There's this bizarre reaction I see from many where they see the excitement and curiosity and hopefulness as a form of error and source of embarrassment. When mixed with an open mind and reasonable skepticism, it's a powerful opportunity to get people engaged in imagining a different world.
I had all kinds of exciting conversations about what a validated, commercially viable LK-99 could produce. Why would I ever be inclined to feel that there's pie on my face now that we've got fairly strong evidence refuting the claims?
During COVID there were multiple cases like this where a study got a lot of hype and discussion from non-experts and turned into "the science says X", when in fact the science was as of yet extremely unsettled. Sure enough, as the experts came to a consensus it rarely matched the public's initial perception, which led to a lot of confusion, conspiracy theories, and fingerpointing.
Science-as-spectator-sport is fun, but I worry about the impact it will have on society as a whole and on the execution of science in particular. How many research decisions will be influenced by the possibility of going viral? How many bad decisions will be made as a result of pressure from millions of non-experts who briefly become armchair X-ologists?
When science is done badly (which arguably shouldn't be considered science), which then leads the public to have elevated expectations, only then for science to be done right and disprove and reject the original "findings", public trust in science is ever so slightly damaged.
PR is something we cannot control -- and avoiding releasing results in a (semi-vain?) attempt to control PR arguably does more harm than releasing them does.
The sea makes waves as it will. We can moderate as much as we are able. I think the rest is simply a matter of accepting that things happen as they do out of our control. We can only truly impact ---- and even then, not necessarily guaranteed! D: ---- -- in some potentially very small part -- whatever sphere is around us, and I feel that that's a collective individual responsibility.
Journalists are going to write nonsense, hype-filled science articles. PR flacks are going to hype puff newswire blurbs. Why? Because that's what they're paid to do.
You can curse the existence of bad incentives, if you want annoying ideologues to call you a communist.
Or you can hire your own PR flacks. Because worrying about how people will react to what you're doing is PR, and going up against professionals without your own is like going to court without a lawyer.
Or you can just, you know, do science, accept that people suck sometimes, and get on with your life.
Having had some work get incredible attention, and other work not at all, I've experienced a small slice of the volatility of the web. My most tweet chain was a semi-technical vent I wrote over the course of 30 minutes after stewing about some semi-useless technical hype that no one seemed to be addressing the flaws in. I wrote it in a way that was more attention-grabbing somewhat than my more technical posts, put it out there, and shared it in a few places.
Two days later or so, my number of Twitter followers had over quadrupled.
I think humanity can be quite finicky sometimes (a more general statement, I don't think one could conclude that from the previous anecdote alone).
This is just another example of the media’s negative effect on society. Similarly, the media endlessly poring over every detail of the Ukraine war has likely made their job much more difficult because it damages the element of surprise.
The media originally began as something quite negative with what we called “yellow journalism.” Then for a century or so we saw a kind of golden age of journalism where newspapers had strong reputations to uphold but were fairly rewarded for it through ads and classifieds.
Now the media is back to yellow journalism (clickbait) and eroding the institutions of society.
How many worse decisions are made by people who can't read and won't learn about the nuances of a topic?
Ask L Ron Hubbard?
The willingness of the crowd to believe in counterfactual things is not constrained to science, and whatever damage/risk is posed by that is not new - as Galileo can attest.
What the general public does not see it the regular flood of papers that pretend to change the world and that turn out to be bogus. So, from an insider point of view, the issue is that what we are supposed to avoid (crack pot theories becoming mainstream or getting too much traction) happened in a spectacular fashion. So a lot of people get excited about nothing and then end up distrusting the scientific process itself (“they don’t know what they’re doing”, “they make everything up”, “they write a lot of nonsense”, etc).
In this case, I think it turned out to be a good thing. People got excited, some of them thought about possible implication, others managed to pick up some notions of material science. The enthusiasm and activity from people trying to replicate and investigate the material was heart-warming. But yeah, it was bound to finish like that.
> Why would I ever be inclined to feel that there's pie on my face now that we've got fairly strong evidence refuting the claims?
You really, really don’t want to be seen as a crack pot when your funding and career depend on how external people evaluate your work. You also really, really don’t want to have to retract a paper because you’ve missed something obvious. Retraction is a traumatic process even if you are in good faith. This is sidestepped by releasing preprints (so no peer review and no risk of retraction). But at the same time this is a reason why outlandish preprints tend not to be taken too seriously. There is less incentives to get it right.
This should be taken in the context of room temperature superconductors being notorious physics vaporware along with practically useful advances in quantum computers and useful fusion. What these have in common is a sort of holy grail status, where it's obvious they'd be a revolutionary complete game changer. Not that any of these things are obviously impossible, there's just been so many instances of discoveries in these areas that have failed to replicate that there's inevitably a lot of eye rolling in physics when these types of findings are announced.
This is probably because people (i) were not aware that there had been many other hypes about RTSC before but less publicly visible all proved to be false, (ii) not being able to accurately judge the technical quality of the initial evidence, (iii) uncritically believing that the data in the initial preprints was proof for superconductivity because their authors said so.
While a convenient abstraction, it plays into our biases to notice and remember only some of the discourse.
Plus I don't think it's really relevant to what I'm saying given I'm not making a claim about how any specific individual or group reacted, but that it's odd when there's people who treat an optimistic outlook as an error.
The last few weeks with the LK-99 hype combined with the usual ChatGPT stories, I actually started feeling that maybe the site should be renamed Hype News.
> but that it's odd when there's people who treat an optimistic outlook as an error.
IMHO it’s best to treat any extraordinary claim as BS until proven otherwise as it’s very easy to concoct BS claims. If we take every one of them seriously, it will consume all of our attention and destroy the signal (actual facts) to noise (unproven claims) ratio on this site.
An optimistic outlook without a semi-plausible basis that you can convincingly elaborate on, or link a vaguely credible source doing so, IS an error, at least going by HN norms.
It is just an attitude that values positive possibilities over fretting about negative possibilities.
Especially in cases where there is a small chance of a huge upside, relative to virtually no downside. We didn’t lose any superconductors. :)
I don’t recall anyone on HN erroneously declaring the material was definitely a new superconductor before subsequent evidence arrived at a consistent conclusion.
