14 ms·

Argonne National Lab is attempting to replicate LK-99

337 points by carabiner 3y ago

awesomeMilou 3y ago
I find it really cool that this whole process didn't involve scientific publishers at all. Paper was submitted to Arxiv, there was Turmoil. Now a national lab is reviewing it, all without a Journal submission.
- xorbax 3y ago
  I don't think LK99 is a superconductor But as an experimental chemist who got a PhD and works at a national lab, if the twitch/Twitter streamers don't produce a semiconductor, it says nothing Experiments and processes are hard and particular. You're expecting to produce a nanoscale material through macroacale processes. Chemistry can be like producing a microchip with a ballpeen hammer. "I hit it seventy times in thirty seconds in 3.8mL acetone and it just forms a single crystal structure. Do not hit it seventy-one or sixty-nine times." Chemists are experts at clearly explaining their procedure while leaving out the meaningless keystone detail that will only take a year or two to suss out if you're a clever experimentalist. And this isn't a clearly outlined procedure. But, again, I think the best case scenario is to watch an ambitious amateur do materials synthesis and see it work less perfectly than he intended. Maybe he and they stick around for the other 5 or 10 or 150 weeks as he does the same thing again to make sure the problem is nature rather than technique. If bet-placing is the fashion, shall we place bets about tenacity and thoroughness?
  - wahern 3y ago
    I wonder if there's a language barrier. I can't judge for myself--neither the substantive content nor the biographies--but hypothetically the principle investigators might not have strong (or any) English language proficiency, relying on a younger, less experienced peer to write the paper. As someone who sucks at languages, I can appreciate that learning new languages does not come easy to everybody, or even to most people, especially in older age. If it seems like all reputable scientists have some English proficiency, that's a selection effect--within the English-speaking world in particular you're not going to bump into or even hear much about those who cannot speak or write English. AFAIU there's a substantial amount of high quality research in, e.g., Japan that is invisible to non-Japanese speakers. Japan's scientific establishment long predates English as a global language, unlike China; and unlike many European countries but similar to the United States there was never a widespread norm of learning foreign languages even among the professional classes, AFAIU. Though Korea is a younger industrialized country, I wouldn't take for granted that the principal discoverers have any English proficiency, especially considering that they would be late middle-age or older if they were working in the lab in 1999.
    - porknubbins 3y ago
      There might be a body of historical purely Japanese scientific research, but I know some Japanese physicists who all speak English well enough, and have heard others on podcasts who do also. It would be serevely limiting to not speak English when that is the language of modern science. I don’t know how far back you would have to go to find monolingual scientists but I would guess several decades at least.
      - xorbax 3y ago
        I find it sort of implausible that somebody high in their field is totally ignorant in English, if only because so many papers are only published in English. I've known so many researchers who apologize every other sentence because they say they've only read English and I would never had known otherwise. Which is to say - it'd be wierd to say "well I don't know English and I don't know anybody who does oh well". But, anyway, the papers were published on aeXive in...
      - rtpg 3y ago
        There are plenty of Japanese scientists who are _at least_ extremely uncomfortable in English. Plenty of people who struggle to write their own stuff in English and get it corrected a lot. Though I think that beyond a certain level you have to be interacting internationally to get anywhere in your career so you're gonna be forced along. Plenty of people would learn Latin to consume some content, but doesn't mean they are proficient in it itself, would be another example. Having said that, I think that in the research field that merely ends up with "very confusingly written papers with mistakes large enough to hide process errors" more than "cannot communicate any info in English". But there are plenty of people who get their doctorate and their only English-language output is their final papers in themselves.
      - Sharlin 3y ago
        You realize there’s an incredibly obvious selection bias in your sample?
        porknubbins 3y ago
  - TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
    Something I've also been thinking about is that we don't appear to have any data on the success rate. Maybe the samples of LK99 are the best that the team has been able to produce, but the process requires further refinement and experimentation.
    - xorbax 3y ago
      It's a little strange that they don't do multiple grinding/crystallization when their best sample produces...gimpy diamagnetism If it's been 1000 experiments, do another. I'm not convinced that 1000 experiments over 24 years is all that intense if you actually do the math.
      - cryptonector 3y ago
        1000 / 24y ~= 41/y, which after vacation and other things is probably closer to 1/wk. If all their experiments involve easy-to-synthesize substances (where easy == no more than 3 or 4 days) then it's not that intense, no. But you really have to be quite confident that this approach will pay off to put 2+ decades into it. I suspect if they really did 1,000 experiments then they often did 2/wk because I don't think they ran all of them continuously over 20+yrs. Speaking of which, can we see their notes on the other 999 experiments that didn't work out? That would be very useful, especially if LK-99 turns out not to be awesome but is good enough to hint that this approach is worthy of more research -- there's 999 compounds not worth testing, right? (Well, maybe maybe. If the physics of LK-99 come to be understood, then maybe some of the other 999 experiments might need to be re-examined.)
        xorbax 3y ago
        This is part of my...curiosity. They didn't have a theory to drive them to doggedly pursue this system as an SC. Was it just the blip 20 years ago? Why wouldn't you wonder if your machine was shitty? If I was them, its decades past believing this might be an empty rabbit hole. You're committed. If it's real, it's heroic. If not? It's a failure of rationality. But it's both simultaneously. If they're right, I'm sure every notebook will be published. If not? We'll never see their fury or process.
  - iancmceachern 3y ago
    Thank you for this, especially the hammer analogy. For a humble mechanical engineer its very helpful to make hammer analogies.
    - xorbax 3y ago
