211–220 of 269 posts
Seems there is new support that its legit! https://twitter.com/Andercot/status/1686215574177841152 National Lab (LBNL) results support LK-99 as a room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor. Simulations published 1 hour ago on arxiv support LK-99 as the holy grail of modern material science and applied physics. https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16892
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The simple truth is we don’t have a culture of replication because no one is paying and no one is paying because no one is demanding it as part of the incentive system that the money is part of… If a prerequisite of publication in a top tier journal was someone having replicated the work… anyone at all… then the quality of write up would improve dramatically because all the stuff that never gets written up would be w…
I would expect pairs of labs to gang up, with one of them giving the other the details so that they can reproduce the result, and the contents of the publication staying more or less the same.
Reason is that everybody wants to prevent others from being able to build on one’s work faster than one can do themselves.
Even if the lab you give more information isn’t run by a buddy of you, having a single competitor is better than having the whole world compete with you.
For example, in this case, people will start cooking all kinds of variations on this stuff to find one that’s easier to produce, allows for higher currents before losing superconductivity, doesn’t have lead in it, etc.
I understand I'm being naive here and ignoring "little" things like funding, profit motives, and basic human nature. But more what I'm suggesting is that there has to be a way to speed up scientific research and application while toning down the hyperbole. This really became apparent to me during Covid. There _have_ to be ways to rethink from first principles how we do and report on science.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read The Double Helix, Watson's autobiography (which I enjoyed), what are you referring to that he failed to mention?
You read a whole book, but can't be bothered to do a google search titled "watson and crick problematic" Weird
It's called conversation and it's why online forums like HN exist.
Doesn't it seem like there should be some sort of annealing process required? this material being essentially a powder smashed into a tablet form seems like it would likely be a very poor conductor unless the superconducting properties not only existed in each of the granules of the powder, but also can easily transition between each of the boundaries. So wouldn't you want the final thing to be closer to like a ceram…
Unequivocally yes… which is why I wasn’t surprised when the first publicised reproduction involved a tiny grain, why the big pressed pellets seem to be staying put, why people are suggesting breaking the samples up, and why the original pictures/video showing the levitation that kicked all this off, is an oddly shaped sample that sort of looks like it flaked off a larger piece. Smash the samples… see if any of the gr…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 continuo…
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…
For computer science people, I always use the yield on wafers as analogy to explain how hard it can be to nail an experiment right. Usually they understand directly because this is something they can easily relate to.
Seems there is new support that its legit! https://twitter.com/Andercot/status/1686215574177841152 National Lab (LBNL) results support LK-99 as a room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor. Simulations published 1 hour ago on arxiv support LK-99 as the holy grail of modern material science and applied physics. https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16892
I do not believe the comments on that other thread are from other practitioners given how confident in this DFT results they seem, when DFT is notoriously unreliable especially when funky correlated things might be going on.
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…
This is a great philosophy in software, where meaningful contributions can be made by any given person with a laptop. It's not as compelling when the only people who can meaningfully advance the research need to spend millions in grant money and/or allocate time to use expensive equipment that's shared across other research groups.
Science is generally dealing with more data than any one person can look at. Anyone with a laptop can provide unique analyses of the data which can fuel new hypotheses, which can be explored with simulations and further analysis.
the big machines represent a bottleneck only in the physical experiments that they enable, but a lot of science can be done around that.
Tighten the feedback loops by all means I say
Especially for public science, but that’s another story