It’s disappointing news but the excitement and amount of replication on this paper was pretty fun to witness and experience.
To me the most interesting part was everyone talking about potential consequences, uses, the order of magnitude improvements we’d see in certain costs or areas. Pumps, MRIs, power grids, chips, etc. Great reminder what materials science can do to some underlying economics.
This is precisely what put me off in these discussions. Not the idea that we might have found a room-temperature superconductor - that part was exciting. It's the part where people confidently talked about its applications without realizing that they probably wouldn't revolutionize CPU performance (Josephson junctions don't seem to work well as non-cryogenic temperatures for reasons unrelated to superconductivity), power grid transmission (transmission lines are already pretty efficient and we already choose less efficient materials for cost), or energy storage (LK-99 would likely have a fairly modest current limit before it stops superconducting).
LK-99 would have interesting applications, known and unknown, but we have a pretty good understanding of superconductors based on 100 years of practical research, and I find this kind of instant punditry pretty tiresome.
Amen. When someone does the math and adds up the winners and losers in all this, one clear winner will be this video from Asianometry, entitled The History of Superconductors (Before LK-99)[1]. It only lightly touched on LK-99 itself, but did an excellent job going through the actual science-based history of superconductors, covering in particular detail previous hype waves. A major point is that the YBCO superconductors, while an amazing scientific discovery, haven't had revolutionary applications, and have only lightly displaced lower temperature (niobium-titanium metal alloy) superconductors in applications requiring generating strong magnetic fields, including MRI machines. For the curious, [2] goes into considerable detail on potential applications and challenges for HTSC in MRI.
> same performance as ITER, but in a tenth the size
So instead of being 400 times the volume of a PWR with the same gross power output, they're just 40 times the volume. It's no panacea to the economic challenges facing fusion.
The other way to get high volumetric power density is go with a configuration of higher beta, the ratio of plasma pressure to magnetic pressure (fusion power at a given magnetic field scales as beta^2). Helion isn't using superconductors at all.
> transmission lines are already pretty efficient and we already choose less efficient materials for cost
You're correct, and this highlights a problem I often see in discussions: "efficiency" just is a measure of benefit/cost. Without knowing the units of benefit and cost, people aren't making meaningful statements when they say "efficient". The important efficiency of transmission lines is capacity per dollar, not capacity per material, and no material requiring lab crystallization is going to be remotely competitive in capacity per dollar.
This is an absolutely disingenuous point that compares the cost of full-economy-of-scale tech to literal one off R&D prototypes.
Maybe new technology made in a lab can one day scale up and compete against current low-cost high-scale solutions. Crazy idea, I know.
However, trying to artificially limit all discussion about R&D and future tech by claiming "it's more expensive than fully scaled solutions" has got to be full luddism. This loom prototype is too expensive! I can hire a man for a shilling a day!
> This is an absolutely disingenuous point that compares the cost of full-economy-of-scale tech to literal one off R&D prototypes.
No, even at scale, materials that you can extract from ore are inherently going to be cheaper than materials you have to extract from three different ores and then crystallize, even in a manufacturing lab. These just aren't comparable processes, and no amount of scale is ever going to fix that.
Instead of assuming I'm making a disingenuous point, you might have asked for clarification.
That's setting aside the problems others have brought up, which is that the materials in question have other properties besides conductivity which make these materials inappropriate for transmission application.
No, switching from raw aluminium to an obscure synthesised compound is not going to be worth it for a few % efficieny gain. We've had centuries of "scale up" with copper and it's still not worth it.
I'm not sure of the correct scientific language here.
As far as I'm aware this is a brittle /inflexible material so my point about the mechanical properties still stands.
And when people refer to growing crystals, that generally refers to a particular kind of crystal. Ive never heard of anyone growing aluminium crystals, except if it's a compound, and then you get a crystal like we think of when we say crystals.
> As far as I'm aware this is a brittle /inflexible material so my point about the mechanical properties still stands.
Yes. You want them to be ductile (malleable, or that can be deformed permanently in less-technical language). Although they could also be flexible (meaning that they can deform, but go back to their natural shape if we stop applying a force), as in the case of fibre optics cables, which are actually not crystals but quite brittle.
The interesting twist is that a solid pretty much has to be a crystal to be malleable. Almost all the metals you can think of are in their crystalline state.
> And when people refer to growing crystals, that generally refers to a particular kind of crystal.
I don’t know. From my experience people equate crystals with shiny things without really thinking about it. But this is HN, and we should try to be a bit better than a random person on the street. After all, most people don’t know a web browser from an OS, but I would be ridiculed if I make that confusion here.
It is a wonderful community where you are almost certain to discuss with some experts in pretty much any given field, it is a great opportunity to learn and grow.
> Ive never heard of anyone growing aluminium crystals
If you’ve seen solid aluminium, then you’ve seen it as a crystal. It is pretty much impossible with common techniques to get non-crystalline solid aluminium.
> except if it's a compound, and then you get a crystal like we think of when we say crystals.
That’s the thing, I don’t know what you think of when you say “crystal”. In actual fact, a crystal is a state of condensed matter in which atoms or ions are aligned in a 3-dimensional pattern that can be replicated to fill the space. In the case of aluminium, you can actually see how the atoms are arranged in a periodic way in articles such as this one (figure 3): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323423565_Anomalous... . There are many other examples, and it is absolutely fascinating. We have the tools to count atoms and see the structure of the material!
I am not the one deciding on terminology. In this case, both copper and aluminium are crystalline metals. Any lump of these is actually formed of a lot of smaller crystals bunched up together in what we call polycrystals. This is why they don't have the nice geometrical shapes people tend to associate with crystals in pop culture. But depending on how the material was made, these geometrical features can be seen with a magnifier or a microscope.
I am not blaming you, I know the knowledge of the general population of this sort of things is not great and you cannot know it before some tells you. A whole bunch of new age scams would completely fall apart if most people actually knew what a crystal is and where we can find them.
They are not ceramics because this is used for compounds with elements such as oxygen or nitrogen, which is not applicable here. Aluminium oxide, Al2O3, which used in sapphire "glass" in watches, is a ceramic that contains aluminium.
No, you're just the one pedantically enforcing a definition that's irrelevant to the conversation at large.
You aren't holding up your end of the conversation. Being a good listener means putting some effort into understanding what people are trying to say even if they get terminology a bit wrong. Jumping in to correct people on minor misuses of terminology doesn't show you're smart, it shows that you care more about correcting them than about their ideas.
I mean, cool, good to know copper and aluminum are crystalline metals, but the point here is that they're ductile and LK-99 isn't--you can't make wires out of LK-99. Arguing that copper and aluminum are crystals isn't adding to the conversation, it's just missing the point.
Ok, I doubt anyone is still reading this, but anyway…
> No, you're just the one pedantically enforcing a definition that's irrelevant to the conversation at large.
I am not enforcing anything. How could I, anyway? I am pointing out an error in terminology. It is far from irrelevant, all the threads about that subject are full of misinterpretations and misunderstandings. One of the reason for that is that scientific articles use the jargon of the field, which can deviate from how certain words are used in our daily lives.
> You aren't holding up your end of the conversation. Being a good listener means putting some effort into understanding what people are trying to say even if they get terminology a bit wrong. Jumping in to correct people on minor misuses of terminology doesn't show you're smart, it shows that you care more about correcting them than about their ideas.
It is not a small vocabulary issue. This stuff is fundamental materials science and you cannot understand anything about this subject if you are confused about this. Again, this thread is full of people who are confused because they don’t understand some words in the same way as the writer. Crystalline and amorphous materials have very different properties as far as conductivity is concerned. The crystalline aspect is fundamental.
> I mean, cool, good to know copper and aluminum are crystalline metals, but the point here is that they're ductile and LK-99 isn't--you can't make wires out of LK-99. Arguing that copper and aluminum are crystals isn't adding to the conversation, it's just missing the point.
What is missing the point is that we know how to make wires with brittle materials. Prime examples are silica in fibre optics and YBCO in superconducting tape. And yes, whether they are crystalline or not is very important for both of them.
In this context, they are speaking of electrical efficiency, i.e. the amount of power lost to system impedance during transmission, not some abstract concept like effectivity. The efficiency of a transmission line is expressed as a ratio of power received at one end of the line over the power sent at the other.[1]
The cost still matters because if the losses cost less to replace than the superconducting material costs to install, no one will use it. So parents point still stands. It doesn't matter how high the electrical efficiency is, what matters is cost efficiency.
This is only true to a point. Evaluating incremental cost benefits on the basis of the delta of energy loss along specific lines ignores the state change that occurs when main trunk elements of the grid become lossless and energy generation and storage solutions can be deployed in a near-location agnostic manner.
As with all toy models being applied to the real world, there are important factors to model in that aren't immediately obvious.
Who's "they"? If anyone is talking about electrical efficiency they shouldn't be because cost efficiency is what matters for a transmission line. Transmission maintainers have no reason to care if a wire transmits with 100% electrical efficiency if it's cheaper to lose some electricity than pay for the perfectly electrically-efficient wire.
I had heard the parts about "probably wouldn't be a big deal for CPU performance" and "probably wouldn't be great for energy storage", but I hadn't heard the point about "we use less efficient materials for power grid transmission than we could, because of costs".
I suppose I didn't expect that we necessarily had like, the "absolute most efficient that could be made" (if that is something substantially more complicated at a materials-science level than "some simple-to-make-alloy"), but I hadn't imagined that it was a substantial difference. (I think I had imagined that they were... copper wires with like, surrounding metal tubes, or something? I hadn't thought much about it.)
Could you either say, or give my a search term I should look up in order to read, a little more about the trade-off being made between materials cost and efficiency of transmission lines?
Am not the author of that comment, but the fact that comes to mind is that aluminum is used for virtually all transmission and distribution lines - for price reasons - even though copper has better conductivity.
If we did discover a room-temperature superconductor, I suspect it would be a while before the cost to produce it in the bulk quantities required for electrical transmission are economically attractive compared to what’s already available.
> it would be a while before the cost to produce it in the bulk quantities required for electrical transmission are economically attractive compared to what’s already available.
Note that there is no guarantee that that would ever happen. Electrical resistance is not the only thing you need for something to be an economically efficient power line. While superconductors are by definition excellent in terms of electrical resistance, there is nothing to guarantee that they wouldn't be too brittle, or too heavy, or too hard to mould into the required shape, or simply require materials that are too rare on Earth. And all of these would not be things that can just be worked around with better production processes or smart engineering - they would be fundamental limitations of the specific material, just like the low temperature requirements of currently known superconductors will never be improved with more research.
So this isn't a matter of when they would reach the point of being better economically, it's also very much a matter of if they would ever reach that point. Hopefully, we'll get lucky one day and find a material that is superconducting at room temperature and above, that is study and light and easy to make into wires and made out of abundantly available elements. LK-99 certainly wasn't most of these things. Even if it had been superconducting, it wasn't a good candidate for any of the other properties we want anyway, so it likely wouldn't have been much better than other known materials for most applications.
The pace of development of computing seems to have trained people to think in terms of "when" for science and engineering problems. The normal paradigm is to think in terms of "if," and that aligns well with most non-computing inventions.
There is a good chance that they never reach the exponential breakpoints that everyone likes to fantasize about.
Yeah. There’s a lot of wishful thinking about science and sciencing up solutions to the world’s problems — especially here. The fact is, most progress is slow, and even if there is progress, it’s not necessarily economical in either financial or energy perspective.
In theory, we could have had a much better power grid with more transmission. The reasons we don't have nothing to do with the price of aluminium, or the resistive losses of it. It's just difficult to build large-scale infrastructure. Transmission projects typically spend longer in court than actually building them. Superconductors would not change a thing, unless it changed that.
Aluminum vs Copper is not that simple. Aluminum has worse conductivity for the same area, but area is in no way fixed. And aluminum has actually better conductivity than copper for the same weight. You just have to make the cables a bit thicker.
It may come down to cost, but other physical properties enter the picture. For example: thermal expansion is an issue for overhead power lines, along with how ductile it is.
In other cases it is more important to reduce resistance, not so much because of the power loss but because of what the power loss means: the generation of heat that may be difficult to remove.
Of course you can get around those problems at extra cost, but it is more than a straight up comparison of the material cost of the conductor.
In some desperate places, people would cut down aluminum power lines and sell them to scrapyards for some quick buck. But copper power lines? Those would be in a similar danger in many more places.
Not only in desperate places. I heard last year (or the year before) someone stole few km of train wire in Germany. Although to this day some people think it was a Russian sabotage rather than genuine theft.
Previously (for example in Poland) I used to hear about things like this all the time until maybe a decade ago.
Gold (2.44x10-8 Ω•m) is worse than copper (1.68x10-8 Ω•m), but better than aluminium (2.82x10-8 Ω•m).
It does have excellent anti-corrosion properties.
I wonder what kinds of alloys we will see in the potential future with asteroid mining and thus comparatively cheap gold.
Imagine replacing lead with gold in industrial applications.
Or the stainless steels with a gold component in them.
The trouble with asteroid mining is that getting anything there and back is expensive, let alone any heavy equipment needed for large scale mining.
My guess is the main application will be for space missions that find it cheaper to carry mining/manufacturing equipment rather than all the materials they need. Even that seems potentially a ways off. I suppose we could mine asteroids for science sooner, but that's quite a bit different than any mission plan which includes mining as a part of the required logistics. Maybe if there's some materials needed for extending life support capabilities? But still I'd have to wonder why not just take the extra supplies with you.
Maybe a moon or Mars base could change some calculus. As I suspect the break even point of such a plan may require lots of use of any such equipment.
Aluminum vs copper is a good example. Another is that we already do use superconducting transmission lines in a few places. We could do more of that, but presumably it's expensive to install and/or maintain otherwise we'd be using it everywhere. I'm not sure what the longest or highest capacity superconducting links currently in existence are.
Actually no: they have to be insulated well. People forget that it doesn't actually take energy to stay cool, just to remove the heat. The issue is what's your heat gain from insulation inefficiency per length - and it does get better then thicker your cable gets, because volume increases more rapidly then surface area.
If you're dealing with usecases that need to be cooled anyway, you may well be better off with the tradeoff of needing liquid nitrogen cooling and better insulation in exchange for entirely eliminating resistive heat.
I wonder if we can use these superconducters on spacecraft and probes. Maybe we can place superconducting links on the outer hull of a spacecraft heading to Mars, or a probe heading into outer space.
Cooling them would still be a problem.
The sunny side might not be the best place for them.
They might find a niche in some instruments in probes, but for wiring it does not make sense.
The rest of the probe electronics don't like being that cold.
Well, I think it comes down to whether the energy cost of active cooling is better or worse than resistive losses. Which one is better doesn't depend on cable length.
We frequently use aluminum wires with a higher thickness to make up for the lower conductivity as compared to copper. It’s not as simple as cost vs performance though, as aluminum is substantially less dense than copper. Gold and silver are also better conductors than copper, but of course are very expensive, and still have resistance. Zero resistance may be with it on some cases. For instance in projects that currently use high voltage dc it may be worth it due to safety and complexity wins, but that all would depend on how hard (expense and complexity) the superconductor is to deploy.
Can confirm, my parents had an aluminium telephone line in the UK until it failed and had to be replaced. Moot point as it's replaced with a fibre optic cable now though.
The crux of the problem for superconductors used as power delivery is the "critical field" problem. [1]
Super conductors are superconductive to a point. Once that point is crossed they turn into regular conductors. (I've seen ~1A cited. For context, EVs charge at around 500A).
To make them useful for power transmission, you'd have to up the voltage to insane levels to avoid collapsing the field.
Superconductors have a critical current density (Ampere/m^2) that varies with temperature and external magnetic field[0]. So if you want more current, you need to use a bigger wire (and/or make it cooler). YBCO HTS tapes have enough current density for power transmission[1].
This is the curse of popular science websites hyping things up; most people, present company included, have no idea what the scientific language means - be it superconductivity, LHC results, or astronomic spectrography.
So popular science wraps it in a "what you could do with it. maybe. possibly." Or what it means. And commenters have latched onto it, but a lot is said with an air of confidence, of just-so. "Oh uh, superconductors, conducting is passing electricity from one end to the next, super is like really good, uuh uh uh... I know, what about power lines from the Sahara to Europe so they can build solar collectors down there!"
Same with exoplanets, the actual science is "yeah the luminosity of this star drops by 0.0003% at a cycle of 300 days and we're getting some photons that indicate there may be hydrogen molecules", pop sci turns that into "EARTH-2 TEEMING WITH LIFE DISCOVERED, GENERATION SHIP WHEN?"
Funny you should mention the solar connectors and electricity interconnections. There is a Morocco -> UK interconnector project that is underway right now.
Interesting, from what I saw a lot of people got informed on why those overly confident predictions were drek - I don't know that I have seen a claim go unchallenged.
It was like stomping out weeds and it wasn't always well received.
I hope that those that got dashed (and observed the dashing) take a step back the next time something from "FuturistSuperScienceNews.com" or whatever pops up touting a revolutionary XYZ. Those sites are like 99% trash that train their readers to distrust science when their clickbate articles don't pan out. If I were conspiracy minded, I'd swear they exist to build out a mistrust in institutions.
I felt a similar way with the news of the fusion 'breakthrough' around 6 months ago. "Fusion power is here! All we need to do is engineering!".
They achieved this fusion by creating a container of material that produced massive amounts of xrays when it was bombarded by a high powered laser. These xrays caused another container's surface to ablate at such a rate it compressed its interior to the point that fusion was achieved.
However, this being a weapons lab, they created the experiment to model the secondary device in an H-Bomb. The secondary is theorized outside the Top Secret world to be a cylindrical tamper of (enriched?) uranium. One hypothesis in the public sphere, is its the primary device's Xrays that cause this to ablate at such a rate and that the inside is compressed to achieve fusion. The purpose of the fusion is primarily for the neutrons it generates, which are used to cause a massive amount of fission in the tamper, producing the majority of the energy. For example, if replace the uranium with another non-fissile material, and you have a "neutron bomb".
The reason the breathless hype annoyed me is that at no point was usable energy the desire of the test. In fact, the test solely was to feed real world data back into the supercomputer models, so that we know how our existing stockpile of weapons would work or even perhaps to find optimizations. We know this mechanism of ablation causing fusion works, we've known for 60+ years, all we're doing is doing it in a lab.
I'm not sure why there is this need to hype these events, like fusion or LK-99 so much. It seems that being a naysayer is reacted to as if the naysayers are explaining a magician's tricks. As if we don't hype these events the public will lose interest, or even our children will drop out of STEM careers.
> They achieved this fusion by creating a container of material that produced massive amounts of xrays when it was bombarded by a high powered laser. These xrays caused another container's surface to ablate at such a rate it compressed its interior to the point that fusion was achieved.
You are telling me that a US weapons lab just announced a successful path to a laser triggered pure fusion bomb? Yikes!
