The papers on arXiv are "crap" because they weren't ready for publication... the actual team's paper has been submitted for peer review to a respected journal and is being looked at/corrected/tested.
What got published was leaked, hence the poor quality work.
Check the twitter list for more info.
Meanwhile, the very well credentialed HyunTak clearly believes it’s real, but he was parachuted in late in the development.
Personally, I think we will just have to wait the week to see if this is real.
It's very obviously not a U-235 disc by the color, unless the LK-99 film changes that somehow? Plus, if it's supposed to be pure U-235, why use that? Weapons grade enriched fissile uranium used in demonstration of properties of a thermally deposited film?
That video makes no sense at all.
Still believe the safe bet is this is spurious.
But it’s some drama that feels a lot more enjoyable and less consequential than most things in the news recently.
Going to be really an interesting August and even if it doesn't pan out to be "superconducting" the theory is one that leads to more structural investigations into crystal structures that "might".
[1]: "The man who almost faked his way to a Nobel Prize" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfDoml-Db64&list=PLAB-wWbHL7...
I have a friend that worked for years at CSH.
Watson is an ... interesting ... chap.
Good at bringing in the money, though.
It's amazing how we can be quite forgiving of people that make money.
Have a great day!
Note the "hard science" qualification -- obviously the Peace and Literature prizes have a controversial history, but disregard those for the moment.
Most recently, Nordhaus, whose work on which the award was based is an absolute travesty.
As with the Peace Prize, the nominations and selection are strongly political.
Bad maths modeling, insipid correlative relation, ignoring of tipping points, etc., etc.
Addressing the shifted goalposts in your "by Keen's math" follow-up: if you're referring to the "rational function" introduced before the fourth-to-last paragraph, note what the context is:
A model that only applies in conditions where it is not needed, when you don’t have an alternative when it is needed, is worse than useless. ... This can easily be illustrated by replacing Nordhaus’s quadratic with a very similar one that does have tipping points.
And Keen specifically chooses a tipping point of +4°C, based on the paper Nordhaus himself cites and Nordhaus's admission that business as usual (BAU) would lead to a +4°C temperature rise by 2100.
The equation also fits observed data.
The point isn't to demonstrate that this is the correct equation, but to show that on the same basis as Nordhaus used to choose his own modeling function, very different results can be demonstrated.
Which Keen makes more than abundantly clear:
Contrary to Nordhaus’s assertion that caution is needed “when using [his model] for large temperature increases”, his model is unreliable for temperatures that are well within the levels on which he has made pronouncements about what global warming will do to GDP.
It just struck me that both the red and blue traces in the last graph he presents, where he arbitrarily(?) adds another term to the math, are so ridiculous as to not be worth further consideration. If there's a more subtle point, like I said, I'd need to re-read to find it. Either that, or the author needs to bring his lede up front and center. Demonstrating that one bit of math is bad by making up another equally bad one doesn't carry the point as effectively as he was probably hoping it would.
(Though I'm not aware of any poorly-supported hard-science Nobels to date.)
It's not going to work here, but similar efforts have confused attribution in the past.
I could be wrong but as I understand it the claim is that lanarkite and copper phosphide, when ground together at a 1:1 ratio, sealed under vacuum in a quartz tube, and heated to 925C, become a *room temperature superconductor*.
This claim is incredible and verifiable, so much so that it annoys me to hear any side chatter.
We should know "soon" (c.f. https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/breaking-supercond...)
It either works or it doesn't. Unlike many other claims, this one doesn't require anything rare or super hard to do. The furnace, tubes, materials, could be bought for around $10k.
I'm only a hobbyist scientist. When I saw the pre-print my first thought was "if this works, why the f- haven't we noticed before!? Someone should have done this accidentally freshman year!"
The good news is we shouldn't have to wait long.
The bad news is that we have to wait at all.
This time in the 20th century, relativity was “obviously” the most important discovery of the century, with the new theory of quantum mechanics right around the corner.
I also hear that it's not uncommon for superconductivity groups to intentionally include "errors" in their early drafts to avoid competitors copying their work before they're ready to publish.
It's turning out to be a wild story regardless of the science... which still seems to be valid, although not publicly replicated yet.
I'll see if I can summarize the present situation: A couple of days ago, two papers were posted to arXiv (science publishing repository) describing a room temperature and ambient pressure superconductor created by a Korean team working at an institute in Korea. It looked promising (still does) and many people work on duplicating the results. Such a discovery would be the most important one in physics this century/Nobel prize material.
The papers had some oddities - a cut and paste error, different authors listed between the two, missing some data and neither one was peer reviewed. Nonetheless, the author scientists (some who are well known) stand by their discovery.
Today, how the papers were published with the above issues was discovered. One of the "authors" listed on one of the papers (YH Kwon) is the one who uploaded both papers (apparently without permission from the other authors, and maybe without being an author) to arXiv.
This person apparently is affiliated with one of the corporate sponsors (LG) of the work in Korea, and he came to the team as a condition of funding for the work. When the team decided to start to publish according to the process (they'd been working on this material for a couple of years, doing their scientific due diligence) about four weeks ago, they apparently decided not to give any credit to the industry person because he was just "there" because of funding. The industry person quit the team then, and left the organization.
The remaining team submitted their paper for peer review in a well known journal, where it's working through the process now.
The industry person went on to upload the two papers (one with edited author list) to arXiv, and apparently today gave a speech at an industry conference in Korea taking credit for the work. So, he's not happy with the team and he's apparently trying to take credit.
The rest of the team working on this material stands by their work and is waiting for the proper peer review process to complete on the paper they submitted to the scientific journal to be done, at which point they would (quite properly following the process) publish it.
So here we are, with one rogue scientist doing his best to claim credit for this discovery and bypassing all standard scientific publishing practices, with the non peer reviewed version of the team's paper and an edited/incorrect version of another paper sent out to the world before the original team could publish theirs.
The good news from all this is that all these people (including well known/respected scientists and professors) are behaving not like frauds but as if they've actually discovered what they say they have. This lends credence to the idea that this major discovery in physics and materials science is real and may change the world.
Attempts to replicate the material (called LK-99) are proceeding based on the "unready/leaked" papers and may or may not succeed. If they do not, it's likely when the peer reviewed version comes out that replication by at least one "real" scientific lab will already have been done prior to publication, and the peer reviewed version of the article will have more/more correct information to aid in duplicating the LK-99 material.
Regardless of what happens, this is an amazing story. The link I CCed above is to a Twitter post giving details on the above. There's now a Twitter list being compiled of all the people working on replication and reporting on the drama, see here: https://twitter.com/altryne/status/1685148163223719936
*Edit: Here's the actual list of LK-99 related Twitterers: https://twitter.com/i/lists/1684446795731206144