Everyone in this thread needs to understand that particularly for materials science, and particularly when there is bad methodology documentation, it is really, really normal for early replication attempts to fail. What works in one lab will often need to be adjusted to work in another, with different equipment, altitude, humidity, all sorts of stuff. Making it even worse, apparently the original team can't even get production correct in more than 10% of runs! Combined with the slipshod methodology, doesn't this make you feel like it was silly to release the arXiv paper when they did? Well, the LK-99 team agree, according to them it was a rogue industrial scientist that they'd apparently fired four months ago who published it to arXiv with himself listed as third author. They wanted more time to nail down sample production and otherwise make a paper to their standards before release, but it effectively leaked and to avoid having credit taken from them for potentially months (or like, forever - science can be brutal) some of them decided to publish what they had on hand within a few hours. This sucks for them, a lot. I don't believe that their intention was to put out work with errors in it or incomplete methodology.
Secondly, this all happened two days ago! If the methodology was perfect, I still wouldn't expect good replication results back within two (part non-business!) days.
I don't know if this material is legit. I really hope it is. But the process of figuring that out could potentially take months (or more), and a two-day-later failed to replicate is not a death sentence.
As much as it sucks, this is really just going to take time to prove it's not a superconductor. If it is a superconductor, we may not know for a while either, unless one of the influencers/"makers" attempting to reproduce the material succeeds and posts some good convincing video of flux pinning or other Meissner effect stuff (that person is going to go insanely viral, if it happens).
Not just materials science though. I’m a longtime reader of Derek Lowe’s In the Pipeline blog, and he often emphasizes the trickiness of lab work and lab techniques. But the model we have of science from elementary and high school doesn’t give us room for the random, ephemeral things that come into play in actual experimental work. Our model is methods equal result, every time, even though jiggling your foot a little bit to get the feeling back may have somehow made your small molecule production have less binding affinity or something. And yes, eventually you figure that out and stop jiggling your foot but two years have passed.
NileRed and other Maker Channels are great to demonstrate that. In every video, there's 1 - 2 of these situations - Nile has been following some documented, established procedure which should result in a specific reaction and it looks decent to the layman - and then it just doesn't work at all. And then he re-does pretty much the same thing and it works.
I can't imagine how frustrating that can be. And then you have to do it with something you don't even know works. Kind of like dealing with obscure retro computers. Does it still work? No one knows. What does it do if it works? No one knows. Can it even function or are parts missing? That's right - no one knows.
It is incredibly frustrating, my experience in an experimental physics lab involved in creation of certain types of wafers for SEM characterization, there are so many things that can go wrong for certain materials. just a certain speck of dust being in the wrong place at the wrong time
Anyone who has dived into FDM 3D printing knows this pain well.
Filament is too wet, the air is too cold, a batch of filament might behave wrong. Or everything goes 99% right and the axis of the moon and the constellations are off and it ruins your entire print after 57 hours. Then you start again and it breaks at 59.5 hours. I’m sure it’s not as hardcore as synthesizing superconductors but the real world is incredibly messy and imprecise.
Well to be fair it's very difficult to nail down every possible parameter to 99.99% accuracy and precision from the original successful experiment. There's a lot of randomness even in a highly controlled, well funded, modern laboratory setting, let alone less well equipped facilities.
We also don't have a culture of replication. Basically all of the post docs I worked with in the lab lamented how hard it can be to replicate reported syntheses in chemistry wet labs.
Everything from humidity and altitude to undocumented "magic tricks" (eg baking something in an oven under vaccuum for a week to get.rid.of.all.the.water.)
I heard anecdotes that experiments were sometimes literally only reproducible in one exact lab because reasons.
Turns out there's just as much art as there is science in experimentation...
The simple truth is we don’t have a culture of replication because no one is paying and no one is paying because no one is demanding it as part of the incentive system that the money is part of…
If a prerequisite of publication in a top tier journal was someone having replicated the work… anyone at all… then the quality of write up would improve dramatically because all the stuff that never gets written up would be written up so that the second lab costs them less money to do the replication work, so the second lab doesn’t spent a month failing because they didn’t bake the powder in a vacuum for a week before performing the entire synthesis under dry nitrogen purge when the methodology just said the powder had been dried and the synthesis was performed at ambient pressure in a zero humidity atmosphere…
> If a prerequisite of publication in a top tier journal was someone having replicated the work… anyone at all… then the quality of write up would improve dramatically
I would expect pairs of labs to gang up, with one of them giving the other the details so that they can reproduce the result, and the contents of the publication staying more or less the same.
Reason is that everybody wants to prevent others from being able to build on one’s work faster than one can do themselves.
Even if the lab you give more information isn’t run by a buddy of you, having a single competitor is better than having the whole world compete with you.
For example, in this case, people will start cooking all kinds of variations on this stuff to find one that’s easier to produce, allows for higher currents before losing superconductivity, doesn’t have lead in it, etc.
Oh absolutely, there’s a lot of potential issues with the simple suggestion of requiring replication. I was tempted to write a bunch more to outline strategies and counter strategies from a game theory perspective but realised it was basically unnecessary since it will never happen.
> The simple truth is we don’t have a culture of replication because no one is paying and no one is paying because no one is demanding it as part of the incentive system that the money is part of…
A darker comment: the non-replication of results implies that nobody's actually making use of the science output, and an alarmingly large fraction of unreplicated positive results are simply a waste of time.
The problem IMHO is funding related. Often enough the original lab's grant is barely enough to account for the research and a shoddily put together paper, the rest is filled with a crapload of un(der)paid/"voluntold" labour.
It's rare for researchers to get the budget to replicate someone else's work - this case might be one of the few exceptions given that everyone and their dog want to be the first one to show the world a successful replication. Hell, there are Youtube and Tiktok streamers on the task as well, that way you know just how nuts everyone is going.
Even in well funded fields, nobody wants to give away easy follow-on publications to other labs.
Oh, you want to document things well enough that people can build on your work and give you citations eventually. But if you've just demonstrated a groundbreaking technique for Foo and the obvious next step is to test it on Bar, you've got an opportunity to get your lab two papers instead of one, and all you have to do is less documentation?
In that light, industrial processes seem even more impressive.
The super power of modern technology is the ability to perform precise steps on a massive scale and basically forever.
Obviously it takes a lot of effort to keep the machinery running but still, the mere fact that it's running in the first place blows your mind if you think about it.
Modern Machinery multiplies the impact on the world of any human who operates it.
Research experimentation is like doing a gymnastics performance, you're trying to prove the limits of what can be done.
Industry is all about doing it cheap, consistently and at scale. So by comparison you don't want any flourish or special conditions that take lots of practice and super skilled operators.
The magic of industrial engineering is figuring out how to go from research to scale. But the flipside is all the crazy stuff that is achievable at the frontier that never gets productionised
This was my experience as well, my job was basically to specialize in reverse engineering those exact “baking” techniques in the tube furnace and it is so challenging and subject to variability.
