6 ms·

To me this is encouraging. 110K is really high! It's higher than YBCO which is what they make commercial "high temperature" superconducting tape out of. IMO if

To me this is encouraging. 110K is really high! It's higher than YBCO which is what they make commercial "high temperature" superconducting tape out of. IMO if this is legit (I have no way of judging the source) then this is the first good third party evidence that the original researchers are not just doing some kind of fraud. A total fraud wouldn't have actually discovered a novel high-temperature, but not room temperature, superconductor. At worst it seems to me like they discovered a cool new superconductor that may have commercial applications. At best, they may have a variant of this material that really is a room temperature superconductor. Either way, there is an important scientific discovery here. I'm surprised the prediction markets don't seem to be reacting. Maybe the source isn't actually credible? Any Chinese speakers here know?

saberdancer 3y ago
I think most people are just seeing the headline 110K instead of realizing the implications (not a scam, not a mistake, hard to replicate). I was quite sceptical earlier today due to unconvincing videos but this finding pushes it heavily into "This might be it" territory.
- tootie 3y ago
  I'm still unclear. Why is the test limit 110K? If this is supposed to be usable at ambient temperature then this seems like not a useful finding. Is it just some artifact of how superconductivity is measured?
  - danielheath 3y ago
    Some people say they can get it to work at room temperature, and others say they can't. Testing a sample at superconductivity-friendly temperatures helps figure out whether there's something to investigate here, since most materials do not superconduct at any useful temperature.
  - golol 3y ago
    The common understanding seems to be that producing true LK99 is very difficult as you need to get the crystal structure just right. Many samples probably have mixes of the correct and other structures. That's why some float and some don't. The sample might be quite "dirty", meaning the critical temperature is lower.
    - trafficante 3y ago
      Seems like it may depend on getting specific binding sites. > Finally, the calculations presented here suggest that Cu substitution on the appropriate (Pb(1)) site displays many key characteristics for high-TC superconductivity, namely a particularly flat isolated d-manifold, and the potential presence of fluctuating magnetism, charge and phonons. However, substitution on the other Pb(2) does not appear to have such sought-after properties, despite being the lower-energy substitution site. This result hints to the synthesis challenge in obtaining Cu substituted on the appropriate site for obtaining a bulk superconducting sample. [1] 1. https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16892 https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16892
  - valianteffort 3y ago
    I believe 110K is where it hit zero resistivity (the lower bound) but any increase from there and it was no longer presenting superconductivity. If we are to trust the SK team, it's possible the design in the paper is outdated and in-house they have dialed it in to something stable at room temperature.
  - saberdancer 3y ago
    Most materials are not superconductors at 110K. If this one is, it is possible Koreans did not fake room temperature results but rather their sample is slightly different for some reason, maybe pure luck, maybe some part of process that they didn't clearly define or that their precursor materials have certain impurities.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - CitizenKane 3y ago
      It is apparently extremely difficult to fabricate LK-99 and most of the time the process being used creates similar substances but without appropriate Cu substitution in its lattice. All of the videos have been of generally quite small samples and the manufacturing difficulty is the purported reason. The SK also supposedly had more details on this but with the leak of the paper those haven't been cleaned up and added to the paper.
      - selestify 3y ago
        I thought the original hype around LK-99 was that it was supposed to be easy to manufacture with materials most labs have on hand? E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36865106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36865106
        caturopath 3y ago
        - It was naive to think a simple recipe was going to play out with everyone getting what they wanted easily when they tried to follow it. - It's still a huge deal if the manufacturing is as easy as it appears to be, even if most of the replication attempts aren't getting _quite_ the right thing. It's hilarious if room temperature superconductors were always "Put these two things in a lucifer furnace and roll a die" away.
        xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
- prohobo 3y ago
  From my perspective the story has went like this: 1. It's probably fake/fraud/error/hopium. 2. Yeah but, it's not a superconductor, it's just diamagnetic. 3. Yeah but, theoretically maybe, but not practically. 4. Yeah but, it's just a warmer superconductor, not room temperature. I don't know if my sensibilities are "bayesian" or something, but while the naysayers are totally correct, their predictions are not where the trend is heading. This thing is consistently defying expectations and gradually becoming more "important" as more information comes out. I believe if the Q-Centre team say it's room-temperature SC, then given the evidence so far I expect to get closer to that conclusion over time. If it fails, then I think it'll fail for very good reasons, not simple error or incompetence. At this point, fraud is totally ruled out.
