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LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

nature.com

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Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#481

Post by goodbyesf »

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.

> how empiricism and the principle of falsification work, and why they are the only known reliable process for generating knowledge.

Only? Math, logic, arts, etc aren't knowledge?

What this episode has shown is that people don't know what they are talking about. Especially the ones cheerleading on the science's side.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#482

Post by NovaDudely »

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.

While I was very skeptical of the base claims of LK99 (extrodinary evidence required), I did sort of fall a little bit for the hype of what this kind of material could be used for. Mostly in terms of computer clock rates and used in batteries. Turns out what seemed intuitive at first was mostly wrong.

But then that is what happens a lot in various fields. Something that seems obvious isn't done because those that actually know the field can explain all the details you didn't know. Anyone here in programming have had that battle with upper management...

Hey lesson learned in this case. Don't always assume you have a grasp of all the details.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#483

Post by mcpackieh »

fragmede wrote: post #278
tysam_and wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're conflating PR with the science underneath. PR is something we cannot control -- and avoiding releasing results in a (semi-vain?) attempt to control PR arguably does more harm than releasing them does. The sea makes waves as it will. We can moderate as much as we are able. I think the rest is simply a matter of accepting that things happen as they do out of our control. We can only truly impact ---- and…

PR stands for public relations. Like, it literally is about controlling what the public does with releases. It's not total absolute control, but PR firms can work wonders. The university press office can take a paper and exaggerate the claims to try to make the university look better, or at least, not highlight that testing was done in mice, for example.

PR is a euphemism for propaganda, popularized by Edward Bernays as propaganda to promote the perception of American exceptionalism (propaganda is something the enemies of America do, here in America we do public relations instead!)

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#484

Post by DennisP »

raphlinus wrote: post #383
hunson_abadeer wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is precisely what put me off in these discussions. Not the idea that we might have found a room-temperature superconductor - that part was exciting. It's the part where people confidently talked about its applications without realizing that they probably wouldn't revolutionize CPU performance (Josephson junctions don't seem to work well as non-cryogenic temperatures for reasons unrelated to superconductivity), p…

Amen. When someone does the math and adds up the winners and losers in all this, one clear winner will be this video from Asianometry, entitled The History of Superconductors (Before LK-99)[1]. It only lightly touched on LK-99 itself, but did an excellent job going through the actual science-based history of superconductors, covering in particular detail previous hype waves. A major point is that the YBCO superconduc…

REBCO is revolutionizing fusion reactors. Several companies are using it to build tokamaks with the same performance as ITER, but in a tenth the size.

REBCO supports stronger magnetic fields, and conveniently, tokamak output scales with the fourth power of magnetic field strength.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#485

Post by spiznnx »

kergonath wrote: post #63
Moomoomoo309 wrote: post #25

I found Thunderf00t's video on LK-99 to be funny because he pointed out something no one else did: In almost all applications of superconductors, they don't use high-temperature ones for one simple reason: Material properties. 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,…

> 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…

you are (mostly) agreeing (except for precise definitions of metallic and ceramic). Their comment is unclear, but it means

"In almost all applications of superconductors, they don't use high-temperature ones. [...] The ones [the superconductors] that see use in the LHC, for instance, aren't [high temperature superconductors]."

It just has a sentence in the middle of it that confuses you into thinking their antecedents are "the HTSCs" and "ceramic" instead of "the SCs" and "HTSCs".

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#486

Post by pclmulqdq »

tsimionescu wrote: post #437
svetb wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am not the author of that comment, but the fact that comes to mind is that aluminum is used for virtually all transmission and distribution lines - for price reasons - even though copper has better conductivity. If we did discover a room-temperature superconductor, I suspect it would be a while before the cost to produce it in the bulk quantities required for electrical transmission are economically attractive compar…

> it would be a while before the cost to produce it in the bulk quantities required for electrical transmission are economically attractive compared to what’s already available. Note that there is no guarantee that that would ever happen. Electrical resistance is not the only thing you need for something to be an economically efficient power line. While superconductors are by definition excellent in terms of electric…

The pace of development of computing seems to have trained people to think in terms of "when" for science and engineering problems. The normal paradigm is to think in terms of "if," and that aligns well with most non-computing inventions.

There is a good chance that they never reach the exponential breakpoints that everyone likes to fantasize about.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#487

Post by FullstakBlogger »

penjelly wrote: post #263
sorenjan wrote: post #237

Sixty Symbols released a video about this yesterday, and in it professor Philip Moriarty is less than impressed with the whole ordeal. I haven't been paying attention, I'm too jaded and skeptical and assumed from the start that there was something wrong and much hype about nothing. Bad Science and Room Temperature Superconductors - Sixty Symbols: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl-AgmoZ5mo

everyone in this thread should watch this, instead of "the excitement was good for everyone" they might realize these hoaxes harm scientific integrity. The audacity of HN to state something is good, without listening to scientists give their take on it.

But there's nothing meaningful in the video. He just keeps reiterating how he thinks you should feel about the situation.

He clearly doesn't think it's worth his time to understand anything about LK-99, its history, or its popularity. It seems like most anybody that watched the fireworks show is more informed than he is. So what's the video about?

The same way he says "this isn't how science is done", you could say also say what he's doing isn't how peer review or journalism is done. What's not being addressed is that this kind of arrogance and appeal to authority is EXACTLY what flat-earthers and the lot are rebelling against, and the solution is not to put up more walls.

There are now potentially 10s or 100s of thousands of people who have seen how the sausage gets made, what kind of pitfalls there are, how measurements can lead to false conclusions, and mistakes can be made; and they're absolutely fascinated by it and want to learn how to do things better.

"An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people."

This doesn't mean that every individual needs to be an expert in every field. You only have to know so much about a given field and the processes within it to develop a degree of confidence in your perspective on who you can trust, and extend that trust to the people they trust.

Mistrust in science is borne of ignorance, but not in the way that you think.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#488

Post by ricardobeat »

gilgoomesh wrote: post #466
gfodor wrote: post #297

The substance produced from the paper isn't a superconductor. While extremely unlikely, there is still a chance that LK-99 is a superconductor, but the paper itself did not sufficiently describe the method needed to make it so as to replicate it properly. We will know the resolution to this once the sample from the original researchers is assessed by a third party, of which there are presently at least two to my unde…

The German team produced a crystal of pure LK-99 and tested it. From the article: > LK-99 is not a superconductor, but an insulator with a resistance in the millions of ohms And furthermore, the graphs from the original pre-print article are just graphs of the resistivity of Cu2S. It sounds like there's nearly zero chance of any further science here (beyond confirmation).

The point is that the original team did not produce a pure crystal, and impurities can be the source of novel properties in a material - you’ll know it as “doping” in the semiconductor industry.

Other comments from more informed people indicate it’s unlikely that this will yield anything useful though.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#490

Post by Dan_Sylveste »

kergonath wrote: post #368
dheera wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> were responsible for the sharp drops in electrical resistivity and partial levitation over a magnet Are these properties still useful? If something can levitate without being a superconductor it is already useful for a LOT of things.

> If something can levitate without being a superconductor it is already useful for a LOT of things. It is not that useful. Electromagnets are used when we need something like that at scale, such as in maglev trains. Permanent magnets have their uses, but we have plenty of others that are as strong as this, and plenty of others that are much stronger than this. I suppose we will investigate it’s properties and we mig…

Magnetic monopoles would be nice
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