Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99 • Hacker News Board

Re: Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

#641

Post by regularfry » Fri, Aug 04, 2023, 11:28 AM UTC

Tainnor wrote: post #595

nindalf wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Auctions, sanitary towels, retirement, banking, disposable razor, sewing machine, canned food, interchangeable parts, antibiotics, solar cells, postage stamp, light bulb, pencil, air conditioning, insurance, dwarf wheat, spreadsheet, cold chain, double entry book-keeping, S-bend, infant formula, clocks, public key cryptography, passports, batteries, printing press, video games, GPS, contraceptive pill, shipping conta…

Looking at that list, I feel like we would first have to establish which things actually do make life better and which only make it more comfortable. This is going to be highly subjective. For some reason, I'm not entirely willing to believe that my parents (who are still alive) had a less happy life than I have even though they didn't grow up with an iPhone. And it's not like modern conveniences have no downsides (e…

Bear in mind that the list is focused on economic impact, which overlaps but is not coterminous with happiness impact.

Re: Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

#642

Post by regularfry » Fri, Aug 04, 2023, 11:29 AM UTC

mellosouls wrote: post #473

nindalf wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Auctions, sanitary towels, retirement, banking, disposable razor, sewing machine, canned food, interchangeable parts, antibiotics, solar cells, postage stamp, light bulb, pencil, air conditioning, insurance, dwarf wheat, spreadsheet, cold chain, double entry book-keeping, S-bend, infant formula, clocks, public key cryptography, passports, batteries, printing press, video games, GPS, contraceptive pill, shipping conta…

A minor observation - pretty much all of those describe a type where applicable, except for iPhone. "Smartphone" would have been consistent and more accurate. I don't know if that's a bias or proofreading issue. It's an interesting and thought-provoking list though.

Smartphones existed before the iPhone, but Apple blew the market open.

Re: Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

#643

Post by jjallen » Fri, Aug 04, 2023, 11:38 AM UTC

constantcrying wrote: post #598

jjallen wrote: post #432

One somewhat ironic fact of this story is that the rogue former employee perhaps deserves some credit for bringing this thing out into the world. They had been working on this for quite a long time themselves, rightfully so. But now the whole world is working on it and exploring other methods and combinations of materials I would assume (to improve upon the original design and avoid any patents). How long would they…

I think there are multiple big reasons they didn't publish sooner. It is pretty clear that they were convinced, but had insufficient evidence to convince others. Additionally there had recently been a sensational fraud in their field so journals would have been extremely sceptical. It seems to me they were just in the process of constructing a convincing paper, which included convincing tests and could have been acom…

Evidently they did have sufficient evidence. With such a big potential payout of such a world changing material, others have invested a few days of time into verifying their rushed paper and indeed their weak evidence was enough.

Again, with a payout so big and ease of replication fairly low, the evidence doesn’t even have to be that convincing.

Re: Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

#644

Post by barelyauser » Fri, Aug 04, 2023, 11:40 AM UTC

urinotherapist wrote: post #337

ChuckMcM wrote: post #129

For those experiencing this type of "black swan, but good" event for the first time, it is helpful to recognize that the human tendency to believe that all future "big events" will be dystopian downers, is statistically unsound. For a while I've kept a list of the things that could be "good" swan events, but to be fair I didn't have "room temperature superconductor on that list" :-) Other things that could happen: 1)…

Commercially viable fusion can be achieved with commercially viable source of muons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00016-009-0006-9 https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.ns.39.... http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph241/yoon1/ https://www.chemeurope.com/en/encyclopedia/Muon-catalyzed_fu...

According to this, breakeven can already be achieved. Rather funny how this is a highly advanced research topic and a mistake like that could take place (if real). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion#Alternat...

Re: Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

#645

Post by mejutoco » Fri, Aug 04, 2023, 11:42 AM UTC

n2d4 wrote: post #533

wcerfgba wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, the 99 stands for 1999, so potentially this material has existed for over 20 years and we could have started testing and replication on a much wider scale a decade ago. What benefit have we gained by disseminating this research so slowly?