  - KeplerBoy 3y ago
    Wasn't fraud basically always ruled out? If you want to benefit from dubious and/or fake research, you'll have to be a lot more subtle about it. Announcing you just found the holy grail will get you all the attention in the world, attention you don't want if you just forged the paper to advance your career.
aqme28 3y ago
> I'm surprised the prediction markets don't seem to be reacting. Which way would you have the prediction markets go? Is this evidence for or against room-temperature superconductivity?
- modeless 3y ago
  Since IMO this makes fraud a less likely explanation, and it seems easily possible to me that there are many materials in this family with different critical temperatures, and it seems really unlikely that the original researchers would correctly measure superconductivity but simply get the temperature wrong by more than 200K, then it seems strongly positive to the probability that the original researchers discovered room temperature superconductivity. Not confirmation, of course.
spandrew 3y ago
The initial claim was speculated to be room temp and ambient pressure superconduction. 110K is a far cry from that.
- kulahan 3y ago
  That could still be possible. We haven't found the ideal form of LK-99 yet, so another lab might have a form which is only stable to 110K, but that doesn't mean all will see the same thing.
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    Not to mention that every new category of SC discovered helps nail down the theory of how it all works.
- ivalm 3y ago
  It’s easy to make a high tc superconductor have lower tc through poor production quality. It may very well be that a poor sample is 110K while a high quality sample is >400K.
- mytailorisrich 3y ago
  Looks like 110K still puts this in the top 5 highest temp known superconductors and it only takes a couple of days to produce out of the blue. So even if that's all it sounds like an important discovery.
  - asdfman123 3y ago
    110K actually makes me excited as someone with a physics background. It seems more realistic, and there's always the possibility of finding full room temp later, too.
- gus_massa 3y ago
  Everyone agree. Oversimplifying, there are 3 categories to classify the initial team: 1) A bunch of clowns. 2) Interesting 3) Next Nobel prize winners I think they had a good reputation in the community, so the opinion of the hivemind was to discard 1. But there was still the possibility of a honest mistake or something weird. If this post is correct, other team confirmed that they discovered a new family of "high temperature" superconductor. The old families have been tweaked and explored to death. A new family gives a lot of room to optimize the composition and building process. So perhaps they found it. If this is confirmed they are definitively in the "interesting" category, at least.
qwezxcrty 3y ago
For non-Chinese speakers: one can jump to 01:50 and 02:32 of the original video, the key figures (XRD and resistance) are presented with English captions. The data look legit although there is a curious dip in resistance in Fig.3(a) between 200K and 250K. Fig.3(b) is also a bit weird as somehow the resistance behaves irregularly with magnetic field strength.
ramesh31 3y ago
>At worst it seems to me like they discovered a cool new superconductor that may have commercial applications. At best, they may have a variant of this material that really is a room temperature superconductor. Either way, there is an important scientific discovery here. I feel like this whole thing is going to be graphene all over again. A massive initial hype around "world changing tech" that ends up being very difficult and costly to scale and produce commercially. Probably we'll see some niche applications in industry after a decade of further refinement, but I'm not holding my breath for hoverboards any time soon.
- asdfman123 3y ago
  I think the rule of thumb, though, is that most things don't turn out to be viable, and then most viable things are only barely useful due to constraints. But occasionally they DO occasionally come up with world-changing technology. Dark example, but the atomic bomb for instance was a dramatic improvement in our capacity to destroy things: night and day difference.
- EthanHeilman 3y ago
