19 ms·
LK-99 is an online sensation but replication efforts fall short
- fnord77 3y agoI'm old enough to remember Fleischmann–Pons. This seems like deja-vu
- noahlt 3y ago> many materials — including graphene, frogs and pliers — can exhibit similar magnetic behaviour. I'm sorry, FROGS!? I looked this up and it's very fun: https://www.ru.nl/hfml/research/levitation-explained/diamagnetic-levitation/ https://www.ru.nl/hfml/research/levitation-explained/diamagn...
- michael_nielsen 3y agoThere's a great video of a frog (and several other items) floating in a strong magnetic field, from 1997: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlJsVqc0ywM&ab_channel=APArchive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlJsVqc0ywM&ab_channel=APArc... Lots of objects are diamagnetic, including human beings, and can potentially be made to float in a strong magnetic field.
- adw 3y agoYes, resulting in Andre Geim (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andre_Geim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andre_Geim) having the best possible scientific resume: - the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize for frog levitation: - the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on graphene.
- h2odragon 3y ago"There were no worlds left to conquer" After that, where do you go? Write poetry? Go start a turkey farm?
- rahkiin 3y agoRome was not build in a day. Let’s not expect scientists to do so after a draft publication.
- jonny_eh 3y agoMakes sense, on the other hand, the recipe is apparently fairly simple, so why would it be so hard to replicate?
- rsfern 3y agoThe steps are simple, but it seems to be quite finicky and there are almost sure to be sensitive to important factors that we don’t have clarity on yet. If it turns out to be definitively shown to be real
- ssijak 3y agoso simple that original authors fail 9 out of 10 times it seems
- tnecniv 3y agoSimple is not synonymous with easy.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoThe unit cell apparently has: 1 Copper atom 25 oxygen atoms 6 Phosphorous atoms 9 lead atoms There are many ways to arrange these constituents. It’s hard to create the environment where they want to go exactly where you hope over a large volume. Sometimes this level of precision requires atomic control of layer growth and extreme temperature management. That’s why the methods list days between steps to get the atoms diffusing, and that’s for a few micrograms of material.
- jonny_eh 3y agoI guess whoever figures out a reliable process for scaling up production gets a second nobel prize?
- v3ss0n 3y agoNature is an online sensational clickbait magazine for a decade
- SomeRndName11 3y agoNature is not the same magazine it used to be. After the "Proximal Origins" paper especially.
- onychomys 3y agoThat wasn't published in Nature, but in Nature Medicine, a separate journal.
- SomeRndName11 3y agoIs it really an important distinction? They are owned and run by the same people - Springer Nature.
- lordnacho 3y agoI don't know what to think. Wasn't there an article earlier today showing the video of the speck of LK-99 standing up in the tube? Also, why does the chunk in the image levitate in a stable manner? As in, why doesn't it slide off to one side, like it would if you just tried to balance two north ends of a magnet on each other?
- serf 3y ago>Also, why does the chunk in the image levitate in a stable manner? I don't know what this new thing is, but isn't 'locking'/'pinning' a known characteristic of superconductors otherwise? that's the whole point of the 'train track' demo they do with cold superconductors for college kids.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jonny_eh 3y agoMeissner effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meissner_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meissner_effect
- lordnacho 3y agoYes but why does expelling the magnetic field make it hover stably instead of just falling out of the side of the field it's in?
- robinduckett 3y agoMy laymen’s interpretation is that superconductors perfectly expel the magnetic field without distorting the field and so can sit in a position that is effectively locked and held in position. I could be completely wrong however.
- bhattid 3y agoThere's a noticeable distortion of the magnetic field near the superconductor. It's this distortion that keeps the superconductor stable - it's caused currents that appear on the surface which match and cancel* the surrounding field. *some of the magnetic field penetrates onto the surface of the superconductor, but internally, there's 0 magnetic field within the superconductor.
