[pcrh]

Preponderance of available evidence is irrelevant to assessing scientific claims of fact.

The original claims only need to be rigorously verified once. As it currently stands the original claims are claimed to have been partially replicated. What's needed now is the rigor.

[bhouston]

> Preponderance of available evidence is irrelevant to assessing scientific claims of fact.

The issue is that trying to prove a negative is very hard in this case.

It is similar to me saying that there is a type of cat that floats, although most don't. It is very hard to prove me wrong because even if you find 1M cats that do not float, it doesn't mean that there is a type of cat you missed to find.

All we can say is that we tried to find cats in a thorough way and none of them float.

When that happens, it is often standard to turn the argument over to the one that is claiming that cats float -- prove that you have a cat that floats, rather than relying on me to prove that no cats float.

This is why people are saying we need to do an analysis of the SC sample from LK. If it is super hard to produce, but we can confirm that they made one, then it is true. Otherwise, it is probably best to assume that the claim isn't true.

[pcrh]

Nobody is trying to prove a negative here. The initial claim is of a RT superconductor. The claim only needs to be rigorously verified once.

If it can't be verified, it remains an unverified claim, not necessarily a falsehood.

[haldujai]

No one in this thread is saying the Korean researchers have a superconductor in their possession has been proven false.

We have an unverified claim of a significant discovery released in a pre-print that was taken on good-faith and replication experiments were attempted.

This has resulted in what can be described as a very thorough and publicized review process by multiple researchers qualified to serve as reviewers. As this was all done in good faith it is effectively analogous to the scientific standard of blinded peer review as no one was considering the author's credibility.

The conclusion of multiple reviews has been the equivalent of "recommend rejection, invitation to resubmit with major revisions". Major revisions being verification of superconductivity in the sample they possess and further details regarding synthesis and yield as what has been described is clearly not working as claimed.

The relevance of author credibility is for a confidence estimation that a superconductor has been discovered at this time. Obviously, if this was Argonne or [peer] one would be more confident than in a private research corporation with a history of claiming false affiliations to notable research institutions. This is not an ad hominem attack, it's a credibility assessment.

The current state is we have a flawed and effectively rejected manuscript making a significant claim. Looking at the authors credibility is an attempt to remain optimistic but this also points to low confidence.