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This 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 th

This 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 ago
100% 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 ago
  Do 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 ago
    As 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.
    - WentFullRetard 3y ago
      [dead]
    - pm215 3y ago
      We're in a hurry in the sense that we don't want to leave investigation of this on the back burner for a few months, but we're not in a hurry in the sense that it's going to make any difference in practice whether a lab group reports today that they've reproduced it, or takes a bit more time to be careful and reports more thoroughly in two weeks time. Any first mover advantages are likely to accrue to the groups who come up with a reliable reproduction method over the next couple of months, not to the ones who send out the first press release and twitter post this week.
      - Torkel 3y ago
        From a scientific perspective, you are probably correct. But think about it from a company/wealth creation perspective. Are you then really sure the correct course of action is to take it chill?
        pm215 3y ago
        My point partly is that as outside observers we can't deduce "is taking it chill" merely because we haven't seen two press releases and three tweetstorms from any particular lab yet. They might be slogging away but not caring to report every step on the path to the outside world.
      - anonylizard 3y ago
        This is why Elon takes dumps on competitor companies. He understands how to market in the social media age.
      - ironborn123 3y ago
        The point is not whether it takes one week or two weeks. But eastern competition is fierce, and the western world is mired in esg and bureaucracy. Something is rotten at a general level, and if its not fixed soon, this trend of lagging behind will also start manifesting where it starts to hurt.
  - blackkettle 3y ago
    My point was not actually about the ultimate result of replication. This guy undoubtably performed an indirect marketing coup for his company by engaging competently on this tangentially related topic and then following through. In my experience though, if he had made any effort to link those two things prior to doing this - e.g. by proposing this as an internally sponsored marketing stunt - it would probably have been rejected.
    - DarmokJalad1701 3y ago
      Eh, I have met the CEO of Varda. They are very much a startup and have that startup energy. One of the founders of Varda has been very vocally supportive of this on Twitter as well.
      - mtillman 3y ago
        Of course, this is all Varda IP as they’re in California and anything a head of research performs that generates IP is owned by the employer.
        jasonjmcghee 3y ago
        Is that a law in California? My understanding of the labor law is that California protects employees, so that if they sign a contract assigning IP to the company (which is almost a sure bet today, but not a law afaik- please correct me otherwise) they are actually protected such that it only applies if: - using company resources, such as time, hardware, or office space, unless otherwise stated. Clearly the case here, but my understanding of this law doesn’t align with how you described it.
huijzer 3y ago
> not a single big academic lab has managed to complete any sort of replication to date! They are still busy getting approvals from three layers of management and one group of lawyers.
- DoctorOetker 3y ago
  Currently out of office, will respond as soon as possible after Impostor Syndrome therapy session is over.
- toxik 3y ago
  Doesn’t ring true for me at all, academia is many things but if your supervisor is onboard, you can generally do anything.
  - huijzer 3y ago
    Okay still stuck in peer review then
    - brainwipe 3y ago
      For journal publish, yes but not for doing the actual work. If you find something interesting, you can go fast.
    - bglazer 3y ago
      Nope you can just put a preprint out. Like it or not, academic labs are probably busy doing things like checking their data and doing multiple replicates varying conditions. You know, science.
      - huijzer 3y ago
        Yes, exactly. And getting approvals from three layers of management. You know, science. I'm pushing back against academia because I think the system is pretty much a mess. Academics believe that we got all the nice technological innovation because of academia. I think it is despite academia. Most money going there is just wasted on writing not what you think is right but what you think will be published, waiting for peer review, and other bureaucracy. The main problem is that academia works with the belief that science needs to be rigorous since bad science might damage their reputation. However, this is how governments think, but not how scientists should think! Would the world be a better place if any new website, company, or YouTuber should be reviewed by peers first? No. Just like science, these are strong link problems [1]. [1] https://www.experimental-history.com/p/science-is-a-strong-link-problem https://www.experimental-history.com/p/science-is-a-strong-l...
waihtis 3y ago
the difference between doers versus academics has never been demonstrated more beautifully
- admissionsguy 3y ago
  The problem is they needed academics to show them what to do.
  - adverbly 3y ago
    That's not entirely accurate. For my understanding, it is a private institution which employed the individuals who made the discovery. Some of whom have alternative backgrounds in academia, and some of whom have it in industry.
  - sashank_1509 3y ago
    The story goes, some professor had a theory in 1999 that was rejected by the mainstream regarding creating superconductors. He passed away and as a dying wish asked his students to continue the research work and develop a theory for why it works. The students unable to get “academic” funding set up a company and got funding from industry to do their research in 2017 and the rest is history. It’s very hard to redeem academia in this example.
    - kome 3y ago
      it's kinda false: https://hackmd.io/@lifthrasiir/lk-99-prehistory https://hackmd.io/@lifthrasiir/lk-99-prehistory people were working on it since soviet times, in academia. And those people influenced other people. Also in academia. It's a slow moving process, but it works.
- dwb 3y ago
  Oh yeah, the commercial "doers" are happy to have a go once academics have slogged away at the hard, risky, expensive, and often thankless trial-and-error before the discovery. Not to do down the people in this particular example, and I'm happy to assume they aren't claiming any credit they shouldn't, but the dichotomy really isn't as you make it out to be.
DoingIsLearning 3y ago
