HN discussion did not particlarly have &quot;reasonable skepticism&quot;.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.

To understand the skeptic&#x27;s perspective: imagine watching people excitedly discussing a sighting of bigfoot.

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!rock music

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 &quot;the science says X&quot;, 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&#x27;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?

&gt; There&#x27;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&#x2F;comments as just a &quot;bizarre reaction&quot;...

&gt; There&#x27;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.&gt; Why would I ever be inclined to feel that there&#x27;s pie on my face now that we&#x27;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.

&gt; There&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s obvious they&#x27;d be a revolutionary complete game changer. Not that any of these things are obviously impossible, there&#x27;s just been so many instances of discoveries in these areas that have failed to replicate that there&#x27;s inevitably a lot of eye rolling in physics when these types of findings are announced.

&gt; When mixed with an open mind and reasonable skepticism, it&#x27;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 &quot;researchers.&quot;It&#x27;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&#x27;s a tendency on HN and similar forums to devour new developments - almost a fanaticism about learning the newest&#x2F;latest&#x2F;best before the general public. But in this case, a truly extraordinary claim had been proposed, and it was even published without the researchers&#x27; consent. There was precious little reason to give it any attention at all at that phase.If people had viewed LK-99&#x27;s properties as &quot;almost surely science fiction&quot; all along, I could find myself agreeing with you, but that&#x27;s really not how this played out. Sadly this event showed there&#x27;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.

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.

Excitement and curiosity about science is a good thing, but hyping up dubious claims and low quality research is not. I don&#x27;t know who to blame in this case; I&#x27;m not sure whether it&#x27;s the researchers, science journalism, social media dynamics, or a combination of all those things. But it doesn&#x27;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&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s not harmful to the underlying scientific&#x2F;political&#x2F;social process.

Another point is: It&#x27;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&#x27;t a &quot;room temperature superconductor.&quot; Might still enable a lot of those &quot;exciting conversations.&quot; Just not some binary yes&#x2F;no computer holy grail.Also, big effect was scientists went &quot;Whoa. There&#x27;s a whole mode&#x2F;regime of resistance change we never really looked at.&quot; The modeling papers that came out almost immediately were really interesting. Might still have cool applications.

Agreed!There&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s pie on my face now that we&#x27;ve got fairly strong evidence refuting the claims?

&quot;Don&#x27;t you guys get it? We did find a room-temperature superconductor! It was us -- conducting teamwork, with no resistance.&quot;Sitcom&#x27;s live studio audience: &quot;Awwwwwww!&quot;

The real superconductors were the friends we made along the way.

It was kind of like thinking about winning the lottery—the fun is in the fantasy of it.

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 &quot;post-scarcity society&quot; mental construct, having infinite energy at zero cost (amortized) would presumably make the price of housing change.

I don&#x27;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 &quot;Mat Ferrell&#x27;s Undecided&quot; except on HN.Also, you can&#x27;t solve the most important economic problems through technology anyway. How is a superconductor going to decrease your rent?

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&#x2F;2 of the length would be better.

I enjoy the optimistic takes as well. I think it&#x27;s really fun to imagine incredible new materials that change our baseline capabilities in design and manufacturing.All that said, there&#x27;s also a case for saving all that energy by seeking out skeptical points of view. See thunderf00t&#x27;s video from 5 days ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;p3hubvTsf3Y" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;p3hubvTsf3Y</a>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.

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.

+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”

Please explain the mechanism by which a short lived twitter craze among web developers will translate into increased “attention funding and research”

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.That’s great.

It sounds like you were explaining it to people before it was confirmed - why did you do that? I don&#x27;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.

&gt; I will look like a god damn idiot.Pride isn’t a good look or smell.Try humility instead. You may not like to eat humble pie, but others love to watch that.Also, perhaps some introspection would give nuance to why being wrong bothers you so much.

You&#x27;ve learnt a lesson and grown from it. There&#x27;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.

&gt; &quot;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.&quot;Y&#x27;know those stories on Reddit about people&#x27;s awful childhoods, like &quot;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 &#x27;embarrassing him&#x27;&quot;? Have you noticed the dad comes out of the story looking bad for prioritising his image? Saying &quot;I don&#x27;t want to tell this to people because then _I_ will look bad&quot; already makes you look bad.I told my dad LK-99 isn&#x27;t a superconductor and he said &quot;that&#x27;s a shame, oh well, exciting while it lasted&quot;.

&gt; 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.&gt; 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.&gt; 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.

&gt; 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.

&gt; 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&#x27;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.&gt; 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&#x27;t prove that no such thing exists. We just do not know.

Hopefully your explanation gave others reason to want to fund more material science research. There&#x27;s nothing wrong with wanting something to succeed, and understanding the potential impacts is good motivation to keep going (while following the science process).

NB: there&#x27;s a lesson here that holds for nearly all of &quot;news&quot;. Much of it is either early (partial, erroneous, speculative) accounts of something that&#x27;s just occurred, speculation about something that might occur, or blather about an event that&#x27;s scheduled and programmed and has little opportunity for real surprise (though of course that slim chance is played for all it&#x27;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&#x2F;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&#x27;d never heard of in China growing at 10x a week caught my attention quickly, as one reasonably recent example.) It&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s worse now).So this time &#x27;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&#x27;s defending a point of view (Business As Usual &#x2F; status quo or New World Order &#x2F; this changes everything, or many views lying betwixt and beyond) recongise many of them as strongly motivated and quite often weakly informed.

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.

diamagnetic material exist, and no theyre not nearly as useful as a superconductor with 0 resistance.

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.

&gt; 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.

&gt; were responsible for the sharp drops in electrical resistivity and partial levitation over a magnetAre these properties still useful? If something can levitate without being a superconductor it is already useful for a LOT of things.

Unfortunately I don&#x27;t think we got &quot;to see what peer review in science actually looks like&quot; because this was such an unusual deal. The amount of interest and excitement gave us the ideal amount of peer review&#x2F;reproduction. For the vast majority of things nobody even tries to reproduce it, and many of the publishers don&#x27;t even provide the tools needed to do so.

&gt; 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&#x27;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&#x27;t know. It sounds like the academic incentive structure worked really well here.

&gt;I hope people will walk away from this experience with a better understanding of how science worksI don&#x27;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&#x27;t think the &#x27;academic incentrive structure&#x27; 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&#x27;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.

&gt; 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 &quot;peer review.&quot; 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&#x27;s just not pretend it&#x27;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&#x27;s about where we&#x27;re at.

&gt; 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 &quot;peer review.&quot; 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.

