Honestly I don't see anything that would prove superconductivity in this video. If LK-99 is a type-II superconductor you should observe flux pinning i.e. you would be able to move the flake with a tweezer and it would be stuck in place as the magnetic flux lines are pinned to defects in the material. I haven't seen any details on the supposed properties of the material like the coherence length, but from the original paper it seems the critical field of a small flake is rather low at a few 100-1000 Oe, so a more convincing test than thermal cycling would be to simply use an electromagnet and increase the field strength, the sample should then drop once the (second) critical field is reached. If the critical field strength is too high you can reduce it by heating the sample, but what's critical is to observe breakdown of diamagnetism with an increase in field strength without any form of hysteresis, which you won't observe in the same way in a diamagnet.
The best test would probably be to produce a Josephson junction and measure Shapiro steps at high frequency, that's something that cannot be explained by anything except a superconducting quantum material. As the sample is highly impure it could even be enough to irradiate it with a microwave source and measure the reflectivity / transmittance, there could even be intrinsic Josephson effect like in high Tc superconductors. Impossible to say though without knowing more details about the material.
There have been some people saying that LK-99 might only be superconducting in one dimension. Does anyone know how that (or even just 2-D/planar superconductivity) would effect the levitation of samples? For the 1-D case, maybe there would be issues in creating loops in the bulk material for persistent currents to flow in? It might be hard to make a Josephson junction unless you knew the orientation of the superconductivity direction? Has anybody studied this before? My intuition breaks down here.
The superconducting wave function can have different symmetry, e.g. most/all low-temperature superconductors have s-wave symmetry (meaning the wave function amplitude is the same in all directions), whereas high-temperature superconductors have d-wave symmetry, which means the wave function amplitude has lobes and drops to zero along the diagonal axes. There are no p-wave superconductors to my knowledge (which I guess is meant when they talk about a 1D superconductor, i.e. the wave function has p-symmetry, but not even sure if that's what they mean).
I know the main researcher has brought forward a modified BCS theory that combines insulator-metal transition physics with superconductivity, no idea though what to make of that.
> which I guess is meant when they talk about a 1D superconductor, i.e. the wave function has p-symmetry, but not even sure if that's what they mean
I think they mean it only appears on islands that are much longer than they are wide or high. I.E. I understand it as a geometric limitation on the form of the crystals they can make.
The theoretical stuff that got here implies it has d-wave symmetry, and so does the original paper.
Could be normal diamagnetism, or even ferromagnetism. Very hard to say as they don't even give any field strengths in the video, it's just a Neodym magnet they hold near the sample. If I understand the video correctly they just orient the magnet by hand, so I would not even rule out a ferromagnetic effect. There can be multiple regions with different orientation in such a polycristalline material, which can produce all kinds of weird effects. Not saying that it's not a superconductor, just that I would not draw any conclusions from this video. If this was a type-II superconductor and the flux pinning is strong enough to lift the flake up you should be able to drag it across the bottom of the beaker with the magnet as the magnetic flux lines "impale" the crystal, i.e. they are in an energy minimum and moving them out of there causes resistance as they need to break the superconductivity in the material surrounding the defect where they are pinned. If it's just diamagnetism that's not the case. So observing that the flake is completely stationary when the magnet is moved in our out tells me this likely isn't flux pinning we're seeing.
I'm a bit skeptical how they even know it's the right material, getting the doping right seemed quite intricate so it would seem quite extraordinary that they can hit the right process after trying for a few days. Not saying they didn't, but so far I'm rather inclined to believe they just got a ferromagnetic metal flake (which is easy to get following the thermal annealing process they did, or even by banging the material up a bit as they seem to have done for getting it out of the synthesis tubes).
To me, this video looks like the sample is experiencing a torque, not a force. (Or at least not a force that is sizable compared to the sample’s weight.). The sample is doing a remarkable job of cavorting without actually going anywhere. Magnetic dipoles experience a torque proportional to the applied field, whereas the force is proportional [0] to the field’s gradient. The field gradient may be fairly small near the surface of a big magnet.
Plenty of things are magnetic dipoles or can be induced to become dipoles in the presence of a magnetic field. Ever played with iron filings and a magnet? Or a ferrofluid and a magnet?
I'm not even sure they reversed the magnet polarity in this video, it seems they just removed the magnet and put it back, so there's no way to rule out a ferromagnetic effect. Again, I just find it really hard to deduce anything from this footage, not saying it can't be a superconductor.
I'm not even sure they reversed the magnet polarity in this video, it seems they just removed the magnet and put it back, so there's no way to rule out a ferromagnetic effect.
I'm not sure either if LK-99 is a type-II superconductor but I would believe so given the papers I've read. Type-II superconductors aren't perfect diamagnets, they allow magnetic flux to penetrate the superconductor once you hit the first critical field, these flux vortices then get pinned at sites of defects where the energy requirement for breaking the superconductivity is lowest. That's what keeps a type-II superconductor levitating over a magnet, a type I superconductor or perfect diamagnet wouldn't do that. Then again I have never seen how e.g. a tiny YBCO flake (high Tc type-II superconductor) would behave if you put it in a beaker and dragged a Neodym magnet below it, so who knows.
Probably why hot takes outside of the field is physics in this instance are ignored.
My hot take rebuttal?
There has been no multi billion dollar investment into LK-99.
If scientists around the world took to Twitter and all tested and sought to disproved Theranos's claim all at once BEFORE Theranos became a juggernaut of fraud, I think there would be a more apt comparison.
To history's credit there were a few scientist who stood up and said that Theranos's claim was not possible.
So far the there is a lot of hype and social media energy, but not the same levels of fraud and deception going on here. If anything the science has started to point towards the likelihood there may be something to the claims in the original LK-99 papers.
The hype is more warranted here because I think material and physics scientists are excited and publicly and clearly skeptical.
There is a wider knowledge that this may be nothing or somewhere in between. The rollercoaster following the developments is why the wider public is enjoying following it as science entertainment.
On Twitter it seems like crypto bros are trying to scam with a LK-99 coin.
AI/ML crowd is pondering what happens to computing power in 5-10-15 years if LK-99 is proven applicable to advance current technologies.
There is a large mix of aspirational futurism and a lot of tempered real science going on here.
All in real time, on active, Twitter, WeChat/Billibili(?) etc
Theranos had very little external hype. No one talked about Theranos until it blew up, outside of pretty niche fields. The founder tried to build some hype but it was still a pretty typical "tech startup founder hyping themselves up" type of situation
This makes me extremely bullish about Varda Space, they have engineers of high quality and expertise that they could do a decent replication very quickly (if they got access to raw materials earlier, they might have been first to do so, comparable with the Chinese Groups) while working on their off time (from what I’ve seen of their twitter) and not a single big academic lab has managed to complete any sort of replication to date!
Instead of a few anonymous peer reviews, you get the entire planet to replicate. Moment you get something meaningful, publish it on arxiv. Quantity, not quality is king. Anomalies are drowned out by large samples. Questionable methods get mass debated in public.
Scientists are dependent on public funding, why squander the biggest moment in pop science for literal decades?
Now this won't work for 99.99% of research. But top tier research will probably get published on youtube and arxiv in the future...
> Questionable methods get mass debated in public.
By people who don't know what they're talking about.
You're seriously underestimating the level of expertise that it takes to professionally assess most research. It wouldn't be unusual for there to be a small handful of people with that ability in the world.
