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.