White LEDs?When I was young, I wanted tu buy a blue LED but it was too expensive. Now I have white LEDs everywhere.Laser pointers are nice too.

This invention almost saved our generation. I mean, our parents invented radar, semiconductors, nuclear energy, etc. For us it&#x27;s back to building social media, adtech, and similar &quot;technology&quot;, I guess.

A researcher wasting his&#x2F;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&#x2F;much would it take to try?Only after that, researches decide to try it or just send it to the paper bin.

&gt; its great to be excited for real science discoveries but hoaxes are not good,There&#x27;s absolutely no evidence of a hoax. The original authors were sloppy and overeager, not malicious.

disagree, the excitement led nowhere. We already have high temp superconductors so even if it was real these applications can&#x2F;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.

&gt; [...] 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.&gt; 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.

Does this extend to climate change science too?

&gt; This whole process has been super healthyHas it, though?The South Korean paper claimed to have found &quot;The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor&quot;. 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&#x27;s clear that they missed several key aspects that seem trivial in retrospect. It&#x27;s just sloppy science.Sure, this caused much excitement in science nerds everywhere, and the media got more ad impressions, but overall I wouldn&#x27;t qualify this particular event as &quot;super healthy&quot;.Coincidentally, or not, this[1] is currently on the front page.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37137405">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=37137405</a>

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.

One of the few things I actually remember from undergrad was a presentation freshman year where some famous person said &quot;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&quot;. I don&#x27;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.

Interesting, from what I saw a lot of people got informed on why those overly confident predictions were drek - I don&#x27;t know that I have seen a claim go unchallenged.Which seems ideal to me. Very educational.

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&#x27;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.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=wUczYHyOhLM">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=wUczYHyOhLM</a>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC5472374&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC5472374&#x2F;</a>

I had heard the parts about &quot;probably wouldn&#x27;t be a big deal for CPU performance&quot; and &quot;probably wouldn&#x27;t be great for energy storage&quot;, but I hadn&#x27;t heard the point about &quot;we use less efficient materials for power grid transmission than we could, because of costs&quot;.I suppose I didn&#x27;t expect that we necessarily had like, the &quot;absolute most efficient that could be made&quot; (if that is something substantially more complicated at a materials-science level than &quot;some simple-to-make-alloy&quot;), but I hadn&#x27;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&#x27;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?

&gt;Josephson junctions don&#x27;t seem to work well as non-cryogenic temperatures for reasons unrelated to superconductivityCan you point me in the direction to learn more about this?

Accelerationism has become a religion for many people working in tech. Social media is teaming with John the Baptists heralding the next messiah.

I think it would make MRI machines cheaper

&gt; transmission lines are already pretty efficient and we already choose less efficient materials for costYou&#x27;re correct, and this highlights a problem I often see in discussions: &quot;efficiency&quot; just is a measure of benefit&#x2F;cost. Without knowing the units of benefit and cost, people aren&#x27;t making meaningful statements when they say &quot;efficient&quot;. 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.

It also wouldn&#x27;t change much in MRI (formally NMR) -- it&#x27;s also very limited on other factors

Also... The material was always a ceramic, and you can&#x27;t do much with other ceramic superconductors either.

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?

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 &quot;what you could do with it. maybe. possibly.&quot; Or what it means. And commenters have latched onto it, but a lot is said with an air of confidence, of just-so. &quot;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!&quot;Same with exoplanets, the actual science is &quot;yeah the luminosity of this star drops by 0.0003% at a cycle of 300 days and we&#x27;re getting some photons that indicate there may be hydrogen molecules&quot;, pop sci turns that into &quot;EARTH-2 TEEMING WITH LIFE DISCOVERED, GENERATION SHIP WHEN?&quot;

I felt a similar way with the news of the fusion &#x27;breakthrough&#x27; around 6 months ago. &quot;Fusion power is here! All we need to do is engineering!&quot;.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&#x27;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&#x27;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 &quot;neutron bomb&quot;.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&#x27;ve known for 60+ years, all we&#x27;re doing is doing it in a lab.I&#x27;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&#x27;s tricks. As if we don&#x27;t hype these events the public will lose interest, or even our children will drop out of STEM careers.

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&#x27;s the part where people confidently talked about its applications without realizing that they probably wouldn&#x27;t revolutionize CPU performance (Josephson junctions don&#x27;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.

&gt; Great reminder what materials science can do to some underlying economics.Just economics? :-))Materials science is practically &lt;&lt;civilization&gt;&gt;.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.

It sounds a lot like the thoughts that one might have before the draw for a large lottery jackpot.It’s a fun exercise, but it’s fantastical thinking.

&gt; the excitement and amount of replication on this paper was pretty fun to witness and experienceI 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).

Of course there&#x27;s some sour grapes in Nature&#x27;s article, as arxiv.org has had the best exposure it&#x27;s likely to get in years. The more that publish there, the fewer who publish behind firewalls, etc. For starters, Nature&#x27;s reprints are hellishly expensive.

It&#x27;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&#x27;s considered fairly certain at this point that the paper was incomplete&#x2F;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&#x27;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.

Serious question: why is extraordinary evidence required? Room temperature superconductivity doesn&#x27;t break any (known) laws of physics, doesn&#x27;t introduce new particles or fields, etc, doesn&#x27;t require an unprecedentedly sensitive instrument (like LIGO&#x2F;VIRGO)...There&#x27;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&#x27;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.

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&#x27;t done because those that actually know the field can explain all the details you didn&#x27;t know. Anyone here in programming have had that battle with upper management...Hey lesson learned in this case. Don&#x27;t always assume you have a grasp of all the details.

I told my brother too, the point is he doesn&#x27;t even remember anymore or care. Most people are, until they see it in a real application

Yes, this really showed me what a great deal of science is nowadays. Backstabbing to publish, get credit&#x2F;funding, rinse&#x2F;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.

The most interesting part is one of the researchers believed it was Nobel&#x27;s prize worthy, went rogue, and submitted a paper with only 3 authors to claim the credit of this invention. Coincidentally, Nobel&#x27;s prize only awards at max 3 people.Soon after the other researchers realized and published a 6-author paper only hours after.What a drama.

&gt;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.

&gt;&gt; to me the most interesting part was everyone talking about potential consequencesno need for a science paper for that, they should&#x27;ve written science fiction or created an educational documentary.

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 basic software&#x2F;systems validation that&#x27;s required in many industries (my experience being in life sciences, but have also seen this in aerospace).Is there no analogue in the physical sciences?