  > I feel like this whole thing is going to be graphene all over again. A massive initial hype around "world changing tech" that ends up being very difficult and costly to scale and produce commercially. That's kinda how science goes. The first free-electron laser was built in 1971. It took decades to develop and commercialize free-electron lasers and we still in the early days. It is rare for a single discovery to revolutionize everything especially in the 21st century. Typically it is a series of discoveries in a row that taken together allow new processes and technologies. Each discovery on that road is important. The short term impacts of discoveries are overestimated, the long term impacts are underestimated. On a 50-100 year time scale, the perception of graphene may be very different from what it is now. We are looking at a tadpole and saying, I thought these eggs were suppose to hatch into frogs, not tadpoles.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    The history of the laser makes for fascinating reading. Moreso because the longer they looked the harder it was to find things that were candidates that they couldn't get to exhibit the effect given the right conditions, but some of those were so extreme that they would have been discarded outright in the early days. The idea originated with Einstein in the middle of WWI, and it took until 1960 for the first working device to be made with lots of incremental progress in the middle. After that it's been a non-stop series of inventions each of which gave rise to new practical applications and new avenues of search. Originally described as 'a solution looking for a problem' it turned out that indeed, it was the solution to a lot of problems, we just didn't realize how applicable this tech would be.
freitzkriesler2 3y ago
What's impressive to me is how simple making it is. There are still low hanging scientific discoveries that are out there but that we haven't figured out yet.
- cyberlurker 3y ago
  Like ancient Roman concrete.
  - arrosenberg 3y ago
    I believe that one was recently figured out - https://news.mit.edu/2023/roman-concrete-durability-lime-casts-0106 https://news.mit.edu/2023/roman-concrete-durability-lime-cas....
callalex 3y ago
What prediction markets are you looking at? Are there any concrete examples of these markets being accurate, or just a venue for gambling addicts to feel smart?
- refulgentis 3y ago
  One prediction market company spent a day spamming e v e r y tweet with a link to their own stuff, so it's adopted a meme-y link to LK-99 but it's honestly unrelated other than a clever marketing campaign
  - callalex 3y ago
    My question is also broader than LK-99, and my point still stands.
    - refulgentis 3y ago
      And my reply still stands, if not read for signs of an adversary, you would read a comment that reinforces (B) of the (A) and (B) you offered people to reply with. Its for gambling addicts
      - yreg 3y ago
        If it's for gambling addicts who know very little then it shouldn't be that difficult to make money on it (not necessarily on LK99, but in general). Either the markets have more insight (swarm intelligence or agents who know more leveraging their knowledge) than me – and in that case they give me some information – or they have less insight and in that case I should play them.
        55555 3y ago
        Does anyone know which real money prediction market is deepest? The ones I see everyone referencing are fake money
crazygringo 3y ago
> I'm surprised the prediction markets don't seem to be reacting. Where can we look at prediction markets on this? For those of us who aren't familiar. I'm very curious -- because unlike sports scores or political elections, this seems like such a hard thing to define a prediction market around, because what is the exact threshold you're defining and what is the threshold of proof of that thing and on what date is that decided?
- staunton 3y ago
  Metaculus has some markets on LK-99, for example
- asdfman123 3y ago
  Those rules are defined in the actual bet. I think it was "three replications of room temperature superconductivity by X date" or something like that. I looked closely because I very much wanted to bet tens of thousands of dollars on "no", but I couldn't because I'm in the US. The two outcomes would be I'd make a lot of money or humanity would make the biggest breakthrough in generations.
  - tshaddox 3y ago
    > I think it was "three replications of room temperature superconductivity by X date" or something like that. That doesn’t sound like a sufficient market resolution condition. Surely it would need to be something like “declared by specific Party X to be a room-temperature superconductor” where Party X is sufficiently trusted by all market participants.
    - asdfman123 3y ago
      I was worried about that too before making the bet, but I realized I couldn't do it anyway and stopped worrying about it. You can find the whole resolution criteria here if you want: https://manifold.markets/QuantumObserver/will-the-lk99-room-temp-ambient-pre https://manifold.markets/QuantumObserver/will-the-lk99-room-...
cpleppert 3y ago
They aren't reacting because this isn't really proof of anything. The test apparatus they used can't actually measure 0 resistance. Superconductivity is implied (thats the most straightforward explanation) but not actually demonstrated here. Its very hard to interpret from the limited data presented. There could be a whole host of contaminants, issue with the experimental setup etc etc. Its hard to go from look at the interesting material properties in this graph to room temperature superconductor. This is also the only confirmatory information we have from the team; their sample didn't show diamagnetism. The reasons to be skeptical are: 1) lot of videos floating around that are just at the threshold of convincing 2) poor results from other teams 3) there is a history of superconductivity discoveries like this that never pan out 4) skepticism of the original paper
- mike_d 3y ago
  > The test apparatus they used can't actually measure 0 resistance. Can you explain how you would make that measurement? It seems like your testing equipment would need to be made of superconductors as well, right?