There is nothing wrong with optimism.
To clarify, I was referring to "An optimistic outlook" in terms of actual assertions/claims/etc. that are written down on-the-record in public.
Of course HN users can have the general abstract sentiment of optimism at anytime in their mind. I don't think there are any norms around internal sentiments.
For the scientists getting their hands on a breakthrough, the risk and reward was worth it, but for the public at large? No one should care until there are definite results.
It's pretty standard to be skeptical of extraordinary, poorly supported scientific claims and you didn't have to be an expert to find out experts were fairly skeptical of this from the beginning and the reasons for their skepticism. The broad HN sentiment was at odds with what you could find elsewhere. This isn't a moral failing or anything, just a common mode of HN-like forums but to elevate it to some some sort of positive rather than a thing to be cautious about seems backwards.
What a shamefully foolish intellectual failure!
Mostly I saw actual physicists who had experience in the field being very skeptical, throwing a lot of cold water on the fire, and pointing out that the original authors looked like amateurs.
And then I saw a lot of people with zero experience in the field running around yelling about how they were out of touch, how this was a revolutionary new way that science would progress on twitter, out in the open, etc. People who were skeptical got called all kinds of names.
It didn't help that a lot of people on twitter pivoted from crypto-hype to AI-hype to LK99-hype pretty much on a dime.
There was also a lot of highly upvoted comments with the usual thoughtleadering style of "let me beak it down for your, here's the ELI5 of what is going on an what the implications will be..." followed by whatever they learned in the past 48 hours from plowing through wikipedia articles.
There could be a lesson here about listening very carefully to experts in the field when they give you their opinions. They often sound very highly biased, but there's usually very good reason for that. Once in a lifetime there's the event where some paradigm is overthrown and all the old scientists look a bit foolish because their instincts were to be skeptical -- but those instincts came through a lifetime of correctly being skeptical 999 times out of 1000 about wild claims in their field.
This could be a teachable moment that could inform people about climate change, coronavirus and other scientific claims. If you want to disagree with experts in the field you really need to get off your ass, get off twitter and the blogs, and go do the hard work of understanding what the scientists actually know by reading the articles that they publish. They're very often correct and their opinions hold more weight because they've literally spent their lifetime learning and thinking about this one thing. They didn't start learning about superconductivity / viruses / climate last week and you need to do better than some showerthought or wishful thinking that you think proves your viewpoint.
But we're not going to do that because its only been a few days and we've literally forgotten about how much flak scientists were getting on here over skepticism towards the initial claims.
And I had some of the most positively stupid arguments on here where people were trying to assert that scientific experts needed to express exactly zero bias because they were experts and held to a higher standard than the average moron with no experience who could argue whatever they liked. Engineering a rationale to be able to reject anyone with a strong opinion based on expertise in favor of strong opinions from randos on twitter.
I addressed why.
One of the things I look forward to in an HN discussion is the comments of people who can collate expert opinions on the subject and surface these kinds of points in a more ELI15 kind of way. But despite there being ~a week of LK-99 stories permanently on the front page, there wasn't much of that (a little on the initial thread, and virtually nothing for the next several days)--and it's not for lack of physicists commenting on the topic (in other forums)!
[1] I saw someone point out that, when you translate the units on the resistivity/temperature graph, it is a worse conductor than copper at room temperature, below its claimed critical temperature.
HN is full of subject matter experts on computing-- that is, software, and to a lesser extent, hardware-- beyond that it's a mixed bag at best. Even as an interface designer, I see so much confidently presented and totally bogus pseudo-expertise on art and design here that it's actually kind of funny, and that's much more closely related to software development than physics is. That BS sounds credible to other developers because it's in a developer's voice and trips on misconceptions common among developers. I suspect that's true with the other non-computing topics discussed here that I don't know enough about to give an expert opinion on.
As a long-time developer myself, I've been on both sides of assuming our astonishing intelligence and analytical capability can make up for lacking the requisite expertise. The mistake is expecting the HN crowd's musings about things outside of it's expertise to be more trustworthy than any other internet forum. If this were some physics subreddit or something like that, the criticism would make more sense. This is just people being excited by something a lot of other people were excited by.
I can tell you from first hand experience, much of the time subject matter experts are often downvoted into oblivion by the HN hive mind. To the point where you only see clueless people at the top.
Happens to me regularly when it comes to machine learning, neuroscience, education/university threads.
For example, people say crazy things about things like university admissions or grad student salaries. Never mind about ML where most of the information here is just wrong.
That’s why many started with dimagnetism indeed.
That’s definitely not true despite your attempts to gaslight us.
There was a dose of Dunning-Kruger, and some software engineers telling us how to science, but there was also a lot of engagement and interesting discussions with genuine experts. Overall I found it quite interesting to follow.
> uncritically believing that the data in the initial preprints was proof for superconductivity because their authors said so.
It had undertones of small team (in a private institution, no less) taking on the stodgy establishment, which is quite popular among some people here. The concepts are also not very difficult to grasp on surface, so a lot of people can form an opinion, however well founded.
People complain about peer review and scientific publisher as well. It is not difficult to see how this could push them to champion something that comes from arxiv.
Kinda buried the lede there. A lot of folks around here and in my own orbit were practicing the former while excluding the latter, or worse, were taking shots at people trying to inject some level of rationality into the conversation. Heck, some folks even went so far as to refer to those types of counterpoints/comments as just a "bizarre reaction"...
rock music
I feel like this line is doing a lot of lifting in your comment.
The problem is that as lay people we are completely unequipped to gauge a claim like this. I followed along on HN and there were plenty of posts by people who were giving LK-99 crazy odds of success, fueled in no small part by viral videos of outright hoaxes from pseudonymous "researchers."
It's fun, in a science fiction-y way, to speculate on what a material with the supposed properties might have meant for the world, but the degree of skepticism that should have been applied was lacking for many.
There's a tendency on HN and similar forums to devour new developments - almost a fanaticism about learning the newest/latest/best before the general public. But in this case, a truly extraordinary claim had been proposed, and it was even published without the researchers' consent. There was precious little reason to give it any attention at all at that phase.
If people had viewed LK-99's properties as "almost surely science fiction" all along, I could find myself agreeing with you, but that's really not how this played out. Sadly this event showed there's a market for hyping up weak claims that people will be poor at evaluating, and I guess we can probably expect more of them.
