The brinkman paper is interesting, but the others are a bit too hand wavy.

By the rumors that I read in forums,

Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim hit the first sample (the prototype of LK-99) in 1999 trying to prove the theory of their professor Choi Dong-Shik. Around 2017 YoungWan Kwon joined to the team and they got investment enough for to buy an SQUID and a EPR. In 2020, L and K hit with LK99. They tried to submit a paper to Nature, but was rejected. They contacted with HyunTak Kim after read his 2021 paper (the one you point), and HyunTak Kim joined to the team.

The above are rumors. I'm not sure if such 2021 paper may give tips in the theory or synthesization behind LK99.

>They tried to submit a paper to Nature, but was rejected

This should be "were rejected" because "were" refers to "they". It cannot refer to the paper even though that would make sense. You could say "but it was rejected" to force the sentence to refer to the singular paper.

Okay, if we don't correct English on HN that's okay. My foreign friends ask me to do this with them but I get that HN is a different forum and that we are not friends.

There was nothing offensive or corrosive about the way you stated the correction so I don't see why you should be down voted; as someone who is learning a foreign language, I can say that having this kind of correction is useful.

Rewarding the mob for its hysteria and stupidity by hiding away from them is the wrong move in my humble opinion; after all, you're only losing internet points which aren't real.

Don't pay too much attention to votes anyways you do you do long as you're politics and helpful (as you have been).

Important additional rumours I heard from a little birdie:

The Nature rejection was because of the Ranga Dias affair, and it wasn't an outright rejection but a requirement that the paper be submitted to a local journal and peer reviewed by local scientists before it would be considered.

Before Kwon joined the team at LG's alleged insistence, the reason that Lee and Kim had restarted research at all was because Choi Dong-Shik had summoned them to his deathbed, and his dying wish was that they prove his theory right; Lee and Kim judged that LK-99 was the best candidate for doing so. If true, that is objectively insane. Imagine if we actually get RTAPS because of an old professor's dying wish, like something out of a fairytale.

> If true, that is objectively insane.

I dunno about that. Look at it this way: we don't know how to make a room temp superconductor, we don't know how to learn what we need to learn to make one. There were some more obvious ideas, they didn't work. There were a lot of less obvious ideas, lots of people tried them, they didn't work.

At this point, one could argue that continued research specifically directed to making a room temp superconductor, absent some kind of new externally originated discovery or a constraint relaxation (like ultra high pressure), is objectively a waste of time.

So we should also expect that the discovery will either be a bit insane or will be a totally unexpected accident from unrelated work (why are my results weird? oh this drug I was testing turned out to be a superconductor!)-- and maybe a combination. Perhaps it turns out that the LK-99 sample is superconducting but due to some accidental impurity in their synthesis, for reasons totally unrelated to their expectations, perhaps one that would have been discovered before but most people making new ceramics aren't testing them for superconductivity.

The sane people are busy making discoveries that if not quite guaranteed are at least in domains where many people haven't already failed.

How much money does actually go into this? I know it's an active research area, but I didn't get the idea this is some kind of "main" focus for humanity. For example a figure I could find is that US$24.5 billion is spend on cancer research (which frankly I find extraordinarily low). I couldn't find a figure online but I doubt it's even 10% of that.

To me it just sounds more like we are just playing around a little bit and not actually taking finding a room temperature super conductor seriously.

If that cancer figure is true, that’s depressingly low for something so devastatingly common and increasingly common.

Actually a lot of strides have been made in cancer survivability rates from that funding - depending on type of cancer, many people can be essentially guaranteed survival these days when just decades ago e.g. prostate cancer was a death sentence.

For sure! That also not what I was implying. The US solo spends something like 770 billion per year just on the military. That means even the entire world together spends 3% of that on cancer research. You can't really tell me this is even remotely sane.

> one could argue that continued research specifically directed to making a room temp superconductor, absent some kind of new externally originated discovery or a constraint relaxation (like ultra high pressure), is objectively a waste of time.

Really? I’m not convinced of that. If anything, the prior papers published by other authors pointing in this direction say the exact opposite to me.

> The Nature rejection was because of the Ranga Dias affair, and it wasn't an outright rejection but a requirement that the paper be submitted to a local journal and peer reviewed by local scientists before it would be considered.

Note that this is indeed what has been told by the group, but it might have been indeed happened (say, as a polite way to say GTFO), or the Nature paper was outright rejected and the notice was made up. There were enough people that questioned the veracity of this very anecdote.

> The Nature rejection was because of the Ranga Dias affair, and it wasn't an outright rejection but a requirement that the paper be submitted to a local journal and peer reviewed by local scientists before it would be considered.

There is no way this is true. Nature only publishes original papers, which means publication in another journal - why would it have to be "local"? - would preclude their ability to publish.

It's the claim they're making, I don't know. Nature hasn't commented publicly at this stage.

If it was a flat-out rejection, the spin on the story may be an attempt to smooth things over and leave the door open to collaboration with Nature in the future. It comes across as the opposite of vindictive, and there's really no way this story makes Nature look bad with the authors saying this. On the other hand, if Nature had rejected it outright and then LK-99 is the real deal, I think that could have been embarassing for them.

I'm so ready for Christopher Nolan to direct this movie.

By the looks of it, to me this is just the once in 5 years rumor cycle. The authors have been working on it for a long time and have been rejected by Nature. Other co-authors have said they weren't consulted before uploading the paper. The author who uploaded had to give a talk, and for whatever reason uploaded it on Arxiv before uploading, and didn't expect it would blow up like it has. For official confirmation of room temp superconductor, I would rather go with a big publishing journal group organising a press conference before paying any attention.