      Chemistry is a wierd field It's too complex to be perfectly predictable, like particle physics But without instruments,you have to hope the nanoscale changes are slow and visible in solution at 1,000,000x larger scale The fact that we can throw shit in a beaker and identify useful reactions is a hell of a thing. Our magic balls are the only thing that take it much beyond it's origins in alchemy.
  - wrp 3y ago
    My dad was an Organiker and he used to go on about the huge amount of lab-craft knowledge you needed beyond what is communicated in reports. One of his favorite movies was It Happens Every Spring (1949), about a chemist who produces a non-reproducible compound.
    - xorbax 3y ago
      I'll have to give that movie a watch. A huge part of science is being a knowledgeable and rigorous experimentalist. You can do every great for years, but you still have to do things right 25 years in or you'll be unable to sleep
  - swader999 3y ago
    Breaking bad showed us all how hard chemistry is. Still rooting for the after hours twitch/Twitter hackers.
  - emtel 3y ago
    > if the twitch/Twitter streamers don't produce a semiconductor, it says nothing If you're referring to Andrew McCalip, he's been very clear that he is not claiming to be doing a serious replication attempt, but he also does zero-g/orbital chemical synthesis for a living so its not quite fair to characterize him as a random twitch streamer.
- godelski 3y ago
  As an academic, I have not so secretly been enjoying the shit storm of revelations lately. Science got along fine for thousands of years without Journals and Conferences deciding what's "correct" and not. It's been a failed experiment. Journals started as a way to help distribute works to other researchers to improve upon the old method of just mailing it to one another. Arxiv is great for peer review. Your work is actually fucking available and not behind some pay wall, where your peers can... review it. Only thing would be better is if we were using OpenReview so we could track discussions, but I'll admit that could get messy real quick as anyone that's open sourced their research work will tell you (lots of questions like "I trained my model, how do I test it?" and "I'm getting a cuda out of memory error, how do I fix this?"). Arxiv/preprints are peer review
  - xorbax 3y ago
    The thing that established journals do better than arXiv is clarity You can upload whatever trash methods you want, but a normal journal will have at least one guy who tells you to wipe your ass and make your bullshit presentable in public, if only because they're expected to be gatekeepers for a minimum standard of supposed reproducibility.
    - godelski 3y ago
      In practice I'm not seeing much of a difference. Maybe it is just being in ML, where if you wait for conferences you're far behind. If a paper is that shitty, it is usually very apparent. Like if a paper isn't in latex you know... I mean there's a lot of garbage in conferences and journals too, I just haven't found it to be a meaningful signal. And it is still silly that people call it "peer review." Peer review is not 3-4 randos briefly glancing my work in an adversarial setting who say my work is not novel because it is the same as some unrelated work that they didn't read either; peer review is the grad student building on top of my work, peer review is lucidrains rewriting my work from scratch, it is Ross Wightman integrating it into timm and retraining, it is the forks that use my work for projects (hobby or professional). Peer review is peers looking and reviewing. More peer review happens on Twitter than these conferences. You can say these conferences and journals are a form of peer review, but we gotta stop saying that just because something is a preprint that it isn't peer reviewed. That's just incorrect. Peer review is when peers review.
- systemvoltage 3y ago
  Somewhere I read that this is how things used to be in Einstein era (or maybe earlier than that). There was little bureaucracy in getting the idea out.
  - ggm 3y ago
    Richard Rhodes' monumental work on the A and H bomb mentions that from Thompson onward, "being heard" Was a problem. Juniors often struggled to be taken seriously, sometimes seniors ostentatiously "spoke for them" to have new ideas given credence and women were doubly disabled on the "taken seriously" front. Right up until Murray Gell-Mann and beyond, speaking outside the current limitations to knowledge was hard. I don't want this to descent into AGW and antivaxx denialism, this is inside classic science but considering radical theory/paradigm shifts which were still testable propositions. New models are hard on early stage career. Blinded peer review was partly designed to help some of that. In a narrow enough field it's impossible for reviewer and submittor not to know each other. There may only be 3-4 people who understand your niche fully. Rueben Hersh discusses that a bit in "what is mathematics really" (I think, could be another book of his, "the mathematical experience") Rhodes discusses Michael Polyani's theory of science as old fashioned apprenticeship. Journeyman scientists publish reproducible, testable work. Theoreticians.. harder to test sometimes.
    - nextos 3y ago
      I agree with what you say but the problem is that journals such as Nature do not have blinded peer review. Reviewers know who you are. This is quite shocking to discover if you come from Math or CS.
      - ggm 3y ago
        Yes. The system broke down. I don't know anyone who thinks it works how it should I've had pretty hard bounces which were deserved and I know how to get work over the threshold, but some review feedback has been petty, passive aggressive ignorance, and suspiciously similar stuff pops up from time to time in "3 papers and your phd is done" which makes me wonder if copycats are getting softballed through for career development. the rules behind length, word count and mark-up are pretty silly too. I've seen some rather odd latex tricks to compensate for length inside word count because typographical checkers were bouncing. I don't do this for a living, barely act as maybe helpful co author these days: it's hard work.
- lloydatkinson 3y ago
  Why should experiments wait to be submitted to some arbitrary academic body before trying to to reproduce them? This is what’s wrong with modern science, everything is academic.
  - kykeonaut 3y ago
    The only thing valuable that academic journals and conferences bring to the table is the peer-review process. Which, to be fair, is needed. In this case, the peer review is being conducted without the need for publishing venues. However, I don't think that is usually the case. Take a look at the countless number of ArXiv papers that lack any sort of peer review.
- oldgradstudent 3y ago
  > I find it really cool that this whole process didn't involve scientific publishers at all. IIRC, the 1989 cold fusion fiasco did not involve scientific publishers as well. Not saying this is a similar fiasco, just that 34 years ago it was done via a press conference and circulating drafts rather than arXiv.
- daniel-cussen 3y ago
  [dead]
carabiner 3y ago