What matters is the discovery of new things that are true, that we can do engineering with. Publication by youtube & arxiv doesn't have to be oriented at public consumption - it works just as well when it's by-researchers, for-researchers. Except without gatekeeping, people like McCalip can participate too. Who cares who's sitting on the sidelines? In post-peer-review, industry-funded academics rush a paper to a preprint server, a space engineer replicates it, and someone else figures out how to mass-produce it, and we get room-temp ambient-pressure superconductors, and we know we did because the engineering works.
This works just as well with less exciting tech, because the point is that we collaboratively learned how to build something.
Agreed. What I don't understand is the gatekeeping. Why would the actions of outsiders have any bearing on "real" research? Are they worried that grant money will get redirected toward shallower, more glamorous groups?
I think the gatekeeping is relevant because almost every time in recent years that the general completely unvetted, often actively ignorant public has gotten an in on the scientific/R&D process, it has been a disaster for the field.
NASA can't take risks and seriously innovate anymore because even intentional explosions will be passed off as failures, we all experienced the sheer madness of the covid years, similarly anything nuclear brings complete randos out of the woodworks claiming absurd things about its dangers.
Not having some amount of gatekeeping just lowers the bar too much and introduces so much more noise.
> Not having some amount of gatekeeping just lowers the bar too much and introduces so much more noise.
I can see how this would be a very controversial subject. Discouraging scientific participation? That's a tough pill to swallow without a lot of justification.
It isn't discouraging participation, it's requiring that you meet some minimum level of proficiency to be considered credible. Kind of like how you need to have some experience in programming to have any credibility when talking about how a programming language should be designed.
> it's requiring that you meet some minimum level of proficiency to be considered credible
That's not really the case though is it? Doubting someone's credibility would simply mean ignoring their results. But withholding information is something else entirely.
> Maybe I'm misunderstanding, where did withholding information come into this?
When I mentioned gatekeeping I was specifically referring to how there's this formula that was kept secret since 1999. At some point the potential significance surely became apparent, and one of the only speculations I can come up with to justify that would be gatekeeping; keeping the information out of the hands of the filthy commoners for reasons.
Maybe it wasn't gatekeeping. If not I'd sure as heck like to know what it was.
In 1999, I was still a student in solid state physics, not far past my bachelor's degree, and happened to notice the publication of something that, to this day, I suspect might be (note, load bearing "might") a critical breakthrough for desalination. Nothing came of it. Nobody has published any follow-up for it. Nobody has done any research that would contradict it either. It's just sitting out there, unnoticed, decades later.
Was it withheld from the public? Eh... yes? Kind of? Because it was only ever published in a journal - probably Materials Letters, but this was a long time ago - that you would only have access to if you were a graduate (or ambitious undergraduate) student with plenty of time to read in a university library, or a specialist in the very narrow field that journal was for, somebody with a membership included subscription...
This isn't gatekeeping, this is, to be blunt, profit motivated hoarding by a handful of publishers in the academic journals business. And this is the thing that arXiv.org and other pre-print venues are actually having an impact on. I, for one, am strongly in favor of academic information being widely available. I'm not as much in favor of people who have not demonstrated their competencies in something that requires a great deal of both knowledge and skill feeling entitled to being given a platform for their (usually laughably clueless) proposals. If you've done enough work to have a tested hypothesis, that's different.
Ah, then I completely misunderstood you. Yeah I'm not in favor of outright withholding information.
However, what I think happened here is that they weren't able to work on it for a while, and if say, they didn't feel confident in their findings back in 1999 and only got around to being able to look at it again in 2017, it would make sense that their intent wasn't to gatekeep, it had just become one of those "we'll get around to testing it one day" type of projects everyone has. In this case it just potentially was a pretty massive thing to put off.
They didn't keep it, they simply did not work on it and only came back to it 20 years later (somebody posted a bit of history on the other thread currently on the front page, I'm on mobile so it takes to long to find it atm). They didn't know about it's superconducting properties either.
So no withholding information at all. But on a more general level if everyone would be posting out every little bit of information they produce during their research instead of publishing articles it would be a disaster. The reason we do science is because we are trying to understand things just posting your random results would just give everyone information overload, because you would know what to focus on. Lk99 is actually a great example, the material would have completely been ignored by most (maybe even has been, not sure if they published about it previously?) if not for these recent results. Moreover because the results were published before the authors were confident about what they had, they have been subject to lots of ridicule and accusations of fraud. It might turn out alright in this case, but something like this can be career ending if it turns out to just be an experimental error.
> They didn't keep it, they simply did not work on it and only came back to it 20 years later (somebody posted a bit of history on the other thread currently on the front page, I'm on mobile so it takes to long to find it atm). They didn't know about it's superconducting properties either.
I really do hope it's something innocent like this.
> if everyone would be posting out every little bit of information they produce during their research instead of publishing articles it would be a disaster.
I'm not sure it would be any worse than it already is. I don't see how we could achieve any more bombastic headlines than we already get.
My personal opinion/reaction likely isn't going to affect anyone's grant status. I'm just a random asshole. But there are less random assholes whose opinion might count. If someone sounding authoritative, but is just a random asshole like me, shits on this work on social media it might affect a group's grant status if it taints the opinion of someone holding the purse strings.
So I don't think asking about credentials or asking about references is gatekeeping. It's putting a statement into context. If I as a random asshole say "this isn't a superconductor" you as a reader should want to know where I'm getting that opinion from rather than just taking my statement at face value.
I'm not suggesting we give random people credibility: I'm suggesting that when we make potentially-enormous breakthroughs that maybe we shouldn't keep that information to ourselves for decades.
> You're seriously underestimating the level of expertise that it takes to professionally assess most research. It wouldn't be unusual for there to be a small handful of people with that ability in the world.
Does it mean that grant money are distributed by people who are unable to "assess most research"?
They say you don’t really understand something until you can teach it. I wonder to what extent “can I teach this to the general public, and do they care?” is an indicator of both understanding new results and also whether or not they really matter.
Of course, we’re often working on a tool to help make tools for other scientists, so that sort of thing is hard to explain to the general public, but ultimately it should terminate in some results that actually have obvious value to society in general.
> top tier research will probably get published on youtube and arxiv in the future...
"Top tier science" is already published on arXiv.
The future happened back in 1995 or something like that.
> Quantity, not quality is king.
No, quality is still king. We don't need videos of flakes standing on their end we need someone who has been working with superconductors all their lives who is competent enough to measure zero resistance across the sample. If one of the wild theories is right we need someone who actually knows how to prove it and not just sound like they're intelligent by talking about 1-d superconductors.
No, this is a new face for peer review. Existing peer review processes have stagnated in the information age, possibly with good reason. There are a lot of advantages to more immediate review of papers and data, and also to bypassing the systems of qualifications presently used to choose who is a valid reviewer.
The reaction I've seen from most of the scientists has been pretty negative on the papers. The originals aren't strong papers. The chemistry has issues: https://nitter.net/Robert_Palgrave/status/168545015680691814... (unbalanced equations, starting materials have pretty different element ratios to final products). As for the main claim, note that LK-99 seems to be a poorer conductor than copper wire at room temperature: https://nitter.net/bedoya_pinto/status/1686848392616423425#m... which is the kind of thing that should really cause a record scratch and make everyone go "um, I think you did something wrong there"--it's something that absolutely would be caught in peer review.
Your link sort of hints at the reason, I think. There's enough posted to make a serious run at replicating it, and it seems to be simple enough that you can do it in a kitchen. At the same time, it's not so easy that people have cleanly demonstrated it -- the constant rollercoaster of "we're so back" and "it's so over" I think drives some of the hype.
