[thkim]

Original authors have been working on it for 23 years since they first found the material in 1999. They are part of private institution and have no incentive to rush the disclosure so that other labs can catch on their life's work. Authors already have stated they will publish more information next year. It's pretty arrogant to draw premature conclusions on quick analysis and demand the authors to disclose more information right now, when they are clearly not obligated to anything.

[bhouston]

I’ve seen inside of privately funded research that doesn’t have publication requirements and sometimes it is driven by a combination of belief, passion and incompetence which leads to an avoidance of accepting failure. Not saying this is the case with this but please do not elevate private research above public research. There is actually less controls over the quality of private research.

[thkim]

I did not say I consider private research in some sort of higher level than public research. I only said they have no incentive to do full disclosure right now. Without knowing exactly what they know, it is insulting to authors to describe, or even hint, them as avoiding to accept failture. It is simply unwarranted ad-hominem and not contributing anything to academic discussion at this point.

[haldujai]

> It is simply unwarranted ad-hominem

When the authors/executives of a private research company are making fraudulent affiliation claims to established corporations and research universities it's actually very warranted to be dismissive of their claims in the absence of supportive evidence. Especially when there is growing evidence suggestive of failure.

This is not the behavior of ethical scientists and suggests malice.

Faking affiliation and refusing to provide supportive evidence both smell like a fundraising scam (i.e. running out of money and need to raise more to continue research seems like the simplest explanation for this behavior).

https://web.archive.org/web/20230806081911/https://koreajoon...

[thkim]

Since when is ad hominem a part of evaluating claims?

[haldujai]

Without getting into a philosophical discussion of whether ad hominem is ever appropriate.

This is, in fact, the opposite of ad hominem.

Ad hominem would suggest we are attacking the claim based solely on the author's credibility. In fact, multiple independent replication experiments failed and theoretical models suggest it doesn't work.

So instead of attacking the authors the question is should we be trusting them at their word, and the answer which is reasonably based on credibility seems to be no.

[thkim]

Whether or not authors are credible, instead of the claims, is not a scientific discussion.

[kergonath]

> It's pretty arrogant to draw premature conclusions on quick analysis and demand the authors to disclose more information right now, when they are clearly not obligated to anything.

“Put up or shut up” is a very valid stance in the face of extraordinary claims backed by dodgy evidence. They are not obligated to anything, but then we don’t have to take them seriously. The mere fact that they’ve sat on it for 20 years and don’t have anything solid after seriously working on it for 4 years is strange.

So far, the community has responded as it should, with a proper mixture of excitement and skepticism, which results in renewed interest in lead apatites (which is fine, apatites are great). But when questions keep piling up, “we have the proof but we’re not going to share” is bound to cause some frustration.

[j16sdiz]

Since when live AMA session and twitch demo an requirement for science?

No scientist can do real work if they are constantly distracted by random internet folk like this.

[kergonath]

Nobody mentioned any of this. There are several tools commonly used for communications within the scientific community, including peer-reviewed articles, letters, preprints, and conferences. It’s hardly controversial.

[cthalupa]

Well, it's important to keep this all in context: They did not want to release the paper, even as a preprint, at this point. The infighting in the group necessitated it when someone went off script and threw up the original shoddy paper, forcing them to release their marginally better one.

They had sent out some samples prior to this whole debacle, including to KENTECH (a Korean university focusing on energy technology), but are waiting to send out more samples specifically because they want to get a peer-reviewed article out there before they start sending them out to a broader audience.

I'm not saying LK-99 is a RTAPS, and current evidence seems to indicate it is almost certainly not one, but the broader LK-99 team seems to have been attempting to follow the normal process the whole time.

[Levitating]

From my understanding they haven't been actively researching during that time.

It should also be noted that the team most likely did not intend to disclose any information already.

"Currently, two papers concerning LK-99 are available on the preprint service arXiv, which does not conduct peer review, and a related past study was published in the Journal of the Korean Crystal Growth and Crystal Technology in April 2023. Kim has only co-authored one of the arXiv papers, while the other is authored by his colleagues at QERC, some of whom also applied for a patent on LK-99 in August 2022. Both papers present similar measurements, however Kim says that the second paper contains “many defects” and was uploaded to arXiv without his permission. In that paper, the work is described as opening a “new era for humankind”." - From the New Scientist

The "second paper" referenced here is actually the first that was published, in which Young-Wan Kwon is the third author. If Hyun-Tak Kim states that this paper was not published with his permisison it seems like Young-Wan Kwon prematurely published it on arxiv to be the third author. The other paper was submitted by Hyun-Tak Kim just two hours later, listing himself as the third author.

Furthermore, Young-Wan Kwon isn't related to the Q-Centre anymore as he resigned from the function of CTO.

[fouc]

The privately funded work didn't start until 2018 or 2019 I think?

They apparently weren't actively researching that material between 1999 and 2018.