  - scarmig 3y ago
    Usually superconductor resistance is measured using four probes: current goes through the two outer probes, and voltage is measured across the two inner probes. Then V=IR. Lead resistance can play a role, but superconductivity is a phase transition: there's a significant discontinuity. It's not a matter of something going from 0 + e (for small e) to 0 (which doesn't happen), but one of going from x (x >>> 0) to 0. When that phase transition happens, it's obvious.
    - lordnacho 3y ago
      Noob question: how do you know you're not going from x >>> 0 to 0 + e? Not clear to me how you know the resistance is nothing at all vs just very small.
- jimmySixDOF 3y ago
  We are in the fog of war phase state of this discovery process so there are data points in every direction with the kpop X-itter drama and sensationalism thrown in to the spin for good measure. Hard to tell if this is geek meme stock phenomenon meets the Reddit Boston Bombers hunt or just the real-time globally hyper connected social media version of exactly what would have happened if social media and arXiv were around in Christmas 1938 when two German chemists noticed a flash and detected Krypton where it should not have been and the Nuclear Age began.
_hypx 3y ago
It seems pretty similar to BSCCO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bismuth_strontium_calcium_copper_oxide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bismuth_strontium_calcium_copp...
snitty 3y ago
YBCO superconducts as high as about 93K, so we're talking 17K difference. Which is useful but not wildly so. LN2 boils at 77K, for reference.
- EthanHeilman 3y ago
  YBCO is used in cutting edge Tokmak fusion reactors like SPARC. I'm not sure how an 18% increase in allowable temperature would change how much closer you could move the magnets to the plasma. Squinting at Figure 1 in [0], it seems possible you could get significant increased in Q from 18% increase in temperature. [0]: Overview of the SPARC tokamak. Journal of Plasma Physics https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-plasma-physics/article/overview-of-the-sparc-tokamak/DD3C44ECD26F5EACC554811764EF9FF0 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-plasma-ph...
- Robotbeat 3y ago
  Mercury based cuprate superconductors go even higher than YBCO, like 145K at ambient pressure.
- nullc 3y ago
  for YBCO the critical field increases the further you get from its threshold temp. If being further from the threshold temp implies a higher critical field then that is very useful.
loxias 3y ago
[flagged]
- scarmig 3y ago
  Spicy take: Theory is shit (betraying my bias here). If someone released a paper that theoretically proved a material was a superconductor from first principles, I would ignore it, every bit as much as I would if it had the opposite results. In materials, experiment has always led theory. Theory has use in suggesting new angles to explore with experiment, but theory is fundamentally reactive: get new data, try to fit that data using known principles and math. It's simply not equipped to say whether reality is real or not. Honestly, I think anyone who thought the DFT-based papers mattered at all doesn't really get how science works. The politics here is also worthy of keeping in mind: if a theorist comes out and says something is flat out impossible, he/she gets egg on their face if it turns out to be possible. If someone says it's possible, there's plenty of wiggle room to justify yourself if the material doesn't pan out (plus, if it does, you get lots of credit for offering the first theoretical explanation).
  - loxias 3y ago
    I have little to add other than I f---ing love your spicy take :D ...and agree with most of it. Yeah ofc I know results lead theory in all physics esp materials... :) Disagree re: the not getting how science works, though you might be facetious?... the fact that it just so happens that if you plug the numbers obtained by experimentation into a current reasonable model, HUH, SOMETHING INTERESTING! That's huge. No, I don't think that's a non-result, and (intentionally using the "appeal to authority" logical fallacy in place of a real argument) Dr. Derek Lowe agrees, so we know how science works. ;-) Can you expand more about what you mean by "the politics here"? (your sentence 1-5 I couldn't agree more with)
    - scarmig 3y ago
      > Disagree re: the not getting how science works, though you might be facetious? Mostly tipsy facetiousness. I mostly wanted to mock the people who thought the DFT analysis was strong evidence that LK-99 is actually a superconductor. Of course, real-life theorists (and experimentalists) know that the advance of science is a progressive dialog between the two groups. > Can you expand more about what you mean by "the politics here"? Politics in the sense of getting (positive) recognition. It's absolutely possible for someone to use theory to hypothesize whether LK-99 is a superconductor (RTP or otherwise), and that attempt provides useful predictive value. But someone posting a negative result from that faces more risks than a positive result: the positive case always has an escape hatch (e.g. other factor wasn't accounted for). Experimentalists are lucky, in that escape hatches--e.g. the exact method to reproduce wasn't known to us--are always available to the negative case, because experiments are so messy.