Perhaps scientists will create a checklist for performing experiments on potential superconductive materials with caveats and gotchas.A team going down the checklist would either demonstrate one of1. They performed the step in the checklist and provide the corresponding sufficient&#x2F;exhaustive evidence of having done so.2. An explanation as to why that step is not applicable allowing them to skip said step.An afterthought:3. The following will not always be possible for any given experiment. However, the LK-99 experiment used cheap materials and a relatively straightforward process to create the material (from my readings of what others have said), I think the scientists in question should have attempted to reproduce the results of their experiment and document the number of successful attempts versus total attempts.

some ferromagnetic propertiesI&#x27;m still interested int hat, as it seems like it could be quite useful and the LK-99 material is not especially hard to produce.

We know why it fooled everybody, but AFAIK the material doesn&#x27;t have any outstanding properties. With certain impurities and under certain conditions, it:- has a striking drop in resistivity during a temperature change — a property published in 1951 as a property of copper sulfide- has some ferromagnetic properties — enough to be tipped up in a magnetic field but not to levitate

What are the practical implications of this?

You cannot please these people, simply put. These folks STILL want the ESSENCE of a shared respect and excitement from the common man for scientific progression - and these folks are the same people, mind you, that speak loudly on the ignorance of the cluster groups within the &quot;anti-science&quot; big tent. But when these same folks see a glimpse of collective curiosity for science and methodologies among a lot of people, they long for the days of opacity and &quot;mature handling of scientific consensus&quot;. Which, ironically, was the path in which almost ALL scientific progressions that spawned anti-science sentiments had taken.You can&#x27;t win.

You&#x27;re arguing for less transparency here? I think one of the side benefits to witnessing the LK-99 discussion is people from all walks (sure, Twitter&#x2F;X isn&#x27;t the end all&#x2F;be-all of global communication) discussing&#x2F;following&#x2F;listening to actual science happen.Do you know how much of that is worth to the world with knock-on effects? Maybe there were future material scientists sitting in the room with their parents listening to the discussion? I feel like that&#x27;s equally as important as peer review&#x2F;replication.

It&#x27;s easy call those claims nonsense in retrospect. However, many important discoveries were made from equally fantastic observations. We would have missed a lot if we brushed them aside cynically. The only way to know for sure is to test the claim scientifically. As the LK99 saga has shown, even incredible claims must be discussed and tested in public. This is one episode where the media hype did work - though the result was disappointing. Well! That&#x27;s the price you pay for progress.

I really like the video but I disagree with his prescription for peer review to increase trust in science.People don’t distrust scientists because there isn’t enough peer review or because of pre-prints failing to replicate, they distrust scientific institutions because scientific institutions often communicate their current best theory as the truth and pretend that they can ‘prove’ things true by way of ‘scientific consensus.’ Going against the consensus can ruin or limit your career.Lots of examples: climate scientists making claims of ice free arctic by 2020, dietary science flip flopping on diet advice (fat and butter is bad, carbs are bad), covid vaccines being a silver bullet, ivermectin not being effective [1]. Add in problems in social ‘sciences’ like the Sokal affair, psychology replication crisis, mainstream economists failing to predict the GFC, definitions of foundational terms like “woman” changing, and you have a recipe for the general public not trusting academia or ‘scientific’ institutions in general. Science and academia in general is being polluted by politics and it is incentivising academics to exaggerate the accuracy of their knowledge.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jamanetwork.com&#x2F;journals&#x2F;jamanetworkopen&#x2F;fullarticle&#x2F;2790173" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jamanetwork.com&#x2F;journals&#x2F;jamanetworkopen&#x2F;fullarticle...</a>
I added the reference here because Ivermectin was a horrible case of politicising science: mainstream institutions called it an animal medicine with full knowledge it was safe for humans. And now there is a potential mechanism for its effect, it looks like it may have been effective after all. During the pandemic I heard many scientists laugh at people for considering it, all because an authority they trusted told them it was silly.

We had similar nonsense with r the EM Drive and cold fusion so this isn’t that new.Either way the best video I’ve seen on this whole thing, Abe why it’s endlessly frustrating, is this:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=zl-AgmoZ5mo">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=zl-AgmoZ5mo</a>

I wonder if this is a net positive, since media hype would increase likelihood of future funding or investment, so the hype generates accelerated progress.It could also be the opposite: shiny result causes over investment in an area of tech which isn’t productive.

this particular news cycle was the final straw for me using twitter. Its not worth 1-3day new cycle is 99% of claims are bs

It&#x27;s better to miss news cycles, but at least this one was about exciting science instead of dreadful politics.

&gt; MO this phenomenon seems to be kind of an artifact of modern media -- I feel like in the old days, peers would have settled it among themselves, and we would have never heard about itThat’s what happened here—peers settled it among themselves.&gt; there is a lot of stuff that people talk about, that ends up being worth ignoringOf course. The thing is, you never know whether it’s worth ignoring or not unless some people pay attention to it.&gt; How many people spent time and energy on that, and how do they feel about that now?Pretty good that we didn’t go to war with North Korea?&gt; Media is adversarialIn some cases it’s adversarial, and in some cases it’s complicit. In that case specifically, sabre rattling was part of Trump’s negotiation tactics, and media playing up the possibility of war was his intention.

&quot;AI&quot; is going through this process at record pace. So far every money-making application I&#x27;ve seen for it has just made existing products worse by reducing the number of humans involved in production. Shittier artwork, shittier blog posts, even shittier recipes.At least with social media we had a few good years where everything was awesome and it felt like our lives were being enriched, not cheapened.

In tech&#x27;s case it&#x27;s oftne just people manipulating the markets. X is the next big thing, X will revolutionize the world, invest everything in X.The people driving the hype cycle sell at the peak, make a quick buck, and move on to the next thing. Unfortunately, I think it&#x27;s a key factor in driving the shitification of everything.

&gt; IMO this phenomenon seems to be kind of an artifact of modern mediaTo my understanding, these researchers had been working on this for decades and were confident what they had was good.Once the information was leaked, the scientific community was roused, and came to consensus within days.I think the contrast in those two timescales is noteworthy.

The Martian canals are interesting misinformation phenomena. A phenomenon that we’ve seen repeated among the woo crowd.Schiaprelli points his telescope at Mars, and sees some faint squiggles. He suspects they’re something dried river beds, and calls them “channels”, like a river channel. Being Italian, he uses the Italian word, “canali”.This word, being the same word used for “canal” in English, gets translated as “canal”. However in English, “canal” refers exclusively to an artificial construction, where as “channel” doesn’t have that distinction.This framing now primes, people when looking at blurry faint marks on Mars. Someone tries to map the “canals” and either through an act of simplification&#x2F;illustration, or psychological priming, connects dark regions (river deltas?) to each other via straight lines — perhaps the shape most evocative of artificiality.And so it snowballs.I don’t think the canal theory ever gained much traction. (It’s a wild idea!) Telescopes just weren’t good enough to consistently observe the channels, let alone see them well enough for a definitive answer. We had to wait for Mariner 4 for that.

