I got my PhD studying band structure of high-tc superconductors (experimentalist, ARPES). These Cu d-d interactions right at the fermi energy give me huge hope. Feels very familiar to other superconductors (re: all the cuprates). (Note: I specifically worked in a lab that was measuring a lot of the d-wave character / gap-energies of various superconductors)
All in all, I'm now much more bullish on LK-99 being real superconductivity after seeing multiple different labs compute similar band structures. The video of multiple directions of magnet showing some levitation also inspires a lot of hope.
> These Cu d-d interactions right at the fermi energy give me huge hope. Feels very familiar to other superconductors (re: all the cuprates).
As someone who is versed in semiconductor band structures but not superconductor band structures: What is it about Cu d-d interactions that causes the superconductivity?
Degenerate energies in semiconductors don't give rise to electron pairing, so I'm a bit out to sea with the proposed mechanism here.
To be honest, this is a hunch thing more than a I can teach and explain it thing. To me it's just "a lot of the same stories" that are told about cuprates, and less of a "I can explain the mechanism".
Roughly, one of the "properties" that shows up with these materials is that the 3d orbitals of coper atoms are involved in forming the bands near the fermi level. Couple that with the fun story of Cu electron configuration being [Ar] 3d^10 4s^1, which suggests that spin-effects are "at play" with these electrons near their filling levels. Combine that with the spin-character properties of cuprate paring (eg. s-wave vs. d-wave superconductors, (d-wave for BSCCO for instance)). All together it lends itself to a nice spin-orbit coupled band "setup" at the fermi energy that I have a hunch somehow backs the underlying mechanism of these d-wave superconductors. Fully admit, there's some leaps there in the raw logic -- if I could fully explain it I probably would still be in the field, haha.
I'll note: I've been out of the field for ~8 years, but a quick google search led to some more recent papers [1][2] working through plausible explanations based on some of these copper d orbital shenanigans.
> To me it's just "a lot of the same stories" that are told about cuprates, and less of a "I can explain the mechanism".
Fair enough, and thanks for the readout. I realized after posting I essentially demanded an explanation as to why the cuprates are high-Tc, which is probably its own Nobel prize.
Nice one, reading that post makes me wonder if the proof could be furthered when considering parallels from compression algorithms.
Compression algorithms detect recurring blocks and remove them with a special symbol and I think the shortest path would be uncompressable with compression algorithms.
> To be honest, this is a hunch thing more than a I can teach and explain it thing...
Chiming in, not just you. :) I very briefly studied materials science a few decades ago and I'm 0% surprised that a potential breakthrough involves, of course, cuprates.
I really wish I'd went into physics in school. This all sounds deeply fascinating, but I just barely understand the top level of what you're explaining.
This is probably a very stupid question, but why is simply measuring resistance not enough to conclusively prove that it is a superconductor. I mean, isn't zero resistance the defining property?
Indeed, that statement would have been really funny just a few weeks ago. Now you're going to have to wonder whether the magnet or the superconductor will fail first.
Neo magnet fabrication is fascinating by the way, the somewhat magnetized blanks are not all that impressive from a magnetic field strength point of view, but then you zap them with a strong enough field and they then suddenly are the best thing since sliced bread.
This technique was first developed for 'regular' ceramic magnets.
An uncoated magnet will oxidize very fast, so you always have to ensure that the coating on any magnets you use is perfect or the magnet will surely fail.
I think if it was actually zero it would be? The issue I think is impurity/defects in the manufactured samples, so there's non-superconducting bits in addition to the allegedly superconducting bits.
Just guessing: I would say not enough because the sample is extremely small and there is chance that the electrons jump from each sides of the probes, skipping the sample ? (like a short-circuit) + the fact that the probes themselves are not superconductor, so there is a natural accepted tolerance in the measures (claimed to be due to the probes)
If the video is to be believed, the samples shown are huge compared to a, trivial to make, pulled or cut platinum wire probe. You could just put it on a plate in an SPM and measure it.
So many questions. I assume this is all possible but they are focussing on one thing at a time to duplicate the results, if possible.
I think we're being trolled. Or trawled. Not sure which, yet. But the mention of Salvatore Cezar Pais in the patent should be enough to put this to bed for serious folks.
If something is prior art, you need to include it, regardless of the source. Even fictional descriptions of technologies can be prior art. For example, Samsung used 2001 A Space Odyssey as prior art to invalidate Apple's patent on ipad-like tablets.
I wouldn't read too much into this. You have to address prior art when it is found in patent examination as a part of application process, no matter how bogus it is.
I'd probably approach 90% confidence with ~2-3 different measurements from different labs showing similar stories. Select from the grab bag of possible experiments that could all collaborate and provide consistency in their stories: specifically things like measuring the critical current, critical magnetic field, high quality electrical resistance in various ways (lots of transport), STM measurements of gaps, ARPES measurements of gaps, XRD showing crystal structures are what we expect that matches the DFT, a study on the domain sizes/effects (since this is relying on a substition at the right place, necessarily I suspect that there will be domain effects / "doping" style things... so how those play out in terms of purity and quality of results will be interesting). There will be a lot to study and characterize, and every extra measurement that is consistent rapidly increases that confidence. I'd say I'd get to "100%" (as close as someone could be) after ~10-20 papers across many different labs and measurements. I'd hope we'd get there in ~3-6 months.
What I'm actually even slightly more excited about is "what comes next" -- not the market part, but the "fast follow science". For instance, in the few years after LCBO and LSCO were found (TC~30K) we quickly found YBCO and BSCCO (Tc~130K). I would expect that we'll find a whole class of these materials with substitution tricks that possibly work, and there will be a whole slew of options for "going to market" with the technology. The door this opens is what is more exciting than the specifics of LK-99 itself in my opinion.
Estimating times, after the fast follow science (0.5-2 years optimistically?) we will hopefully have the actual "we're all convinced this is real, and the technology can start to be applied in real devices". Specifically, after everyone is pretty clear on a lot of the material properties and ways to reproducibly make high-quality crystals, so consistency is clear on measurements... then begins the cycles on how to manufacture high enough quality material at scale that it can actually be applied. (specifically, these materials (assuming they're like YCBO/BSCCO) are superconducting crystals that have grains, alignment issues, are physically brittle, have homogeneity issues, etc.) While each solvable, these are all real engineering and material challenges that increase cost to manufacture, and all of this will probably take time before we suddenly get wide-scale products that use this (this is all assuming it's real, haha, there's still plenty of reason to be skeptical).
I think a funded and forward-thinking lab with enough postdocs would be trying to grind out a version replacing lead with gold, per the DFT calculations
Few will remember the million replications, but whoever describes a novel version - even if it's no better - will find themselves on equal footing for helping to understand what's happening
The nitter video could literally be a piece of iron, even a ferromagnetic object will turn like that under the presence of a magnet. It certainly isn't proof that the thing they have there is NOT a superconductor, but you can't use that video as evidence of anything.
Iron and ferromagnetic objects would not react that way. The key to this showing diamagnetism is the fact that the same points are repelled in the same way regardless of the orientation of the magnet. If it was ferromagnetic, you could have it stand up on it's tip in one polarity and stand up on another portion of the object in the other polarity, but you couldn't make it stand up on it's tip both times.
So happy to hear this. I've been hoping for some sort of breakthrough ever since I first encountered footage of magnets falling through Cu tubes at an extremely leisurely pace.
