21 ms·
Andrew McCalip demonstrates synthesis of LK99
- yread 3y agoI like the 2:35am timestamp
- duckmysick 3y agoAlso, McMaster-Carr (of the "I-can't-belive-how-fast-their-site-is-loading" fame) ziplock bag on the following tweet.
- gabesullice 3y agoNitter: https://nitter.net/andrewmccalip/status/1687405505604734978#m https://nitter.net/andrewmccalip/status/1687405505604734978#...
- ssijak 3y agopardon my ignorance but why are people posting nitter links every time, what is wrong with original twitter urls?
- lifthrasiir 3y agoTwitter nowadays is much more strict about rate limits from non-logged-in clients.
- mr_sturd 3y agoTwitter tries to force sign in/up, when you scroll down through replies.
- jansan 3y agoThis allows people without a Twitter account to read tweets and replies. Also, some people (as myself) have blocked Twitter.
- pera 3y agoTwitter is basically broken if you don't login, compare this: https://twitter.com/andrewmccalip https://twitter.com/andrewmccalip https://nitter.net/andrewmccalip https://nitter.net/andrewmccalip In Twitter the latest tweet I see is from July, in Nitter is 22 minutes ago. Additionally in Twitter I get 3 notices/popups that I need to close.
- ssijak 3y agoI was not aware of this, I'm always logged in when I visit twitter
- willis936 3y agoAnd I'm not.
- rvnx 3y agoLinks behind logins wall/paywall should be totally forbidden, Twitter, Quora, news websites, etc. I don't even get why they are indexed by Google, as this is cloaking, and forbidden by the ToS (+ gets annoying)
- mrkeen 3y agoYeah that would be nice, but pretty hard to enforce. I just read until I hit the first popup, then I back out. I'd downvote if I could.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoGoogle gave up on checking or enforcing these things because they'd otherwise lose traffic and ad revenue.
- vinyl7 3y agoGoogle has a rule where links from google can't be paywalled. So you can see Quora posts if you enter from a Google link, but not if you go to the URL directly.
- nicce 3y ago
- gmerc 3y agoElon is turning his platform to pay for misinformation and rage baiting. No need to support that even passively.
- Swenrekcah 3y agoYou are not wrong. I certainly was no fan of the old twitter’s ultra woke circle jerk and bullyism but you could at least mostly ignore it and the verified accounts were actual verified people. Today the misinformation and shitposting crap is impossible to avoid, the top comments are invariably random 8 dollar people (?) that add little to the discussion and porn bots / onlyfans all over the place. On top of that it seems there might be a bias in the accounts that get selected for payouts and there is indeed quite the incentive for ragebait there.
- gmerc 3y ago70% of the payouts in the top tier (10 people) go to Elon
- h11h 3y agoIf not logged in, Twitter shows no replies, not even ones in the same thread.
- tambourine_man 3y agoHow’s Nitter still working after all these recent restrictions from Twitter?
- flotzam 3y agohttps://github.com/zedeus/nitter/pull/927 https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/pull/927
- tambourine_man 3y agoThanks, but do you have more info on this new authentication method? Is Musk suddenly OK with it? What has changed?
- nzoschke 3y agoTwitter isn’t loading at all for me at this moment. No idea if it’s me, or twitter or being logged out or logged in or what. Nitter let’s me see the content instantly.
- rsynnott 3y agoIn this brave new Twitter-y world, if the Twitter link loads at all (hardly a sure thing lately) it'll only show the tweet without any replies, unless you're logged in. Nitter will show the whole thing (it's ultimately dependent on Twitter so may also be broken, but in several recent partial Twitter outages nitter has been usable while the twitter web UI was not loading).
- timeon 3y agoI do not have account. Even if Twitter links loads (which is not always the case) - there are no comments/thread.
- userbinator 3y agoLoads very quickly and viewable without any JS.
- lopkeny12ko 3y agoBecause people on HN love to hate on Elon. "Elon bad! Twitter bad!" It's uninspired and tiring.
- giantrobot 3y agoYes. It must be that and not at all the fact that Twitter is unavailable at worst or degraded at best if you don't have an account. There's something uninspired and tiring but I don't think it's people avoiding Twitter.