FOGBANK, the classified styrofoam-like material used as a filler in US thermonuclear warheads, had a similar issue. They needed to restart production, but the new samples didn't work! It turns out an impurity present in the original batch was critical. Once they reproduced that impurity, the material acted correctly.
Samsung 3nm had a yield rate well below 20% back in early 2022, and that's not unheard of while still in the development phase. To be economically viable the yield rates have to be around 80%, so mature nodes can be expected to be in that ballpark.
But the performance binning is a direct result of careful design that goes out of its way to ensure that a subset of failures can still lead to a workable/binnable products.
It's still a failure to produce a part that matches the full design.
Absolutely, ultimate failures to replicate are generally multiple labs across dozens and dozens of attempts and continuous communication with the authors. And yeah, it's a thing in science in general, materials science is just particularly susceptible because of the nature of the work.
> But the model we have of science from elementary and high school doesn’t give us room for the random, ephemeral things that come into play in actual experimental work. Our model is methods equal result, every time, even though jiggling your foot a little bit to get the feeling back may have somehow made your small molecule production have less binding affinity or something.
That wasn't my experience, in either high school physics or undergrad electronics. I hated keeping a lab book (just wanted to 'do' & see results I suppose) but the emphasis was always on recording as much as possible to understand what's important and what happened etc. when you review later.
I suppose looking through another lens you can call that an expectation of repeatability, but it's just a matter of emphasis isn't it? You know it might be hard to repeat, so you record as much as possible about the setup & process to remove variables and control what needs to be controlled (especially if you don't yet understand what that is, or the full scope).
If research moves more to arxiv + discussion forums rather than paid journals, sharing research results earlier seems like a good thing, not bad. If they didn't publish early, when they published maybe things would be clearer for other researchers. But by publishing earlier other people have the choice to engage with it or wait for later. Seems like many people decided to not wait, so it seems like it was a good choice?
I think this is the best direction for science generally: publish everything open and early.
It might be naive, but I would love an environment where everyone self published or arxiv papers/reviews/datasets/models. Then journals could publish the best papers/review preprints.
I imagine a world where journals beg researchers for the rights to publish their paper after seeing an excellent preprint. Or a journal finds an interesting comment on PubPeer and pays for the author to expand it into a more detailed review.
Yes I think we will end there someday but are still overcoming a publishing model historically based on physical journals. Open science becoming more common shows that progress is occurring.
It will take a while before academics and systems upgrade skills and infrastructure. When they do, I am excited for enhanced capabilities like continuous science. Imagine a website with a study result with P values which continuously update as data is published and integrated into the existing analysis!
This is an incredibly high-profile type of result, so in this case people are willing to spend a lot of resources replicating this result, even if the paper appears half-baked and unfinished. Most scientific results aren’t like that: people will be enthusiastic about polished work but won’t waste any time on something half-baked. Think about how many “Show HN” posts don’t get voted up to the front page. Now imagine there is no HN and no voting system to rank posts, and also you didn’t have anyone test your code so your cool project immediately crashes on 50% of browsers.
This is a great philosophy in software, where meaningful contributions can be made by any given person with a laptop. It's not as compelling when the only people who can meaningfully advance the research need to spend millions in grant money and/or allocate time to use expensive equipment that's shared across other research groups.
What is the difference? I would argue it is more important to publish early when using shared expensive equipment, since there is a huge opportunity cost to wasting resources when better information exists.
Science is generally dealing with more data than any one person can look at. Anyone with a laptop can provide unique analyses of the data which can fuel new hypotheses, which can be explored with simulations and further analysis.
the big machines represent a bottleneck only in the physical experiments that they enable, but a lot of science can be done around that.
Tighten the feedback loops by all means I say
Especially for public science, but that’s another story
Just want to add to this thought: this isn't to say I believe the status quo in academia isn't antiquated. It is. My point is that we can't just "take open source and move it over there," so to speak.
It's not dissimilar to the way food recipe books work.
Creating a dish, replicating the dish, writing a recipe, getting competent cooks to follow the recipe, getting non-competant cooks to follow it, and so on. [1]
It all leads to multiple revisions and takes a lot of time.
And this is for -food-. Imagine doing it for something a lot less tolerant of variation.
[1] old recipes start with "pluck 2 chickens" because, you know, someone followed the recipe and didn't pluck the chickens...
> Combined with the slipshod methodology, doesn't this make you feel like it was silly to release the arXiv paper when they did? Well, the LK-99 team agree
As I understand it, the 99 in the name is because they first discovered it in 1999.
Seems to me that if you didn't manage to nail down the process in 24 years, it's probably time to publish and let someone else have a go.
But if I was an early-career researcher looking to establish myself, secure funding and maybe a tenure-track position, and I had a nobel-prize-winning discovery up my sleeve, I can't imagine many things that would take precedence.
I mean, obviously whatever happened happened. It just seems strange to simultaneously claim to have discovered something 24 years ago, and to have been rushed into publishing prematurely.
There was no one who would be willing to fund their research into a room temperature semiconductor? Even though they had a sample that passed the basic tests?
You make it sound like that is easy while not knowing much about them or their circumstances. There still isn't. Look at their shitty rented lab. Obviously there are aspects to their situation that not everyone here is aware of.
the world is filled with quacks looking for funding for superconductor research, I can definitely imagine that 20 years ago it would have been difficult to find funding for blue-sky research in superconductivity even with a modest amount of evidence in-hand
> mean, obviously whatever happened happened. It just seems strange to simultaneously claim to have discovered something 24 years ago, and to have been rushed into publishing prematurely.
Probably there was a big team. Somebody with a low rank worked his/her ass off on the breakdown, but then noticed their names would be filled off or put only in acknowledgements section, to be replaced with some senior lab manager that did just administrative paperwork and barely knew the work. So they said screw it and just published whatever they could before the laurels were stolen.
And if this technology is on the critical path to solving world hunger/curing cancer or ending wars, then those things have been delayed 24 years, and millions of people are dead, all so these guys could have a shot at a paper in Nature.
This comment intrigued me, so I pulled together some information.
The first paper submitted is titled "The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor." It lists three authors: Sukbae Lee, Ji-Hoon Kim, and Young-Wan Kwon. Its timestamp is Saturday, July 22, 2023 at 07:51:19 UTC. [1]
The second paper submitted is titled "Superconductor Pb10−xCux(PO4)6O showing levitation at room temperature and atmospheric pressure and mechanism." This paper lists six authors: Sukbae Lee, Jihoon Kim, Hyun-Tak Kim, Sungyeon Im, SooMin An, Keun Ho Auh [2]. Its timestamp is Saturday, July 22nd, 2023 at 10:11:28 UTC, or two hours and twenty minutes after the first paper.
In both papers the first author is Sukbae Lee and the second author is Jihoon Kim, and in both their affiliation is given as "Quantum Energy Research center, Inc." in Seoul. The first paper posted has Young-Wan Kwon as third author. The second paper does not have Young-Wan Kwon as an author, and has four additional authors with various affiliations.