It also seems like it has at least pretty strong diamagnetism, which while not a demonstration of superconductivity is both somewhat interesting and gives a vivid demonstration that's amenable to social media.
I’m not sure I understand your point. Are you trying to say that people shouldn’t be paying attention to this? I would personally be horrified if I found out that the paper on the synthesis of a room temperature superconductor went through the normal peer review process instead of letting the world know they discovered something huge.
My point is why should this unreviewed claim of ambient condition superconductor be exalted as the holy grail and all of the other unreviewed claims of ambient condition superconductor languish in obscurity when they come out? It's definitely not for the strength of evidence!
There is no conclusive proof that this is a superconductor on the replications, but the evidence has been on a different level from nearly everything else you'll find on Arxiv since the beginning.
AIUI, things that float in a magnetic field at ~room temperature are moderately common claims, and this is really the only evidence that LK-99 might be a room-temperature superconductor. The published ancillary evidence in the original paper actually raises red flags that isn't a superconductor--the "0 resistivity" domain in their temperature-dependent resistivity plot is (when you realize the units they're using) actually slightly less resistive than regular copper wire, which suggests that the sharp drop in resistivity may be nothing more than a pedestrian phase change in the material.
> things that float in a magnetic field at ~room temperature are moderately common claims
At monopolar magnetic fields weak enough to come from a permanent magnet is a lot rarer.
Almost all superconductor claims come from measuring magnetic resonance or direct resistance measurements. Both are noisy things to measure, and won't get you reliable results.
> Quantity, not quality is king. Anomalies are drowned out by large samples.
Yeah, that's not how it works.
At practice, anomalies are hyped into everybody's attention, and large samples are drowned out by lack of novelty. You don't need questionable methods to get bad results, you just need quantity.
All the things that are happening are great, and this may be an astonishing discovery. But don't put more certainty on it than it's warranted.
> Instead of a few anonymous peer reviews, you get the entire planet to replicate.
Notably, peer reviews typically don't involve reviewers trying to replicate the results. So we've essentially skipped peer review (at least temporarily) and went full speed ahead with the post-peer-review process.
Speed is correlated with execution quality. All else being equal, A lab which is better equipped - with better access to materials, and motivated and competent researchers will deliver before the equivalent lab which is deficient in any of the above.
A twitter post isn't peer review, but it is a nice way of sharing part of the process. A video etc. will help others in their attempts to replicate.
It's really disappointing that no other US lab has engaged with the public in the same manner. Regardless of the outcome, I think seeing things get built and experimented with in mostly real-time is a massive source of inspiration.
The National Labs have to be a lot more careful with putting out potentially incorrect results due to their notoriety, being public funded and the public's lack of respect for the trial and error involved in the scientific process.
So they'll quietly slog away trying and retrying experiments, checking and rechecking their data before finally saying anything.
As we saw with other previous big things, like the first gravitational wave detection, they took some time to make sure that they were right.
I think that if it turns out to be real and national lab experiments prove that out, we'll be hearing rumors circulating within the field some time before an official announcement, just like how there were rumors about LIGO's detection circulating for a month before the announcement.
I don’t know what’s going on here, but I can see some guys are trying to make a LK-99 bubble in here. politically, not scientifically. We should be aware that there is still no critical evidence of room-temp superconductors.
All I see from US academics on Twitter are debates about this and that. Borderline annoying. This is the first result from mighty US capitalist machine meanwhile 3 Chinese labs have published pre prints and Russian replicated it in her kitchen.
This, its utterly shameful. Hot takes here, hot takes there, skepticism here, tell people to calm down there.
Yet not a single replication! China has gone through multiple failed and successful replications so far. And the first US replication is from an amateur.
If LK-99 works out, expect some congressmen to use this as a bludgeoning tool against the state of US public science.
Nanjing University physics professor Wen Haihu said in an interview with The Paper that the news was extremely likely to be false and they only assigned a student to it because many groups internationally were working on replications https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_24024641
"A researcher from the Institute of Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) declined to comment on LK-99, telling the Post that even taking the issue seriously would be ridiculous." https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3229778/coul... (It's unclear to me whether this was before or after the HUST team published their video.)
I don't think it's so much "China good at science, everyone else shamefully bad," but that some institutions (including in China) are more risk-averse, because labs who're already working on something they expect to succeed are less likely to benefit from dropping it to try something unproven.
Not go all conspiracy, but isn’t that also pretty much the playbook you’d run if you were trying to discredit it, to get as much of a jump on the rest of the world as possible? The Chinese government is not exactly known for playing fair.
That requires a government so competent they immediately notice the significance of a claimed breakthrough by a foreign lab and coordinate an information campaign where their leading scientists act all skeptical just like leading scientists in other countries, denying rumours that the Academy of Sciences is working on a replication etc., ... but completely fail to act on similar rumours sparked at the same time by screenshots of a HUST professor getting all excited about his university's replication work in a group chat.
Usually, when the Chinese government is confronted with an unexpected development they want to suppress, the opposite happens: official spokespeople clam up, nobody has a statement ready, related keywords get censored more or less effectively on social media, until an official narrative is revealed that doesn't withstand further scrutiny but survives anyway because such scrutiny is censored as well.
So no, it's pretty much not the playbook they'd run if they were trying to discredit it.
Individual lab heads might do this sua sponte. Think: while everyone else is busy playing replication games you can work on reliably making LK-99 and beat everyone else to the punch on the more valuable patents and engineering glory.
The other thing is that even if LK-99 is finally conclusively shown to be a room temp & ambient pressure SC, there will be lots of important challenges to work on surrounding LK-99, so not being the first to replicate is no tragedy:
- challenges in practical and reliable
manufacturing of LK-99
- challenges in engineering w/ LK-99
- challenges in finding better materials
than LK-99 using similar approaches
If I were in a position where I could devote funding and researcher and lab time into LK-99 research, I might well quietly let others to do the replication work while having my team quietly research practical manufacturing of LK-99 so that we could a) beat everyone else to the punch on practical and reliable manufacturing, b) get the patents for (a).
To be fair, no one in the us has a grant to replicate something that came out this week. Its also the academic summer. A good amount of PIs are probably nowhere near their labs on vacation currently.
> To be fair, no one in the us has a grant to replicate something that came out this week
And yet researchers in other countries managed to find the money this week. That would seem to point to a real relative weakness that's worth thinking about.
Whether it is the result of gatekeeping, bureaucracy, academic squabbling, or something else, a cranky (and hilarious) Russian did better, faster work in her kitchen. Even putting aside professional scientific dysfunction, that seems to indicate a strategic cranky kitchen chemist gap.
Hmm I'm not convinced that the establishment is sitting it out. Isn't it more likely that they are working the conservative process of registering experimental intent and planning only then to be followed by the experiment and only then to be followed by press release? If a bunch of amateurs can spook the old guys into violating well established procedure then id be pretty concerned about their competence.
It's the same in Korea where the research originated.
A bunch of professors belonging to a hastily formed academic committee are trying to monopolize the public debate, quibbling about errors in the arxiv paper and demanding that Lee & Kim turn over samples of LK-99 because the big-name professors are obviously too busy to make their own. It seems that their first priority is to avoid a repeat of the Hwang scandal than to touch any novel research.
Any time the material exhibits a properties inconsistent with superconductors, the to-go explanation is that it's supposedly extremely difficult to manufacture. Not to mention, the original instructions include stuff like "The sealed tube containing the mixed powder was heated in a
furnace at 925°C for 5-20 hours." which sounds a tad bit imprecise.