Not actually sure if it can be used to ignite more fusion fuel, but if they using this to test secondaries then it sounds like it might.
I really hope we get fusion reactors before pure fusion bombs, as pure fusion bombs are going to be a nuclear non-proliferation nightmare. While it might not be easier to built pure fusion bombs than bombs with a fission trigger, controlling the precursors and knowledge is going to be very difficult.
> "Fusion power is here! All we need to do is engineering!".
I agree with this statement and it has been true of fusion since at least the early 2000s. Don't underestimate the difficulty of engineering. Safe fission breeder reactors are an engineering problem as well, one which humanity has largely abandoned due to repeated failures.
I think the most efficient means of delivering so much xrays that kilograms of material can fuse is with the primary stage of an hbomb, which is just an implosion fission bomb. I wouldn't be too worried about this test creating a new weapon.
However... In the early 80s, the SDI initiative aimed to have orbiting satellites that utilized x-ray lasers to shoot down incoming warheads. The theory of these were you had h-bombs in orbit, with long cylinders of a material that would amplify the x-rays from the bomb. You'd point these at the incoming warheads and trigger the bomb and (chefs kiss) you have beams of xrays that would destroy warheads.
One of the major reasons this was skuttled, was that the test they used to find a material they thought amplified xrays was flawed (see below).
With the test-ban treaty, they weren't able to test any other materials. Now we have a facility that tests materials to amplify x-rays...
Sidenote: The test was, explode a bomb in a tunnel, shut the tunnel down with explosives to trap the shockwave, then use the xrays to test materials to withstand x-rays as well as amplify them. Teller thought they had seen amplification and sold the military on the satellite idea. Another scientist, thought it was a secondary thermal effect on Oxygen. There is an interesting story about the back and forth, and the pressure to have another scientist lose his credentials for disagreeing with Teller, that is a good follow on to the Oppenheimer story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excalibur
> I think the most efficient means of delivering so much xrays that kilograms of material can fuse is with the primary stage of an hbomb, which is just an implosion fission bomb.
I agree with you, if you have fission triggers, you aren't going to want to use lasers. At least with today's lasers.
> I wouldn't be too worried about this test creating a new weapon.
My concern is that NNP has focused on controlling access to fissionable material, so potentially this is a path to h-bomb that doesn't require fissionable material. As lasers get better, secondaries that don't use controlled fission materials become a risk. At what point does the world start having to worry about controlling access to lasers? How does this impact the future research and funding of lasers?
Additionally if you can test h-bombs without tests. This also makes it easier to develop and test a h-bomb without revealing you have an h-bomb. Typically nuclear weapons tests are detectable via seismographs.
A large part of the energy loss in electronics happens in switch-mode Buck-Boost DC-DC converters, as I understand it mainly due to internal resistance in the components used and due to the magnetic field not being directed enough to transfer 100% power between two inductors.
Would a cheap room temperature superconductor bring any benefits here?
For "normal" DC-DC converters it's the losses in the semiconductor switches and diodes that dominate[1], unless cheap inductors or capacitors are used.
High-efficiency DC-DC converters often use a resonant tank circuit[1], which supports high-frequency operation and zero-current or zero-volt switching, which together significantly reduces switching losses.
In such a circuit I imagine superconducting inductors/transformers and superconducting capacitors could be beneficial to improving efficiency further.
Keep in mind though that resonant DC-DC converters can reach 98% (or higher) efficiency already[3] with current tech.
> but the excitement and amount of replication on this paper was pretty fun to witness and experience.
I was really elated to see how people were so interested and getting to see what peer review in science actually looks like. How in the real world it is done outside of journals and conferences, which people frequently give the misnomer "peer review." I hope people will walk away from this experience with a better understanding of how science works and why replication is such a critical aspect of it. Because the truth is that our academic incentive structure has generally fallen out of alignment with the actual goals of science.
Unfortunately I don't think we got "to see what peer review in science actually looks like" because this was such an unusual deal. The amount of interest and excitement gave us the ideal amount of peer review/reproduction. For the vast majority of things nobody even tries to reproduce it, and many of the publishers don't even provide the tools needed to do so.
Yeah, I agree that for the vast majority of things most people don't try. Or at least publicly demonstrate that they tried (key phrasing). But it is also silly to think that 3-5 people sitting at a desk reading a summary of work can validate said work. Really they can only invalidate or specify that it is indeterminate, but neither of these are validation. Which that's a key difference from the general public understanding of "peer review" (meaning journal publication).
But it might also be worth noting that often reproduction happens behind the scene. People point to big works like that which comes out of CERN, LIGO, or other massive projects and state that such works cannot be replicated. But actually those have high rates of replication, which is why there are hundreds of authors on the work.
For LK-99, people got to see a lot of what is typically done by grad students who never tell the public what they did (or even their community). That the communication between scientists is happening through preprints, email, twitter, and other methods that are not journal publications. Because science happens faster than the journal cycle. Most scientists are reading preprints, and letting the work dictate the signal of validity long before a journal can.
But what I was alluding to, which you might have picked up on, is that the reward system we have in place ("publish or perish", h-index, journals, etc) are misaligned as they do not reward this cornerstone of science -- replication -- (typically discourages is) unless there are credible claims of breakthroughs of the highest kind. Maybe we should rethink this system, and I hope that the timing of this along with the other discussions of academic fraud can help people to question the system and metrics that we use to evaluate, and ask if they are actually aligned with the original goals.
>I hope people will walk away from this experience with a better understanding of how science works
I don't think this was at all what this saga was about. People essentially turned a physics experiment into social media drama and science had nothing to do with it.
I also don't think the 'academic incentrive structure' has fallen out of alignment with the actual goals of science, despite the fact that people keep saying it, and in particular not in condensed matter physics.
If anything this whole thing showed two things: 1. Science works fine, 2. Please keep it to the actual scientists instead of turning it into yet another discipline dragged on Twitter. I know it's an unfashonable thing to say these days, but 99.9% of people have literally nothing to contribute to a debate about bleeding edge physics research, despite that apparenly everyone feels entitled to have an opinion on it.
> Because the truth is that our academic incentive structure has generally fallen out of alignment with the actual goals of science.
Did it though? Nobody published this, which is good, right? And then Max Planck Institute gave the most conclusive answer, and they're the most prestigious replicator-to-be mentioned, so that also sounds good right?. And now, Mr. L and Mr. K will not receive funding for this material, because it decisively failed to publish, which is also good?
I don't know. It sounds like the academic incentive structure worked really well here.
Yes. Science is about more than producing novel ideas. A lot more.
> Nobody published this, which is good, right?
People did publish it, and many responses. They published on Arxiv. I think you are misunderstanding what papers are. Papers are simply a communication method between domain experts. The purpose of journals is to improve distribution and to provide a signal to help experts sift through the (possibly) large number of work. But you need question if they are accomplishing the goals. Do they provide more access than arxiv? Certainly no, arxiv is about as accessible as it comes. Do they provide better distribution than other modes? (colleagues, google scholar, semantic scholar, Twitter, etc) This is debatable and likely depends on your domain. Do they provide a useful signal to other experts? Also arguable and depends on your field. I'd say that the more papers/yr in your field, the weaker the signal. THEN you need to ask if these benefits outweigh the costs. That's both monetary costs from governments, corporations, and universities as well as the time costs to format the papers for the specified venue, deal with the back and forth with reviewers, and being a reviewer yourself. After you have considered the costs and benefits you can answer if these venues are good for science.
> Max Planck Institute gave the most conclusive answer,
Via "preprint"
> And now, Mr. L and Mr. K will not receive funding for this material, because it decisively failed to publish, which is also good?
Indeterminate. Science is noisy. You're wandering around in the dark. All we know is that they failed. But >90% of research results in failure. What is a better question is if their work advanced scientific knowledge. Which it looks like it did.
> I don't know. It sounds like the academic incentive structure worked really well here.
I'm what you think the academic goals are, which we need to know before you can determine if the incentives are aligned. For some added ethos, I'll reference Peter Higgs[0]
> I was really elated to see how people were so interested and getting to see what peer review in science actually looks like. How in the real world it is done outside of journals and conferences, which people frequently give the misnomer "peer review." I hope people will walk away from this experience with a better understanding of how science works and why replication is such a critical aspect of it.
I saw people become enamored with a Russian anime cat girl on twitter.
This was vapid, consumptive entertainment. Which is perfectly fine, let's just not pretend it's better than the bachelor because science. Replace Chad had a date on love island with Anime cat girl did the science things, and that's about where we're at.
On the bright side: when people say “believe in the science,” this is exactly what they should be thinking: challenge.
This whole process has been super healthy and similar challenges are important and needed for everything published, not just this particular research area.
I might be out in left field, but I read so often that researchers are running out of ideas. What’s wrong with getting a PhD for challenging something already published? It is incredibly valuable to society.
The South Korean paper claimed to have found "The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor". It took a month for researchers around the world to essentially debunk this.
Science works by peer review, yes, but that should have never been a claim to begin with. They were blinded by excitement of the results and eager to publish the paper, instead of being conservative and making sure they got everything right.
Now it's clear that they missed several key aspects that seem trivial in retrospect. It's just sloppy science.
Sure, this caused much excitement in science nerds everywhere, and the media got more ad impressions, but overall I wouldn't qualify this particular event as "super healthy".
Coincidentally, or not, this[1] is currently on the front page.
I believe it is the pressure to publish. The number of papers published has grown exponentially and it is reported that the quality of research has decreased.
As I understand it the paper was a leaked preprint. Which means they didn't "claim" anything, but were distributing it to get peer review and feedback before publishing.
Sure, but there's a level of entry to the "challenge" call to action. When folks are saying "believe in the science", it also means to believe in the scientific method, which does include challenging observations and independently validating conclusions. A proper challenge requires coming up to the plate, proposing a challenging hypothesis to a given conclusion, and then going through the work required to test your hypothesis, documenting the inputs, the variables, and showcasing your outputs.
What this doesn't mean is the average human who does not like the conclusion producing a statement saying "I don't think that's real", or even going so far as to cite data which could appear to refute the conclusion, are producing a challenge to the conclusion. They're just stating an opinion. This isn't designed to be exclusionary, but to ensure that challengers are going through the effort that the producer of the conclusion did. If one is not willing to learn the problem space enough to reasonably challenge the effort, then that challenge is moot.
Not too long ago, a creationist would have sarcastically asked "Does this extend to biology too?", and gone away thinking they had made an actual argument.
Try challenging climate science, even in a valid way, and see how popular it is on reddit or HN or twitter. Even my above comment now has a negative score which sort of proves my point.
note: i don't deny climate science but like any science there are ways to challenge it
People are "against" challenging climate science because a) it is extremely mature and the broad strokes as well as most of the fine strokes are overwhelmingly settled and have been for decades, and b) challenge implies a delay, which is not something we can afford; this tactic is often used by people engaging in bad faith, using the guise of "challenge" to discredit the science.
People are probably downvoting you because you're coming across as either contrarian at best or bad-faith at worst. Surely you realize this.
Again, this sounds an awful lot like the creationist rhetoric a few decades ago.
> "Try challenging evolutionary biology, even in a valid way, and see how popular it is".
All crackpots think they're under siege and that their ideas are unfairly dismissed. Their ideas are "valid" (because they say so), so why are those ideas being dismissed without due consideration? You hear the same rhetoric from anti-vaxxers, creationists and climate change doubters.
The problem is a lack of perspective. Crackpots of all stripes don't know that they're crackpots. To them, their distorted thought patterns aren't distorted.
At the same time, it's a common mistake to believe that any argument that anyone is capable of making is automatically as valid as any other argument. Some arguments are simply more valid than others; there's no use in humoring people just because they think their unfounded opinion is as valid as any other.
Or maybe I should just defer to how Isaac Asimov put it: "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"
I'm not dismissing any particular argument. I'm dismissing the attitude espoused in comments like this:
> Try challenging climate science, even in a valid way, and see how popular it is on reddit or HN or twitter.
It is an attitude that is a hallmark of cranks of all forms who think they've pierced the veil, but almost inevitably they have fallen for some distorted thinking that they can't see beyond due to the limitations of being trapped in their own head and echo chamber.
I would add that logical fallacies like ad hominem are only useful up to a point. In the real world, once a group of people advance N obviously false arguments, they will lose credibility and their N+1th argument will be treated less seriously. I don't think the N+1th argument should ever be entirely ignored, but these people can't expect to be up on a podium presenting to a climatology conference if they have a long history of advancing ludicrous and/or dishonest arguments and have no deep expertise in the domain.
> It is an attitude that is a hallmark of cranks of all forms who think they've pierced the vale
And labeling groups who disagree with them as “heretics”, “crazies”, “cranks”, etc is how the orthodoxy censors — as they’ve done for thousands of years.
That the orthodoxy seeks to censors dissent rather than address it, particularly when ignoring their own ridiculous members (eg, Al Gore and Greta Thunberg making absurd statements), is why trust in institutions has collapsed. Institutions now routinely engage in obviously dumb ideas because they censor their critics and then run off a metaphorical cliff.
In allowing themselves to censor and demean “cranks”, orthodox institutions have rotted badly — both from the perspective of delivering quality results and from the perspective of driving effective policy change.
The problem here is that it is much easier to create bullshit than it is to refute it. At some point you have to stop addressing the points of people who have repeatedly been incorrect, because there are better uses of your time.
> And labeling groups who disagree with them as “heretics”, “crazies”, “cranks”, etc is how the orthodoxy censors
It's also how you accurately describe people who actually are cranks, such as creationists, flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, and so on. That these labels can sometimes be wrongly weaponized doesn't mean that such descriptions aren't also sometimes accurate and helpful.
It's useful to have a unifying descriptive label because it reflects the fact that all these groups of people are similar in one important way: they think there exists an orthodoxy that are stifling any questioning of an official narrative. When, in reality, this "orthodoxy" are simply a group of people who know more about the topic than you, and who view the crank in the same way that you view flat earthers. As people with distorted thinking who have advanced an argument that is entirely void of merit.
> That the orthodoxy seeks to censors dissent rather than address it
How do you think biologists should deal with the claims of creationists? That's not a rhetorical question. There are many, many groups with a grievance against the "orthodoxy", who harbour perceptions of being ignored/censored Do you think creationists are unfairly treated by biologists? Or do you think biologists are correct to ignore them? If you think biologists are correct in doing so, doesn't that violate the principles you've outlined?
> (eg, Al Gore and Greta Thunberg making absurd statements)
I mostly agree with your take. But I think considering that 99.999...% of the population are not climate scientists, it is still a valid question based on what they are declaring differing opinions as invalid and theirs as correct. Is that not based mostly on faith, next to some superficial indicators like "majority of scientists", etc.?
For the record - I personally agree with the findings of bodies like the IPCC. But I am not sure there is more than the aforementioned faith and some more indicators backing me up on that.
> Is that not based mostly on faith, next to some superficial indicators like "majority of scientists", etc.?
I believe it should be the same rule of thumb we are accustomed to using elsewhere.
If we have a computer security question, we will defer to the people who have dedicated 30 years of their life to mastering computer security. Whatever their opinion is, it's statistically more likely to be correct than whatever opinion I have after 2 weeks of "research". Likewise for astronomy, neurosurgery, being a pilot, and any other complicated area of study. I can't fly a plane, I can't operate the LHC, and I don't know anything about vaccines, so in all of these areas I need to outsource my opinions, to an extent, to the people that know these things better than everyone else. It's not perfect, and we can call that imperfection faith, but I can't think of a better approach.
I would say yes, but not for political reasons, which I pay zero attention to.
I just believe that there is a tremendous amount of pressure (financial and otherwise) to publish, there is academic pressure to toe the line on popular theories, and humans are fallible.
This is most likely the same for climate science as it is for medical research or any scientific field.
It's not over yet, at least not definitively. Nature Magazine like every other source so far is basing its comments on the attempted replications using the leaked paper. It's considered fairly certain at this point that the paper was incomplete/not enough to duplicate the material.
The full paper with the original samples were reportedly sent to Korea University of Science and Technology for examination. That lab group has only so far verified the structure of the material, no word on whether they've replicated it or its actual properties based on replicated samples or the original samples.
Until we hear from them, everyone (including Nature) is just guessing.
Of course there's some sour grapes in Nature's article, as arxiv.org has had the best exposure it's likely to get in years. The more that publish there, the fewer who publish behind firewalls, etc. For starters, Nature's reprints are hellishly expensive.
> arxiv.org has had the best exposure it's likely to get in years. The more that publish there, the fewer who publish behind firewalls
We're talking about condensed matter physics here, arxiv needs zero exposure in this field. It is extremely common to publish on arxiv first and only then begin the process of submitting the same manuscript to be published (and peer reviewed) in a journal.
And while there are still some authors that skip over publishing pre-prints at all, there's no serious arxiv competitor if you do decide to publish pre-prints. It is a de-facto monopoly in this field.
True, but it's given the site more exposure in the general sense, it's now quoted by outlets that probably hadn't heard of it before this 'excitement'. (That can only help in the long run, one day Elbakyan mightn't need to do what she does.)
I think it’s fair to say that even as a failure, it’s likely to stimulate much more attention, funding, and research in the area of high temperature superconductors going forward.
> Great reminder what materials science can do to some underlying economics.
Just economics? :-))
Materials science is practically <<civilization>>.
The Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age.
The other axes are: energy production, transportation improvements. But even those frequently come from materials science. The steam engine needed mass production of high quality steel, etc.
While I was very skeptical of the base claims of LK99 (extrodinary evidence required), I did sort of fall a little bit for the hype of what this kind of material could be used for. Mostly in terms of computer clock rates and used in batteries. Turns out what seemed intuitive at first was mostly wrong.
But then that is what happens a lot in various fields. Something that seems obvious isn't done because those that actually know the field can explain all the details you didn't know. Anyone here in programming have had that battle with upper management...
Hey lesson learned in this case. Don't always assume you have a grasp of all the details.
Serious question: why is extraordinary evidence required? Room temperature superconductivity doesn't break any (known) laws of physics, doesn't introduce new particles or fields, etc, doesn't require an unprecedentedly sensitive instrument (like LIGO/VIRGO)...
There's a lot of modern physics, chemistry, biology that is uncritically accepted which I think deserves a somewhat higher bar of skepticism than RTSC
I'd settle for regular evidence: a nice paper from a reputable lab that replicates the findings of the original team. Extraordinary evidence would be required for non standard model physics or aliens or something like that.
I enjoy the optimistic takes as well. I think it's really fun to imagine incredible new materials that change our baseline capabilities in design and manufacturing.
All that said, there's also a case for saving all that energy by seeking out skeptical points of view. See thunderf00t's video from 5 days ago: https://youtu.be/p3hubvTsf3Y
All in all, I appreciate that so many people are enthusiastic about one thing in particular: replicating results. So many people will take a press release or an academic paper at face value. But the real value is in replicating the results.