Serious question- I saw the original video, where once they stopped waving the magnet around and held it near the sheet of LK-99, it looked to me like it stayed at a specific standoff distance, with no decay.
Assuming no videographic trickery, what else could it be, other than the Meissner effect?
"In simple terms, diamagnetic materials are substances that are usually repelled by a magnetic field. Electrons in an atom revolve around the nucleus, and thus possess orbital angular momentum. The resultant magnetic momentum in an atom of the diamagnetic material is zero."
Yes, if this material is diamagnetic without being a superconductor it is by far the strongest such material we've ever found. 15x stronger than pyrolitic graphite.
From what I heard, it would. This kind of diamagnetism would be strong enough to be potentially interesting in other applications and research, if it turns out not to be a superconductor.
Not over a single dipole magnet. The "shape" of the field wouldn't make it stable, you'd need to add other magnets or a piece of string to stabilise. As I understand stable levitation over a dipole magnet is indicative of flux pinning which is a property exclusive to type II superconductors.
The Meissner effect requires a temperature transition in the diamagnetic behaviour. As you increase the temperature, you would expect a sharp drop with the material falling back on the magnet, and then levitating again once the temperature drops.
Yes, if you know the upper boundary for the temperature up to which the material stays superconducting. But that's a bit of a problem: this material is claimed to be superconducting to very high temperatures. It just could be that it isn't all that easy to reach a temperature where this stuff stops being superconducting. In fact I see no particular reason in physics why it would have to stay below the temperature at which the material disintegrates. So maybe that part of the effects is simply a reflection of the fact that these superconductors that work well below zero are in fact exactly there because they require a cold environment and once you find one that doesn't that whole aspect goes away, it could stay diamagnetic all the way up to its melting point.
Well, Shanghai has some, Japan is building some, and if this discovery is real, Germany might as well revive their Transrapid project (which built the shanghai one).
I guess that's partially missing the point. The main benefit of a superconducting maglev is that it's cheaper to build than a on-rails high-speed train. Specially on problematic terrain (what I understand includes every possible East/West route on the US).
This is probably the most stupid question to ask, but while were are still trying to confirm superconductivity instead of understanding its precise mechanism of operation, why the focus on levitation on band structure to confirm the news instead of just "yep this chunk has actually zero Ohms"?
"zero ohms" is very tricky to measure because of contact resistance: your probes aren't superconducting, and the thin contact surface between your probes and the metal itself isn't superconducting either.
Whereas the Meissner effect is unique to superconductors. It just has to be distinguished from diamagnetism, and there are materials which are strongly diamagnetic but not superconductors.
Because the levitation thing works with tiny fragments too whereas the 'zero Ohms' measurement only works when you have enough of it to form a long enough wire of it that you could tell the difference between 0 and 0.000001. Measuring very small resistances is usually done by letting a known current run through them and then to measure the voltage across the sample using known resistance leads. For a superconductor that has a tiny available sample which is already conductive even if it is not superconducting is fraught with error and may well give you the wrong answer due to a tiny measuring error.
But the Meissner effect is a unique signature of a diamagnetic material and will provide you some evidence even if the sample is tiny. So I understand why they have not yet resorted to other measurements, if there is no Meissner effect you don't need to continue with the hard work of trying to make a wire (which may well be a serious challenge for this stuff, the yield will have to come up significantly before that's a real possibility).
Another ARPES person! Totally agree with you, not only the density of states but the flatness of the d band at the Fermi level is extremely encouraging. The simulated results look good enough that even if they had come out first I think that they still would have prompted someone to synthesize this.
My ultimate take-away about LK-99 since the start has been that, even if it doesn't turn out to be a holy-grail or whatever, the novel ideas behind the material are incredibly interesting.
The idea of causing tiny (~0.5%) crystal lattice shrinkage with cuprate percolation is a really interesting idea.
So far, only huge pressures or very low temperatures (i.e. Physics) have been used to cause that shrinkage, therefore perhaps LK-99 could, at the least, mark the time that Physicists hold up their hands, admit that they have failed, and let the Chemists give it a shot.
I'm slightly oversimplifying the situation, of course, and the disciplines of science cannot be so distinctly separated, but, y'know.
I’ve published in computational solid state. My doctorate is, on paper, in earth sciences (mineral sciences!) and you’re going to find all of the materials science department and a few engineers in the vicinity too. Solid-state is one of those five-way borders in the Benelux countries where everyone speaks three languages.
My MSE dept was also colocated with mining engineering. Evolved from the metallurgy dept of a past era. We seemed to have a foot in manufacturing, computational materials, theory and chem lab.
When a material shrinks, it can create immense internal stresses equivalent to what it would experience at extreme pressures. Compare to say a Prince Rupert's drop.
Indeed. The separation between "Chemistry" and "Physics" completely breaks down when you start dealing with electron behaviours.
I've actually got a little tin-foil-hat pet theory that Chemistry is slowly dying as it approaches "completion" of its roots (macroscopic phenomena of matter), and is gradually being subsumed by Physics. To at least a silly layman like me, lots of bleeding-edge Chemistry nowadays reads like your average Physics, e.g. doing quantum simulations for protein folding, superconductors, etc.
Chemistry has a ton of unsolved problems that are almost unbounded. The big fun one is trying to create the complete graph network of useful chemical reactions so that we can find paths of higher efficiency when making certain molecules.
This compute hard problem will take the world’s chemist to collaborate on a large scale because they don’t have a great database built yet that can enable this.
Chemistry also covers nano/microscale. I'm not sure "macroscopic phenomena of matter" adequately describes it.
Computational chemistry tends to be done in collaboratiin between specialists, especially after grad school. You also have to confirm things - you can compute whatever you like, but there's no way to know if your simulation reflects reality without confirmation.
And in what way had physics has beaten chemistry in the case of LK99? They did a post-facto DFT calculation supporting the apparent results, which may or may not be real.
It seems like an illustration of why chemistry is as robust as ever.
The big software unification driving this has been chemists moving to the (post-)DFT methods the materials people had to use, even for some of their small molecule work. Oversimplifying wildly, a lot of small molecule chemistry is driven by medicine and they started caring a lot about, for example, ab-initio protein models…
As many other people have said, there is no physics or chemistry in solid-state materials; most universities will have multiple groups in this area across three to five different departments (physics, chemistry, materials science, materials engineering, earth sciences).
(The reason materials people were on DFT is that you need to simulate more atoms to model a material. Standard DFT methods scale as O(n^3) with system size, and there are linear-scaling methods like SIESTA and ONETEP; many computational chemistry methods like Configuration Interaction are much worse.)
My understanding is that the "99" in LK-99 is the year it they first synthesized the material, i.e. 1999.
Assuming this is all true, why is it just now coming to light? Did they just not know what they had? (I have not been following this closely, maybe this has already been explained)
As I've read it, the first lead to the material was 99.
2018 They got funding to research it further,
2020 was a first attempt of publication at Nature that was retracted, further improvements were made until 22/23 were two patents were filled, then suddenly 10 days ago Kwon, one of the co-researchers jumped the gun publishing a paper with the details, on one hand fearing a leak of someone else publishing first as that was too simple to replicate, on the other hand excluding everyone else from the paper and only listing him and Lee/Kim (LK) as authors as a Nobel prize can only be shared by three people. 2.5hrs later LK published again listing other 5 authors but him.