Don't you think in those conditions it's at least a little bit reasonable to demand samples?
>Don't you think in those conditions it's at least a little bit reasonable to demand samples?
No. Because ultimately they don't owe anyone anything outside of the standard scientific process. They want to get the peer reviewed article published, and have stated that if people still want samples after that they will provide them.
Half of twitter shitposting about FLOAT THE ROCK and a bunch of curious scientists and engineers attempting to replicate this doesn't fundamentally change this equation. If it's a superconductor now, it'll be a superconductor in 6 months.
None of the media hype or unwashed masses treating this as science entertainment should significantly impact the process they are going through. Assuming they've got an RTAPS, they'll get the Nobel Prize regardless of whether or not they satisfy everyone's curiosity right this moment or a year from now. Assuming they don't have one, well, that'll get found out too.
This is very ambiguous. So, everyone can make samples in their kitchens, but unfortunately, the researchers don’t have enough samples to provide, right? Researchers have their own primary responsibility to prove it, not the public. And this was not a debatable issue before the LK-99 bomb.
They’ve said they will provide samples after peer review. Which seems fair doesn’t it? How can they complete their paper and peer review without the samples? And if the samples get damaged they will be regret ever handing them over. If you were in the same situation you’d make the same decision.
I and everybody else would love them to hand over the samples for external testing, but it’s their samples so they can do whatever they want with it, and the rest of the world just has to pound lanarkite while we wait.
But I heard that in the interview, Dr. Kim said they have various samples that have different magnetization properties. It doesn’t make sense that they have only a few samples, ironically. I’m sorry, but this makes me think that they are trying to move the public some other way.
Judging from the Korean-language interviews making the rounds today, there seems to be some sort of political tension between the researchers and the so-called verification committee. There's disagreement about whether anyone actually demanded samples, or whether it was just a polite request...
I have a hunch that this might have something to do with the late professor Chair (Choi?) who came up with the idea back in the 90s, and whose last wish his disciples claim to be following. Chair was a sort of outcast in the superconductor research scene, and the methodology his disciples have been using are also, um, unorthodox at best. Someone might stand to lose a lot of credibility if the verdict goes one way or another. We know there's been tension even inside the team, as one of the three men named in the first paper was dropped from the second paper. At this stage, I'd be more concerned about these internal tensions and personal grudges than any attempt to manipulate the public at large.
Now I understand what's going on in South Korea. Okay, this is more political than I thought. But the problem is, the researchers even didn't send the sample abroad to prove it. Even though they had many requests for a week. This doesn't make sense, and that kind of background story is not helpful in solving this.
It would not be a normal part of the process for people to be demanding samples just because there was a preprint posted on arxiv. It's a weird situation and they don't owe anyone any of these samples.
They say they want to share samples after they get a peer reviewed paper published. That's not a weird position to be in. If it wasn't for the hype around this, they wouldn't be in this position.
Let the process play out like it normally does, and if none of the replication attempts pan out, they can provide the samples after the peer review. We'll still care about RTAPS even if it takes another year for a sample to be provided.
This case is something different. Because everyone reviewed their Arxiv papers and found that there’s no meaningful figure for the resistivity. And even magnetization data was not matched between two Arxiv papers. Now, here is where we are. After these reviews, they never updated their data to solve this issue, but they decided to let other guys do their experiment instead of them. The easiest way to solve this is to plot the resistivity data again on a logarithmic scale. And this takes less than a minute because they have raw data. This is a very uncommon situation in the scientific community.
> gone through multiple failed and successful replications so far
The "successful" replications are partial. No one knows how to make a large enough sample of LK-99 that can be tested to definitely show superconductivity (or not) at room temp and ambient pressure.
IMO the most bullish research done yet is the theoretical research.
> If LK-99 works out, expect some congressmen to use this as a bludgeoning tool against the state of US public science.
I hope for the same here in Germany. It's way past time we actually deal with the sorry state of science funding and academia in general across the Western world.
Yeah and it's not just the US but also France/UK/Germany/Canada, all the western countries usually held in high regards for science, the lack of enthusiasm (for lack of a better word) is rather disappointing. I don't think I've seen a single university lab in these countries announced "hey we're trying to replicate this as well".
They don't have the funds to do so any more. Everything is just project based grants, which often enough aren't even enough to run a project to completion. And professors have to chase grants and do other bullshit paperwork in an awful lot of their time.
Given the international reach of the US' War on Drugs, is red phosphorus also controlled in other nations? Being denied access to the precursors needed makes replication far harder.
Yes, I laughed when I saw that comment. I believe she would be denied entry to the US based on the questions that screen out communists, although because the particular question mentions a party and I don't believe she's a CPRF member it's possible it wouldn't apply. Regardless, not a good fit on either end of the relationship.
I'm more amused by 'grab anyone we want' stance, along with 'everyone wants to be the US citizen'. Imagine some Chinese would said that about some US scientist.
Who can do anything? Things cost money and money is usually already earmarked for other things. The labs that can engage with this have both some sort of a slush fund or another account appropriate to charge these fishing expeditions to, and also a post doc who somehow has plenty of time on their hands to drop everything they are doing and validate a dubious result.
Nope you can just put a preprint out. Like it or not, academic labs are probably busy doing things like checking their data and doing multiple replicates varying conditions. You know, science.
Yes, exactly. And getting approvals from three layers of management. You know, science.
I'm pushing back against academia because I think the system is pretty much a mess. Academics believe that we got all the nice technological innovation because of academia. I think it is despite academia. Most money going there is just wasted on writing not what you think is right but what you think will be published, waiting for peer review, and other bureaucracy. The main problem is that academia works with the belief that science needs to be rigorous since bad science might damage their reputation. However, this is how governments think, but not how scientists should think! Would the world be a better place if any new website, company, or YouTuber should be reviewed by peers first? No. Just like science, these are strong link problems [1].
I’m in an academic lab right now. I have never once had to get approval from three levels of management to do any experiment, nor have I ever heard of anyone having to do that. I’m not even sure who would be three levels of “management” above me.
Indeed. I've worked at two academic labs and one startup. The talent density at the startup is higher, but the academic labs were far scrappier and resourceful with limited resources. Venture capital makes people fat and lazy. They forget what it's like to operate on fumes.
You just have to be registered / approved with the DEA — most labs are and can freely order phosphorus and almost other chemicals with no further burden. Seems like Varda didn’t have any prior use for restricted chemicals so they hadn’t registered yet, a not uncommon situation that will be quickly resolved for their next attempts I’m sure.
Indeed, DEA-listed chemicals don't even require a DEA license, it's just a bit of paperwork for new buyers, so the DEA can later come and ask uncomfortable questions if they suspect your usage is not legitimate.
There is a large degree of luck involved. The original team, who have been working on this for significant time, have only attained a 1/10 success rate (one of the better samples came from a test tube being dropped on the floor part-way through annealing). So it's part talent, part luck.
I don't understand why people are attaching any weight to Alexandra's claims. AFAIK, it's a pseudonymous account that has provided no evidence that couldn't be easily faked. You might object that the evidence provided by the non-pseudonymous scientists could also be faked, but the key distinction is that they're attaching real, professional identities to their claims. There are reputational consequences to making things up. They have skin in the game. A pseudonymous account doesn't. Why should we believe them?
Not quite pseudonymous - she says her name is Iris Alexandria and that she's affiliated with the IGB in Russia and is now collaborating with the MEPI in producing more and measuring samples and that this is the reason why she doesn't publish any data as it's not hers and is bound for a publication, and that some of the researchers there are familiar with alternative superconducting theories which LK99's late PI was basing off on.