saberdancer 3y ago

I think most people are just seeing the headline 110K instead of realizing the implications (not a scam, not a mistake, hard to replicate). I was quite sceptical earlier today due to unconvincing videos but this finding pushes it heavily into "This might be it" territory.

tootie 3y ago
I'm still unclear. Why is the test limit 110K? If this is supposed to be usable at ambient temperature then this seems like not a useful finding. Is it just some artifact of how superconductivity is measured?
- danielheath 3y ago
  Some people say they can get it to work at room temperature, and others say they can't. Testing a sample at superconductivity-friendly temperatures helps figure out whether there's something to investigate here, since most materials do not superconduct at any useful temperature.
- golol 3y ago
  The common understanding seems to be that producing true LK99 is very difficult as you need to get the crystal structure just right. Many samples probably have mixes of the correct and other structures. That's why some float and some don't. The sample might be quite "dirty", meaning the critical temperature is lower.
  - trafficante 3y ago
    Seems like it may depend on getting specific binding sites. > Finally, the calculations presented here suggest that Cu substitution on the appropriate (Pb(1)) site displays many key characteristics for high-TC superconductivity, namely a particularly flat isolated d-manifold, and the potential presence of fluctuating magnetism, charge and phonons. However, substitution on the other Pb(2) does not appear to have such sought-after properties, despite being the lower-energy substitution site. This result hints to the synthesis challenge in obtaining Cu substituted on the appropriate site for obtaining a bulk superconducting sample. [1] 1. https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16892 https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16892
- valianteffort 3y ago
  I believe 110K is where it hit zero resistivity (the lower bound) but any increase from there and it was no longer presenting superconductivity. If we are to trust the SK team, it's possible the design in the paper is outdated and in-house they have dialed it in to something stable at room temperature.
- saberdancer 3y ago
  Most materials are not superconductors at 110K. If this one is, it is possible Koreans did not fake room temperature results but rather their sample is slightly different for some reason, maybe pure luck, maybe some part of process that they didn't clearly define or that their precursor materials have certain impurities.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - CitizenKane 3y ago
    It is apparently extremely difficult to fabricate LK-99 and most of the time the process being used creates similar substances but without appropriate Cu substitution in its lattice. All of the videos have been of generally quite small samples and the manufacturing difficulty is the purported reason. The SK also supposedly had more details on this but with the leak of the paper those haven't been cleaned up and added to the paper.
    - selestify 3y ago
      I thought the original hype around LK-99 was that it was supposed to be easy to manufacture with materials most labs have on hand? E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36865106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36865106
      - caturopath 3y ago
        - It was naive to think a simple recipe was going to play out with everyone getting what they wanted easily when they tried to follow it. - It's still a huge deal if the manufacturing is as easy as it appears to be, even if most of the replication attempts aren't getting _quite_ the right thing. It's hilarious if room temperature superconductors were always "Put these two things in a lucifer furnace and roll a die" away.
        xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
prohobo 3y ago
From my perspective the story has went like this: 1. It's probably fake/fraud/error/hopium. 2. Yeah but, it's not a superconductor, it's just diamagnetic. 3. Yeah but, theoretically maybe, but not practically. 4. Yeah but, it's just a warmer superconductor, not room temperature. I don't know if my sensibilities are "bayesian" or something, but while the naysayers are totally correct, their predictions are not where the trend is heading. This thing is consistently defying expectations and gradually becoming more "important" as more information comes out. I believe if the Q-Centre team say it's room-temperature SC, then given the evidence so far I expect to get closer to that conclusion over time. If it fails, then I think it'll fail for very good reasons, not simple error or incompetence. At this point, fraud is totally ruled out.
- KeplerBoy 3y ago
  Wasn't fraud basically always ruled out? If you want to benefit from dubious and/or fake research, you'll have to be a lot more subtle about it. Announcing you just found the holy grail will get you all the attention in the world, attention you don't want if you just forged the paper to advance your career.