- bbatsell 3y agoThere were people complaining in earlier threads that bigger publications haven't been reporting on LK-99 — this article is a perfect distillation of why. It is already significantly outdated, missing out on multiple interesting findings that were posted yesterday which would almost certainly have resulted in a much different piece had they been available when it was reported out and sources asked for comment.
- Lewton 3y agoI severely doubt the nature article would look much different if written today
- Verdex 3y agoI'm absolutely ready to be disappointed by LK-99. Some sort of fraud, some sort of experimental error, something interesting that's still not a real superconductor, a real superconductor but a quirk of the material means that it'll never scale past being a parlor trick, whatever. However, Nature weighing in that way feels premature to me. It's been what ... 2 weeks? If that? Somehow it just feels that something as momentous as a plausible room temperature superconductor should take a bit more time to rule out as a fake. Unless there's some pretty blatant fraud involved where they're literally levitating it with a string. Nature feels like the sort of publication where their job is to have the final say after all of the dust has settled. Participating in hot takes with a negative conclusion just feels like they're hedging their bets. If it turns out to be false then they can say that they were right at the beginning. If it turns out to be true, then everyone will be so excited that they'll forget about anything nature came out with. Meanwhile, wikipedia feels like it has pretty objective reporting on things that are actually happening more or less as they're happening. It just doesn't have a narrative to go along with it.
- whycome 3y agoThe simulation is just testing the release. They haven't decided whether or not to make it real yet. There's a lot of bureaucracy involved. Even doing this initial test caused a lot of debate as it's deemed too early. If it launches, it requires a lot of updates on the backend to expand.
- 2bitencryption 3y agoWhat's even more interesting than the mysteries properties of LK-99 is the kind of response it's brought out. You even see it right here in HN. Have you ever seen a Youtube video about someone reviewing a Tesla or comparing it to another car? The comments are always full of hostile and vitriolic remarks by people who are personally offended if the video suggests the cup holders on a Model 3 are less than perfection. For some reason, Tesla is surrounded by a cult of personality where it's not just a car, it's a lifestyle. And bizarrely, something similar is happening with this funny floating rocks. Here we are, on HN, and people in this very thread are calling Nature (Nature!) an "online sensational clickbait magazine" because they want to believe the hype that the rock has properties that they only learned about from Wikipedia a few days prior (and only understood 5% of it, at that) Is there reason to be excited? Hell yeah. Are all the different replication attempts super fascinating? Hell yeah. Could it be the real deal? It could! But this has become some weird spectator sport, where you're either a believer or a skeptic, and if you're on a different side than I am then screw you, even if you are Nature.
- xvector 3y ago[flagged]
- mycologos 3y agoI understand the sentiment, but I really want HN to stay as free as possible of this low-effort half-conscious meme way of speaking.
- zero_shift 3y ago"The problem with pretending to be an idiot on the internet is that eventually you attract genuine idiots, who think themselves in good company"
- namuol 3y agoThere’s a real kernel of truth to what you’re saying but don’t you think calling something a “cult” is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy? You’re turning this into an “us vs them” thing when it never should have been one, by your own assessment. There’s no better way to politicize something than to group people based on some reductive binary belief and generalize about said group.
- tromp 3y ago> that a compound of copper, lead, phosphorus and oxygen, dubbed LK-99, is a superconductor at ambient pressure and temperatures above 127 °C (400 Kelvin). No; it's claimed to superconduct at temperatures up to 127 °C. They didn't perform tests above 127 °C.
- mbauman 3y ago> They didn't perform tests above that temperature. Right, exactly, they're claiming that Tc is above 127°C. The claim is that it's a superconductor at (some) temperatures even higher than what was tested. It's also still a superconductor at temperatures below.
- croes 3y agoI was puzzled by that sentence. I wouldn't call 127°C room temperature.
- philwelch 3y agoAll of the known, confirmed superconductors only work at extreme cryogenic temperatures.