Of course it could all be faked, but she is prima facie attaching real, professional identities to her claims.
A worthless replication. Grainy photos of supposed samples floating. When asked for videos she just insulted the people asking for videos to no end and to date has not provided any. No measurements provided either.
I think you're misinterpreting the second tweet, I read it as "I can't publish a preprint myself since I'm not the only one working on it now, and my team doesn't feel our work is ready for publication". Of course it can still be bullshit but it makes sense that a biochemist doesn't have the means to test this material and that a credible physics institute wouldn't want to rush publication if they aren't sure of their results.
I believe she said it wasn't a replication because she had changed the formula.
She seemed to have problems with the efficiency of the original formula, which is why I believe she doesn't believe it's replication what she produced may in the end not be LK-99.
It seems like she's in the process of getting X-ray diffraction analysis (XRD) done.
There has been several fake videos placed out there on the Internet.
There is a quote by jay-z I'll paraphrase
"
Men lie
Women lie
But replicable science don't lie.
"
The mixture of USSR tweets has patriotic Americans so ruffled that some can't see through their disbelief and rage.
>I believe she said it wasn't a replication because she had changed the formula.
She seemed to have problems with the efficiency of the original formula, which is why I believe she doesn't believe it's replication what she produced may in the end not be LK-99.
Yes, it isn't replication, and the only proof that her modified substance does anything interesting is a photo of a single grain suspended inside a small tube. She hasn't written anything clarifying the process from her vague twitter thread, she hasn't posted a video showing the sample's behavior (which would be better than nothing), she hasn't shown any measurements, and when people ask for these things, she gives unconvincing excuses.
And yet every thread is full of people saying she was the first to replicate. The USSR tweets are a little eyerolling but not the main issue
That person’s twitter feed reads like the howlings and scribblings of someone in a manic depressive cycle. I’m a little surprised _anyone_ would take them seriously.
I have to assume that charlatans have long since figured out how to select social media names that insinuate a relationship to a well known organization, when in fact no such relationship exists.
More than that, she calculated how high it will float, and how height will depend on temperature, before starting the experiment, and confirmed all her predictions.
She has been alluding to old Soviet scientists having a theoretical foundation for the type of conductivity shown. She posted a link to this comment that explains some of the background: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36996337
Check out her twitter for some real fun rants @iris_IGB
They use a magnet for movement. “When the magnet is placed parallel and flat to the bottom of the beaker, the sample stands at a 90deg angle to the field.”
>> World first replication was done by Iris Alexandra using her own accelerated process and there is no way Varda Space could have beaten her.
World first public replication
As much respect for her as I have & as much I’ve enjoyed watching this pan out, a U.S. DoE affiliated lab or other nation states’ equivalent likely did something in the same timeframe.
People working in those labs are unfathomably smart & talented.
Do you have any evidence or are you just speculating?
I don't doubt that the people working in these labs are very smart and talented, perfectly capable of their own replication attempt. But would they rush to try replicating it immediately after the paper's publication?
100% true and actually a very interesting statement. Can you imagine if he had tried to present this idea to the c-suite as a potential marketing or PR coup?!
Do we really care if they confirm it in a week or two ? Are we on a hurry ? I don't know anything bout supraconductors but given the number of failing attempts to repicalte (and the number succeeding), I would not be suprised if it'd take quite some time before we can be certain. Moreover, we'll need a consensus among all the people who understand the subject. So, a week or even a month won't make any difference.
My point was not actually about the ultimate result of replication. This guy undoubtably performed an indirect marketing coup for his company by engaging competently on this tangentially related topic and then following through.
In my experience though, if he had made any effort to link those two things prior to doing this - e.g. by proposing this as an internally sponsored marketing stunt - it would probably have been rejected.
Eh, I have met the CEO of Varda. They are very much a startup and have that startup energy. One of the founders of Varda has been very vocally supportive of this on Twitter as well.
Is that a law in California? My understanding of the labor law is that California protects employees, so that if they sign a contract assigning IP to the company (which is almost a sure bet today, but not a law afaik- please correct me otherwise) they are actually protected such that it only applies if:
- using company resources, such as time, hardware, or office space, unless otherwise stated.
Clearly the case here, but my understanding of this law doesn’t align with how you described it.
As engineers we are given building blocks that we can build things from. Iron, steel, copper, plastic. Every once in a while a new building block arrives. It takes a while for us to figure out how to use it. But when we do, the world changes.
- batteries + touch screens => iPhone
- batteries got better => Tesla
- reinforced concrete => pretty much all the worlds buildings and bridges
- neodymium magnets + gyros => drones
A room temperature superconductor... well, that changes things on a completely new level. Order of magnitude smaller losses plus order of magnitude higher magnetic fields? OMFG can we build SciFi things from this if it pans out.
So yeah - we are in a hurry. If this pans out, there will be a massive shift in how pretty much anything is made. And the reward for the people who can figure it out first are insane, in terms of potential value created.
We're in a hurry in the sense that we don't want to leave investigation of this on the back burner for a few months, but we're not in a hurry in the sense that it's going to make any difference in practice whether a lab group reports today that they've reproduced it, or takes a bit more time to be careful and reports more thoroughly in two weeks time. Any first mover advantages are likely to accrue to the groups who come up with a reliable reproduction method over the next couple of months, not to the ones who send out the first press release and twitter post this week.
Ever felt schedule pressure / been on the critical path? This is that concept applied globally. The hurry is that delays in initial research measurably delays potential rollout. I'd like to see this material meaningfully used in my lifetime for its potential global society wide benefits / ease of human suffering / margin on total ecological collapse. The pace set now affects the mean and standard deviation of probability of that happening on the timeline.
My point partly is that as outside observers we can't deduce "is taking it chill" merely because we haven't seen two press releases and three tweetstorms from any particular lab yet. They might be slogging away but not caring to report every step on the path to the outside world.
These are completely different activities... Doing some week long materials experiment has almost no relevance to production aerospace engineering with regulatory burdens and multi-year test schedules. I might as well say that any mathematician who can publish a paper quickly about boundary functions can also be a very effective SWE at Amazon working on cloud.
Oh yeah, the commercial "doers" are happy to have a go once academics have slogged away at the hard, risky, expensive, and often thankless trial-and-error before the discovery. Not to do down the people in this particular example, and I'm happy to assume they aren't claiming any credit they shouldn't, but the dichotomy really isn't as you make it out to be.
The story goes, some professor had a theory in 1999 that was rejected by the mainstream regarding creating superconductors. He passed away and as a dying wish asked his students to continue the research work and develop a theory for why it works. The students unable to get “academic” funding set up a company and got funding from industry to do their research in 2017 and the rest is history.
It’s very hard to redeem academia in this example.
That's not entirely accurate. For my understanding, it is a private institution which employed the individuals who made the discovery. Some of whom have alternative backgrounds in academia, and some of whom have it in industry.
Private R&D has always towered above academics. People who can compete create significant innovations. People who can't compete stay as professors doing research because it's the easiest and most convenient pathway.
I follow ~200 extremely high quality people on twitter, never use the algorithmic timeline -- just the "Following" tab, and it is easily 10x more signal to noise than HN for me, I'm almost upset I didn't start using it sooner.
Only works if you can resist the temptation to follow national news orgs, politics, etc. In my little niche, though, I essentially never see any of that, even less than one sees on HN. It's all just tech, AL/ML, space/rockets, startups, etc.
