> Worst case scenario, we got another class of high temp (warmer than liquid nitrogen but cold enough that applications are limited) superconductor but nothing revolutionary since at this point, it is pretty conclusive that there is something interesting with LK-99.
I don't think that's the worst case scenario. The worst case scenario is that there is actually nothing interesting with LK-99, and everything we've seen that suggests otherwise is experimenter bias heaped on top of experimental error. I'm actually surprised by the sheer lack of people commenting in the more-or-less-perma-LK-99 threads who show skepticism of the results.
> I'm actually surprised by the sheer lack of people commenting in the more-or-less-perma-LK-99 threads who show skepticism of the results.
There's plenty of people that are skeptical and making it a point to tell everyone they are skeptical. There's plenty of people that are skeptical that are still engaging on the possibility of it being real because it is interesting to do so. There are plenty of people discussing potential pitfalls in the papers being written and experiments being done.
But ultimately talking to people in the comments on HN is a form of entertainment for most of the people engaging, and skepticism is a lot less entertaining for most people in general than being enthusiastic and engaging on possibilities. It's not surprising that people going somewhere for engagement and entertainment are doing the thing that is more fun to the majority.
I doubt the majority of people that are excited about it would place serious money on it being true - I sure wouldn't. But I am having fun watching the developments, talking about things to the minimal extent I understand, and thinking about the Cool Stuff that would become possible if we were to suddenly have a new room temp ambient pressure semiconductor
This. The idea that science can't also be fun seems to be the mindset of a lot of people criticizing others for participating more as eager spectators. Nothing wrong with that. Let people enjoy things. If LK-99 turns out to be nothing then we got some entertainment out of it and a lot of people learned about superconductors
(and science in general) in the process. How's that not a win in and of itself?
I'm guessing some people feel like the time spent discussing/keeping up to date would be a waste of time if it turns out it isn't true.
Which I guess is fine, the friction comes from when those people think others shouldn't "risk" wasting their time, as they start wanting to impose their own will upon others. But this happens all the time with humans so...
Cold fusion was replicated by a few labs but that wasn’t good enough for the media and they killed it. For background see 60 minutes episode “Cold Fusion is Hot again” where they interview and admit Pons Fleischmann was right.
The difference now is that China is a super power and doesn’t have to kiss the ring of the US hegemon.
Journal seems legitimate, but author has a H-index of 7 and is making a revolutionary claim that the vast majority of working scientists in the field reject. Why aren't people accepting his work, then? Who is perpetrating this "hoax" you are referencing?
Okay, so if this global conspiracy is about maintaining control of the world through the supply of oil, thus they are suppressing cold fusion, why have they allowed solar power and wind power to exist? Or battery storage technology, or electric cars?
Not comparing here, but I just remembered that the first paper on graphene was rejected (twice) and one of the reviewers said something like 'this paper does not represent a scientific advance.'
No, it's not. Most people engaging in scientific papers are not themselves scientists in the field. Further, their enthusiasm doesn't change reality. LK-99 is or is not a superconductor. People getting overly excited doesn't change that. Lighten up.
Just because you are not a scientist in the field does not mean you cannot engage and improve your critical thinking skills. I do not need to lighten up, you need to learn some intellectual rigor.
Ha, I've been talking about the same topic with an experimental physics professor friend of mine. He was just not interested at all, like "I've seen stuff like that so many times before, I'm not interested at this point. I may look at it when there's a publication in a serious journal." while I was like "Hey it's popcorn time, this is a fun ride, whatever the outcome!". =)
Speaking as an academic, I really hope they don't ever publish in a serious journal even if it turns out to replicate. Did your friend take Ranga Dias seriously because that was published in Nature? I understand there's a lot of noise, but one of the things one learns is to cut out noise without having to rely on journal brand
Do you even do proofs in your line of work? I'm saying making publication necessary for arousal is a foolproof way to miss out on the beginnings of most of the really interesting stuff. Yeah he can read the ivy-approved materials in nature, but that would be stale. Okay, I can understand that his own line of work is much more interesting to him, that he would ignore the latest glimmerings from adjacent fields. That makes more sense than just taking peer review at face value.
Several years ago there was publicized a P = NP proof, and during our group meeting I couldn't help but audibly scoff, but our advisor just calmly downloaded the pdf and started skimming it.