The analysis in the video is good, like most of his videos. But I hope someone makes a roge tldwthunderf00t channel, that cut all the parts he repeats and when he laugh of people. A video with the same content and 1/2 of the length would be better.
The most interesting part is one of the researchers believed it was Nobel's prize worthy, went rogue, and submitted a paper with only 3 authors to claim the credit of this invention. Coincidentally, Nobel's prize only awards at max 3 people.
Soon after the other researchers realized and published a 6-author paper only hours after.
Yes, this really showed me what a great deal of science is nowadays. Backstabbing to publish, get credit/funding, rinse/repeat, so you can continue to marginally exist. Would be nice if we could just return to do actual science, for, you know, science and the advancement of our species.
disagree, the excitement led nowhere. We already have high temp superconductors so even if it was real these applications can/are already handled. Its not harmless either, people invested time, money, and effort.
its great to be excited for real science discoveries but hoaxes are not good, and can potentially cripple, crush the industry thats actually developing these things.
"The original authors were sloppy and overeager, not malicious"
Reckon so, but if they believed they were on the brink of a great discovery and thought they could be beaten to it at any moment, then it's understandable.
A researcher wasting his/her time in a promising result is business as usual. An important part of the work is to read papers and decide if they are promising enough to try to informaly replicate them and extend them.
There are a lot of details to consider. Does it makes sense? Who published it? Did that team has a gopd track record? Where was it published? Did somepne else used the paper as a base for a new paper? How long/much would it take to try?
Only after that, researches decide to try it or just send it to the paper bin.
>Great reminder what materials science can do to some underlying economics.
I had a similar experience when reading up on the history of gyroscopes recently. Its absolutely amazing to watch the advances and miniaturization from mechanical to optical to now micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS). Watching the giant machines from the space race first shrink, then get replaced by light traveling fiber optics to now vibrating bits of silicone. With the prices imploding as a result.
Still havent fully grasped the implications of older lithography systems being now usable for electro, mechanical and optical applications. Especially as they seem to be quite affordable, especially with multi-project wafers. With open source project even getting chips for free via google.
> [...] There was nothing missing from so many beautiful works, except that it was true that the tooth was made of gold. When a goldsmith had examined it, it was found to be gold leaf applied to the tooth with great skill; but books were written before the goldsmith was consulted.
> I am not so convinced of our ignorance by the things that are, and whose reason is unknown to us, than by those that are not, and whose reason we find. This means that not only do we not have the principles that lead to the truth, but that we also have others that accommodate the false very well.
Bernard Le Bouyer de Fontenelle, Histoire des Oracles 1687. Translated with Deepl.
One of the few things I actually remember from undergrad was a presentation freshman year where some famous person said "almost all major leaps in engineering ability come from one of three things: economics of scale, something else (maybe new algorithm? not sure), or a new material that simply has better properties". I don't want to be a materials scientist, but that line got me very interested in materials science and gave me a lot of respect for it. If you find a new material that is 3x better than any other in some way, that unlocks entirely new doors.
> the excitement and amount of replication on this paper was pretty fun to witness and experience
I understand a lot of people were more cautious and jaded, but this was my first go-round on the science news hype-mobile. I was really, really excited! It was a real emotional rollercoaster (if you imagine a rollercoaster that takes a couple of weeks to get anywhere).
> If something can levitate without being a superconductor it is already useful for a LOT of things.
It is not that useful. Electromagnets are used when we need something like that at scale, such as in maglev trains. Permanent magnets have their uses, but we have plenty of others that are as strong as this, and plenty of others that are much stronger than this. I suppose we will investigate it’s properties and we might find something interesting, but almost certainly not because of its magnetic properties.
Not really, what really matters is what weight it can actually support. Most of these materials can barely levitate a few grams - way below any kind of useful application except for maybe gimmicky toys.
Diamagnetic levitation is extremely weak, which makes it much less practically useful, and also reduces its entertainment value (if you can levitate things 2 cm above the surface the 2 billion children in the world will be all over the stuff; the 1-2 mm you can get with bismuth diamagnetism isn't particularly impressive.
Maglev trains do not use diamagnetism or this kind of permanent magnets. They use electromagnets and sometimes much stronger rare-earth magnets, which are much more convenient and effective. Some of them do use superconductors, though, AFAIK.
I don't know what you are talking about. This material was never going to revolutionize anything even if it was a superconductor. What you call fun to witness was to me just another episode of "Mat Ferrell's Undecided" except on HN.
Also, you can't solve the most important economic problems through technology anyway. How is a superconductor going to decrease your rent?
Room temp Superconductors, along with fusion, would affect the economy profoundly. What the exact effect on rent would be is hard to predict but under the "post-scarcity society" mental construct, having infinite energy at zero cost (amortized) would presumably make the price of housing change.
Room temperature superconductors would not give us zero-cost energy any time soon. Even if one had a high enough critical current to be used in transmission lines (which is not a given), transmission losses are under 10% in modern grids.
> transmission losses are under 10% in modern grids
Modern grids are designed to keep those losses down.
If the losses weren't a factor the grids would be designed differently. Very differently. As in, North Africa would be so full of solar panels the generating fields would be visible from space.
The point is that room temperature superconductors only matter if they have several other properties - they have to be ductile (easy to mold into wires), have good material resistance, maintain their superconductivity under high enough currents, and be cheap enough to produce.
A ceramic room-temperature superconductor, like LK-99 would have been, is not a promising material at all, since it's extremely costly to make wires out of it. And even if we found a way to do so, it might not have mattered at all if it only worked for the very low currents/voltages in the original tests.
I was talking about a hypothetical RTSC that was amenable to industrial scale, not LK-99. Even so, merely knowing that RTSC with poor properties existed, would lead to massive search of the nearby (and other) spaces for better properties.
See the history of glass optimization- hundreds of years of poking around with terrible quality glass, then a revolution during the Schott era, to modern day Gorilla Glass. Or silicon- the initial transistor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Replica-of-first-transist...) was not something you could shove into a missile, that took 15 years to develop. To today's modern ICs which approach the atomic limits of semiconductor manufacturing.
The hope is that the initial RTSCs will follow a similar path, obvious there no guarantee
Still, if LK-99 had turned out to be an RTSC, that wouldn't necessarily take us any closer to an industrial-grade RTSC. It could just as well be a false lead, an interesting material with some niche applications that would remain more of a curiosity than anything.
RTSCs are not like cold fusion - as far as we know, they should be possible, so finding one would not upend science in some huge way. If the ones we find don't also happen to have all the other interesting properties we need, then they may never have any significant impact at all. This is what seems to be missed.
If LK-99 had been an RTSC, it should still not have been major news outside materials science research, since it wouldn't have had any direct impact on the economy, nor any predictable pathway to one. Some other future discovery, if it ever happened, would have been the one that actually mattered. That potential future discovery may have built on the current work, but whether it would be 1 year down the line or 10 or 100 or never would not be knowable.
It's like you're arguing with somebody different from me, who said something entirely different from what I said, while also agreeing with my unstated premise, and conditional language.
My point, which I believe contradicts yours, is that it's perfectly plausible that 1000 years from now humanity knows about plenty of RTSCs and still chooses copper and aluminum for power transmission and sillicon for transistors etc, because none of the RTSCs are actually useful on an industrial scale - so RTSCs would not have any significant effect on the economy. Of course, the opposite is also perfectly plausible.
I take your other comments to imply that finding one RTSC would prove or at least suggest that a path exists to some significant industrial usage of RTSCs down the line. I don't think that's correct, and I'm arguing about why I don't think that's correct. Of course, I may have misunderstood your comments.
I fully agree that finding an existence proof of RTSC could also fail to achieve anything, and even not affect rent at all- absolutely zero change in the two world lines.
Let me rewrite my original sentence that bothered people, so it's a bit clearer. Here's the original:
"""Room temp Superconductors, along with fusion, would affect the economy profoundly. What the exact effect on rent would be is hard to predict but under the "post-scarcity society" mental construct, having infinite energy at zero cost (amortized) would presumably make the price of housing change."""
Change "would" to "could" in the first sentence to make it conditional. Add an additional sentence at the end pointing out that house prices are complex and many factors influence them, and another pointing out that while sometimes we can achieve a property in a material, but fail to realize its industrial potential".
It does seem reasonable to posit that RTSCs, even if they failed to realize their industrial potential- could have an affect on rent. Rent is (to a zeroth order approximation) determined by a wide range of macroeconomic activities, and if we reordered our entire society around improving RTSCs, that could have indirect effect on the cost of housing.
All of that was implicit in my original text- and I had hoped to make that clear- rather than making a strong statement like "rent will go down if RTSCs exist".
makes it easy to deliver power from huge centralized fusion reactors to the edge. It is neither sufficient, nor necessary, but could be a useful thing to have.
+1. I’m wondering how many people will become physicist due to this wave of exciting news :) we’re not getting superconductors today, but we might get less “oh my god the earth is doomed humans are horrible” and more “I’m optimistic about the future of the human race”
As a practising material physicist, I am very enthusiastic about the progress of knowledge in my field and human curiosity and ingenuity, and also very pessimistic about the outlook for our various civilisations and appalled by human carelessness, shortsightedness, and selfishness.
My long term pessimism comes partly from the fact that I know what is behind the magical technologies that are supposed to save us, which is why I am very skeptical about them. I am also very doubtful about our ability to make the right decisions in difficult times and under severe constraints. But hey, I do have a cool, interesting, and enjoyable job.
This invention almost saved our generation. I mean, our parents invented radar, semiconductors, nuclear energy, etc. For us it's back to building social media, adtech, and similar "technology", I guess.
There's this bizarre reaction I see from many where they see the excitement and curiosity and hopefulness as a form of error and source of embarrassment. When mixed with an open mind and reasonable skepticism, it's a powerful opportunity to get people engaged in imagining a different world.
I had all kinds of exciting conversations about what a validated, commercially viable LK-99 could produce. Why would I ever be inclined to feel that there's pie on my face now that we've got fairly strong evidence refuting the claims?
In this case, I think the excitement and hopefulness was not dangerous or wrong, but I do see a risk to this kind of preprint hype in other contexts.
During COVID there were multiple cases like this where a study got a lot of hype and discussion from non-experts and turned into "the science says X", when in fact the science was as of yet extremely unsettled. Sure enough, as the experts came to a consensus it rarely matched the public's initial perception, which led to a lot of confusion, conspiracy theories, and fingerpointing.
Science-as-spectator-sport is fun, but I worry about the impact it will have on society as a whole and on the execution of science in particular. How many research decisions will be influenced by the possibility of going viral? How many bad decisions will be made as a result of pressure from millions of non-experts who briefly become armchair X-ologists?
I think this kind of excitement followed up with "wasn't anything after all" is both dangerous and wrong.
When science is done badly (which arguably shouldn't be considered science), which then leads the public to have elevated expectations, only then for science to be done right and disprove and reject the original "findings", public trust in science is ever so slightly damaged.
I think you're conflating PR with the science underneath.
PR is something we cannot control -- and avoiding releasing results in a (semi-vain?) attempt to control PR arguably does more harm than releasing them does.
The sea makes waves as it will. We can moderate as much as we are able. I think the rest is simply a matter of accepting that things happen as they do out of our control. We can only truly impact ---- and even then, not necessarily guaranteed! D: ---- -- in some potentially very small part -- whatever sphere is around us, and I feel that that's a collective individual responsibility.
PR stands for public relations. Like, it literally is about controlling what the public does with releases. It's not total absolute control, but PR firms can work wonders. The university press office can take a paper and exaggerate the claims to try to make the university look better, or at least, not highlight that testing was done in mice,
for example.
That is technically true, though in practice the definition I believe has expanded to include "general news and press coverage of XYZ", which is how I'm phrasing it here.
Having had some work get incredible attention, and other work not at all, I've experienced a small slice of the volatility of the web. My most popular, for example, tweet chain was a semi-technical vent I wrote over the course of 30 minutes after stewing about some semi-useless technical hype that no one seemed to be addressing the flaws in. I wrote it in a way that was more attention-grabbing somewhat than my more technical posts, put it out there, and shared it in a few places. It was pretty shallow, technically, I think, but I feel like it really had to be stated, since it sorta felt...really pretty obvious?
Two days later or so, my number of Twitter followers had over quadrupled.
I think humanity can be quite finicky sometimes (a more general statement, I don't think one could conclude that from the previous anecdote alone).
PR is a euphemism for propaganda, popularized by Edward Bernays as propaganda to promote the perception of American exceptionalism (propaganda is something the enemies of America do, here in America we do public relations instead!)
Furthermore, preemptively reacting to expected third-party behaviors is doomed.
Journalists are going to write nonsense, hype-filled science articles. PR flacks are going to hype puff newswire blurbs. Why? Because that's what they're paid to do.
You can curse the existence of bad incentives, if you want annoying ideologues to call you a communist.
Or you can hire your own PR flacks. Because worrying about how people will react to what you're doing is PR, and going up against professionals without your own is like going to court without a lawyer.
Or you can just, you know, do science, accept that people suck sometimes, and get on with your life.
public trust in science is ever so slightly damaged
This is just another example of the media’s negative effect on society. Similarly, the media endlessly poring over every detail of the Ukraine war has likely made their job much more difficult because it damages the element of surprise.
The media originally began as something quite negative with what we called “yellow journalism.” Then for a century or so we saw a kind of golden age of journalism where newspapers had strong reputations to uphold but were fairly rewarded for it through ads and classifieds.
Now the media is back to yellow journalism (clickbait) and eroding the institutions of society.
I don’t think you can blame the media for this one. I heard very little to nothing about LK-99 from the news or the regular people in my life. But I heard a ton about it from my “tech” friends that spend a lot of time on Twitter, and HN.
The issue mostly comes from the current yellow journalism state of science news sites. It's a game of telephone where the further you get from the paper, the more details are missing and hyped. Often times losing the very essence of what was discovered.
I don't know why you're implying that laymen are beneath discussing/speculating on scientific research, since during COVID plenty of bullshit was spread by the supposed experts too, which is what fueled distrust in the first place. It should be a lesson that people now take "Science" far too seriously, it has clearly turned into a religion for many with a hierarchy of authorities that must not be questioned (something like government propagandists > mainstream journal editors > scientists >>> the lowly sinful masses). I guess that's why the blunders of our health authorities are being conveniently forgotten or handwaved with paltry excuses today; they're above criticism, while it's "dangerous" if the proles commit the same mistakes.
> How many research decisions will be influenced by the possibility of going viral? How many bad decisions will be made as a result of pressure from millions of non-experts who briefly become armchair X-ologists?
Ask L Ron Hubbard?
The willingness of the crowd to believe in counterfactual things is not constrained to science, and whatever damage/risk is posed by that is not new - as Galileo can attest.
Mr Hopkins, you have earned tremendous respect for your work over the decades, and your passion for social justice is commendable, but there are better ways to channel it than into off-topic incivility and joking about killing people.
Have we been so throughly baked into anti-intellectualism that people who can read, and use that advanced skill on Wikipedia, along with the other skill of critical thinking, are to be denigrated as "armchair X-ologists"? I know our country's rallying cry is "Math is hard, let's go shopping", but not all of us have bought into that anti-science, anti-knowledge, anti-being-smart-at-all attitude. Thanks to a lot of hard work by a lot of very clever and motivated people, we have humanity's knowledge at our fingertips, and we're supposed to not use it? Just proudly stand up and say "I refuse to learn new things!"
How many worse decisions are made by people who can't read and won't learn about the nuances of a topic?
> When mixed with an open mind and reasonable skepticism, it's a powerful opportunity to get people engaged in imagining a different world.
I feel like this line is doing a lot of lifting in your comment.
The problem is that as lay people we are completely unequipped to gauge a claim like this. I followed along on HN and there were plenty of posts by people who were giving LK-99 crazy odds of success, fueled in no small part by viral videos of outright hoaxes from pseudonymous "researchers."
It's fun, in a science fiction-y way, to speculate on what a material with the supposed properties might have meant for the world, but the degree of skepticism that should have been applied was lacking for many.
There's a tendency on HN and similar forums to devour new developments - almost a fanaticism about learning the newest/latest/best before the general public. But in this case, a truly extraordinary claim had been proposed, and it was even published without the researchers' consent. There was precious little reason to give it any attention at all at that phase.
If people had viewed LK-99's properties as "almost surely science fiction" all along, I could find myself agreeing with you, but that's really not how this played out. Sadly this event showed there's a market for hyping up weak claims that people will be poor at evaluating, and I guess we can probably expect more of them.
> Sadly this event showed there's a market for hyping up weak claims that people will be poor at evaluating
I don't see it as in any way an unique event, and also not unique for the enthusiasm seen on this site. The "believers" in most of the hypes typically aren't cured fast, as the article notes:
"While some commentators have pointed to the LK-99 saga as a model for reproducibility in science, others say that it’s an unusually swift resolution of a high-profile puzzle. "Often these things die this very slow death...""
The tone here on HN was very similar to the tone of a lot of credible physicists. Just because it turned out to be not superconducting doesn't mean that the people you are criticising were wrong to think what they thought given the available information at the time.
HN discussion did not particlarly have "reasonable skepticism".
This is probably because people (i) were not aware that there had been many other hypes about RTSC before but less publicly visible all proved to be false, (ii) not being able to accurately judge the technical quality of the initial evidence, (iii) uncritically believing that the data in the initial preprints was proof for superconductivity because their authors said so.
I find it perilous to treat an entire community as it if has one voice. Ie. "the HN discussion" as a singular entity with a singular binary state on its skepticism. Someone else could equally claim that the HN community was super pessimistic and skeptical about it, because I certainly saw a lot of that too!
While a convenient abstraction, it plays into our biases to notice and remember only some of the discourse.
Plus I don't think it's really relevant to what I'm saying given I'm not making a claim about how any specific individual or group reacted, but that it's odd when there's people who treat an optimistic outlook as an error.
The last few weeks with the LK-99 hype combined with the usual ChatGPT stories, I actually started feeling that maybe the site should be renamed Hype News.
> but that it's odd when there's people who treat an optimistic outlook as an error.
IMHO it’s best to treat any extraordinary claim as BS until proven otherwise as it’s very easy to concoct BS claims. If we take every one of them seriously, it will consume all of our attention and destroy the signal (actual facts) to noise (unproven claims) ratio on this site.
I am perfectly capable of managing, simply unknowns, it doesn’t have to have an actual boolean value. Treating it as bullshit is not the correct approach - sure, there is a healthy amount of skepticism, realism to have, but while RTSC is a too nice to be true goal, it is not fundamentally against any known laws, I would retain my bullshit behavior to faster than light travel, the daily tesla-free-energy-for-the-world, etc. kind of low-effort ones, and even in their case would hold a tiny 0.001% chance of my skepticism being wrong.
It's not about managing unknowns. It's about low information speculation taking up all the information bandwidth crowding out high information factual stuff.
it's odd when there's people who treat an optimistic outlook as an error.
