Honestly, just send out the samples and have people verify the claims. Demonstrating Meissner effect can be done by a grad student, especially if you don't need a pressure cell or low-temperature setup.
It’s obvious there’s a limited number of samples and they potentially don’t feel like they have a complete grasp on how to reliably produce more using their current level of knowledge regarding the process they used to create the first one… sometimes science involves luck. They have been working on this for years, I can completely believe a non-trivial portion of that time was spent trying to go from a fluke to having at least some ability to produce samples that demonstrate superconducting properties.
They may have only a half dozen samples of varying purity and quality…
The samples may not be particularly “strong” and given the powder based process involved may be too brittle to safely “send” and thus require careful hand courier delivery like a fresh organ for transplant, just without the urgency…
It’s entirely possible they may be mistaken and it’s not a superconductor, but these people are not fools, so I’m inclined to “give them enough rope” and to let this all play out and see where the either falter and the falsehoods exposed by the absence of any further evidence, they are are shown their mistakes once others get their hands on samples, other’s reproduction proves them correct, or their samples are studied by others and the evidence from their paper proves to be correct regardless of novel theories regarding the mechanism of superconductivity involved.
Science is a process, and to be honest it’s fun watching how fast people are pouring on the gas and trying to find out if this is real or not … stark contrast to the abject scepticism and shoestring budgets given to many innovative potential ideas.
I hear what you're saying, but it's not like the sample would need hand couriering a great distance. They're in Seoul, home to a large number of universities [1]. If the discovery is real then I'd hope another university there validates it soon.
And if the reproduction is hard to nail due to delicacies in the process, the the inventors should provide samples for analysis.
According to the tweet in question, YH Kwon had samples with him and was willing make them available for investigation but they didn’t have the tools for.
this is Satoshi/Wright all over again. All Wright had to do is sign a document with the original key to provide (reasonably) plausible proof that he was indeed Satoshi.
Behavior of grifters always has this constant: infuriate your peers by making excuses and dazzle the outsiders/media with techno-babble. Sit back and watch both camps fight in social media, from where it infects MSM. Once it takes off the 2 camps battling another ensure it stays in the news and the cult that was created ensures their idols (gods) are protected. The public can no longer tell truth from fiction because as they understand "where there's smoke there's fire". At this point the suits and corporate talking-heads promise big returns, so there is no stopping it because money is being made regardless from it being real.
In Wright's case what's funnier is that after his little trickery in his attempts to prove he's Satoshi (which fell to bits immediately), he was willing to go to extraordinary lengths to keep up the act. He came up with some Back To The Future style excuse for not being in possession of certain keys saying that he'd somehow split them into N parts and had arranged for some bonded courier to show up at a given day (which obviously didn't happen). Additionally he fought against the estate of a former business partner, persuaded the judge that he was Satoshi and therefore worth billions and owes the estate $100m in damages:
> Following a three-week trial in late 2021, a jury found Wright liable for conversion but awarded Kleiman's estate US$100 million in damages while Kleiman's estate had sought upwards of US$25 billion at trial. Wright took the position that verdict served as a vindication of his role in inventing bitcoin and stated that he would not appeal the jury's findings
The worst about it is how much of other people's time their wasting. Other folks are trying to verify/disprove their claims. Of course it is some kind of measurement error. Do your due diligence before you claim that you broke physics as we know it. All these people could be spending their time working on something worthwhile...
> Do your due diligence before you claim that you broke physics as we know it
Do room temperature semi conductors break physics as we know it? I didn’t think they contradicted known physics, which is why so many people were researching them.
It doesn't break physics as we theorize it, but physics as we practice it. If someone found a working room temp and pressure, within a few years it would be used in labs around the world. Which is why the superconductor claim is such a big deal.
That’s… fair, but strikes me as a quite different claim.
“Breaks physics as we know it” seems very much to imply “perpetual motion machine” sorts of claim, that violate pretty strongly held physical laws.
Anyway, this is more a minor quibble with the specific language, rather than a broader disagreement, but just a heads up that to me (and I’m guessing many others), that specific phrase holds a far broader connotation than it seems you intended.
They're wasted because it becomes this game where one side claims the other side didn't do it right, and the other side claims it's not described in sufficient detail, it takes years to actually disprove something if the other side is persistent. It's not a one and done, it's a huge time sink that drains energy from researchers. You try to replicate something, you fail, that's not a publication, that's just nothing. For a phd student in a lab, that can derail your career plans if you it breaks the timeline of working toward your thesis. It's hugely damaging on an individual level. Not to mention the frustration and cynicism that comes with spending months to work, spending tens of thousands of dollars, on some bullshit that someone made up. Nobody learned or gained anything really from the Schön scandal[^1]. It just sucks all around. Not to mention it ups the pressure on scientists when fakes build a publication record, leading to a vicious cycle where the pressure makes it more likely that folks bend the truth a little bit.
