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).
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.