The first pre-print came out on 22 July (if I am not mistaken). Not enough time has passed pure and simple. If I was an academic working on this, I would be following the Sagan Standard and triple checking my results before claiming anything. I think we are all suffering from 24 hour news cycles. The work in China and now Varda is very exciting but they are warp speed developments.
- anonylizard 3y ago
  This is simply what post-peer-review looks like. Instead of a few anonymous peer reviews, you get the entire planet to replicate. Moment you get something meaningful, publish it on arxiv. Quantity, not quality is king. Anomalies are drowned out by large samples. Questionable methods get mass debated in public. Scientists are dependent on public funding, why squander the biggest moment in pop science for literal decades? Now this won't work for 99.99% of research. But top tier research will probably get published on youtube and arxiv in the future...
  - CharlieDigital 3y ago
    Not all meaningful science is this level of groundbreaking for this model to work. Formal peer review is still very much necessary.
  - ironborn123 3y ago
    This kind of public interest and demonstrations is unique only to RTS and few other phenomena - ordinary ppl more or less understand the importance of RTS - a visible and understandable effect (Meissner) can be shown on successful replication - the materials required are easier to understand, but the synthesis procedure is tricky, and purity is important - The skills of chemists comes into play, leading to kind of a Breaking Bad feel
  - svara 3y ago
    > Questionable methods get mass debated in public. By people who don't know what they're talking about. You're seriously underestimating the level of expertise that it takes to professionally assess most research. It wouldn't be unusual for there to be a small handful of people with that ability in the world.
TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
It's really disappointing that no other US lab has engaged with the public in the same manner. Regardless of the outcome, I think seeing things get built and experimented with in mostly real-time is a massive source of inspiration.
- WentFullRetard 3y ago
  [dead]
- iamshs 3y ago
  All I see from US academics on Twitter are debates about this and that. Borderline annoying. This is the first result from mighty US capitalist machine meanwhile 3 Chinese labs have published pre prints and Russian replicated it in her kitchen.
  - anonylizard 3y ago
    This, its utterly shameful. Hot takes here, hot takes there, skepticism here, tell people to calm down there. Yet not a single replication! China has gone through multiple failed and successful replications so far. And the first US replication is from an amateur. If LK-99 works out, expect some congressmen to use this as a bludgeoning tool against the state of US public science.
    - iamshs 3y ago
      They couldn't even source Phosphorus!
    - yorwba 3y ago
      Nanjing University physics professor Wen Haihu said in an interview with The Paper that the news was extremely likely to be false and they only assigned a student to it because many groups internationally were working on replications https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_24024641 https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_24024641 "A researcher from the Institute of Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) declined to comment on LK-99, telling the Post that even taking the issue seriously would be ridiculous." https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3229778/could-chinese-teams-viral-lk-99-video-offer-clue-superconductor-holy-grail-physicists https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3229778/coul... (It's unclear to me whether this was before or after the HUST team published their video.) I don't think it's so much "China good at science, everyone else shamefully bad," but that some institutions (including in China) are more risk-averse, because labs who're already working on something they expect to succeed are less likely to benefit from dropping it to try something unproven.
sanxiyn 3y ago
World first replication was done by Iris Alexandra using her own accelerated process and there is no way Varda Space could have beaten her.
- iamshs 3y ago
  Her rock actually floats. Did it all in the kitchen too. She should rightly be credited as first one.
  - sanxiyn 3y ago
    More than that, she calculated how high it will float, and how height will depend on temperature, before starting the experiment, and confirmed all her predictions.
    - epups 3y ago
      Wow, that's hugely impressive! Where can I find more info about this? Is it all on twitter?
      - terrut 3y ago
        She has been alluding to old Soviet scientists having a theoretical foundation for the type of conductivity shown. She posted a link to this comment that explains some of the background: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36996337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36996337 Check out her twitter for some real fun rants @iris_IGB
    - ThisIsMyAltFace 3y ago
      Where did she do this? I haven't found anything in her twitter feed
  - mtillman 3y ago
    They use a magnet for movement. “When the magnet is placed parallel and flat to the bottom of the beaker, the sample stands at a 90deg angle to the field.”
littlestymaar 3y ago
You forgot the Russian twitter biologist.
devwastaken 3y ago
Private R&D has always towered above academics. People who can compete create significant innovations. People who can't compete stay as professors doing research because it's the easiest and most convenient pathway.
- alsaaro 3y ago
  Maybe. A better explanation for the slowness of the national laboratories is they their word will be taken more definitively on this issue than anyone else. They are the ones with reputations and have to answer to critics in the private sector, amateur sector, and in Congress. I think their slowness is an encouraging sign, it means LK99 isn't easily debunked.
ciniclinic 3y ago
[dead]
stephenitis 3y ago
I was impressed by this being an extra time endeavor. It does show genuine scientific curiousity from Andrew and his team(they might just be along for the ride). If more company bonding events could be live streamed/tweeted experimental replication attempts of novel compounds instead of happy hours. The world would be a stranger place.
zamalek 3y ago
There is a large degree of luck involved. The original team, who have been working on this for significant time, have only attained a 1/10 success rate (one of the better samples came from a test tube being dropped on the floor part-way through annealing). So it's part talent, part luck.
carabiner 3y ago
These are completely different activities... Doing some week long materials experiment has almost no relevance to production aerospace engineering with regulatory burdens and multi-year test schedules. I might as well say that any mathematician who can publish a paper quickly about boundary functions can also be a very effective SWE at Amazon working on cloud.
lyapunova 3y ago
The word "bullish" and fundamental science should stay as far away from each other as possible.