aqme28 3y ago

> I'm surprised the prediction markets don't seem to be reacting. Which way would you have the prediction markets go? Is this evidence for or against room-temperature superconductivity?

modeless 3y ago
Since IMO this makes fraud a less likely explanation, and it seems easily possible to me that there are many materials in this family with different critical temperatures, and it seems really unlikely that the original researchers would correctly measure superconductivity but simply get the temperature wrong by more than 200K, then it seems strongly positive to the probability that the original researchers discovered room temperature superconductivity. Not confirmation, of course.

spandrew 3y ago

The initial claim was speculated to be room temp and ambient pressure superconduction. 110K is a far cry from that.

kulahan 3y ago
That could still be possible. We haven't found the ideal form of LK-99 yet, so another lab might have a form which is only stable to 110K, but that doesn't mean all will see the same thing.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  Not to mention that every new category of SC discovered helps nail down the theory of how it all works.
ivalm 3y ago
It’s easy to make a high tc superconductor have lower tc through poor production quality. It may very well be that a poor sample is 110K while a high quality sample is >400K.
mytailorisrich 3y ago
Looks like 110K still puts this in the top 5 highest temp known superconductors and it only takes a couple of days to produce out of the blue. So even if that's all it sounds like an important discovery.
- asdfman123 3y ago
  110K actually makes me excited as someone with a physics background. It seems more realistic, and there's always the possibility of finding full room temp later, too.
gus_massa 3y ago
Everyone agree. Oversimplifying, there are 3 categories to classify the initial team: 1) A bunch of clowns. 2) Interesting 3) Next Nobel prize winners I think they had a good reputation in the community, so the opinion of the hivemind was to discard 1. But there was still the possibility of a honest mistake or something weird. If this post is correct, other team confirmed that they discovered a new family of "high temperature" superconductor. The old families have been tweaked and explored to death. A new family gives a lot of room to optimize the composition and building process. So perhaps they found it. If this is confirmed they are definitively in the "interesting" category, at least.

qwezxcrty 3y ago

For non-Chinese speakers: one can jump to 01:50 and 02:32 of the original video, the key figures (XRD and resistance) are presented with English captions. The data look legit although there is a curious dip in resistance in Fig.3(a) between 200K and 250K. Fig.3(b) is also a bit weird as somehow the resistance behaves irregularly with magnetic field strength.

ramesh31 3y ago

>At worst it seems to me like they discovered a cool new superconductor that may have commercial applications. At best, they may have a variant of this material that really is a room temperature superconductor. Either way, there is an important scientific discovery here. I feel like this whole thing is going to be graphene all over again. A massive initial hype around "world changing tech" that ends up being very difficult and costly to scale and produce commercially. Probably we'll see some niche applications in industry after a decade of further refinement, but I'm not holding my breath for hoverboards any time soon.

asdfman123 3y ago
I think the rule of thumb, though, is that most things don't turn out to be viable, and then most viable things are only barely useful due to constraints. But occasionally they DO occasionally come up with world-changing technology. Dark example, but the atomic bomb for instance was a dramatic improvement in our capacity to destroy things: night and day difference.
EthanHeilman 3y ago
> I feel like this whole thing is going to be graphene all over again. A massive initial hype around "world changing tech" that ends up being very difficult and costly to scale and produce commercially. That's kinda how science goes. The first free-electron laser was built in 1971. It took decades to develop and commercialize free-electron lasers and we still in the early days. It is rare for a single discovery to revolutionize everything especially in the 21st century. Typically it is a series of discoveries in a row that taken together allow new processes and technologies. Each discovery on that road is important. The short term impacts of discoveries are overestimated, the long term impacts are underestimated. On a 50-100 year time scale, the perception of graphene may be very different from what it is now. We are looking at a tadpole and saying, I thought these eggs were suppose to hatch into frogs, not tadpoles.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  The history of the laser makes for fascinating reading. Moreso because the longer they looked the harder it was to find things that were candidates that they couldn't get to exhibit the effect given the right conditions, but some of those were so extreme that they would have been discarded outright in the early days. The idea originated with Einstein in the middle of WWI, and it took until 1960 for the first working device to be made with lots of incremental progress in the middle. After that it's been a non-stop series of inventions each of which gave rise to new practical applications and new avenues of search. Originally described as 'a solution looking for a problem' it turned out that indeed, it was the solution to a lot of problems, we just didn't realize how applicable this tech would be.

