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LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

nature.com

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Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#171

Post by godelski »

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.

> but the excitement and amount of replication on this paper was pretty fun to witness and experience.

I was really elated to see how people were so interested and getting to see what peer review in science actually looks like. How in the real world it is done outside of journals and conferences, which people frequently give the misnomer "peer review." I hope people will walk away from this experience with a better understanding of how science works and why replication is such a critical aspect of it. Because the truth is that our academic incentive structure has generally fallen out of alignment with the actual goals of science.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#172

Post by rvz »

This only proves that you shouldn't believe such random 'breakthroughs' on the internet, these days.

What a shame, but the attention seeking and hype clearly worked and duped many here. Even though they won't admit that they fell for the hype.

Be a bit skeptical next time.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#173

Post by rowanG077 »

fluoridation wrote: post #136
rowanG077 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem, which is often the case with Thunderf00t, is that he is missing the forest for the trees. No one who knows anything was thinking of using LK-99 for serious applications. The specs of LK-99 where just too shit. What it would have been is a start shot for understanding the effect and creating more useful materials based on the same underlying physical process.

Thunderf00t's point, though, is that LK-99 is not novel in its material category. High temperature superconductors that are hard and brittle already existed. What would be interesting would be a malleable high temperature semiconductor, because then you can make it into cables.

a superconductor at 100+ degrees celsius and ambient pressures doesn't exist as of now. anything even approaching that would be earth shattering. Even if they are ceramic.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#174

Post by [deleted] »

DarkmSparks wrote: post #169

"The science is settled." Proceeds to quote a guy who studied chemistry at university and now works in finance. Now, Im not saying it is a superconductor. But please, don't insult my intelligence with garbage like that, I'm more inclined to believe that kind of reporting is evidence that serious scientists are not willing to go on record as saying it isn't.

[deleted]

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#175

Post by kergonath »

putnambr wrote: post #133
kergonath wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most high-temp superconductors (including LK-99, he was assuming it was one, since he's not qualified to say one way or the other) are a ceramic. The ones that see use in the LHC, for instance, aren't. Aren’t the LHC magnets niobium-titanium? Those aren’t high temperature superconductors. Though it is indeed a metal under any definition. The rule of thumb is that high-temperature superconductors can be cooled by li…

Did you skip over "In almost all applications of superconductors, they don't use high-temperature ones for one simple reason: Material properties." They're saying that LHC does not use a ceramic, and therefore high-temperature, superconductor; instead they use metallic (cooled) superconductors because they can be molded.

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 superconductors in the LHC, just as in ITER. Some are design and engineering issues, as you mention. Another one is that the tapes we use for YBCO were not a practical thing when the LHC was designed. But now they are (though they haven’t been used in such a large scale) and you can bet that they’ll jump at any opportunity to get rid of the helium loop and take advantage of the stronger magnetic fields you can get with YBCO.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#176

Post by freedomben »

godelski wrote: post #171
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.

> but the excitement and amount of replication on this paper was pretty fun to witness and experience. I was really elated to see how people were so interested and getting to see what peer review in science actually looks like. How in the real world it is done outside of journals and conferences, which people frequently give the misnomer "peer review." I hope people will walk away from this experience with a better u…

Unfortunately I don't think we got "to see what peer review in science actually looks like" because this was such an unusual deal. The amount of interest and excitement gave us the ideal amount of peer review/reproduction. For the vast majority of things nobody even tries to reproduce it, and many of the publishers don't even provide the tools needed to do so.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#177

Post by brutusborn »

tuatoru wrote: post #148
brutusborn wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like the video but I disagree with his prescription for peer review to increase trust in science. People don’t distrust scientists because there isn’t enough peer review or because of pre-prints failing to replicate, they distrust scientific institutions because scientific institutions often communicate their current best theory as the truth and pretend that they can ‘prove’ things true by way of ‘scientific…

Your specific examples are of media wilfully misunderstanding what the science says in order to sensationalise, and get clicks. Get your science from the newspaper, get trash. Ivermectin, for instance, has been on the World Health Organisation's list of essential medicines for a long time. The replication crisis is a real thing, for sure. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHO_Model_List_of_Essential_Me...

I don’t think the media caused the psychology replication crisis. The media plays a part in all this, but the scientific institutions shouldn’t crumble to media or political pressure.

See the FDA’s advice on Ivermectin: https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/why-you-shoul...

“Ivermectin has not been shown to be safe or effective for these indications,” but fail to mention that there is no evidence that it is not safe for this particular indication. This implies it wasn’t banned for safety reasons. It was banned because many associated it with Trump and right wing conspiracy theories.

There was no science used to justify banning it to begin with, and we are now years later, with a potential mechanism for the benefit and it is still banned!

One more link to prove I’m not completely insane: the AMA and other mainstream medical bodies recommended not using it for Covid https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-aph...

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#179

Post by adrian_b »

chmod600 wrote: post #38

None of the earlier articles mentioned ferromagnetic levitation vs superconducting levitation and how to tell them apart.

There is no such thing as ferromagnetic levitation (i.e. there is no stable position).

Nevertheless, a piece of ferromagnetic material which has a permanent remanent magnetization (which is possible only for a subset of the ferromagnetic materials) when put on a magnet may take a position close to vertical, with one edge pressed on the magnet.

It is very easy to verify if this is what you see by moving the piece of material to the other pole of the magnet, where it must take a reversed position, with the other edge pressed on the magnet.

A diamagnetic material will be equally repelled by both poles of the magnet, so moving it between the poles will not change its behavior.

A soft ferromagnetic material, like iron, will be equally attracted by both poles of the magnet.

The explanations that iron impurities could be present in quantities so great as to form some unknown iron compounds with high coercivity and some unknown experimental circumstances could magnetize permanently the samples, are not significantly more credible than the claims that room-temperature superconductors do exist.

In any case, anyone who has made some samples can verify easily whether they are ferromagnetic or diamagnetic. It would be more credible that someone has made fake claims, than that they have mistaken a ferromagnetic material for a diamagnetic material.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#180

Post by nullc »

calibas wrote: post #29

> By contrast, superconductors that levitate over magnets can be spun and even held upside-down. “None of those behaviors look like what we see in the LK-99 videos,” van Gennep says. Aren't they confusing Type-I and Type-II superconductors?

hm? "superconductors that levitate over magnets" == type-II, type-II can be spun and held upside-down.
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