Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by toshk 1041 days ago
Breakthroughs are exciting; hoping it's true!

But I understand nothing of this field

What's the general consensus here, real or not?

4 comments

The consensus on HN is that it’s le epic exciting discovery. The consensus among physicist is that’s it’s likely to be a dud
> The consensus among physicist is that’s it’s likely to be a dud

That's really not true. It's unclear whether it's a superconductor, but the consensus worst-case outcome is that something very unexpected is happening, which is in itself worth learning more about.

The consensus 'here' unfortunately does not seem to reflect the very critical consensus amongst r/Physics :

https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/15i3h9d/lk99_megat...

The comments here are of a higher quality (due to top tier moderation) and generally the community is smarter and more in tune. I'd go with the HN consensus any day, over some random subreddit.
It is not some random subreddit, it is r/physics.

HN is a tech forum, plenty of smart people in there, but also plenty of people who think they know more than they really do. Lots of arrogance in here. I am guilty of it myself, and some of my posts got a lot of upvotes even though it was way out of my field of expertise. I try to get things right, fact checking and all that, but my opinion is certainly not worth that of an expert.

All that to say that on tech matters, I think HN is pretty good, because that's where the tech guys go. But for physics, I'd go for r/physics.

It is a discovery of an interesting semi conductor with strong diamagnetism.

It will likely spur a lot of new solid state physics research.

Sources for this as the consensus take? Or is this your personal take? As far as I have heard, it is still well under discussion, especially with more recently (per this weekend) levitating flakes, and the fact that noone has successfully replicated a certain-failure of actual conducting properties.
Burma-Shave
I had to Google what Burma-Shave is :)