> 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

> 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.