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

arxiv.org

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

#931

Post by veeet »

lyre-lyre wrote: post #890
lifthrasiir wrote: post #384

So what the heck has happened with LK-99 really? (Disclaimer: I'm no physicist nor chemist, but I have co-written a report on three LK-99 papers [1] and am tracking the Twitter discussion as much as I can. I also got some help from knowledgable friends---much thanks for proof-reading.) It turned out that LK folks were not talking about some stupid shit. Specifically they were one of the last believers of long-forgott…

There is a tendency to call any scientific work that came out of anywhere in the former USSR as "Russian". Nikolay Bogolyubov is probably at least as "Ukrainian" as "Russian": he grew up and went to university in Kyiv, became a member of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, and now has a physics institute named after him in Kyiv (and another in Moscow) -> https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-the…

Should we call them Soviet scientists then? Neither Russian science nor (esp.) Ukrainian science can be taken individually.

Bogolyubov and Korolyev both are Russian names. Bogolyubov was born in Russia and he didn't speak any Ukranian, which maybe important here.

I don't have a skin in the game. If Bogolyubov then came to US and did some research here, we could call him Russian born Ukranian-American.

It's OK to list all the affiliations, it is not OK to pick and choose.

"Russian" is correct (technicality, as this was indeed his nationality specified in the passport) but incomplete. Just "Ukranian" is incorrect.

Yeah, we can do better. This conversation is an example how things could be blown out of proportion.

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

#933

Post by dontmobile »

happytiger wrote: post #901
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #798

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a quite biased view. As a non-Chinese scientist, I can attest that there is intense pressure to publish as many papers as possible pretty much everywhere , and this leads to a problem of bad research across the world. China may be among the worst offenders in this respect, but the particular thing the OP is asking about doesn't strike me as a Chinese-specific thing at all. I see non-Chinese scientists rushing…

China publishes more science research with fabricated peer-review than everyone else put together https://qz.com/978037/china-publishes-more-science-research-... I respectfully submit that you may be providing an anecdotal experience. It’s so bad that China’s courts have called for the death penalty for scientific fraud. https://www.statnews.com/2017/06/23/china-death-penalty-rese... Goodness me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

Replication is just a nice term for it. It can just as well be a crisis of fraud with the failure of replicating fraudulent results as the consequence.

Scientific fraud and garbage results is a huge problem Everywhere. It's actually big enough to nearly invalidate the entire field of psychology.

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

#934

Post by ETH_start »

XorNot wrote: post #395
ETH_start wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent insight and perspective. > 2) Commercially viable fusion energy. Will change a lot of things. How would that be any better than commercially viable fission breeder reactors (which seem far closer to reality than commercially viable fusion energy)?

Mostly public perception (annoyingly): people are still going to have a go at being anti-nuclear about it, but building a fusion power reactor is going to have a lot more public cultural cachet to draw upon then fission. We've got a generation of science fiction who's core message is "fusion power solved all the problems". Though there are genuine advantages: for as radioactive as the interior of a fusion reactor may…

Thanks for the explanation.

I think there should be a bigger effort to change public perception about nuclear fission reactors if we're on the cusp of what is effectively the equivalent of the dream of endless fusion energy in the latest generation fission breeder reactors.

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

#935

Post by lifthrasiir »

lyre-lyre wrote: post #890
lifthrasiir wrote: post #384

So what the heck has happened with LK-99 really? (Disclaimer: I'm no physicist nor chemist, but I have co-written a report on three LK-99 papers [1] and am tracking the Twitter discussion as much as I can. I also got some help from knowledgable friends---much thanks for proof-reading.) It turned out that LK folks were not talking about some stupid shit. Specifically they were one of the last believers of long-forgott…

There is a tendency to call any scientific work that came out of anywhere in the former USSR as "Russian". Nikolay Bogolyubov is probably at least as "Ukrainian" as "Russian": he grew up and went to university in Kyiv, became a member of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, and now has a physics institute named after him in Kyiv (and another in Moscow) -> https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-the…

Indeed the original draft said USSR, but we are talking about Russian theories, not USSR scientists who are ethnically Ukrainian. We came to realize that we have so little information about the exact theory and our best knowledge suggests that the theory is, while may or may not have been pioneered by a Ukrainian scientist (see the updated post), currently rooted in Russia and not in the former USSR.

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

#936

Post by xpe »

jacquesm wrote: post #780
dmix wrote: post #771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What personal benefit does this gain someone to publish it so quickly? Is it just social media attention?