Ning Li’s superconductor anti-gravity claims are another good comparison. Very senior scientist, big claims, no repeatable results by any other teams. 30 years on and still no antigravity effect.
Sorta? Except her career is less "stopped publishing" and "left academia with her department chair and set up a DoD-attached corp that did something for decades we don't know about"
I hope we collectively figure out that "this idea is exclusively mine" for however long I can keep it secret or get my 'patent rights' enforced is an obsolete idea.
exclusive property over ideas is an old practice that needs to stay back in the 20th century, where it was useful and when the technology was not just here yet
can we have a 21st century digital renaissance yet?
Isn’t Kwon the one who was sent by the original pair’s corporate sponsors to supervise them? If so, that makes his behavior all the more bonkers? I really want to understand what he thinks he’s doing by going rogue like this in the year 2023.
It’s like the 19th century race to claim credit for discovering the source of the Nile, except obviously falsifiable due to communication technology.
Korean scientists announce room-temperature superconductor. Ridiculous amounts of squabbling over who invented it immediately ensue, even though the jury's still out on whether it even works.
Bc that's not how independent scientific verification works. Other labs need to replicate it themselves to avoid/reduce any bias from the original experiment.
This is pretty off-topic, but as a Korean, I can tell you that the public mood in Korea has been more of a skeptical one. The public is already making a lot of mockery about it.
I can't believe that the most important discovery of my lifetime is surrounded by this cloud of uncertainty.
At the same time, having watched Oppenheimer recently, when humanity discovered how to split the atom was chaotic too and met with a lot of scepticism.
> I can't believe that the most important discovery of my lifetime is surrounded by this cloud of uncertainty.
I don't get it, what else would you expect? Any claimed scientific breakthrough should generally be met with a healthy dose of skepticism at first. Competition between multiple or overlapping groups working on the same problem is common, and that alone will often result in some not-so-pretty scenes. Look up eg the story of the discovery of the HI virus. That's what you get when 'only' career accomplishments are at stake. Now add billion-dollar commercial potential to the mix, and I'd say that some nerves starting to unravel is a rather expected outcome.
The good thing is that this is science, and nature doesn't care about any of that. So we'll know soon enough.
> I don't get it, what else would you expect? Any claimed scientific breakthrough should generally be met with a healthy dose of skepticism at first.
Well, I've heard the name LK-99 is from the initials of discoverers Lee and JH Kim, and the year of discovery (1999).
So I don't buy that they were under great time pressure due to fear of getting scooped. Surely they'd have mountains of samples if they've been making it for 24 years?
> I can't believe that the most important discovery of my lifetime is surrounded by this cloud of uncertainty.
This is because you are a witness and obviously past discoveries are read in books just as a facts. Even when there is a story, the story doesn't have the "resolution" to mimic every hour, day, weeks, etc of the event. And in such great events, even if they don't work but the people involved think they work, there is great greed. Pure Shakespeare?
Borges wrote in Funes the Memorious [1] "Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day; he had never once erred or faltered, but each reconstruction had itself taken an entire day." [2]
I recently saw a documentary on the science teams that published the first image of a black hole. A lot of due diligence went into confirming their approach was sound, as getting it wrong would destroy their reputation.
In this case, the challenge is that these are relatively unknown scientists, from a relatively unknown lab. Of course their findings can be genuine, but we need to wait until it has been replicated.
One red flag is that he claimed he had a sample, but nobody could test it. If it is a room temperature, or close to room temperature super conductor, not a lot of equipment is needed. You just need a strong magnet to confirm the Meisnner effect. You can do this with off the shelf neodymium magnets. I have some on my fridge.
Given the historical importance of confirming the super conductivity at room temperature, I am sure you could obtain such magnets from an university department. Personally I would happily pay for an Uber to collect them.
Limited samples and the ones they have are extremely impure could be a reason. There’s super conductivity in them but method to make them is unrefined.
It works well for us. Most of the time the skeptics are right but we rarely read about those times. It’s a feature of this process, not a bug. Not that any individual comment or opinion is useful, but that’s an effect of a common attitude of, “oh yeah? Prove it!”
Even the brightest scientists have egos (maybe even more than the average person) and the prospect of fame and money has clouded the mind of many persons before.
I was in grad school when Pons and Fleischmann published their paper on Cold Fusion. It was exciting and anyone with a lab was trying to confirm or disprove their results. I’m getting similar vibes here.