I don't see it as in any way an unique event, and also not unique for the enthusiasm seen on this site. The "believers" in most of the hypes typically aren't cured fast, as the article notes:
"While some commentators have pointed to the LK-99 saga as a model for reproducibility in science, others say that it’s an unusually swift resolution of a high-profile puzzle. "Often these things die this very slow death...""
I think the public reaction in this case is a symptom of a problem with our information ecosystem that extends beyond science. Just because something is fun to participate in in the moment doesn't mean it's not harmful to the underlying scientific/political/social process.
A significant reduction in room temperature resistance would still be incredible, even if it wasn't a "room temperature superconductor." Might still enable a lot of those "exciting conversations." Just not some binary yes/no computer holy grail.
Also, big effect was scientists went "Whoa. There's a whole mode/regime of resistance change we never really looked at." The modeling papers that came out almost immediately were really interesting. Might still have cool applications.
Sitcom's live studio audience: "Awwwwwww!"
Also, you can't solve the most important economic problems through technology anyway. How is a superconductor going to decrease your rent?
Modern grids are designed to keep those losses down.
If the losses weren't a factor the grids would be designed differently. Very differently. As in, North Africa would be so full of solar panels the generating fields would be visible from space.
A ceramic room-temperature superconductor, like LK-99 would have been, is not a promising material at all, since it's extremely costly to make wires out of it. And even if we found a way to do so, it might not have mattered at all if it only worked for the very low currents/voltages in the original tests.
See the history of glass optimization- hundreds of years of poking around with terrible quality glass, then a revolution during the Schott era, to modern day Gorilla Glass. Or silicon- the initial transistor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Replica-of-first-transist...) was not something you could shove into a missile, that took 15 years to develop. To today's modern ICs which approach the atomic limits of semiconductor manufacturing.
The hope is that the initial RTSCs will follow a similar path, obvious there no guarantee
RTSCs are not like cold fusion - as far as we know, they should be possible, so finding one would not upend science in some huge way. If the ones we find don't also happen to have all the other interesting properties we need, then they may never have any significant impact at all. This is what seems to be missed.
If LK-99 had been an RTSC, it should still not have been major news outside materials science research, since it wouldn't have had any direct impact on the economy, nor any predictable pathway to one. Some other future discovery, if it ever happened, would have been the one that actually mattered. That potential future discovery may have built on the current work, but whether it would be 1 year down the line or 10 or 100 or never would not be knowable.
I take your other comments to imply that finding one RTSC would prove or at least suggest that a path exists to some significant industrial usage of RTSCs down the line. I don't think that's correct, and I'm arguing about why I don't think that's correct. Of course, I may have misunderstood your comments.
Let me rewrite my original sentence that bothered people, so it's a bit clearer. Here's the original:
"""Room temp Superconductors, along with fusion, would affect the economy profoundly. What the exact effect on rent would be is hard to predict but under the "post-scarcity society" mental construct, having infinite energy at zero cost (amortized) would presumably make the price of housing change."""
Change "would" to "could" in the first sentence to make it conditional. Add an additional sentence at the end pointing out that house prices are complex and many factors influence them, and another pointing out that while sometimes we can achieve a property in a material, but fail to realize its industrial potential".
It does seem reasonable to posit that RTSCs, even if they failed to realize their industrial potential- could have an affect on rent. Rent is (to a zeroth order approximation) determined by a wide range of macroeconomic activities, and if we reordered our entire society around improving RTSCs, that could have indirect effect on the cost of housing.
All of that was implicit in my original text- and I had hoped to make that clear- rather than making a strong statement like "rent will go down if RTSCs exist".
All that said, there's also a case for saving all that energy by seeking out skeptical points of view. See thunderf00t's video from 5 days ago: https://youtu.be/p3hubvTsf3Y
All in all, I appreciate that so many people are enthusiastic about one thing in particular: replicating results. So many people will take a press release or an academic paper at face value. But the real value is in replicating the results.
My long term pessimism comes partly from the fact that I know what is behind the magical technologies that are supposed to save us, which is why I am very skeptical about them. I am also very doubtful about our ability to make the right decisions in difficult times and under severe constraints. But hey, I do have a cool, interesting, and enjoyable job.
That’s great.
Now I have to walk back explanations I gave to various people and explain LK-99 actually isn’t special at all. I will look like a god damn idiot.
The whole time LK-99 was in the news, we were wringing our hands about potential uses and the impact it would have on our world. For once it seemed maybe there was hope that we’d see exciting times again with exponential advances in technology. That dream has now been thoroughly eradicated.
By the time a true room temp superconductor comes out, it probably won’t be in our lifetimes.
Is it the idea that there might be something great happening, and that we might get the chance to live in exciting times? I could see people wanting to believe in that opportunity.
Pride isn’t a good look or smell.
Try humility instead. You may not like to eat humble pie, but others love to watch that.
Also, perhaps some introspection would give nuance to why being wrong bothers you so much.
This is also a great opportunity to demonstrate your understanding on how difficult the scientific process is to your friends.
Telling your friends you have changed your mind on everything you told them earlier because of new evidence should be something you take pride in. Because only true scientists change their minds, and even discard their most cherished theories, based on new evidence.
Y'know those stories on Reddit about people's awful childhoods, like "I needed the toilet in a shop and my parents told me to be quiet, and then when I pissed myself, my dad dragged me outside and beat me for 'embarrassing him'"?
I told my dad LK-99 isn't a superconductor and he said "that's a shame, oh well, exciting while it lasted".
There is a lesson there: do not make definitive statements about something that is uncertain. There are a lot of interesting things to say about this material along the lines of “it would be cool if it worked, then we could do x or y” while still making clear that this is tentative.
> The whole time LK-99 was in the news, we were wringing our hands about potential uses and the impact it would have on our world. For once it seemed maybe there was hope that we’d see exciting times again with exponential advances in technology. That dream has now been thoroughly eradicated.
Some people did. The materials scientists I know were mostly skeptical with a hint of cynicism or optimism, depending on the individual.
> By the time a true room temp superconductor comes out, it probably won’t be in our lifetimes.