It was an object lesson for me. Keep an open mind, use your own competence and intellectual abilities to see for yourself and decide. And only then can you offer insightful criticism.
There’s plenty of skepticism. It’s the zero-cost position here. But there are good and bad skeptical positions. The good one involves people attempting to replicate and publishing results whether positive, negative or somewhere in between. The bad one consists of sitting in forums and threads being, “the voice of reason”.
If there’s a real problem, it’s that we have still not made publication of negative results sufficiently attractive. That’s still a problem throughout science and one we desperately need to address since it is what would let us think more clearly in situations like this.
> The bad one consists of sitting in forums and threads being, “the voice of reason”.
You put it perfectly. I'm mostly skeptical and very guardedly optimistic because something seems to be happening. But I've very carefully marked each and every one of my comments with 'assuming this is true' or 'if this is true' to avoid the impression that I'm already convinced. I'm not. But I'm on the side of everybody getting their hands and their lab gear dirty: they are the ones doing the work and they are the ones who put their time (and sometimes their reputations) on the line. That starts off with the original Korean team but also goes for everybody else that has rolled up their sleeves and gone to work. Those people have an audience now, thanks to all these connected media and it's great to see the scientific process acting out in the open for a change where everybody gets to see how the sausage is made.
Meanwhile the Debbie Downers have probably never seen the insides of a lab and have never made anything, they're just taking the default position because it doesn't require any work at all and has the highest likelihood of being true. But I very quietly hope that they're wrong and I also hope that if they are wrong that they will own it. Unqualified negativity is just as dumb as unqualified positivity, it just looks smarter, but it isn't a sign of intelligence.
I think the unqualified negativitiy is based on a common misunderstanding of the scientific process, that if one finds any shortcoming in a result--be it applied or theoretical--one can throw the entire work in the trash under the pretense of falsification.
But this is wrong. Science is about weighing the totality of evidence, and refining that evidence in one direction or another over many iterations.
Indeed, lots of progress was salvaged from failed attempts. In a way all of science is a continuous refinement of our model of how things really work by finding how it definitely doesn't work.
> The bad one consists of sitting in forums and threads being, “the voice of reason”.
I refer to these folks as the "boring universe brigade." The heuristic seems to be that if it's in any way exciting it's probably bullshit. It's a blind overreaction to memetically-optimized pseudoscience.
Isn’t it just a reasonable application of the “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”?
And I say this as someone really hoping that this is true, since I assume this would be great news for renewable energy (and we really need great news on that front)
pg: "Being too cynical will cause you to miss out on the most important phase changes."
Defaulting to "no" might get you the right answer the majority of the time, but it also makes you miss the times that "yes" is correct. And correct things that are a radical departure from the status quo are probably the most important and useful to get right.
Skepticism is good (it's still ambiguous whether LK-99 is anything at all), but pessimistic cynicism is not the same thing.
The brain loves an excuse to apply a noise cutting heuristic. There was an article a while back about that being a problem for general physicians, where the problem is usually simple, but very very rarely something serious. A doctor can appear good when they get it right 99% of the time, but they might achieve that by defaulting to “you’re fine, here’s some (ibuprofen/antibiotic/antihistamine/etc)”. Thus, their actual job is to identify that 1% with reasonable accuracy.
Personally, I think we are past the point of this being nothing. There have been multiple confirmations of at least something unexplained going on. Maybe all of them are wrong but honestly, that is more of an extraordinary claim than saying this is something interesting, just not a full on room temp superconductor.
When people rush to replicate an experiment, everybody with a positive result has something to publish very quickly, and everybody with a negative result need a lot more time to be certain of it.
The kinds of results we are seeing are very hard to get by chance or due to bad experimental setup. But as a rule, we can't really differentiate a real thing from random noise in as little time as have passed.
How is that possibly true? LK-99 is already amongst the highest-temperature superconductors ever found (with that claim substantiated by at least two independent research teams as of this moment).
But, for what it's worth, as both an LK-99 optimist and as someone who has worked in the field and who still talks to people in it, most people in it seem to put the chances well below 50%.