- moh_maya 3y agoIts a bit surprising to see a journal like nature effectively whine about replication efforts falling short in what’s likely a very temperamental, context / environment influenced synthesis process of a new composition. Its not going to work immediately. Even if it is a real breakthrough, material synthesis of a new material in any lab, and doing so reproducibly, is tricky enough that I am absolutely not going to infer / conclude from, or pass any comment on any replication efforts this early into the process. Its going to be an iterative process - which means one has to start somewhere. Some of the quoted folks come across (to me) as just peevish. Derek Lowe [0] has a far more balanced take on it, IMO. His article was discussed on HN a few days ago [1]. [0] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/room-temperature-superconductor-new-developments https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/room-temperature-s... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36957678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36957678
- photonerd 3y agoNatures op-ed articles are very low quality pop-sci trash, unfortunately. It’s made all the more galling because their long form in-depth content is still great. Guess it’s the price they pay to remain solvent in the clickbait age. Really all anyone—Nature included—can say at this point is there’s something interesting going on. It may or may not be a super-conductor, but it’s certainly interesting.
- inopinatus 3y agoyet their clickbait game is weak. you still have to bait the click! corrected headline: They Heated Powdered Lanarkite And Copper Phosphide Crystals In A Vacuum-Sealed Tube At 1200K For 5‒20 Hours And You Won't Believe What Happened Next
- deepspace 3y agoFTA: "Evan Zalys-Geller, a condensed matter physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, says that the resistance measurement wasn’t sensitive enough to distinguish between a zero resistance superconductor or a low-resistance metal like copper." I have little knowledge of the field, but as an EE, I would have thought that making sure that you are actually able to measure the effect you are trying to prove would be step zero in an experimental setup, no?
- distortionfield 3y agoFrom what in understood, the sharp drop in resistivity was consistent enough to mark as the change to superconduction
- dekhn 3y agoPeople overestimate their ability to run high quality scientific experiments. I think a perfect example was the claim of faster than light neutrinos (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_anomaly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_ano...). it was experimental error. CERN sent a team of smart EE/physics folks to debug it quickly. This is consistent with my estimate that 90% of all physics labs aren't capable of building, running, and interpreting state-of-the-art scientific measurement and discovery.
- Janicc 3y agoDidn't the indian team have a big chunky rock of LK-99? Considering that the majority of researchers can at most create a tiny grain of it where there's still parts of it that aren't levitating, the conclusion to me is that their findings are largely useless.
- meindnoch 3y agoNature seems pretty salty about this whole thing circumventing prestigious journals like theirs :D
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- b800h 3y agoThis is it. This episode is the beginning of science moving away from journals altogether.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y agoThis is the most fun hot take. I still think it won't be replicated, but on the off chance we've got the real deal on our hands, science publication will have changed forever and this article will have aged very poorly.
- fullspectrumdev 3y agoNature supposedly rejected the paper, according to some accounts, which makes that doubly funny.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- golol 3y agoReads like a T-online article lol
- 1970-01-01 3y agoThe gestalt of LK-99 is ironic. It is both a sensation and (hopefully) an almost magical rock, and still "None of the studies provide direct evidence for any superconductivity in the material."
- dragonwriter 3y agoLK-99, as a social phenomenon, is looking a lot like cold fusion with the added energy of social media.
- golol 3y agoPeople are just having fun entertaining the very real possible and "believing". What's wrong with that? It is more interesting to just go ahead and say that they are 100% sure LK-99 is real whent here are no stakes. Having differentiated and uncertain opinions all the time gets boring.
- theogravity 3y agoI'm really excited by the hype around it because it's a great demo of how science works in practice in a semi "real-time" fashion. Whenever I share news on it, I always preface that it's still in the replication / validation phases by multiple labs. I don't I've read of anyone so far stating that this is 100% legit. It's just nice to see the scientific process get carried out - here's something we discovered, and now labs are working to reproduce the result to see if it's an actual thing or not. From my understanding, this stuff generally takes years to validate, but we're getting "immediate" glimpses here and there which makes it really exciting. I get that the paper hasn't gone through peer review yet, but there's something interesting about the findings that are prompting labs to immediately try to replicate it.