It's pretty standard to be skeptical of extraordinary, poorly supported scientific claims and you didn't have to be an expert to find out experts were fairly skeptical of this from the beginning and the reasons for their skepticism. The broad HN sentiment was at odds with what you could find elsewhere. This isn't a moral failing or anything, just a common mode of HN-like forums but to elevate it to some some sort of positive rather than a thing to be cautious about seems backwards.
> Plus I don't think it's really relevant to what I'm saying given I'm not making a claim about how any specific individual or group reacted, but that it's odd when there's people who treat an optimistic outlook as an error.
An optimistic outlook without a semi-plausible basis that you can convincingly elaborate on, or link a vaguely credible source doing so, IS an error, at least going by HN norms.
It is just an attitude that values positive possibilities over fretting about negative possibilities.
Especially in cases where there is a small chance of a huge upside, relative to virtually no downside. We didn’t lose any superconductors. :)
I don’t recall anyone on HN erroneously declaring the material was definitely a new superconductor before subsequent evidence arrived at a consistent conclusion.
To clarify, I was referring to "An optimistic outlook" in terms of actual assertions/claims/etc. that are written down on-the-record in public.
Of course HN users can have the general abstract sentiment of optimism at anytime in their mind. I don't think there are any norms around internal sentiments.
This superconductor material was the literal definition of something you forget about and then get pleasantly surprised (not excited) about once it is replicated.
For the scientists getting their hands on a breakthrough, the risk and reward was worth it, but for the public at large? No one should care until there are definite results.
Also, if anything this black-and-white view of the world is responsible for the bad outcomes associated with optimism in hyped science. If we could distance ourselves from the binary result/truth and simply engage with the topic without that weight, we would have much more productive discussions.
On the flip side, there was a lot of what I'd call, hmm, "unreasonable" skepticism. If I had a dime every time someone said "This is fake because Korean culture (blah blah armchair sociology)" ...
HN demonstrated its common ability to surface prolific posters who identify as autodidacts and appear to have gone on a Wikipedia binge this morning, but who nonetheless speak with a confidence that until now may only have been demonstrated by ChatGPT.
The absolute worst part is that some of these guys, especially the younger (e.g. fresh grad through ~30) ones, do this in person! I was out drinking with some colleagues a few months ago and I said something offhand in a normal human conversation about wanting to learn more about X, and one guy pulls out his phone and just starts reading me the Wikipedia article about X.
I could personally take or leave live readings of Wikipedia. I wouldn't do it, but I have also gone on my share of solo wiki binges. There's no problem with learning about things. The thing that bothers me is a room full of people with shallow knowledge of a subject who talk over anybody else. I think it's fine to care about things, but I need other people to be able to tune their volume to their level of knowledge and understanding, which you really can't do if you think you know everything.
Jeez— it's almost like few people around here are physicists, consider physicists credible on their specialty, saw physicists excited by the potential, and get excited by exciting things.
As noted by the sibling comment, the physicists (especially those who specialized in superconductor research!) were the ones who were the most skeptical of the announcement, partially because claims of room-temperature superconductors are actually relatively common, and partially because the evidence in the paper was just atrociously bad [1].
One of the things I look forward to in an HN discussion is the comments of people who can collate expert opinions on the subject and surface these kinds of points in a more ELI15 kind of way. But despite there being ~a week of LK-99 stories permanently on the front page, there wasn't much of that (a little on the initial thread, and virtually nothing for the next several days)--and it's not for lack of physicists commenting on the topic (in other forums)!
[1] I saw someone point out that, when you translate the units on the resistivity/temperature graph, it is a worse conductor than copper at room temperature, below its claimed critical temperature.
> One of the things I look forward to in an HN discussion is the comments of people who can collate expert opinions on the subject and surface these kinds of points in a more ELI15 kind of way.
HN is full of subject matter experts on computing-- that is, software, and to a lesser extent, hardware-- beyond that it's a mixed bag at best. Even as an interface designer, I see so much confidently presented and totally bogus pseudo-expertise on art and design here that it's actually kind of funny, and that's much more closely related to software development than physics is. That BS sounds credible to other developers because it's in a developer's voice and trips on misconceptions common among developers. I suspect that's true with the other non-computing topics discussed here that I don't know enough about to give an expert opinion on.
As a long-time developer myself, I've been on both sides of assuming our astonishing intelligence and analytical capability can make up for lacking the requisite expertise. The mistake is expecting the HN crowd's musings about things outside of it's expertise to be more trustworthy than any other internet forum. If this were some physics subreddit or something like that, the criticism would make more sense. This is just people being excited by something a lot of other people were excited by.
> One of the things I look forward to in an HN discussion is the comments of people who can collate expert opinions on the subject and surface these kinds of points in a more ELI15 kind of way.
I can tell you from first hand experience, much of the time subject matter experts are often downvoted into oblivion by the HN hive mind. To the point where you only see clueless people at the top.
Happens to me regularly when it comes to machine learning, neuroscience, education/university threads.
For example, people say crazy things about things like university admissions or grad student salaries. Never mind about ML where most of the information here is just wrong.
I have no qualms one way or another, but afaik conductivity in small samples is insanely hard to properly measure even when the synthesis process is more deterministic/efficient.
Mostly I saw actual physicists who had experience in the field being very skeptical, throwing a lot of cold water on the fire, and pointing out that the original authors looked like amateurs.
And then I saw a lot of people with zero experience in the field running around yelling about how they were out of touch, how this was a revolutionary new way that science would progress on twitter, out in the open, etc. People who were skeptical got called all kinds of names.
It didn't help that a lot of people on twitter pivoted from crypto-hype to AI-hype to LK99-hype pretty much on a dime.
There was also a lot of highly upvoted comments with the usual thoughtleadering style of "let me beak it down for your, here's the ELI5 of what is going on an what the implications will be..." followed by whatever they learned in the past 48 hours from plowing through wikipedia articles.
There could be a lesson here about listening very carefully to experts in the field when they give you their opinions. They often sound very highly biased, but there's usually very good reason for that. Once in a lifetime there's the event where some paradigm is overthrown and all the old scientists look a bit foolish because their instincts were to be skeptical -- but those instincts came through a lifetime of correctly being skeptical 999 times out of 1000 about wild claims in their field.
This could be a teachable moment that could inform people about climate change, coronavirus and other scientific claims. If you want to disagree with experts in the field you really need to get off your ass, get off twitter and the blogs, and go do the hard work of understanding what the scientists actually know by reading the articles that they publish. They're very often correct and their opinions hold more weight because they've literally spent their lifetime learning and thinking about this one thing. They didn't start learning about superconductivity / viruses / climate last week and you need to do better than some showerthought or wishful thinking that you think proves your viewpoint.
But we're not going to do that because its only been a few days and we've literally forgotten about how much flak scientists were getting on here over skepticism towards the initial claims.
And I had some of the most positively stupid arguments on here where people were trying to assert that scientific experts needed to express exactly zero bias because they were experts and held to a higher standard than the average moron with no experience who could argue whatever they liked. Engineering a rationale to be able to reject anyone with a strong opinion based on expertise in favor of strong opinions from randos on twitter.
So... who cares? Why should laypeople be expected to engage in that much analysis solely to avoid excitement? These aren't policy makers. No lives were lost. Only keystrokes were wasted... and, calling them wasted is probably too harsh. Lots of people learned what a cool thing this would be if it happened, are disappointed that this isn't it, and might even be a little more interested in physics going forward. Why are you so emotionally invested in saying "told ya so"?
Imagining that attention to this somehow displaces attention those things is beyond dubious. You could pick literally any popular topic and level the same exact criticism.
> HN discussion did not particlarly have "reasonable skepticism"
There was a dose of Dunning-Kruger, and some software engineers telling us how to science, but there was also a lot of engagement and interesting discussions with genuine experts. Overall I found it quite interesting to follow.
> uncritically believing that the data in the initial preprints was proof for superconductivity because their authors said so.
It had undertones of small team (in a private institution, no less) taking on the stodgy establishment, which is quite popular among some people here. The concepts are also not very difficult to grasp on surface, so a lot of people can form an opinion, however well founded.
People complain about peer review and scientific publisher as well. It is not difficult to see how this could push them to champion something that comes from arxiv.
I feel that I had reasonable skepticism based on the consequences to the scientists if they turned out to be wrong. Korea is not known to be a particularly forgiving or understanding culture, and I suspect that all of these men will be working at a fast food restaurant soon.
> There's this bizarre reaction I see from many where they see the excitement and curiosity and hopefulness as a form of error and source of embarrassment.
What the general public does not see it the regular flood of papers that pretend to change the world and that turn out to be bogus. So, from an insider point of view, the issue is that what we are supposed to avoid (crack pot theories becoming mainstream or getting too much traction) happened in a spectacular fashion. So a lot of people get excited about nothing and then end up distrusting the scientific process itself (“they don’t know what they’re doing”, “they make everything up”, “they write a lot of nonsense”, etc).
In this case, I think it turned out to be a good thing. People got excited, some of them thought about possible implication, others managed to pick up some notions of material science. The enthusiasm and activity from people trying to replicate and investigate the material was heart-warming. But yeah, it was bound to finish like that.
> Why would I ever be inclined to feel that there's pie on my face now that we've got fairly strong evidence refuting the claims?
You really, really don’t want to be seen as a crack pot when your funding and career depend on how external people evaluate your work. You also really, really don’t want to have to retract a paper because you’ve missed something obvious. Retraction is a traumatic process even if you are in good faith. This is sidestepped by releasing preprints (so no peer review and no risk of retraction). But at the same time this is a reason why outlandish preprints tend not to be taken too seriously. There is less incentives to get it right.
> There's this bizarre reaction I see from many where they see the excitement and curiosity and hopefulness as a form of error and source of embarrassment. When mixed with an open mind and reasonable skepticism, it's a powerful opportunity to get people engaged in imagining a different world.
This should be taken in the context of room temperature superconductors being notorious physics vaporware along with practically useful advances in quantum computers and useful fusion. What these have in common is a sort of holy grail status, where it's obvious they'd be a revolutionary complete game changer. Not that any of these things are obviously impossible, there's just been so many instances of discoveries in these areas that have failed to replicate that there's inevitably a lot of eye rolling in physics when these types of findings are announced.
> There's this bizarre reaction I see from many where they see the excitement and curiosity and hopefulness as a form of error and source of embarrassment. When mixed with an open mind and reasonable skepticism...
Kinda buried the lede there. A lot of folks around here and in my own orbit were practicing the former while excluding the latter, or worse, were taking shots at people trying to inject some level of rationality into the conversation. Heck, some folks even went so far as to refer to those types of counterpoints/comments as just a "bizarre reaction"...
Excitement and curiosity about science is a good thing, but hyping up dubious claims and low quality research is not. I don't know who to blame in this case; I'm not sure whether it's the researchers, science journalism, social media dynamics, or a combination of all those things. But it doesn't seem healthy to have the general public incentivizing scientists to rush out early results with sensationalist claims. Real science takes years to validate results and a lot of that happens behind closed doors, as it should.
I think the public reaction in this case is a symptom of a problem with our information ecosystem that extends beyond science. Just because something is fun to participate in in the moment doesn't mean it's not harmful to the underlying scientific/political/social process.
Another point is: It's properties might still be interesting (possibly amazing, just not a superconductor).
A significant reduction in room temperature resistance would still be incredible, even if it wasn't a "room temperature superconductor." Might still enable a lot of those "exciting conversations." Just not some binary yes/no computer holy grail.
Also, big effect was scientists went "Whoa. There's a whole mode/regime of resistance change we never really looked at." The modeling papers that came out almost immediately were really interesting. Might still have cool applications.
My only gripe was the VCs declaring superconductivity without any evidence. They’re so quick to follow the heard and jump on trends that they do zero diligence in just waiting to see if something is legitimate or not. People being hopefully and discussing possible solutions is not a problem. But VCs declaring that it’s the future and you’re falling behind if you’re not working on it is the problem.
In a world where true dreamers are often sidelined, where the embrace of change is met with resistance, and where society prioritizes incremental economic evolution over the visions of genuine pioneers, we find ourselves amidst signs and patterns all too indicative of a … culture in decline!
I disagree. I get pissed off when revolutionary scientific news is brought to me only to turn out to be some bogus crap. I don’t care about the replication and peer review process, it’s not fun, it’s banal. I would much rather have preferred to learn about LK-99 once it was confirmed to be a room temp superconductor, and if it wasn’t then I’d rather never hear about it.
Now I have to walk back explanations I gave to various people and explain LK-99 actually isn’t special at all. I will look like a god damn idiot.
The whole time LK-99 was in the news, we were wringing our hands about potential uses and the impact it would have on our world. For once it seemed maybe there was hope that we’d see exciting times again with exponential advances in technology. That dream has now been thoroughly eradicated.
By the time a true room temp superconductor comes out, it probably won’t be in our lifetimes.
> Now I have to walk back explanations I gave to various people and explain LK-99 actually isn’t special at all. I will look like a god damn idiot.
There is a lesson there: do not make definitive statements about something that is uncertain. There are a lot of interesting things to say about this material along the lines of “it would be cool if it worked, then we could do x or y” while still making clear that this is tentative.
> The whole time LK-99 was in the news, we were wringing our hands about potential uses and the impact it would have on our world. For once it seemed maybe there was hope that we’d see exciting times again with exponential advances in technology. That dream has now been thoroughly eradicated.
Some people did. The materials scientists I know were mostly skeptical with a hint of cynicism or optimism, depending on the individual.
> By the time a true room temp superconductor comes out, it probably won’t be in our lifetimes.
It is difficult to say. We barely understand what makes a material a superconductor. This understanding will improve, and we will do some more systematic studies. Or it might show up in some completely unrelated project, just by chance. It is very difficult to say when this might happen. All we can say is that so far we don’t think that room-temperature superconductors are a physical impossibility. So at least there is hope.
It sounds like you were explaining it to people before it was confirmed - why did you do that? I don't really grok the emotional connection you seem to be talking about - how does someone pin their mental state so much on something like this (unconfirmed research)?
Is it the idea that there might be something great happening, and that we might get the chance to live in exciting times? I could see people wanting to believe in that opportunity.
we already live in exciting times. I wouldnt blame someone for explaining an idea that the scientists themselves came forward and claimed it as a valid result either. Blind optimism is NOT good in my opinion even if intentions are good
You've learnt a lesson and grown from it. There's no reason to blame others for your own actions.
This is also a great opportunity to demonstrate your understanding on how difficult the scientific process is to your friends.
Telling your friends you have changed your mind on everything you told them earlier because of new evidence should be something you take pride in. Because only true scientists change their minds, and even discard their most cherished theories, based on new evidence.
> "Now I have to walk back explanations I gave to various people and explain LK-99 actually isn’t special at all. I will look like a god damn idiot."
Y'know those stories on Reddit about people's awful childhoods, like "I needed the toilet in a shop and my parents told me to be quiet, and then when I pissed myself, my dad dragged me outside and beat me for 'embarrassing him'"? Have you noticed the dad comes out of the story looking bad for prioritising his image? Saying "I don't want to tell this to people because then _I_ will look bad" already makes you look bad.
I told my dad LK-99 isn't a superconductor and he said "that's a shame, oh well, exciting while it lasted".
> Now I have to walk back explanations I gave to various people and explain LK-99 actually isn’t special at all. I will look like a god damn idiot.
And that's just LK-99. You could easily be just as mistaken about other things. If you start confusing possibles with absolutes things get messy really quickly.
> By the time a true room temp superconductor comes out, it probably won’t be in our lifetimes.
It could happen tomorrow, next week, next year, within the next 500 years or later or even never at all. And that still wouldn't prove that no such thing exists. We just do not know.
> Now I have to walk back explanations I gave to various people and explain LK-99 actually isn’t special at all. I will look like a god damn idiot.
Maybe, but I have immensely more respect for someone who can just admit they were wrong compared to someone who bends over backwards to justify their incorrectness.
NB: there's a lesson here that holds for nearly all of "news". Much of it is either early (partial, erroneous, speculative) accounts of something that's just occurred, speculation about something that might occur, or blather about an event that's scheduled and programmed and has little opportunity for real surprise (though of course that slim chance is played for all it's worth).
If you step back and scan headlines a few days, or weeks, or years, after, you find that almost all of it comes to naught. (Not absolutely all of it, there is some real news, and occasionally a story grips and/or surprises.)
You can spare yourself a tremendous amount of cognitive and emotional strain and whiplash by waiting for the dust to settle. And possibly, cultivating a sense for what might actually be significant. (Early stories of a virus in a city I'd never heard of in China growing at 10x a week caught my attention quickly, as one reasonably recent example.) It's possible to get caught with a normalcy bias, though being prepared to quickly revise your priors helps here.
The LK-99 story reminded me a lot news that broke shortly after I'd first come online via the campus Unix network at uni: the Fleischmann–Pons cold fusion paper. There was a lot of excited discussion, and within a few days I had (courtesy of an FTP server --- this was not only pre-World Wide Web, but pre-Gopher, though we had Usenet) an ASCII-text version of the paper, something I excitedly wrote (via snail mail) home about. And ... after a few weeks ... it turned out to be nothing.
Science, mostly, progresses relatively slowly. Big upsets are rare. Extravagent claims (in a hype-driven and grant-driven world) are increasingly prevalent (it was bad enough 35 years ago, it's worse now).
So this time 'round, I scanned the headlines and some of the discussion, but mostly sat the story out.
The generative-AI story (as another recent example) seems more substantial but still somewhat frothy. Though I strongly do expect that far more capable AI techniques could well emerge quite suddenly and to profound effect.
But when you recognise that a story is largely speculation, especially if it's defending a point of view (Business As Usual / status quo or New World Order / this changes everything, or many views lying betwixt and beyond) recongise many of them as strongly motivated and quite often weakly informed.
Hopefully your explanation gave others reason to want to fund more material science research. There's nothing wrong with wanting something to succeed, and understanding the potential impacts is good motivation to keep going (while following the science process).
Sixty Symbols released a video about this yesterday, and in it professor Philip Moriarty is less than impressed with the whole ordeal. I haven't been paying attention, I'm too jaded and skeptical and assumed from the start that there was something wrong and much hype about nothing.
As Philip points out, Sabine Hossenfelder’s quick summary on LK-99 2 weeks ago punched large holes into this whole thing in less than 5 minutes. I wish media outlets presented skeptic viewpoints instead of just hype.. but that doesn’t sell.
Hossenfelder is just a cynic that critizises more or less everything that isn't her own work. She even tried to discredit LIGO a few years ago - not even using her own insight but merely by paraphrasing what a Danish group thought they had seen as error. This issue has been resolved since then and the Danes just misunderstood parts of the original paper.
Lol. These conspiracy scientist outgrowths are getting truly insane. "Lets ignore all these published, peer reviewed independent studies that confirm the discovery and listen to one random guy who's most likely not even a physicist and writes his ideas on wikipedia."
everyone in this thread should watch this, instead of "the excitement was good for everyone" they might realize these hoaxes harm scientific integrity. The audacity of HN to state something is good, without listening to scientists give their take on it.