If you push it, all the diamagnetism videos people published about reproducing it could be created by some weird and unlikely distribution of ferromagnetism on the sample. Except for the one that nobody knows where it comes from, that could easily be a fabrication.
That leaves the original, that is clearly diamagnetism, but still could be misleading in many ways.
We don't know how many labs are working on replicating this. So we have no idea how unlikely mistakes we should expect to see.
But that people have a positive result at all to publish is extraordinary. If this isn't a super conductor at this point that is probably even bigger than a superconductor - it means there is other physics we are not aware of to investigate.
At this point I've changed to this is probably true, but I don't know how big it is. (if it is true but impossible to produce at industrial scale it is not revolutionary)
I understand why a lot of people think this, but I don't think we can say that with confidence yet. Cold fusion "replicated successfully" multiple times in the 80s too.
Unfortunately, we live in the age of TikTok. Videos on their own bring no more credibility than written text; they no longer evince a substantively greater investment of resources. I'm more inclined toward the cheerleading section of the LK-99 audience, but watching the videos I realized now is a perfect opportunity to apply recalibrated B.S. detectors.
This doesnt pass the smell test. Why would multiple independent labs fake their videos? What’s the conspiracy here? There is no upside, we will know in a couple of weeks if it’s real or not.
I didn't mean to insinuate that anybody faked anything. Just that video evidence on its own isn't per se any more credible than if they unambiguously made the same claim in writing. The technology for making fake or misleading videos is easy to come by, so why mentally lean on the fact that they were videos at all? Our answers wrt likelihood of truthfulness simply lie in provenance and other indicia of credibility that would be shared with claims in any other trivially falsified medium, like writing. Why, indeed, would multiple seemingly non-cooperating supposed researchers make the set of claims that have been made?
I don't think anything was faked, nor did I think anything was faked before videos began appearing. But that's precisely why this is an opportune time to exercise recalibrated judgment in not allowing the videographic character to inflate my cautious enthusiasm.
If it takes X weeks to do research and someone publishes results before that time, then the conclusion that the results are suspect is warranted and is in no way a conspiracy theory.
Thats because Cold Fusion does work, its just useless. It loses energy.
You need Muons, a negatively charged particle that is 200 times heavier than an electron. They replace electron in the atom. Two Muon-replaced atoms of hydrogen can fuse at room temperature.
The problem is that muons a very expensive to produce and decay quickly. So you spend more energy producing muons than you get from fusion.
Wasn't the problem with Cold Fusion that it did NOT replicate, and thus got sullied with a bad reputation, so nobody wanted to touch it.
Then decades later, it's still kind of open question. Aren't there some studies still going on, more on the down-low since it has such a bad reputation. Kind of like the super-conductor, have to keep it quiet and make really sure before publishing.
Some stuff replicated. It was clearly not cold fusion.
Some people made a career studying the kinds of sonoluminescence needed to explain what that experiment saw. (And AFAIK, nobody found a use for the theory yet.)
The big difference is that standard theoretical techniques have indicated the compound to be promising from an electronic structure point of view and confirmed that it would be tricky to synthesize just right.
Cold fusion always was dependent on new physics to be discovered
In the cold fusion experiments, they were measuring an exess of heat. That's very difficult to measure, and some noise or experimental error can confuse the people.
No one measured a huge flow of neutrons, that were expected to be generated by the fusion and are more easy to distingish from noise.
Reading this paper they’re pretty restrained. They got zero resistance but didn’t get everything they were looking for.
This material is fascinating and I love the interest and good debate it’s generating.
Sometimes it feels like we missed so many golden ages but we might still get to experience something world changing before our eyes and understand what it means.
Real technological progress and societal improvement breed optimism. This could be the start of something big. Even if it isn’t it reminds us why we are still searching for theorised technologies.
You're right that this is the worst case scenario, but each interesting replication or semi-replication, even sloppy replication, or theoretical model erodes at that.
Being perma-skeptic is as bad as being a perma-fanboy
Anyways your memory is really short. Don't you remember how when it first came out (not even a week ago) everyone was hollering that it was fake?
Inb4 "extraordinary claims...": there is no fundamental reason for superconductivity in general to be impossible at RT.
> You're right that this is the worst case scenario, but each interesting replication or semi-replication, even sloppy replication, or theoretical model erodes at that.