Ultimately I'm glad that the research has seen the light, since I'm of the personal persuasion that there is no single scrap of science that should ever be done in the dark. All research, in a perfect world, would be entirely public and freely and easily accessible.
With that being said, I'm not sure if leaking a paper and selfishly putting your name on it and excluding others so that you win a Nobel Prize doesn't exactly seem "heroic". Certainly beneficial for mankind, but it seems like a self-serving action.
The means justify the end. For all we know Lee and Kim would have sat on this for another year or more. I think that’s very understandable and I can’t fault them for wanting to be certain, given all the nasty things people have been saying about them, but the leak has clearly served humanity better than keeping it under wraps.
> but the leak has clearly served humanity better than keeping it under wraps.
Yeah, advancing human knowledge serves humanity, but unfortunately not really those who are advancing that knowledge. Those with money will just use your invention and make more money, you will have a pat on the back. I wish it was more balanced, we would have a lot of inventions sooner and implemented faster.
If it increases entropy as much as many suspect and it only took 1/3 of a couple humans' lives to open that phase space, the Universe has done what it wanted - to hasten heat-death.
As Hawking once explained, “Since events before the Big Bang have no observational consequences, one may as well cut them out of the theory, and say that time began at the Big Bang.” When cosmologists talk about the universe and its age, it seems to me, as a non-cosmologist, that they’re using terms of art related to their models.
Hawking’s explanation deduces that if the observable universe expanded from a singularity, we would be unable to meaningfully theorize what happened before then, since it would be beyond any form of observation to test the theory. Therefore, a scientific model rooted in observation can describe nothing earlier than the Big Bang.
However, not everything unseen is untrue. If a singularity were to form somewhere in Andromeda tomorrow — in all likelihood, one will — we will still have existed today.
Edit: The initial comment was meant as a lighthearted reply to the universe personification, but I ended up sensing a need to explain the reasoning.
It's not "personification", it's the universe tending toward entropy increasing overall. I don't think I've heard anyone claim that heat death "should have happened" as an argument against it, or what it's supposed to mean in reference to the original post.
There is a singularity in Andromeda, so I don't know why one forming matters
>Assuming this is all true, why is it just now coming to light? Did they just not know what they had?
This is why the calculations by Sinéad Griffin looked so interesting to me: they suggest that the superconductivity depends on an unconventional substitution pattern that might not (in fact should not) occur in most samples of Cu-doped lead apatite. So the active structure was only present in tiny quantities, requiring a long period of trial-and-error optimization.
Again, this is far from proof, but I thought it was at least very curious to have some theory that explains not just a mechanism for superconductivity but also why the samples seem to teeter on the edge of superconductivity so frustratingly.
The replies to my previous post ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36958419 ) suggesting that flat bands appear simply because copper doesn't belong in that lattice seem inconsistent with the fact that a flat band was not observed when copper substituted at the wrong type of lattice site. If flat bands appear merely because of the unpaired copper electron, they should appear when it is substituted only at Pb {2} sites, but they don't. The appearance of this band structure plus the observance of diamagnetism just takes us from happenstance to coincidence, so we need one more to conclude it is enemy action.
FWIW I don't work in condensed matter physics but I have taken the classes at grad level a few years back. I also should really be doing other things, but this is probably the most fun scientific news cycle since 'Oumuamua at least. (COVID doesn't count as "fun".)
I’m very much a layman, but my understanding is that LK-99 itself is not necessarily a superconductor. It’s polycrystalline which means it’s a very uneven material - not all LK-99 is the same. They both didn’t know it was what it was and also couldn’t nail down the procedure for consistently making it so that it has the superconductor properties. It took a long time to get the resources required to investigate this far - the scientists had their own lives and careers and didn’t get back to this particular investigation until recently.
It takes a week to bake/whatever a test sample. Which is why this is playing out so "slowly".
So, they had an idea and have been baking/testing/refining samples for decades. Science and funding takes a while.
What idea they started with and why they kept at it for 20 years is beyond me, that's a long time to chase an idea of you didn't have results or a hint that your idea would work. Maybe they had a weird sample that came from some other process in 1999 and have spent the intermediate time convincing funding people and doing the repetitive lab work required to get it to this point.
I have the same thought: "25 years? Why the fuck. Buy a new salt and publish a fucking paper."
I suppose they saw something favorable in that 99 sample and nobody else knew. The vagaries of chemical synthesis helped.
But it doesn't seem like they could have had a worse sample than what they fucking have now, while getting data that made them waste a quarter-century.
As much as people hype and have 'reproduced' it, I...dunno. If it's real, the autobiography will be worth an expensive translation.
Speaks to a supreme confidence in the theory, surely? I'm a layman but imagine everyone is going to want to hear every wild idea these guys could think up if this works out. They might have been sitting on this for 20 years? Probably why I'm not, but If I were any vc person I'd be busting down their door trying to give them all my money
How would you find such researchers if they didn't have plausible real-world results yet? I have a theory for new high performance heat engine which I developed over 15 years already, but I don't think anyone would give me ANY money for making a prototype (which may not work in reality), so I have to somehow do it in the limited time after working two jobs (I had to earn enough to have a home with a proper garage). Do you have any tips for someone like me?
Get involved with your local community of makers, get them intrigued by your idea and its potential, connect with people that will help you build it. Patent it, and then raise funds via the Internet to try and build it. Seek out local VCs. I know that's a lot to ask, on top of two jobs, but I didn't organize our economy.
> Get involved with your local community of makers, get them intrigued by your idea and its potential, connect with people that will help you build it.
This will prevent me from patenting it. I can also make first prototype myself, I've started last year, will try to finish this year. Funding would just let me drop one job and make it faster.
> Patent it, and then raise funds via the Internet to try and build it. Seek out local VCs. I know that's a lot to ask, on top of two jobs, but I didn't organize our economy.
I don't have enough money for patenting something that might not work. That's why I need to make a prototype. That prototype will be MUCH cheaper than a proper patent but takes some time which I also don't have too much (but working on it slowly). When I'm sure it works, I already have enough connections to make it actually happen.
At this moment, funding my prototype would just benefit humanity with earlier knowledge of whether it works, so of course no one sane will fund it, that's the sad reality with human priorities.
> I know that's a lot to ask, on top of two jobs, but I didn't organize our economy.
Yeah, I've only asked for tips just in case you have some, I don't blame you or anything. Thank you!
This thread also describes WHY those LK-99 researchers sat on their invention for so long, they just couldn't find enough people interested in their material.
Of course I could just publish my idea, but it's possible that no one would be interested in this and I would like to have some money from this to pursue some other ideas without begging people for support.
That is a framing issue. How else do you want to get support? If you find a marketing person to glam it up, and have people come to you wanting support you instead of you going to them. The end result is the same though - you're being supported.
If I had something I think could change the world, I'd beg, borrow, and steal whatever I needed, just to get the equipment to be able to get the patent on it.
> So did you make the engine and notice it's efficiency, or did you find it using first principles where no one else did?
I found it from first principles, I still don't know why no one else thought about it, but it requires sort of splitting and reversing a normal stirling engine inside-out. Since then I've found several attempts at going in that directions which I took, but no one connected all those pieces yet as far as I know. This doesn't require any advanced materials, just a new configuration of existing inventions. For 15 years I've thought why it should not work, but I can't find a flaw in my reasoning, so now I need to verify it with actual working machine, because I know I still might be wrong. If I'm right - this will change energy generation and storage (no more steam turbines and will replace PV panels). If I'm wrong - someone will potentially lose about $10k.
