LK-99: The Live Online Race for a Room-Temperature Superconductor (Summary)
https://eirifu.wordpress.com/2023/07/30/lk-99-superconductor-summary/#sbtable
This is really exciting, I’m obviously skeptical like others but I’m also very hopeful about this.
@mikegioia Indeed. There are some smart people working on this (with some drama involving who gets the third beneficiary on the Nobel prize), people outside of the field just have to wait and watch.
So far, tests results with a “high” reliability are negative, ie cannot reproduce results. Looks like the claim is either false, or the conditions to get the superconducting material to work aren’t so easy to get.
Let’s not rush, give people a few weeks to finish tests, review the original paper, then let’s see what experts in the field think.
Edit: link
There’s more preliminary results from other teams, including a simulation and an actual experiment.
Maybe there’s some hope after all. Let’s put the champagne in the fridge (not the freezer) in case it’s real. It may take a while for the original+replication studies to be peer reviewed and published.
It’s clear lk-99 has created a lot of buzz, but this really puts it into perspective how shady the “discovery” really is. I really really want to be wrong about my doubts though.
@crow Not really sure how someone faking it would expect things to work out. Someone could decide they could get a bunch of clout and followers by faking it. But at some point they get shown to be a fraud then they lose any following they had. Are the people who claim to have discovered something notable before this or could they just be riding a wave for a min for a quick buck? I guess there have been cases in more proper scientific circles of faked results.
Reporting on it is kinda whatever as that’s kinda just talking about what someone else claimed.
Another possibility is that some other mechanism is at work or there is a fault in the test setup. At that point the person making the claim could be wrong but not necessarily aware of it. Maybe due to a lack of knowledge.
To me it seems that it would be worth it to repeat such groundbreaking tests before publishing the results just to avoid such negative press? Especially, if the material in question was relatively simple to produce.
Didn’t it come out that the paper was sent to preprint without consent of all the authors? If we want to steelman their case, it could be that they’re still finishing up documenting and studying some dependent variables for the recreation process.