When are these old days? I remember cold fusion from the late 1980s.There&#x27;s polywater from the 1960s.N-rays in the 1900s (the first decade) made it to &quot;spiritualists&quot; and &quot;crackpots and extremists&quot; outside of academia, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;flashofcathodera0000dahl&#x2F;page&#x2F;246&#x2F;mode&#x2F;2up?q=nancy" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;flashofcathodera0000dahl&#x2F;page&#x2F;24...</a> .Giovanni Schiaparelli 1877 observation of &quot;canali&quot; on Mars captivated the public.

Time wasted. I have not missed this cycle. All posts and discussions I have read were pointless at best - toxic at worst.

&gt; Well I&#x27;m kinda glad I missed this whole news cycleWhat negative effects would you have suffered if you had not missed this news cycle?

Is that true for RTSCs? In the last month of this saga, every time I saw someone comment on some amazing new technology that RTSC would enable, another expert would chime in and explain why that’s not actually possible or feasible for various reasons. The only convincing gain I’ve seen is a ~10% drop in power transmission costs. But obviously this can’t be right because of how excited everyone gets about it.

I&#x27;m struggling with the claimed consequences.The electricity grid has losses of about 30 percent, so a fully superconducting grid could increase delivered power by about 43 percent, not an order of magnitude more.More compact MRI machines would be nice to have, certainly, but wouldn&#x27;t materially change mortality.What else is there?

Room temperature superconductivity, like quantum computing, fusion power, and em drives, and other similar &quot;magic&quot; technologies, have one thing in common, which is that the potential consequences of their existence are positive, substantial, and relatively easy to explain and to comprehend, while the difficulties preventing those technologies from seeing the light of day are complex, difficult, and a &quot;bummer&quot; to hear about.

The larger media outlets were smart enough to stay away from the hype until there was more data available from replication efforts. Maybe they&#x27;re learning? Everything I saw about LK-99 before the last week or so was on HN or social media.

&gt; I always bring up that whole news cycle in 2017 about a potential war with North Korea. How many people spent time and energy on that, and how do they feel about that now? Media is adversarialAnd then there are tons of counter examples: &quot;no way Russia will invade Ukraine&quot;, &quot;Hitler will stop at Poland&quot;, etc. then the opposite happens. How do those people feel? Did they dismiss the stories warning of imminent conflict as adversarial media hysteria?Expecting people to correctly follow a news story or not based on an unknown future outcome is impossible.If you can consistently bat above .500 in predicting the news, there&#x27;s a lot of money to be made in prediction markets.

100% agree, that’s the problem with social media and why I hate it.. you have people with 20% knowledge in the subject but with thousands of followers grifting on the topic, while the actual scientists (or subject matter experts) barely have any voice or influence, and results? Public opinion is being shaped by those idiots

News cycle? Maybe if you count Twitter as tabloid.When the hype came people here were asking: &#x27;why western labs and traditional media are so passive?&#x27;. Then Nature came with article telling people to calm down. People here called Nature and peer reviews to be in decline.

Oh man, there&#x27;s goes my <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lk99.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lk99.com</a> community website!

Well I&#x27;m kinda glad I missed this whole news cycleIMO this phenomenon seems to be kind of an artifact of modern media -- I feel like in the old days, peers would have settled it among themselves, and we would have never heard about itThe same thing happens in tech -- there is a lot of stuff that people talk about, that ends up being worth ignoring...I always bring up that whole news cycle in 2017 about a potential war with North Korea. How many people spent time and energy on that, and how do they feel about that now? Media is adversarial

Yeah, stem cell capital of the world and all that.

On root-cause, I wonder if it’s some variation or combination of “publish or perish” linked to failure averse political and cultural structures? I don’t think the circumstances are unique to SK as you see similar effect globally where success is measured purely quantitatively (I.e X number of published papers for promotion, X% score on a test to avoid military service).
One thing I can’t get my head around is how the surrounding narrative was so bizarre. Particularly the “death bed dying wish”. Is this a result of 20+ years of lead poisoning combined with aforementioned political issues?

Once again, South Korea&#x27;s academia overwhelms&#x2F;overpromises but under-delivers.This is surely going to be a &#x27;boy who cried wolf&#x27; moment for Korean schools.

Good science takes time. Anyone making definitive claims, including this article, is full of it.LK-99 is probably not a super conductor, key word probably. It’ll be definitive when the original samples have been independently tested.

Some fields are so advanced that people are expert in one single material in very specific settings. There are some really exotic things out there that are barely used&#x2F;studied

He is likely an expert in many other materials too.

I work with people who have basically researched amorphous silicon for decades.

You have to (though in general we’re expert on a couple of classes of compounds rather than just one). The literature is just too vast to follow otherwise. Particularly in fashionable fields with loads of funding like high-temperature superconductors, battery materials, PV materials, fuel cells, things like that.

Most PhDs are incredibly specific and don’t necessary indicate broad knowledge of a field as a whole.Which is why you should be wary of “experts” making overly broad claims about topics within their field but far outside their area of expertise.Early on during Covid you would see postdoc infectious disease experts on every news channel 3 times daily giving their takes. Some of whom maybe took a 3000 level course in epidemiology when they were 21 and did their PhD on nematode infections in a single population of freshwater clams. Technically an infectious disease expert but I don’t particularly care what they have to say about Covid over a random person on the street either.

Well it doesn&#x27;t preclude him being expert (or just doing work) in anything else?e.g. you might be a C++ expert, but also proficient in Python, and currently working professionally in Rust?