The second paper appears to have been was prepared in LaTeX, and the first paper appears to have been prepared in Word. The title and abstract of the first paper explicitly claim the creation of the world's first room temperature and pressure superconductor. The title and abstract of the second paper don't explicitly claim demonstration of the first superconductor, though they use some terminology that sounds like superconducting properties.
The accusation is that Young-Wan Kwon published the first paper without the consent of the rest of the LK-99 team, listed himself as third author, and left off the other four. Two hours later, the rest of the LK-99 team stuffed as much as they had into the second paper, and released it as soon as possible.
To me that totally seems like what happened. It explains why there are two different papers from the same group submitted on the same subject on the same day, and it explains why the author lists are different between the two. I haven't yet looked in detail, but I'm betting it also explains a lot of the oddities that people have noted in the first two papers.
This also makes me way more excited about the possibility these claims are legit. The information so far is consistent with a research group that was forced to publish early, and who produced a superconductor through a fabrication process that is a bit tricky. There's nowhere near enough evidence to conclude LK-99 is a room temperature superconductor. But one failed replication doesn't prove LK-99 isn't a superconductor - if the fabrication process is finicky we'd expect to see a few dozen failed reproductions and a few successful reproductions
Yeah, this in-fighting thing has been proposed before as credibility-supporting. Here's an earlier tweet with some background on the palaver, account worth following on it all:
Thank you, I made the original comment on a whim after coming to the thread and being disappointed at how everyone was talking about this result as though it immediately exposed Lee, Jihoon Kim, Hyun-Tak Kim etc as frauds. It was also late at night and I was tired ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯ I really appreciate you putting together some more sourcing and explanatory material for it.
Side note, the upvotes on the original comment have pushed me well past the 500 upvotes mark, so now I have a downvoted button on most comments. Which is actually kind of annoying on mobile because God, they are right beside each other and absolutely tiny, with no remaining visual indicator afterwards as to whether you upvoted or downvoted a comment.
Rushing out the second paper was a mistake and not a good look for the group. It would have been enough to force the retraction of Kwon's paper, and even without a retraction it's very unlikely it would have counted for anything with such weak data.
idk if it turns out this material is a room temperature superconductor, the rushed second paper will have been the right thing to do. Science happening in real time is gonna be messy
If it's about the Nobel, no it doesn't make sense. There's been more than one Nobel where the author(s) of an earlier paper were passed over in favour of a later paper because it was insufficient to conclusively prove the claim. One example would be Randy Hulet.
In general I'd agree with you, but in this case I think the second group very likely didn't reproduce the first group's material. The measured electrical properties of the two groups aren't even close to each other. I think that strongly suggests the two groups were measuring different materials, and that the structure of the second group's material differed in some way. A more convincing failed replication would find mostly similar electrical properties and reproduce the levitation that the first group found, but explain it with a phenomenon other than superconductors
we used to joke in the chemistry lab that someone once tried to reproduce a reaction that was done in india. Procedure called for boiling ether, room temperature, WTF. Of course, room temperature in india can get up to 40C.
In Sabine's opinion. I've seen Sabine's video when it was posted and intend no disrespect to her. The predominant theoretical explanation for the alleged new superconductor is that it may be a new type of superconductor, not type I or type II, or it may be presenting in unusual ways. There have been a bunch of confusing theoretical prodictions, like anisotropic conduction (how would that affect the way levitation looks)?, chance-based copper substitution in the lattice that could lead to superconducting clusters in what is otherwise just normal lead apatite (how would that affect the way levitation looks in a bulk chunk like that?), etc.
Plenty of people who know the theory of superconductors are sceptical. They're not wrong about the theory. It's also worth pointing out that every previous time a new superconductor critical temp limit was broken in a major way, superconductor theory saying it shouldn't be possible was a cause for early scepticism amongst those who knew the theory. Sabine's gut reactions in a YouTube video doesn't make the result very unlikely. It doesn't make her wrong either, she's right that all existing superconductors, if pure and homogeneous, would not behave like that on a magnet. It is also the case that all existing superconductors do not superconduct at room temperature and ambient pressure. It is also the case that (absent fraud, which is on everyone's mind after Ranga Dias) we don't know of any material that could plausible behave the way that video shows something behaving. The only thing I can think of that could behave that way would be impure/heterogeneous diamagnetic material, but like 15x as diamagnetic as the next highest non-superconductor, which means if that material exists we don't know about it. If it was fraud, it would be with a magnetised sample on a magnet like that. The reason I think fraud is the only option if it was a magnetised sample is because that's a really, really obvious explanation for the effect and they have to have measured the sample for magnetism before putting it on a magnet. They would also literally feel it/see it/hear it while placing the sample on the magnet. Also it would almost certainly have to be composed of different elements than they describe, because lead apatite with copper definitely should not be ferromagnetic at all.
The thing is - there is a totally easy and simple mechanism to create early-stage believability.
Take a video of you producing and testing it, with a mobile phone.
It only works 10% of the time? Not an issue, post 10 videos.
Whatever.
Would it be perfect? No, of course it could be faked.
But i guaranteed people would be a ton less skeptical and willing to push hard on this if the original authors had done this sort of thing.
It's honestly not that hard to set up a tripod and a mobile phone, and even in the circumstances here, where they apparently got pushed to publish quickly, it could still show that it works.
It also would help those trying to reproduce see exactly what you did, in detail.
A lot of science takes a mind-numbing amount of time at the lab desk. Something like 40 hours a week just dedicated to picking apart fruit flies with tweezers under a microscope is pretty common. I think I read somewhere that with MatSci, mortars and pestles and blisters are involved. It would be a lot of recording that would have to happen, and then you have to record every setting on every instrument you touch. How do we know that that's actually that reagent in that bottle? Yeah this just doesn't hold up for actual science. It's not something you can just take a Zoom recording of.
I'm sorry, you really think it's that hard to have a camera running in a lab that records footage continuously, and you save the clips where you succeed?
What percent of the cost of running these experiments do you think that is to buy a nest or a unifi camera?
Heck, Do you believe the university doesn’t already have a surveillance system almost certainly in the hallway to the lab. Plenty of them even have cameras in every lab already.
In the past two weeks, I was in three material science labs in Georgia, and South Carolina and all of them had cameras in every lab.
This is not that hard. If you wanna argue that it’s not helpful, that’s one thing. But arguing that it is difficult seems very silly.
Ah, another example of how something is so easy when you just imagine other people doing it.
Your aspiration, I suppose, is that this (e.g., surveillance?) video will document the experimental activities in enough detail so that they can be replicated and/or convincingly proven. As a practical matter, it's ludicrous to think that any of the examples that you suggest as obvious and trivial would do either of these things much less survive a cursory consideration of their cost/benefit. Maybe you should prototype your system using a Nest camera in the corner of a lab and demonstrate reading the label on a critical reagent from the video.
Further, this is a classic example of premature optimization. Should only labs that are confident that they will be contesting for a Nobel prize be monitoring all their experiments or do you also envision this as an activity for labs with lesser aspirations or self-esteem?
What makes you believe I haven't done this before?
