Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

541–550 of 754 posts

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#541

Post by zmgsabst »

hackerlight wrote: post #528
zmgsabst wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling groups “crazy” to dismiss their arguments is a classic ad hominem .

I'm not dismissing any particular argument. I'm dismissing the attitude espoused in comments like this: > Try challenging climate science, even in a valid way, and see how popular it is on reddit or HN or twitter. It is an attitude that is a hallmark of cranks of all forms who think they've pierced the veil, but almost inevitably they have fallen for some distorted thinking that they can't see beyond due to the limit…

> It is an attitude that is a hallmark of cranks of all forms who think they've pierced the vale

And labeling groups who disagree with them as “heretics”, “crazies”, “cranks”, etc is how the orthodoxy censors — as they’ve done for thousands of years.

That the orthodoxy seeks to censors dissent rather than address it, particularly when ignoring their own ridiculous members (eg, Al Gore and Greta Thunberg making absurd statements), is why trust in institutions has collapsed. Institutions now routinely engage in obviously dumb ideas because they censor their critics and then run off a metaphorical cliff.

In allowing themselves to censor and demean “cranks”, orthodox institutions have rotted badly — both from the perspective of delivering quality results and from the perspective of driving effective policy change.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#542

Post by vietvu »

agrippanux wrote: post #156

My wife will be very happy. When I explained to her the potential if it truly was the breakthrough being reported, her first reaction was: "I hope we establish a government agency to regulate everything floating around because I don't want to get bumped into by random stuff".

When I told my wife about this, all she replied was how it's gonna be monopolized by big countries/big tech and our third world country like ours will never use it.

It's a point, but well human need to push the limit, no matter what.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#543

Post by throwawaylinux »

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…

> 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.

I saw people become enamored with a Russian anime cat girl on twitter.

This was vapid, consumptive entertainment. Which is perfectly fine, let's just not pretend it's better than the bachelor because science. Replace Chad had a date on love island with Anime cat girl did the science things, and that's about where we're at.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#544

Post by science4sail »

vietvu wrote: post #542
agrippanux wrote: post #156

My wife will be very happy. When I explained to her the potential if it truly was the breakthrough being reported, her first reaction was: "I hope we establish a government agency to regulate everything floating around because I don't want to get bumped into by random stuff".

When I told my wife about this, all she replied was how it's gonna be monopolized by big countries/big tech and our third world country like ours will never use it. It's a point, but well human need to push the limit, no matter what.

"Never" is a strong word - smartphones were once monopolized by rich countries, but are now a worldwide phenomenon. Even explicitly-banned/controlled technologies like nuclear weapons managed to eventually diffuse around the world.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#546

Post by fnordpiglet »

I think it’s a fairly interesting story over all, and it feels like exactly how science should happen. We are humans and easily deluded. We fall easily for things we wish to be true. The fascinating story behind LK99 is incredibly human - including the rushing a preprint out to secure a noble prize by one of the researchers who was being excluded. The fascinating part to me was the fact engineers and scientists could on their own time try to replicate and did so in the open. People were excited and eager for it to be true and found hope in the ambiguity and excitement in the partial successes, and dreamed of what could be. Then, through careful analysis by experts who know their subjects well, we learned it was not the magic we dreamed it might be but a magic that we already knew about. A negative result of something so many people wished to be true is an ultimate victory of science, and to me more exciting than a positive result in many ways. It tells me we are on the right track on a great many things in the world, when it feels often we are on a wrong track on most things.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#548

Post by vagab0nd »

throwaway4220 wrote: post #220

“ Derrick van Gennep, a former condensed-matter researcher at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who now works in finance ” This is always sad to see but I get it

Is it really sad though? On the surface it seems the society heavily incentivizes smart people to work on "less impactful" things. But if every smart person becomes a condensed-matter researcher then obviously we have a problem. So what's the right amount of people that should work on condensed matter physics? Who should decide on such amount? Currently the market decides. But maybe there's a better way?

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#549

Post by jonathankoren »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #486
tsimionescu wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yeah. There’s a lot of wishful thinking about science and sciencing up solutions to the world’s problems — especially here. The fact is, most progress is slow, and even if there is progress, it’s not necessarily economical in either financial or energy perspective.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#550

Post by Eji1700 »

namuol wrote: post #530
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

I find it amusing how so many so-called skeptics seem to be unaware of the phenomenon of hindsight bias.

I find it amusing how many people like you didn't notice the large amount of people bringing up all the points that this video made on the first day, as justification for why they doubted the hell out of this claim.
Post reply on HN