- knbrlo 3y agoWhen publications put out things like this it reminds me of why I can't trust them. They're writing this article for clicks and attention and to feed that side of society that constantly pulls us down about what's not possible while the publication makes money from taking the other side of a issue. It's plain corruption.
- KingLancelot 3y ago[dead]
- psychphysic 3y agoMainstream science: we need to get the public excited about science. Also mainstream science: no stop talking about us!! What's the bfd? This isn't IV bleach for COVID... So what if tiktokers are suddenly talking about the quirks of BCS? Nature is just bitter imo because they passed on an article that the public was fascinated by because as the authors put it "trauma". They are reacting just like all the publishers who passed on JK Rowling because no one wants to read a fantasy book a girl wrote. This is like YouTube telling people not to watch Cobra Kai on Netflix because they passed on it.
- Eji1700 3y agoIt's because people aren't excited about the science. They're excited about the speculation, the gossip, and the potential result. That is literally antithetical to the entire process of proper science, and the exact kind of behavior/mentality that most scientists hate due to how it warps things like funding. Science is the process. It's taking your time, proving your work, and most importantly, replicating your results.
- fragmede 3y agoIs the gossip about LG's involvement and the leaked-ness of the paper and the death bed dying breath parts really taking center stage here? I've come across that stuff but the focus of the excitement really seems to be on "will it replicate".
- mcpackieh 3y agoYou don't get to have public interest in science without public interest in science drama and gossip. Humans being what they are, it's unreasonable for you to expect otherwise. There is not a single topic for which the public has an interest in the thing but no interest in the gossip and drama surrounding that thing.
- moolcool 3y ago> It's because people aren't excited about the science. They're excited about the speculation, the gossip, and the potential result I think you could argue that the initial spark of intuition-- the thing that makes you go "huh. Let me look into this more" before gathering evidence and peer review, is one of the most important steps of "the science"
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- agnosticmantis 3y ago> … despite the fact that many materials — including graphene, frogs and pliers — can exhibit similar magnetic behaviour. This is a dishonest argument. Frogs and pliers don’t levitate on a typical magnet in ambient conditions, so you can’t say the behavior is ‘similar’ just because ‘everything levitates in a strong enough magnetic field’. If your measuring stick can’t distinguish these two significantly different behaviors, it’s a useless measuring stick. Also, more generally, the logic of science is statistics, not Boolean logic. We all know that [(p —> q) and q] doesn’t logically imply p, but still observing q makes p more likely when thinking probabilistically. Overall I found the article to be very dismissive of weak evidence and also shortsighted when considering the potential applications that we can’t think of right now (even if those are not the typical hoped-for applications like efficient power transmission).
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y agoThe logic of science is logic. Statistics is used to provide confidence intervals.
- spxtr 3y agoDo you disagree with ET Jaynes then?
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y agoYou'll have to be more specific: what are you asking me whether I disagree with?
- TehCorwiz 3y agoI'm pretty sure the parent comment just dunked on you by demonstrating a deep well-read understanding of the underpinnings of both logic and statistics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Thompson_Jaynes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Thompson_Jaynes "Jaynes strongly promoted the interpretation of probability theory as an extension of logic. "
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- antirez 3y agoThis looks like a very odd statement: "There’s no guarantee a material that is a room-temperature superconductor would be of practical use, Vishik says."
- WitCanStain 3y agoCould be extremely expensive or impractical to produce at scale, could be extremely brittle, etc.
- mbauman 3y agoI don't think it's too hard to imagine that other characteristics of the material could indeed get in the way of practical applications — perhaps brittle-ness or difficulty of manufacture or challenges in making it in the appropriate forms or ...