If you want to know, maybe, you know, ask ("Have you ever tried to do this before in a lab?" - this is also not hard, and even the people not contending for the Nobel prize can do it), rather than just assert that this is just something i only want to see others do in my imagination, which is not just rude, but actually, it turns out, wrong.
But hey, don't let that stop you. Please, continue to assert things about me rather than actually ask or otherwise use means that might gain knowledge of me and what i have or haven't done.
To answer the rest, so, actually, no, that's not my aspiration. My aspiration was "producing and testing", specifically targeted at "early stage believability". Which is what I said.
You seem to have decided that means "be able to show all pieces in a convincing way" or "make a how to video". That would be silly, which is why i didn't say that.
This is is mostly about showing a video of the end result in a meaningful way, as the literal top thread on this on HN now does, posting multiple reproduction and testing videos. If you can show production in some way at all, awesome.
I'm not interested in the residents cynics shitting on every single way that it could be faked, nor are most other people.
To most people, those videos are much more convincing than all the papers and anything else you produce.
As for who monitors, as I mentioned elsewhere, lots of labs already have cameras, because universities now put them in almost every room. As I mentioned, I was even in multiple material science labs in the past week, and all had cameras.
But please, feel free to continue to pretend that this is some super complicated thing to do when it's already being done and being used to good effect, convincingly, on HN, right now.
I guess they all just contending for a nobel prize, because otherwise, this is clearly impossible, despite it literally having been done.
I don't know what problem you think you're solving with the idea of using webcams in a lab. The inventors of LK-99 have a video of their sample on a magnet. So it's not addressing that problem. Some replication attempts are livestreaming on Twitch, so it's not solving that problem.
Do you think that it would be easier to replicate the LK-99 process if video from a corner of their lab existed?
OK. I want to know - have you produced compelling video of a controversial experiment in a lab using the pre-existing security cameras? And did that video quiet any critics?
Production takes more than a day - I don't know of any phone that can take videos lasting that long (if people are even willing to watch it). You can of course take several videos and splice them together.
Worse yet, I can with a bit of trick photography and standard liquid nitrogen cooled super conductors make a video that looks like success even though I'm working with colored wax for materials in the production process. (liquid nitrogen is hard to disguise, but with some trick photography and multiple takes I can do it). Or I can skip all that and spend some time in blender to do the above via CGI. (well I don't know blender that well, and most blender animations are obvious, but someone with a few months could pull this off)
It is not that hard or expensive to record footage for a few days at a time having a continuous overwrite.
You likely don't even need to go that far -Most universities have cameras everywhere, anyway, including plenty of universities that have cameras in every lab of this kind.
It is also done by millions of home users all the time.
As I said, yes, things can be faked, but who cares that’s not the point
Which is why the top thread is now replication videos?
I didn’t say strong evidence, I said evidence.I was, in fact, quite clear that it is not strong evidence. you seem to have added that so that you could be more dismissive.
They write that:
"
As shown in Figure 9, the x-ray diffraction spectrum of the
ground powder of the finally sintered product is highly consistent with the x-ray diffraction
spectrum reported by Lee et al.[3] and coincides well with the diffraction pattern of the apatite.
This proves that we have successfully synthesized the modified lead-apatite as Lee et al.[3.4]
"
(First off, you need to pay to the spectrum swear jar. an XRD pattern is a pattern, not a spectrum, it resolves space, not energy.)
But looking at figure 9 shows that the material is not the same.
They are missing a peak at ~17.5 degrees, and have an extra one around 25 degrees.
Further, all the peaks seem to be shifted about the same amount from the LK-99 structure, as the LK-99 is from pure lead-apatite.
This indicates that they have an even smaller unit cell. So if the .5% compression in the original LK-99 paper is correct, there could easily be an overcompression present in this article.
All the XRD pattern tells you is that they produced something wrong, an that it did not superconduct.
It makes it impressive how pure the phase was in the original LK-99 paper.
I will however say that there are some problems with the XRD pattern in the original paper too:
They did not write which energy the XRD was measured at, one would then guess that it is Cu-Ka, but who knows.
Under any circumstances, a peak should not be missing completely from a powder measurement (if it was a pellet, it could be missing due to orientation effects)
I got a similar impression from the XRD spectra, but I don't think it's correct to focus on the shifts. That could easily be a minor calibration issue. The biggest difference I see is in the peak around 44 degrees, which is very pronounced in the original work and much weaker in this work.
There are strong similarities between the XRD patterns, but considering the theoretical paper yesterday about selective site substitution being necessary to achieve superconductivity, it's reasonable to suspect that these "minor" differences may be critical.
Recently[1], there was an exciting claim that a new type of material could conduct electricity perfectly at room temperature (this is what is meant by "superconductivity")[4]. This material was a version of lead-apatite [2], a type of mineral, that was altered with certain additions and made by combining two other materials, lanarkite and copper phosphide.
The researchers writing this report wanted to check if this claim was true. So, they made the same types of materials (lanarkite, copper phosphide, and the altered lead-apatite) and tested how they conducted electricity and reacted to magnets.
What they found was that lanarkite (Pb2SO5) didn't conduct electricity well at all, and copper phosphide Cu3P) conducted electricity similar to a semiconductor [3]. The altered lead-apatite, which was supposed to be the superconductor, behaved more like a semiconductor (a type of material that can sometimes conduct electricity, depending on conditions).
Also, a key property of superconductors is that they repel magnets. But when the researchers put a magnet near their lead-apatite, there was no repulsion.
Because of these tests, they're suggesting that the original claim about this room-temperature superconductor should be re-examined more carefully. It doesn't seem to behave like a superconductor in their tests.
I think this theoretical result by Griffin at the Livermore Lab explains why labs are having difficulty replicating the LK-99 sample: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.16892.pdf
There are basically two repeating crystal cells. Her theoretical calculation shows superconducting properties when you substitute one cell for copper, but not the other. The "bad" substitution is a lower energy substitution that occurs more easily.
"Finally, the calculations presented here suggest that
Cu substitution on the appropriate (Pb(1)) site displays
many key characteristics for high-TC superconductivity,
namely a particularly flat isolated d-manifold, and the
potential presence of fluctuating magnetism, charge and
phonons. However, substitution on the other Pb(2) does
not appear to have such sought-after properties, despite
being the lower-energy substitution site. This result hints
to the synthesis challenge in obtaining Cu substituted on
the appropriate site for obtaining a bulk superconducting
sample."
Research out of Berkeley, 1 Aug 2023: theoretical analysis suggests high-Tc superconductors from apatite possible, points to synthesis challenges.
> Finally, the calculations presented here suggest that
Cu substitution on the appropriate (Pb(1)) site displays
many key characteristics for high-TC superconductivity,
namely a particularly flat isolated d-manifold, and the
potential presence of fluctuating magnetism, charge and
phonons. However, substitution on the other Pb(2) does
not appear to have such sought-after properties, despite
being the lower-energy substitution site. This result hints
to the synthesis challenge in obtaining Cu substituted on
the appropriate site for obtaining a bulk superconducting
sample.