- dm_me_dogs 3y agoMy online life has been way less stressful since I both deleted my Twitter account, and set up my own Nitter instance. Same goes for Reddit.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thepasswordis 3y agoThis has to be the new version of: “I don’t even own a TV!”
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dvngnt_ 3y agosocial media is much worse than TV though
- mderazon 3y agoWhat does setting up your own Nitter instance give you that the hosted one doesn't? Just additional privacy? As for Reddit, is there another frontend?
- swader999 3y agoHN is all I have left. Been this way for a few years. I guess I still use Twitter, but just for local emergency news.
- gamegoblin 3y agoI follow ~200 extremely high quality people on twitter, never use the algorithmic timeline -- just the "Following" tab, and it is easily 10x more signal to noise than HN for me, I'm almost upset I didn't start using it sooner. Only works if you can resist the temptation to follow national news orgs, politics, etc. In my little niche, though, I essentially never see any of that, even less than one sees on HN. It's all just tech, AL/ML, space/rockets, startups, etc.
- fosterfriends 3y agoAs someone new to the Twitter sphere - could some help me understand Nitter?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- yoavm 3y agoIt's an open-source privacy oriented and no bullshit interface to Twitter.
- fosterfriends 3y agoOut of curiosity, how do they sync through Twitter's now-very-closed API?
- blamazon 3y agoOff the top of my head I think it's basically using the same publicly undocumented API that the Twitter-hosted front ends use - Twitter did successfully block nitter et al recently with the "must be logged in to view tweets" change but rolled that back (partly?) after Threads launched. I surmise that to block such access by Nitter completely while keeping Twitter's own front ends open to the public, Twitter would need to be extensively re-factored on both the front and back ends, a goal that the organization may not be capable of successfully completing at this time, but is presumably working towards.
- littlestymaar 3y agoTwitter is so slow to load on mobile that it's faster to hand-replace "twitter.com" with "nitter.nl" than to wait for the load time and the close the multiple pop-ups.
- dabeeeenster 3y agoHoly hell. Is this it?
- ssijak 3y agoit is it but what it is is still to be determined
- subzel0 3y agoI don't see why people go crazy over this, the meissner effect in superconductors look different.
- willis936 3y agoHow so?
- subzel0 3y agoThe rock should float for a start.
- blueflow 3y agoMeissner Effect does not mean it has to float. It only floats if thats the easiest way to expulse the magnet field. Otherwise it aligns normally with the magnetic field, which is supposedly happening here.
- supriyo-biswas 3y agoAs it’s been theorized elsewhere, it may be that the production processes produce a material with only bits of the theorized superconductor in it, leading to the wiggling effect we see here as well as the Chinese replication video.
- Timon3 3y agoI don't understand what you're not seeing. Nobody is saying that the whole LK-99 sample is superconducting. Why would you expect the whole sample to float, instead of "partial floating" as we're seeing, if you have a material that's only partially superconducting?
- fragmede 3y agoHis piece of LK-99 is much bigger than the tiny grains I've seen elsewhere.
- est 3y agoIt's made in USA baby!
- OJFord 3y agoI think you're joking, I'd 100% assume it, except that I ran into some truly bizarre US patriotism while trying to follow McCalip's updates a few days ago - last relevant one I could find was 'materials coming tomorrow' on 27th, but then I couldn't find anything about using them or any update. Just a decent into people tweeting (in thread) about how great America is, the best country, etc. Really surreal. Think it was in replies here, but not logged in to tell: https://twitter.com/andrewmccalip/status/1684438158837153792 https://twitter.com/andrewmccalip/status/1684438158837153792
- baq 3y agoIt's jarring for us Euros (I dunno, ghosts of the war are still alive maybe?), but it's pretty normal stateside.
- pookah 3y ago[dead]
- rsynnott 3y agoAlso, the Soviet Union, I think; it’s just bad associations all the way down. I realise that Americans have a different background and an American being really into flags and founding fathers and all that usually means something completely different (and less worrying) than someone in Europe doing same, but it’s still hard not to find it offputting.