It is difficult to say. We barely understand what makes a material a superconductor. This understanding will improve, and we will do some more systematic studies. Or it might show up in some completely unrelated project, just by chance. It is very difficult to say when this might happen. All we can say is that so far we don’t think that room-temperature superconductors are a physical impossibility. So at least there is hope.
Maybe, but I have immensely more respect for someone who can just admit they were wrong compared to someone who bends of backwards to justify their incorrectness.
And that's just LK-99. You could easily be just as mistaken about other things. If you start confusing possibles with absolutes things get messy really quickly.
> By the time a true room temp superconductor comes out, it probably won’t be in our lifetimes.
It could happen tomorrow, next week, next year, within the next 500 years or later or even never at all. And that still wouldn't prove that no such thing exists. We just do not know.
If you step back and scan headlines a few days, or weeks, or years, after, you find that almost all of it comes to naught. (Not absolutely all of it, there is some real news, and occasionally a story grips and/or surprises.)
You can spare yourself a tremendous amount of cognitive and emotional strain and whiplash by waiting for the dust to settle. And possibly, cultivating a sense for what might actually be significant. (Early stories of a virus in a city I'd never heard of in China growing at 10x a week caught my attention quickly, as one reasonably recent example.) It's possible to get caught with a normalcy bias, though being prepared to quickly revise your priors helps here.
The LK-99 story reminded me a lot news that broke shortly after I'd first come online via the campus Unix network at uni: the Fleischmann–Pons cold fusion paper. There was a lot of excited discussion, and within a few days I had (courtesy of an FTP server --- this was not only pre-World Wide Web, but pre-Gopher, though we had Usenet) an ASCII-text version of the paper, something I excitedly wrote (via snail mail) home about. And ... after a few weeks ... it turned out to be nothing.
Science, mostly, progresses relatively slowly. Big upsets are rare. Extravagent claims (in a hype-driven and grant-driven world) are increasingly prevalent (it was bad enough 35 years ago, it's worse now).
So this time 'round, I scanned the headlines and some of the discussion, but mostly sat the story out.
The generative-AI story (as another recent example) seems more substantial but still somewhat frothy. Though I strongly do expect that far more capable AI techniques could well emerge quite suddenly and to profound effect.
But when you recognise that a story is largely speculation, especially if it's defending a point of view (Business As Usual / status quo or New World Order / this changes everything, or many views lying betwixt and beyond) recongise many of them as strongly motivated and quite often weakly informed.
Are these properties still useful? If something can levitate without being a superconductor it is already useful for a LOT of things.
It is not that useful. Electromagnets are used when we need something like that at scale, such as in maglev trains. Permanent magnets have their uses, but we have plenty of others that are as strong as this, and plenty of others that are much stronger than this. I suppose we will investigate it’s properties and we might find something interesting, but almost certainly not because of its magnetic properties.
I was really elated to see how people were so interested and getting to see what peer review in science actually looks like. How in the real world it is done outside of journals and conferences, which people frequently give the misnomer "peer review." I hope people will walk away from this experience with a better understanding of how science works and why replication is such a critical aspect of it. Because the truth is that our academic incentive structure has generally fallen out of alignment with the actual goals of science.
But it might also be worth noting that often reproduction happens behind the scene. People point to big works like that which comes out of CERN, LIGO, or other massive projects and state that such works cannot be replicated. But actually those have high rates of replication, which is why there are hundreds of authors on the work.
For LK-99, people got to see a lot of what is typically done by grad students who never tell the public what they did (or even their community). That the communication between scientists is happening through preprints, email, twitter, and other methods that are not journal publications. Because science happens faster than the journal cycle. Most scientists are reading preprints, and letting the work dictate the signal of validity long before a journal can.
But what I was alluding to, which you might have picked up on, is that the reward system we have in place ("publish or perish", h-index, journals, etc) are misaligned as they do not reward this cornerstone of science -- replication -- (typically discourages is) unless there are credible claims of breakthroughs of the highest kind. Maybe we should rethink this system, and I hope that the timing of this along with the other discussions of academic fraud can help people to question the system and metrics that we use to evaluate, and ask if they are actually aligned with the original goals.
Did it though? Nobody published this, which is good, right? And then Max Planck Institute gave the most conclusive answer, and they're the most prestigious replicator-to-be mentioned, so that also sounds good right?. And now, Mr. L and Mr. K will not receive funding for this material, because it decisively failed to publish, which is also good?
I don't know. It sounds like the academic incentive structure worked really well here.
Yes. Science is about more than producing novel ideas. A lot more.
> Nobody published this, which is good, right?
People did publish it, and many responses. They published on Arxiv. I think you are misunderstanding what papers are. Papers are simply a communication method between domain experts. The purpose of journals is to improve distribution and to provide a signal to help experts sift through the (possibly) large number of work. But you need question if they are accomplishing the goals. Do they provide more access than arxiv? Certainly no, arxiv is about as accessible as it comes. Do they provide better distribution than other modes? (colleagues, google scholar, semantic scholar, Twitter, etc) This is debatable and likely depends on your domain. Do they provide a useful signal to other experts? Also arguable and depends on your field. I'd say that the more papers/yr in your field, the weaker the signal. THEN you need to ask if these benefits outweigh the costs. That's both monetary costs from governments, corporations, and universities as well as the time costs to format the papers for the specified venue, deal with the back and forth with reviewers, and being a reviewer yourself. After you have considered the costs and benefits you can answer if these venues are good for science.
> Max Planck Institute gave the most conclusive answer,
Via "preprint"
> And now, Mr. L and Mr. K will not receive funding for this material, because it decisively failed to publish, which is also good?
Indeterminate. Science is noisy. You're wandering around in the dark. All we know is that they failed. But >90% of research results in failure. What is a better question is if their work advanced scientific knowledge. Which it looks like it did.
> I don't know. It sounds like the academic incentive structure worked really well here.
I'm what you think the academic goals are, which we need to know before you can determine if the incentives are aligned. For some added ethos, I'll reference Peter Higgs[0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...
I don't think this was at all what this saga was about. People essentially turned a physics experiment into social media drama and science had nothing to do with it.
I also don't think the 'academic incentrive structure' has fallen out of alignment with the actual goals of science, despite the fact that people keep saying it, and in particular not in condensed matter physics.