- bunnie 3y agoPerhaps a charitable interpretation of that statement is "there are years of work to go from a proof of concept to a usable product". Even if LK-99 is some kind of a superconductor, there are a whole host of daunting technical issues that will need to be solved. For example: how do we get the yield up? How to turn it into a wire? If the material is not ductile, how to form the wire into a useful shape? How to reliably couple to the wire? How does the material age over time and and humidity? How to deposit and pattern it as a thin film? We have a lot of arrows in our quiver to shoot at these problems -- I would be optimistic that the promising applications of a room temperature superconductor would attract plenty of investment and talent. On the other hand, I imagine it may take years or even decades before we have answers to these hard questions. As the quote says, "there's no guarantee" that we can solve them, because right now we know so little about the properties of the material at this time. Of course, that is no reason to throw in the towel right now!
- moultano 3y agoWhy does the tone of this sound just like the January 2020 articles saying "weird nerds on twitter freaked out about viruses in china when they should be worried about the flu?"
- distortionfield 3y agoYeah, this article has all the smacking of major news players with egg on their face. Like that front page of a magazine with Jeff Bezos on it mocking him for starting AWS.
- none_to_remain 3y agoThe same "no evidence" line was used about airborne COVID-19 transmission the whole time that evidence mounted it was airborne.
- woah 3y ago"VCs are washing their hands"
- RyanAdamas 3y agoWhy does it sound like "trust the science" popular authoritarianism? Covid was a scam. You were duped. That's the fact.
- stainablesteel 3y agothis seems click-baity but i'm glad about that, because it means communication on other platforms are more effective at sharing results than an outdated publishing system that drains people of their livelihood
- consumer451 3y agoSpeaking of which, here is a new video with Varda - some US engineers who just replicated a bit. Live stream ended 5 minutes ago, not sure how long the video will stay up: LK-99 with Varda – This Week in Startups [live video] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37002618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37002618 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1o88seNB-w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1o88seNB-w
- akasakahakada 3y agoThis article is like what a high school student would write for their essay: quote some dudes' speech without actually explaining anything and call it a day. Those speeches are my proofs because they say so. Room temperature superconductor is useless because someboby said that on twitter! Seriously every argument in this article is flawed.
- areoform 3y ago> LK-99’s purported superconductivity drew immediate scrutiny from scientists. “My first impression was ‘no.’” says Inna Vishik, a condensed matter experimentalist at the University of California, Davis. “These ‘Unidentified Superconducting Objects’, as they’re sometimes called, reliably show up on the arXiv. There’s a new one every year or so.” Advances in superconductivity are often touted for their potential practical impact on technologies such as computer chips and maglev trains, but Vishik points out that such excitement might be misplaced. Historically, progress in superconductivity has had tremendous benefits for basic science, but little in the way of everyday applications. There’s no guarantee a material that is a room-temperature superconductor would be of practical use, Vishik says. As someone who loves Nature, I would like to commit a dash of heresy. A manufacturable, room temperature superconductor with a low current density wouldn't lead to maglevs, but it would revolutionize the world. It would be one of the starkest turning points in human history. Most of the heat generated by a CPU is generated shuttling electrons back and forth. A superconductor instantly changes the calculus and, depending on whom you ask, makes processors 500x more efficient. And that's just the start. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_computing The before/after is so stark that it's really hard to game out all of the consequences, but it's quite obvious that it instantly changes the cost of running these massive AI models as well as the cost of doing highly detailed FEM simulations. Even if some of the properties are replicated, the strangeness of this material puts us on track to that world. It's incredible what it could be. I'm extremely excited!
- shkkmo 3y ago> it's quite obvious that it instantly changes the cost of running these massive AI models as well as the cost of doing highly detailed FEM simulations. This seems pretty overstated. Developing the tooling to build chips takes years, there is good reason to think that even if this material does revolutionize chip efficiencies, it will be years at least before we start producing those chips and probably years more before that production scales to fully supplant the existing production infrastructure.