- thepasswordis 3y ago
- lifthrasiir 3y ago[flagged]
- refulgentis 3y agoClicked through 3 links to be greeted with "Disclaimer: I’m no physicist nor chemist...It turned out that LK folks were not talking about some stupid shit." -- combined with "(Note: was written and published hours before this demonstration.)", and there wasn't an attempt to explain the connection between TFA and this new other article I'm supposed to read. I'm good, thanks.
- lifthrasiir 3y ago"I’m no physicist nor chemist" means that I have no qualification to say whether the theory is legitimate or not. "It turned out that LK folks were not talking about some stupid shit" means that their theory is not out of the thin air, but rather based on some alternative theory that has not been actually disproven but simply forgotten. This one is much easier to verify. "was written and published hours before this demonstration" means that I have no prior knowledge about this demonstration. Otherwise you could argue that I have written the article to justify this demonstration.
- willis936 3y agoThe last point doesn't make much sense since there were multiple prior similar demonstrations. It's still a prediction made after the experiment has concluded and the results are widely disseminated.
- lifthrasiir 3y agoTo my knowledge this is the first ever demonstration to show the exactly same thing as Q-center's original video (partly because this sample is much larger than others), so I believe my argument is probably safe. But I understand your and GP's judgements given the recent craze. To be fair, I'm still conservative about the whole thing, but it does look clear to me that we are witnessing the conflict between two big theories of SC, rather than some crackpot versus "legit" scientists, hence my new article.
- ssijak 3y agoThere is a Checz lab also documenting the process https://twitter.com/CondMatfyz https://twitter.com/CondMatfyz
- yread 3y agoCzech
- tw1984 3y agoI am totally confused, it is documented in the original south korean paper, why anyone would want to rely on such second hand unverified info when first hand info from the original inventors are freely available to everyone?
- TheAceOfHearts 3y agoHaving multiple groups document and share their progress while attempting to replicate LK-99 is exciting and it captures people's imagination. People want to see LK-99 being replicated by multiple sources. Aside from that, as I understand it the information in the original South Korean paper leaves out a lot of details on how to fully replicate their findings.
- ssijak 3y agonot sure what you are saying. other labs are trying to replicate what Koreans published and are documenting the their process of replication
- threeseed 3y agoAlso it's great that all of the labs have their own style for how they replicate it.
- mholm 3y agoIt is documented fairly poorly in the South Korean paper. Not atrociously poorly, but enough that there's a fair bit of ambiguity, and several top labs have failed to replicate for this reason. When replication is this difficult, hundreds of labs doing experiments will give tremendous data on the principles behind what create the material, moreso than one lab repeating hundreds of small tweaks.
- ginko 3y agoAt this point it feels like even of this turns out to not be a full superconductor it will be a huge leap forward
- sashank_1509 3y agoInteresting, this is being done in room temperature too. I suppose a few things I can conclude from this saga: 1. The synthesis process is much more complex than the original paper suggests. Every group except the original is unable to create a large piece of sufficient purity. 2. It seems like even with a pure sample, the entire structure might not be superconducting which leads it to tilt on one edge instead of completely floating. (Some call it a 1D superconductor, I’m a bit out of my depth here) Should expect all these things to improve soon, but seems like a genuine breakthrough, not a fake or a dud’
- blackkettle 3y agoThe original group also stated that they are preparing another paper specifically about this synthesis process IIRC. This would seem to indicate that the challenge is known and the initial omission either deliberate or another side effect of this absurdly gripping kdrama.
- EvgeniyZh 3y agoThis 1D stuff really confuses me. I was taught that 1D superconductivity is prohibited by Mermin Wagner theorem. You can induce superconductivity on 1D system but that requires higher dimensional SC near it, which is the opposite of proposed scenario? If someone have seen theoretical papers explaining this and/or understands it, I'd love to know. Iris Alexandera posted link to some experimental paper [1] but I didn't understand the mechanism from it and it is very scarcely cited [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1103.1459 https://arxiv.org/abs/1103.1459
- sashank_1509 3y agoThis makes me extremely bullish about Varda Space, they have engineers of high quality and expertise that they could do a decent replication very quickly (if they got access to raw materials earlier, they might have been first to do so, comparable with the Chinese Groups) while working on their off time (from what I’ve seen of their twitter) and not a single big academic lab has managed to complete any sort of replication to date!