Edit: Layperson summary from https://twitter.com/Andercot/status/1686215574177841152. It's crazy for the sim to not only be favorable towards SC, but also showing results that align with what the researchers proposed and what the replicators are experiencing (difficulty in synthesis).
> The simulations modeled what the original Korean authors proposed was happening to their material - where copper atoms were percolating into a crystal structure and replacing lead atoms, causing the crystal to strain slightly and contract by 0.5%. This unique structure was proposed to allow this amazing property.
> Lastly, these interesting conduction pathways only form when the copper atom percolates into the less likely location in the crystal lattice, or the 'higher energy' binding site. This means the material would be difficult to synthesize since only a small fraction of crystal gets its copper in just the right location.
Some days I wish I could just run DFT on everything and have it spit out the ones with "interesting" results and then patent those. Unfortunately, this is not feasible (computationally) nor likely to produce very many true positives.
I wonder if you could troll theorists into doing simulations of just about any substance by publishing convincing-looking papers in arxiv. Scratch that: we know it's possible.
Brute forcing the space of all chemicals isn't practical, so just do what humans do, generate plausible candidates with a neural net and then check with DFT.
The patent system in its current form isn't going to survive the next few decades, on this I agree. First step is probably going to be chopping down the patent length from its current 15 year term.
I don't think these results will replicate and it's still unclear whether the material has any useful properties. But I could be wrong. The theory sims say nothing; it's a bunch of noise right now.
> In addition, when a pressed Pb10-xCux(PO4)6O pellet is located on top of a commercial Nd2Fe14B magnet at room temperature, no repulsion could be felt and no magnetic levitation was observed either.
So what about the video[1] that shows magnetic levitation occurring?
Since the linked article was unable to reproduce this effect, it seems there are two possibilities:
1. The video is fake (which is really, really hard to imagine since that would predictably end the authors' careers).
2. The sample synthesized for the linked article doesn't match the original one for whatever reason.
Apparently a new paper is supposed to come out from the original authors about the production method [0]. So it really is unclear whether everybody generates the same material.
It's a shame that these papers were published before they were polished by the authors.
Seems the fastest way to clear this up would just be for the original team to send a sample to some other scientists for testing. That would solve any issues regarding other teams reproducing the material incorrectly, and at a first pass, what everyone cares about is whether its a superconductor at room temp, not how to make it.
> Once the findings are published in a peer-reviewed journal, which Kim says is in the works, he will support anyone who wants to create and test LK-99 for themselves. [1]
Sounds like that’s the plan once they’ve secured the Nature paper.
Sounds like they have it the wrong way round. Considering the uncertainty surrounding all of this, and the initial problems with replication, why would Nature publish this before it has been independently replicated?
Not sure what they're worried about here. They already have priority, and if this replicates, every journal on Earth will be fighting over the privilege to publish it.
The world's leading science journal publishing grand claims without verification, in the face of mounting evidence that the claims might be incorrect, is most certainly not "the scientific method".
> It would be entirely infeasible for them to require someone else to test the sample.
Actually this is the scientific method. Anything else just makes publishing groundbraking results harder and depends on some people’s (faulty) judgements.
Nature basically publishes the sensational claims papers. That's their model, anything "high impact" goes there. It's then on other scientists to publish work refuting it or proving it's not correct. It's an issue that the refutations tend to go in lower impact journals, but it's the way it's works.
They are busy trying to characterise it properly and making sure they understand what they have created. At least that's what they ought to be doing if this isn't a big scam.
Normally (at least in my field), that’s beyond the scope of peer review in the traditional sense. Peer review typically just involves review of just the material submitted to the journal (manuscript, data, maybe code depending on its size and complexity). Depending on the experiment, reproducing a result may require resources, equipment, or skills unavailable to the reviewer or that cannot be acquired in a reasonable amount of time needed for the review.
Peer review serves basically as a smell test where capable experts certify that the paper is novel, interesting, properly justifies its claims, and contains enough detail to reproduce the results. It is not uncommon for only a few labs to contain all of the expensive, specialized equipment to reproduce an experiment, and getting that experiment working (if it is reproducible) can take a significant time commitment from multiple individuals in a lab. Also keep in mind that reviewers are normally not paid for their services, journals typically want at least two independent reviewers (who they pick, sometimes with input from the author to narrow down who has the background to perform the review), and going from submission to publication is typically a many-month process without the high standard of reproduction.
Reproduction happens in the manner that is going on right now. If your publication makes waves, people will want to build on your result and either reproduce it as a first step or conduct a related experiment that adds evidence to support the hypothesis. This way is far more practical, but the devious thing is that, if you lie and manipulate your data, some poor grad student might waste two years of their PhD trying to get your thing to work.
Having journals or some independent body fund reproduction themselves runs into both capital challenges and the problem of attracting a large enough number of capable scientists to cover every discipline who would only want to work on reproduction full time. As nice as that would be, I’m not sure such a venture would work in the real world.
That's true but if a reputable journal publishes this before that verification is in and it ends up being mistaken or even a hoax or fraud then their reputation will be dinged so with the stakes this high given the material and the visibility there is a fair chance that they will indeed wait for independent replication before committing to publishing it. But I don't see it happening during the peer review process itself, it will happen simply because another lab tries the same and gets lucky (or not, in which case the whole thing will blow over).
The journals reputation will be dinged if it comes to light that they have not adequately performed their due diligence. Which, as has been explained above, does not include replication.
If you require replication for publication practically nothing will get published ever. Once published, others will attempt to replicate, and it is the authors' reputation on the line if nobody manages to replicate it following the paper and consulting with the authors.
They are not going to replicate this themselves, obviously. But extraordinary claims etc, and this one is about as extraordinary as they come. Papers that are non-controversial even if they might turn out to be wrong get published all the time. But papers where 95% of the scientists out there are going to be super skeptical will find it much harder to get published. Both the authors and the publishers have a reputation to protect. Keep in mind that the peer-reviewers will have to sign off on the publication as well.
It would be a variation on what's already out there right now. And the whole problem is that the recipe is vague, in other words even if they have a working sample they don't know exactly what goes into making it.
I’m asking on a legitimate basis. I am not involved in the science world and only know about Nature as a publication from high school and college. The way Nature was described to gave me the sense that you weren’t going to have a paper published unless you had some surprising results, and that didn’t include the null hypothesis.
If that’s not the case for this publication then I would appreciate if someone showed me how they changed in the past decade
They publish surprising and high-profile results, yes.
However, there's also an informal crazy claims filter. If your paper is so surprising they think it might be made up or wrong, they might ask for extensive revisions prior to publication.
So they won't publish my paper saying the moon is made of cheese no matter how surprising such a finding might be.
Easy to say, but this is hard. "I got a box of dust from you". Now was this the lab sending dust because they know it doesn't work, and want to hide their tracks; the receiving lab destroying the sample because they want their own discovery to win a Nobel prize; or just regular managed in shipping? You should be able to think of other reasons that an unethical lab on either end might want to ensure the samples are destroyed instead of tested.