blackkettle 3y ago

100% 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 ago
Do 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 ago
  As 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.
  - WentFullRetard 3y ago
    [dead]
  - pm215 3y ago
    We're in a hurry in the sense that we don't want to leave investigation of this on the back burner for a few months, but we're not in a hurry in the sense that it's going to make any difference in practice whether a lab group reports today that they've reproduced it, or takes a bit more time to be careful and reports more thoroughly in two weeks time. Any first mover advantages are likely to accrue to the groups who come up with a reliable reproduction method over the next couple of months, not to the ones who send out the first press release and twitter post this week.
    - Torkel 3y ago
      From a scientific perspective, you are probably correct. But think about it from a company/wealth creation perspective. Are you then really sure the correct course of action is to take it chill?
      - pm215 3y ago
        My point partly is that as outside observers we can't deduce "is taking it chill" merely because we haven't seen two press releases and three tweetstorms from any particular lab yet. They might be slogging away but not caring to report every step on the path to the outside world.
    - anonylizard 3y ago
      This is why Elon takes dumps on competitor companies. He understands how to market in the social media age.
    - ironborn123 3y ago
      The point is not whether it takes one week or two weeks. But eastern competition is fierce, and the western world is mired in esg and bureaucracy. Something is rotten at a general level, and if its not fixed soon, this trend of lagging behind will also start manifesting where it starts to hurt.
- blackkettle 3y ago
  My point was not actually about the ultimate result of replication. This guy undoubtably performed an indirect marketing coup for his company by engaging competently on this tangentially related topic and then following through. In my experience though, if he had made any effort to link those two things prior to doing this - e.g. by proposing this as an internally sponsored marketing stunt - it would probably have been rejected.
  - DarmokJalad1701 3y ago
    Eh, I have met the CEO of Varda. They are very much a startup and have that startup energy. One of the founders of Varda has been very vocally supportive of this on Twitter as well.
    - mtillman 3y ago
      Of course, this is all Varda IP as they’re in California and anything a head of research performs that generates IP is owned by the employer.
      - jasonjmcghee 3y ago
        Is that a law in California? My understanding of the labor law is that California protects employees, so that if they sign a contract assigning IP to the company (which is almost a sure bet today, but not a law afaik- please correct me otherwise) they are actually protected such that it only applies if: - using company resources, such as time, hardware, or office space, unless otherwise stated. Clearly the case here, but my understanding of this law doesn’t align with how you described it.

huijzer 3y ago

> not a single big academic lab has managed to complete any sort of replication to date! They are still busy getting approvals from three layers of management and one group of lawyers.