- blackkettle 3y ago100% true and actually a very interesting statement. Can you imagine if he had tried to present this idea to the c-suite as a potential marketing or PR coup?!
- wiz21c 3y agoDo we really care if they confirm it in a week or two ? Are we on a hurry ? I don't know anything bout supraconductors but given the number of failing attempts to repicalte (and the number succeeding), I would not be suprised if it'd take quite some time before we can be certain. Moreover, we'll need a consensus among all the people who understand the subject. So, a week or even a month won't make any difference. We're not talking about a vaccine.
- Torkel 3y agoAs engineers we are given building blocks that we can build things from. Iron, steel, copper, plastic. Every once in a while a new building block arrives. It takes a while for us to figure out how to use it. But when we do, the world changes. - batteries + touch screens => iPhone - batteries got better => Tesla - reinforced concrete => pretty much all the worlds buildings and bridges - neodymium magnets + gyros => drones A room temperature superconductor... well, that changes things on a completely new level. Order of magnitude smaller losses plus order of magnitude higher magnetic fields? OMFG can we build SciFi things from this if it pans out. So yeah - we are in a hurry. If this pans out, there will be a massive shift in how pretty much anything is made. And the reward for the people who can figure it out first are insane, in terms of potential value created.
- xcodevn 3y agoCan anyone conduct a proper measurement of resistivity versus temperature and determine whether it's a superconductor or not?
- adrian_b 3y agoIn another thread such a measurement has been discussed. Unfortunately such measurements are not enough for definitive conclusions, because all that they can show is that below some temperature the resistance becomes smaller than the error of the measuring equipment. Moreover, because the samples obtained so far are extremely inhomogeneous, they do not show a definite transition temperature, which would have made superconductivity much more plausible. In any case, the results obtained so far are enough for showing that it is worthwhile to invest time and money for developing a method of producing samples that are larger and more pure, because whatever they are, they must have unusual properties. The best would be to develop a method for making monocrystals, because this material has an asymmetric crystal structure, which might have very anisotropic properties. The most interesting properties of semiconductors could not be discovered during the first century after their discovery by Faraday, because they were not available as pure monocrystals. Only after the methods for growing pure crystals have been developed during WW2 (for radar diodes), it became possible to measure the intrinsic properties of the semiconductors and to design new devices using them, and then the semiconductor industry has grown exponentially. With this kind of non-metallic superconductor, the problems may be similar.
- ETH_start 3y agoFYI: you can use the x.com hostname when linking to tweets, e.g. https://x.com/andrewmccalip/status/1687405505604734978 https://x.com/andrewmccalip/status/1687405505604734978
- tw1984 3y agothe really amazing part of the LK99 is that you don't any big name with access to some national labs to demonstrate that for you, all you need is some high school lab equipments and some very basic understanding of the subject.
- yxhuvud 3y agoYes and no. You still need access to red phosphorous which is not all that easy to get hold of.
- h2odragon 3y agoI recall using it for fireworks recipes. Good thing we controlled access since then; otherwise people would be making drugs with it all over...
- baq 3y agothe 1000 C furnace is nothing to sneeze at either.
- varjag 3y agoThese are rather common. Often used in metalworking for steel hardening.
- baq 3y agoyeah but OP said 'high school lab'... which granted may be true in the US but certainly not what I'd call 'common' or even 'rare' where I live. a good description would be 'completely unheard of'.
- cthalupa 3y ago>which granted may be true in the US I'm a graduate of the public school system in the US in a state that is not in the top 10-15 for education - my high school had a pretty impressive furnace. I'm too far removed to remember what it's maximum temperature was but I wouldn't be surprised if it was 1000C+
- timinou 3y agoI'm curious what companies stand to gain the most from this discovery... I understand the promises of LK-99, but where do you think where we'll see it be applied first?
- dvh 3y ago$9 floating superconductor toy on AliExpress, free shipping
- sixQuarks 3y agoLol. You’re probably right
- megaman821 3y agoDepends on its price and properties. If it is affordable, I would go with electric motors. Not having to cool them would be hugely beneficial. If it is expensive, then MRI machines and space equipment.
- eterevsky 3y agoIs it possible to distinguish SC levitation from diamagnetism, based on this experiment?