> instead of "the excitement was good for everyone" they might realize these hoaxes harm scientific integrity.
Totally disagree. If anything, this whole episode (debacle?) reinforced the fact that science works and the process played out exactly how the scientific process should work:
1. First, the paper was originally posted on arxiv, meaning it was a pre-print and didn't go through any peer review. So the vast majority of comments I saw on it was "Wow, this would be really cool, if it turns out to be true."
2. Immediately many labs around the world started trying to replicate the results. And very quickly there were some negative results that came back.
3. The thing that I think is so cool is not only did negative results come back, but from TFA people now have a very good understanding of why the initial analysis was incorrect. That's great science.
One may argue that this was really a failure in media communication vs. the actual underlying science, but if anything it teaches appropriate skepticism, especially when a report is initially published, without peer review, without yet being replicated, that ends with the sentence "We believe that our new development will be a brand-new historical event that opens a new era for humankind."
good points. I can agree to that. However, I do think something did break down and I think your assessment below is more accurate than my initial take.
> One may argue that this was really a failure in media communication vs. the actual underlying science
the scientific process and scientists here are innocent, media not so much in my eyes.
While we’re talking about things working as they should, even when frequently the opposite is true… what a wonderful discourse this was between two people disagreeing and then coming to find common ground. Thank you for providing such a great example to all of us.
The media is often wrong about many things. Sometimes due to ignorance. Others negligence. And occasionally its malicious. If anyone figures out how to fix that without destroying freedom of the press they should get a nobel.
Yeah, I think Professor Moriarty in the video comes to a similar conclusion - he does say "in that sense is science working", and goes on to lament the problems with misinformation in the social media age. I can definitely sympathize with the frustration of scientists having to deal with so much social media bullshit, and people who so confidently believe "My ignorance is as equal as your hard work and experience."
That said, I really loved that Sixty Symbols video for a couple reasons:
1. First, Moriarty was pretty much exactly spot on in his skepticism: the reduction in resistivity is not the behavior you'd expect to see in a superconductor (turned out to be due to copper sulfide impurities), and that the floating in a magnet behavior is not that surprising and could be due to diamagnetism.
2. I wasn't previously that familiar with diamagnetism beyond a vague "I remember hearing about that", so this whole thing led me known the wikipedia rabbit hole to find out about diamagnetism which was really interesting to me.
3. Professor Moriarty explains "this is not how you do science" (bad science by over-hyped press release is at least as old as cold fusion) and gives very good advice on how you should do good science in an age of Arxiv.
But there's nothing meaningful in the video. He just keeps reiterating how he thinks you should feel about the situation.
He clearly doesn't think it's worth his time to understand anything about LK-99, its history, or its popularity. It seems like most anybody that watched the fireworks show is more informed than he is. So what's the video about?
The same way he says "this isn't how science is done", you could say also say what he's doing isn't how peer review or journalism is done. What's not being addressed is that this kind of arrogance and appeal to authority is EXACTLY what flat-earthers and the lot are rebelling against, and the solution is not to put up more walls.
There are now potentially 10s or 100s of thousands of people who have seen how the sausage gets made, what kind of pitfalls there are, how measurements can lead to false conclusions, and mistakes can be made; and they're absolutely fascinated by it and want to learn how to do things better.
"An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people."
This doesn't mean that every individual needs to be an expert in every field. You only have to know so much about a given field and the processes within it to develop a degree of confidence in your perspective on who you can trust, and extend that trust to the people they trust.
Mistrust in science is borne of ignorance, but not in the way that you think.
Yeah. I would argue that he displayed some bad science of his own. He kept harping on about how the LK-99 paper didn't show resistivity going down to exactly zero, but had a residual resistivity. But that is exactly what you would have seen with a mixed phase sample with some superconductor and some normal material. It took proper scientific detective work to distinguish the possibilities, not this kind of silly snark.
I didn't interpret his criticisms that way at all, and given that his criticisms with both the resistivity graph and the not-Meissner effect turned out to be exactly correct, I'd give him a bit more credit.
As someone who remembers the original cold fusion debacle well, this felt exactly the same to me: announce a result with a ton of unnecessary hype and fanfare (I mean, the closing sentence in the paper was just absurd in my opinion) without first trying to (a) at least call up some experts in superconductivity to get their opinion, or at least (b) write a paper with less of a "new era for humanity" tone. This smelled 100% of these researchers chasing glory without a modicum of introspection. I thought the most important part of the video is where the professor said that scientists are taught that when they get weird results, their first instinct should absolutely be to question it: what could have gone wrong? how could my experimental setup have been flawed? These researchers showed none of that appropriate skepticism.
The video is published merely 1 day ago, when the consensus that "LK-99 isn't it" had already been formed, and these points have been long discussed by other scientists and random people on Internet long time ago.
There is nothing newsworthy about these points; they're even borderline hindsight.
Best as we can tell, it wasn’t a hoax. It was a poorly understood experiment (and perhaps premature arxiv preprint). It’s very similar to the “faster than speed of light” puzzle from a few years back. It doesn’t harm scientific integrity. It reveals that science is by nature an exploratory process where what we know today is subject to change in light of new data and theory.
As a PhD physics scientist with a familiarity with this area, I’m glad this got the attention it did and showed science working “as it should”.
I like Phil but around the table this morning with a few working/publishing scientists they all disagreed with his assertion that this paper has done more harm than good.
Consensus was that this would lead to more people interested in the field and what actually does work.
There’s heaps of sloppy science out there. There are massive structural issues in how science is done.
There’s obviously not enough money or prestige in condensed matter physics if Phil thinks this is a bad hoax and it’s bad for Science.
Within the space of a month this was resolved. It wasn’t even published. Go to pharma, medicine, vet, ag and you will see hoaxes that last years. Reviewers who don’t have any relevant knowledge. Journals which won’t retract until you threaten to sue them. Universities that will take no disciplinary action against hoaxers at all. LK-99 was almost debunked in a single media cycle.
The people who have taken this to reduce the credibility of science rather than these fallible humans who succumbed to their impulse for fame didn’t give science any credibility in the first place.
EDIT: shout out to our favourite website retraction watch. Anything you read there remember, that’s science working and some Scientist somewhere who likes being right has vanquished their enemy in the academy. https://retractionwatch.com/
I wouldn't call it a hoax - it was largely a very overstated result that didn't stand up to deeper scrutiny. That isn't really harmful. The primary issue I have with this, and many related things in recent years, is people outside the community of working scientists treating "X was posted on the arXiv" as "X was published". This tends to lead to people assuming that since it appears on that site and has the layout of a regular paper that it somehow has legitimacy. We saw this over and over and over during the peak of the pandemic, even seeing regular news sources writing articles where the only source material was some random recently posted arXiv paper. I don't think I ever saw corrections published in the cases when those preprints proved to be bogus. The arXiv is extremely useful, but lots of people outside the community of working scientists don't seem to understand how to weight what people post there.
As for the "audacity of HN" - this site is a very bizarre mixture of a relatively small number of working scientists, a lot of people without much scientific background who are very interested in science, and get-rich-quick startup types who are sniffing around for the next breakthrough they can turn into money. That mix leads to weird dynamics when it comes to how scientific activities get discussed.
You couldn't be more wrong. Getting people excited about possible technological advnacements is exactly the kind of thing we should be doing, we used to do this, in the 50s up until the 90s the prospect of the future was exciting.
What is the medias representation of the future now? A burning shithole, no future. It's depressing and not true. I enjoyed the few days of excitement, I want us to go back to having an optimistic outlook on the future of humanity.
We are humans, the greatest species on the planet. Even before industrialisation we lived on almost every continent ranging from scorching deserts to blizzard-filled snowlands.
Humans are the greatest adaptors to a given environment, even if the climate catastrophising ends up being true, we will survive.
How to be really optimistic?
Get away from the news, social media. Spend more time on hobbbies, family and friends. Do something for your community.
It’s still important to disambiguate the curious optimists from swindlers and fraud scientists. There’s nothing wrong with asking “what if?”.
Shaming laypeople and the media for not being scientifically literate enough to navigate quickly-releasing literature on quantum mechanics isn’t good for science either. It stifles curiosity, and this kind of take is what hinders people from taking an interest in science in the first place. What’s important is that as new information comes in, those same laypeople are willing to take in that new information, which is exactly what happened.
Science isn’t perfect and in this case, the process worked exactly as designed.
How is it a hoax? I haven't seen a serious article or video calling LK-99 a hoax, including this one. There were some faked reproductions from independent "researchers", but these weren't very trustworthy to begin with.
There was some drama between the authors, the science was sloppy and the writing inappropriate, but AFAIK, no faked data, no secrecy, they gave away their recipe in a way that allowed for reproduction attempts, and a few weeks later, we have a convincing explanation. Stupidity, not malice.
Loved the video. Also very annoyed with the general reception seen on HN like “well it was fun”. Unreal the authors had the audacity to add that last line proclaiming a new age for humankind. Even more unreal that news everywhere fell for it.
What I care about more than "fell for it" is the general lack of patience and skepticism from us, the audience and the commenters. As commenters, we are part of the media (i.e. social media). Usually, anything claiming itself a revolutionary discovery, especially in physics, has a strong undertone of crankery. For it to be included, even in a preprint, is a bit preposterous.
It's not wrong to be excited, but there is a sort of fatigue which builds up, like the boy who cried wolf.
The video really rubbed me the wrong way. I guess it's a persona he's putting on for the YouTube channel, but that "tough minded skeptic" bit is way over the top. He spent all his time criticizing various problems with the LK-99 paper that were indeed problematic (and widely commented on elsewhere), but didn't necessarily falsify the claim (e.g. they might have come from having mixed phase samples).
And he did not talk at all about the scientifically most interesting part of the affair, which was the clever investigation from multiple angles that finally unearthed the explanation. It's as though he just ran his mouth without reading the literature... which is not a very scientific thing to do, is it?
I was deeply sceptical of LK-99 and simply chose not to comment on it in public on the internet because: (1) confirmation or contradiction will come soon enough, and (2) being sceptical, however measured, usually attracts accusations of being a negative, cynical naysayer, and I don't need that in my life.
There’s a way to be skeptical without being “negative” but I definitely get it. People will sometimes latch on to things to the point that their identity is threatened by the possibility that they are wrong. I try to ignore this and just have fun speculating. Science as a spectator sport is a fun idea if we can avoid the drunken hooliganism.
I find it amusing how many people like you didn't notice the large amount of people bringing up all the points that this video made on the first day, as justification for why they doubted the hell out of this claim.
I'm well aware, and it's purposefully ignoring that the video is not bringing up anything new, nor were the authors beliefs new. It's implying that they would not have come to the same conclusions when it's just not true.
I’m implying that the off-handed prejudicial confidence from certain so-called skeptics is also “bad science” if we’re also willing to lambast the public for engaging with science without the requisite rigor.
I think it’s a fairly interesting story over all, and it feels like exactly how science should happen. We are humans and easily deluded. We fall easily for things we wish to be true. The fascinating story behind LK99 is incredibly human - including the rushing a preprint out to secure a noble prize by one of the researchers who was being excluded. The fascinating part to me was the fact engineers and scientists could on their own time try to replicate and did so in the open. People were excited and eager for it to be true and found hope in the ambiguity and excitement in the partial successes, and dreamed of what could be. Then, through careful analysis by experts who know their subjects well, we learned it was not the magic we dreamed it might be but a magic that we already knew about. A negative result of something so many people wished to be true is an ultimate victory of science, and to me more exciting than a positive result in many ways. It tells me we are on the right track on a great many things in the world, when it feels often we are on a wrong track on most things.
No, this was just bad science from the beginning. I've done experimental physics research and the way this team published their results and how sloppy everything looked is definitely not how science should happen, it's just a great way to ruin your reputation as a scientist (which the original authors thoroughly did). Every PhD student learns to e.g. include proof that an observed effect is not caused by a different mechanism than the one claimed (i.e. ferromagnetism instead of superconductivity), this is sorely lacking from the original publication. That paper would never have made it through peer review. The paper producing single crystal LK-99 and refuting the claims [1] is good science, read it and you'll immediately notice the differences in the quality of the text, the diagrams, presentation of methods, overall structure and conclusions.
I don’t think you got my point. I didn’t say their science was well done. I said science worked the way it’s supposed to work. Science can’t depend on everyone being flawless or above board, being unbiased, etc. the entire process - end to end - is built around the idea that we are all flawed, but through collaboration and rigor, we can see past the flaws to some deeper truth. That’s a collective effort. It’s perhaps easier when everything is done really really well. But it’s more impressive when everything is off the rails.
I disagree. The paper should never have been published. Science should not happen in the news with people making wild claims about non peer reviewed papers. More so about papers that were getting lots of negative public peer review in real time.
The only reason this story has a happy ending is the authors included manufacturing instructions. But everything else about the paper is not a good model of how to publish (wild claims that you will revolutionise the world, the title, the bad graphs, the 2nd paper that was published with different authors...).
The fact that papers get retracted is nothing new. Science as a field is already generally good at retractions. Science is generally bad at incentivising reproduction... But this case was extreme and not a good model. It should not require sensationalist news and dozens of labs to reproduce a paper that was failing peer review.
I think we disagree about what science is. Science isn’t something that is a optimal condition process. It’s a process resilient to human nature. Everything you hold up as a failure is in my mind a victory for science.
The failures of science are the papers that are outright fraud and as such are cunningly crafted to deceive and it actually works, and we believe falsehoods to this day - which I think we agree on being the failure of science.
This however was not. Yes the paper shouldn’t have been published. But it was. Etc. As humans are wont to do. Science didn’t happen in the news - excitement happened in the news. Human failures and bias reigned. Yet Science happened in the lab. That is victory.
Yet, the fact there are failures in no way impugns the victories.
Agree except on the peer review part.
Peer review is a farce perpetrated by the journal industry, both of which are an unnecessary burden and tax on science.
What “peer review” pretends to accomplish should happen after publication (comments or the sort).
A lot of people, myself included, are disappointed about how "science happened" here and absolutely don't share the view that it should be like this.
You're right that the system ultimately worked.
But doing things "well" isn't just to win some aesthetics contest. It's essential precisely because, due to all our human flaws, it's too easy to delude yourself by doing sloppy work.
In this case, doing sloppy work has won the authors international fame and attention -- an insult to all those who do their experiments properly.
The LK-99 authors probably didn't do themselves any favors in the long run, but it is easy to think of examples where sloppy work leads to some quick social media wins, but the topic is not as sexy so ultimately isn't scrutinized in the same way.
Social media clout is already playing a role in hiring decisions, and social media is only becoming more important. If they haven't already done so, it's just a matter of time before funding agencies factor it into their decisions.
Performative show science designed to wow a mass public is exactly what we don't need.
These things actually require real, deep study, talent, and tens of thousands of hours of hard work to do and assess properly. The people doing that need to be able to do their work in peace without needing to pander to crowds.
Right - it would certainly make science easier if we weren’t human, but we are, so we devised a system that is eventually resilient to quackery and hysteria. It’s impractical to lament our fate as hairless apes driven by the need to preen in public and dream of bigger better shinies. The truth doesn’t have to come with fanfare. It just has to dominate in the end.
Wow, so in the end you still think science is going to save us? We're completely ignoring science every single day when we go about our thoroughly unsustainable lives. We only like science when it gives us more (like LK-99). We ignore it otherwise. There is no reason to believe science will give us anything more apart from simply wanting it to be true.
I don’t know if anything will save us. I don’t know that’s the job of science regardless. But I believe when science works, it’s amazing and starkly so in a world of so much broken.
When I told my wife about this, all she replied was how it's gonna be monopolized by big countries/big tech and our third world country like ours will never use it.
It's a point, but well human need to push the limit, no matter what.
"Never" is a strong word - smartphones were once monopolized by rich countries, but are now a worldwide phenomenon. Even explicitly-banned/controlled technologies like nuclear weapons managed to eventually diffuse around the world.
Yes, it is never absolute. But I get her points, always mean majority. Like for her I am always late for dinner. The days that I was early does not count, even if it's like 20%.
When I told my wife about this, all she replied was how it's gonna be monopolized by big countries/big tech and our third world country like ours will never use it.
The materials and hardware required to make LK-99 are within the reach of a high school. It's really simple and doesn't require anything more than a very hot oven (hotter than a domestic one, but still very common). If it'd turned out to be a real superconductor anyone who wanted to make it could have done.
I'm not sure about that. So many people had hard time synthesizing LK-99, and the original researchers said that even for themselves only 1 out of 10 attempts to create a material succeeded.
The pure LK-99 crystals pictured in the article were obtained using more advanced technique: "Unlike previous synthesis attempts that relied on crucibles, the researchers used a technique called floating zone crystal growth that allowed them to avoid introducing sulfur into the reaction, eliminating the Cu2S impurities."
But I agree that if there's money to be made, it will be available world wide quickly.
I found Thunderf00t's video on LK-99 to be funny because he pointed out something no one else did: In almost all applications of superconductors, they don't use high-temperature ones for one simple reason: Material properties. Most high-temp superconductors (including LK-99, he was assuming it was one, since he's not qualified to say one way or the other) are a ceramic. The ones that see use in the LHC, for instance, aren't. They're metallic, so you can form them into the shape you need without having to manufacture it in that shape to begin with, since you'd need another superconductor to join pieces like glue, which we don't have. That alone doomed LK-99 to the department of "cool, but not super useful", since most of the really interesting uses were for large things, not small ones.
The existing high temperature superconductors in production are also ceramics. They just deposit thin layers on another substrate and then you get flexible tapes. When you hear "second generation" HTS tapes, that is what people are referring to. AMSC and SuperPower crank it out by the mile.
> Most high-temp superconductors (including LK-99, he was assuming it was one, since he's not qualified to say one way or the other) are a ceramic. The ones that see use in the LHC, for instance, aren't.
Aren’t the LHC magnets niobium-titanium? Those aren’t high temperature superconductors. Though it is indeed a metal under any definition. The rule of thumb is that high-temperature superconductors can be cooled by liquid nitrogen alone. This is not the case of the LHC magnets, which also have a liquid helium cooling loop.
> They're metallic, so you can form them into the shape you need without having to manufacture it in that shape to begin with, since you'd need another superconductor to join pieces like glue, which we don't have.
The term “metallic” is unhelpful because often in material science it just means an electronic conductor (a material with a non-zero density of states at the Fermi level). Under that definition, some ceramics are metallic, and the opposite of “metallic” is “insulator”, or sometimes “semi-conductor”.
YBCO, which is probably the most used high-temperature superconductor, is an oxyde, so a ceramic, but still an electronic (super)conductor, so metallic. The fact that it’s an oxyde does not prevent its use, notably in spherical tokamaks.
So I don’t know the person you’re referencing but their background work on the subject seems less than adequate, from what you say.