freitzkriesler2 3y ago

What's impressive to me is how simple making it is. There are still low hanging scientific discoveries that are out there but that we haven't figured out yet.

cyberlurker 3y ago
Like ancient Roman concrete.
- arrosenberg 3y ago
  I believe that one was recently figured out - https://news.mit.edu/2023/roman-concrete-durability-lime-casts-0106 https://news.mit.edu/2023/roman-concrete-durability-lime-cas....

callalex 3y ago

What prediction markets are you looking at? Are there any concrete examples of these markets being accurate, or just a venue for gambling addicts to feel smart?

refulgentis 3y ago
One prediction market company spent a day spamming e v e r y tweet with a link to their own stuff, so it's adopted a meme-y link to LK-99 but it's honestly unrelated other than a clever marketing campaign
- callalex 3y ago
  My question is also broader than LK-99, and my point still stands.
  - refulgentis 3y ago
    And my reply still stands, if not read for signs of an adversary, you would read a comment that reinforces (B) of the (A) and (B) you offered people to reply with. Its for gambling addicts
    - yreg 3y ago
      If it's for gambling addicts who know very little then it shouldn't be that difficult to make money on it (not necessarily on LK99, but in general). Either the markets have more insight (swarm intelligence or agents who know more leveraging their knowledge) than me – and in that case they give me some information – or they have less insight and in that case I should play them.
      - 55555 3y ago
        Does anyone know which real money prediction market is deepest? The ones I see everyone referencing are fake money

crazygringo 3y ago

> I'm surprised the prediction markets don't seem to be reacting. Where can we look at prediction markets on this? For those of us who aren't familiar. I'm very curious -- because unlike sports scores or political elections, this seems like such a hard thing to define a prediction market around, because what is the exact threshold you're defining and what is the threshold of proof of that thing and on what date is that decided?

staunton 3y ago
Metaculus has some markets on LK-99, for example
asdfman123 3y ago
Those rules are defined in the actual bet. I think it was "three replications of room temperature superconductivity by X date" or something like that. I looked closely because I very much wanted to bet tens of thousands of dollars on "no", but I couldn't because I'm in the US. The two outcomes would be I'd make a lot of money or humanity would make the biggest breakthrough in generations.
- tshaddox 3y ago
  > I think it was "three replications of room temperature superconductivity by X date" or something like that. That doesn’t sound like a sufficient market resolution condition. Surely it would need to be something like “declared by specific Party X to be a room-temperature superconductor” where Party X is sufficiently trusted by all market participants.
  - asdfman123 3y ago
    I was worried about that too before making the bet, but I realized I couldn't do it anyway and stopped worrying about it. You can find the whole resolution criteria here if you want: https://manifold.markets/QuantumObserver/will-the-lk99-room-temp-ambient-pre https://manifold.markets/QuantumObserver/will-the-lk99-room-...

cpleppert 3y ago

They aren't reacting because this isn't really proof of anything. The test apparatus they used can't actually measure 0 resistance. Superconductivity is implied (thats the most straightforward explanation) but not actually demonstrated here. Its very hard to interpret from the limited data presented. There could be a whole host of contaminants, issue with the experimental setup etc etc. Its hard to go from look at the interesting material properties in this graph to room temperature superconductor. This is also the only confirmatory information we have from the team; their sample didn't show diamagnetism. The reasons to be skeptical are: 1) lot of videos floating around that are just at the threshold of convincing 2) poor results from other teams 3) there is a history of superconductivity discoveries like this that never pan out 4) skepticism of the original paper

