LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

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.

Well, there is some of it in most hardware :D

> saw physicists excited by the potential,

Mostly I saw actual physicists who had experience in the field being very skeptical, throwing a lot of cold water on the fire, and pointing out that the original authors looked like amateurs.

And then I saw a lot of people with zero experience in the field running around yelling about how they were out of touch, how this was a revolutionary new way that science would progress on twitter, out in the open, etc. People who were skeptical got called all kinds of names.

It didn't help that a lot of people on twitter pivoted from crypto-hype to AI-hype to LK99-hype pretty much on a dime.

There was also a lot of highly upvoted comments with the usual thoughtleadering style of "let me beak it down for your, here's the ELI5 of what is going on an what the implications will be..." followed by whatever they learned in the past 48 hours from plowing through wikipedia articles.

There could be a lesson here about listening very carefully to experts in the field when they give you their opinions. They often sound very highly biased, but there's usually very good reason for that. Once in a lifetime there's the event where some paradigm is overthrown and all the old scientists look a bit foolish because their instincts were to be skeptical -- but those instincts came through a lifetime of correctly being skeptical 999 times out of 1000 about wild claims in their field.

This could be a teachable moment that could inform people about climate change, coronavirus and other scientific claims. If you want to disagree with experts in the field you really need to get off your ass, get off twitter and the blogs, and go do the hard work of understanding what the scientists actually know by reading the articles that they publish. They're very often correct and their opinions hold more weight because they've literally spent their lifetime learning and thinking about this one thing. They didn't start learning about superconductivity / viruses / climate last week and you need to do better than some showerthought or wishful thinking that you think proves your viewpoint.

But we're not going to do that because its only been a few days and we've literally forgotten about how much flak scientists were getting on here over skepticism towards the initial claims.

And I had some of the most positively stupid arguments on here where people were trying to assert that scientific experts needed to express exactly zero bias because they were experts and held to a higher standard than the average moron with no experience who could argue whatever they liked. Engineering a rationale to be able to reject anyone with a strong opinion based on expertise in favor of strong opinions from randos on twitter.

> 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.

This should be taken in the context of room temperature superconductors being notorious physics vaporware along with practically useful advances in quantum computers and useful fusion. What these have in common is a sort of holy grail status, where it's obvious they'd be a revolutionary complete game changer. Not that any of these things are obviously impossible, there's just been so many instances of discoveries in these areas that have failed to replicate that there's inevitably a lot of eye rolling in physics when these types of findings are announced.

The excitable people are certainly “loud” though.

The last few weeks with the LK-99 hype combined with the usual ChatGPT stories, I actually started feeling that maybe the site should be renamed Hype News.

> but that it's odd when there's people who treat an optimistic outlook as an error.

IMHO it’s best to treat any extraordinary claim as BS until proven otherwise as it’s very easy to concoct BS claims. If we take every one of them seriously, it will consume all of our attention and destroy the signal (actual facts) to noise (unproven claims) ratio on this site.