Well, it's officially mainstream. No chance of this remaining an academic story if it fails to replicate now.
Just a reminder: it could take months to a year to figure out whether this is legit. Contrary to initial impressions from the (terrible, full of holes) included methodology, the synthesis process is actually difficult (not gigapascal diamond anvil difficult, but not just baking store bought powder in a furnace then squeezing either). A successful replication could happen at any moment, but one not happening until six months or more from now is very possible too, and isn't a death knell for the material (or the material family).
We normally aren't exposed to scientific research this early in the process. There are a lot of alleged dramatic reasons for why we are in this case being exposed to the research before the original team wanted us to be, as well as COVID normalising people taking arXiv preprints far more seriously (for completely understandable reasons). Also, while I don't agree with this scientific philosophy at all on principle, this is coming out of a commercial lab and I have no idea whether and to what extent they are willing to share samples/invite outside teams into their labs, considering they are likely attempting to monetise this as much as possible (I hate this mindset, hope it fails!).
The wildcard here is citizen scientists (including a particular Soviet molecular biologist) and the various labs around the world that are trying to replicate. With how bad the methodology documentation is many labs will probably fail to replicate if just looking at that (but Li Liu et al of Beihang U, that XRD pattern really should have made you look a lot closer at whether you'd successfully synthesised), I don't know what the odds are on outside labs being able to replicate without much better information on methodology and materials. It could end up not being feasible until the original research team offers more help, and while they're offering some help now they've also implied they want to get their paper published first before really opening up (this part is normal).
Just going to be a waiting game. If you want to follow the drama and find the citizen science/"It's so over... We're so back!!!" saga entertaining, then definitely follow the accounts on Twitter that are doing that. If you just want to know whether we have peer-reviewed, reputably published, replicated results confirming RTAPS, then you just have to wait it out until academia resolves this over the next year.
She's an anonymous Russian troll who's only proof is a photo of a spec of dust (glued?) in a syringe. She refuses to take a video, she says _she didnt follow the paper_ beause she immediately invented a better way to make a different room temp superconductor, she says she doesnt care about superconductors and she keeps tweeting bizzare USSR propaganda.
We're seeing so much citizen science! I remember there was a HN article a while back that a urged for more regular people conducting science! This stuff should be celebrated, not drowned beneath a pile of "not actual science".
Not Russian, depending on who you're asking. Not Ukrainian, depending on who you're asking. There's a reason she describes herself as being ethnically Soviet.
>troll
Sure, she's a character alright. Doesn't mean she's wrong.
>proof is a photo of a spec of dust
Explicitly labelled as fanservice and not presented as proof of anything - she has explicitly requested that if people want proof, they should follow her procedures with appropriate safety and then once they get the same results as her they will have proof. She has also explicitly stated that her Twitter posts are not and are not intended to be a replacement for academic replication.
>She refuses to take a video
She insisted video was easily faked and the harassment + demands for proof would only increase if she did what her annoying reply guys wanted. She didn't make the decision I would like (I'd love to see the video), but it's probably the decision I would make in her shoes, going from a couple dozen followers to more than 20,000 in a week.
I initially thought she was over playing the "video is easily faked" thing, until a literal faked video (store bought pyrolitic graphite sputtering target on a magnet displaying its regular diamagnetism) went viral and got cited as replication of LK-99. That convinced me she was right, video can convey a false sense of authority. Better to report results and methods accurately.
>she says _she didnt follow the paper_ beause she immediately invented a better way to make a different room temp superconductor
If you are familiar with the academic history of what "replication of Western academic papers" looked like in the Soviet Union, you would understand where this academic methodology comes from. They were never given samples, could not reach out to authors for help, always had to understand the theory of what the authors were communicating at a base level and then try and implement it themselves. It is consistent with her professional background and culture that she would view it this way. If her method turns out to be correct, it probably deserves its own paper (appropriately citing the Korean paper, of course).
>she keeps tweeting bizzare USSR propaganda.
I think you maybe need to read more history or meet more Soviet-trained scientists if you think that this is a point against her as a scientist. Politically inconvenient, maybe, but the USSR had a very impressive academic tradition and made a lot of very good scientists. We have our own politically opinionated scientists here, too. Let the results speak for themselves.
What do you mean by doxxed? Not accusing, just want to make sure I'm not spreading any information I shouldn't be. I don't remember that she went out of her way to keep her identity a secret, but she's got a photo of herself in the lab up (and I believe news has already reported on which lab she works at) and her social graph is on Twitter. I don't know if Iris Alexandra is her government name, but for a transgender person in Russia I would be unsurprised if her government name didn't match her real name.
“considering they are likely attempting to monetise this as much as possible (I hate this mindset, hope it fails!).”
In the history of getting science out the door, it turns out that the ability to monetize makes it far more likely to happen.
This is game theoretically true because the first entity that wastes all the effort figuring out how to scale would immediately be copied (first mover disadvantage).
We need well funded capital projects to have a mechanism to make their existence low risk, especially when it comes to materials science which is far more expensive to scale than software.
I don't know, we're already getting lots of interesting results in the first round of replication attempts (eg diamagnets, confirmed 0 resistance at 110K, etc).
It doesn't feel far-fetched to think at one point a lab will go big and bake, like, two hundred samples in a row with slightly different compositions until they stumble upon a winning combo.
Like I said, a successful replication could happen at any moment. I was just cautioning that failures to replicate this early mean barely anything, and it would be historically extremely lucky if a paper like this (materials science, complicated synthesis, not well written) got replicated inside six months. Basically, unless evidence of fraud comes out we're not going to be able to rule out this result being real for months, at least. Also, we could get some really great evidence or a successful replication any day. It's just a waiting game.
Just a reminder: it could take months to a year to figure out whether this is legit. Contrary to initial impressions from the (terrible, full of holes) included methodology, the synthesis process is actually difficult (not gigapascal diamond anvil difficult, but not just baking store bought powder in a furnace then squeezing either). A successful replication could happen at any moment, but one not happening until six months or more from now is very possible too, and isn't a death knell for the material (or the material family).
We normally aren't exposed to scientific research this early in the process. There are a lot of alleged dramatic reasons for why we are in this case being exposed to the research before the original team wanted us to be, as well as COVID normalising people taking arXiv preprints far more seriously (for completely understandable reasons). Also, while I don't agree with this scientific philosophy at all on principle, this is coming out of a commercial lab and I have no idea whether and to what extent they are willing to share samples/invite outside teams into their labs, considering they are likely attempting to monetise this as much as possible (I hate this mindset, hope it fails!).
The wildcard here is citizen scientists (including a particular Soviet molecular biologist) and the various labs around the world that are trying to replicate. With how bad the methodology documentation is many labs will probably fail to replicate if just looking at that (but Li Liu et al of Beihang U, that XRD pattern really should have made you look a lot closer at whether you'd successfully synthesised), I don't know what the odds are on outside labs being able to replicate without much better information on methodology and materials. It could end up not being feasible until the original research team offers more help, and while they're offering some help now they've also implied they want to get their paper published first before really opening up (this part is normal).
Just going to be a waiting game. If you want to follow the drama and find the citizen science/"It's so over... We're so back!!!" saga entertaining, then definitely follow the accounts on Twitter that are doing that. If you just want to know whether we have peer-reviewed, reputably published, replicated results confirming RTAPS, then you just have to wait it out until academia resolves this over the next year.