Did you skip over "In almost all applications of superconductors, they don't use high-temperature ones for one simple reason: Material properties."
They're saying that LHC does not use a ceramic, and therefore high-temperature, superconductor; instead they use metallic (cooled) superconductors because they can be molded.
The sentence still does not make sense because the superconductors in the LHC (though, rereading it a couple of times it is somewhat ambiguous) are not high temperature by any definition. Also, again, ceramic high-temperature superconductors are metallic, or they would not be conductors. “Ceramic” and “metallic” are not mutually exclusive in material sciences.
There are lots of reasons to use more classical superconductors in the LHC, just as in ITER. Some are design and engineering issues, as you mention. Another one is that the tapes we use for YBCO were not a practical thing when the LHC was designed. But now they are (though they haven’t been used in such a large scale) and you can bet that they’ll jump at any opportunity to get rid of the helium loop and take advantage of the stronger magnetic fields you can get with YBCO.
can you make wires from cermets? Thats the point. we need a substance that is malleable(?) enough like copper wire that electrons can pass through. Pottery ceramic wont work like that.
Well, nobody mentioned cermets, or wires, and there are plenty of applications for superconductors beyond wires. Even so, we are perfectly able to make fibre optics cables with silica, which is a ceramic.
> we need a substance that is malleable(?) enough like copper wire that electrons can pass through.
Malleability (actually, ductility) has nothing to do with electric conductivity. It can be useful depending on the use case, but for example on a printed circuit you don’t care about that. Not everything is a dangling wire.
Also, you might not realise this but pretty much nothing is malleable at liquid helium temperature.
> Pottery ceramic wont work like that.
Sigh. Ceramics are not pottery, and more than 99% of the time do not have anything to do with pottery. Ceramics are compounds that are not intermetallic, typically oxides, sulphides, nitrides, etc. Some are bendy (though generally less than metallic alloys), some are hard, some are electric conductors, some are not. They have very diverse sets of properties.
They are everywhere in the chips on the device you use, in its display, in the power plants that make electrons move so you can use it, in any lithium-ion battery, etc. I don’t think I can name one device that does not involve ceramics. Even a shovel, either in the form of a passive layer that makes it stainless, or in the form of rust on it. None of that has anything to do with pottery.
Yes, but the minimal bending radius would be far from impressive.
> Thats the point. we need a substance that is malleable(?) enough like copper wire that electrons can pass through.
So many assumptions here. Copper wire is but one form that is useful for energy transport. But superconductors don't need a lot of thickness and parallel layers of tape have enough flex in one dimension to be very useful. Usually they allow for complex routing by adding twists, like flatcable, but given the magnetic fields involved you don't want to do that in free space but firmly tied down to something (preferably something non-magnetic!).
> Pottery ceramic wont work like that.
Ceramics are a vast class of materials, which includes pottery ceramics but also many others which have a very large range and diversity of properties. They are essentially a whole branch on the tree of materials science that range from Tungsten Carbide to diamond to ordinary clay and a whole raft of others.
you are (mostly) agreeing (except for precise definitions of metallic and ceramic). Their comment is unclear, but it means
"In almost all applications of superconductors, they don't use high-temperature ones. [...] The ones [the superconductors] that see use in the LHC, for instance, aren't [high temperature superconductors]."
It just has a sentence in the middle of it that confuses you into thinking their antecedents are "the HTSCs" and "ceramic" instead of "the SCs" and "HTSCs".
The current generation of mass manufactured high temperature superconducting tape is based on YBCO, which is a crystalline material (presumably what is meant here when saying ceramic). So the argument that superconductors need to be metallic/malleable to be useful doesn't really make a lot of sense.
> presumably what is meant here when saying ceramic
Probably not. Being crystalline and being a ceramic are completely unrelated. Standard superconductors like niobium-tin and niobium-titanium are crystalline metals (intermetallic alloys). The vast majority of metals are crystalline, to the point that when a company tried to make a metallic glass a couple of years ago (under the name Liquid Metal), it made quite a bit of noise.
YBCO isn't really used for anything. MRI machines use metallic NbTi even though it requires liquid helium because YBCO is too brittle and can't handle large currents.
The problem, which is often the case with Thunderf00t, is that he is missing the forest for the trees. No one who knows anything was thinking of using LK-99 for serious applications. The specs of LK-99 where just too shit. What it would have been is a start shot for understanding the effect and creating more useful materials based on the same underlying physical process.
Thunderf00t's point, though, is that LK-99 is not novel in its material category. High temperature superconductors that are hard and brittle already existed. What would be interesting would be a malleable high temperature semiconductor, because then you can make it into cables.
There is nothing remotely close to the category of "stp superconductor". This is quite obvious when looking at a plot of critical limits of known superconductors.
a superconductor at 100+ degrees celsius and ambient pressures doesn't exist as of now. anything even approaching that would be earth shattering. Even if they are ceramic.
Thunderfoot is more focused on being a contrarian than being accurate and unbiased. See sibling comments that explain why it being a ceramic isn't that relevant.
I thought it was a poor point. The paper proposed a new mechanism for the superconductivity, which would have been a bigger deal than this specific formulation (lk-99). If it were true, it would be a new class of superconductors which I would think this would lead to development of new formulations that perhaps had better properties. Plus as others have said, superconductor material can and is deposited on tapes (see ReBCO) to make it usable.
They didn't propose new class of superconductors. They conjectured that LK99 follows some 25-year-old theory from a paper written in Korean. Leaving alone the fact that the theory doesn't make much sense to me (at least the parts I managed to understand), there was no evidence in the LK-99 paper that this mechanism is indeed what makes LK99 superconductive (or more precisely that it is present in LK99).
Lots of superconductors aren't very good superconductors. They have a low critical magnetic field which limits the current they can carry and the magnetic field they can produce.
The liquid helium cooled niobium-titanium can make strong field and is easy to produce. The RBCOs superconductors, YBCO is the main one, are liquid nitrogen cooled and make even higher magnetic fields. It sounds like it took a while to figure out how make them in bulk.
YBCO superconductors are going to be revolution but will take time for the older systems to disappear. Good example is ITER, which was designed for liquid helium magnets cause nothing else was practical at the time. The SPARC tokamak from MIT uses YBCO magnets which means it can be smaller, higher field, and cheaper cooling.
Ceramic "high-temp" ones are not used because they still operate at very low temperatures so you are not completely free of cooling requirements, they are just slightly lower.
In that case it may make sense to use superconductor with better material properties in exchange for more cooling.
A room temperature ambient pressure superconductor would remove the need for special cooling so it would be vastly better than current "high" temperature ones.
Why can't regular conductors be used as such glue? i.e. you mix the ceramic superconductor powder into, say, molten copper, and make the wires out of the mix. The result would be copper wires with bits of superconductor in it. The result won't be superconducting per se, but should have less resistance than pure non-superconducting material which might be useful for certain applications.
>In almost all applications of superconductors, they don't use high-temperature ones for one simple reason: Material properties.
The problem is that this is not true anymore. It was true when I was in high school. Modern methods of manufacturing cuprate superconductors have been applied to the largest-scale projects:
All these use metallic (or ceramic-like with metallic properties) super conductors, though. That was the point: the material properties. If it's not metallic or exhibiting metallic-like properties (e.g. BSCCO), the practical usefulness is limited.
The substance produced from the paper isn't a superconductor. While extremely unlikely, there is still a chance that LK-99 is a superconductor, but the paper itself did not sufficiently describe the method needed to make it so as to replicate it properly. We will know the resolution to this once the sample from the original researchers is assessed by a third party, of which there are presently at least two to my understanding doing this right now.
The thing is that there are now multiple independent lines of investigation pointing to LK-99 not being a superconductor, and explaining away the original "smoking guns" offered by the authors.
It's like we have a murder suspect, the murder weapon, and fingerprints lifted from the scene. At this point it could still be space aliens, but nobody in their right mind would treat that possibility seriously.
These analogies aren't useful. Much of this process so far has relied upon a single point of failure not failing: that the paper contains the necessary information to replicate and describe the material. If that assumption is wrong, while some science will still remain valid, much of it would turn out to have been unindicative of the actual state of reality.
You almost described the reaction of the "tech bros" when the Reiser murder happened: The number of gymnastics some people went through to justify Hans' actions(removing a seat in his car, buying books about crime investigation, blood on the car, etc, etc.) was comical.
The point is that the original team did not produce a pure crystal, and impurities can be the source of novel properties in a material - you’ll know it as “doping” in the semiconductor industry.
Other comments from more informed people indicate it’s unlikely that this will yield anything useful though.
"So you're saying there's a chance?"... What you say is not incorrect, proving a negative here beyond all other possibility is hard. But I feel like for the lay person like me (us?), this matter should be considered resolved now. There's no point stretching hope and spending energy to follow it further.
It was interesting seeing real peer reviewed science from accredited labs like LLNL and Fermi get brushed aside and almost dismissed while people were cheering on this LK-99 thing.
Not sure what to make of that but that's what I'll remember most about this debacle.
Its kind of like a "nice/fun" flip-side of the anti-science internet experts we saw during covid, although I think the people at the forefront this time were genuinely pro-science and positively motivated.
That's an interesting take. Crackpots and overhyped layman being a dual of anti-science. What would we call that? Well, I guess we'd normally talk about that stuff as science fiction.
Oh ok. Mainstream media reported on fusion ignition #2 while (rightfully) ignoring LK-99. I think the takeaway here is just how bad techbros are at evaluating hard science.
I didn't follow it too closely because I didn't see how it could be anything but a nothingburger. I think the internet got high off LLM success and expected nonstop breakthroughs like entitled children.
They should have also included a quote from CISR an Indian lab that go there about the same time as many of the American labs https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.03544
Yes, I noticed that this article disproportionately quoted American scientists who played relatively minor roles in the replication efforts. I guess the reporter just found it more convenient to reach out to them for comments.
One of the papers that argued that LK-99's levitation was due to mixed diamagnetism and weak ferromagnetism also assigned it a very strong diamagnetism: -2•10^-4, which would make it the second-strongest such material known, beating out bismuth. Probably not that useful, but interesting if confirmed.
I read some of the papers linked in this article, but they use different units and don't identify a diamagnetic susceptibility in the way that I'm used to, so I'm not sure if that was confirmed (and I have stuff to do).
Copper sulfide's diamagnetism is not that high. It would be notable if it were. So that isn't a possible explanation. Cu2S was suggested as a culprit for the observed conductivity changes.
The preprint reporting the high value of diamagnetism is here:
Is it really sad though? On the surface it seems the society heavily incentivizes smart people to work on "less impactful" things. But if every smart person becomes a condensed-matter researcher then obviously we have a problem. So what's the right amount of people that should work on condensed matter physics? Who should decide on such amount? Currently the market decides. But maybe there's a better way?
I don't see how 0.002 ohms per cm could be confused with superconductivity. Is that not orders of magnitude too high? Or there are no instruments which can directly measure resistance more precisely?
Yes, that was my first thought. There are absolutely instruments which can directly measure resistance down to 10E-8 ohms/m or lower, and I would expect any lab doing research into superconductivity to at least have one of those.
Testing at 5 Kelvin is not hard. You don't have to take everything ultraliterally.
And science isn't about saying wood isn't a superconductor because it's impractical to test. That's not a result. You may be getting science confused with engineering.
The conclusion is a bit clearer: they think they observed what seemed like zero resistance at the temperature but they are unsure it was actually superconducting, hence the title being the measured resistivity instead of superconductivity directly. It's also possible (and far more likely IMO) them reaching the noise floor of the instrument was not the same as the sample actually having 0 resistance. Superconductors have a sharp dropoff at the critical temperature whereas their sample seemed to just continually have less resistance until the noise floor of the tool.
It'd be cool to find it was superconducting at a temperature near that high though. That'd still be one of the best high temperature superconductors we've found.
The units for resistivity would be ohms*cm (Ohms times a length), not Ohms per cm. Then if you divide by the cross-sectional area of a sample, you would get the resistance per length.
Yes, I was typing faster than I was thinking. I should have said Resistivity instead of Resistance and ohms.m instead of ohms/m. My point is still valid, though.
I think the positive take here is "an unusually swift resolution of a high-profile puzzle".
So it sounds like the leak was in fact a positive and that overall rewarding people with nobel prizes is detrimental to science.
edit: it's OK to make mistakes. If science focused on EXPERIMENTING instead of trying to be the arbiter of truth on how the world is, we'd progress much farther. Maybe there is a reason why it seems physics has been stuck for the past 50+ years... maybe it is a shift in culture, driven social media, the fear of being wrong, of being shamed by the collective, of using the improper labels, etc. that is holding everyone back.
> "They were very precise about it. 104.8ºC," says Prashant Jain, a chemist at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. "I was like, wait a minute, I know this temperature."
Their favorite radio station in IL? 104.8 KCRF, all phase transitions, all the time.
I think the big takeaway if something like this happens in the future is half float ain't a miesner effect. Makes me increasing skeptical of Taj Quantums claim to a super conductor.
https://tajquantum.com/art-t2sc/
Just a reminder that’s not everything one can find in a paper (never mind a preprint) is true. The response from the community was great. Modellers doing some electronic structure calculations, synthesis experts trying to re-create the material, people doing all sorts of characterisation. The closest parallel I can think of is the faster-than-light neutrinos from a couple of years ago. Except that this time there were many teams and individuals all over the world trying to replicate the results. The material was supposedly easy to make, the reagents were quite easy to find, room-temperature conductivity measurements are not too difficult. There was a lot of enthusiasm and activity, which was really motivating.
The fact that it could not be replicated is not surprising, considering the sloppiness of the original preprint. But still, it was a very public example of science in action.
What was also interesting is the response from some corners of the Internet who were more than happy to bash scientists who were supposedly trying to cover up their own incompetence by debunking the plucky researchers from a brave private institution. Well, most often if something sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is.
I'd add that the 3-4 preprints that put the final nails in the coffin for LK-99 --- the ones that showed how ferromagnetic samples produce half-levitation, pointed out the Cu2S structural phase transition, explaining why the flat bands are not conducive to superconductivity, and the creation and characterization of a pure single crystal --- were all good showcases of scientific ingenuity.
It was particularly impressive to see some groups putting together high-quality, publication-ready preprints from scratch in the span of a month. Especially crazy when you think about the shoddy original papers that the Korean group spent years working on...
> in particular, copper sulfide — were responsible for the sharp drops in electrical resistivity and partial levitation over a magnet, which looked similar to properties exhibited by superconductors.
Is this effect novel and/or potentially useful as a material?
Here is a list of replication attempts from another comment [0]. Looks like most of the replications were only on the weak levitation property, which could be explained by diamagnetism or impurities.
What about L and K, the original scientists? Lots of speculation that LK-99 would be a career ending paper if it turned out that it wasn't a room temperature superconductor.
Well, yes, but their prototype time machine let them put in more years per year than you'd expect.
(Someone anonymously claimed they have a time machine on social media, so it must be true!)
Seriously though, it sounds like the research group is doing interesting work, and also being careful about the claims they make (even if the internet hype cycle is not), so kudos to them.
No, they were not careful about their claims. Putting aside the drama around the arxiv postings, they had previously explicitly made the "discovered a room temperature ambient pressure superconductor" claim in a Korean language journal, in a 2020 submission to Nature that was rejected, and on multiple patent applications.
There is no evidence of them doing interesting work, either. If reporting is to be believed, their company mostly does unrelated consulting odd-jobs for the chaebols, and this was a passion project for Lee and Kim. But you know what? I'm glad there are oddballs like this on the fringe of science. They're mostly harmless, occasionally entertaining, and maybe once in an epoch they might come up with something real.
Article fails to establish title's claim. Yeah the pure crystal isn't a superconductor - but guess what? the Koreans never claimed that substituting in copper atoms in a random fashion would work.
You know what? I needed that saga. That was fun. I don’t think I’ve been this interested in any research project since being a kid skimming thru popular science or something :)
It’s been so cool to see all of the replication studies, people talking about the latest news and all of that. Kind of a peek behind the scientific curtain to see all of the work that goes into confirming claims.
I've quite enjoyed this story and it's resolution.
It does seem that the doomsayers who predicted the Earth would stop spinning because of lay public speculating about LK-99 were wrong. The system works. Yay!
Thats the first news that really torpedo this sc claim.(a Cooper sulphide expert recognizing the main claim of 104c of a resistance drop was in fact a know property of a non superconductor). It’s too much of a coincidence plus the guy wouldn’t lie.
You can publish an article with a title like this and probably not end up embarrassed. Room temperature and pressure super conductors seem hard enough to find that chances are any given paper claiming to have found one will end up with a more mundane explanation. And I do think the information about the phase change of Cu2S is highly relevant, as it points at a way the original researches my have fooled themselves.
The dismissal of the partial levitation as ferromagnetism, on the other hand, doesn't strike me as especially robust. Ferromagnetism explains the partial levitation of tiny fragments of material generated by people trying to reproduce LK-99. Very light and thin pieces of ferromagnetic material will align themselves with a magnetic field. For example, Andrew McCalip (who streamed himself attempting to reproduce the material in his rocket startup's lab) generated a partially levitating fragment and sent it into USC, where they determined it was ferromagnetic. But bulk pieces of ferromagnetic material will just stick to magnets (or if they are magnetized, they will stick to one side and be unstably repelled from the other).
Ferromagnetism doesn't explain the levitation demonstrated in the videos put out by the original researches, though. Barring fraud, the most likely explanation for that kind of levitation is diamagnetism. The article mentions Derrick van Gennep recreating the partial levitation video with a chunk of pyrolytic graphite (one of the most diamagnetic materials we know of, other than superconductors), supergluing iron filings to a corner of it to anchor it to the magnet. The levitation in that video comes from diamagnetism, not ferromagnetism. LK-99 is primarily made of lead, not graphite, which is 5-10 times denser, so the diamagnetic effect must be at least that much stronger than pure pyrolytic graphite. The thing is, as the rest of the article points out, the supposed main constituents of LK-99 have now been extensively studied, and none of them appear to be especially diamagnetic, so something in those samples the original team recorded must be extremely diamagnetic to make up for it!
>so something in those samples the original team recorded must be extremely diamagnetic to make up for it!
I wonder what would have happened if they would have pushed a paper out talking about anomalously high diamagnetism and skipped any mentions of superconducting. And let people speculate if it is a superconductor. I suppose we wouldn't be talking about it. But I hope that we see some group try to replicate the diamagnetic material properties.
I'm inclined to think that LK et al might eventually decide to withdraw the submission themselves, or likely got rejected directly, given the various factors at play. Alternatively, they may continue to keep the arXiv pre-print updated with each round of revisions to transparently address issues raised by peer reviewers. However, based on the current situation and the rigorous standards of APL Materials, I find it challenging to envision this work being accepted for publication in that journal.
So it sounds like the purple crystal isn't repelled by magnets. So what part of the samples was causing the magnetic properties? Or are we saying that all of those videos and images were faked?
