That, of course, was pure fraud from the beginning. This might be, too. At the very least, it's looking like poor science. They should have never released any press announcement unless they had reached a point of knowing that their results were reproducible, or at least verifiable, by others. When I worked at NIST, we thought we were onto something that would have been ground-breaking. But, knowing that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, we kept setting out to proof ourselves wrong and eventually we did. The same thing when I was working at the Academy. Incidental to the work we were doing, we thought we had stumbled upon a way to distinguish between different hash functions, such as SHA-256 and MD5 and some of the SHA-3 candidates. That would have been huge news. But, again, extraordinary claims. So we spent a couple of months trying to confirm the results, which kept looking promising, and assuming that they were, in fact, an artifact of some little mistake, and eventually we found the mistake. In both cases, the attitude from the beginning was that there was no way we were going to make some public claim unless we damn well knew that we had done the work to back it up.

Hi,

In this day and age and with the internet, it seems the other way around now. Make any dang claim you want then make up some excuse once the dust settles down. The old adage was, "Extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidence", but the new one has become, "Make any extraordinary claim you want as long as it gets people to read about it".
A good example I think is incredibly underpriced items or services and when you click on them it takes you to a search to find those very items or services! They state they are available, then pass you off to a search engine, which of course, never finds anything at those incredibly low prices.

Another trick is to just include one of the words like, "might", "could", "should", etc. Combine that with one of the words like, "breakthrough", "ground breaking", and you've got a 'big' story going. There's also phrases like, "major step toward", and stuff like that which gives it a boost too.

Maybe it is the internet that caused this. It's too easy to make claims and have them read by a large audience. It's probably too tempting not to do that if you are writing about these topics.

 

Hi,

In this day and age and with the internet, it seems the other way around now. Make any dang claim you want then make up some excuse once the dust settles down. The old adage was, "Extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidence", but the new one has become, "Make any extraordinary claim you want as long as it gets people to read about it".
A good example I think is incredibly underpriced items or services and when you click on them it takes you to a search to find those very items or services! They state they are available, then pass you off to a search engine, which of course, never finds anything at those incredibly low prices.

Another trick is to just include one of the words like, "might", "could", "should", etc. Combine that with one of the words like, "breakthrough", "ground breaking", and you've got a 'big' story going. There's also phrases like, "major step toward", and stuff like that which gives it a boost too.

Maybe it is the internet that caused this. It's too easy to make claims and have them read by a large audience. It's probably too tempting not to do that if you are writing about these topics.

I don't hold bloggers and marketers and reporters to the same standard of conduct as scientists that want to claim to be legitimate researchers.

 

I don't hold bloggers and marketers and reporters to the same standard of conduct as scientists that want to claim to be legitimate researchers.

Hi,

Yeah, and I think that would be impossible to do anyway (ha ha).

Reporters used to be mostly of the high integrity type so that they could earn a reputation that garnered them a larger and respectful audience. Those days seem to be gone. No more Ted Koppels.

 

 

 

We can't forget that high-temperature superconductors were thought to be impossible before they were discovered, because the only known mechanism for superconductivity, namely phonon-coupling to create a Bose condensate, was limited to about 23 K. Any proof that room-temperature(and pressure) superconductivity can't exist has to not be based on proofs that all known mechanisms can't achieve it, but rather on a rigorous proof that no possible mechanism can exist that can achieve it. That's a much higher bar.

 

Larry Nevin a really good science fiction writer proposed another cool property it might exist in superconductors, super thermal conductivity. If this is ever discovered it will also be a game changer. A super thermal conductor will be the same temperature throughout the material no matter what part of it is put in an extreme temperature. Imagine a cooling hose and a radiator with no liquids. I have found nothing to indicate that this is possible but it is a neat thought.

 

If it did exist, then it would have it's limits, just like superconductors and superfluids do. So it wouldn't be "no matter what part of it is put in an extreme temperature", just like a supercoductor doesn't remain a superconductor at extreme currents, magnetic fields, temperatures, or stresses.

 

+1 above

Larry Nevin a really good science fiction writer proposed another cool property it might exist in superconductors, super thermal conductivity. If this is ever discovered it will also be a game changer. A super thermal conductor will be the same temperature throughout the material no matter what part of it is put in an extreme temperature. Imagine a cooling hose and a radiator with no liquids. I have found nothing to indicate that this is possible but it is a neat thought.

https://www.britannica.com/science/superfluidity

Related phenomena observed in the superfluid phase include the ability to sustain persistent currents in a ring-shaped container; the phenomenon of film creep, in which the liquid flows without apparent friction up and over the side of a bucket containing it; and a thermal conductivity that is millions of times its value in the normal phase and greater than that of the best metallic conductors.

