[dekhn]

Nature doesn't need to hedge its position.

The article doesn't deprecate LK-99. The article is about the hype surrounding the announcement and its replication results, mainly, but not exclusively by, amateurs in other fields (who seem to have shown that they can make samples that have unconventional properties, but not necessarily superconducting).

It's worth reading about a previous social media science debacle, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_ano... where the observations of neutrinos being faster than light was eventually debugged to some simple hardware errors and naive analysis.

"After the initial report of apparent superluminal velocities of neutrinos, most physicists in the field were quietly skeptical of the results, but prepared to adopt a wait-and-see approach. Experimental experts were aware of the complexity and difficulty of the measurement, so an extra unrecognized measurement error was still a real possibility, despite the care taken by the OPERA team"

[jacquesm]

No, but they also don't need to try to catch some of the hype while pretending to be immune to that hype. Clearly they feel the need to put LK-99 in at least one article title even if there is no news. That's not their normal standard for articles, at least not as far as I'm aware.

I'm aware of quite a few other scientific debacles, some involving outright fraud, data fabrication and sometimes true believers that even convinced themselves. What is interesting about the Ranga Diaz episode is that it was Nature that published it (and it took two years to retract it):

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2801-z

So their stance right now is understandable but also a bit self serving.

[arka2147483647]

> So their stance right now is understandable but also a bit self serving.

If there is this hot topic about LK-99, is it not their job to report it to their readers? Not everybody follows social media or has come across this personally. From this point of view, the article seems fair enough roundup of whats been happening.

[Natsu]

> It's worth reading about a previous social media science debacle, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_ano... where the observations of neutrinos being faster than light was eventually debugged to some simple hardware errors and naive analysis.

"Debacle?" Some scientists saw something funny, pointed out that it violated known laws of physics, and asked for help explaining the results. They got that help relatively quickly and it was found that, indeed, the neutrinos were not moving faster than light.

If I were looking for a debacle, I'd look for something where there was outright fraud.

Here we have lots of people levitating small black rocks. It's probable that the samples created are impure, but something interesting might well be going on and so it's getting attention. Making things levitate like that is pretty cool, though, even if yes, you can do it with pencil lead (and a different magnet setup, not just a single magnet).

So people are trying to understand it. It's messy, and the results are unclear, but... hey, that's how things go. Sure, I'll wait to call it confirmed until we have a number of labs with good quality samples and expert testing, but I'll also give them time to actually try a few things since there are good reasons to think the synthesis is less easy than is reported.

But I'm not going to hate on people who just wanna see the rocks float, either. And we have quite a few people now with floaty rocks, which is more than enough to keep the average person entertained while the science settles.

[dekhn]

Sorry, debacle wasn't the right word. Situation? Event?

In this case it wasn't as simple as asking for help- the team that caused this situation really just wasn't up to the task, and that should have been detected far earlier than their press release announcing faster than light neutrinos.

From https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/24/science/24speed.html """Nima Arkani-Hamed, a particle theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, said in an e-mail, “There was no need for a press release or indeed even for a scientific paper, till much more work was done. They claim that they wanted the community to scrutinize their result — well, they could have accomplished that by going around and giving talks about it.”"""

[Natsu]

Sure, that's better. I dunno, feels like bikeshedding to worry about the best way of getting help. It's sad that it turned out to be relatively boring (equipment not set up right) instead of any actual scientific discovery, but I'd personally rather see more people having fun and learning to love the process of discovery even when it doesn't pan out. And most things don't pan out, I get that.

This may well not pan out either, but lots of people with little floaty rocks are going to capture people's imagination in a way that a bunch of graphs just don't.