If anything this whole thing showed two things: 1. Science works fine, 2. Please keep it to the actual scientists instead of turning it into yet another discipline dragged on Twitter. I know it's an unfashonable thing to say these days, but 99.9% of people have literally nothing to contribute to a debate about bleeding edge physics research, despite that apparenly everyone feels entitled to have an opinion on it.
I saw people become enamored with a Russian anime cat girl on twitter.
This was vapid, consumptive entertainment. Which is perfectly fine, let's just not pretend it's better than the bachelor because science. Replace Chad had a date on love island with Anime cat girl did the science things, and that's about where we're at.
When I was young, I wanted tu buy a blue LED but it was too expensive. Now I have white LEDs everywhere.
Laser pointers are nice too.
its great to be excited for real science discoveries but hoaxes are not good, and can potentially cripple, crush the industry thats actually developing these things.
There are a lot of details to consider. Does it makes sense? Who published it? Did that team has a gopd track record? Where was it published? Did somepne else used the paper as a base for a new paper? How long/much would it take to try?
Only after that, researches decide to try it or just send it to the paper bin.
There's absolutely no evidence of a hoax. The original authors were sloppy and overeager, not malicious.
Reckon so, but if they believed they were on the brink of a great discovery and thought they could be beaten to it at any moment, then it's understandable.
> I am not so convinced of our ignorance by the things that are, and whose reason is unknown to us, than by those that are not, and whose reason we find. This means that not only do we not have the principles that lead to the truth, but that we also have others that accommodate the false very well.
Bernard Le Bouyer de Fontenelle, Histoire des Oracles 1687. Translated with Deepl.
This whole process has been super healthy and similar challenges are important and needed for everything published, not just this particular research area.
I might be out in left field, but I read so often that researchers are running out of ideas. What’s wrong with getting a PhD for challenging something already published? It is incredibly valuable to society.
What this doesn't mean is the average human who does not like the conclusion producing a statement saying "I don't think that's real", or even going so far as to cite data which could appear to refute the conclusion, are producing a challenge to the conclusion. They're just stating an opinion. This isn't designed to be exclusionary, but to ensure that challengers are going through the effort that the producer of the conclusion did. If one is not willing to learn the problem space enough to reasonably challenge the effort, then that challenge is moot.
note: i don't deny climate science but like any science there are ways to challenge it
Tone matters and your tone matches up really well with someone trying to “gotcha” the people around them, which is obnoxious.
> i don't deny climate science but like any science there are ways to challenge it
Not successfully.
Never?
"Try challenging evolutionary biology, even in a valid way, and see how popular it is".
All crackpots think they're under siege and that their ideas are unfairly dismissed. Their ideas are "valid" (because they say so), so why are those ideas being dismissed without due consideration? You hear the same rhetoric from anti-vaxxers, creationists and climate change doubters.
The problem is a lack of perspective. Crackpots of all stripes don't know that they're crackpots. To them, their distorted thought patterns aren't distorted.
Or maybe I should just defer to how Isaac Asimov put it: "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"
> Try challenging climate science, even in a valid way, and see how popular it is on reddit or HN or twitter.
It is an attitude that is a hallmark of cranks of all forms who think they've pierced the vale, but almost inevitably they have fallen for some distorted thinking that they can't see beyond due to the limitations of being trapped in their own head and echo chamber.
I would add that logical fallacies like ad hominem are only useful up to a point. In the real world, once a group of people advance N obviously false arguments, they will lose credibility and their N+1th argument will be treated less seriously. I don't think the N+1th argument should ever be entirely ignored, but these people can't expect to be up on a podium presenting to a climatology conference if they have a long history of advancing ludicrous and/or dishonest arguments and have no deep expertise in the domain.
And labeling groups who disagree with them as “heretics”, “crazies”, “cranks”, etc is how the orthodoxy censors — as they’ve done for thousands of years.
That the orthodoxy seeks to censors dissent rather than address it, particularly when ignoring their own ridiculous members (eg, Al Gore and Greta Thunberg making absurd statements), is why trust in institutions has collapsed. Institutions now routinely engage in obviously dumb ideas because they censor their critics and then run off a metaphorical cliff.
In allowing themselves to censor and demean “cranks”, orthodox institutions have rotted badly — both from the perspective of delivering quality results and from the perspective of driving effective policy change.
It's also how you accurately describe people who actually are cranks, such as creationists, flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, and so on. That these labels can sometimes be wrongly weaponized doesn't mean that such descriptions aren't also sometimes accurate and helpful.
It's useful to have a unifying descriptive label because it reflects the fact that all these groups of people are similar in one important way: they think there exists an orthodoxy that are stifling any questioning of an official narrative. When, in reality, this "orthodoxy" are simply a group of people who know more about the topic than you, and who view the crank in the same way that you view flat earthers. As people with distorted thinking who have advanced an argument that is entirely void of merit.
> That the orthodoxy seeks to censors dissent rather than address it
How do you think biologists should deal with the claims of creationists? That's not a rhetorical question. There are many, many groups with a grievance against the "orthodoxy", who harbour perceptions of being ignored/censored Do you think creationists are unfairly treated by biologists? Or do you think biologists are correct to ignore them? If you think biologists are correct in doing so, doesn't that violate the principles you've outlined?
> (eg, Al Gore and Greta Thunberg making absurd statements)
Climate activists != climatologists.
For the record - I personally agree with the findings of bodies like the IPCC. But I am not sure there is more than the aforementioned faith and some more indicators backing me up on that.
I believe it should be the same rule of thumb we are accustomed to using elsewhere.
If we have a computer security question, we will defer to the people who have dedicated 30 years of their life to mastering computer security. Whatever their opinion is, it's statistically more likely to be correct than whatever opinion I have after 2 weeks of "research". Likewise for astronomy, neurosurgery, being a pilot, and any other complicated area of study. I can't fly a plane, I can't operate the LHC, and I don't know anything about vaccines, so in all of these areas I need to outsource my opinions, to an extent, to the people that know these things better than everyone else. It's not perfect, and we can call that imperfection faith, but I can't think of a better approach.