 

Meanwhile, Lk99's story is not over yet:

Quantum Simulation Analysis Claims that If We Made High-symmetry Phase LK99 It Would Be Ambient Pressure Room Temperature Superconductors

​

[]We are still waiting for the original korean team that developed LK99 to finish a new research paper that is going through peer review. The koreans will not rush out the new paper given the doubts of their original rushed paper.

 

Meanwhile, Lk99's story is not over yet:

Quantum Simulation Analysis Claims that If We Made High-symmetry Phase LK99 It Would Be Ambient Pressure Room Temperature Superconductors
View attachment 303454​

[]We are still waiting for the original korean team that developed LK99 to finish a new research paper that is going through peer review. The koreans will not rush out the new paper given the doubts of their original rushed paper.

Sure and if I had wings I might be able to fly too. So far every experiment to replicate results have failed from every top superconductor research faciality. What needed is a working sample and method, not a Molecular dynamics simulation.

 

Sure and if I had wings I might be able to fly too.

You look more like a Gorn than a pig.

 

You look more like a Gorn than a pig.

 

Sure and if I had wings I might be able to fly too. So far every experiment to replicate results have failed from every top superconductor research faciality. What needed is a working sample and method, not a Molecular dynamics simulation.

Agreed ... but you know what the difference between perseverance and obstinacy is? ... the end result ...

 

Agreed ... but you know what the difference between perseverance and obstinacy is? ... the end result ...

I would love a real room temp superconductor (We actually need a superconductor that's good up to normal summer operating conditions of power grid lines across death valley for practical uses) but IMO LK99 shows what happens when we're just slinging mud on the wall hoping that something sticks. We can do better.

 

I would love a real room temp superconductor (We actually need a superconductor that's good up to normal summer operating conditions of power grid lines across death valley for practical uses) but IMO LK99 shows what happens when we're just slinging mud on the wall hoping that something sticks. We can do better.

Well, it worked for Pollock... but yeah, there are better research methods out there.

 

So if the hype is to be believed, it is a process control problem. I hope so. I suspect everyone reading this does too.

 

So if the hype is to be believed, it is a process control problem. I hope so. I suspect everyone reading this does too.

I hope so too but really, the odds are very long at this point. LK-99 samples of various kinds around the world have been made, tested and been found wanting for superconductivity by the leading experts in the field.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/science-journal-says-lk-99-superconductor-dream-is-over

The rabbit hole scientists have been following around LK-99 pertains to copper sulfide (Cu2S) impurities. The specificity of the temperature at which the Korean authors detected a tenfold drop in resistivity (from 0.02 ohm-centimeters to 0.002 ohm-cm) seems have been the definitive thread. Prashant Jain, a chemist at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, said that that was the detail that most caught his eye. The thing is that Jain had seen that specific temperature before: it's the temperature at which copper sulfide (one of the impurities that results from the LK-99 synthesis process) undergoes a phase transition. below the temperature needed for that phase transition to occur, in a way that's almost identical to the same transition towards superconductivity the original authors attributed to LK-99.

 

Meanwhile, Lk99's story is not over yet:

Quantum Simulation Analysis Claims that If We Made High-symmetry Phase LK99 It Would Be Ambient Pressure Room Temperature Superconductors
View attachment 303454​

[]We are still waiting for the original korean team that developed LK99 to finish a new research paper that is going through peer review. The koreans will not rush out the new paper given the doubts of their original rushed paper.

Hi,

That's interesting but the operational word here is, again, "could".
Could, should, would, maybe, might, looks-like, etc.

I half stopped reading articles like that now due to the fact that they always leave you guessing anyway, so they don't give you anything concrete to really take away from that reading time.

What else is happening now I see is that the lead-in will state that something is definite, then in the body of the article it states it is only possible and not really definite. That's even worse.

I have a limited amount of reading time I don't want to be reminded over and over again that things are possible. I only want to know if they have been proven, at least to the extent that we usually accept a proof these days.

 

https://www.wsj.com/science/room-temperature-superconductor-retract-journal-nature-e554536a

Co-authors of a paper that claimed the discovery of a room-temperature superconductor have asked the journal Nature to retract the study because, they said in a letter to the journal, the lead researcher misrepresented data.

“We respectfully request and recommend that Nature issue a retraction,” eight of the 11 authors wrote to Tobias Rödel, a senior editor at the journal, according to the letter, which was obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

This is why many are extremely sceptical about SC claims.