Scientists can move far quicker than you expect, and a positive or negative replication of this superconductor claim should be a very easy publication to grab. It would definitely be worth alloting a few weeks of grad student time to replicating this ASAP to get that publication.
That said, I remember reading about shockley having ideas about the transistor that he only fessed up to as his other more open collaborators started understanding the phenomenon.
If someone claimed to have a complex proof, i dont think people would stop and drop everything.
If someone claimed to have a constructive solution to p=np, claimed to have implemented it, and put the code on github - yeah i think lots of people would drop everything to run it and see if it works.
Im not a physicist, but maybe with the relative ease on making this material (according to other comments) it is more like the second situation.
At this point assisting anybody who wants to help prove him correct (and I know that I’m making the assumption that he genuinely believes he has made what he claims in the paper with the mechanisms and methodology as outlined) will just help secure get rich faster and make his Nobel prize even more secure.
Polycrystaline materials are kinda finicky so more samples helps eliminate the error bars. So obviously why didn’t they do heaps of samples and have a longer paper? … Money! They got funding for quantum physics based sensor/detector research and this appears to have been a happy accident, so naturally they kept their heads down, got their patents (they have multiple patents each of which costs money) and did a little bit more work to be absolutely sure, then as soon as it was smart, they published their results and are now going to let the entire world excitedly double check their results… because the results if true, are fucking awesome…
Of course the world wants to replicate this, no one wants to be waiting for someone else to confirm a breakthrough this big… I bet there’s even some corporate labs doing a little work on replication too, so some smart managers in various industries can factor room temperature superconducting materials into their designs and future plans sooner, because otherwise their competitors might be! (Obviously there’s not going to be a lot of this since most companies don’t have internal science groups but the Lockheed-Martins of the world, the Daewoos, the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the Ratheons … I’d be surprised if they didn’t already have someone somewhere in the world who is still currently making batches and putting them into furnaces because the material is cheap and you can get a lot more certainty from additional samples if your are prepared to pay for the work. I’d be dammed sure someone at General Dynamics is making some because it would massively help them convince the US Navy to give them more funding to continue work on railguns!
Whether people will stop what they are doing to verify it is literally a matter of people stopping what they are doing. University labs are usually quick on that.
I would have figured ATF. What drug can you synthesize with phosphorus? (EDIT: Apparently meth [1].)
[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2000/09/25/00-2455...
From the linked article:
> You can bet that furnaces in solid-state materials labs around the world have been cooking yesterday and today to try to reproduce its synthesis and the properties, and we should be hearing about the results of these experiments very soon. The first samples should be coming out of the quartz vessels. . .sometime tomorrow, perhaps? Depends on what was available around the lab!
It's impossible that at least some people didn't drop everything to try it.
If it is false we may never get a final report, just everyone gives up on reproducing it. (though with the hype we may see it like cold fusion were a few not very good researchers keep it alive via badly done experiments).
Only time will tell.
Labs all over the world are dropping everything to replicate this. It's simple self interest.
It only takes 2-3 days and the people involved in the paper are credible.
If it's real, your lab would be at the forefront of the biggest revolution since the transistor. If it's real, there will be hundreds of papers on the topic by next year. Your lab could be the one to discover a variant that can carry more current, that could have patent on the material of the future power grid. The papers that provide the basics for how this works and the data that everyone will be using will get 100k+ citations in a few years. The PhD students that become experts in this will be in high demand everywhere.
I don't think, at least generally, work is as rigid as indicated. At least at white collar jobs, and especially a research lab, and most especially a university research lab.
I'd expect some lab out there to report a result by the end of the week. The synthesis really is super simple, just grinding powders together and baking in a furnace. Granted, the final product has to be baked under vacuum, but that's not super difficult to achieve. The authors sealed the material in a quartz tube and baked in a standard furnace.