The above can be managed, but it can't be done over a weekend. The lab has stated they are willing to send their working samples out to other labs. However to ensure it arrives safely (avoiding issues like the above) means that you shouldn't even be concerned until two months have passed, and accept reassurance for a few months after that.
This assumes the chemical structure is stable, which may not be the case. If the material is truly not superconductive at room temperature, it will take a long time to gather enough diverse experimental evidence to build a scientific consensus. A good rule of thumb is probably 3 months to reproduce, 6 months to discredit.
If I can replicate a result, that's fairly straightforward: I replicated it!
If I can't, that doesn't mean the result was necessarily wrong; maybe I just messed up, or got unlucky and the result only happens 20% of the time. You might need several independent failed replications to start to be confident that the original result was definitely wrong.
It's like saying: there's a buried treasure in this acre. If I find it on my first pass through with a metal detector, job done. If I don't find it on my first pass, I'll probably need to make several more passes, maybe bring in fancier equipment and so on, before I could be pretty confident that it's not there.
Someone claims that a human can run a 5 minute mile.
To prove it true, you just need to show a human who can run that fast. To provide it fast, you have to accumulate incontrovertible evidence that it's simply beyond us...
>It's a shame that these papers were published before they were polished by the authors.
Saying nothing about these specific papers, in general I disagree strongly.
I find the peer review process to be extremely flawed. If you get a bunch of interest from experts in the field on the internet who comment and do work to understand, replicate and analyse (and without hiding behind fake-anonymity) that is a million times better in every dimension than anonymous "peer review." That is, it works better as a BS detector, it works better identifying issues in the data analysis, methodology and so on.
Anonymous peer review has been great compared to alternatives for hundreds of years, just now, our alternatives are frequently better than that.
For these papers in particular, it seems like peer review was badly needed before publication. Sure, it's a meme that Reviewer 2 is always going to complain that could you please run like, 50 more experiments, and for something as potentially groundbreaking as room-temp superconductor, even more so.
But one of the main issues with the papers right now is their chemistry is deficient. The key chemical reactions don't balance, and there's also an unexpected and unexplained oxidation state change in the copper. This is the kind of issue that would be flagged quickly in peer review, and it's the sort of catastrophic paper issue that makes replication problematic--how can you be sure that you're comparing against what the original sample was?
Sure and all of that is coming out in public with people's names and reputations attached to it. So we're certainly not behind on any of those issues. I say there are very real benefits too.
I think a huge part of that is translation: imagine what you might sound like if you wrote a press release for or tried to explain to a layman some project you're involved in, and then had it translated to Korean.
Some benign description of why room temp atmospheric pressure superconductors are interesting becomes 'a brand-new historical event that opens a new era for humankind'.
> imagine what you might sound like if you wrote a press release for or tried to explain to a layman some project you're involved in, and then had it translated to Korean.
My understanding is that this was supposed to be a (draft of a) research paper, not a "press release". The article certainly doesn't read like laymen are the intended audience.
> Some benign description of why room temp atmospheric pressure superconductors are interesting becomes 'a brand-new historical event that opens a new era for humankind'.
Although I don't speak Korean, I strongly doubt that.
When you're claiming you have a room temperature superconductor, it would be more suspicious if you weren't claiming that. Because if LK99 works, then that's exactly what it is. It'll be material of the century.
Look at some of the most ground-breaking research papers in the history of science, such as the Watson/Crick DNA structure papers. They literally discovered the core of life itself, which is infinitely more important than a room-temperature superconductor. Yet they are incredibly modest about it, and don't waste a single sentence waxing philosophical about what all this means etc.
In a similar vein, Andrew Wiles announced his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem in a lecture modestly called "Modular Forms, Elliptic Curves and Galois Representations" – not "The Historic Proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, with Endless Implications for the Future of Mathematics".
And the unsanctioned paper is titled: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor. And the response paper is titled: Superconductor Pb10−xCux(PO4)6O showing levitation at room temperature and atmospheric pressure and mechanism.
Notably not “We’re fucking changing history”. What are you griping about? That the paper admits that this would be a significant finding with wide-ranging applications? Because that’s true…
But she is brought up constantly and annoyingly in this regard. Why be a negative Nancy? There’s books from not long after the discovery that tell her story. You don’t think there are people who are legitimately forgotten in the process of every discovery?
I'm perfectly willing to forgive some hubris if their claims turn out to be accurate. Watson and Crick are not a great choice of role model for good character.
Rosalind Franklin's work paved the way for Watson and and Crick. She and her PhD student took the photo that showed the double helix. The scientist leading the team at the lab, Maurice Wilkins, showed the photo to Watson and Crick. He and Franklin did not work together, and she was hired while he was not there, under the impression she would be working alone. And so she did. Wilkins was not involved in the taking of the photo, yet he shared her private research with Watson and Crick.
This photo was the missing piece for them to understand the structure of DNA and Franklin was not credited for it at the time. Wilkins, meanwhile, received the Nobel prize with Watson and Crick despite the single biggest contribution that came from the lab being Franklin's photograph.
It's nearly impossible to overstate just how pivotal and important this photograph was. There was no theory or model at the time that would have gotten them to understanding DNA. This x-ray crystallography photograph was THE missing piece.
Watson, Crick, and Wilkins could have properly credited her at any time. They included her photograph in the paper, explained how important it was. She wasn't even mentioned. They effectively plagiarized her work and took the credit.
From what I have gathered reading things online, there is some theorizing that given a "perfect" baking process there is something probabilistic going on that means your batch is never 100%.
I'm not a material scientist, but I've spoken with folks who do advanced vapor deposition and thin-film synthesis for high-temperature superconductors (the ones that work at liquid-nitrogen temperature).
It's basically witchcraft-adjacent, with so many variables that getting everything right is an art. That's why we're only now getting practical high-TC superconducting tape, even though the original materials were discovered in 80-s.
The best way right now would be for the Korean team to send their sample to a reputable lab for testing. Once its properties are verified, labs can start deconstructing the process.
You're producing a nanoscale material through macroscale processes
It's not quite like asking somebody with a hammer and chisel to produce a microchip, but depending on how many processes and sensitive variables affect your chemical processes, it ain't far off.
Maybes it's cooling rate. Maybe it's venting phosphorous gas. Maybe it's introducing ambient air. Maybe oxygen would be better. Maybe it should be faster. Maybe it should be introduced slower with faster cooling. Or slower cooling. Maybe the oven heats funny and placement matters given the distribution and the heating is the key.
Experimental chemistry can be a real pain, and it takes quite a lot to figure out what you've got.
The video doesn’t really prove anything. Non-superconducting diamagnetic can’t freely levitate due to a fundamental instability; they will always fall out of levitation (unless they’re spinning in a specific way). The superconductor in the video is in physical contact with the magnet beneath it, which is enough to resolve that unstable condition and keep the material steady.
