That’s how you know you’re doing actual groundbreaking science

I forget the actual quote, but there is a saying that if an old esteemed scientist says something is possible, they are almost certainly right. If they say something is impossible, they may be wrong.

You'll see a bunch of old scientists saying a legitimate revolutionary breakthrough is bullshit, but you didn't see the other 99 times they called bullshit correctly.

That's why it's called LK-99

One to go then.

Actually, the 99 apparently comes from its year of discovery, 1999.

No, I don't know why it took over two decades for their discoverers to figure out it was a room-temperature superconductor.

Don’t know if it’s the original source but Arthur C. Clarke had an even more definitive quote along those lines.

"1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. 2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. 3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." A. C. Clark

I particularly love #3

Related : "Science progresses one funeral at a time"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle

It’s not over until multiple labs fail to reproduce it. A definitive no will take months.

Unless in the meantime the authors realize they made some mistake in their analysis & retract their claims.

Even if it doesn’t turn out to be a superconductor, it is at least strongly diamagnetic, so it opens avenues for future research either way. There’s a potential scenario here where this doesn’t turn out to be a superconductor, but it nonetheless leads to a superconductor further down the line.

The one wrinkle here is if the sample we saw actually was pyrolytic carbon and someone simply mislabeled a vial when looking for something to shoot the video with.

At the extreme end of big news, stupid things can happen (I've worked in a lab: people suck at labelling things they make).

If it is pyrolytic carbon, they've somehow significantly enhanced the dimagnetism of it, which is remarkable. Usually that stuff only barely floats, and only when it is very thin.

Where would this carbon come from? I think being able to produce an element out of thin air is more impressive than STP superconductors.

> It’s not over until multiple labs fail to reproduce it. A definitive no will take months.

Yes. Some may remember the problems with cold fusion. I once went to a packed talk at Stanford where some physicists and chemists were trying to reproduce the effect. They mentioned that in the first attempts, they had radiation alarms set up in case the thing suddenly started emitting substantial amounts of radiation. After a while, it became clear that the effect, if it existed at all, was small, somewhere below twice background radiation, so it wasn't high risk. They discovered that people moving around the apparatus affected the results; humans have a lot of water and are neutron reflectors. Finally they did the experiment inside a "neutron cube", a box made of lead bricks, to eliminate stray neutrons. No neutron generation measured inside the cube.

They worked hard for months getting to a definitive "no".

Right. But this is social-media science, so there needs to be an answer by Saturday or - at worst - Sunday.

Entertain our sudden fickle intellect! We're paying attention now, so you should all hop to, regardless of theory or evidence!

But would a yes be immediately obvious? Is there a test for superconductivity that doesn't easily show false positives?

This feels wrong. The burden of proof should be on the one making the extraordinary claims.

They are literally willing to mail out samples of their claimed superconducting material to labs for independent testing and verification.

Exactly how much more proof than "Here, have a super conductor we made" do you want exactly?

The only thing required is a little patience.