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Semiconducting Transport in LK99 reproduction attempt

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Re: Semiconducting Transport in LK99 reproduction attempt

#191

Post by bluGill »

DannyBee wrote: post #189
lucubratory wrote: post #98

Everyone in this thread needs to understand that particularly for materials science, and particularly when there is bad methodology documentation, it is really, really normal for early replication attempts to fail. What works in one lab will often need to be adjusted to work in another, with different equipment, altitude, humidity, all sorts of stuff. Making it even worse, apparently the original team can't even get…

The thing is - there is a totally easy and simple mechanism to create early-stage believability. Take a video of you producing and testing it, with a mobile phone. It only works 10% of the time? Not an issue, post 10 videos. Whatever. Would it be perfect? No, of course it could be faked. But i guaranteed people would be a ton less skeptical and willing to push hard on this if the original authors had done this sort o…

Production takes more than a day - I don't know of any phone that can take videos lasting that long (if people are even willing to watch it). You can of course take several videos and splice them together.

Worse yet, I can with a bit of trick photography and standard liquid nitrogen cooled super conductors make a video that looks like success even though I'm working with colored wax for materials in the production process. (liquid nitrogen is hard to disguise, but with some trick photography and multiple takes I can do it). Or I can skip all that and spend some time in blender to do the above via CGI. (well I don't know blender that well, and most blender animations are obvious, but someone with a few months could pull this off)

Re: Semiconducting Transport in LK99 reproduction attempt

#192

Post by WanderPanda »

brutusborn wrote: post #160
vasco wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If research moves more to arxiv + discussion forums rather than paid journals, sharing research results earlier seems like a good thing, not bad. If they didn't publish early, when they published maybe things would be clearer for other researchers. But by publishing earlier other people have the choice to engage with it or wait for later. Seems like many people decided to not wait, so it seems like it was a good choi…

I think this is the best direction for science generally: publish everything open and early. It might be naive, but I would love an environment where everyone self published or arxiv papers/reviews/datasets/models. Then journals could publish the best papers/review preprints. I imagine a world where journals beg researchers for the rights to publish their paper after seeing an excellent preprint. Or a journal finds a…

Nice counterfactual! Do you think it is just a path dependency that we didn‘t end up in the (local) minimum that you mention?

Re: Semiconducting Transport in LK99 reproduction attempt

#194

Post by hatsunearu »

numpad0 wrote: post #100
bestcoder69 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could be a skill issue on the part of the replicators? The russian anime girl scientist had to make a bunch of modifications (and was cursing the orig authors) before she could make her rocks float.

a nitpick - I think it's more likely that person is he/him. anime is gender and masculinity averse/avoidant so everyone/everything is depicted in girly tone, else they don't exist

[flagged]

Re: Semiconducting Transport in LK99 reproduction attempt

#195

Post by bluGill »

simplicio wrote: post #33
Azrael3000 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently a new paper is supposed to come out from the original authors about the production method [0]. So it really is unclear whether everybody generates the same material. It's a shame that these papers were published before they were polished by the authors. [0] https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/claims-of-room-tempe...

Seems the fastest way to clear this up would just be for the original team to send a sample to some other scientists for testing. That would solve any issues regarding other teams reproducing the material incorrectly, and at a first pass, what everyone cares about is whether its a superconductor at room temp, not how to make it.

Easy to say, but this is hard. "I got a box of dust from you". Now was this the lab sending dust because they know it doesn't work, and want to hide their tracks; the receiving lab destroying the sample because they want their own discovery to win a Nobel prize; or just regular managed in shipping? You should be able to think of other reasons that an unethical lab on either end might want to ensure the samples are destroyed instead of tested.

The above can be managed, but it can't be done over a weekend. The lab has stated they are willing to send their working samples out to other labs. However to ensure it arrives safely (avoiding issues like the above) means that you shouldn't even be concerned until two months have passed, and accept reassurance for a few months after that.

Re: Semiconducting Transport in LK99 reproduction attempt

#196

Post by mhb »

DannyBee wrote: post #189
lucubratory wrote: post #98

Everyone in this thread needs to understand that particularly for materials science, and particularly when there is bad methodology documentation, it is really, really normal for early replication attempts to fail. What works in one lab will often need to be adjusted to work in another, with different equipment, altitude, humidity, all sorts of stuff. Making it even worse, apparently the original team can't even get…

The thing is - there is a totally easy and simple mechanism to create early-stage believability. Take a video of you producing and testing it, with a mobile phone. It only works 10% of the time? Not an issue, post 10 videos. Whatever. Would it be perfect? No, of course it could be faked. But i guaranteed people would be a ton less skeptical and willing to push hard on this if the original authors had done this sort o…

Are you suggesting that they take phone video of all their experiments over the course of multiple years? Or just the one they know will succeed?