- mercutio2 3y agoMost of the heat generated in a CPU is voltage turning on and off, not current flowing continuously. Superconductors do not have zero inductance.
- merman 3y ago"The first attempts to replicate LK-99, reported in the past days, have not improved the material’s prospects. " This to me is sort of a summary of Nature's position. Reframing- there is no reason to change from the default position of skepticism - that the material is uninteresting. If you ignore the viral hype, and only pay attention to the replication attempts: They have been rushed. They lack rigor. Still, the summation of their findings is reason to think there is something very interesting going on with this material. I do see some manic hysteria. I understand the urge to push back on that. It's smart to advise people to maintain skepticism. But if you do not think that the replication attempts are an indication that there is something there, I think it's because you have some sort of error in reasoning.
- Lewton 3y agoI do not think that the argument is that the material is -uninteresting-, there's just plenty of reasons to believe it might not be a superconductor
- NotYourLawyer 3y agoThe original team has been working on it for 24 years (that’s what the 99 in the name refers to). Everyone who expected a clean replication in a week was deluding themselves.
- ummonk 3y agoThis seems like a rather bad faith article. While there are certainly people overhyping LK-99 (and prediction markets seem to have a higher chance of success than one would expect), the general sentiment about the material I find online is that it's probably the cold fusion of our time. The hype is because of the potential groundbreaking results, and the fact that the material is unusual even if, as is most likely, it turns out not to be a room temperature superconductor. As for the videos, are the people posting these joke videos trying to imply that the videos we're seeing of partial levitation (including one put out by an actual Chinese lab) are fake? One can point out that the videos are likely merely evidence of really good diamagnetism without pretending they're hoaxes.
- fullstackchris 3y agohaha, now even nature has to have a commentary. a bit hypocritical title eh?
- oivey 3y agoThis Nature article claimed that two of the Chinese labs attempting replication provided XRD measurements that didn’t at all match what the Korean lab had. I’m not a pro in this field, but XRD gives you insight into the crystalline structure of materials. That suggests that whatever they made might not even be LK-99. I suppose the difference could be other contamination? Is my understanding right? If so, slightly shocking that these replication attempts are garnering so much visibility.
- TaylorAlexander 3y agoDid anyone notice the description for the image at the top of the article? My understanding is that this description is nonsense, but I am an amateur and would love some clarification: “A superconducting magnet is cooled by liquid nitrogen, producing a strong magnetic field that causes the magnet to levitate.” Like superconductors don’t float because they’re a “strong magnet” they float because they reject all magnetic fields beyond the London depth and this somehow leads to levitation. Right??
- rizzaxc 3y agoSC requires a critical temperature, so the "cooling" part leading to the "producing" part is correct
- TaylorAlexander 3y agoIs the producing part correct? My understanding is that once cooled they reject magnetic fields, not produce them. According to wikipedia: "The Meissner effect (or Meißner–Ochsenfeld effect) is the expulsion of a magnetic field from a superconductor during its transition to the superconducting state when it is cooled below the critical temperature. This expulsion will repel a nearby magnet." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meissner_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meissner_effect
- emtel 3y agoThere seems to be a group of people who have appointed themselves the science police. If you are excited about a tantalizing phenomenon that has yet to withstand expert scrutiny, you can expect to hear from them! I do not understand this mentality. There is no conflict between these two statements: - LK99 cannot be considered a proven superconductor until there have been multiple replications that withstand expert scrutiny. - The evidence that is freely available on twitter and elsewhere right now is worth getting excited about. Look, this isn't like Covid, where at least there is some public interest served by a skeptical approach to treatments. At least for the next six months or so, LK99 is an almost purely scientific topic with almost no wider implications. But people love to clutch their pearls - I have read twitter commentators claiming they are concerned that amateur replicators may get lead poisoning! Lead, while dangerous, is not polonium or something - there are plenty of reasons people choose to tolerate some exposure (recreational shooting, civil aviation, fishing...), all of which I would consider less compelling that what may be the biggest scientific breakthrough in decades. I do not think people are truly concerned about lead exposure, I think they want people to "stay in their lanes". An attitude that I find detestable. The fact that such a (possible) enormous breakthrough is within the reach of chemistry amateurs is wonderful! Everybody who has the equipment, knowledge, and inclination to attempt a replication should do so, and if you do, I hope you will post videos online so I can cheer you on.