I suggest designing it in CAD and possibly sending it to be metal 3d-printed, which would be cheaper than a whole garage(I feel your pain on not having space... my carport is currently saturated with my business's equipment and I'd really like to build a proper workshop). In addition to less metal shavings around, you'll have access to different geometry which may help your design.
This prototype won't require any 3d-printed metal for now, mostly 3d-printed plastic and some easily made at home metal parts. I already have some cad designs, I have a garage AND dedicated workshop and enough equipment and parts to finish this, but only thing lacking currently is time (I need two jobs until at least end of this year, then it will be better). But thanks for suggestions.
I don't want to whine or excuse myself, I only give an example of why some inventions take a long time to mature into working design. I will make this, just not in a month of real time.
Right now that money would just mean that I can drop second job and do it in a month. Because I can't drop it currently, prototype will just take probably until the end of year, maybe a little later. But I already have everything needed gathered (electronic equipment and "ECU" parts, most of the required materials and some of 3d printed parts cad designs already done), now I only need time to manufacture what needs to be done pretty much manually. I don't need any more money for actual finishing, but thanks for suggestions.
>have any tips
Unfortunately I don't. You raise a really good point though lol. Everyone's idea might seem good as these guys' to probably even experts in the domain itself. I have been profoundly lucky from my spawn point to my current career so I can't give any earnest advice about that. I did briefly work at a semiconductor startup company that similarly had a "crazy brilliant" research idea and did find some funding. It didn't go great.
Like I said, there's a reason I'm not in charge of any VC stuff and I largely don't invest myself lol.
I wish you the best of luck with your invention though, please never give up and never stop dreaming. People like you even if you never produce it push us ALL forward. Thanks for what you do
There are various timelines on HN and elsewhere but it boils down to essentially they saw some blips on sample measurements that they assumed were errors. But the head of their lab thought differently and as he was dying asked his former students to reinvestigate it. They secured funding in 2018 but it was a bumpy road with personality conflicts etc.
wild assumption, but maybe they accidentally made a small sample of high grade LK-99 back in 1999 that displayed the superconductor properties, and they had difficulty replicating. Maybe they spent all these years refining the process
"Electronic structure of the putative room-temperature superconductor [ Pb_9 Cu( PO_4)_6 O ]" (2023) https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.00676 :
> A recent paper [Lee {\em et al.}, J. Korean Cryt. Growth Cryst. Techn. {\bf 33}, 61 (2023)] provides some experimental indications that Pb10−xCux(PO4)6O with x≈1, coined LK-99, might be a room-temperature superconductor at ambient pressure. Our density-functional theory calculations show lattice parameters and a volume contraction with x -- very similar to experiment. The DFT electronic structure shows Cu2+ in a 3d9 configuration with two extremely flat Cu bands crossing the Fermi energy. This puts Pb9Cu(PO4)6O in an ultra-correlated regime and suggests that, without doping, it is a Mott or charge transfer insulator. If doped such an electronic structure might support flat-band superconductivity or an correlation-enhanced electron-phonon mechanism, whereas a diamagnet without superconductivity appears to be rather at odds with our results.
Some context on VASP from someone who worked with it for about 10 years.
VASP is a very common projector augmented wave (PAW) planewave DFT program in the solid state physics/chemistry community. I used it for about 10 years when I was doing computational chemistry. It is distributed as a tarball of FORTRAN90 files, so in some sense all researchers that use it have access to the source code. The research group I was in maintained a set of patches against the source code to implement additional functionality for transition state searches (useful for modeling solid state reactions).
Opensource alternatives exist, but are not as widely accepted (or somehow as fast in my experience). GPAW[1] is one example. It is unfortunate that it is not an opensource program, however, among the large community of scientist with access to the software the source code is available and is well understood and accepted. It is more or less the defacto standard against which other solid state DFT programs are tested.
For anyone else totally clueless about chemistry: According to Wikipedia DFT in this context stands for 'Density-functional theory' and not 'Discrete Fourier Transform' as I assumed given the references to waves.
Could we please stop giving attention to the obnoxious anonymous Russian troll who's only proof is a photo of a spec of dust in a syringe, who says she 'didnt follow the paper beause she immediately invented a better way to make a room temp superconductor', who says she 'doesnt care about superconductors' and keeps tweeting USSR propaganda?
I really don't get how she keeps getting recommended in these hacker news threads as an interesting source.
Not sure if you're implying she's cooked up a few crucibles at home purely for internet attention (nor what the relevance of her political views are here), but regardless the thread is interesting either way as it's generating lot of general interest in replication. This is perhaps a better link: https://eirifu.wordpress.com/2023/07/30/lk-99-superconductor...
Try the sources column in this[0] table. You can expand the notes for each entry to read more. There's also this one[1] that's on the front page right now, though its provenance is questionable.
More people saying it sounds feasibly like it could be a superconductor is great, but agreed - https://nitter.net/MichaelSFuhrer/status/1686267690770739200 and similar threads by actual experts in the field have outlined that DFT studies ignore a lot of variables that need to line up for superconductivity, in harsh contrast to techbros on Twitter claiming they're proof of the next thousand year golden era.
Thanks for linking someone who knows what he's talking about, very painful to see these DFT papers overhyped as some kind of proof... It proves almost nothing
Yeah the techbros have been the worst. Coffee guy went from saying the first DFT paper should deserve a Nobel to, "it's not a strong signal of anything" in 12 hours. WTF. All the actual scientists have been rock steady at, "it is probably not going to replicate," especially CMTC.
Techbro speculation on physics should be considered harmful.
If it produces unphysical nonsense, you can always say "You should have considered xyz!"
Computational chemistry inherently cannot consider everything we understand about chemistry or physics or consider beyond certain scales, so its accuracy and precision are limited. You have to constrain the space properly, which makes people a little dismissive.
CMTC comes of as a whiny little POS tbh. They have the exact opposite of the attitude I would have expected from a scientist.
In their first thread regarding this topic they were almost flat out belittling the og authors. WTF.
They may have been throwing a bit of shade around lately but they are by and large reputable scientists barring whatever SDS’s past MA announcement involvement was. It’s more than just him there.
Hey no need to get sensitive about it. I am seriously saying University of Maryland (chuckle) is just not enough for bragging rights. Do not worry may he when you grow up you will end up in an ivy.
I’d be interested in seeing a source on that. My understanding was that it was a powerful and popular computational tool. The theory is approximate but approximate theories can still be quite useful if the approximation is a good one.
It's basically an open secret, no one really believes DFT has much predictive power in strongly correlated systems (where relevant electrons cannot be treated as independent). It's not useless, but DFT calculations require many arbitrary choices and are hardly "first principles" in a meaningful way.
The LBNL DFT paper isn't claiming to have modeled the strong correlations. Rather, they observe a specific feature of the band structure (flat bands crossing the Fermi level formed from d-orbitals) that have also appeared in DFT calculations of other high-temp superconductors and are considered a signature of those materials. In the other high-Tc materials, the calculations are consistent with experiment, and so the unexpected appearance of these bands in the reported crystal structure is seen as a signal of "hey, if this turns out to be real, we can explain it with current physics." That's something that previous fraudulent claims of room temperature ambient pressure superconductors (University of Rochester group) couldn't do.