Do you mean closed source software? Because that would rule out Hackernews. But I agree on the principle. Maybe it's the type of discussion. I would be happier if this very exciting superconductor story was unfolding somewhere else than Twitter.
A walled garden is a site that degrades significantly or is unavailable without an account, like Twitter. Anyone can view all of HN modulo dead comments without an account.
I appreciate the clarification, thanks. This forum is open to the public at the moment. Though Hackernews could go down or take the conversation offline at any moment (this is an issue of trust more than anything, and I think HN does a good job, certainly more than Twitter)
Links behind logins wall/paywall should be totally forbidden, Twitter, Quora, news websites, etc.
I don't even get why they are indexed by Google, as this is cloaking, and forbidden by the ToS (+ gets annoying)
Google has a rule where links from google can't be paywalled. So you can see Quora posts if you enter from a Google link, but not if you go to the URL directly.
In this brave new Twitter-y world, if the Twitter link loads at all (hardly a sure thing lately) it'll only show the tweet without any replies, unless you're logged in. Nitter will show the whole thing (it's ultimately dependent on Twitter so may also be broken, but in several recent partial Twitter outages nitter has been usable while the twitter web UI was not loading).
You are not wrong. I certainly was no fan of the old twitter’s ultra woke circle jerk and bullyism but you could at least mostly ignore it and the verified accounts were actual verified people.
Today the misinformation and shitposting crap is impossible to avoid, the top comments are invariably random 8 dollar people (?) that add little to the discussion and porn bots / onlyfans all over the place.
On top of that it seems there might be a bias in the accounts that get selected for payouts and there is indeed quite the incentive for ragebait there.
Yes. It must be that and not at all the fact that Twitter is unavailable at worst or degraded at best if you don't have an account. There's something uninspired and tiring but I don't think it's people avoiding Twitter.
Twitter is so slow to load on mobile that it's faster to hand-replace "twitter.com" with "nitter.nl" than to wait for the load time and the close the multiple pop-ups.
Off the top of my head I think it's basically using the same publicly undocumented API that the Twitter-hosted front ends use - Twitter did successfully block nitter et al recently with the "must be logged in to view tweets" change but rolled that back (partly?) after Threads launched.
I surmise that to block such access by Nitter completely while keeping Twitter's own front ends open to the public, Twitter would need to be extensively re-factored on both the front and back ends, a goal that the organization may not be capable of successfully completing at this time, but is presumably working towards.
Interesting, this is being done in room temperature too. I suppose a few things I can conclude from this saga:
1. The synthesis process is much more complex than the original paper suggests. Every group except the original is unable to create a large piece of sufficient purity.
2. It seems like even with a pure sample, the entire structure might not be superconducting which leads it to tilt on one edge instead of completely floating. (Some call it a 1D superconductor, I’m a bit out of my depth here)
Should expect all these things to improve soon, but seems like a genuine breakthrough, not a fake or a dud’
The original group also stated that they are preparing another paper specifically about this synthesis process IIRC. This would seem to indicate that the challenge is known and the initial omission either deliberate or another side effect of this absurdly gripping kdrama.
This 1D stuff really confuses me. I was taught that 1D superconductivity is prohibited by Mermin Wagner theorem. You can induce superconductivity on 1D system but that requires higher dimensional SC near it, which is the opposite of proposed scenario?
If someone have seen theoretical papers explaining this and/or understands it, I'd love to know. Iris Alexandera posted link to some experimental paper [1] but I didn't understand the mechanism from it and it is very scarcely cited
Exactly, that Russian anime girl shud not be getting any credit, I don’t say this because of her anonymity but because of her absolute refusal to take a video or do absolutely anything that can make outsiders trust her claims.
Looks like there's at least three other people in front of Andrew on the "first floaty flake replication" list[0], and something like four more efforts where the flakes didn't float which arguably still counts as replications.
Why? Simple, there's lots of mentally ill people on this planet.
Anime profile pictures are usualy a redflag.
These kind of people should only be ignored since they never want to cooperate.
> Anime profile pictures are usualy a redflag. These kind of people should only be ignored since they never want to cooperate.
A lot of them are simply trans and tired of dealing with constant harassment campaigns directed towards their gender identity. Of course they're wary about cooperations with people they don't intimately trust.
“Some people are rude to me for reasons entirely unrelated to the issue at hand” isn’t a valid reason to lack any level of humility, or to withhold evidence of your extraordinary claims.
USSR means something different to Russians than it does to Americans. To Americans it was the Enemy. To Russians it was the last time that Russia was truly important on the world stage and had some degree of prosperity.
You’re making quite a leap here assuming they’re trans, but it’s an inarguable stance to take anyway. If I say “they should reveal to increase the profile of trans folks everywhere”, you’ll say “why is it incumbent upon them to prove their value?” If I say “they should reveal to shut down harassers,” you’ll say that I must be a transphobe.
Sexual politics is tiring and pointless, honestly. With all the ad hominem bullshit and disingenuous positioning, no one is even trying to resolve it.
The culture around anime profile pictures is that you pick a character that you at least somewhat relate to - or used to in the past and embraced that.
For trans people that's usually a character that is at least in some way gender-bending - like being mistaken for the other sex by other characters or people unfamiliar with the franchise.
Her methods were improvised and lacking, by her own admission. There are several world class labs working on this today. There's basically zero chance a junior researcher doing amateur chemistry in the kitchen is going to outperform the best groups in the world at figuring out how to synthesize this thing with decent yield, and then characterizing it.
I am totally confused, it is documented in the original south korean paper, why anyone would want to rely on such second hand unverified info when first hand info from the original inventors are freely available to everyone?
Having multiple groups document and share their progress while attempting to replicate LK-99 is exciting and it captures people's imagination. People want to see LK-99 being replicated by multiple sources. Aside from that, as I understand it the information in the original South Korean paper leaves out a lot of details on how to fully replicate their findings.
It is documented fairly poorly in the South Korean paper. Not atrociously poorly, but enough that there's a fair bit of ambiguity, and several top labs have failed to replicate for this reason. When replication is this difficult, hundreds of labs doing experiments will give tremendous data on the principles behind what create the material, moreso than one lab repeating hundreds of small tweaks.
That's one of the core tenets of science of course: experimental reproducibility given reasonable instructions; the laws of physics are the same everywhere in the universe, well except for possibly blackholes
I think you're joking, I'd 100% assume it, except that I ran into some truly bizarre US patriotism while trying to follow McCalip's updates a few days ago - last relevant one I could find was 'materials coming tomorrow' on 27th, but then I couldn't find anything about using them or any update. Just a decent into people tweeting (in thread) about how great America is, the best country, etc. Really surreal.
I don’t think the USA is at the forefront of science, and I’m really disappointed to see discoveries like this originating from South Korea, China, and Russia before we saw results here. But even in light of that, I don’t think it’s very controversial to say that the USA is inarguably the greatest country on the planet.
While it's true that the USA may not always be the first to every scientific discovery, what it is at the forefront of is global trends and driving forward progress in a multitude of arenas. Silicon Valley has single-handedly transformed the global tech landscape, with pioneering companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook leading the charge.
American universities such as MIT, Harvard, and Stanford consistently rank among the top in the world, pushing the boundaries of research and innovation. The cultural sphere is heavily influenced by American trends as well. Hollywood and New York City define global standards in entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle.
Also, America's economic is the largest globally, and has considerable influence in shaping global financial trends. And let's not forget the huge strides in space exploration, highlighted by NASA's momentous moon landing and Mars missions. I mean, even the Soviets got a man in space! And that was half a century ago! European astronauts have to hitch a ride on an American-made rocket to represent their nations.