It's over for this compound I'm pretty sure, but it is cool to see the range of responses from professionals in this field. Some like Jorge Hirsch (superconductivity researcher and came up with the h-index) think it's a joke (and his work is cited by the Korean scientists), and then some guys at a national lab are trying to synthesize it. Hirsch is also apparently a bit of a shitposter at age 70 and was banned for flaming people on arxiv last year.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  That’s how you know you’re doing actual groundbreaking science
- valine 3y ago
  It’s not over until multiple labs fail to reproduce it. A definitive no will take months.
  - carabiner 3y ago
    https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/555/116/b2e.png https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/555/116/b2e...
  - rendang 3y ago
    Unless in the meantime the authors realize they made some mistake in their analysis & retract their claims.
    - zarzavat 3y ago
      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.
      - XorNot 3y ago
molticrystal 3y ago
While I am very skeptical, when working with what seems to be a fluke, it is more important to test the claim then to test a reproduction. Figure out how to send an independent lab's equipment and personal there or a sample of the substance to an independent lab that verify and if true. Also ensure that they can also do material analysis such as X-Ray spectroscopy & diffraction , and a battery of other stuff if a miracle did occur. For all we know, this could be one of those accidents of sloppiness that introduces a particular containment that makes everything line up as a super conductor that nobody else will easily reproduce.
- kurthr 3y ago
  I think all they have to do is send a sample to another lab to analyze. Apparently, people feel it's pretty easy to make, but in any case, if they have a sample they can see if it has the claimed properties and analyze what it's made of.
  - sanxiyn 3y ago
    Condensed Matter Theory Center (a Twitter account affiliated with University of Maryland) says they will send samples. https://twitter.com/condensed_the/status/1684960318718406656 https://twitter.com/condensed_the/status/1684960318718406656
- Simon_O_Rourke 3y ago
  > For all we know, this could be one of those accidents of sloppiness that introduces a particular containment that makes everything line up as a super conductor that nobody else will easily reproduce. I get that terrible sense too - either the original studies were in error, or some one-off fluke makes it difficult to reproduce. On the upside however, and I'd caveat this as not being fully in the know about the art of the possible in solid state labs, it seems that the material isn't that awfully difficult to produce given an appropriate lab and equipment. Hopefully we'll know one way or the other shortly.
- hooande 3y ago
  why don't they just repro their own experiment? If they can do it twice, then it isn't a fluke. at worst it's something specific to their lab. if they can't do it a second time, then the issue is settled. I'm sure it will take a lot of time and money to run everything again. but all of earth seems willing to give them whatever resources they need.
shusaku 3y ago
> On the other hand, he says, researchers at Argonne and elsewhere are already trying to replicate the experiment. “People here are taking it seriously and trying to grow this stuff.” The submitted title has been heavily editorialized. That’s the only relevant part of the article, and that’s far from implying that there’s a concerted effort at Argonne.
- mhb 3y ago
  Yes. And article is also two days old. Ancient for this.
- tigershark 3y ago
  I would say that the best part of the article is: “Some of you haven't had blisters from overusing your pestle and it shows.”
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  > The submitted title has been heavily editorialized. That’s the only relevant part of the article, and that’s far from implying that there’s a concerted effort at Argonne. What's wrong with the submitted title (other than being very narrow)? It just says they're attempting to replicate, which they are. If anything I'd say that "taking it seriously" is stronger language, and the submitted title is slightly underselling it.
  - mhb 3y ago
    Being very narrow is exactly what's wrong with it. That's not what the article is about.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      That has nothing to do with the sentiment I was addressing, though. That is a different complaint. I agree that it was too narrow, but it wasn't exaggerating.
      - 3y ago
brucethemoose2 3y ago
Why didn't the researchers ship their "working" sample to another lab? I can't imaging any institution turning down the chance. Is it unstable?
- sanxiyn 3y ago
  They are willing and eager to ship samples. (Search for my other comments.)
  - brucethemoose2 3y ago
    > https://twitter.com/condensed_the/status/1684960318718406656 https://twitter.com/condensed_the/status/1684960318718406656 Oh wow. If true, then that's that. If they are stable, the original samples will validate, or they will not. The researchers could wave their hands and claim the sample deteriorated, but I think that would still end optimism for replication.
sanxiyn 3y ago
I wrote a comprehensive thread on the current situation here. It is somewhat long and hard to summarize, sorry. https://twitter.com/sanxiyn/status/1685094029116297216 https://twitter.com/sanxiyn/status/1685094029116297216
- doctoboggan 3y ago
  Can you post a link to one of the mirrors that lets logged out people read the thread?
  - krasin 3y ago
    Here: https://nitter.net/sanxiyn/status/1685094029116297216 https://nitter.net/sanxiyn/status/1685094029116297216
    - amai 3y ago
      Reading all this I‘m starting to believe the paper was written by chatGPT.
- carabiner 3y ago
  Yes this is an excellent thread. You have done some of the only on the ground reporting from Seoul. The takedowns you linked of the paper, CMTC giving it an F, are damning. There's one legit professor Kim from William & Mary who had a tiny part of this, but more and more, it looks like it's the output of a few cranks out of a "Q-Centre." The bulk of the work took place before Kim's involvement and he's listed on 1 of 3 papers so far. He's the only thread of legitimacy in this whole thing, and it's a thin one. The 5 other guys are just loony.
- callalex 3y ago
  Paywall
  - krasin 3y ago
    Same thread on nitter: https://nitter.net/sanxiyn/status/1685094029116297216 https://nitter.net/sanxiyn/status/1685094029116297216
carabiner 3y ago
Whatever happens, this goan be a great 4,000 word New Yorker article, or Netflix kdrama.
- evrimoztamur 3y ago
  ...or the next BobbyBroccoli special like the one on Hwang Woo-suk, the man who faked human cloning (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ett_8wLJ87U https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ett_8wLJ87U). Not claiming the researchers of LK99 are intentionally faking their results, by the way!
hmaxwell 3y ago
EEVblog's input on this is actually hilarious, if you haven't seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHPFphlzwdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHPFphlzwdQ
- harrid 3y ago