Not really. The ur-example of the worst-case scenario is cold fusion, and as we were reminded by somebody [1] early on, is that the first replications of the Fleischmann–Pons experiment were actually successful to some degree. Those initial replications were later retracted when it was found that there was experimental error that could observe the same phenomenon, and other replication attempts were reporting outright failure instead of partial success.
> Anyways your memory is really short. Don't you remember how when it first came out (not even a week ago) everyone was hollering that it was fake?
Your memory is really short. The first thread was 8 days ago [2], over a week ago. I've just been perusing those comments quickly, and there's very few accusations of it being fake. The dominant sentiment is along the lines of "big, if true" or "please let it be true", and there's only a few top-level comments casting any shade on its plausibility. But the threads since the weekend have largely seemed to cast aside even the limited skepticism once opined.
[1] I'd love to credit them, but sorry, trying to dig out which comment out of several hundred splayed out across the various early threads was the one I remembered is more work than I can devote at the time. Edit: credit is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36884183, thanks to segfaultbuserr for finding the link.
> I'd love to credit them, but sorry, trying to dig out which comment out of several hundred splayed out across the various early threads was the one I remembered is more work than I can devote at the time.
It was posted by curiousObject at [1]. I upvoted that thread and participated in that discussion (including adding extra information on why cold fusion experiments were inherently problematic), so I have the link.
As the submitter of the current paper, I'm cautiously optimistic based on the recent theoretical and experimental results. But I strongly agree with you that a repetition of cold fusion's initial false-positive replication "success" is a real risk.
Fortunately, observing a levitating fleck of diamagnetic material is far less error prone than measuring heat or neutrons in a messy cold fusion experiment.
> Being perma-skeptic is as bad as being a perma-fanboy
Not really?
Perma-skeptic will be far more accurate than perma-fanboy.
Depends on context but for example believing every get-rich-quick scheme will get you robbed by scammers, while perma-skeptic will miss very occasional actual opportunity.
Obviously catching and exploiting great opportunities would be even better, but of these two perma-skeptic is better.
> Perma-skeptic will be far more accurate than perma-fanboy.
That's not accuracy, that's statistics. Once you bias for the expected outcome the perma skeptic will be just as often wrong or right as the perma optimist. They have no information about the thing they are talking about, they only have information about that expected outcome based on previous observations. If they had information about the thing itself they wouldn't be wrong for those things that turn out to be true (but then, I guess they wouldn't be perma skeptics to begin with). So, a perma skeptic misses all of the real stuff and a perma optimist misses all of the bad stuff. Neither shows intelligence.
I read through this thread and I can't help to feel reminded of the discussion about cryptocurrencies. So many people that want to believe, rational people that try to explain why it has to work when there is just not enough information right now. As if we believing it will change the outcome of the replication everybody that doesn't believe is shunned and called a heretic. Suddenly people that studied social sciences try to explain to me (a certified electrical engineer) why this is a big deal, because they saw a few videos on youtube about it, with theories of how this solves all energy problems that are so far removed from practical reality that this can only become a let-down.
Note: I am cautiously optimistic myself, but damn, just wait and don't overhype it.
> I read through this thread and I can't help to feel reminded of the discussion about cryptocurrencies.
Same. Some people are simply wired to be perma-skeptics / perma-bears / perma-negative. This community is still full of people who truly don’t grasp how world changing bitcoin is. They are in complete denial, most often parroting unoriginal talking points that they’ve been handed from others.
It’s easier to bypass deep thinking and deep learning and just imitate being an expert. It takes courage to admit being ignorant.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not an expert in superconductors. I doubt most people in this thread are. But they are parroting and making ignorant predictions - just like crypto.
I'll not take a personal stance on crypto in this comment, but it's really a stretch to try and compare the two.
No one debates that there are significant and important uses for RTAPS. Lots of people debate if there are significant and important uses for cryptocurrency.
As I said I feel reminded of the discussions, I did not compare this scientific finding to crypto-assets per se. What I did however compare is the way this finding is being discussed in comparison to how crypto-assets have been discussed at a certain point in time.
More specifically I was comparing a specific trait of some actors in both of these discussions (the "I want to believe"-type). I stand behind that observation, although I see how people can read more into my comment, depending on where they are coming from.