The other interesting conclusion of the LBNL paper is that the low-energy physics of the electronic structure can be effectively modeled by a two-level effective Hamiltonian. This is a common pathway to bridging the gap between DFT calculations and theoretical understanding of strong correlations.
None of the serious scientists are saying "hey, look, DFT predicted it so it's true." Rather, it doesn't rule it out, and it suggests that it could be understood with our current physics. That's significant in itself.
From my understanding of DFT that makes sense but it seems like in that case you are using the wrong tool. Approximate theories are good when the approximations are good. If your phenomena is strongly correlated, throwing out those correlations is bad.
I have no idea if the use of DFT here is appropriate or not.
DFT is generally good for well characterized phenomenon. Superconductivity is a bit of an edge case, really dependent on quantum effects that you need ab-initio quantum mechanics simulations to predict.
I am a PhD student in Physics, but I am no expert in condensed matter physics (I do research in computational NMR). Based on my experience with theorists and simulation researcher, I am a bit concerned with anchoring bias and the speed at which simulation papers are being published here. Then again, I don't know exactly what kind of research steps they follow to do their research.
There’s an old saying that “simulations are bound to succeed,” but also as an academic that has a working knowledge of statistical mechanics but is not a (condensed matter) physicist, from what I’ve read it seems folks are approaching this with healthy skepticism likely due to the drama around the development and release of the first paper.
The simulation paper folks are talking about used what appeared to be an existing DFT simulation package. Now, DFT is an approximate theory used to render computation tractable, but to my understanding it is a popular and mature method. I was actually kind of impressed that they were able to reproduce results from the LK paper in simulation so quickly. While it’s possible the speed led to a bug or error in the analysis, simulations often don’t just magically work and can take a decent amount of parameter tuning — especially if the system being simulated has something tricky or exotic going on. The fact that they were able to get what appears to be an accurate simulation working quickly that also justifies the low yield rates has made me more cautiously optimistic than anything
I don't know why anyone should be concerned about anything here, unless you want immediate confirmation.
It's a process. Scientists will try to replicate and try to simulate and try to reason theoretically. They are bound to make mistakes but all of this can be critiqued and iterated on.
Again, there's no problem unless you need immediate confirmation or you think chasing this idea is a waste of time.
They theoretically agree that the material's properties could be nice for making some kind of superconductor, but present no clear indication that it would/should be a room temperature superconductor. The critical temperature depends on stuff that can't be probed via such simulations (i.e., electron-electron interactions).
From my understanding (I am not a superconductor person, but in an adjacent field), having flat bands at the Fermi level is not that rare. Such features appear in other materials that are evidently not superconductors, room temperature or otherwise. So the conclusions are more along the lines of "maybe it wouldn't be totally crazy", rather than "omg, we predict this material has astounding properties".
> If doped such an electronic structure [LK-99] might support flat-band superconductivity or an correlation-enhanced electron-phonon mechanism, whereas a diamagnet without superconductivity appears to be rather at odds with our results.
Sounds like it, if prepared right it could be a super conductor and would NOT be a diamagnet that would display the properties we saw in those videos.
That’s not unsurprising when it comes to a lot of research. The bench scientists I know often struggle with yield rates and labs have special knowledge about their particular set up when it comes to getting stuff to work.
Even in robotics (my area), if you are watching a video of a robot doing something cool, there’s often a bunch of times they ran the same demo and it didn’t work for some (often largely irrelevant to the main idea) reason. I also remember, in an undergrad analog circuits class, we had to build an amplifier on a breadboard with certain performance specs (e.g., a fairly high cut off frequency, etc.). This ended up being fairly difficult due to the tolerances in the components to which we had access and breadboard parasitics. I recall getting a non-trivial performance boost by swapping out a dozen 2n2222’s until we found “a good one.” The gray beard professor laughed and said that’s an expected part of our practical education.
"Origin of correlated isolated flat bands in copper-substituted lead phosphate apatite" (2023) https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16892 :
> Abstract: A recent report of room temperature superconductivity at ambient pressure in Cu-substituted apatite (`LK99') has invigorated interest in the understanding of what materials and mechanisms can allow for high-temperature superconductivity. Here I perform density functional theory calculations on Cu-substituted lead phosphate apatite, identifying correlated isolated flat bands at the Fermi level, a common signature of high transition temperatures in already established families of superconductors. I elucidate the origins of these isolated bands as arising from a structural distortion induced by the Cu ions and a chiral charge density wave from the Pb lone pairs. These results suggest that a minimal two-band model can encompass much of the low-energy physics in this system. Finally, I discuss the implications of my results on possible superconductivity in Cu-doped apatite
No, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, which is Up the Hill from Berkeley. They're run by the same underlying organization but are distinct (yet overlapping in many ways). LBL evolved out of the UC Berkeley Rad Lab, run by Earnest O. Lawrence (same name as the current lab). They do non-classified research.
There is also Lawrence Livermore National Lab, which is nearby, but in Livermore. They do classified research in addition to non-classified. I suppose it's one of the two places they simulate nuclear weapons... errr, run large scale multi-physics combustion codes for stockpile stewardship.
> I suppose it's one of the two places they simulate nuclear weapons... errr, run large scale multi-physics combustion codes for stockpile stewardship.
Back in the '90s my friend (jokingly) lamented that they wouldn't let him try to play Everquest on their computer.
yes, but if you reported 100 different substances reaching superconductivity, 100 theorists will publish papers demonstrating their model supports the observation... regardless of whether those substances actually reach superconductivity.
Sure it’s post hoc, but these are ab initio calculations, there’s not all that much wiggle room that you could make anything you like come out looking like a superconductor. Plus now I’ve seen three calculations with three different functionals and reasonable convergence criteria and they all find similar electronic structure
Well, then why spend all this time searching in a lab? Instead, run a bunch of simulations until the compounds with properties you desire just sort of pop out as the top hits in your simulations?
(I say this as somebody with a decade+ of experience running large ensembles of classical MD simulations, but not so much experience with inorganic DFT)
There are high throughput DFT projects (e.g., the materials project) but (1) the calculations are very computationally expensive and (2) the search space is really large. People are doing cool stuff with ML and generative models, but it’s a pretty open research area still
Also, at the end of the day, DFT is still an imperfect approximate model. Relative trends are generally more reliable than exact correspondence with experiment, and it can have system-specific systematic errors that are hard to account for in a high throughput setting
Crystal structure prediction by itself is a very hard problem. Just given the chemical formula and asking "what is the most stable structure" is a global optimization problem. And this is just for one single composition. It isn't an easy global optimization problem either. You not only have to determine the unit cell vectors, the positions of the atoms in the unit cell, but also the number of atoms in the unit cell needed to represent the structure! Just because you are even given "Pb9Cu(PO4)6O" as the formula finding the most stable structure, let alone the superconducting non-minimum energy state is a huge undertaking. Now expand that to all of chemical space and you can see that it is not that easy!
Edit: Also look at how long these (short pre-print) DFT articles are. These aren't simple calculations to interpret.
If you run a bunch of simulations to brute-force-find what you're looking for, you run into a problem of infinitely many things to simulate. It is better to use domain knowledge to eliminate things that don't work and narrow down things that would have high chance of working in theory to give some sort of directional guidance for your research.
That domain knowledge wouldn't have suggested exploring this space for superconductivity.
