6 ms·

My limited experience with people like this is that they actually believe what they are doing. My question is, where does he get these plots, etc. Is he just wi

by RK 17y ago

My limited experience with people like this is that they actually believe what they are doing. My question is, where does he get these plots, etc. Is he just wildly misinterpreting it or is he in fact just making it up?

mechanical_fish 17y ago
It is entirely possible that he is just making it up. Far more high-profile cases of deliberate fiction have happened. But it is more likely that the plots are real, that he really did make some high Tc material in his personal lab and do some measurements. It's not rocket surgery, to someone with a bit of training. It's just chemistry, electronic equipment, and liquid nitrogen, none of which is especially expensive. The problem arises in the interpretation. He points at some random squiggles and calls them a Meissner transition. I see squiggles. It would sure be nice to have a control, yes? A curve traced from a piece of boring commercially-available YBCO, plugged into the same apparatus, and showing similar squiggles at the known transition temperature of commercially-available YBCO? Similarly, if you take any data enough times you will get some odd discontinuities now and then. Your chart recorder software will glitch, you'll leave a switch in the wrong position, your sample temperature is changing during the measurement in a way that is being missed by your apparatus, your sample is in the middle of disintegrating, etc. The initial impulse is always to suspect that each glitch is an amazing new discovery, but they almost never are. So it would be nice to know if the results were repeatable. How many samples did he make? Can he show me the data from all the samples? Where did the stoichiometry data and the structural data come from? Mixing up a batch of a compound is one thing, but analyzing it is something else: That actually does require equipment, and money. How was it done? Where was it done, and by whom? What is the margin of error in the results? Has this material really never been made before? If someone else has made it before, why didn't they publish this first? I should stress that, compared to many cranky projects (cough cold fusion cough) this is a highly believable report. It's not as if high-Tc superconductors are unattested in the literature. It's not as if this guy's results require throwing out established theory. It's not as if he couldn't have gotten lucky and built a one-off sample with an amazingly high Tc in his basement -- most good physics is done in someone's basement, and most reproducible results start their lives as barely reproducible results. But, because he's an incredibly sloppy publisher, the author forces us to assume that he is a crank until proven otherwise.
- RK 17y ago
  This guy appears to have made announcements every few months with a Tc improvements of between about 8 - 20 K with various materials. Whatever he's doing, he's getting consistently "good results".
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Well, a simple test for superconductivity at that temperature exists (if Kamerlingh Onnes could do it then so can he). The bigger problem here is that his writing elsewhere that you found already indicate he's lost a few of his marbles, that makes it very hard to put much credibility in some amazing breakthrough he reports. Reputation really does matter. I'm flagging this because I really think it is bull and until there is a report that is reviewed I don't think it deserves this kind of attention.

by RK 17y ago

mechanical_fish 17y ago

It is entirely possible that he is just making it up. Far more high-profile cases of deliberate fiction have happened. But it is more likely that the plots are real, that he really did make some high Tc material in his personal lab and do some measurements. It's not rocket surgery, to someone with a bit of training. It's just chemistry, electronic equipment, and liquid nitrogen, none of which is especially expensive. The problem arises in the interpretation. He points at some random squiggles and calls them a Meissner transition. I see squiggles. It would sure be nice to have a control, yes? A curve traced from a piece of boring commercially-available YBCO, plugged into the same apparatus, and showing similar squiggles at the known transition temperature of commercially-available YBCO? Similarly, if you take any data enough times you will get some odd discontinuities now and then. Your chart recorder software will glitch, you'll leave a switch in the wrong position, your sample temperature is changing during the measurement in a way that is being missed by your apparatus, your sample is in the middle of disintegrating, etc. The initial impulse is always to suspect that each glitch is an amazing new discovery, but they almost never are. So it would be nice to know if the results were repeatable. How many samples did he make? Can he show me the data from all the samples? Where did the stoichiometry data and the structural data come from? Mixing up a batch of a compound is one thing, but analyzing it is something else: That actually does require equipment, and money. How was it done? Where was it done, and by whom? What is the margin of error in the results? Has this material really never been made before? If someone else has made it before, why didn't they publish this first? I should stress that, compared to many cranky projects (cough cold fusion cough) this is a highly believable report. It's not as if high-Tc superconductors are unattested in the literature. It's not as if this guy's results require throwing out established theory. It's not as if he couldn't have gotten lucky and built a one-off sample with an amazingly high Tc in his basement -- most good physics is done in someone's basement, and most reproducible results start their lives as barely reproducible results. But, because he's an incredibly sloppy publisher, the author forces us to assume that he is a crank until proven otherwise.

RK 17y ago
This guy appears to have made announcements every few months with a Tc improvements of between about 8 - 20 K with various materials. Whatever he's doing, he's getting consistently "good results".
jacquesm 17y ago
Well, a simple test for superconductivity at that temperature exists (if Kamerlingh Onnes could do it then so can he). The bigger problem here is that his writing elsewhere that you found already indicate he's lost a few of his marbles, that makes it very hard to put much credibility in some amazing breakthrough he reports. Reputation really does matter. I'm flagging this because I really think it is bull and until there is a report that is reviewed I don't think it deserves this kind of attention.