Doesn't it seem like there should be some sort of annealing process required? this material being essentially a powder smashed into a tablet form seems like it would likely be a very poor conductor unless the superconducting properties not only existed in each of the granules of the powder, but also can easily transition between each of the boundaries. So wouldn't you want the final thing to be closer to like a ceramic form? (probably not understanding something here)
Unequivocally yes… which is why I wasn’t surprised when the first publicised reproduction involved a tiny grain, why the big pressed pellets seem to be staying put, why people are suggesting breaking the samples up, and why the original pictures/video showing the levitation that kicked all this off, is an oddly shaped sample that sort of looks like it flaked off a larger piece.
Smash the samples… see if any of the grains float… (it’s becoming a bit of a refrain on Twitter whenever a big chunky pressed pellet sample is published as a failed replication) … it won’t be hard to improve the process and try and get larger contiguous samples that show the effect once we know for sure that it’s actually happening even if it’s happening in smaller more obviously superconducting samples, be it the size of a sand grain or a grain of rice, as long as it’s clearly a room temperature superconductor… once we have more samples… the analysis experts can get stuck in, there’s a global army of analytical experts… crystallographers, spectrographers, and all the sub disciplines of analytical chemistry… with clearly superconducting samples these people can swing into action and work out what the magic is and what we have to do to make more and bigger floating rocks.
It'll be fascinating if an industrial production process involved grinding it up, using magnets as a screen to discard non-levitating particles, then reforming the compliant ones.
I was looking at the floating sample picture and it struck me as odd how the material levitates at an angle. [0] The broken part floating and the "pressed" part resting on the plate. To me, this suggests that a significant amount of the material is not the target material.
Further, if the target material was evenly distributed, I'd expect that levitation properties would correlate with the thickness of the piece and the piece would float, evenly. Right, if a 1mm piece has 1unit of levitation, a 5mm piece should have 5 units of levitation. If the 1mm piece levitates, then the 5mm portion should as well.
Since it's not levitating evenly, I suspect the target material is unevenly distributed. Further, I'd argue that the target material is actually consolidated to a single piece of that sample. Perhaps (conjecture) that little silver spec near the tip of the crack.
From what I've been reading, it seems like it's very, very hard to trick the copper into the right place. It seems possible that the process does work, but a lot of luck is needed to create a large enough piece to support the levitation effect.
It's almost like someone stuck a "super strong" helium balloon in the center of a half-eaten cake. The helium balloon lifts the cake, but the weight of the uneaten half of the cake causes tilt.
If the DFT paper is correct, then annealing would let the Cu atoms relax to the Pb(2) sites, which doesn't induce potentially superconducting bands.
Metastable alloys (roughly, alloys that are only stable at room temperature because the atoms get frozen in place too quickly for them to reach the energetically favorable positions) are quite common in materials science, both for bulk metals and for semiconducting crystals. There are far more possible metastable alloys than stable alloys, so the range of material properties possible in metastable alloys is far wider than that in stable alloys. So, considering we have never discovered a room temperature superconductor, so far, it wouldn't be particularly surprising if it requires a metastable alloy.
I worked in this field and imo these preliminary DFT results do not actually mean that much.
I do not believe the comments on that other thread are from other practitioners given how confident in this DFT results they seem, when DFT is notoriously unreliable especially when funky correlated things might be going on.
Yeah, I would class it as encouraging, but far from definitive. But at least it shows that there might be some theoretical basis to it.
It might be useful (as jboggan mentioned in another thread) in explaining why reproduction could be difficult; it seems to be a finicky material to create.
Given the stark contrast in behavior between their sample and the one described in Lee et al., is this even the same material? Surely while the conductive characteristics can be explained by errors in measurement procedure, why would the behavior in a magnetic field be different? Were the original authors being dishonest? Was the replicated material different? The X-ray analysis seems to support that they are very similar, if not the same. I expect we're going to see more of this over the next week as more Chinese labs manufacture the samples.
> In addition, when a pressed Pb10-xCux(PO4)6O pellet is located on top of a commercial Nd2Fe14B magnet at room temperature, no repulsion could be felt and no magnetic levitation was observed either.
Unless we assume the original paper's authors were straight up lying, it sounds like this paper's author didn't end up with exactly the same material?
The original authors have apparently said they are only able to successfully produce the material in around 1 in 10 attempts and they don't yet know why. Also, replicators have reported that the information in the papers and the patent aren't entirely clear on some potentially significant implementation details.
Unfortunately, real science makes for a pretty lousy spectator sport :-). Given the context of the release, it was always a near-certainty that early replication attempts would be a random mix of "No" and "Maybe" results. I think our best chance for any meaningful near-term clarity rest with the team of scientists reportedly visiting the original authors in their lab to test the author's own samples. While a positive result from that won't be a definitive replication, it will at least be external validation of the original process and results.
I actually agree with you because I've enjoyed it immensely but I suspect you and I share fairly nuanced and informed perspectives. My statement was more directed to those who seem to be expecting some kind of near-term definitive verdict or box score, more like a sporting event.
This is more like a high stakes multi round baking competition :)
I never thought of replication experiment as an alternative to televized sports, but this does it for me (caveat: I never really was into following sports competitions).
Imagine if national sports were replication attempts :P I suspect this whole story is at least going to inspire a few material science/chemistry/EE careers in South Korea!
They mention the possibility of a mistake when measuring resistivity, which has already been discussed.
But yeah, the partial levitation is not a mistake. Their abstract suggests LK-99 is a "highly insulating diamagnet", but they are not even able to "detect any
reliable diamagnetic signal" with their instruments.
I'd rank the possibilities as: fraud, a different material, or some comical series of bizarre mistakes and contamination from the original team.
While fraud is always possible, so far I'm not getting fraud vibes. I'm really rooting for an eventual outcome somewhere between: "These guys are an experimental mess but damn it seems to kind of work" and "It's not a room temp superconductor but it is something new, interesting and maybe even useful."
There's also the possibility that the original team is deceiving themselves. By all appearances, they're deeply committed to this result (that could be an act, but that's not the sense I'm getting). But those biases could creep into the analysis of the material: in this particular field, a lot of things are witchcraft (witchcraft that occasionally works). So take a novel material with some interesting properties and human interpretative fallibility, and you get the paper. Which would still mean a powerful diamagnetic material, but that's... well, not something we'd have kilothreads on HN about.
My stance (did research in high-Tc superconductors in undergrad ages ago, but doing banal software dev nowadays): who knows. The "easy replication" idea has faded away, which isn't promising, but maybe? It's fun to put my faith in Twitter anime catgirl avatars, though, so I'm still rooting for it.
There's betting markets on this, aren't there? The super cynical take is that the original scientists know that it's a fraud but in the lead up to it being proven as fraud can make a lot of money before coming out and saying "sorry, we messed up, experimental errors etc etc"
How are they going to make money with this? A few weeks of buzz isn't going to make anyone rich. It's not like they're going for some product placement along with the buzz.
I guess they could bet heavily against themselves, try to get prediction markets to coalesce around the result being genuine, them come out saying "oops, we were mistaken"? Bam, rich!