It looks like he doesn&#x27;t specialize exclusively in copper sulfide. His most cited works are to do with gold, and he has articles on a bunch of different materials:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scholar.google.com&#x2F;citations?user=7WQhABIAAAAJ&amp;hl=en&amp;oi=ao" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scholar.google.com&#x2F;citations?user=7WQhABIAAAAJ&amp;hl=en...</a>

Oh for sure. Expertise is exceptionally narrow. It&#x27;s not a super low variance value, as there is spillover (physics&#x2F;concepts&#x2F;math&#x2F;whatever share many similar principles), but most people __vastly__ underestimate the depth and complexity of any given topic, no matter how mundane and simple it may seem. I mean a good example is that you&#x27;ll find books on o-rings, nails, screws, bolts, etc that are individually over a thousand pages. Hell, The Art of Electronics -- a book this community is probably more familiar with -- is a fucking godsend, but even being over 1k pages and generally a reference manual it is still lacking. Even if you get the second book (X Chapters) with an additional 500 pages!This is also why experts can often sniff one another out on online forums like this. There&#x27;s a subtly to the language that is used which conveys an understanding of many deeper nuances than were a novice or even someone with a undergraduate would use to discuss a topic. There&#x27;s a common misnomer that you don&#x27;t understand something unless you can explain it to a layman (probably invented by a layman to justify their lack of understanding), but accuracy and complexity are tightly coupled. A concept with x% accuracy has a minimum of y complexity. But also knowing this can help you sniff out experts in fields you aren&#x27;t also an expert in, but of course your classification accuracy drops since you are introducing more noise. Still, a useful guide if you&#x27;re trying to figure out who to listen to. Obviously much easier said than done.

My partner&#x27;s grandmother spent her entire career researching a single bacteria species and its reaction to a single environmental toxin.

One of my professors was an expert in the Helium-3 isotope.  Spent a lot of time on the second excited state.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;In-Tesla-and-SpaceX-how-much-of-the-technical-designing-is-Elon-Musk-involved-in" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;In-Tesla-and-SpaceX-how-much-of-the-te...</a>A number of years back I had an email from a bloke called Elon Musk. I was vaguely aware of who he was but not very.At the time I was the global expert in a very weird alloy (the market for it was perhaps 5 or 10 tonnes a year. A very weird and minority interest alloy). It was aluminium scandium, which the Russians had developed to compete with Nasa’s use of aluminium lithium. In many ways a better alloy too. And, obviously, there were possible uses in rockets and so on (rather more in something like a Shuttle than in simple rockets though).OK, so I get this email and it asks me whether this aluminium scandium is worth it, will it make my rockets lighter, asks Musk. No, not really, it’ll make them easier to weld but not lighter particularly. Which was pretty much the end of the exchange.So, when people ask me whether Musk does tech stuff I would have to say yes. Because he tracked down a one man company that knew the straight answer to the question he needed answering. OK, you might not think that is engineering, preferring to think of it as people using a slide rule to work it all out themselves. But finding the bloke who knows the answer and asking them is engineering to me - it’s still getting to the right answer, isn’t it?

He&#x27;s probably a *-sulfide or copper-* expert. Or maybe just a physical chemist that the press is ginning up. Actually, the latter. His page doesn&#x27;t even mention copper or sulfide; and makes only one mention of conductors.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chemistry.illinois.edu&#x2F;jain" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chemistry.illinois.edu&#x2F;jain</a>

&gt; Jain, a copper-sulfide expertI would have never known that people are actual experts in one material. This is impressive.

They&#x27;d be a juicy target for some kind of malfeasance. Never put all the experts in the same location!

Their family would be miserable, their kids would swear to never become a material science expert, and they&#x27;d all be missing on the cross discussions with other fields and inspirations coming from outside the material science world ?Not really trying to be flippant, but that pretty much feels like a James Bond villain fantasy, and only a few select people would probably enjoy the setting.We kinda have a real world equivalent with people working on the LHC by the way.

it took 1 weekend of developers and support staff, tucked away in a conference room, for overstock.com to accept crypto payments on their site.I think we can do better!

Imagine if we could get all the materials science experts tucked away in a lab for a year working together with a large budget...

Per the article, CU2S was well-characterised in the 50s.The CU2S was a confounding factor because 104C is where it undergoes phase changes, which drastically change its resistivity. So the change in resistivity was from the CU2S impurities, not the LK99 itself. As the tail end of the article notes, when researchers grew a completely pure crystal of LK99 they got a strong insulator (in the mega-ohms).And as a nearby commenter notes, neither 0.02 ohm-cm nor 0.002 ohm-cm is even a good conductor: typical conductor metals (gold, copper, silver, aluminum) are under 3e-6.

So they saw a large change in resistivity at 104C but what&#x27;s not clear from this excerpt is why the Cu2S was a confounding factor, or isnt interesting.Is it that LK99 had impurities of Cu2S and the properties of Cu2S dominated but we already know things about Cu2S?

It&#x27;s almost like &quot;I know Unix&quot; from Jurassic Park, but not as silly.

There&#x27;s probably plenty of &quot;computer numbers&quot; you&#x27;d recognize immediately.(&quot;It stops working after 65,535 seconds? Wait a minute, I know that number.&quot;)

&gt;“I was like, wait a minute, I know this temperature.”This is an incredibly funny quote out of context, and the absurdity of it betrays an extreme domain expertise.

Resistivity is measured in ohms * meter, so this may be a unit conversion issue…

Right? That&#x27;s what&#x27;s not clear to me either. If they got readings for superconductivity and Cu2S impurities were the cause then fantastic, Cu2S is the room temperature superconductor? Just get a load of that instead then.Or perhaps the way they measured the whole experiment was completely inane from the start if a simple conductor passes with flying colours. With that and them presenting ferromagnetism as the Messner effect makes me kind of question the competence of the entire analysis.

When I first saw the quoted resistivity, 0.002 ohms per cm, my thought was &quot;this is not even a conductor, let alone a superconductor&quot;.  0.2 Ohms&#x2F;m is several orders of magnitude less conductive than most metals, and solidly in the semiconductor range.

I really wish less people would give pseudo-anon accounts this much credence. Literally no good science has (ever?) been done on Twitter&#x2F;X, it&#x27;s mostly just stupid equivocating. Much thanks goes out to the actual scientists out there working in labs and publishing their findings.The academic&#x2F;publishing process is far from perfect already (conflicts of interest, funding, political pressure, institutional pressure, personal pride), now imagine throwing a &quot;Catgirl Girlfriend&quot; (that trolls on an anonymous social media account) into the mix.Free speech is fine, it&#x27;s the listeners I have a problem with.