You mean cryptography? Yeah, thanks to let's encrypt we are now reaching widespread adoption of TLS. You barely see any http websites anymore thanks to that.
Cryptocurrencies on the other hand don’t seem to be doing all thar well. Their hype-phase is definitely over and not many actually useful use cases remained.
The reason I don't think this is the case is that they have literally been working on this thing for a quarter of a century. While the people involved are not full on superconductor experts, they are also not super stupid and realize that their claim is a huge one.
How could you work on something for years and years and years, make a claim that it is the first room temperature SC and be _totally_ wrong about it. Even if they only worked on it for ten years, I don't think they are totally wrong.
I think what has happened is that they rushed to publish the paper and the reason it has not been replicated is that they don't even know how to reliably make the material yet. This is why the methods to make it are not in the paper -- because they don't even know how to do it.
Remember they were forced to publish this paper by a rogue former employee.
While I have no expertise in material science, it is definitely not some minecraft crafting - depending on the procedure, you may get only few percents of useful output that you may have no way to further purify.
At least for chemistry, it is often a completely different paper that introduces an efficient way for actually mass-producing the given chemical. The first one is more like a proof of concept throwaway code, if we want an analogy.
> I'm actually surprised by the sheer lack of people commenting in the more-or-less-perma-LK-99 threads who show skepticism of the results.
You're not seeing them because every thread with a significant percentage of sceptical voices trips the HN flamewar detector, which goes off when there are more comments than upvotes.
I've counted three threads where this happened. It's the reason why the front page wasn't plastered with LK-99 news.
Wouldnt a emotional keyword filter make for better statistical flamewar detection? Also, i guess length of comment might be a strong indicator of thread degeneration.
Finally you could create fields of expertease for every account (upvoted comments keywords) and ban threads with non-experts majority commenting.
> Wouldn't a emotional keyword filter make for better statistical flamewar detection?
Something like http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html but fine tuned to flamewars? Perhaps. The mods have some easy automatic criteria, the flags, vouches and upvotes from users, and then apply manual moderation on top of that.
It may be hard to distinguish a good discussion about a war from a bad discussion about icecream. Or replace war and icecream with your favorite topics.
> Also, i guess length of comment might be a strong indicator of thread degeneration.
I like that. Very short comments are usually bad, but huge wall of text too. Perhaps they have something more advanced and never told us. It may be part of the secret sauce. (Or it may be good that they pretend they have advanced stuff, so people behave better.)
> Finally you could create fields of expertise for every account (upvoted comments keywords) and ban threads with non-experts majority commenting.
It's an interesting idea, but my guess is that it's too hard. I'm not sure which tags apply to me. In some topics I'm mathematician, but I comment a lot in physics stuff because I have an unfinished degree in physics. But it depend on the area. In some areas I know a lot and in others I can just skim the article and look at the graphics. [1]
My guess is that non-experts are always the majority. For me the important part is that the comments by experts float near the top. There are also some interesting comments from non-experts, sometimes with a good reply from an expert. Upvoting good comments is very important to make the discusion better.
[1] Protip: Reading medicine studies, remember to Ctr+F "exclusion", because sometimes after the study started they excluded some of the subjects, like the guy that had 100% success after excluding the 1 dead and 5 other weird cases.
It's good to keep an open mind both ways, but "skepticism" without either interesting or convincing arguments is IMO just as useless.
We all know there is a good chance it turns out to be a dud. We all know cold fusion/emdrive/superluminal experiments turned out to be duds. We all know this.
I wonder what news do "skeptics" have to bring to the table. Nothing a skeptic has to say changes anything. We are all - except for the handful of actual experts here - amateurs at best, but probably ignorant peasants. Just about anything we have to say about it is just noise. I'd favor the positive noise, but that's just me.
Imagine being at a football game: "This game could easily be lost! Ah, see, another pass failed. Don't get your hopes up! Please don't cheer, please wait until the very last moment and then wait another hour to have administrative confirmation. Then wait two weeks. Then you may cheer, but only modestly."
> It's good to keep an open mind both ways, but "skepticism" without either interesting or convincing arguments is IMO just as useless.
skepticism is an useful filter
> I wonder what news do "skeptics" have to bring to the table.
reminder of "We all know there is a good chance it turns out to be a dud. We all know cold fusion/emdrive/superluminal experiments turned out to be duds. We all know this."