Here are two biologists that might not agree with your statement. https://www.youtube.com/@DarkHorsePod/
People are probably downvoting you because you're coming across as either contrarian at best or bad-faith at worst. Surely you realize this.
I just believe that there is a tremendous amount of pressure (financial and otherwise) to publish, there is academic pressure to toe the line on popular theories, and humans are fallible.
This is most likely the same for climate science as it is for medical research or any scientific field.
Has it, though?
The South Korean paper claimed to have found "The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor". It took a month for researchers around the world to essentially debunk this.
Science works by peer review, yes, but that should have never been a claim to begin with. They were blinded by excitement of the results and eager to publish the paper, instead of being conservative and making sure they got everything right.
Now it's clear that they missed several key aspects that seem trivial in retrospect. It's just sloppy science.
Sure, this caused much excitement in science nerds everywhere, and the media got more ad impressions, but overall I wouldn't qualify this particular event as "super healthy".
Coincidentally, or not, this[1] is currently on the front page.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333487946_Over-opti...
As I understand it the paper was a leaked preprint. Which means they didn't "claim" anything, but were distributing it to get peer review and feedback before publishing.
LK-99 would have interesting applications, known and unknown, but we have a pretty good understanding of superconductors based on 100 years of practical research, and I find this kind of instant punditry pretty tiresome.
I suppose I didn't expect that we necessarily had like, the "absolute most efficient that could be made" (if that is something substantially more complicated at a materials-science level than "some simple-to-make-alloy"), but I hadn't imagined that it was a substantial difference. (I think I had imagined that they were... copper wires with like, surrounding metal tubes, or something? I hadn't thought much about it.)
Could you either say, or give my a search term I should look up in order to read, a little more about the trade-off being made between materials cost and efficiency of transmission lines?
Super conductors are superconductive to a point. Once that point is crossed they turn into regular conductors. (I've seen ~1A cited. For context, EVs charge at around 500A).
To make them useful for power transmission, you'd have to up the voltage to insane levels to avoid collapsing the field.
The AmpaCity project in Essen, Germany, gives insights about the implementation details, as the involved parties were required to publish their work.
https://www.enargus.de/pub/bscw.cgi/?op=enargus.eps2&q=%2201...
for the specific aspect under discussion, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology report is of interest:
https://www.tib.eu/de/suchen/id/TIBKAT:872231372/Ampacity-10...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yttrium_barium_copper_oxide#/m...
[1] https://www.amsc.com/comed-and-amsc-announce-successful-inte...
If we did discover a room-temperature superconductor, I suspect it would be a while before the cost to produce it in the bulk quantities required for electrical transmission are economically attractive compared to what’s already available.
Note that there is no guarantee that that would ever happen. Electrical resistance is not the only thing you need for something to be an economically efficient power line. While superconductors are by definition excellent in terms of electrical resistance, there is nothing to guarantee that they wouldn't be too brittle, or too heavy, or too hard to mould into the required shape, or simply require materials that are too rare on Earth. And all of these would not be things that can just be worked around with better production processes or smart engineering - they would be fundamental limitations of the specific material, just like the low temperature requirements of currently known superconductors will never be improved with more research.
So this isn't a matter of when they would reach the point of being better economically, it's also very much a matter of if they would ever reach that point. Hopefully, we'll get lucky one day and find a material that is superconducting at room temperature and above, that is study and light and easy to make into wires and made out of abundantly available elements. LK-99 certainly wasn't most of these things. Even if it had been superconducting, it wasn't a good candidate for any of the other properties we want anyway, so it likely wouldn't have been much better than other known materials for most applications.
There is a good chance that they never reach the exponential breakpoints that everyone likes to fantasize about.
They might find a niche in some instruments in probes, but for wiring it does not make sense. The rest of the probe electronics don't like being that cold.
Communication/low voltage is a different matter of course.
In other cases it is more important to reduce resistance, not so much because of the power loss but because of what the power loss means: the generation of heat that may be difficult to remove.
Of course you can get around those problems at extra cost, but it is more than a straight up comparison of the material cost of the conductor.
Very expensive to build anything sizable out of it
It does have excellent anti-corrosion properties.
I wonder what kinds of alloys we will see in the potential future with asteroid mining and thus comparatively cheap gold. Imagine replacing lead with gold in industrial applications. Or the stainless steels with a gold component in them.
My guess is the main application will be for space missions that find it cheaper to carry mining/manufacturing equipment rather than all the materials they need. Even that seems potentially a ways off. I suppose we could mine asteroids for science sooner, but that's quite a bit different than any mission plan which includes mining as a part of the required logistics. Maybe if there's some materials needed for extending life support capabilities? But still I'd have to wonder why not just take the extra supplies with you.
Maybe a moon or Mars base could change some calculus. As I suspect the break even point of such a plan may require lots of use of any such equipment.
Aluminum wires even made it into residential housing when copper was expensive/rare. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminum_building_wiring
Copper is expensive so over hundreds of miles you may not want that.
REBCO supports stronger magnetic fields, and conveniently, tokamak output scales with the fourth power of magnetic field strength.
So instead of being 400 times the volume of a PWR with the same gross power output, they're just 40 times the volume. It's no panacea to the economic challenges facing fusion.
The other way to get high volumetric power density is go with a configuration of higher beta, the ratio of plasma pressure to magnetic pressure (fusion power at a given magnetic field scales as beta^2). Helion isn't using superconductors at all.
Which seems ideal to me. Very educational.
I hope that those that got dashed (and observed the dashing) take a step back the next time something from "FuturistSuperScienceNews.com" or whatever pops up touting a revolutionary XYZ. Those sites are like 99% trash that train their readers to distrust science when their clickbate articles don't pan out. If I were conspiracy minded, I'd swear they exist to build out a mistrust in institutions.
Can you point me in the direction to learn more about this?
You're correct, and this highlights a problem I often see in discussions: "efficiency" just is a measure of benefit/cost. Without knowing the units of benefit and cost, people aren't making meaningful statements when they say "efficient". The important efficiency of transmission lines is capacity per dollar, not capacity per material, and no material requiring lab crystallization is going to be remotely competitive in capacity per dollar.
Maybe new technology made in a lab can one day scale up and compete against current low-cost high-scale solutions. Crazy idea, I know.