&quot;ethnically Soviet&quot; she insisted IIRC

Iris, the fabled ethnicly Russian LK99 Homebrewer with the Catgirl Girlfriend, is not convinced :- &quot;70% CuS impurity&quot; are you sure you didn&#x27;t grab the Chalcocite by accident?- There&#x27;s no significant CuS in samples prepared at 925°C.
There cannot be.- I tried forcefully introducing sulfide into pbo, it just. Doesn&#x27;t work. Even at 600°C. PbS reduces lead in 2 PbO to 3Pb, leaving as SO2.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;iris_IGB&#x2F;status&#x2F;1691840478189384097?t=cByj5Lw8Q7gnlDQdJlfQTQ&amp;s=19" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;iris_IGB&#x2F;status&#x2F;1691840478189384097?t=cB...</a>

In their preprint, the Korean authors note one particular temperature at which LK-99’s showed a tenfold drop in resistivity, from about 0.02 ohms per centimetre to 0.002 ohms per cm. “They were very precise about it. 104.8ºC,” says Prashant Jain, a chemist at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. “I was like, wait a minute, I know this temperature.”The reaction that synthesizes LK-99 uses an unbalanced recipe: for every 1 part copper-doped lead phosphate crystal — pure LK-99 — it makes, it produces 17 parts copper and 5 parts sulfur. These leftovers lead to numerous impurities — especially copper sulfide, which the Korean team reported in its sample.Jain, a copper-sulfide expert, remembered 104ºC as the temperature at which Cu2S undergoes a phase transition if exposed to air. Below that temperature, Cu2S’s resistivity drops dramatically — a signal almost identical to LK-99’s purported superconducting phase transition. “I was almost in disbelief that they missed it.” Jain published a preprint on the important confounding effect on 7 August.[...]“That was the moment where I said, ‘Well, obviously, that’s what made them think this was a superconductor,’” says Fuhrer. “The nail in the coffin was this copper sulfide thing.”Science is hard. Kudos to everyone involved for trying to replicate it and figuring this puzzle out.

Are you implying that people on Hacker News saying LK-99 is a superconductor helped the scientific community in some way?

&quot;but the hype only serves to obfuscate the truth&quot;Is that true? Do you think the Koreans or anyone would have made more progress finding the truth without the hype?

That&#x27;s a fair point. Maybe people did react similarly, but the LK-99 hype was at the very least grounded in scientific methodology.I should keep that in perspective and be a little less harsh.

At least superconductors are a real thing.

Watching this unfold on HN has been eerily similar to watching r&#x2F;UFOs whenever someone comes forward with &quot;proof&quot; of UFOs&#x2F;coverups&#x2F;whatever. I never want to rain on anyone&#x27;s parade, as proof of ETs or room temperature superconductors would be great, but the hype only serves to obfuscate the truth. At this point, I&#x27;m prepped to disbelieve because of the obvious over-hyping.People want these things to be true so bad that they will twist every detail to fit the narrative they want. It would be funny, if it weren&#x27;t so sad.

I&#x27;m going to vote for &quot;ambient superconductor&quot; even after this. At least we know superconductors actually exist at all, and the history of the field reflects incremental progress in terms of increasing the threshold temperature for superconductivity. With &quot;aliens&quot; we don&#x27;t have much to go on at all, aside from vague Fermi-equation&#x27;esque appeals to &quot;There must be aliens because the universe is so big[1]&quot; or whatever.[1]: I actually agree that it&#x27;s very likely that alien life either has existed, does exist, or will exist somewhere in the universe. My skepticism is towards the possibility of that life visiting Earth. And mostly for the exact same reason: because the universe is so damn big.

Which is more likely in our lifetime: aliens, or an ambient superconductor?

&gt;bash scientists who were supposedly trying to cover up their own incompetence by debunking the plucky researchers from a brave private institutionHas this really been happening?

I&#x27;d add that the 3-4 preprints that put the final nails in the coffin for LK-99 --- the ones that showed how ferromagnetic samples produce half-levitation, pointed out the Cu2S structural phase transition, explaining why the flat bands are not conducive to superconductivity, and the creation and characterization of a pure single crystal --- were all good showcases of scientific ingenuity.It was particularly impressive to see some groups putting together high-quality, publication-ready preprints from scratch in the span of a month. Especially crazy when you think about the shoddy original papers that the Korean group spent years working on...

Just a reminder that’s not everything one can find in a paper (never mind a preprint) is true. The response from the community was great. Modellers doing some electronic structure calculations, synthesis experts trying to re-create the material, people doing all sorts of characterisation. The closest parallel I can think of is the faster-than-light neutrinos from a couple of years ago. Except that this time there were many teams and individuals all over the world trying to replicate the results. The material was supposedly easy to make, the reagents were quite easy to find, room-temperature conductivity measurements are not too difficult. There was a lot of enthusiasm and activity, which was really motivating.The fact that it could not be replicated is not surprising, considering the sloppiness of the original preprint. But still, it was a very public example of science in action.What was also interesting is the response from some corners of the Internet who were more than happy to bash scientists who were supposedly trying to cover up their own incompetence by debunking the plucky researchers from a brave private institution. Well, most often if something sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is.

Cheap doesn&#x27;t mean free. We can already reduce resistance by piling in more cheap metal, but it becomes more effort than it&#x27;s worth.And superconductors have limits on how much power they can carry.But most importantly, the power grid doesn&#x27;t lose all that much to resistance. And you&#x27;d still lose power to transmission line capacitance against the ground.

&gt; Imagine a power-grid that no longer loses power to electrical resistence in the wires.From what I can see the power loss is in the 8-15% range. It&#x27;d be awesome to save that, but it&#x27;s not game changing, and you have to take into account the cost of replacing the wires.

Because a room-temp, amb-press superconductor, that can be made from readly available cheap materials, would be almost on par with the discovery of fire in terms of importance for our species technological capabilities.Even the simplest example of what that would mean is already amazing to our society: Imagine a power-grid that no longer loses power to electrical resistence in the wires.

It was the techbros hyping it on twitter.

People are desperate to turn everything into content-identity fodder. Hundreds of IFLS channels making &quot;fans of science.&quot; Piles of WSB bros wanting to play some markets like they have a fucking clue what&#x27;s going on. Crypto-AI idiots hoping to jump and pump the next thing. Men on the street with little context hearing &quot;cheaper phones.&quot; Culture warriors saying it means we don&#x27;t have to worry about global warming anymore.Nothing can just be itself anymore, it&#x27;s all gotta be grist.

I don&#x27;t understand how did LK-99 create such wuss in the first place.

Didn&#x27;t they only get funding to horse around with that material several years ago?

If 20 years of horsing around with a material that does not work did not end their careers, neither will this.

What about L and K, the original scientists? Lots of speculation that LK-99 would be a career ending paper if it turned out that it wasn&#x27;t a room temperature superconductor.

&gt; presumably what is meant here when saying ceramicProbably not. Being crystalline and being a ceramic are completely unrelated. Standard superconductors like niobium-tin and niobium-titanium are crystalline metals (intermetallic alloys). The vast majority of metals are crystalline, to the point that when a company tried to make a metallic glass a couple of years ago (under the name Liquid Metal), it made quite a bit of noise.