mike_d 3y ago
> The test apparatus they used can't actually measure 0 resistance. Can you explain how you would make that measurement? It seems like your testing equipment would need to be made of superconductors as well, right?
- scarmig 3y ago
  Usually superconductor resistance is measured using four probes: current goes through the two outer probes, and voltage is measured across the two inner probes. Then V=IR. Lead resistance can play a role, but superconductivity is a phase transition: there's a significant discontinuity. It's not a matter of something going from 0 + e (for small e) to 0 (which doesn't happen), but one of going from x (x >>> 0) to 0. When that phase transition happens, it's obvious.
  - lordnacho 3y ago
    Noob question: how do you know you're not going from x >>> 0 to 0 + e? Not clear to me how you know the resistance is nothing at all vs just very small.
jimmySixDOF 3y ago
We are in the fog of war phase state of this discovery process so there are data points in every direction with the kpop X-itter drama and sensationalism thrown in to the spin for good measure. Hard to tell if this is geek meme stock phenomenon meets the Reddit Boston Bombers hunt or just the real-time globally hyper connected social media version of exactly what would have happened if social media and arXiv were around in Christmas 1938 when two German chemists noticed a flash and detected Krypton where it should not have been and the Nuclear Age began.

_hypx 3y ago

It seems pretty similar to BSCCO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bismuth_strontium_calcium_copper_oxide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bismuth_strontium_calcium_copp...

snitty 3y ago

YBCO superconducts as high as about 93K, so we're talking 17K difference. Which is useful but not wildly so. LN2 boils at 77K, for reference.

EthanHeilman 3y ago
YBCO is used in cutting edge Tokmak fusion reactors like SPARC. I'm not sure how an 18% increase in allowable temperature would change how much closer you could move the magnets to the plasma. Squinting at Figure 1 in [0], it seems possible you could get significant increased in Q from 18% increase in temperature. [0]: Overview of the SPARC tokamak. Journal of Plasma Physics https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-plasma-physics/article/overview-of-the-sparc-tokamak/DD3C44ECD26F5EACC554811764EF9FF0 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-plasma-ph...
Robotbeat 3y ago
Mercury based cuprate superconductors go even higher than YBCO, like 145K at ambient pressure.
nullc 3y ago
for YBCO the critical field increases the further you get from its threshold temp. If being further from the threshold temp implies a higher critical field then that is very useful.

loxias 3y ago

[flagged]

scarmig 3y ago
Spicy take: Theory is shit (betraying my bias here). If someone released a paper that theoretically proved a material was a superconductor from first principles, I would ignore it, every bit as much as I would if it had the opposite results. In materials, experiment has always led theory. Theory has use in suggesting new angles to explore with experiment, but theory is fundamentally reactive: get new data, try to fit that data using known principles and math. It's simply not equipped to say whether reality is real or not. Honestly, I think anyone who thought the DFT-based papers mattered at all doesn't really get how science works. The politics here is also worthy of keeping in mind: if a theorist comes out and says something is flat out impossible, he/she gets egg on their face if it turns out to be possible. If someone says it's possible, there's plenty of wiggle room to justify yourself if the material doesn't pan out (plus, if it does, you get lots of credit for offering the first theoretical explanation).
- loxias 3y ago
  I have little to add other than I f---ing love your spicy take :D ...and agree with most of it. Yeah ofc I know results lead theory in all physics esp materials... :) Disagree re: the not getting how science works, though you might be facetious?... the fact that it just so happens that if you plug the numbers obtained by experimentation into a current reasonable model, HUH, SOMETHING INTERESTING! That's huge. No, I don't think that's a non-result, and (intentionally using the "appeal to authority" logical fallacy in place of a real argument) Dr. Derek Lowe agrees, so we know how science works. ;-) Can you expand more about what you mean by "the politics here"? (your sentence 1-5 I couldn't agree more with)
  - scarmig 3y ago
    > Disagree re: the not getting how science works, though you might be facetious? Mostly tipsy facetiousness. I mostly wanted to mock the people who thought the DFT analysis was strong evidence that LK-99 is actually a superconductor. Of course, real-life theorists (and experimentalists) know that the advance of science is a progressive dialog between the two groups. > Can you expand more about what you mean by "the politics here"? Politics in the sense of getting (positive) recognition. It's absolutely possible for someone to use theory to hypothesize whether LK-99 is a superconductor (RTP or otherwise), and that attempt provides useful predictive value. But someone posting a negative result from that faces more risks than a positive result: the positive case always has an escape hatch (e.g. other factor wasn't accounted for). Experimentalists are lucky, in that escape hatches--e.g. the exact method to reproduce wasn't known to us--are always available to the negative case, because experiments are so messy.