> What benefit have we gained by disseminating this research so slowly? It's less visible, but at this scale there's a high cost in everyone pausing their research to replicate LK-99. If it turns out to be real that's worth, but if not it could've gone to better use. Think of what we could've done with the time we spent reproducing cold fusion. It's survivorship bias; yes, you would love to see the significant discov…

Exactly, hindsight is 20/20. This reminded me of a friend of mine fixing a coding issue that was impacting performance. Fixing it saved a lot of money and it was the initiative of the engineer to bring it up. The response of the (at the time) CEO: well, why did you not fix it earlier?

Re: Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

#646

Post by mannykannot » Fri, Aug 04, 2023, 11:46 AM UTC

a_bonobo wrote: post #146

icapybara wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) doesn't make a whole lot of sense. A perfect understanding of something doesn't mean you can fix anything wrong with it. 3) has already happened. The AI chat bots aren't very smart, but they're clearly capable of some degree of basic reasoning.

There's a wonderful paper on 1) from a few years ago: https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo... >Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor? >We show that the [neuroscience experimental] approaches reveal interesting structure in the data but do not meaningfully describe the hierarchy of information processing in the microprocessor. This suggests current analytic approaches in neuroscien…

This paper, and its precursor 'Could a Biologist Fix a Radio?' mentioned by bschne, come across as somewhat smug and wiser-than-thou. While they do a good job in showing the difficulty of gathering useful information about complex biological systems, they tend to underestimate what human ingenuity can do with just that information which can be gained experimentally. This was demonstrated recently by the rapid development of synthetic vaccines against Covid.

Re: Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

#647

Post by rootsudo » Fri, Aug 04, 2023, 11:49 AM UTC

anonylizard wrote: post #504

m463 wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, how did co-discoverer a few days ago become rogue former employee today?

There's 3 main parties to LK99. L&K, are two PHDs taught by their now dead former professor. Their research into LK-99 is inherited from their former professor but they lacked funding, hence it was a hobby project for a long time, and they needed funding to work on it full time. The Korean professor: A professor who started taking interest and sponsoring the project for the last few years. However, he likely didn't p…

Thank you for the excellent wrap-up. I couldn't keep up with everything, but with the attention this is getting - this is just excellent.

Now to learn physics.

Re: Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

#648

Post by ClumsyPilot » Fri, Aug 04, 2023, 11:50 AM UTC

lucideer wrote: post #571

n2d4 wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What benefit have we gained by disseminating this research so slowly? It's less visible, but at this scale there's a high cost in everyone pausing their research to replicate LK-99. If it turns out to be real that's worth, but if not it could've gone to better use. Think of what we could've done with the time we spent reproducing cold fusion. It's survivorship bias; yes, you would love to see the significant discov…

> It's less visible, but at this scale there's a high cost in everyone pausing their research to replicate LK-99. If it turns out to be real that's worth, but if not it could've gone to better use. Think of what we could've done with the time we spent reproducing cold fusion. This is a (I feel rudimentarily obvious) fallacy of finite time implying there is N researchers working on one thing that must be useful at any…

Most PhF students a desperately looking for a usefull thing to work on. Most professors desperstely search for a usefull topic that they can use to justify grant funding. etc.

Re: Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

#649

Post by ekianjo » Fri, Aug 04, 2023, 11:51 AM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #129

For those experiencing this type of "black swan, but good" event for the first time, it is helpful to recognize that the human tendency to believe that all future "big events" will be dystopian downers, is statistically unsound. For a while I've kept a list of the things that could be "good" swan events, but to be fair I didn't have "room temperature superconductor on that list" :-) Other things that could happen: 1)…

Black swan is just called hindsight. There is no insight in Taleb's book. He just gave a name to stuff that changes things in an irreversible way.

Re: Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

#650

Post by danuker » Fri, Aug 04, 2023, 11:52 AM UTC

mejutoco wrote: post #645

n2d4 wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What benefit have we gained by disseminating this research so slowly? It's less visible, but at this scale there's a high cost in everyone pausing their research to replicate LK-99. If it turns out to be real that's worth, but if not it could've gone to better use. Think of what we could've done with the time we spent reproducing cold fusion. It's survivorship bias; yes, you would love to see the significant discov…

Exactly, hindsight is 20/20. This reminded me of a friend of mine fixing a coding issue that was impacting performance. Fixing it saved a lot of money and it was the initiative of the engineer to bring it up. The response of the (at the time) CEO: well, why did you not fix it earlier?

The right response is "because my performance issues ticket was never prioritized".