So yeah, while there's always room for improvement, America's influence as a pace-setter, innovator, and leader on the global stage sets it apart. This isn’t just a “USA! USA!” chant, I have a seemingly never-ending list of criticisms of my country, but, in terms of advancing the human species, I would take the USA over literally any other country every single day of the week.
It’s simply because the US is the richest country on the planet[0]. A lot of money buys a lot of science. Many of those great discoveries are not made by Americans, if you look around at any of those American universities you’ll see people from all corners of the world.
So yes, the US is quite good at research, but it’s not due to some intrinsic quality of the country any more than a billionaire’s ability to attract beautiful women is down to their good looks. The US is simply punching at its (very heavy) weight.
[0] Why is the US the richest country? It has a lot of arable land to support a large population. Most of the original settlers came from the previous richest country, and it was never colonized (or more precisely it was never decolonized) meaning that the wealth was not diverted away from the people like it was in most of the worlds countries. The real story here is how China has completely mismanaged all the opportunities it’s had, you can thank Mao for that.
That's my point exactly. The USA is a melting pot of all other nations. We have some of the most genius minds from around the globe, and it's exactly the fact that it's the richest nation in the world that makes it the best at many things.
"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, and I'll fund all of their research projects."
Also, the Soviet Union, I think; it’s just bad associations all the way down. I realise that Americans have a different background and an American being really into flags and founding fathers and all that usually means something completely different (and less worrying) than someone in Europe doing same, but it’s still hard not to find it offputting.
I think you would be hard pressed to find any Euro seriously and non-ironically proclaiming their country the best in the world. Then again, it's not unheard of.
It just sounds stupid here, because even when all of us combine we only ever so slightly pass the "regional power" mark. And we know it.
Italians are convinced that Italy is the center of the world, with the best food, home of Rome, etc.
French are convinced that France is the center of the world, with the best food, home of Democracy, etc.
The British are convinced that Britain is the center of the world...although maybe not so convinced of the food :-P.
Germans, same thing.
Portugese same thing, but it's the "secret" version of Spain with better wine, better food, better beaches, etc.
Everybody has national pride. That's a good thing. You should be proud of the place where you live because it means you'll take care of it and wont' trash it.
It's just done differently, I don't know, it's hard to explain, but:
A: [orders some chemicals]
B: God damn I love America
A: Hell of a thing, America
C: greatest country in the world
just reads so weirdly to me. Maybe it's partly that I can't imagine finding (or any other British/western European person finding) this a source of national pride to begin with, but even when it's something we do.. I just can't see non-Americans talking like that.
That sort of cringey, oblivious patriotism has existed here for a long time, but I have a feeling it's become more common on Twitter since the average demo of active participants has undoubtedly shifted toward the political and cultural sensibilities of Elon Musk. This will probably read as pretty divisive, but I think it's the truth.
He’s replicating a cutting edge material science in his garage. People are celebrating the optimistic spirit of Americans. The indomitable will that this country encourages and the sense that anything is possible if you’re ambitious and smart enough to pull it off.
(a) it's an industrial lab.
(b) if there's any optimism to be commended, it's that of the South Korean researchers who worked on this on-off for ~20 years.
(A) It’s a metal garage that has some industrial equipment in it. There’s literally a motorcycle parked in it.
(B) The Koreans will rightly get their Nobel if this pans out. But what McCalip has done could never happen in a place like, say, Europe. The people there just don’t have the fortitude (those that do come here!) for this kind of thing. America is rich with ambition and creating the future. Other places had their time and are just fossilized remains now. But fun to tour, especially when the people there dress up like their glorious ancestors that made them famous did. It’s fun to look at the past sometimes (but obviously not live in it!).
Those are the original authors pieces, who obviously have secret know-how that they are going to sell for many $millions rather than give out for free.
I'm curious what companies stand to gain the most from this discovery... I understand the promises of LK-99, but where do you think where we'll see it be applied first?
Depends on its price and properties. If it is affordable, I would go with electric motors. Not having to cool them would be hugely beneficial. If it is expensive, then MRI machines and space equipment.
A piece of magnetized iron would flip the other way if you turned over the magnet. That's why in the Chinese videos you see them remove the magnet, flip it over, and put it back.
The same "end" of LK99 floats, no matter which pole of the magnet you put toward the sample.
To me, this doesn’t really look like the little sample is trying to levitate. It looks like it’s trying to rotate, almost like it’s trying to line up with the magnetic field.
Magnetic dipoles in a magnetic field experience a torque, and if a little sliver of stuff experiences a torque trying to make it point a particular direction, this could easily overcome the force pulling it toward the magnet.
(The torque on a dipole is proportional to the applied field. The force is proportional to the gradient of the field. And the experimenters seem to be using a pretty big flat magnet or a big solenoid, close to the center, which is likely to have a fairly spatially constant field near the surface.)
I’m reminded of once holding a bar magnet in a small plasma testbed electromagnet. Small = a few feet long and maybe 2 feet across. (The big one across the room was about the size of a semi truck IIRC.). I naively expected the magnet to be pulled in toward the center. Nope, not so much, but it tried quite hard to twist itself in my hands.
the really amazing part of the LK99 is that you don't any big name with access to some national labs to demonstrate that for you, all you need is some high school lab equipments and some very basic understanding of the subject.
yeah but OP said 'high school lab'... which granted may be true in the US but certainly not what I'd call 'common' or even 'rare' where I live. a good description would be 'completely unheard of'.
I'm a graduate of the public school system in the US in a state that is not in the top 10-15 for education - my high school had a pretty impressive furnace. I'm too far removed to remember what it's maximum temperature was but I wouldn't be surprised if it was 1000C+
It's showing a sample of something that might be partially a superconductor (as in, one side of it might be superconducting and one side might not be). It's probably not a complete superconductor, since it would be floating if it was. Some people are saying it's a very weird magnet.
If it's a superconductor then this could be comparable in impact to the development of the transistor. As in, it won't change things overnight but in 50 years people will look back at it as the beginning of a new era of technology.
>I see conflicting things (e.g. "room temperature" but video says "500C").
I think the 500C refers to the manufacturing process, not the current temperature.
>Also, is this real or fake? I've seen comments on both.
The video is almost certainly real, but it may not show a superconductor. The risk isn't intentional fraud, it's just hard to tell with these small, impure samples.
500°C/min cool. This is the cooling rate. It should be written 500K/min. He explains that he had no data about the cooling rate from the original paper and as such is going to test several rates.
Their whole thing is in-space manufacturing in general, and stuff in space could make use of an RTAPS. I don't think the parent comment was anything more than "It'd be cool to see the space manufacturing company manufacture the thing they were one of the first handful of people to potentially publicly replicate"
From what little I know of solid state chemistry — which is not a lot — I do know that when mixing powders that don’t melt, grinding them with a mortar and pestle is not generally good enough. A ball mill is much better, but still may not be sufficient. An even better approach is to precipitate both reagents out of solution together for nano-scale mixing.
I’d like to see this redone with a much finer grind and thorough mixing.
In another thread such a measurement has been discussed.
Unfortunately such measurements are not enough for definitive conclusions, because all that they can show is that below some temperature the resistance becomes smaller than the error of the measuring equipment.
Moreover, because the samples obtained so far are extremely inhomogeneous, they do not show a definite transition temperature, which would have made superconductivity much more plausible.
In any case, the results obtained so far are enough for showing that it is worthwhile to invest time and money for developing a method of producing samples that are larger and more pure, because whatever they are, they must have unusual properties.
