It felt like I went to the bathroom at a party and came back to an empty room and I had to stay and clean up. I knew I’d be done in a year or two, so it felt weird to try and find a new social group when I was on short time, but boy was the end of my PhD a slog in part due to feeling disconnected socially.
But scientifically? Yeah, I'll go with "exciting". The field seemed to move at a tremendous speed, or at least that's how it looked to me as an outsider.
Sequencing within less than a week, extremely rapid movement on the mRNA front (and really, the whole vaccination field - 200 candidates in 9 months), revamped understanding of aerosol transmission, leaps in rapid modelling, tremendous progress in terms of test development, growth in international collaboration, progress in the (public) understanding of chronic diseases, scaling up of wastewater monitoring, ...
Definitely exciting.
The practical science may have been exciting. Unfortunately "The Science" has been forever tainted thanks to secrets, tight-lips, mis-direction and "just trust us".
I think Covid was a net-negative for science.
Who did let us down: the people that were making things worse from day #1 by stirring the pot against science.
What is the solution to this?
The framing seems way too simplistic to ever be useful. It makes it seem as though there was just the Good side that had all the answers all along, and the Bad side who just needed to do what the Good side said.
In reality, it all came down to "who do you trust to both have your best interests at heart and to also be competent enough to achieve those best interests".
Turns out those aren't easy questions, and that people are naturally going to arrive at different answers for all sorts of reasons, and I think very few of them look like "boo science".
That, right there, is where so many people went wrong and what was blatantly exploited by grifters up and down the chain. The side of science didn't "have answers all along", but it was willing to learn and change.
And no, it wasn't "boo science". It was, to a large extent, political maneuvering using science as a convenient scape goat, because whenever science learned, it got turned into a "see, they don't know either". And, of course, with a large helping of grifters making money off the ensuing confusion.
In reality, it came down to seeing who was willing to change their mind in the face of new evidence, and it was a pretty clear signal. (It was not noise free, absolutely, but it was not extremely hard to read, either - if folks had a basic amount of scientific education. There's your solution, too)
This is the framing that I disagree with. There is no "the side of science". There are only people making assertions.
Some of those people were practicing the scientific method competently and in good faith, some of those people were doing nothing of the sort, and from here in the cheap seats we just had to do our best to decide who was who.
Some people like to think everyone should have trusted who they themselves decided to trust. I think this is unreasonable, but also unsurprising.
Yet VIX is at a near all time low. I guess everyone is drinking the cool-aid or they’ve finally started living in the moment.
Of course it for tedious very quickly, but I remember going to the park and people being told not to sit on benches by police on horseback. How is that not crazy and sort of exciting?
> Lee & Kim had been working on the material on and off since Kim was in graduate school in 1999 (LK-99 geddit?). Lee never makes tenure and is still stuck as an adjunct professor 19 years later. Kim goes off to work in battery materials for a decade plus. 2018 - they get funding from industry for another go at it.
Comparing the two is silly.
Note that the 'room temperature' thing is a human requirement, and not one grounded in physics of conductivity per se, and that we started around 3 Kelvin (or -270 degrees Celsius)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/superconductors-t...
To 200K or -70 Celsius) degrees for the latest confirmed superconductor:
https://physicsworld.com/a/hydrogen-sulphide-is-warmest-ever...
In about 100 years. That is on average a two degree per year increase over that period. But the rate of improvement isn't linear and the closer you get to zero the bigger the market is and so the larger the amount of funding available to search for the bit that will close the gap.
This is why we will likely have room temperature superconductors somewhere in the near future, assuming it doesn't already exist. Obviously there is no guarantee that anything that hasn't been discovered yet exists. But in this case, given the arbitrariness of the boundaries set and the fact that those are mostly dictated by chance conditions on planet Earth (if we were living on the dark side of the moon we'd already have room temperature superconductivity...).
I don’t think people that are a little skeptical are being negative they are just being realistic. We’ve experienced things like this before and some of the hallmarks of the ones that let us down are there in this one.
Should he rather be excited about hype manufactured by entertainment or sport companies? Cause that's much more common.
If it happens to be the latter, it's a huge scientific leap forward.
Even if this turns out to flop, I hope history remembers the original authors favorably. They really did find something that by all accounts could plausibly be a room temp superconductor. And of course this seems to have turned over quite a stone. Peripheral research as a result of this will likely continue for years, even if superconductivity is disproven.