Re: Semiconducting Transport in LK99 reproduction attempt

#197

Post by lambdasquirrel »

mhb wrote: post #196
DannyBee wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is - there is a totally easy and simple mechanism to create early-stage believability. Take a video of you producing and testing it, with a mobile phone. It only works 10% of the time? Not an issue, post 10 videos. Whatever. Would it be perfect? No, of course it could be faked. But i guaranteed people would be a ton less skeptical and willing to push hard on this if the original authors had done this sort o…

Are you suggesting that they take phone video of all their experiments over the course of multiple years? Or just the one they know will succeed?

A lot of science takes a mind-numbing amount of time at the lab desk. Something like 40 hours a week just dedicated to picking apart fruit flies with tweezers under a microscope is pretty common. I think I read somewhere that with MatSci, mortars and pestles and blisters are involved. It would be a lot of recording that would have to happen, and then you have to record every setting on every instrument you touch. How do we know that that's actually that reagent in that bottle? Yeah this just doesn't hold up for actual science. It's not something you can just take a Zoom recording of.

Re: Semiconducting Transport in LK99 reproduction attempt

#198

Post by ilc »

djtango wrote: post #131
dmvdoug wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just materials science though. I’m a longtime reader of Derek Lowe’s In the Pipeline blog, and he often emphasizes the trickiness of lab work and lab techniques. But the model we have of science from elementary and high school doesn’t give us room for the random, ephemeral things that come into play in actual experimental work. Our model is methods equal result, every time, even though jiggling your foot a little…

We also don't have a culture of replication. Basically all of the post docs I worked with in the lab lamented how hard it can be to replicate reported syntheses in chemistry wet labs. Everything from humidity and altitude to undocumented "magic tricks" (eg baking something in an oven under vaccuum for a week to get.rid.of.all.the.water.) I heard anecdotes that experiments were sometimes literally only reproducible in…

Look up FOGBANK (nuclear material), if you want to see what happens when people get REALLY motivated to replicate the impossible to replicate.

Re: Semiconducting Transport in LK99 reproduction attempt

#199

Post by MichaelZuo »

tetha wrote: post #114
dmvdoug wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just materials science though. I’m a longtime reader of Derek Lowe’s In the Pipeline blog, and he often emphasizes the trickiness of lab work and lab techniques. But the model we have of science from elementary and high school doesn’t give us room for the random, ephemeral things that come into play in actual experimental work. Our model is methods equal result, every time, even though jiggling your foot a little…

NileRed and other Maker Channels are great to demonstrate that. In every video, there's 1 - 2 of these situations - Nile has been following some documented, established procedure which should result in a specific reaction and it looks decent to the layman - and then it just doesn't work at all. And then he re-does pretty much the same thing and it works. I can't imagine how frustrating that can be. And then you have…

Well to be fair it's very difficult to nail down every possible parameter to 99.99% accuracy and precision from the original successful experiment. There's a lot of randomness even in a highly controlled, well funded, modern laboratory setting, let alone less well equipped facilities.

Re: Semiconducting Transport in LK99 reproduction attempt

#200

Post by brutusborn »

WanderPanda wrote: post #192
brutusborn wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the best direction for science generally: publish everything open and early. It might be naive, but I would love an environment where everyone self published or arxiv papers/reviews/datasets/models. Then journals could publish the best papers/review preprints. I imagine a world where journals beg researchers for the rights to publish their paper after seeing an excellent preprint. Or a journal finds a…

Nice counterfactual! Do you think it is just a path dependency that we didn‘t end up in the (local) minimum that you mention?

Yes I think we will end there someday but are still overcoming a publishing model historically based on physical journals. Open science becoming more common shows that progress is occurring.

It will take a while before academics and systems upgrade skills and infrastructure. When they do, I am excited for enhanced capabilities like continuous science. Imagine a website with a study result with P values which continuously update as data is published and integrated into the existing analysis!

https://towardsdatascience.com/continuous-science-6b5ed833ab...

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