The best would be to develop a method for making monocrystals, because this material has an asymmetric crystal structure, which might have very anisotropic properties.
The most interesting properties of semiconductors could not be discovered during the first century after their discovery by Faraday, because they were not available as pure monocrystals. Only after the methods for growing pure crystals have been developed during WW2 (for radar diodes), it became possible to measure the intrinsic properties of the semiconductors and to design new devices using them, and then the semiconductor industry has grown exponentially.
With this kind of non-metallic superconductor, the problems may be similar.
Wouldn't a regular fleck of magnetic metal do this too? I've seen many examples where metal dust arranges itself into lines along the magnetic field lines like this video is showing
I'm absolutely not an expert on any of this so I'm probably missing something
A piece of magnetized iron would flip the other way if you turned over the magnet. That's why in the Chinese videos you see them remove the magnet, flip it over, and put it back under the sample.
The same "end" of LK99 floats, no matter which pole of the magnet you put toward the sample.
I don't understand what you're not seeing. Nobody is saying that the whole LK-99 sample is superconducting. Why would you expect the whole sample to float, instead of "partial floating" as we're seeing, if you have a material that's only partially superconducting?
I was wondering this, why do all the samples not completely float. If the sample is only partially superconducting, could you just smash it into smaller pieces and find a few floating ones? Or would the different domains be so small that you have to turn the sample into dust before you get a completely superconducting piece? Probably can not be answered in general as it heavily depends on the synthesis process?
> If you were to cut off the part that isn't lifting, do you reckon the entirety of the floaty half would float? AKA is this semi-float thing a purity issue?
And Andrew responded [0]:
> We wanted to do rock surgery, but I was scared we would shatter our biggest piece. It definitely has a piece that isn't contributing lift.
I'm guessing once they've prepared more samples and had existing samples tested they'll break some into smaller parts to try and get a piece that floats independently.
This should be due to the anisotropy of the material, that is, its quasi-one-dimensional structure. Because there is a fixed crystal phase in the material, that direction has the strongest diamagnetism, so the magnetic field lines will always go along this direction, causing all The samples are all upright.
If the material is a one-dimensional superconductor where current can only flow with zero resistance along one direction, aligning that direction with the magnetic field lines should produce the weakest diagmanetism, because the magnetic force is proportional to the cross product of current and magnetic field. If the two are parallel, the force is zero.
Of course this could explain why the sample doesn't lift off: it starts out with the superconducting direction at an angle to the magnetic field and relatively strong diamagnetism leading to a righting force until the two directions are nearly aligned and the diamagnetism is too weak to overcome gravity.
That's what is currently being done! A few videos have surfaced of smaller grains of LK-99 fully levitating. We're waiting for additional confirmation.
I thought it was clear that the process for creating the material is low yield, and the reaction produces other materials, so most of the material we're seeing is not LK-99. See the wiki section on synthesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99 . Right now we don't have a good way to produce the material with better yield.
Imagine you take red paint and blue paint and mix it together. It is certainly true that there is red paint and blue paint still in there, but however small samples you take it’s still going to be purple. You might get some samples that are reddish purple and some that are bluish purple however.
The Russian molecular biologist “Iris” had a tiny speck that floats, and there was another video as well (I don’t remember the source, but I saw it on Twitter). However, the credentials of the people or the labs they work for are unknown, so take it with a grain of salt.
So if we increased the magnitude of the magnetic field (e.g. by using an electric magnet), why couldn't we still have the sample float? Or does the Meissner effect not relate to the magnitude of the magnetic flux?
Unless, of course, the other end is attracting the magnet.
Meissner Effect does not mean it has to float. It only floats if thats the easiest way to expulse the magnet field. Otherwise it aligns normally with the magnetic field, which is supposedly happening here.
As it’s been theorized elsewhere, it may be that the production processes produce a material with only bits of the theorized superconductor in it, leading to the wiggling effect we see here as well as the Chinese replication video.
Clicked through 3 links to be greeted with "Disclaimer: I’m no physicist nor chemist...It turned out that LK folks were not talking about some stupid shit."
-- combined with "(Note: was written and published hours before this demonstration.)", and there wasn't an attempt to explain the connection between TFA and this new other article I'm supposed to read.
"I’m no physicist nor chemist" means that I have no qualification to say whether the theory is legitimate or not.
"It turned out that LK folks were not talking about some stupid shit" means that their theory is not out of the thin air, but rather based on some alternative theory that has not been actually disproven but simply forgotten. This one is much easier to verify.
"was written and published hours before this demonstration" means that I have no prior knowledge about this demonstration. Otherwise you could argue that I have written the article to justify this demonstration.
The last point doesn't make much sense since there were multiple prior similar demonstrations. It's still a prediction made after the experiment has concluded and the results are widely disseminated.
To my knowledge this is the first ever demonstration to show the exactly same thing as Q-center's original video (partly because this sample is much larger than others), so I believe my argument is probably safe. But I understand your and GP's judgements given the recent craze. To be fair, I'm still conservative about the whole thing, but it does look clear to me that we are witnessing the conflict between two big theories of SC, rather than some crackpot versus "legit" scientists, hence my new article.
This isn't a big deal but to explain a bit why it came off wrong, sometimes I have a hard time socially and wish people would just explain their reactions instead of focusing on having the reaction:
- It's not the first, to wit, the repro's author pointing out it looks the same as effect from China repro from...3 days ago? Time is elusive.
- The Russian catgirl superconductor theory stuff is a blind alley, you've gone very far down it for someone without physics/chemistry background, it's unintelligible to people who haven't followed the sociology of every repro attempt and people who do have a background and know that's a massive theoretical question that can't be resolved via twitter or LK99, particularly when we're still figuring out LK99
- It's odd to reframe news of a room temperature superconductor as a "conflict between two theories of SC", we're just scratching the surface, we're months and months away from that, if it is resolvable at all.
- You've gotten wrapped up in the meta and express it via namecalling in a way that distracts, c.f.
---- my reference to the "stupid shit" quote.
---- "crackpot versus legit scientists": what I call They'ing, what smarter people would call creating dichotomous groups out of thin air and then attributing positions to them.
---- "recent craze" "still conservative": the metajudgements don't contribute anything and there's plenty of it to be found, it's mostly gone/downvoted on HN over last 24-48 hours because it became stifling.
You could have just requested more contexts then. You instead picked three particular phrases, which are actually least relevant parts of the linked article, and concluded (or appeared to conclude) that my article is not worthwhile to read. It might be, but I want it to be worthwhile to read and your reply had no hints to avoid that. Especially given that the very point of my article is about providing those contexts.
I, for one, am not impressed by his Twitter thread. It looks very sloppy, and I am completely disregarding videos of floating flakes of gray whatever-the-heck. They look like they have none of the equipment to properly test what material they created or what its properties are. It doesn't inspire confidence, it's just more damn attention-seeking. Stick to rockets or whatever.
That said, the fact that LK-99 has not been instantly debunked makes me somewhat hopeful that even ridiculously sloppy attempts like this did manage to create a bit of the crystal lattice that makes this material unique, and that, if indeed it does have superconducting properties, the manufacturing process won't be hard.
The best test would probably be to produce a Josephson junction and measure Shapiro steps at high frequency, that's something that cannot be explained by anything except a superconducting quantum material. As the sample is highly impure it could even be enough to irradiate it with a microwave source and measure the reflectivity / transmittance, there could even be intrinsic Josephson effect like in high Tc superconductors. Impossible to say though without knowing more details about the material.