- SubiculumCode 3y agoThe only downside is disappointment after great excitement, and the animosity it can create towards the field's viability.
- emtel 3y agoI think we are witnessing that animosity right now, and if I understand correctly, it seems to be the result of (allegedly) fraudulent claims that people got excited about, e.g. Ranga Dias. But I have seen absolutely no evidence that anybody is acting in bad faith here, and so I see no reason to treat this the way we ought to treat fraud.
- deleted 3y ago
- m3kw9 3y agoReplication seem pretty successful to me, 3-4 labs has made the same effect. Nature sound salty they are not really involved in anyway now that results are displayed on social media rather than through journals
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- option 3y agosilly question - if superconducting materials enable huge advances and apparently many are known to exist at extremely low temperatures, are they actually used in space? Like on satellites? If no - why?
- hcks 3y agoYou don’t understand. Real science happens on Twitter. Real scientists are the startup founders who make grandiloquent threads about Arxiv pre-publications. Academia doesn’t work at all. Actuallly, academia’s scientists are just jaded. We’re so much smarter than them. You need to root for LK99 to be real so we can live in the post-scarcity techno magic utopia. If you spread FUD the rock wont levitate. Extraordinary claims only require trivial amount of suggestive evidence. Did you hear an anon cat girl already made a Gundam robot in her kitchen out of the stuff? Maybe if you squint hard enough and try 999 times it’ll work the 1000th. Epistemic standards don’t matter. What matters is to be excited and enthusiastic. That’s what science is really about. We’re all in this together folks. What an adventure.
- DoingIsLearning 3y agoIrrespective of your view on the Nature article and the current online activity, it is useful to remember that much like Epistemic standards, HN also has standards. At the bottom of this page you will find a Guidelines page with an "In comments" section: " Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." You were both not entertaining and added nothing to the discussion. As much as I agree with you, people are excited for the potential of an extraordinary result, and in my view this article's tone is completely out of place for a publication with the historic weight and impact of Nature.
- victorantos 3y agoOh, I see you're embracing a rather unconventional perspective on science and academia. While it's true that social media platforms like Twitter have provided new avenues for scientific discussions and collaboration, it's essential to consider the potential downsides of context switching and chasing after every shiny new experiment. Research and replication are crucial components of the scientific process. Context switching too frequently can indeed lead to wasted time, as researchers may not have the opportunity to delve deeply into a particular topic and build upon existing knowledge. Replication is essential for validating findings and ensuring the reliability of scientific claims. While some interesting discussions may occur on Twitter, it's important not to dismiss academia entirely. Academic institutions provide an environment conducive to rigorous research, peer review, and collaboration, which are fundamental aspects of advancing scientific knowledge.
- progrus 3y agoIt’s definitely the UFOs at this point. You might see a fake UFO landing soon.
- kaeresten_dit 3y agoI guess it's not entirely surprising to see this from Nature, but it's been incredible to see how many people across the web try to tear any shred of possibility of LK99 being a real breakthrough because of a lack of replication, but from my understanding the lab it came put of, QEL, commercial research lab, so why would they publish the exact process to be able to create the material especially if they don't even fully understand it themselves Regardless it is a promising development with the potential to flip several industries on their heads in terms of what is possible with current understandings but also what is possible from the mind of someone who grows up with the internet like those born post 2k with the internet