  Being loud and obnoxious is at best orthogonal to being correct. I'm not on either side on the LK99 question)
  - hmaxwell 3y ago
    What part of the video I linked to was "loud" or "obnoxious"? I am not sure if you even watched the video...
    - ehnto 3y ago
      Are you Australian by chance? He's really laying on the sarcasm during the intro, I could totally see that getting misconstrued by someone not familiar with our flavour of sarcasm.
      - hmaxwell 3y ago
        Despite not being of Australian origin, I can understand how one could interpret his initial remarks as being tinged with sarcasm. In my personal analysis, however, I found his comments to be injected with a considerable amount of wit and humor.
        csydas 3y ago
        as a non-australian but native English speaker, I found the video annoying because it's padded and the jokes/sarcasm weren't really all that funny. If you trim out his YouTube-OverReactions, I think the video goes down to like 1.5 minutes in my mind and still conveys the same information, perhaps even better. I get probably this is a popular video maker in whatever sphere he's in, but as an outsider, it's difficult to get into the video because of what I attribute as the presenter's YouTube personality. (also it very much so bugs me to see people using Chrome and see all the nags for notifications, the random extensions/features, etc. And any browser without uBlock origin throws me as it takes me a minute to realize why all the websites look so bad, but that's just a personal issue :) )
bawolff 3y ago
One of the common threads seems to be that other scientists think that lk-99 is not a super conductor but just strongly diamagnetic. As a non physicist i wonder if that is useful in and of itself? Skimming wikipedia it doesn't seem like there are that many strongly diamagnetic materials. Would discovering a new one still be a big discovery (just not earth shattering)
- tux3 3y ago
  It would be cool, but there are no world-changing implications to a new diamagnet made of lead. It's just kinda neat if you find one.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    I don’t know how that explains the resistances measurements though? Unless they’re complete fabrications don’t they imply superconductivity?
    - tux3 3y ago
      I truthfully don't know. A few people suggested they might have measured an insulator, the threshold where resistance changes being the breakdown where current starts flowing. I'm skeptical either way, I think it's too early to say.
      - fnordpiglet 3y ago
        I see. V=IR=0 means R can measure as 0, but they did measure small current. Presumably they know the voltage. That seems odd if they can’t measure the resistance accurately if their instrumentation is rated to measure that current.
        adrian_b 3y ago
        It is not possible to determine that a resistance is exactly zero through direct measurement, because any kind of probes that can be used to contact the material will have a high contact resistance, which will vary from one probe contact to another. Even when the resistance is measured with a 4-point probe, the only conclusion that can be reached is that the resistance is smaller than the experimental error. However it should be possible to determine that the resistance is zero through various indirect effects, for instance by establishing a closed current in the material and verifying that it does not decrease in time. Even such experiments must be done carefully because some materials with unusual magnetic properties may behave apparently in a similar way to superconductors in some experiments, e.g. both a magnetized ferromagnetic material and a superconductor ring carrying a current will have a remanent magnetic field that is constant in time and in both cases the magnetic field will disappear when the temperature is raised above a threshold.
Khaine 3y ago
[flagged]
- einpoklum 3y ago
  I asked NotReallyChatGPT to evaluate this comment and it told me to downvote.
aaron695 3y ago
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Tade0 3y ago
To me the main takeaway is that there has had to be some advancement in this field over the past two decades if claims of sufficiently-close-to-ambient superconductivity are currently not dismissed outright. Maybe we'll have maglev everything by the time I'm old and gray.
- ehnto 3y ago
  Not room temperature but very cool to see practical implementations making progress in the form of the SCMaglev line in Japan.
azernik 3y ago
Despite some criticism of the original work, they seem to have been very conscientious about making replication easy. =========== Nadya Mason, a condensed matter physicist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign says, “I appreciate that the authors took appropriate data and were clear about their fabrication techniques.” Still, she cautions, “The data seems a bit sloppy.”
nemo44x 3y ago
My young son came to and excitedly asked, “Daddy, is it true that LK99 is an ambient pressure, room temperature superconductor?” I replied, “It might be or it might not be…” and I looked at him and grinned and said “but you still have to clean your bedroom!” “Oh dad!” He said as he scampered off.
scythe 3y ago
Norman's complaints that lead atoms are too heavy do not seem consistent with the composition of other known superconductors. As far as I know, the most widely used cuprate superconductor is bismuth strontium calcium copper oxide (BSCCO), which was used for the world's first superconducting power line: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holbrook_Superconductor_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holbrook_Superconductor_Projec... >What’s more, lead and copper atoms have similar electronic structures, so substituting copper atoms for some of the lead atoms shouldn’t greatly affect the electrical properties of the material The lead (II) ions claimed have an even number of electrons. Copper (II) has an odd number. Or if copper (I) is present, then the charge itself is different. Again, this is just a very confusing argument to hear from a physicist. >First, the undoped material, lead apatite, isn’t a metal but rather a nonconducting mineral. The cuprate and iron superconductors are not metals either. In fact some are Mott insulators (materials with unexpectedly high resistance) under normal conditions. There is a case for skepticism about LK-99, but it isn't this one.
djsedaw 3y ago
K9 would be better
jamesfisher 3y ago
Why is no one asking to analyze the superconductors they claimed to make? Everyone's talking about replicating it by following their recipe, but isn't the proof in the pudding?
xbox99 3y ago
There’s some consensus that the results can be questioned based on: - Lenz’s law applying to copper (Lenz's law - Wikipedia 7) - Copper phosphide (“Lanarkite and Cu3P were uniformly mixed in a molar ratio of 1:1 in an agate mortar with a pestle”). Pretty high copper content. -No Meissner effect just standard copper-related phenomena based on Lenz’s law.
kimorpark 3y ago
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kimorpark 3y ago
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337 points by carabiner 3y ago