DoctorOetker 3y ago
Currently out of office, will respond as soon as possible after Impostor Syndrome therapy session is over.
toxik 3y ago
Doesn’t ring true for me at all, academia is many things but if your supervisor is onboard, you can generally do anything.
- huijzer 3y ago
  Okay still stuck in peer review then
  - brainwipe 3y ago
    For journal publish, yes but not for doing the actual work. If you find something interesting, you can go fast.
  - bglazer 3y ago
    Nope you can just put a preprint out. Like it or not, academic labs are probably busy doing things like checking their data and doing multiple replicates varying conditions. You know, science.
    - huijzer 3y ago
      Yes, exactly. And getting approvals from three layers of management. You know, science. I'm pushing back against academia because I think the system is pretty much a mess. Academics believe that we got all the nice technological innovation because of academia. I think it is despite academia. Most money going there is just wasted on writing not what you think is right but what you think will be published, waiting for peer review, and other bureaucracy. The main problem is that academia works with the belief that science needs to be rigorous since bad science might damage their reputation. However, this is how governments think, but not how scientists should think! Would the world be a better place if any new website, company, or YouTuber should be reviewed by peers first? No. Just like science, these are strong link problems [1]. [1] https://www.experimental-history.com/p/science-is-a-strong-link-problem https://www.experimental-history.com/p/science-is-a-strong-l...

waihtis 3y ago

the difference between doers versus academics has never been demonstrated more beautifully

admissionsguy 3y ago
The problem is they needed academics to show them what to do.
- adverbly 3y ago
  That's not entirely accurate. For my understanding, it is a private institution which employed the individuals who made the discovery. Some of whom have alternative backgrounds in academia, and some of whom have it in industry.
- sashank_1509 3y ago
  The story goes, some professor had a theory in 1999 that was rejected by the mainstream regarding creating superconductors. He passed away and as a dying wish asked his students to continue the research work and develop a theory for why it works. The students unable to get “academic” funding set up a company and got funding from industry to do their research in 2017 and the rest is history. It’s very hard to redeem academia in this example.
  - kome 3y ago
    it's kinda false: https://hackmd.io/@lifthrasiir/lk-99-prehistory https://hackmd.io/@lifthrasiir/lk-99-prehistory people were working on it since soviet times, in academia. And those people influenced other people. Also in academia. It's a slow moving process, but it works.
dwb 3y ago
Oh yeah, the commercial "doers" are happy to have a go once academics have slogged away at the hard, risky, expensive, and often thankless trial-and-error before the discovery. Not to do down the people in this particular example, and I'm happy to assume they aren't claiming any credit they shouldn't, but the dichotomy really isn't as you make it out to be.

DoingIsLearning 3y ago

The first pre-print came out on 22 July (if I am not mistaken). Not enough time has passed pure and simple. If I was an academic working on this, I would be following the Sagan Standard and triple checking my results before claiming anything. I think we are all suffering from 24 hour news cycles. The work in China and now Varda is very exciting but they are warp speed developments.

anonylizard 3y ago
This is simply what post-peer-review looks like. Instead of a few anonymous peer reviews, you get the entire planet to replicate. Moment you get something meaningful, publish it on arxiv. Quantity, not quality is king. Anomalies are drowned out by large samples. Questionable methods get mass debated in public. Scientists are dependent on public funding, why squander the biggest moment in pop science for literal decades? Now this won't work for 99.99% of research. But top tier research will probably get published on youtube and arxiv in the future...
- CharlieDigital 3y ago
  Not all meaningful science is this level of groundbreaking for this model to work. Formal peer review is still very much necessary.
- ironborn123 3y ago
  This kind of public interest and demonstrations is unique only to RTS and few other phenomena - ordinary ppl more or less understand the importance of RTS - a visible and understandable effect (Meissner) can be shown on successful replication - the materials required are easier to understand, but the synthesis procedure is tricky, and purity is important - The skills of chemists comes into play, leading to kind of a Breaking Bad feel
- svara 3y ago
  > Questionable methods get mass debated in public. By people who don't know what they're talking about. You're seriously underestimating the level of expertise that it takes to professionally assess most research. It wouldn't be unusual for there to be a small handful of people with that ability in the world.