The varda shards found to be responsive to magnetic fields had trace amounts of iron impurity as well which was given as the expected reason in that case. Not sure about every other case of course.
The Cu₂S was responsible for the temperature dependent resistivity measurement caused by a phase change at 104 °C, not the magnet properties. If you have some more information on the ferromagnetic properties of copper sulfides, I'd like to learn more.
While there's certainly a lot of evidence that its not a superconductor, no one can make the definitive statement that this article does without testing the original sample.
I did wonder if we suddenly could produce loads of room temperature super conductors if eventually we’d start to affect earth’s magnetic field; I learned that super conductors basically force magnetic fields around them and do not allow them to pass through. If they started to be used everywhere from power lines to train lines to computer chips we might start to cause unintended consequences. Does anyone have an idea if this is a real concern?
I'm curious (but not really qualified to understand) if the theoretical calculations on viable superconducting structures was a new insight on its own.
If there is a theoretical model for ambient temperature superconductivity, then that should help us zoom in on potential materials that could be an actual superconductor someday?
> When copper oxide superconductors were discovered in 1986, researchers leapt to probe their properties. But nearly four decades later, there is still debate over the material’s superconducting mechanism, says Vishik. Efforts to explain LK-99 came readily.
To me, the interesting take-away is that, right at the end. All too often we see peer-review as this slow, inching, excruciating process, particularly in social sciences where it's a de-facto afterthought. It was great to see science chugging ferociously away like a (somewhat!) well-oiled machine, such as the electronic analysis via slightly different methods (e.g. DFT) and the material synthesis efforts by the Argonne NL and Max Planck Institute.
Farewell for now, RTSC.
Side-note: Pure LK-99 is visually beautiful! Who would-a known from those crumbly grey flakes, huh?
I'd like to second this. Bonus points if a magnet were included so that the sample could be "levitated" over it. This is definitely a kind of novelty gift suitable for science-y and geeky friends.
One of the good things that came out of this whole story: A very public demonstration, transported through mass and even social media channels, how empiricism and the principle of falsification work, and why they are the only known reliable process for generating knowledge.
Math and logic are as much subjected to falsification as physics or biology. Mathematicians write proofs, and their peers try to find flaws in them.
> arts, etc aren't knowledge?
I am obviously talking about scientific knowledge, and in that regard: No, they aren't. The study of art can be scientific, and is as subjected to empiricism and falsification as everything else. Art in itself however isn't.
If humanity forgot all the works of Mozart and Schubert, it would be a very sad day, but society would still function. If humanity forgot how to make steel, or had to rediscover the fourier transformation, we would have a problem.
> Math and logic are as much subjected to falsification as physics or biology.
No they are not.
> Mathematicians write proofs, and their peers try to find flaws in them.
There is a difference between checking whether a proof has flaws and running experiment to falsify a theory. In other words, when a proof has no flaws ( aka has been proven ), it's proven forever. Once euclid proved that there are an infinite amount of prime numbers, that's it. Nobody tries to falsify his claim because it's already been proven. Also, mathematicians checking for flaws in proofs is not empiricism. Go learn what empiricism means first before making absurd assertions.
Not only do you not know what science is, you don't even know what math is, you don't know what empiricism is.
> I am obviously talking about scientific knowledge
Then what's your nonsense about 'Math and logic are as much subjected to falsification as physics or biology.' Do you know what a syllogism is? How about modus ponens? Implication?
> If humanity forgot all the works of Mozart and Schubert, it would be a very sad day, but society would still function. If humanity forgot how to make steel, or had to rediscover the fourier transformation, we would have a problem.
If humanity forgot language, laws, government, etc, society would crumble as well.
Or are you going to pretend that language, laws, government, history, etc are now part of science.
No, mass and social media stopped paying attention days ago because Trump or Hawai'i or whatever. In a few years some might have a flashback, Google "what happened stupor conduct", and after a few sentences conclude science isn't really worth paying attention to after all.
I would charitabily read the parent's comment as referring to the middle brow 'mass media' aimed at those moderately above average in terms of paying attention to these topics.
It overlaps with a sizable majority of the HN readerbase.
Not the mass media of grocery store checkout aisle magazines.
We have wildly diverging views of the average HNer. I'm thinking the median is much closer to "Russian catgirl home-cook on X" than "studious reader of The Atlantic".
The people who bought tons of shares and options on AMSC on 7/18, just a four days before the original drop. Just look at the options chain and volume. It’s outrageous.
Bit late to the thread, but for those interested I found this interview with two scientists trying to reproduce LK99 insightful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFnA8gwnLms
Lots of interesting nitty gritty details. Also raises an interesting point about how lot of labs trying to reproduce LK99 are probably not doing it correctly.
So does this mean that the videos that showed LK-99 hovering but not rotating are fake? Or can you have that static hover effect without being a superconductor?
> In the video, the same edge of the sample seemed to stick to the magnet, and it seemed delicately balanced. By contrast, superconductors that levitate over magnets can be spun and even held upside-down. “None of those behaviors look like what we see in the LK-99 videos,” van Gennep says.
> He thought LK-99’s properties were more likely the result of ferromagnetism. So he constructed a pellet of compressed graphite shavings with iron filings glued to it. A video made by Van Gennep shows that his disc — made of non-superconducting, ferromagnetic materials — mimicked LK-99’s behaviour.
Those Korean researchers who consistently refused to share samples now has the moral obligation to come out and explain what is really going on.
I call it corruption - if you claim you have the sample that is a room temp supercondutor and you want the attention of the research community, how about just get some 3rd party to access your bloody sample? what we got was excuses after excuses.
I'm more upset that it was possible to successfully register a patent on the LK-99. On the one hand, patent services seem to be not obliged to check the workability of the patents, but on the other hand this is absolutely malicious activity, as it is a direct road to patent trolling and fraud on non-existent intellectual property.
> studies have shown that impurities in the material — in particular, copper sulfide — were responsible for the sharp drops in electrical resistivity and partial levitation over a magnet, which looked similar to properties exhibited by superconductors.
So I can understand how having a phase change causes the material to have a critical temperature but why does it also have a critical current and a critical magnetic field. A simple phase change material wouldn't have a variable critical temperature dependent on current?
Founders- note, you just experienced a mini-bubble. It is good to learn from this because it has commonalities to other bubbles. Fortunately, the cost of this bubble was only time and attention. Unfortunately, time and attention are scarce and precious.
This shows that the properties that were observed aren't as a result of a pure single crystal. If the observed properties can be explained and controlled by dislocation dynamics or other mechanisms of the impurities, then it may still be of interest.
> in particular, copper sulfide — were responsible for sharp drops in its electrical resistivity and a display of partial levitation over a magnet, properties similar to those exhibited by superconductors.
I worried less as to whether LK-99 was a superconductor or not when I thought that the 'flat band' theory might hold water. That could have led to all sorts of interesting results, but alas it appears not to work after all.
Not sure why this is presented as so conclusive, the sample they have exhibits none of the floating properties and the recipe is different. Of course testing whatever this is isn't a superconductor.
I was hopeful the first couple of days when it hit twitter but it became pretty obvious after that it just hopium and decided to wait for the paper. I wonder if they'll even bother to try and publish now...
I still think it’s a room temperature and ambient pressure superconductor. I’m amazed at how bad Nature, Scientific American and the mainstream press are.
I felt like folks were getting too optimistic in the early days and now I feel folks are getting way to pessimistic. We don't know if any of these failed replication experiments actually made the same LK-99 the Korean team did. The only way of knowing for sure if LK-99 is a room temp superconductor is if outside labs test the samples the Korean team has made. It's entirely possible that the exact impurities in their material caused by their exact manufacturing process are required for superconducting properties to emerge. Seems like that will be done in the next few weeks. Still betting against it working but keeping my fingers crossed.
Company that has already lied in the past lies again, and everyone eats it up, again...
The internet has taught me to never trust material science advancements at face value. Batteries, solar power, superconductors, nanomaterials.. Even when they legit work, there is usually a straight forward reason why it just isn't feasible, and that is conveniently left out of the press release. I have to go to the HN comment section to get disappointed once again.
I would like to remind/point out how many people on here were bashing on American scientists for failing to replicate this in the first few days when labs around the world were confirming replication- saying they had lost their touch, and are no longer relevant.
Then getting called racist over having the opinion that the original authors sounded like amateurs.
Then seeing that briefly turn on a dime and the Beijing University preprint being instantly discredited in favor of "wait for western institutions to weigh in".
What this really showed is just how pathetic our current situation is. We have a way of life that is unsustainable but instead of changing it we all pray that science will save us. LK99 was basically like the coming of Christ. Really sad to see so many intelligent people so eager to believe.
Has anyone ever worked out a "proof" that a room temperature/ambient pressure superconductor can even be made? Like is there a formula or something that can be pointed to that says, according to everything we know its even possible?
No. We don’t understand superconductivity well enough to even attempt something like that.
I think we can say that some of the current superconductor mechanisms don’t allow it at room temperature, but we don’t have enough of an overarching theory of superconductivity to say something like that more generally.
> By contrast, superconductors that levitate over magnets can be spun and even held upside-down. “None of those behaviors look like what we see in the LK-99 videos,” van Gennep says.
Aren't they confusing Type-I and Type-II superconductors?
Ah. I wasn't aware that people were claiming that-- I guess it was an effort to explain why there was apparent diamagnetism but no clear demonstrations of flux pinning.
Not exactly. Cold fusion was contradicted by our knowledge of Physics at the time. Room-temperature superconductors are a field of active study, because even though we don’t know one, we think they might exist and the industrial applications could be world-changing. The response was not “room-temperature superconductors cannot exist”, as with cold fusion, but more “this sounds implausible and your preprint is dodgy; nevertheless we’ll try to replicate it”.
Unbelieveble the effort invested in demonstrating that LK-99 is not a superconductor.
Humans work like crazy when the oportunity arises to ridiculize others. If only...
So in your view a bunch of scientists got together and produced an enormous effort for the purpose of ridiculing other scientists? It wasn't perhaps because of an opportunity to significantly change the world?
Because all of the people publishing information about this were playing the options market. There was no need to actually educate anyone on anything. This was a scam. It worked.
One person sees the opportunity it creating a hype train and gets a few buddies on board. Loads up on $1 calls for something they feel could be the next meme stock, like AMSC. Options start to load up on 7/18, just a few days before the 7/22 original drop on arxiv. You get the 7/22 drop and then uploads of grainy videos start to show up. Bank a few million in options contracts as the price of AMSC doubles overnight. Other people see the hype train leaving the station and start their own, using the same strategy.
It's how you end up with a dozen potato quality videos and very specific information attached to the comment threads, "This is going to be HUGE for quantum computing @IonQ_Inc if true."
We have seen these types of market manipulation scams in the past. This was the first time we've seen someone use something like arxiv to do this. Brilliant idea, really. We will see more in the future no doubt.
There is no such thing as ferromagnetic levitation (i.e. there is no stable position).
Nevertheless, a piece of ferromagnetic material which has a permanent remanent magnetization (which is possible only for a subset of the ferromagnetic materials) when put on a magnet may take a position close to vertical, with one edge pressed on the magnet.
It is very easy to verify if this is what you see by moving the piece of material to the other pole of the magnet, where it must take a reversed position, with the other edge pressed on the magnet.
A diamagnetic material will be equally repelled by both poles of the magnet, so moving it between the poles will not change its behavior.
A soft ferromagnetic material, like iron, will be equally attracted by both poles of the magnet.
The explanations that iron impurities could be present in quantities so great as to form some unknown iron compounds with high coercivity and some unknown experimental circumstances could magnetize permanently the samples, are not significantly more credible than the claims that room-temperature superconductors do exist.
In any case, anyone who has made some samples can verify easily whether they are ferromagnetic or diamagnetic. It would be more credible that someone has made fake claims, than that they have mistaken a ferromagnetic material for a diamagnetic material.
I'm going to vote for "ambient superconductor" even after this. At least we know superconductors actually exist at all, and the history of the field reflects incremental progress in terms of increasing the threshold temperature for superconductivity. With "aliens" we don't have much to go on at all, aside from vague Fermi-equation'esque appeals to "There must be aliens because the universe is so big[1]" or whatever.
[1]: I actually agree that it's very likely that alien life either has existed, does exist, or will exist somewhere in the universe. My skepticism is towards the possibility of that life visiting Earth. And mostly for the exact same reason: because the universe is so damn big.
Watching this unfold on HN has been eerily similar to watching r/UFOs whenever someone comes forward with "proof" of UFOs/coverups/whatever. I never want to rain on anyone's parade, as proof of ETs or room temperature superconductors would be great, but the hype only serves to obfuscate the truth. At this point, I'm prepped to disbelieve because of the obvious over-hyping.
People want these things to be true so bad that they will twist every detail to fit the narrative they want. It would be funny, if it weren't so sad.
A common thread in a lot of these stories is people pushing the idea that The Authorities are not to be trusted. The government is lying to you about UFOs! The scientific establishment has been sitting on room temperature superconductors for 20 years!
And sure, question authority.
But also question the people telling you to question authority.
Because contrarians are just ripe for affinity fraud, and while most of that affinity fraud is centered around alt-med, the cultivation of a pervasive distrust of authority is part of what enables the scam.
Who on HN said that with enough confidence and credibility to do enough damage to the conversation such that it would be better had the conversation not happen at all?
The interest and intrigue around LK-99 made science cool. There will be all kinds of positive knock on effects of this - least of which is that we got down to the bottom of LK-99 years before it would've happened if the preprint never got published.
In their preprint, the Korean authors note one particular temperature at which LK-99’s showed a tenfold drop in resistivity, from about 0.02 ohms per centimetre to 0.002 ohms per cm. “They were very precise about it. 104.8ºC,” says Prashant Jain, a chemist at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. “I was like, wait a minute, I know this temperature.”
The reaction that synthesizes LK-99 uses an unbalanced recipe: for every 1 part copper-doped lead phosphate crystal — pure LK-99 — it makes, it produces 17 parts copper and 5 parts sulfur. These leftovers lead to numerous impurities — especially copper sulfide, which the Korean team reported in its sample.
Jain, a copper-sulfide expert, remembered 104ºC as the temperature at which Cu2S undergoes a phase transition if exposed to air. Below that temperature, Cu2S’s resistivity drops dramatically — a signal almost identical to LK-99’s purported superconducting phase transition. “I was almost in disbelief that they missed it.” Jain published a preprint on the important confounding effect on 7 August.
[...]
“That was the moment where I said, ‘Well, obviously, that’s what made them think this was a superconductor,’” says Fuhrer. “The nail in the coffin was this copper sulfide thing.”
Science is hard. Kudos to everyone involved for trying to replicate it and figuring this puzzle out.
Most PhDs are incredibly specific and don’t necessary indicate broad knowledge of a field as a whole.
Which is why you should be wary of “experts” making overly broad claims about topics within their field but far outside their area of expertise.
Early on during Covid you would see postdoc infectious disease experts on every news channel 3 times daily giving their takes. Some of whom maybe took a 3000 level course in epidemiology when they were 21 and did their PhD on nematode infections in a single population of freshwater clams. Technically an infectious disease expert but I don’t particularly care what they have to say about Covid over a random person on the street either.
There was a B- or C-list physics blogger a few years back whose graduate homework I used to grade. (I still remember this one, so that should tell you something.) He got very angry that I gave him zero credit for one particular question. But he:
- did not use the standard/expected approach to this problem
- did not explain what he was doing well enough for me to find him any partial credit (this is not easy!)
- had a pile of impenetrable unnecessary very complex alien math that I wasn't going to try to cut through given that
- his final answer was very, very wrong
- in fact, it was wrong by 26 orders of magnitude
- and he didn't have the skill to notice something was wrong (and, yes, I was lenient with students who noticed final answers were weird even if they couldn't/didn't fix it up)
- also, he was a major asshole (no surprise given that he's complaining about this "indignity") who was
- somehow still causing #MeToo problems in the 21st century despite being under 30 (seriously??)
So if that's who gets held up as "authorities", even minor ones, forgive me if I don't listen too much. I'll choose who I trust.
Honestly? His mannerisms was all we really needed. He was not well liked in his year, and that takes some doing to achieve these days. The smug "how could I be wrong" when he was, well, 26 orders of magnitude wrong, is special even by entitled scientist standards.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but I strongly believe, based on my experiences with really successful people, that being open to being wrong absolutely does count for a lot more than the current truth value of your ideas.
I didn't say authority, and I didn't say trust blindly. I just said I'd trust someone with baseline qualifications over a random (presumably unqualified) person. lmao
My point is that this person has baseline qualifications (Physics PhD!), was accepted by the media as "qualified" to be a blogger, and yet was still a complete god damned moron even in his own field of "specialization".
It wouldn't have made such an impact except that he was getting paid to publicly write about this stuff, at the same time he was privately incompetent. A stellar example of the Gell-Mann Effect (aka Amnesia) if ever there was one.
> Most PhDs are incredibly specific and don’t necessary indicate broad knowledge of a field as a whole
> Which is why you should be wary of “experts” making overly broad claims about topics within their field but far outside their area of expertise.
I mostly agree, but also I think it depends on how strong you are suggesting this and if you also acknowledge that there is high variance between domains as to the variance within the distribution of knowledge. Your last sentence is where I really disagree. There is a big difference.
But I think for the general person, there's 2 things of note: 1) just because you should be wary of an expert talking outside their niche (but inside their broader domain), doesn't mean that their opinion is equal to that of a layman. I'd still trust the mostly-expert over the non-expert any day. The true-expert is often very hard to find tbh. Look for nuance and you'll increase the likelihood of finding the expert. 2) It is easy to confuse expert talk with arrogance or pretentiousness. It is also easy to be that way when talking to a layman as the nature of those conversations will never be between peers, but more akin to a teacher and student. The two parties are not equal, but we're primed to treat any non-academic setting conversation as if we are. The experts often have serious doubts and are far more self-conscious than they appear. You just won't see that unless you're a peer and can speak the language, because experts are also specifically taught to defend their work and speak with confidence. Your hint is how they respond to critiques from other experts (but that's not easy to do accurately as there's probably a lot of nuance you aren't seeing and they are speaking a different language even if you understand all the words).
Everyone should always be skeptical though. That's for certain. But I just want to make sure we don't turn knowledge into a binary setting: expert vs idiot. There's a lot in-between and that matters a lot.
> I'd still trust the mostly-expert over the non-expert any day. The true-expert is often very hard to find tbh.
Right, you can always find somebody more expert than someone else. The level of specificity that some people expect for a variety of problems will leave only a dozen or so people in the world who can call themselves experts.