I actually think far more people know this than done; it wouldn't surprise me if it truly is practically "everyone" on Hacker News.
But what is the expectation here? Must every comment thinking about the possibilities or being excited by incremental evidence of support be prefaced with a note of skepticism? Must we engage in such ritualistic behavior in order to be seen as anything other than hopeless scientific romantics? I must pour a bucket of cold water on my own head before feeling even an ounce of optimism? Optimism carries the possible - even likely - cost of disappointment, and in the wrong company can create the same in others. Pessimism is beneficial, but it doesn't have to be worn on one's sleeve at all times lest it sap joy and color from the world. This is a community of enthusiasts, we can be enthusiastic without also being hopeless idiots lurching from one false discovery to the next.
Thank god for the skeptics. I might have gotten enthused about something. Can you imagine the implications of that? My god, please tell me someone is going to stop me from being mildly entertained before it gets out of hand.
Agents of reason, please enlighten us with your eternal negativity so that we may perceive clearly the folly of our excited ways.
> The worst case scenario is that there is actually nothing interesting with LK-99, and everything we've seen that suggests otherwise is experimenter bias heaped on top of experimental error.
well while we're one-upping each other I'm pretty sure the worst case scenario is some lk99 synthesizer actually creates a black hole which gobbles up the planet.
What if thats where all black holes come from and thats why we haven’t found any aliens? Just a misfortune reality that “accidental blackhole” is lower on the tech tree than fast space travel.
> I'm actually surprised by the sheer lack of people commenting in the more-or-less-perma-LK-99 threads who show skepticism of the results.
HN is supposed to have a high signal-to-noise for comments. I'm skeptical about this. I think it's the modern Pons + Fleishmann, but I won't post that on every thread because it contributes nothing. There's more insightful, and interesting comments about chemistry than anything I can write that would add to the discussion.
I think it comes down to a lack of knowledge. I was pretty skeptical of the original claim, since RT has been a goal for a long time and no one has achieved it . So far all the repro attempts I have seen mention temps around 100K. I don't follow SC so 100k sounds "really cold" to me. It matches with my shallow understanding of SC "it is really cold". Maybe that is really warm in SC land. Either way there hasn't been a near freezing repro so I have grown more skeptical of the original claim.
100K is very cold. But if this result pans out, it's a very good thing for the possibility that LK99 really is an RTAPS.
There are a lot of explanations as to why they might not see bulk superconductivity at room temp - impurities in the sample (or the impurities being the SC) being the big one.
If LK99 is a superconductor at all, but not a RTAPS, it would be quite strange for the South Korean team to have made a mistake. It's quite difficult to accidentally cool something down to 100K, and if they were just getting false positives on their testing for superconductivity, it would be a massive coincidence that it happened to actually be one at 100K.
We're also seeing a lot of videos that show strong diamagnetism - this doesn't mean it's a superconductor, but all superconductors are perfect diamagnets. We have some unverified videos that seem to show things beyond just diamagnetism, with the material being stable in suspension over a single magnet, which a regular diamagnetic material cannot do. These pieces of material are too small to have been cooled down to 100K and stay there for the duration shown, as well as no frost appearing, etc., which would be quite difficult at that temperature in an environment with any humidity.
I think the bigger concern is around whether or not this is a valid result at all - the Real Deal scientists discussing it seem to have mixed thoughts there, particularly around the noise floor of the instrumentation equipment, etc. Some say that that doesn't matter, others say that it does, particularly since we don't see the kind of on/off drop you would in other superconductors, etc.
At worst, this replication attempt's result is from a misunderstanding of how their equipment works in this condition. At best it provides evidence in favor of LK99 being an RTAPS.
I'd go one step further. The worst case is they made up data enough to seem plausible, knowing full well replication is impossible, but their institution wanted their name in a major publication so they were told to make shit up and get published.
I don't think that's the worst case scenario. The worst case scenario is that there is actually nothing interesting with LK-99, and everything we've seen that suggests otherwise is experimenter bias heaped on top of experimental error. I'm actually surprised by the sheer lack of people commenting in the more-or-less-perma-LK-99 threads who show skepticism of the results.