There are no prizes for being second in science.

>> What personal benefit does this gain someone to publish it so quickly? Is it just social media attention?

> There are no prizes for being second in science.

The reply (second quote above) fits in context, but there is more to it.

1. Publishing early at the expense of quality has a way of catching up to one's reputation. (Hopefully.)

2. History has many examples of scientists who were "too early" or not "in the right place at the right time" to get recognition.

3. A result may get little attention in one field but a lot in another. One example that comes to mind are string-matching algorithms. Sometimes they seem a dime-a-dozen in CS. But the "right" ones have transformed DNA sequencing.

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

#937

Post by zetadoop »

veeet wrote: post #931
lyre-lyre wrote: post #890

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a tendency to call any scientific work that came out of anywhere in the former USSR as "Russian". Nikolay Bogolyubov is probably at least as "Ukrainian" as "Russian": he grew up and went to university in Kyiv, became a member of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, and now has a physics institute named after him in Kyiv (and another in Moscow) -> https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-the…

Should we call them Soviet scientists then? Neither Russian science nor (esp.) Ukrainian science can be taken individually. Bogolyubov and Korolyev both are Russian names. Bogolyubov was born in Russia and he didn't speak any Ukranian, which maybe important here. I don't have a skin in the game. If Bogolyubov then came to US and did some research here, we could call him Russian born Ukranian-American. It's OK to list…

It make sence to not map all soviet people to russians after Russia started invasion and killed 150.000 civilians in Mariupol only and people in Russia support that. Many of them have Ukrainian family names and nationalities. Also many people in Ukraine resist invasion with Russian family names and nationalities. If Bogolyubov was alive then he could decide what side to support. So calling him soviet is correct way to go.

What practical use case could be for that new material? Can we make a battery with it or something practical?

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

#938

Post by dotancohen »

salty_biscuits wrote: post #915
dotancohen wrote: post #907

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Magnetic force scales as 1/r^3, not 1/r^2 like gravity The magnetic force and gravity are two of the four fundamental forces, no? The others being the strong and weak nuclear force? At what rate do those two scale at?

If you are really close to one pole of a magnet and far away from the other then the force scales like 1/r^2, it is in the far field under the influence of both poles of the magnet that it scales like 1/r^3. Electrostatics scales like 1/r^2 (because you fet isolated charges). The other two are a complicated story.

If you have time, I would love to hear that complicated story.

I remember once hearing that the rate of those forces' decay indicates (but does not prove) that they decay in more than three dimensions. This was an accomplished chemist talking, so I'm sure that she was being concise but factual.

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

#939

Post by dang »

NotYourLawyer wrote: post #160
dang wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone else is wrong and you know more, it would be great to share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn. But please don't post unsubstantive putdowns—they just make everything worse. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Silently leaving incorrect information in place seems worse for the overall state of the thread than a quick note disputing it.

I hear you - but there are two problems with that argument.

(1) the internet is, to a first approximation, wrong about everything - so while posting "Wrong" tells us that you disagree with the GP, it doesn't tell us anything about who's actually right;

(2) shallow dismissals like "Wrong" have a degrading influence on the threads - they don't just encourage others to post more of the same, but worse. Basically, either your comments are contributing to improving the discussion culture or they're worsening it - there isn't really any level ground.

You can overcome both (1) and (2) by respectfully and substantively explaining why the other commenter is wrong. Then we all can learn something. Maybe (hopefully) even the other commenter can learn something.

If you don't want to do that or don't have time, it's better to post nothing than to just post "Wrong". That way you don't have a negative impact a la (2), and per (1), the internet is wrong about everything anyway, so you're basically just leaving things the way you found them.

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

#940

Post by alanbernstein »

bglazer wrote: post #873
kevstev wrote: post #760

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last year I read The Double Helix and The Code Breaker within a few months of each other, and what really stood out to me is that while we celebrate the first person who discovers something, in reality there were several teams all racing to the finish line, and were sometimes days or only even hours behind in presenting their findings. Yet only one team gets the accolades and their names in textbooks, the others are…

Another example that might be of interest is the use of neural networks in Monte Carlo Tree Search. In 2017 there were two papers published showing how effective the combination of NN’s and MCTS are for planning in board games. One is an algorithm called ExIT published by Anthony et al, it showed excellent performance on a somewhat obscure board game called Hex. The authors using a typical academic lab setup to achie…

If this is the Hex game I know, the one on Wikipedia, I think you're kind of sweeping a lot under the rug by equating Go and Hex.
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