacular fashion. So a lot of people get excited about nothing and then end up distrusting the scientific process itself (“they don’t know what they’re doing”, “they make everything up”, “they write a lot of nonsense”, etc).

In this case, I think it turned out to be a good thing. People got excited, some of them thought about possible implication, others managed to pick up some notions of material science. The enthusiasm and activity from people trying to replicate and investigate the material was heart-warming. But yeah, it was bound to finish like that.

> Why would I ever be inclined to feel that there's pie on my face now that we've got fairly strong evidence refuting the claims?

You really, really don’t want to be seen as a crack pot when your funding and career depend on how external people evaluate your work. You also really, really don’t want to have to retract a paper because you’ve missed something obvious. Retraction is a traumatic process even if you are in good faith. This is sidestepped by releasing preprints (so no peer review and no risk of retraction). But at the same time this is a reason why outlandish preprints tend not to be taken too seriously. There is less incentives to get it right.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#110

Post by parker_mountain »

transcriptase wrote: post #88
darth_avocado wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Jain, a copper-sulfide expert I would have never known that people are actual experts in one material. This is impressive.

Most PhDs are incredibly specific and don’t necessary indicate broad knowledge of a field as a whole. Which is why you should be wary of “experts” making overly broad claims about topics within their field but far outside their area of expertise. Early on during Covid you would see postdoc infectious disease experts on every news channel 3 times daily giving their takes. Some of whom maybe took a 3000 level course in…

> Technically an infectious disease expert but I don’t particularly care what they have to say about Covid over a random person on the street either.

I would absolutely care more what they had to say over the rando, especially if they prefaced it with their level experience.

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