- alberth 3y agoELI5, can someone please. This stuff is over my head (what I'm looking at, ramifications, etc) I'm also confused because I see conflicting things (e.g. "room temperature" but video says "500C"). Also, is this real or fake? I've seen comments on both.
- sebzim4500 3y ago>what I'm looking at, ramifications, etc) It's showing a sample of something that might be partially a superconductor (as in, one side of it might be superconducting and one side might not be). It's probably not a complete superconductor, since it would be floating if it was. Some people are saying it's a very weird magnet. If it's a superconductor then this could be comparable in impact to the development of the transistor. As in, it won't change things overnight but in 50 years people will look back at it as the beginning of a new era of technology. >I see conflicting things (e.g. "room temperature" but video says "500C"). I think the 500C refers to the manufacturing process, not the current temperature. >Also, is this real or fake? I've seen comments on both. The video is almost certainly real, but it may not show a superconductor. The risk isn't intentional fraud, it's just hard to tell with these small, impure samples.
- Loic 3y ago500°C/min cool. This is the cooling rate. It should be written 500K/min. He explains that he had no data about the cooling rate from the original paper and as such is going to test several rates.
- refulgentis 3y agoK has same dimension as C, K = C + 273.15
- ssabev 3y agoWhat a time to be alive. Props for Varda jumping on it. If/when this works out would love to see them manufacture it in space.
- refulgentis 3y agoWhy?
- cthalupa 3y agoTheir whole thing is in-space manufacturing in general, and stuff in space could make use of an RTAPS. I don't think the parent comment was anything more than "It'd be cool to see the space manufacturing company manufacture the thing they were one of the first handful of people to potentially publicly replicate"
- DarmokJalad1701 3y agoThe humility is refreshing, compared to anime girl. Also, the photos/videos are not shot using a potato.
- sashank_1509 3y agoExactly, that Russian anime girl shud not be getting any credit, I don’t say this because of her anonymity but because of her absolute refusal to take a video or do absolutely anything that can make outsiders trust her claims.
- xvector 3y agoI don't understand why she would be like this. Why would anyone hold back the production process for a material that could change humanity forever?
- ssabev 3y agoLots of bizarre pro-Soviet behaviour from her as well which feels somehow connected
- refulgentis 3y agoShe's _literally_ Russian, not ironically. So not so bizarre.
- ssabev 3y agoWell, she said, she's ethnically Ukrainian. It was great times for us during the USSR so not that's why I was finding it a bit odd.
- maipen 3y agoWhy? Simple, there's lots of mentally ill people on this planet. Anime profile pictures are usualy a redflag. These kind of people should only be ignored since they never want to cooperate.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- titzer 3y agoI, for one, am not impressed by his Twitter thread. It looks very sloppy, and I am completely disregarding videos of floating flakes of gray whatever-the-heck. They look like they have none of the equipment to properly test what material they created or what its properties are. It doesn't inspire confidence, it's just more damn attention-seeking. Stick to rockets or whatever. That said, the fact that LK-99 has not been instantly debunked makes me somewhat hopeful that even ridiculously sloppy attempts like this did manage to create a bit of the crystal lattice that makes this material unique, and that, if indeed it does have superconducting properties, the manufacturing process won't be hard.
- coding123 3y agoCan someone ELI43 what benefits a shaving of metal dancing in a beaker can do for the world? And will this be like my 90% efficient solar panels that I'm still waiting for?
- xwdv 3y agoJust needs to scale up. We need several kilotons of this material ASAP.
- great_psy 3y agoI’m obviously way out of my depth here, But, How is this different than a tiny magnetized piece of iron ? Are they saying this piece showing in the video will always float the same way regardless of orientation ? Also would this effect still work with an electromagnet ?
- xsmasher 3y agoA piece of magnetized iron would flip the other way if you turned over the magnet. That's why in the Chinese videos you see them remove the magnet, flip it over, and put it back. The same "end" of LK99 floats, no matter which pole of the magnet you put toward the sample.