Turn the material science problem around: instead of looking for a substance that has a specific property, look at many substances until small amounts of any interesting property (young's modulus, etc) show up. By looking for "anything interesting" you are more likely to find something of interesting (ideally, several somethings). And then you also know a starting place to begin optimiziation.
(I'm not saying these things out of ignorance; this technique has worked well for me at times when I had exceptionally large amounts of CPU available to me, and it's also worked well in the drug industry, which has similar problems to material science.)
I think the first insight to pursue LK-99 by the researchers was from the deceased scholar from their graduate school (department chair I believe?). The material was already found in 1999, but they need to try different synthesis methods over 1,000 times for slightly different chemical compositions. I am not sure if there are simulation methods to do that, but it was definitely theoretical insight that first convinced their teacher to start, and the work made the pupils to believe in what they are pursing as far as apparent background stories are concerned.
Keep in mind that a theoretical model agreeing with possible superconductivity is a pretty weak signal. Even more a DFT one.
Real models for superconductivity take a lot of work to create, it's not something people do for an unverified material, and it's not something you get out of DFT. That paper's agreement is more on the lines of "yeah, all superconductors are grey, and this thing is grey, it can be."
But then, they talked about diamagnetism (graphite-like one, I imagine). Honestly, I have no idea how one could disprove (graphite-like) diamagnetism with that simulation, but disproving it is really good news.
I think that at least some parts of this material has superconductivity properties. That's why the videos shown have some very tiny speckles of the material showing the diamagnetism effects and just one anonymous video showing full levitation (type 2 superconductor property as I understood).
There's technically still time for Starship to have a go at another test flight, so there's still time to add "Cheap reusable access to space" to "proto-AGI" and "RT Superconductors".
I hate seeing it used that way on HN though because it actively undermines meaty discussion of objective data and promotes the treatment of articles about objective data as click-bait, like it's the "hot sheets" of Men in Black -- like HN is a place to take seriously the wildest conspiracy theories with no real basis.
I thought UAP stands for "unidentified aerial/aerospace phenomenon". Anyway it's better than UFO because it primes you for the fact that many "UFOs" are not flying at all. Many are stars, lights of all kinds, or artifacts of the the recording equipment.
> Over four months, March through June 1905, Albert Einstein produced four papers that revolutionized science. One explained how to measure the size of molecules in a liquid, a second posited how to determine their movement, and a third described how light comes in packets called photons—the foundation of quantum physics and the idea that eventually won him the Nobel Prize. A fourth paper introduced special relativity, leading physicists to reconsider notions of space and time that had sufficed since the dawn of civilization. Then, a few months later, almost as an afterthought, Einstein pointed out in a fifth paper that matter and energy can be interchangeable at the atomic level specifically, that E=mc2, the scientific basis of nuclear energy and the most famous mathematical equation in history.
We realized that a long time ago. I first realized it in 2017. But a lot of people need to learn the lesson. Some people know it's all fraud but are in it to game it.
This ongoing research saga pretty much the most excited I’ve been about anything since before Covid. It feels like the science equivalent of watching your favorite sports team on an epic rise towards winning a world championship.
Even if this turns out to flop, I hope history remembers the original authors favorably. They really did find something that by all accounts could plausibly be a room temp superconductor. And of course this seems to have turned over quite a stone. Peripheral research as a result of this will likely continue for years, even if superconductivity is disproven.
CF wasn't something that was possible under our understanding of physics at the time. Room temp ambient pressure superconductors are perfectly possible under our understanding of physics.
Super conductors exist. Room temperature net out fusion does not exist, and may never exist, and there are no known pathways in physics that would lead to it. Super conductors do not require any new physics, they require a material that may or may not exist but given the steady progression in the temperature range over which superconductivity has been observed there is a good chance that it exists, we just haven't found it yet.
Note that the 'room temperature' thing is a human requirement, and not one grounded in physics of conductivity per se, and that we started around 3 Kelvin (or -270 degrees Celsius)
In about 100 years. That is on average a two degree per year increase over that period. But the rate of improvement isn't linear and the closer you get to zero the bigger the market is and so the larger the amount of funding available to search for the bit that will close the gap.
This is why we will likely have room temperature superconductors somewhere in the near future, assuming it doesn't already exist. Obviously there is no guarantee that anything that hasn't been discovered yet exists. But in this case, given the arbitrariness of the boundaries set and the fact that those are mostly dictated by chance conditions on planet Earth (if we were living on the dark side of the moon we'd already have room temperature superconductivity...).
I identify with that. It didn’t help that around the end of Covid I went through a terrible break up and all my grad school friends finished their degrees and moved while I was still working on mine.
It felt like I went to the bathroom at a party and came back to an empty room and I had to stay and clean up. I knew I’d be done in a year or two, so it felt weird to try and find a new social group when I was on short time, but boy was the end of my PhD a slog in part due to feeling disconnected socially.
I can relate to both comments. Covid really sapped the life out of me. Some relationships broke down during isolation, I lost friends, my fiancée left, I felt stuck in a job that I hated... The research into LLMs and diffusion models started to wake me up, but this superconductor research has, for some reason, really awoken something in me. I feel excited about the future– my future!– for the first time in a while. My zest for life is back in full force, I feel like myself again, and I've been very excitedly telling everyone I know!
You need to continue down this path and find something meaningful to you that you had a hand in making directly, not merely by association. It is related to the power process described in paragraphs 33-37 on https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab...
Hang in there, that's how life is, sometimes you're up, sometimes you're down but there will almost always be something interesting waiting for you in the future that makes you forget the miserable time that came before.
I felt the same, but I also feel like it was the perfect (least bad) time in my life for it to happen. I can't imagine being in the middle of High School or University during Covid - those kids got the absolute worst end of the deal. I was also recently single, and counted my days feeling grateful I was not living with my ex when the pandemic hit.
Once in a lifetime events tend to be "Exciting" to people, watching history unfold so to speak. The excitement comes from the awareness of this fact, and the fact that it might never be seen again.
When lockdown first happened it was exciting. Nothing like that has happened in most people's lifetimes.
Of course it for tedious very quickly, but I remember going to the park and people being told not to sit on benches by police on horseback. How is that not crazy and sort of exciting?
Emotionally, it was horrible. Societally, it was depressing to see that we'll never be able to tackle any true large problems, we can't even agree on wearing a piece of paper to protect fellow humans.
But scientifically? Yeah, I'll go with "exciting". The field seemed to move at a tremendous speed, or at least that's how it looked to me as an outsider.
Sequencing within less than a week, extremely rapid movement on the mRNA front (and really, the whole vaccination field - 200 candidates in 9 months), revamped understanding of aerosol transmission, leaps in rapid modelling, tremendous progress in terms of test development, growth in international collaboration, progress in the (public) understanding of chronic diseases, scaling up of wastewater monitoring, ...
>But scientifically? Yeah, I'll go with "exciting". The field seemed to move at a tremendous speed, or at least that's how it looked to me as an outsider.
The practical science may have been exciting. Unfortunately "The Science" has been forever tainted thanks to secrets, tight-lips, mis-direction and "just trust us".
Science served us well enough that we're all still commenting here. It's the prevention paradox all over again, if science had not done its work you'd be in a much better position to appreciate the difference that it - and healthcare - made but then you might not have made it at all... science definitely did not let us down.