However, trying to artificially limit all discussion about R&D and future tech by claiming "it's more expensive than fully scaled solutions" has got to be full luddism. This loom prototype is too expensive! I can hire a man for a shilling a day!
>material requiring lab crystallization
How are you going to string a crystals between towers? The material properties are all wrong for this application.
As far as I'm aware this is a brittle /inflexible material so my point about the mechanical properties still stands.
And when people refer to growing crystals, that generally refers to a particular kind of crystal. Ive never heard of anyone growing aluminium crystals, except if it's a compound, and then you get a crystal like we think of when we say crystals.
Yes. You want them to be ductile (malleable, or that can be deformed permanently in less-technical language). Although they could also be flexible (meaning that they can deform, but go back to their natural shape if we stop applying a force), as in the case of fibre optics cables, which are actually not crystals but quite brittle.
The interesting twist is that a solid pretty much has to be a crystal to be malleable. Almost all the metals you can think of are in their crystalline state.
> And when people refer to growing crystals, that generally refers to a particular kind of crystal.
I don’t know. From my experience people equate crystals with shiny things without really thinking about it. But this is HN, and we should try to be a bit better than a random person on the street. After all, most people don’t know a web browser from an OS, but I would be ridiculed if I make that confusion here.
It is a wonderful community where you are almost certain to discuss with some experts in pretty much any given field, it is a great opportunity to learn and grow.
> Ive never heard of anyone growing aluminium crystals
If you’ve seen solid aluminium, then you’ve seen it as a crystal. It is pretty much impossible with common techniques to get non-crystalline solid aluminium.
> except if it's a compound, and then you get a crystal like we think of when we say crystals.
That’s the thing, I don’t know what you think of when you say “crystal”. In actual fact, a crystal is a state of condensed matter in which atoms or ions are aligned in a 3-dimensional pattern that can be replicated to fill the space. In the case of aluminium, you can actually see how the atoms are arranged in a periodic way in articles such as this one (figure 3): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323423565_Anomalous... . There are many other examples, and it is absolutely fascinating. We have the tools to count atoms and see the structure of the material!
And it is undoubtedly a crystal.
A ceramic?
I'm happy to accept that internet explorer isn't an OS, but it would be nice to know what terminology you would find acceptable.
I am not blaming you, I know the knowledge of the general population of this sort of things is not great and you cannot know it before some tells you. A whole bunch of new age scams would completely fall apart if most people actually knew what a crystal is and where we can find them.
They are not ceramics because this is used for compounds with elements such as oxygen or nitrogen, which is not applicable here. Aluminium oxide, Al2O3, which used in sapphire "glass" in watches, is a ceramic that contains aluminium.
No, you're just the one pedantically enforcing a definition that's irrelevant to the conversation at large.
You aren't holding up your end of the conversation. Being a good listener means putting some effort into understanding what people are trying to say even if they get terminology a bit wrong. Jumping in to correct people on minor misuses of terminology doesn't show you're smart, it shows that you care more about correcting them than about their ideas.
I mean, cool, good to know copper and aluminum are crystalline metals, but the point here is that they're ductile and LK-99 isn't--you can't make wires out of LK-99. Arguing that copper and aluminum are crystals isn't adding to the conversation, it's just missing the point.
> No, you're just the one pedantically enforcing a definition that's irrelevant to the conversation at large.
I am not enforcing anything. How could I, anyway? I am pointing out an error in terminology. It is far from irrelevant, all the threads about that subject are full of misinterpretations and misunderstandings. One of the reason for that is that scientific articles use the jargon of the field, which can deviate from how certain words are used in our daily lives.
> You aren't holding up your end of the conversation. Being a good listener means putting some effort into understanding what people are trying to say even if they get terminology a bit wrong. Jumping in to correct people on minor misuses of terminology doesn't show you're smart, it shows that you care more about correcting them than about their ideas.
It is not a small vocabulary issue. This stuff is fundamental materials science and you cannot understand anything about this subject if you are confused about this. Again, this thread is full of people who are confused because they don’t understand some words in the same way as the writer. Crystalline and amorphous materials have very different properties as far as conductivity is concerned. The crystalline aspect is fundamental.
> I mean, cool, good to know copper and aluminum are crystalline metals, but the point here is that they're ductile and LK-99 isn't--you can't make wires out of LK-99. Arguing that copper and aluminum are crystals isn't adding to the conversation, it's just missing the point.
What is missing the point is that we know how to make wires with brittle materials. Prime examples are silica in fibre optics and YBCO in superconducting tape. And yes, whether they are crystalline or not is very important for both of them.
No, even at scale, materials that you can extract from ore are inherently going to be cheaper than materials you have to extract from three different ores and then crystallize, even in a manufacturing lab. These just aren't comparable processes, and no amount of scale is ever going to fix that.
Instead of assuming I'm making a disingenuous point, you might have asked for clarification.
That's setting aside the problems others have brought up, which is that the materials in question have other properties besides conductivity which make these materials inappropriate for transmission application.
As with all toy models being applied to the real world, there are important factors to model in that aren't immediately obvious.
If you remove that, those things become... really, just tubes wrapped in various coils connected to a software defined radio of average quality.
Also you can't just write off the fringe field.
Would a cheap room temperature superconductor bring any benefits here?
High-efficiency DC-DC converters often use a resonant tank circuit[1], which supports high-frequency operation and zero-current or zero-volt switching, which together significantly reduces switching losses.
In such a circuit I imagine superconducting inductors/transformers and superconducting capacitors could be beneficial to improving efficiency further.
Keep in mind though that resonant DC-DC converters can reach 98% (or higher) efficiency already[3] with current tech.
[1]: https://www.analog.com/en/technical-articles/an-efficiency-p...
[2]: https://www.monolithicpower.com/understanding-llc-operation-...
[3]: https://ietresearch.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1049/iet-... (random example)
So popular science wraps it in a "what you could do with it. maybe. possibly." Or what it means. And commenters have latched onto it, but a lot is said with an air of confidence, of just-so. "Oh uh, superconductors, conducting is passing electricity from one end to the next, super is like really good, uuh uh uh... I know, what about power lines from the Sahara to Europe so they can build solar collectors down there!"