Oh for sure. Expertise is exceptionally narrow. It's not a super low variance value, as there is spillover (physics/concepts/math/whatever share many similar principles), but most people __vastly__ underestimate the depth and complexity of any given topic, no matter how mundane and simple it may seem. I mean a good example is that you'll find books on o-rings, nails, screws, bolts, etc that are individually over a thousand pages. Hell, The Art of Electronics -- a book this community is probably more familiar with -- is a fucking godsend, but even being over 1k pages and generally a reference manual it is still lacking. Even if you get the second book (X Chapters) with an additional 500 pages!
This is also why experts can often sniff one another out on online forums like this. There's a subtly to the language that is used which conveys an understanding of many deeper nuances than were a novice or even someone with a undergraduate would use to discuss a topic. There's a common misnomer that you don't understand something unless you can explain it to a layman (probably invented by a layman to justify their lack of understanding), but accuracy and complexity are tightly coupled. A concept with x% accuracy has a minimum of y complexity. But also knowing this can help you sniff out experts in fields you aren't also an expert in, but of course your classification accuracy drops since you are introducing more noise. Still, a useful guide if you're trying to figure out who to listen to. Obviously much easier said than done.
You have to (though in general we’re expert on a couple of classes of compounds rather than just one). The literature is just too vast to follow otherwise. Particularly in fashionable fields with loads of funding like high-temperature superconductors, battery materials, PV materials, fuel cells, things like that.
Right but it’s more like someone is an expert in the “async” method. You’d expect them to be expert in whatever language they’re using, so the framing threw me off.
Yeah I get what you mean. Could just be a quirk of the reporting too - like you might write a lot of async python, comment on some hot topic case using that knowledge, GIL removal say, and then get labelled 'async functions expert Darth Avocado' when really you'd never think of yourself that way.
It looks like he doesn't specialize exclusively in copper sulfide. His most cited works are to do with gold, and he has articles on a bunch of different materials:
He's probably a *-sulfide or copper-* expert. Or maybe just a physical chemist that the press is ginning up. Actually, the latter. His page doesn't even mention copper or sulfide; and makes only one mention of conductors.
A number of years back I had an email from a bloke called Elon Musk. I was vaguely aware of who he was but not very.
At the time I was the global expert in a very weird alloy (the market for it was perhaps 5 or 10 tonnes a year. A very weird and minority interest alloy). It was aluminium scandium, which the Russians had developed to compete with Nasa’s use of aluminium lithium. In many ways a better alloy too. And, obviously, there were possible uses in rockets and so on (rather more in something like a Shuttle than in simple rockets though).
OK, so I get this email and it asks me whether this aluminium scandium is worth it, will it make my rockets lighter, asks Musk. No, not really, it’ll make them easier to weld but not lighter particularly. Which was pretty much the end of the exchange.
So, when people ask me whether Musk does tech stuff I would have to say yes. Because he tracked down a one man company that knew the straight answer to the question he needed answering. OK, you might not think that is engineering, preferring to think of it as people using a slide rule to work it all out themselves. But finding the bloke who knows the answer and asking them is engineering to me - it’s still getting to the right answer, isn’t it?
Scandium-aluminium alloy was popular for bicycle frames briefly in the 2000s. On-One made a frame wittily called the Scandal from it. I have a Scandal frame, but it's a second generation one where they dropped the scandium but kept the name!
Some fields are so advanced that people are expert in one single material in very specific settings. There are some really exotic things out there that are barely used/studied
I really wish less people would give pseudo-anon accounts this much credence. Literally no good science has (ever?) been done on Twitter/X, it's mostly just stupid equivocating. Much thanks goes out to the actual scientists out there working in labs and publishing their findings.
The academic/publishing process is far from perfect already (conflicts of interest, funding, political pressure, institutional pressure, personal pride), now imagine throwing a "Catgirl Girlfriend" (that trolls on an anonymous social media account) into the mix.
Free speech is fine, it's the listeners I have a problem with.
This is a bad counter-argument. What do you think is the overwhelming product of ranting and raving of anime-picture "scientists" on Twitter: scientific muddying of waters that confuse laypeople and promulgate disinformation, or actual theorem-solving?
Anonymization is the only completely sane response to the completely crazy reach-impact spiral of data mining data broker platform TOS. Online persona(s) are private brands of built up real public social value over time and just because there is no officiated imprimatur's stamp of approval, doesn't mean you can exclude them without other cause from the real conversation walled off in ivory corporate towers of group think apprentice effected idea cloning orthodoxy.
I know of a 3D graphics format interop workgroup at an official Standard Setting Organization where some of the main contributors are MAdjDuckSauce type handles and its caused no lack of backflipping through hoops to get their input codified because of ISO 9000 prescribed forms that still want your employer organization's fax number listed.
In fact, how this whole story played out on arXiv is a great example of the power of all hands on deck crowdsourced global fact checking in the broad noisy open realtime light of day. More claims should be subject to this kind of wide net scrutiny not less.
(*Correction to post above it should read "ethnically Soviet" as pointed out below)
Ad Hominem attacks like this are what make me follow people like Iris more. I've both published and peer-reviewed research, and I've seen some hot garbage come from academics.
When I first saw the quoted resistivity, 0.002 ohms per cm, my thought was "this is not even a conductor, let alone a superconductor". 0.2 Ohms/m is several orders of magnitude less conductive than most metals, and solidly in the semiconductor range.
Right? That's what's not clear to me either. If they got readings for superconductivity and Cu2S impurities were the cause then fantastic, Cu2S is the room temperature superconductor? Just get a load of that instead then.
Or perhaps the way they measured the whole experiment was completely inane from the start if a simple conductor passes with flying colours. With that and them presenting ferromagnetism as the Messner effect makes me kind of question the competence of the entire analysis.
So they saw a large change in resistivity at 104C but what's not clear from this excerpt is why the Cu2S was a confounding factor, or isnt interesting.
Is it that LK99 had impurities of Cu2S and the properties of Cu2S dominated but we already know things about Cu2S?
Per the article, CU2S was well-characterised in the 50s.
The CU2S was a confounding factor because 104C is where it undergoes phase changes, which drastically change its resistivity. So the change in resistivity was from the CU2S impurities, not the LK99 itself. As the tail end of the article notes, when researchers grew a completely pure crystal of LK99 they got a strong insulator (in the mega-ohms).
And as a nearby commenter notes, neither 0.02 ohm-cm nor 0.002 ohm-cm is even a good conductor: typical conductor metals (gold, copper, silver, aluminum) are under 3e-6.
Their family would be miserable, their kids would swear to never become a material science expert, and they'd all be missing on the cross discussions with other fields and inspirations coming from outside the material science world ?
Not really trying to be flippant, but that pretty much feels like a James Bond villain fantasy, and only a few select people would probably enjoy the setting.
We kinda have a real world equivalent with people working on the LHC by the way.
Maybe someone with a billion dollars could re-locate them and their families onto some posh island all expenses paid. If Elon had instead invested 40B into this and other tactical science projects rather than dump it into Twitter, imagine the possibilities lol.
This was absolutely a fun and worthwhile experience for everyone involved. A lot of people got more interested in current materials science because of this. We watched a large community spring up out of nowhere to investigate a new discovery.
It was really an incredible thing to witness, and I see only good things came of it.
I can't really understand the sour grapes commenters in this thread. Not sure if they just want to feel smarter/better than everyone else who went along for this ride, or if they really hold the belief that the best science should be gate-kept in universities and not discussed in a wider context.
For me personally it is just general (mild) annoyance with a community that somewhat consistently likes to think it is smarter and better than others and which is then only ever willing to admit they were wrong in roundabout ways like "well this was all fun, anyone who thinks it was a waste of resources or what-have-you doesn't see how much impact it had".
You can see this wild speculation play out _commonly_ for lots of will-be fads like cryptocurrency, metaverse, prompt engineering, vector databases, "autoGPT"/langchain, GPT3/4 performance degradation, GPT4 architecture, and more.
People here dress it all up in well-written prose, citing their past experience at big tech or the ivy league, but at the end of the day much of it is as misinformed as a viral 4chan post. And then, as I said, there is very little postmortem from those same posters (although to be fair, I have seen several cryptocurrency people finally admit they were wrong).
edit:
For clarity, I am not encouraging a shame-based "admit you're wrong and I'm right!" attitude. That just results in more of the same but from the other side. I am merely condoning a healthy amount of humility and acceptance that it is _absolutely_ okay to be wrong, but that it is quite important to _admit_ it (if only to yourself) in fairly clear terms.
My frustrations are largely related to social media in general and the notion that scientists are gatekeeping seems to forget about the very real effects of misinformation. None of us like to realize it, but some people really have begun to take the word of internet comments over the word of credentialed takes and it is _ruining_ society in my opinion.
Exactly, and when you tell people not to get ahead too far ahead of themselves and wait for secondary confirmation before we get all excited, you get downvoted.
This isn't my first rodeo. I've seen this show before.
Now, one of these times, we're going to get a secondary confirmation and then things will get really exciting! Until there's such a secondary confirmation, I'm going to remain a curious sceptic.
Who really knows _that_ much about anything though? Few people are experts in a given topic. Although I see your point, I suppose more people would be good to recognise that, especially about themselves.
That said, this is a fairly general forum and (mostly) for entertainment purposes right?
It's sad to see people accept the credibility of this article simply because it's from Nature. The author himself is a freelance science journalist (with no real expertise in the field), so this article is not worth any more of our attention than many twitter threads.
I accept the credibility of the article because it is very well written (far above any twitter thread on the issue that I have seen), and it cites high-quality sources. In my experience, the news section of nature contains some of the best science journalism out there.
So what about the sources he cites, are those also from freelance science journalists? Or are you going after the messenger because you can't attack the message?
It's quoting several researchers verbatim which gives a clear picture of the compound in question.
At this point it would be a scandal if the quotes were made up or taken out of context. I don't see what is sad about people believing it. Do you go back to the source on every article you read online or in print?
Do not judge for yourself because you are not a dense material scientist. Comments like these pose themselves as intelligent. But intelligent people know that they don't have the expertise to judge everything and do defer to experts in the field. And the experts currently are not able to replicate the findings.
I care about the process of determining truth. If one does expert deferral, then they should do so properly. Sadly Nature is expending their social capital as a scientific journal to pivot to a typical news organization.
If one is up to date with sc news, this article should not affect their beliefs.
But maybe some people are happy that they can share an article from Nature to convince their friends.
Honestly, I feel bad for the original authors, who were correctly holding out for stronger evidence but were forced into publishing early by the actions of a third party going behind their backs.
I hope they don't experience undue blowback because of this.
Yet we're all the better for it happening. Even for the original researchers - maybe it would've taken them another 10 years to get to a similar conclusion. Now, they can take the next step and not waste more time.
Seems like this followed the same rule of internet answers: Ask a question and you'll get crickets. Answer a question wrong and you'll get tonnes of people telling you the right answer.
This was great science. Hypothesis, test, and attempted confirmation. Too bad it's not superconducting, but the process worked the way it is supposed to.
I think the story might be more complicated than that, I remember reading that the "third party" was the one paying the bills for the experiment so pushing it out early and even publicly failing would've been preferable to getting it dragged out infinitely for an unlikely hope of it being successful.
Because a room-temp, amb-press superconductor, that can be made from readly available cheap materials, would be almost on par with the discovery of fire in terms of importance for our species technological capabilities.
Even the simplest example of what that would mean is already amazing to our society: Imagine a power-grid that no longer loses power to electrical resistence in the wires.
Cheap doesn't mean free. We can already reduce resistance by piling in more cheap metal, but it becomes more effort than it's worth.
And superconductors have limits on how much power they can carry.
But most importantly, the power grid doesn't lose all that much to resistance. And you'd still lose power to transmission line capacitance against the ground.
>We could cut those losses right now by making the existing cables thicker. But we don't.
If we could make cables superconducting simply by making them thicker, we wouldn't need superconductors.
> What are the better examples?
Microelectronics for a start. Resistence bleeds heat, heat buildup limits designs. A novel superconducting materials would allow us to make more efficient chips.
> Imagine a power-grid that no longer loses power to electrical resistence in the wires.
From what I can see the power loss is in the 8-15% range. It'd be awesome to save that, but it's not game changing, and you have to take into account the cost of replacing the wires.
Well, that's true, but there are also more important applications: reducing heat and power loss in chips, increasing the efficiency of electric motors, increasing the efficiency of electromagnets, decreasing charge times for batteries, and so on. I may not say as important as fire, but it would certainly be in the same league as the integrated circuit.
The electromagnets are losing a notable amount to resistance in a way that superconducting could help. The chips and batteries are not.
I don't know why people even bring up batteries. They're not going to make any difference to batteries that I'm aware of. In theory you could use superconducting coils as storage, but that's on the level of bulk capacitors, not batteries.
> It'd be awesome to save that, but it's not game changing
An 8-15% increase in available electricity without any new power plants built isn't game changing?
The ability to transport power over longer distances, making eg. solar farms in remote locations suddenly feasible projects isn't game changing?
> and you have to take into account the cost of replacing the wires
No I really don't have to, as we, as a species, seem to have money in abundance. What we do not have in abundance, is biospheres. We have exactly one of those, and if it's ruined, all the money won't help.
The ability to suddenly boost the efficiency of our electrical grids by 8-15% would not solely solve the problems our species currently causes for itself, but it would help a ton.
> The ability to suddenly boost the efficiency of our electrical grids by 8-15% would not solely solve the problems our species currently causes for itself, but it would help a ton.
That's far from clear. If our grids are 8-15% more efficient and the cost of electricity falls accordingly, it will boost demand and we may end up needing more power plants than we otherwise would have. If the goal is to reduce the consumption of a resource, making its consumption more efficient is often counterproductive (see [1,2,3]). Granted, if the alternative is burning fossil fuel then it's a good thing! But once electricity becomes more economical than fossil fuels for all uses, making it even cheaper is not going to help the biosphere. And I think that's probably going to happen before we have a room temperature superconductor that can be used in power transmission.
People are desperate to turn everything into content-identity fodder. Hundreds of IFLS channels making "fans of science." Piles of WSB bros wanting to play some markets like they have a fucking clue what's going on. Crypto-AI idiots hoping to jump and pump the next thing. Men on the street with little context hearing "cheaper phones." Culture warriors saying it means we don't have to worry about global warming anymore.
Nothing can just be itself anymore, it's all gotta be grist.
We do have a "superconductor" but its not the one we wanted. It is the best description for the behavior of online (social) media: no longer exhibits any resistance and the tiniest spark leads to amplification and a system meltdown.
These collective hysterias are a combination of people desperate for technological solutions to (typically) social problems and a system that eagerly exploits that for the benefit of a few.
Of course there are countless mysteries still remaining to be uncovered in materials science, just like there is an infinity of algorithmic advances to be made in processing information.
But the more important invention of all might be to find the checks and balances, feedback loops and regulators that will prevent people from behaving like panicked apes. At best this uncontrolled lemming instinct of ours is a huge waste of time. At worst it undermines society and our welfare.
Well I'm kinda glad I missed this whole news cycle
IMO this phenomenon seems to be kind of an artifact of modern media -- I feel like in the old days, peers would have settled it among themselves, and we would have never heard about it
The same thing happens in tech -- there is a lot of stuff that people talk about, that ends up being worth ignoring
...
I always bring up that whole news cycle in 2017 about a potential war with North Korea. How many people spent time and energy on that, and how do they feel about that now? Media is adversarial
You're arguing for less transparency here? I think one of the side benefits to witnessing the LK-99 discussion is people from all walks (sure, Twitter/X isn't the end all/be-all of global communication) discussing/following/listening to actual science happen.
Do you know how much of that is worth to the world with knock-on effects? Maybe there were future material scientists sitting in the room with their parents listening to the discussion? I feel like that's equally as important as peer review/replication.
You cannot please these people, simply put. These folks STILL want the ESSENCE of a shared respect and excitement from the common man for scientific progression - and these folks are the same people, mind you, that speak loudly on the ignorance of the cluster groups within the "anti-science" big tent. But when these same folks see a glimpse of collective curiosity for science and methodologies among a lot of people, they long for the days of opacity and "mature handling of scientific consensus". Which, ironically, was the path in which almost ALL scientific progressions that spawned anti-science sentiments had taken.
I think a different way to frame this is that an Internet discussion will involve people with opinions across the spectrum.
I don’t think this is about pleasing “these people”, but about recognizing which attitudes are useful and which are not. Encountering some mix of all of the above is a product of the diversity of people involved in the conversation, and not necessarily “these people” wanting it both ways.
My framing is fine, in my biased opinion. Saying, "You can't please these people about this" is essentially the same as saying "Their attitude about this is not useful" - though one might be more polite.
Maybe I went amiss, maybe I need perspective, but I don't see why a consideration for a re-frame is necessary if one still gets their point across; albeit maybe with more "passion" than necessary.
> These folks STILL want the ESSENCE of a shared respect and excitement...But when these same folks see a glimpse of collective curiosity...they long for the days of opacity and "mature handling of scientific consensus".
You are claiming that it's the same group of people holding incongruous viewpoints.
My point was that this is likely an illusion caused by the communication medium, i.e. "these people" represent a myriad of individual viewpoints, which may not align because I think "A" and you think "B". Not because I think "A" and "B".
To frame it in this way doesn't allow for a useful exploration of the issue. It casts aside an entire group instead of examining the roots of the problematic behavior. It also creates a straw man - the person who believes both things incongruously, when this person doesn't seem likely to exist, or at least seems likely that this is a rare stance.
> Saying, "You can't please these people about this" is essentially the same as saying "Their attitude about this is not useful"
These are saying very different things. One discards the entire person on the basis of a view you disagree with. This is a road to nowhere. The other allows an examination of the actual behavior, which is arguably far more important if there's a case to be made that someone should change their behavior.
"Oh, you're one of those people" gets you nowhere. "The problem with this line of thinking/attitude is that it limits the potential for public excitement and involvement with the process..." gives you and the person who disagree something to work with.
This isn't about being polite. This is about choosing whether the point is to explore the nature of the problem, or to complain about a group of people.
Not-that-unpopular opinion: Some form of soft gatekeeping is required to keep a healthy signal/noise ratio, in a lot of contexts.
The issue is, what sort of gatekeeping, and how aligned is it with the desired effect? Even simply crudely throwing up all sorts of arbitrary obstacles (e.g. various forms of academic hazing) is sufficient to at least keep out people who aren't willing to put in some sort of effort. The problem is that has a lot of collateral damage - it also loses perfectly fine people whose only flaw is a low tolerance for institutionally imposed arbitrary obstacles. A perfect gatekeeping mechanism would exclude everyone who can't contribute while presenting minimal obstacles to those who can. I don't want to speculate here what that might look like, but it's not contradictory to want everyone to have access to science while simultaneously wanting ignorant loudmouths to be gently suppressed.
If I may mutilate a beloved Pixar film, "anyone can science". But not everyone can be a scientist. Everyone should just be given a chance.
To me the most interesting part was everyone talking about potential consequences, uses, the order of magnitude improvements we’d see in certain costs or areas. Pumps, MRIs, power grids, chips, etc. Great reminder what materials science can do to some underlying economics.