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LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

nature.com

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Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#621

Post by generic92034 »

hackerlight wrote: post #571
zmgsabst wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> And labeling groups who disagree with them as “heretics”, “crazies”, “cranks”, etc is how the orthodoxy censors It's also how you accurately describe people who actually are cranks, such as creationists, flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, and so on. That these labels can sometimes be wrongly weaponized doesn't mean that such descriptions aren't also sometimes accurate and helpful. It's useful to have a unifying descripti…

I mostly agree with your take. But I think considering that 99.999...% of the population are not climate scientists, it is still a valid question based on what they are declaring differing opinions as invalid and theirs as correct. Is that not based mostly on faith, next to some superficial indicators like "majority of scientists", etc.?

For the record - I personally agree with the findings of bodies like the IPCC. But I am not sure there is more than the aforementioned faith and some more indicators backing me up on that.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#622

Post by thrdbndndn »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #504
seewhydee wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I would argue that he displayed some bad science of his own. He kept harping on about how the LK-99 paper didn't show resistivity going down to exactly zero, but had a residual resistivity. But that is exactly what you would have seen with a mixed phase sample with some superconductor and some normal material. It took proper scientific detective work to distinguish the possibilities, not this kind of silly snar…

I didn't interpret his criticisms that way at all, and given that his criticisms with both the resistivity graph and the not-Meissner effect turned out to be exactly correct, I'd give him a bit more credit. As someone who remembers the original cold fusion debacle well, this felt exactly the same to me: announce a result with a ton of unnecessary hype and fanfare (I mean, the closing sentence in the paper was just ab…

What do you mean by "turned out" though?

The video is published merely 1 day ago, when the consensus that "LK-99 isn't it" had already been formed, and these points have been long discussed by other scientists and random people on Internet long time ago.

There is nothing newsworthy about these points; they're even borderline hindsight.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#623

Post by thrdbndndn »

Eji1700 wrote: post #550
namuol wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think he meant this particular video, which was only published one day ago.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#624

Post by krisoft »

nathan_f77 wrote: post #586
SamBam wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That have to be kept cool with liquid nitrogen, so it would have to be pretty darn short.

I wonder if we can use these superconducters on spacecraft and probes. Maybe we can place superconducting links on the outer hull of a spacecraft heading to Mars, or a probe heading into outer space.

But why? What is the problem you are trying to solve by placing superconducting links on the outer hull of spacecraft?

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#625

Post by athrowaway3z »

ecf wrote: post #451
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

Loved the video. Also very annoyed with the general reception seen on HN like “well it was fun”. Unreal the authors had the audacity to add that last line proclaiming a new age for humankind. Even more unreal that news everywhere fell for it.

There is an cycle to these things.

In the background you'll have heard older voices whisper warnings about the previous time.

For the next ~10 to 20 years people will shout "Remember LK99" for every overly-grandiose severely-lacking scientific paper.

Then a new paper will hit the right mix of attention-chasers and ignorance.

I'll be there, just whispering warning.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#626

Post by pbhjpbhj »

Joker_vD wrote: post #433
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…

In some desperate places, people would cut down aluminum power lines and sell them to scrapyards for some quick buck. But copper power lines? Those would be in a similar danger in many more places.

They steal buried copper cables in rural locations (UK) by attaching one end to a truck and driving off. Mostly seems to be communication lines.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#627

Post by Cthulhu_ »

hunson_abadeer wrote: post #378
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.

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…

This is the curse of popular science websites hyping things up; most people, present company included, have no idea what the scientific language means - be it superconductivity, LHC results, or astronomic spectrography.

So popular science wraps it in a "what you could do with it. maybe. possibly." Or what it means. And commenters have latched onto it, but a lot is said with an air of confidence, of just-so. "Oh uh, superconductors, conducting is passing electricity from one end to the next, super is like really good, uuh uh uh... I know, what about power lines from the Sahara to Europe so they can build solar collectors down there!"

Same with exoplanets, the actual science is "yeah the luminosity of this star drops by 0.0003% at a cycle of 300 days and we're getting some photons that indicate there may be hydrogen molecules", pop sci turns that into "EARTH-2 TEEMING WITH LIFE DISCOVERED, GENERATION SHIP WHEN?"

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#628

Post by rrssh »

lolinder wrote: post #330
fragmede wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have we been so throughly baked into anti-intellectualism that people who can read, and use that advanced skill on Wikipedia, along with the other skill of critical thinking, are to be denigrated as "armchair X-ologists"? I know our country's rallying cry is "Math is hard, let's go shopping", but not all of us have bought into that anti-science, anti-knowledge, anti-being-smart-at-all attitude. Thanks to a lot of har…

You're attacking a very elaborate straw man constructed around a single phrase in my comment. I didn't say what you think I said.

Strawmen attacks meet the minimum requirement of coherence, there's a connection to the statement being attacked. So like be grateful.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#629

Post by throwawaymaths »

NovaDudely wrote: post #482
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 act…

Serious question: why is extraordinary evidence required? Room temperature superconductivity doesn't break any (known) laws of physics, doesn't introduce new particles or fields, etc, doesn't require an unprecedentedly sensitive instrument (like LIGO/VIRGO)...

There's a lot of modern physics, chemistry, biology that is uncritically accepted which I think deserves a somewhat higher bar of skepticism than RTSC

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#630

Post by wesleywt »

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

This is not bad science. This is science working as intended. Claim followed by verification. I only wish other fields was this good.
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