- ThePhysicist 3y agoHonestly I don't see anything that would prove superconductivity in this video. If LK-99 is a type-II superconductor you should observe flux pinning i.e. you would be able to move the flake with a tweezer and it would be stuck in place as the magnetic flux lines are pinned to defects in the material. I haven't seen any details on the supposed properties of the material like the coherence length, but from the original paper it seems the critical field of a small flake is rather low at a few 100-1000 Oe, so a more convincing test than thermal cycling would be to simply use an electromagnet and increase the field strength, the sample should then drop once the (second) critical field is reached. If the critical field strength is too high you can reduce it by heating the sample, but what's critical is to observe breakdown of diamagnetism with an increase in field strength without any form of hysteresis, which you won't observe in the same way in a diamagnet. The best test would probably be to produce a Josephson junction and measure Shapiro steps at high frequency, that's something that cannot be explained by anything except a superconducting quantum material. As the sample is highly impure it could even be enough to irradiate it with a microwave source and measure the reflectivity / transmittance, there could even be intrinsic Josephson effect like in high Tc superconductors. Impossible to say though without knowing more details about the material.
- floxy 3y agoThere have been some people saying that LK-99 might only be superconducting in one dimension. Does anyone know how that (or even just 2-D/planar superconductivity) would effect the levitation of samples? For the 1-D case, maybe there would be issues in creating loops in the bulk material for persistent currents to flow in? It might be hard to make a Josephson junction unless you knew the orientation of the superconductivity direction? Has anybody studied this before? My intuition breaks down here.
- ThePhysicist 3y agoThe superconducting wave function can have different symmetry, e.g. most/all low-temperature superconductors have s-wave symmetry (meaning the wave function amplitude is the same in all directions), whereas high-temperature superconductors have d-wave symmetry, which means the wave function amplitude has lobes and drops to zero along the diagonal axes. There are no p-wave superconductors to my knowledge (which I guess is meant when they talk about a 1D superconductor, i.e. the wave function has p-symmetry, but not even sure if that's what they mean). I know the main researcher has brought forward a modified BCS theory that combines insulator-metal transition physics with superconductivity, no idea though what to make of that.
- BurningFrog 3y agoI keep reading that room temperature super-conduction will revolutionize so many fields. Is there a good summary of which fields, and how, somewhere?
- Sevii 3y agoAnything involving electricity or magnetic fields.
- swader999 3y agoWho is going to be the first to sell a rock of this on eBay?
- binary132 3y agoMaybe I’m confused, but how is this different than an iron filing standing up in a magnetic field?
- xsmasher 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37003137 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37003137
- yonatan8070 3y agoWouldn't a regular fleck of magnetic metal do this too? I've seen many examples where metal dust arranges itself into lines along the magnetic field lines like this video is showing I'm absolutely not an expert on any of this so I'm probably missing something
- xsmasher 3y agoA piece of magnetized iron would flip the other way if you turned over the magnet. That's why in the Chinese videos you see them remove the magnet, flip it over, and put it back under the sample. The same "end" of LK99 floats, no matter which pole of the magnet you put toward the sample.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- amluto 3y agoTo me, this doesn’t really look like the little sample is trying to levitate. It looks like it’s trying to rotate, almost like it’s trying to line up with the magnetic field. Magnetic dipoles in a magnetic field experience a torque, and if a little sliver of stuff experiences a torque trying to make it point a particular direction, this could easily overcome the force pulling it toward the magnet. (The torque on a dipole is proportional to the applied field. The force is proportional to the gradient of the field. And the experimenters seem to be using a pretty big flat magnet or a big solenoid, close to the center, which is likely to have a fairly spatially constant field near the surface.) I’m reminded of once holding a bar magnet in a small plasma testbed electromagnet. Small = a few feet long and maybe 2 feet across. (The big one across the room was about the size of a semi truck IIRC.). I naively expected the magnet to be pulled in toward the center. Nope, not so much, but it tried quite hard to twist itself in my hands.
- jiggawatts 3y agoFrom what little I know of solid state chemistry — which is not a lot — I do know that when mixing powders that don’t melt, grinding them with a mortar and pestle is not generally good enough. A ball mill is much better, but still may not be sufficient. An even better approach is to precipitate both reagents out of solution together for nano-scale mixing. I’d like to see this redone with a much finer grind and thorough mixing. Didn’t Nile Red just get a ball mill?