There's been a few "over-eager" findings these last few years. Skepticism is warranted; if LK-99 is a superconductor it will still be one after six months' peer review.
Sure. No one reasonable is seeing this and deciding they need to go investing their life savings in whatever adjacent stocks they think will take off. Skepticism is fine.
The Nature article is still weird in tone, though, since there's been plenty of interesting results that have been replicated. LK99 is a weird material, at the very least. That it's weird in a way that somewhat implies it could be an RTAPS makes it plenty interesting.
I've seen a lot of discussion around LK99 in a bunch of different contexts, and the portion of people that are treating it like anything more than entertaining curiosity at this point is extremely low - so this article really reads as the authors being upset that other people are having fun in their domain. That's what comes across as gatekeeping.
Or the concerns around "amateur" reproduction - who is trying to reproduce this without any understanding of how to operate the equipment or some understandings around basic chemistry and physics? These private reproductions are being done by engineers, chemists, physicists, etc. - I haven't seen anything to indicate that people with no business doing these experiments are rushing out there to try it.
It's just a very strange to be written in the tone it is and make these points. It seems very divorced from the reality of the situation, which is basically a whole lot of people on twitter memeing "MAKE ROCK FLOAT"/"WE BACK"/"ITS SO OVER", people on more technical/science oriented forums having the sorts of discussions we see on HN, and most the population sitting around waiting to see if anything useful comes of this.
Having worked in a solid state lab that focused on synthesis and imaging characterization of various substrates including superconductors, being an engineer does not make you not an amateur.
Please read my comment again. I am not saying engineers (of the sort attempting replication) are more than amateurs when it comes to superconductors, I am saying they are not amateurs around relatively mundane equipment.
> who is trying to reproduce this without any understanding of how to operate the equipment or some understandings around basic chemistry and physics?
The engineers replicating it are at places that already had this equipment. They weren't using it to try and make floating rocks, but they didn't have the furnaces, etc., sitting around for the hell of it, and they're going to be aware of basic precautions like "Don't eat your lead and don't breathe it in in vaporized form when pulling it out of a 1000C furnace."
I do not understand the idea that people already using this equipment day to day for other purposes are somehow at significant risk while attempting to synthesize LK-99
I do not mean this in a hostile way, but I fucking hate this take.
There are plenty of people who get EXTREMELY excited when shit turns out to be true. There's this sterotype of boring serious people who never have fun and don't enjoy what everyone else is enjoying and it's just wrong.
There are people in the industry who are going to go fucking nuts if this is true, but they're not dancing in the streets because this is the equivalent of "is katy perry pregnant? Our pictures maybe sorta show a bump!".
To be clear, if that kind of gossip is your life, that's fine, but even then you're probably about to read a shitload of ill informed speculation based on suspicious evidence, with undeniable proof 3-6 months away. You've seen this thing literally hundreds of times before, and see nothing to be excited about because it's just noise. If there's a baby in 6 months, great, if not, "yeah maybe" is about the extent of the information.
Science is done slow because you need to prove things. Even with this material being "easy" to replicate by the standards of the field, it still doesn't happen overnight (and to my amateur understanding in part because of a lack of detail).
So while I can't speak for the person you're replying to, I can damn sure say I find nothing about this exciting (more embarrassing that so many people have turned this into a cult following, much like the cold fusion claims on steroids), and will be one of the first people to be extremely excited when we have confirmation.
This is not "watching the process" happen. It is "speculating on the process at every single step no matter how suspicious because the process isn't fast enough for you"
There's plenty of real scientists doing real science with this. It's pretty dismissive to talk about university labs full of PhDs posting preprints and videos and all of that and liken them to TMZ style reporting.
People bring up the cold fusion stuff repeatedly, and that's also bizarre - Muon stuff aside, cold fusion wasn't thought to be possible under our understanding of physics when that craze happened. That's a lot of what was so weird about it. On the other hand, there's absolutely nothing in our understanding of physics that makes a RTAPS impossible.