The biggest question in this whole thing was, why not bring a sample to another lab for verification? Well, now we’re starting to get some reproduction attempt results anyways.
> Once the findings are published in a peer-reviewed journal, which Kim says is in the works, he will support anyone who wants to create and test LK-99 for themselves.
But why? The base materials are cheap and easily available, and the synthesis process seems rather straightforward. Why don't they have kilograms of this stuff by now?
They’ve been working on this for years. To me it looks like whatever their process is, they don’t have something that’s repeatable. So maybe a couple of small samples are all there are after 1000s of attempts doing more or less the same thing.
> So the groups trying to replicate right now are basically wasting their time?
If a few dozen groups all try and replicate, and there is something to replicate, then odds are good someone will get lucky (birthday paradox and all that). Each individual group is definitely wasting their time, but the aggregate time spent may not be a waste.
The birthday paradox would only apply if we are interested in one group replicating the result of any other group, not the result of the original paper.
It's the difference between "do any people in this group share a birthday" vs "do any people in this group share my birthday".
No, this still needs replication. A room temp and pressure superconductor being possible at all, verifiably, implies there are probably better versions to be discovered. This could really improve the funding in the area, and labs that attempt replication and fail could benefit from that.
Maybe not yet the final nail in the coffin but I would no longer bet much on a successful replication. Which leaves me wondering how we got the initial papers. Does fraud make any sense, how could you possibly benefit from something like this? And if I would think that I might have produced a room temperature superconductor due to experimental errors, I would double and tripple check what I did. Assuming there is time for that. So incompetence? Self-delusion due to a desire for it to be true?
Apparently [1] the group wanted to play safe and push for more verification internally, but Kwon (the third author of the first arXiv submission) posted his own draft without others' consent. So it's in my opinion useless to discuss whether the submission itself was sincere or not---it was never their intention.
This is a very nice summary, especially for those of us who cannot read Korean. Thank you. If you posted it as a top level comment, it might get some more visibility.
Could be a skill issue on the part of the replicators? The russian anime girl scientist had to make a bunch of modifications (and was cursing the orig authors) before she could make her rocks float.
Of course under the assumption that LK-99 is indeed not what has been claimed, I am not completely ruling out that they just failed to reproduce the material. And while I initially said that the LK-99 paper does at least not look like a crackpot paper [1][2] and still think that was not an unreasonable judgment given my complete lack of expertise in the field, just comparing the presentation in this paper and the original LK-99 paper makes me judge the replicators as more competent. But sure, looks can be deceptive.
Honestly I found their account dubious, it’s difficult to believe that a person with a background in molecular biology to have synthesized it especially given that other groups have failed to do so. There are also no affiliations mentioned on their profile.
Falls into the bucket of "specialists can have weird hobbies" element though - i.e. the background to do this is basically "has access to lead oxide, copper and red phosphorous" and "a kiln" - particularly if you dispense with trying to do the vacuum synthesis as that account claimed too (also a point in favor: having random access to dangerous chemicals is sort of something I'd expect out of states with less enforcement of drug synthesis laws).
The mechanism is plausible - if the reaction actually proceeds by driving off the sulfate and substituting in the copper at high temperature, it's entirely possible the vacuum synthesis of the authors is unnecessary (I have in fact had personal experience with trying to replicate a paper where it turned out that a pretty important step was acting as an oxygen-diffusion rate-limiter, and this just...wasn't identified at all by the papers authors).
a nitpick - I think it's more likely that person is he/him. anime is gender and masculinity averse/avoidant so everyone/everything is depicted in girly tone, else they don't exist
I get a strong feeling that this guy is like the lab that said they found life that didn’t use phosphorous for dna a few years back. I think it just turned out to be shoddy lab work and not accounting for contaminants in their lab chemicals.
If you find something extremely rare that rewrites what we know you need to be damn sure that what you are saying is true. But some people rush to the media and trying to publish it before they’ve even made sure.
A little bit of a rabbit trail, but with this and similar science/reporting issues, I find myself wishing both the hype and the vitriol was taken out completely. What if the world could follow the LK-99 team and replication attempts in near real time and everyone had a sense like "if this succeeds, great, if not, we know one more way it doesn't work". And what if the millions of various studies on any topic were publicly accessible, instantly searchable, discussed intelligently, then novel ideas bubbled up and became studies themselves.
I understand I'm being naive here and ignoring "little" things like funding, profit motives, and basic human nature. But more what I'm suggesting is that there has to be a way to speed up scientific research and application while toning down the hyperbole. This really became apparent to me during Covid. There _have_ to be ways to rethink from first principles how we do and report on science.
It's amazing we don't have good personal content filtering yet. I would pay so much for an all-encompassing blocker.
There is so much content I would block if I actually could. Completely disable YouTube Shorts on mobile. All snarky/sarcastic/political/ad-hominem takes filtered.
There is an interesting take on this on Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock: wealthy people can afford to have personal curators that filter news and other content for them, while the lower classes have been driven off the deep end by the near future Internet's relentless stream of disinformation.
A paper dropped on the 29th examining if their theory of LK99's superconducting mechanism was plausible. The good news that it is. The bad news is that the copper atoms need to end up in the least likely place in the crystal.
Long story short, though the ingredients are easy to find we should expect reproduction to take longer than we first thought.
Can anyone ELI5 - Is the compound/material used for LK-99 that unique? Are there other, similar materials that might also have this 'quantum well' quality?
It's relatively common materials, basically, lead, copper, sulfur, and oxygen, combined in a specific manner.
There is a chance that either the original measurements were wrong or that there remains some unrealized step in the process to make the superconductor superconduct.
I’m surprised/impressed by the quick turnaround between the original LK99 paper submitted on 22 Jul 2023 and this reproduction attempt submitted on 31 Jul 2023. Could there have been a pre-print of the original paper that allowed the reproduction attempt to begin earlier?
How many days have scientists been working on this? Like 2, not including the weekend? I'm impressed that results and papers are already starting to come out.
This is another example of why to do great science you need to do great engineering. The original group rushed to publish the paper without polishing the details, and now other groups are struggling to replicate their results.
There is apparently a whole bunch of controversy with the paper being published by one of the authors that had been allegedly kicked out and wanted to ensure he was credited as an author. The other authors were apparently still working on the paper, production methods etc but this unauthorised early publication derailed that.
I was just thinking that it would be funny if, having actually discovered a high-temp ambient pressure superconductor, rather than announce it, go around to other labs and replace their samples with yours.
Secondly, this all happened two days ago! If the methodology was perfect, I still wouldn't expect good replication results back within two (part non-business!) days.
I don't know if this material is legit. I really hope it is. But the process of figuring that out could potentially take months (or more), and a two-day-later failed to replicate is not a death sentence.
As much as it sucks, this is really just going to take time to prove it's not a superconductor. If it is a superconductor, we may not know for a while either, unless one of the influencers/"makers" attempting to reproduce the material succeeds and posts some good convincing video of flux pinning or other Meissner effect stuff (that person is going to go insanely viral, if it happens).