YBCO isn&#x27;t really used for anything. MRI machines use metallic NbTi even though it requires liquid helium because YBCO is too brittle and can&#x27;t handle large currents.

The current generation of mass manufactured high temperature superconducting tape is based on YBCO, which is a crystalline material (presumably what is meant here when saying ceramic). So the argument that superconductors need to be metallic&#x2F;malleable to be useful doesn&#x27;t really make a lot of sense.

The existing high temperature superconductors in production are also ceramics. They just deposit thin layers on another substrate and then you get flexible tapes. When you hear &quot;second generation&quot; HTS tapes, that is what people are referring to. AMSC and SuperPower crank it out by the mile.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duckduckgo.com&#x2F;?t=ffab&amp;q=superconducting+tape&amp;iax=images&amp;ia=images" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duckduckgo.com&#x2F;?t=ffab&amp;q=superconducting+tape&amp;iax=im...</a>

Did you skip over &quot;In almost all applications of superconductors, they don&#x27;t use high-temperature ones for one simple reason: Material properties.&quot;They&#x27;re saying that LHC does not use a ceramic, and therefore high-temperature, superconductor; instead they use metallic (cooled) superconductors because they can be molded.

you are (mostly) agreeing (except for precise definitions of metallic and ceramic). Their comment is unclear, but it means&quot;In almost all applications of superconductors, they don&#x27;t use high-temperature ones. [...] The ones [the superconductors] that see use in the LHC, for instance, aren&#x27;t [high temperature superconductors].&quot;It just has a sentence in the middle of it that confuses you into thinking their antecedents are &quot;the HTSCs&quot; and &quot;ceramic&quot; instead of &quot;the SCs&quot; and &quot;HTSCs&quot;.

&gt; Most high-temp superconductors (including LK-99, he was assuming it was one, since he&#x27;s not qualified to say one way or the other) are a ceramic. The ones that see use in the LHC, for instance, aren&#x27;t.Aren’t the LHC magnets niobium-titanium? Those aren’t high temperature superconductors. Though it is indeed a metal under any definition. The rule of thumb is that high-temperature superconductors can be cooled by liquid nitrogen alone. This is not the case of the LHC magnets, which also have a liquid helium cooling loop.&gt; They&#x27;re metallic, so you can form them into the shape you need without having to manufacture it in that shape to begin with, since you&#x27;d need another superconductor to join pieces like glue, which we don&#x27;t have.The term “metallic” is unhelpful because often in material science it just means an electronic conductor (a material with a non-zero density of states at the Fermi level). Under that definition, some ceramics are metallic, and the opposite of “metallic” is “insulator”, or sometimes “semi-conductor”.YBCO, which is probably the most used high-temperature superconductor, is an oxyde, so a ceramic, but still an electronic (super)conductor, so metallic. The fact that it’s an oxyde does not prevent its use, notably in spherical tokamaks.So I don’t know the person you’re referencing but their background work on the subject seems less than adequate, from what you say.

They didn&#x27;t propose new class of superconductors. They conjectured that LK99 follows some 25-year-old theory from a paper written in Korean. Leaving alone the fact that the theory doesn&#x27;t make much sense to me (at least the parts I managed to understand), there was no evidence in the LK-99 paper that this mechanism is indeed what makes LK99 superconductive (or more precisely that it is present in LK99).

I thought it was a poor point. The paper proposed a new mechanism for the superconductivity, which would have been a bigger deal than this specific formulation (lk-99). If it were true, it would be a new class of superconductors which I would think this would lead to development of new formulations that perhaps had better properties. Plus as others have said, superconductor material can and is deposited on tapes (see ReBCO) to make it usable.

Thunderf00t&#x27;s point, though, is that LK-99 is not novel in its material category. High temperature superconductors that are hard and brittle already existed. What would be interesting would be a malleable high temperature semiconductor, because then you can make it into cables.

The problem, which is often the case with Thunderf00t, is that he is missing the forest for the trees. No one who knows anything was thinking of using LK-99 for serious applications. The specs of LK-99 where just too shit. What it would have been is a start shot for understanding the effect and creating more useful materials based on the same underlying physical process.

Lots of superconductors aren&#x27;t very good superconductors. They have a low critical magnetic field which limits the current they can carry and the magnetic field they can produce.The liquid helium cooled niobium-titanium can make strong field and is easy to produce. The RBCOs superconductors, YBCO is the main one, are liquid nitrogen cooled and make even higher magnetic fields. It sounds like it took a while to figure out how make them in bulk.YBCO superconductors are going to be revolution but will take time for the older systems to disappear. Good example is ITER, which was designed for liquid helium magnets cause nothing else was practical at the time. The SPARC tokamak from MIT uses YBCO magnets which means it can be smaller, higher field, and cheaper cooling.

yeah thunderfoots video really dismissed a lot of the hopes i had, and im glad for it.

All these use metallic (or ceramic-like with metallic properties) super conductors, though. That was the point: the material properties. If it&#x27;s not metallic or exhibiting metallic-like properties (e.g. BSCCO), the practical usefulness is limited.

&gt;In almost all applications of superconductors, they don&#x27;t use high-temperature ones for one simple reason: Material properties.The problem is that this is not true anymore. It was true when I was in high school. Modern methods of manufacturing cuprate superconductors have been applied to the largest-scale projects:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Holbrook_Superconductor_Project" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Holbrook_Superconductor_Projec...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;publikationen.bibliothek.kit.edu&#x2F;1000075557&#x2F;4402937" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;publikationen.bibliothek.kit.edu&#x2F;1000075557&#x2F;4402937</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;indico.cern.ch&#x2F;event&#x2F;775529&#x2F;contributions&#x2F;3309887&#x2F;attachments&#x2F;1828600&#x2F;2993908&#x2F;Minervini_HTS-for-Fusion-WAMHTS-5.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;indico.cern.ch&#x2F;event&#x2F;775529&#x2F;contributions&#x2F;3309887&#x2F;at...</a>

Thunderfoot is more focused on being a contrarian than being accurate and unbiased. See sibling comments that explain why it being a ceramic isn&#x27;t that relevant.

Why can&#x27;t regular conductors be used as such glue? i.e. you mix the ceramic superconductor powder into, say, molten copper, and make the wires out of the mix. The result would be copper wires with bits of superconductor in it. The result won&#x27;t be superconducting per se, but should have less resistance than pure non-superconducting material which might be useful for certain applications.