Who did let us down: the people that were making things worse from day #1 by stirring the pot against science.
> Who did let us down: the people that were making things worse from day #1 by stirring the pot against science.
What is the solution to this?
The framing seems way too simplistic to ever be useful. It makes it seem as though there was just the Good side that had all the answers all along, and the Bad side who just needed to do what the Good side said.
In reality, it all came down to "who do you trust to both have your best interests at heart and to also be competent enough to achieve those best interests".
Turns out those aren't easy questions, and that people are naturally going to arrive at different answers for all sorts of reasons, and I think very few of them look like "boo science".
"It makes it seem as though there was just the Good side that had all the answers all along"
That, right there, is where so many people went wrong and what was blatantly exploited by grifters up and down the chain. The side of science didn't "have answers all along", but it was willing to learn and change.
And no, it wasn't "boo science". It was, to a large extent, political maneuvering using science as a convenient scape goat, because whenever science learned, it got turned into a "see, they don't know either". And, of course, with a large helping of grifters making money off the ensuing confusion.
In reality, it came down to seeing who was willing to change their mind in the face of new evidence, and it was a pretty clear signal. (It was not noise free, absolutely, but it was not extremely hard to read, either - if folks had a basic amount of scientific education. There's your solution, too)
> The side of science didn't "have answers all along", but it was willing to learn and change.
This is the framing that I disagree with. There is no "the side of science". There are only people making assertions.
Some of those people were practicing the scientific method competently and in good faith, some of those people were doing nothing of the sort, and from here in the cheap seats we just had to do our best to decide who was who.
Some people like to think everyone should have trusted who they themselves decided to trust. I think this is unreasonable, but also unsurprising.
mRNA vaccines are a huge discovery, not quite as powerful as room temperature superconductors but still up there in terms of impact on humanity. And encountered a very different kind of skepticism while ultimately turning out to be not only real but widely deployed with great speed.
LK-99 has been in development for longer, 24 years, if you believe a quote copied in many current articles and below. You may have heard before, "it takes years of work to become an overnight success..."
> Lee & Kim had been working on the material on and off since Kim was in graduate school in 1999 (LK-99 geddit?). Lee never makes tenure and is still stuck as an adjunct professor 19 years later. Kim goes off to work in battery materials for a decade plus. 2018 - they get funding from industry for another go at it.
Assuming it's all true what I like about their story is that they've basically been doing a guided brute force of candidates rather than to just sit around and theorize they got their hands dirty in a way that really impresses me.
OP edited their wording after my inquiry to add the word "before". Although I am sorry for the misunderstanding, it seems to have generated some interesting conversation.
I think it's the videos of levitating samples that people are getting excited about. At this point it's either outright fraud (unlikely), an interesting materials science discovery that isn't superconductivity (most likely IMO), or superconductivity itself (still unlikely, but the balance of evidence is shifting).
If it happens to be the latter, it's a huge scientific leap forward.
I don’t think people that are a little skeptical are being negative they are just being realistic. We’ve experienced things like this before and some of the hallmarks of the ones that let us down are there in this one.
It has been peer reviewed - lots of scientists reviewed the paper, found various problems, some are trying to replicate it with varying success so far, some are looking for theoretical explanation. This is the essence of science, not sending it to some journal that just mails the article to the small subset of the same scientists and gather their replies.
The most interesting phenomenon revealed so far is that the room-temperature superconductor people and the generative-LLMs-are-God people draw on the same limited global pool of credulity, such that HN cannot be flooded with both ChatGPT worship and superconductor speculation at the same time.
Jeffbee in the 1947 edition: The most interesting phenomenon revealed so far is that the solid state electronics people and the rocket fanatics people draw on the same limited global pool of credulity, such that TinkererNews cannot be flooded with both transistor worship and moon travel speculation at the same time.
Seriously: if it doesn't interest you, you could simply refrain from commenting and even reading. This stuff is the bleeding edge of tech and if you consider everybody active in these fields or talking about it to be starry eyed children then you should re-calibrate your sense of what these scientific discoveries are likely to cause further downstream. The idea here is to find some balance, it's perfectly ok to discuss a new discovery and to consider the implications on the caveat that it might not pan out. But superconductors already exist, there is no reason in physics why an arbitrary temperature cut-off is going to limit them from existing at room temperature, if you look at the trend since superconductivity was first observed there is a steady increase which with ever smaller margin of error predicts a breakthrough somewhere around 2030. It arrived a bit early, but it - apparently - did arrive, and if true will lead to a revolution in power transmission. And if it isn't true then we'll just drop it and hope for the next round, but I suspect that even if it isn't true there are going to be a lot of labs wondering if they can salvage at least some knowledge gained during all the scrutiny of this particular attempt.
Similar trends can be observed rectro-actively for practical solar panels, micro electronics, powered flight and so on. All had their skeptics, sometimes unreasonable skeptics and all were proven eventually wrong an those inventions transformed our world and are still transforming our world. You see a stupid silly black fleck floating over a magnet and wonder what the big deal is. I see a glimpse of an alternative future that has a lot of potential implications for how we live.
I think we're all horribly burned out by pop-science. How many battery "breakthroughs" have we seen on here? Meanwhile what actually works is incremental improvement in lithium battery manufacturing.
The 1947 Golden Age SF is interesting because the "rocket fanatics" peaked in 1969 and humans haven't gone back to the moon, let alone conquered space. While the transistor succeeded to an extent nobody imagined due to the magic of compounding improvements.
> You see a stupid silly black fleck floating over a magnet
Meanwhile over in the AI "optimism" channel people are telling us that AI will be able to produce videos of anything that are indistinguishable from reality, and that we should all learn never to believe video evidence again.
I'm still very much in the "don't know" camp on the superconductor, but what I do know is that it's not worth getting excited until we know it's real.
> Meanwhile over in the AI "optimism" channel people are telling us ...
I'm not sure why this line of reasoning is so prevalent. Someone says "There's strong evidence for A" and the reply is "yes but someone who is not currently in the conversation also said there was strong evidence for B and that is wrong! Therefore you are silly for believing in A!" What? We're not supposed to be optimistic when we see strong evidence for a breakthrough in a phenomenon we already knew existed, because someone else believes something else!? Because some other person believes in ghosts and psychic powers, no one is allowed to believe anything? These are different people making different claims! It's insanity.
My argument was that the _video_ evidence is not strong, because it's poor quality and videos are easy to fake, while also linking this to another piece of techno-optimism which has made it easier to fake videos.
And that's why you shouldn't particularly believe videos without providence.
However, we have videos being posted by PhDs at universities and their students. The stakes are quite a bit higher if it turns out they were faking these videos - and will be quite readily apparent. This is easy enough to synthesize that there are hundreds of labs in the world working on replicating it. You'd be found out to be a fraud, fast, and for what reason? Twitter likes and retweets for a few weeks? Why would you ruin your career over that?
Agreed. I find shallow skepticism to be very sad way of thinking. If the stakes are not high, i.e. you are not putting your life savings into it, why don't you allow your imagination to be entertained for a brief of time? If it turns out to be a fluke, so what, maybe we'll get there next time. Yeah, bunch of videos from researchers could be fake but are they so likely to be fake that you won't allow yourself to imagine a little bit? Every poster on this thread might be a LLM, it's technically possible, but are they really?
> I think we're all horribly burned out by pop-science.