I would agree with the idea that not being excited about this at this point in time doesn't make you a curmudgeon. But saying "I do not mean this in a hostile way" doesn't mean much when you proceed to be hostile and disparaging towards people. The tone of your comment doesn't change at all if you replace "I do not mean this in a hostile way, but" with "You morons"
It's this kind of excitement of possibility that drives people to work on ideas like this in the first place. Thousands of people tuned into Andrew McCalip's twitch stream of an oven, just because of the possibility that something world-changing might come out. I'm sure lots of those viewers, many of them young people who are in the prime years of forming interests and career choices, have never even heard of superconductors before last week, and now are soaking up all the information they can on the topic. That's awesome.
Was the hype leading up to the moon landing also a waste of time, just because it was just "gossip" until boots hit the surface? Such a joyless take.
I am somewhat adjacent to businesses that sell superconductors. I get tired with every premature take I see, including Nature's. However, I am quite optimistic with LK-99. It has had a different scent from the beginning than prior STP SC claims. More than optimistic, I am excited because of this scent of legitimacy. The level of conspiracy necessary at this point to make LK-99 a nothingburger is a bit big for my taste. It's too soon to say exactly what we have on our hands here, but it is exciting. Anyone denying that without a novel argument has a suspect agenda imo. It needs further replication and methods development and it's only been a week.
It’s only been a week and we have had already multiple confirmations of important properties from several independent sources.
Given that it’s quite unlikely that they are all producing fraudulent results I would say that something strange seems to be really happening with this novel material.
But it is hostile. It also shows a lack of emotional control at least on par with the people that are openly enthusiastic and possibly much worse. At least they are having fun...
> Watching the process happen in real time is fun and exciting.
YOU ARE NOT WATCHING THE PROCESS.
The people who have spent their lives on superconductors and who have the expertise to replicate and conclusively evaluate these claims so far haven't said anything publicly. They are presumably busy doing the actual hard work.
What you're doing is watching is a side show full of influencers on social media.
I can open my rss feed for hep-ex today and read something like this:
Which is due ultimately to the work of over 1,000 people on the LHCb collaboration (two of them now deceased), but the conclusions are just "agrees with the standard model" so the result of the very good work done grinding away at the problem has no headline generating potential. Most of the people here fawning over the excitement of science done in the open wouldn't ever bother trying to read that kind of paper, and probably don't know that sharing physics preprints over the internet dates back to before the Web existed (and to before most of them existed).
we could have been sitting around now talking about breaking new experimental results from LHCb that call into question the standard model, you have to actually do the work to check. and you have to check a lot of unexciting results in order to find one which is groundbreaking (which is actually what the authors of the LK-99 paper claim to have done over decades before finding this one material).
I can’t really think of any over eager findings in the past years. Plenty of fluffy university press releases and the perpetual 20 years from now. But this is the first fundamental breakthrough that has had any stick. Skepticism is always warranted but the other results like the university of Rochester superconductor was met with extreme skepticism at first (and has been shown to be warranted). Lk99 had the combination of big result, AND importantly “easily” testable, despite low yield rates.
The Nature article is still weird in tone, though, since there's been plenty of interesting results that have been replicated. LK99 is a weird material, at the very least. That it's weird in a way that somewhat implies it could be an RTAPS makes it plenty interesting.
I've seen a lot of discussion around LK99 in a bunch of different contexts, and the portion of people that are treating it like anything more than entertaining curiosity at this point is extremely low - so this article really reads as the authors being upset that other people are having fun in their domain. That's what comes across as gatekeeping.
Or the concerns around "amateur" reproduction - who is trying to reproduce this without any understanding of how to operate the equipment or some understandings around basic chemistry and physics? These private reproductions are being done by engineers, chemists, physicists, etc. - I haven't seen anything to indicate that people with no business doing these experiments are rushing out there to try it.
It's just a very strange to be written in the tone it is and make these points. It seems very divorced from the reality of the situation, which is basically a whole lot of people on twitter memeing "MAKE ROCK FLOAT"/"WE BACK"/"ITS SO OVER", people on more technical/science oriented forums having the sorts of discussions we see on HN, and most the population sitting around waiting to see if anything useful comes of this.