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This further confirms the existing discourse around sample makeup and quality, the video, to me at least, looks like a large flake of inert material attached to

This further confirms the existing discourse around sample makeup and quality, the video, to me at least, looks like a large flake of inert material attached to a smaller whiteish looking bit of reactive material at one end of the flake, each time it’s demonstrated that end of the sample is the end that moves and the rest of it looks like it’s hanging down… the same sort of thing we saw with the original demonstration with the larger lopsided sample in the very first publication on by the QCenter original Korean researchers… As I said in an earlier post on another article, smash the samples… let’s see some clear unambiguous levitation of small grains with little dead weight, this process is clearly not yet refined enough to give large samples of high enough quality to visibly demonstrate levitation… several of the existing failures to replicate could actually just be failures to have a high enough ratio of superconducting to normal mass and thus no levitation… these powered based bulk material processes are tricky as hell, even when you aren’t trying to modify the chemical properties and do reactions it can be hard to get structural cohesion of samples and a lot of dry powder based ceramic products have had notoriously bad quality control issues… we “mastered” wet clay ceramics thousands of years ago, yet depending on what your trying to do, something as “simple” as dry ceramic sintering can be challenging! I don’t think a lot of the researchers rushing to perform replication are being sufficiently thoughtful about the nature of the samples they are producing. They are smart capable people who potentially have very little powder process knowledge or may have it from a background where this sort of thing isn’t as important… heck I only have my knowledge of this stuff from research into ultra high temperature ceramics for use in rocket engines, where poor powder process control can affect the structural and thermal properties and lead to all sorts of erosions cracks and other kinds of material degradation and sample destruction… so yeah I don’t expect all these teams to fully understand the challenges of powder based solid chemistry and I think we are seeing it brought out in the visible evidence we’ve seen posted online. Also… It’s interesting how often people are using the same new AI powered video translation service … which I’d literally never heard of before the initial release and some of the interested parties using it to translate the original Korean information. Everyone following along has heard of this service now and it seems to be a happy accident that they are getting publicity and interest from being associated with the community gathering around the internet to follow LK-99 related work!

kleene_op 3y ago
Considering the trouble everyone seem to have making the material and considering how few of the stuff they managed to produce, it's understandable that they're hesitant about breaking their sample into smaller bits. If I were them, I would keep producing more samples before deciding to break some of them to get full levitation confirmation.
- throw310822 3y ago
  Could you, ehm, just make it a into a fine powder, then use a magnet to separate the powder that levitates from the powder which doesn't, then collect the levitating powder and stick it back together... with glue?
  - amluto 3y ago
    I would expect that, in the best case, this would give a gluey clump of stuff that can be levitated. I think it would be more interesting to separate out the magnetically interesting material like this and attempt to analyze it to find out what it is.
    - techdragon 3y ago
      Effectively you could take a watch glass or a petri dish, either not compress to a pellet in the first place, or just break up your sample gently between your fingers into the onto the watch glass or into the Petri dish, then just place that on top of the biggest magnet you can find and pluck away any floating fragments with plastic tweezers… seems simple… assuming you appreciate the sorts of thing’s about solid powder chemistry (which can seem a lot more like applied geology than the kind of chemistry most people are used to)… if you want to see some interesting things and like a good chemistry video I thoroughly recommend searching for dry powder on powder chemical reactions… most of them are fire related demonstrations but it can be interesting to see them gently spoon a powder on top on another powder and nothing happens, until they poke it with a stirring rod hard enough to press the powder firmly against the other powder and get the reaction surface area to increase and then it’s off to the races… physical contacts between materials can sometimes not be in as much contact as you think… even when it’s literally pilled on top of the other stuff.

kleene_op 3y ago

Considering the trouble everyone seem to have making the material and considering how few of the stuff they managed to produce, it's understandable that they're hesitant about breaking their sample into smaller bits. If I were them, I would keep producing more samples before deciding to break some of them to get full levitation confirmation.

throw310822 3y ago
Could you, ehm, just make it a into a fine powder, then use a magnet to separate the powder that levitates from the powder which doesn't, then collect the levitating powder and stick it back together... with glue?
- amluto 3y ago
  I would expect that, in the best case, this would give a gluey clump of stuff that can be levitated. I think it would be more interesting to separate out the magnetically interesting material like this and attempt to analyze it to find out what it is.
  - techdragon 3y ago
    Effectively you could take a watch glass or a petri dish, either not compress to a pellet in the first place, or just break up your sample gently between your fingers into the onto the watch glass or into the Petri dish, then just place that on top of the biggest magnet you can find and pluck away any floating fragments with plastic tweezers… seems simple… assuming you appreciate the sorts of thing’s about solid powder chemistry (which can seem a lot more like applied geology than the kind of chemistry most people are used to)… if you want to see some interesting things and like a good chemistry video I thoroughly recommend searching for dry powder on powder chemical reactions… most of them are fire related demonstrations but it can be interesting to see them gently spoon a powder on top on another powder and nothing happens, until they poke it with a stirring rod hard enough to press the powder firmly against the other powder and get the reaction surface area to increase and then it’s off to the races… physical contacts between materials can sometimes not be in as much contact as you think… even when it’s literally pilled on top of the other stuff.