I find it really cool that this whole process didn't involve scientific publishers at all. Paper was submitted to Arxiv, there was Turmoil. Now a national lab is reviewing it, all without a Journal submission.

xorbax 3y ago
I don't think LK99 is a superconductor But as an experimental chemist who got a PhD and works at a national lab, if the twitch/Twitter streamers don't produce a semiconductor, it says nothing Experiments and processes are hard and particular. You're expecting to produce a nanoscale material through macroacale processes. Chemistry can be like producing a microchip with a ballpeen hammer. "I hit it seventy times in thirty seconds in 3.8mL acetone and it just forms a single crystal structure. Do not hit it seventy-one or sixty-nine times." Chemists are experts at clearly explaining their procedure while leaving out the meaningless keystone detail that will only take a year or two to suss out if you're a clever experimentalist. And this isn't a clearly outlined procedure. But, again, I think the best case scenario is to watch an ambitious amateur do materials synthesis and see it work less perfectly than he intended. Maybe he and they stick around for the other 5 or 10 or 150 weeks as he does the same thing again to make sure the problem is nature rather than technique. If bet-placing is the fashion, shall we place bets about tenacity and thoroughness?
- wahern 3y ago
  I wonder if there's a language barrier. I can't judge for myself--neither the substantive content nor the biographies--but hypothetically the principle investigators might not have strong (or any) English language proficiency, relying on a younger, less experienced peer to write the paper. As someone who sucks at languages, I can appreciate that learning new languages does not come easy to everybody, or even to most people, especially in older age. If it seems like all reputable scientists have some English proficiency, that's a selection effect--within the English-speaking world in particular you're not going to bump into or even hear much about those who cannot speak or write English. AFAIU there's a substantial amount of high quality research in, e.g., Japan that is invisible to non-Japanese speakers. Japan's scientific establishment long predates English as a global language, unlike China; and unlike many European countries but similar to the United States there was never a widespread norm of learning foreign languages even among the professional classes, AFAIU. Though Korea is a younger industrialized country, I wouldn't take for granted that the principal discoverers have any English proficiency, especially considering that they would be late middle-age or older if they were working in the lab in 1999.
  - porknubbins 3y ago
    There might be a body of historical purely Japanese scientific research, but I know some Japanese physicists who all speak English well enough, and have heard others on podcasts who do also. It would be serevely limiting to not speak English when that is the language of modern science. I don’t know how far back you would have to go to find monolingual scientists but I would guess several decades at least.
    - xorbax 3y ago
      I find it sort of implausible that somebody high in their field is totally ignorant in English, if only because so many papers are only published in English. I've known so many researchers who apologize every other sentence because they say they've only read English and I would never had known otherwise. Which is to say - it'd be wierd to say "well I don't know English and I don't know anybody who does oh well". But, anyway, the papers were published on aeXive in...
    - rtpg 3y ago
      There are plenty of Japanese scientists who are _at least_ extremely uncomfortable in English. Plenty of people who struggle to write their own stuff in English and get it corrected a lot. Though I think that beyond a certain level you have to be interacting internationally to get anywhere in your career so you're gonna be forced along. Plenty of people would learn Latin to consume some content, but doesn't mean they are proficient in it itself, would be another example. Having said that, I think that in the research field that merely ends up with "very confusingly written papers with mistakes large enough to hide process errors" more than "cannot communicate any info in English". But there are plenty of people who get their doctorate and their only English-language output is their final papers in themselves.
    - Sharlin 3y ago
      You realize there’s an incredibly obvious selection bias in your sample?
      - porknubbins 3y ago
- TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
  Something I've also been thinking about is that we don't appear to have any data on the success rate. Maybe the samples of LK99 are the best that the team has been able to produce, but the process requires further refinement and experimentation.
  - xorbax 3y ago
    It's a little strange that they don't do multiple grinding/crystallization when their best sample produces...gimpy diamagnetism If it's been 1000 experiments, do another. I'm not convinced that 1000 experiments over 24 years is all that intense if you actually do the math.
    - cryptonector 3y ago
      1000 / 24y ~= 41/y, which after vacation and other things is probably closer to 1/wk. If all their experiments involve easy-to-synthesize substances (where easy == no more than 3 or 4 days) then it's not that intense, no. But you really have to be quite confident that this approach will pay off to put 2+ decades into it. I suspect if they really did 1,000 experiments then they often did 2/wk because I don't think they ran all of them continuously over 20+yrs. Speaking of which, can we see their notes on the other 999 experiments that didn't work out? That would be very useful, especially if LK-99 turns out not to be awesome but is good enough to hint that this approach is worthy of more research -- there's 999 compounds not worth testing, right? (Well, maybe maybe. If the physics of LK-99 come to be understood, then maybe some of the other 999 experiments might need to be re-examined.)
      - xorbax 3y ago
        This is part of my...curiosity. They didn't have a theory to drive them to doggedly pursue this system as an SC. Was it just the blip 20 years ago? Why wouldn't you wonder if your machine was shitty? If I was them, its decades past believing this might be an empty rabbit hole. You're committed. If it's real, it's heroic. If not? It's a failure of rationality. But it's both simultaneously. If they're right, I'm sure every notebook will be published. If not? We'll never see their fury or process.
- iancmceachern 3y ago
  Thank you for this, especially the hammer analogy. For a humble mechanical engineer its very helpful to make hammer analogies.
  - xorbax 3y ago