TheAceOfHearts 3y ago

It's really disappointing that no other US lab has engaged with the public in the same manner. Regardless of the outcome, I think seeing things get built and experimented with in mostly real-time is a massive source of inspiration.

WentFullRetard 3y ago
[dead]
iamshs 3y ago
All I see from US academics on Twitter are debates about this and that. Borderline annoying. This is the first result from mighty US capitalist machine meanwhile 3 Chinese labs have published pre prints and Russian replicated it in her kitchen.
- anonylizard 3y ago
  This, its utterly shameful. Hot takes here, hot takes there, skepticism here, tell people to calm down there. Yet not a single replication! China has gone through multiple failed and successful replications so far. And the first US replication is from an amateur. If LK-99 works out, expect some congressmen to use this as a bludgeoning tool against the state of US public science.
  - iamshs 3y ago
    They couldn't even source Phosphorus!
  - yorwba 3y ago
    Nanjing University physics professor Wen Haihu said in an interview with The Paper that the news was extremely likely to be false and they only assigned a student to it because many groups internationally were working on replications https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_24024641 https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_24024641 "A researcher from the Institute of Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) declined to comment on LK-99, telling the Post that even taking the issue seriously would be ridiculous." https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3229778/could-chinese-teams-viral-lk-99-video-offer-clue-superconductor-holy-grail-physicists https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3229778/coul... (It's unclear to me whether this was before or after the HUST team published their video.) I don't think it's so much "China good at science, everyone else shamefully bad," but that some institutions (including in China) are more risk-averse, because labs who're already working on something they expect to succeed are less likely to benefit from dropping it to try something unproven.

sanxiyn 3y ago

World first replication was done by Iris Alexandra using her own accelerated process and there is no way Varda Space could have beaten her.

iamshs 3y ago
Her rock actually floats. Did it all in the kitchen too. She should rightly be credited as first one.
- sanxiyn 3y ago
  More than that, she calculated how high it will float, and how height will depend on temperature, before starting the experiment, and confirmed all her predictions.
  - epups 3y ago
    Wow, that's hugely impressive! Where can I find more info about this? Is it all on twitter?
    - terrut 3y ago
      She has been alluding to old Soviet scientists having a theoretical foundation for the type of conductivity shown. She posted a link to this comment that explains some of the background: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36996337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36996337 Check out her twitter for some real fun rants @iris_IGB
  - ThisIsMyAltFace 3y ago
    Where did she do this? I haven't found anything in her twitter feed
- mtillman 3y ago
  They use a magnet for movement. “When the magnet is placed parallel and flat to the bottom of the beaker, the sample stands at a 90deg angle to the field.”

littlestymaar 3y ago

You forgot the Russian twitter biologist.

devwastaken 3y ago

Private R&D has always towered above academics. People who can compete create significant innovations. People who can't compete stay as professors doing research because it's the easiest and most convenient pathway.

alsaaro 3y ago
Maybe. A better explanation for the slowness of the national laboratories is they their word will be taken more definitively on this issue than anyone else. They are the ones with reputations and have to answer to critics in the private sector, amateur sector, and in Congress. I think their slowness is an encouraging sign, it means LK99 isn't easily debunked.

ciniclinic 3y ago

[dead]

stephenitis 3y ago

I was impressed by this being an extra time endeavor. It does show genuine scientific curiousity from Andrew and his team(they might just be along for the ride). If more company bonding events could be live streamed/tweeted experimental replication attempts of novel compounds instead of happy hours. The world would be a stranger place.

zamalek 3y ago

There is a large degree of luck involved. The original team, who have been working on this for significant time, have only attained a 1/10 success rate (one of the better samples came from a test tube being dropped on the floor part-way through annealing). So it's part talent, part luck.

carabiner 3y ago

These are completely different activities... Doing some week long materials experiment has almost no relevance to production aerospace engineering with regulatory burdens and multi-year test schedules. I might as well say that any mathematician who can publish a paper quickly about boundary functions can also be a very effective SWE at Amazon working on cloud.

lyapunova 3y ago

The word "bullish" and fundamental science should stay as far away from each other as possible.