It misses the point.Ceramic &quot;high-temp&quot; ones are not used because they still operate at very low temperatures so you are not completely free of cooling requirements, they are just slightly lower.In that case it may make sense to use superconductor with better material properties in exchange for more cooling.A room temperature ambient pressure superconductor would remove the need for special cooling so it would be vastly better than current &quot;high&quot; temperature ones.

I found Thunderf00t&#x27;s video on LK-99 to be funny because he pointed out something no one else did: In almost all applications of superconductors, they don&#x27;t use high-temperature ones for one simple reason: Material properties. Most high-temp superconductors (including LK-99, he was assuming it was one, since he&#x27;s not qualified to say one way or the other) are a ceramic. The ones that see use in the LHC, for instance, aren&#x27;t. They&#x27;re metallic, so you can form them into the shape you need without having to manufacture it in that shape to begin with, since you&#x27;d need another superconductor to join pieces like glue, which we don&#x27;t have. That alone doomed LK-99 to the department of &quot;cool, but not super useful&quot;, since most of the really interesting uses were for large things, not small ones.

Yes, and I though the claim was that LK-99 was a type-I superconductor.

hm? &quot;superconductors that levitate over magnets&quot; == type-II,  type-II can be spun and held upside-down.

&gt; By contrast, superconductors that levitate over magnets can be spun and even held upside-down. “None of those behaviors look like what we see in the LK-99 videos,” van Gennep says.Aren&#x27;t they confusing Type-I and Type-II superconductors?

Thank you for the informative reply.Given that it&#x27;s so easy for the experimenter to verify, you are saying that the most credible explanation is scientific fraud?

There is no such thing as ferromagnetic levitation (i.e. there is no stable position).Nevertheless, a piece of ferromagnetic material which has a permanent remanent magnetization (which is possible only for a subset of the ferromagnetic materials) when put on a magnet may take a position close to vertical, with one edge pressed on the magnet.It is very easy to verify if this is what you see by moving the piece of material to the other pole of the magnet, where it must take a reversed position, with the other edge pressed on the magnet.A diamagnetic material will be equally repelled by both poles of the magnet, so moving it between the poles will not change its behavior.A soft ferromagnetic material, like iron, will be equally attracted by both poles of the magnet.The explanations that iron impurities could be present in quantities so great as to form some unknown iron compounds with high coercivity and some unknown experimental circumstances could magnetize permanently the samples, are not significantly more credible than the claims that room-temperature superconductors do exist.In any case, anyone who has made some samples can verify easily whether they are ferromagnetic or diamagnetic. It would be more credible that someone has made fake claims, than that they have mistaken a ferromagnetic material for a diamagnetic material.

Because all of the people publishing information about this were playing the options market. There was no need to actually educate anyone on anything. This was a scam. It worked.One person sees the opportunity it creating a hype train and gets a few buddies on board. Loads up on $1 calls for something they feel could be the next meme stock, like AMSC. Options start to load up on 7&#x2F;18, just a few days before the 7&#x2F;22 original drop on arxiv. You get the 7&#x2F;22 drop and then uploads of grainy videos start to show up. Bank a few million in options contracts as the price of AMSC doubles overnight. Other people see the hype train leaving the station and start their own, using the same strategy.It&#x27;s how you end up with a dozen potato quality videos and very specific information attached to the comment threads, &quot;This is going to be HUGE for quantum computing @IonQ_Inc if true.&quot;We have seen these types of market manipulation scams in the past. This was the first time we&#x27;ve seen someone use something like arxiv to do this. Brilliant idea, really. We will see more in the future no doubt.

None of the earlier articles mentioned ferromagnetic levitation vs superconducting levitation and how to tell them apart.

Stopping paying attention in the sense of &quot;waiting for news&quot; sense, sure.

I would charitabily read the parent&#x27;s comment as referring to the middle brow &#x27;mass media&#x27; aimed at those moderately above average in terms of paying attention to these topics.It overlaps with a sizable majority of the HN readerbase.Not the mass media of grocery store checkout aisle magazines.

No, mass and social media stopped paying attention days ago because Trump or Hawai&#x27;i or whatever. In a few years some might have a flashback, Google &quot;what happened stupor conduct&quot;, and after a few sentences conclude science isn&#x27;t really worth paying attention to after all.

The people who made millions off this saw something positive from it.

&gt; Only? Math, logicMath and logic are as much subjected to falsification as physics or biology. Mathematicians write proofs, and their peers try to find flaws in them.&gt; arts, etc aren&#x27;t knowledge?I am obviously talking about scientific knowledge, and in that regard: No, they aren&#x27;t. The study of art can be scientific, and is as subjected to empiricism and falsification as everything else. Art in itself however isn&#x27;t.If humanity forgot all the works of Mozart and Schubert, it would be a very sad day, but society would still function. If humanity forgot how to make steel, or had to rediscover the fourier transformation, we would have a problem.

&gt; how empiricism and the principle of falsification work, and why they are the only known reliable process for generating knowledge.Only? Math, logic, arts, etc aren&#x27;t knowledge?What this episode has shown is that people don&#x27;t know what they are talking about. Especially the ones cheerleading on the science&#x27;s side.

&gt; It’s a “Science enthusiast” only knows about Popper episode

One of the good things that came out of this whole story: A very public demonstration, transported through mass and even social media channels, how empiricism and the principle of falsification work, and why they are the only known reliable process for generating knowledge.

For sure! The original researchers showed remarkable restraint considering what they were potentially sitting on. Kudos to them!

I suspect the third party is the one that will mostly suffer the career consequences.

This funder-rushed science exactly what created Doc Ock and the Green Goblin.

I think the story might be more complicated than that, I remember reading that the &quot;third party&quot; was the one paying the bills for the experiment so pushing it out early and even publicly failing would&#x27;ve been preferable to getting it dragged out infinitely for an unlikely hope of it being successful.

Seems like this followed the same rule of internet answers: Ask a question and you&#x27;ll get crickets. Answer a question wrong and you&#x27;ll get tonnes of people telling you the right answer.

This was great science.  Hypothesis, test, and attempted confirmation. Too bad it&#x27;s not superconducting, but the process worked the way it is supposed to.

Yet we&#x27;re all the better for it happening. Even for the original researchers - maybe it would&#x27;ve taken them another 10 years to get to a similar conclusion. Now, they can take the next step and not waste more time.

Honestly, I feel bad for the original authors, who were correctly holding out for stronger evidence but were forced into publishing early by the actions of a third party going behind their backs.I hope they don&#x27;t experience undue blowback because of this.

LK-99 isn’t a superconductor