    Chemistry is a wierd field It's too complex to be perfectly predictable, like particle physics But without instruments,you have to hope the nanoscale changes are slow and visible in solution at 1,000,000x larger scale The fact that we can throw shit in a beaker and identify useful reactions is a hell of a thing. Our magic balls are the only thing that take it much beyond it's origins in alchemy.
- wrp 3y ago
  My dad was an Organiker and he used to go on about the huge amount of lab-craft knowledge you needed beyond what is communicated in reports. One of his favorite movies was It Happens Every Spring (1949), about a chemist who produces a non-reproducible compound.
  - xorbax 3y ago
    I'll have to give that movie a watch. A huge part of science is being a knowledgeable and rigorous experimentalist. You can do every great for years, but you still have to do things right 25 years in or you'll be unable to sleep
- swader999 3y ago
  Breaking bad showed us all how hard chemistry is. Still rooting for the after hours twitch/Twitter hackers.
- emtel 3y ago
  > if the twitch/Twitter streamers don't produce a semiconductor, it says nothing If you're referring to Andrew McCalip, he's been very clear that he is not claiming to be doing a serious replication attempt, but he also does zero-g/orbital chemical synthesis for a living so its not quite fair to characterize him as a random twitch streamer.
godelski 3y ago
As an academic, I have not so secretly been enjoying the shit storm of revelations lately. Science got along fine for thousands of years without Journals and Conferences deciding what's "correct" and not. It's been a failed experiment. Journals started as a way to help distribute works to other researchers to improve upon the old method of just mailing it to one another. Arxiv is great for peer review. Your work is actually fucking available and not behind some pay wall, where your peers can... review it. Only thing would be better is if we were using OpenReview so we could track discussions, but I'll admit that could get messy real quick as anyone that's open sourced their research work will tell you (lots of questions like "I trained my model, how do I test it?" and "I'm getting a cuda out of memory error, how do I fix this?"). Arxiv/preprints are peer review
- xorbax 3y ago
  The thing that established journals do better than arXiv is clarity You can upload whatever trash methods you want, but a normal journal will have at least one guy who tells you to wipe your ass and make your bullshit presentable in public, if only because they're expected to be gatekeepers for a minimum standard of supposed reproducibility.
  - godelski 3y ago
    In practice I'm not seeing much of a difference. Maybe it is just being in ML, where if you wait for conferences you're far behind. If a paper is that shitty, it is usually very apparent. Like if a paper isn't in latex you know... I mean there's a lot of garbage in conferences and journals too, I just haven't found it to be a meaningful signal. And it is still silly that people call it "peer review." Peer review is not 3-4 randos briefly glancing my work in an adversarial setting who say my work is not novel because it is the same as some unrelated work that they didn't read either; peer review is the grad student building on top of my work, peer review is lucidrains rewriting my work from scratch, it is Ross Wightman integrating it into timm and retraining, it is the forks that use my work for projects (hobby or professional). Peer review is peers looking and reviewing. More peer review happens on Twitter than these conferences. You can say these conferences and journals are a form of peer review, but we gotta stop saying that just because something is a preprint that it isn't peer reviewed. That's just incorrect. Peer review is when peers review.
systemvoltage 3y ago
Somewhere I read that this is how things used to be in Einstein era (or maybe earlier than that). There was little bureaucracy in getting the idea out.
- ggm 3y ago
  Richard Rhodes' monumental work on the A and H bomb mentions that from Thompson onward, "being heard" Was a problem. Juniors often struggled to be taken seriously, sometimes seniors ostentatiously "spoke for them" to have new ideas given credence and women were doubly disabled on the "taken seriously" front. Right up until Murray Gell-Mann and beyond, speaking outside the current limitations to knowledge was hard. I don't want this to descent into AGW and antivaxx denialism, this is inside classic science but considering radical theory/paradigm shifts which were still testable propositions. New models are hard on early stage career. Blinded peer review was partly designed to help some of that. In a narrow enough field it's impossible for reviewer and submittor not to know each other. There may only be 3-4 people who understand your niche fully. Rueben Hersh discusses that a bit in "what is mathematics really" (I think, could be another book of his, "the mathematical experience") Rhodes discusses Michael Polyani's theory of science as old fashioned apprenticeship. Journeyman scientists publish reproducible, testable work. Theoreticians.. harder to test sometimes.
  - nextos 3y ago
    I agree with what you say but the problem is that journals such as Nature do not have blinded peer review. Reviewers know who you are. This is quite shocking to discover if you come from Math or CS.
    - ggm 3y ago
      Yes. The system broke down. I don't know anyone who thinks it works how it should I've had pretty hard bounces which were deserved and I know how to get work over the threshold, but some review feedback has been petty, passive aggressive ignorance, and suspiciously similar stuff pops up from time to time in "3 papers and your phd is done" which makes me wonder if copycats are getting softballed through for career development. the rules behind length, word count and mark-up are pretty silly too. I've seen some rather odd latex tricks to compensate for length inside word count because typographical checkers were bouncing. I don't do this for a living, barely act as maybe helpful co author these days: it's hard work.
lloydatkinson 3y ago
Why should experiments wait to be submitted to some arbitrary academic body before trying to to reproduce them? This is what’s wrong with modern science, everything is academic.
- kykeonaut 3y ago
  The only thing valuable that academic journals and conferences bring to the table is the peer-review process. Which, to be fair, is needed. In this case, the peer review is being conducted without the need for publishing venues. However, I don't think that is usually the case. Take a look at the countless number of ArXiv papers that lack any sort of peer review.
oldgradstudent 3y ago
> I find it really cool that this whole process didn't involve scientific publishers at all. IIRC, the 1989 cold fusion fiasco did not involve scientific publishers as well. Not saying this is a similar fiasco, just that 34 years ago it was done via a press conference and circulating drafts rather than arXiv.
daniel-cussen 3y ago
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carabiner 3y ago