Einstein's Relativity was called "fake Jew science". In national newspaper.
But you have to also understand every discovery is met with skepticism, because 99.9999999% of them turn out BS.
Ideally, humanity would cut it out with the idiotic hot takes (both rejecting and glorifying the paper... based on "hunches") and review the paper and try to reproduce. Unfortunately that's hard. While idiotic hot takes are easy.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, I guess. I'm not at all surprised there's this much drama around this. It sounds like it's a matter of a little time and we'll know what's going on.
> Einstein's Relativity was called "fake Jew science".
Thankfully, along the way, we discovered that "Jew Science" is quite good. I imagine an alien civilization visiting the Earth at that time trying to make sense of the arguments being given as to why one particular race/nationality's science is better than another's ... I think we'd find our answer to the Fermi paradox, maybe.
If you follow that rabbit hole you find that the Nazis had this whole batshit crazy alternative science. It was sort of like Lysenkoism in spirit (an ideologically conforming “alternative truth”) but zanier and wilder. Think hollow Earth and mystical traits of the Aryan race and such.
I heard a historian once describe the SS as “what you would get if you made the Church of Scientology a branch of the military.” The Nazi party was kind of unique in that it was more of a cult with a political party than a simple political party in the classical sense.
I speculate that this is why the Nazis are such a symbol of evil in spite of Stalin having a similar body count. It’s the same reason the Manson murders are creepier than your average serial killing or shoot ‘em up. The culty stuff gives it this extra layer of dark edginess. Stalin just wasn’t as edgelord.
Nazi mysticism and volkisch stuff lives on in the New Age and other areas which is why flipping people in those worlds to Q and other thinly veiled fascist cults was so easy. There’s already a ton of esoteric fascist memes floating around that world.
That # depends on if you count eastern front WWII casualties (& related civilian deaths via famine etc) in the total, and if you consider them Hitler or Stalin's "fault."
You do know that Stalin lived after 2nd WW almost a decade, yes? And you do know that the entire Eastern Europe was under the heavy boot of red plague, yes? Do you think that "oh, after WW2 Stalin never caused any more deaths, purges, famine, and became such a good boy"?
I suggest you read about communist plagues caused by his regime after WW2, not just before or during.
I'm not sure what you're on about, I never implied any of what you just said, and your tone is entirely inappropriate for this forum. I suggest you go read the HN guidelines (again?). This isn't Reddit.
In particular:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
and
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names"
Nothing in my comment said anything about the post-war period or implied any positive interpretation of Stalin or in fact the direction of the totals at all.
I kindly ask that you consider your interactions here more carefully.
Maybe he’s upset because you minimized and even tried to blame others for the tyranny that communism has plagued the world with? That you somehow did not consider the decades after the war where communists murdered 10s of millions of innocent people.
I can imagine someone being offended by that in the same way someone making excuses for the nazis would be offensive.
We started counting the XXth century biggest criminals, yes? And you simply stopped at WW2 because that's when Hitler (allegedly) died, yes? While I was counting the entirety of that century for the whole of those criminals life.
And I see this all the time on HN. Somebody responds to my comments just to be argumentative for the sake of it when I reply, despite me just making a simple comment. And then when I take their reply seriously and respond with proven facts they go with "oh HN rules and conduct bla bla". Well, maybe next time check the facts first, then be argumentative.
That was as a general idea. Now, personally, for this subject here, me living in an Eastern Europe country, having witnessed the horrors of communists, and fully know that Russia/USSR's Iron Curtain was just modern slavery where they (the red plague) pillaged and took all our countries resources and shipped them to Kremlin (hence why in the beginning of space race USSR was head to head with US) making them rich and the rest of us poorer, when somebody like you dismisses those facts I get to a boiling point.
Also, while on this subject, you can see that effect today. Everybody on the Eastern Europe/former Soviet Bloc countries hates Russia and why we simply took Ukrainian refugees in our homes without our still corrupt governments moving a finger at first. That's why we keep donating to Ukraine's war effort. Because a dismantled Russia is our only chance to have peace in Europe. And this is what Russians and Putin don't understand about us. We simply do not want another half a century of pillaging from them. And this is why Stalin vs Hitler body count are not similar. Both are bad, but Stalin was way worse.
Again, you've just mischaracterized my comment, and appear to be imagining an argument and disagreement where there really was none, and then using that as a rather negative platform.
I feel no need to engage with you further, it's not an honest discussion, you're just making strawmen.
Also, he was an ally and posed in historical pictures celebrating history with his good friends, Churchill and Roosevelt. It took a while to overturn good rep like that.