Same with exoplanets, the actual science is "yeah the luminosity of this star drops by 0.0003% at a cycle of 300 days and we're getting some photons that indicate there may be hydrogen molecules", pop sci turns that into "EARTH-2 TEEMING WITH LIFE DISCOVERED, GENERATION SHIP WHEN?"
They achieved this fusion by creating a container of material that produced massive amounts of xrays when it was bombarded by a high powered laser. These xrays caused another container's surface to ablate at such a rate it compressed its interior to the point that fusion was achieved.
However, this being a weapons lab, they created the experiment to model the secondary device in an H-Bomb. The secondary is theorized outside the Top Secret world to be a cylindrical tamper of (enriched?) uranium. One hypothesis in the public sphere, is its the primary device's Xrays that cause this to ablate at such a rate and that the inside is compressed to achieve fusion. The purpose of the fusion is primarily for the neutrons it generates, which are used to cause a massive amount of fission in the tamper, producing the majority of the energy. For example, if replace the uranium with another non-fissile material, and you have a "neutron bomb".
The reason the breathless hype annoyed me is that at no point was usable energy the desire of the test. In fact, the test solely was to feed real world data back into the supercomputer models, so that we know how our existing stockpile of weapons would work or even perhaps to find optimizations. We know this mechanism of ablation causing fusion works, we've known for 60+ years, all we're doing is doing it in a lab.
I'm not sure why there is this need to hype these events, like fusion or LK-99 so much. It seems that being a naysayer is reacted to as if the naysayers are explaining a magician's tricks. As if we don't hype these events the public will lose interest, or even our children will drop out of STEM careers.
You are telling me that a US weapons lab just announced a successful path to a laser triggered pure fusion bomb? Yikes!
Not actually sure if it can be used to ignite more fusion fuel, but if they using this to test secondaries then it sounds like it might.
I really hope we get fusion reactors before pure fusion bombs, as pure fusion bombs are going to be a nuclear non-proliferation nightmare. While it might not be easier to built pure fusion bombs than bombs with a fission trigger, controlling the precursors and knowledge is going to be very difficult.
> "Fusion power is here! All we need to do is engineering!".
I agree with this statement and it has been true of fusion since at least the early 2000s. Don't underestimate the difficulty of engineering. Safe fission breeder reactors are an engineering problem as well, one which humanity has largely abandoned due to repeated failures.
However... In the early 80s, the SDI initiative aimed to have orbiting satellites that utilized x-ray lasers to shoot down incoming warheads. The theory of these were you had h-bombs in orbit, with long cylinders of a material that would amplify the x-rays from the bomb. You'd point these at the incoming warheads and trigger the bomb and (chefs kiss) you have beams of xrays that would destroy warheads.
One of the major reasons this was skuttled, was that the test they used to find a material they thought amplified xrays was flawed (see below).
With the test-ban treaty, they weren't able to test any other materials. Now we have a facility that tests materials to amplify x-rays...
Sidenote: The test was, explode a bomb in a tunnel, shut the tunnel down with explosives to trap the shockwave, then use the xrays to test materials to withstand x-rays as well as amplify them. Teller thought they had seen amplification and sold the military on the satellite idea. Another scientist, thought it was a secondary thermal effect on Oxygen. There is an interesting story about the back and forth, and the pressure to have another scientist lose his credentials for disagreeing with Teller, that is a good follow on to the Oppenheimer story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excalibur
I agree with you, if you have fission triggers, you aren't going to want to use lasers. At least with today's lasers.
> I wouldn't be too worried about this test creating a new weapon.
My concern is that NNP has focused on controlling access to fissionable material, so potentially this is a path to h-bomb that doesn't require fissionable material. As lasers get better, secondaries that don't use controlled fission materials become a risk. At what point does the world start having to worry about controlling access to lasers? How does this impact the future research and funding of lasers?
Additionally if you can test h-bombs without tests. This also makes it easier to develop and test a h-bomb without revealing you have an h-bomb. Typically nuclear weapons tests are detectable via seismographs.
Just economics? :-))
Materials science is practically <<civilization>>.
The Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age.
The other axes are: energy production, transportation improvements. But even those frequently come from materials science. The steam engine needed mass production of high quality steel, etc.
It’s a fun exercise, but it’s fantastical thinking.
I understand a lot of people were more cautious and jaded, but this was my first go-round on the science news hype-mobile. I was really, really excited! It was a real emotional rollercoaster (if you imagine a rollercoaster that takes a couple of weeks to get anywhere).
The full paper with the original samples were reportedly sent to Korea University of Science and Technology for examination. That lab group has only so far verified the structure of the material, no word on whether they've replicated it or its actual properties based on replicated samples or the original samples.
Until we hear from them, everyone (including Nature) is just guessing.
We're talking about condensed matter physics here, arxiv needs zero exposure in this field. It is extremely common to publish on arxiv first and only then begin the process of submitting the same manuscript to be published (and peer reviewed) in a journal.
And while there are still some authors that skip over publishing pre-prints at all, there's no serious arxiv competitor if you do decide to publish pre-prints. It is a de-facto monopoly in this field.
But then that is what happens a lot in various fields. Something that seems obvious isn't done because those that actually know the field can explain all the details you didn't know. Anyone here in programming have had that battle with upper management...
Hey lesson learned in this case. Don't always assume you have a grasp of all the details.
There's a lot of modern physics, chemistry, biology that is uncritically accepted which I think deserves a somewhat higher bar of skepticism than RTSC
Soon after the other researchers realized and published a 6-author paper only hours after.
What a drama.
I had a similar experience when reading up on the history of gyroscopes recently. Its absolutely amazing to watch the advances and miniaturization from mechanical to optical to now micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS). Watching the giant machines from the space race first shrink, then get replaced by light traveling fiber optics to now vibrating bits of silicone.
Still havent fully grasped the implications of older lithography systems being now usable for electro, mechanical and optical applications. Especially as they seem to be quite affordable, especially with multi-project wafers. With open source project even getting chips for free via google.
no need for a science paper for that, they should've written science fiction or created an educational documentary.
To me the most interesting part was everyone talking about potential consequences, uses, the order of magnitude improvements we’d see in certain costs or areas. Pumps, MRIs, power grids, chips, etc. Great reminder what materials science can do to some underlying economics.