It's over for this compound I'm pretty sure, but it is cool to see the range of responses from professionals in this field. Some like Jorge Hirsch (superconductivity researcher and came up with the h-index) think it's a joke (and his work is cited by the Korean scientists), and then some guys at a national lab are trying to synthesize it. Hirsch is also apparently a bit of a shitposter at age 70 and was banned for flaming people on arxiv last year.

ethanbond 3y ago
That’s how you know you’re doing actual groundbreaking science
valine 3y ago
It’s not over until multiple labs fail to reproduce it. A definitive no will take months.
- carabiner 3y ago
  https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/555/116/b2e.png https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/555/116/b2e...
- rendang 3y ago
  Unless in the meantime the authors realize they made some mistake in their analysis & retract their claims.
  - zarzavat 3y ago
    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.
    - XorNot 3y ago

molticrystal 3y ago

While I am very skeptical, when working with what seems to be a fluke, it is more important to test the claim then to test a reproduction. Figure out how to send an independent lab's equipment and personal there or a sample of the substance to an independent lab that verify and if true. Also ensure that they can also do material analysis such as X-Ray spectroscopy & diffraction , and a battery of other stuff if a miracle did occur. For all we know, this could be one of those accidents of sloppiness that introduces a particular containment that makes everything line up as a super conductor that nobody else will easily reproduce.

kurthr 3y ago
I think all they have to do is send a sample to another lab to analyze. Apparently, people feel it's pretty easy to make, but in any case, if they have a sample they can see if it has the claimed properties and analyze what it's made of.
- sanxiyn 3y ago
  Condensed Matter Theory Center (a Twitter account affiliated with University of Maryland) says they will send samples. https://twitter.com/condensed_the/status/1684960318718406656 https://twitter.com/condensed_the/status/1684960318718406656
Simon_O_Rourke 3y ago
> For all we know, this could be one of those accidents of sloppiness that introduces a particular containment that makes everything line up as a super conductor that nobody else will easily reproduce. I get that terrible sense too - either the original studies were in error, or some one-off fluke makes it difficult to reproduce. On the upside however, and I'd caveat this as not being fully in the know about the art of the possible in solid state labs, it seems that the material isn't that awfully difficult to produce given an appropriate lab and equipment. Hopefully we'll know one way or the other shortly.
hooande 3y ago
why don't they just repro their own experiment? If they can do it twice, then it isn't a fluke. at worst it's something specific to their lab. if they can't do it a second time, then the issue is settled. I'm sure it will take a lot of time and money to run everything again. but all of earth seems willing to give them whatever resources they need.

shusaku 3y ago

> On the other hand, he says, researchers at Argonne and elsewhere are already trying to replicate the experiment. “People here are taking it seriously and trying to grow this stuff.” The submitted title has been heavily editorialized. That’s the only relevant part of the article, and that’s far from implying that there’s a concerted effort at Argonne.

mhb 3y ago
Yes. And article is also two days old. Ancient for this.
tigershark 3y ago
I would say that the best part of the article is: “Some of you haven't had blisters from overusing your pestle and it shows.”
Dylan16807 3y ago
> The submitted title has been heavily editorialized. That’s the only relevant part of the article, and that’s far from implying that there’s a concerted effort at Argonne. What's wrong with the submitted title (other than being very narrow)? It just says they're attempting to replicate, which they are. If anything I'd say that "taking it seriously" is stronger language, and the submitted title is slightly underselling it.
- mhb 3y ago
  Being very narrow is exactly what's wrong with it. That's not what the article is about.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    That has nothing to do with the sentiment I was addressing, though. That is a different complaint. I agree that it was too narrow, but it wasn't exaggerating.
    - 3y ago

brucethemoose2 3y ago

Why didn't the researchers ship their "working" sample to another lab? I can't imaging any institution turning down the chance. Is it unstable?

sanxiyn 3y ago
They are willing and eager to ship samples. (Search for my other comments.)
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  > https://twitter.com/condensed_the/status/1684960318718406656 https://twitter.com/condensed_the/status/1684960318718406656 Oh wow. If true, then that's that. If they are stable, the original samples will validate, or they will not. The researchers could wave their hands and claim the sample deteriorated, but I think that would still end optimism for replication.

sanxiyn 3y ago

I wrote a comprehensive thread on the current situation here. It is somewhat long and hard to summarize, sorry. https://twitter.com/sanxiyn/status/1685094029116297216 https://twitter.com/sanxiyn/status/1685094029116297216

doctoboggan 3y ago
Can you post a link to one of the mirrors that lets logged out people read the thread?
- krasin 3y ago
  Here: https://nitter.net/sanxiyn/status/1685094029116297216 https://nitter.net/sanxiyn/status/1685094029116297216
  - amai 3y ago
    Reading all this I‘m starting to believe the paper was written by chatGPT.
carabiner 3y ago
Yes this is an excellent thread. You have done some of the only on the ground reporting from Seoul. The takedowns you linked of the paper, CMTC giving it an F, are damning. There's one legit professor Kim from William & Mary who had a tiny part of this, but more and more, it looks like it's the output of a few cranks out of a "Q-Centre." The bulk of the work took place before Kim's involvement and he's listed on 1 of 3 papers so far. He's the only thread of legitimacy in this whole thing, and it's a thin one. The 5 other guys are just loony.
callalex 3y ago
Paywall
- krasin 3y ago
  Same thread on nitter: https://nitter.net/sanxiyn/status/1685094029116297216 https://nitter.net/sanxiyn/status/1685094029116297216

carabiner 3y ago

Whatever happens, this goan be a great 4,000 word New Yorker article, or Netflix kdrama.

evrimoztamur 3y ago
...or the next BobbyBroccoli special like the one on Hwang Woo-suk, the man who faked human cloning (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ett_8wLJ87U https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ett_8wLJ87U). Not claiming the researchers of LK99 are intentionally faking their results, by the way!

hmaxwell 3y ago

EEVblog's input on this is actually hilarious, if you haven't seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHPFphlzwdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHPFphlzwdQ

harrid 3y ago
Being loud and obnoxious is at best orthogonal to being correct. I'm not on either side on the LK99 question)
- hmaxwell 3y ago
  What part of the video I linked to was "loud" or "obnoxious"? I am not sure if you even watched the video...
  - ehnto 3y ago
    Are you Australian by chance? He's really laying on the sarcasm during the intro, I could totally see that getting misconstrued by someone not familiar with our flavour of sarcasm.
    - hmaxwell 3y ago
      Despite not being of Australian origin, I can understand how one could interpret his initial remarks as being tinged with sarcasm. In my personal analysis, however, I found his comments to be injected with a considerable amount of wit and humor.
      - csydas 3y ago
        as a non-australian but native English speaker, I found the video annoying because it's padded and the jokes/sarcasm weren't really all that funny. If you trim out his YouTube-OverReactions, I think the video goes down to like 1.5 minutes in my mind and still conveys the same information, perhaps even better. I get probably this is a popular video maker in whatever sphere he's in, but as an outsider, it's difficult to get into the video because of what I attribute as the presenter's YouTube personality. (also it very much so bugs me to see people using Chrome and see all the nags for notifications, the random extensions/features, etc. And any browser without uBlock origin throws me as it takes me a minute to realize why all the websites look so bad, but that's just a personal issue :) )

bawolff 3y ago

One of the common threads seems to be that other scientists think that lk-99 is not a super conductor but just strongly diamagnetic. As a non physicist i wonder if that is useful in and of itself? Skimming wikipedia it doesn't seem like there are that many strongly diamagnetic materials. Would discovering a new one still be a big discovery (just not earth shattering)

tux3 3y ago
It would be cool, but there are no world-changing implications to a new diamagnet made of lead. It's just kinda neat if you find one.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  I don’t know how that explains the resistances measurements though? Unless they’re complete fabrications don’t they imply superconductivity?
  - tux3 3y ago
    I truthfully don't know. A few people suggested they might have measured an insulator, the threshold where resistance changes being the breakdown where current starts flowing. I'm skeptical either way, I think it's too early to say.
    - fnordpiglet 3y ago
      I see. V=IR=0 means R can measure as 0, but they did measure small current. Presumably they know the voltage. That seems odd if they can’t measure the resistance accurately if their instrumentation is rated to measure that current.
      - adrian_b 3y ago
        It is not possible to determine that a resistance is exactly zero through direct measurement, because any kind of probes that can be used to contact the material will have a high contact resistance, which will vary from one probe contact to another. Even when the resistance is measured with a 4-point probe, the only conclusion that can be reached is that the resistance is smaller than the experimental error. However it should be possible to determine that the resistance is zero through various indirect effects, for instance by establishing a closed current in the material and verifying that it does not decrease in time. Even such experiments must be done carefully because some materials with unusual magnetic properties may behave apparently in a similar way to superconductors in some experiments, e.g. both a magnetized ferromagnetic material and a superconductor ring carrying a current will have a remanent magnetic field that is constant in time and in both cases the magnetic field will disappear when the temperature is raised above a threshold.

Khaine 3y ago

[flagged]

einpoklum 3y ago
I asked NotReallyChatGPT to evaluate this comment and it told me to downvote.

aaron695 3y ago

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Tade0 3y ago

To me the main takeaway is that there has had to be some advancement in this field over the past two decades if claims of sufficiently-close-to-ambient superconductivity are currently not dismissed outright. Maybe we'll have maglev everything by the time I'm old and gray.

ehnto 3y ago
Not room temperature but very cool to see practical implementations making progress in the form of the SCMaglev line in Japan.

azernik 3y ago

Despite some criticism of the original work, they seem to have been very conscientious about making replication easy. =========== Nadya Mason, a condensed matter physicist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign says, “I appreciate that the authors took appropriate data and were clear about their fabrication techniques.” Still, she cautions, “The data seems a bit sloppy.”

nemo44x 3y ago

My young son came to and excitedly asked, “Daddy, is it true that LK99 is an ambient pressure, room temperature superconductor?” I replied, “It might be or it might not be…” and I looked at him and grinned and said “but you still have to clean your bedroom!” “Oh dad!” He said as he scampered off.

scythe 3y ago

Norman's complaints that lead atoms are too heavy do not seem consistent with the composition of other known superconductors. As far as I know, the most widely used cuprate superconductor is bismuth strontium calcium copper oxide (BSCCO), which was used for the world's first superconducting power line: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holbrook_Superconductor_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holbrook_Superconductor_Projec... >What’s more, lead and copper atoms have similar electronic structures, so substituting copper atoms for some of the lead atoms shouldn’t greatly affect the electrical properties of the material The lead (II) ions claimed have an even number of electrons. Copper (II) has an odd number. Or if copper (I) is present, then the charge itself is different. Again, this is just a very confusing argument to hear from a physicist. >First, the undoped material, lead apatite, isn’t a metal but rather a nonconducting mineral. The cuprate and iron superconductors are not metals either. In fact some are Mott insulators (materials with unexpectedly high resistance) under normal conditions. There is a case for skepticism about LK-99, but it isn't this one.

djsedaw 3y ago

K9 would be better

jamesfisher 3y ago

Why is no one asking to analyze the superconductors they claimed to make? Everyone's talking about replicating it by following their recipe, but isn't the proof in the pudding?

xbox99 3y ago

There’s some consensus that the results can be questioned based on: - Lenz’s law applying to copper (Lenz's law - Wikipedia 7) - Copper phosphide (“Lanarkite and Cu3P were uniformly mixed in a molar ratio of 1:1 in an agate mortar with a pestle”). Pretty high copper content. -No Meissner effect just standard copper-related phenomena based on Lenz’s law.

kimorpark 3y ago

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kimorpark 3y ago

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