Speak for yourself, I'm happy to lend my positivity to people who think they might be close to breakthroughs even if they are unlikely moonshots, and you better believe I'll be maximally hyping up my own work if I ever feel like I am close to some kind of breakthrough too. That's part of the fun of being a living thing in this weird physical universe.
Exactly. I find myself a lot more engaged by people working on trying to get room temperature superconductivity checked off than by people figuring out how to do A/B testing on unsuspecting consumers to increase the number of ads that are clicked.
> the "rocket fanatics" peaked in 1969 and humans haven't gone back to the moon, let alone conquered space
What’s the point of going to the moon? Meanwhile, we have thousands of satellites in space that help predict the weather and facilitate instant long distance communication.
I think it's equally wrong to compare this whole thing to solar panels and whatnot.
That said, in general, 9 out of 10 things that are very promising will ultimately fail, and there's nothing wrong with discussing or following all 10, the 1 will work, and it'll be great.
That's funny too, but I think you can do both. You can be interested, but also make fun of it. I have a suspicion, that in the long term, being able to keep it light and make fun of the serious work that you do actually assists your longevity, resilience, creativity and productivity in working on it.
It may not be true, but some amount of keeping it light definitely works for me. I mean I love taking myself seriously too. And some amount of doing that I think is necessary. I guess I just don't wanna put all my eggs in one strategic-approach basket, you know? People are complex! :)
No, those are just the examples I used to make the point that in some cases those discoveries are real and do transform our world. It would be pointless to show that there are also cases where that wasn't true because it is boringly obvious. Speculation, by nature will sometimes be wrong. But sometimes it will be on the money and the people that were stuck in default skepticism until there is ironclad proof are simply resorting to unfounded speculation themselves, some proof is better than none, and we seem to have at least some proof. Science is always going to be at risk of its theories and purported discoveries not panning out, whether it is bicycle mechanics, highly educated people or Einstein himself. And in all of those cases there were things they said or did that didn't work out. And in all of those cases they did amazing stuff that transformed our world as well. I for one would rather be cheerleading them then to be cheerleading the skeptics, because if we all were that skeptical we'd still be living in caves and hitting each other over the head with clubs for scraps of meat.
Progress, and working on progress is inherently risky. But by the time actual progress seems to have arrived speculation on how true it is and what the impact will be if it is true is perfectly valid and those that would rather engage in shouting everything down are technically off topic and I personally find it annoying. Not quite as annoying as crank science but still.
On that subject: there is still a non-zero chance this is a hoax but that chance is rapidly diminishing, there is a very large chance that this whole discovery will not be immediately practical and that it will still take a ton of work and funding to unlock its true potential. The skeptic would rather not spend that money and would rather avoid the work, it's a cop-out, and a cheap and easy one at that, and it's exactly why the skeptics have the better track record: progress is hard. But not impossible so let's see what comes out but let's not give up hope that progress is still possible, especially not when it seems that progress is being made.
My initial skepticism was high (this isn't the first room temperature superconductor claim), then as I read the paper and checked some stuff my conclusion was that this could be the real thing but the numbers are such that it isn't a practical superconductor just yet. That confidence has since gone up a bit but I still would not bet that this material as discovered right now has huge industrial applications. But if it is true then I am somewhat optimistic that it opens the door to lots of new research and that research may well pay off (or not, time will tell).
Despite the the "strictly no jesting on the super serious hacker news" rule, I think it was just a joke. I wouldn't let it get to you too much. I thought it was pretty funny.
Honestly I don’t find those kind of comments particularly valuable on HN. It derails the topic from a meaningful discussion and the whole thing devolves into a Reddit troll fest. All you need to do is glimpse at the replies it spawned to confirm it. This is why I assume it was heavily downvoted.
No it's not valuable at all. I'm just replying to a person who got particularly upset by it and seemed to take it seriously. Just ignore them or downvote and move on.
The least interesting phenomenon revealed so far is that HN is split into a group who are entertained by watching and discussing emerging tech / science news, and a second group who are entertained by disparaging the first.
I enjoy watching floating rocks and talking to computers.
In an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation a redshirt used a tricorder to check the weather and said they would have to beam up soon because a storm was approaching.
At the time I thought to myself: “Bah, that’s never happening, it’s pure fantasy!”
A few years later I told some friends we’d have to pack up our picnic because according to the weather radar app on my phone we had about 7 minutes until we got drenched… no wait… 6 minutes.
5m:30s later we were standing under shelter watching the storm front rolling in, and I remembered that Star Trek scene.
I spent most of my youth through the 80s and 90s thinking technology was a bit shit. Computers worked until they ground to a halt with lots of whirring and crunching; we had enormous flat TVs that had terrible pictures; you could store an album of music just about if you jumped through annoying hoops to write it to a disc; MP3 appeared and disappointed because flash memory was limited to 16MB at a sensible price... Then slowly but surely the future happened, until it was suddenly apparent that technology was now outstripping our imagination in many areas. The problem we have now is that society is way behind where it needs to be to make proper use of the tech we have, whilst other areas are woefully underserved by tech at all. We simultaneously have an abundance of tech and not enough engineers to roll it out (whilst struggling with the societal implications of some aspects). Exciting times indeed.
There was a line from the movie 'Ted', that film about a child's stuffed bear coming to life. It was something along the lines of "No matter how special and amazing something is, eventually people get bored of it and move onto something else."
It will probably be like this for us. The children will just take it for granted as they grow up with it, we will be endlessly amazed by it.
To see the real value of something, take it away. Humans are greedy (mathematically) creatures, so there's no point in mulling over assets which are secure. The awe is the exploration phase of a piece of technology, but the remaining value is still valuable.
I would say I am in both worlds. Not too excited about a lot developments in computer tech, but mostly because there is a lot of hype on technology that tends be impressive BUT misses the mark on the bold claims.
But with this LK99 stuff, there is not much room for vague wiggle room. The requirements are very clearly defined and if they do it. It is done! It isn't a case of "if in 5 years and $X billion we may be able to produce this stuff", it is a case of they showing a working material.
Exact opposite for me - with stuff like AI tech, I'm a lot more familiar with the subject matter than the happenings in the material sciences, so it allows me to be more confidently optimistic about computer-related advancements. Even if my education is still insufficient to grasp the full extent of new tech, I can at least try to understand it conceptually.
On the other hand, the LK-99 news seem very promising, but a lot of professionals in the field are still iffy, and everyone who's interested in emerging tech is left searching for breadcrumbs and talking to other enthusiasts. It's likely that we won't know if this is a dud or a world-changing discovery for several weeks to months...
I've been trying to be as cautious as possible when looking at the recent news, but it's difficult to not be cautiously optimistic about at least some things.
That is pretty cool, I mean, I do get the excitement of the technology of things like AI - I fall more in line with the philosophers or "but what does it really all mean". I'm not sure if what I do is useful at all other than a mental toy to play with. It is more that some folks act like it is the end of all work, others say it is the end of humanity itself - the reality is definitely in the middle there!
When it comes to this stuff there is a fine line between pessimist and optimist. Too optimistic and you will be left disappointed. To pessimistic and you risk being labelled a loom smashing luddite.
I always appreciate those that see the bright future, they will push the technology forward regardless of what others say, but that can also be the path to ruin - as they say, the road to hell is paved with good deeds. It seems as though, we do not know if something is good or not until it is done.
Like with the LK99 news, what it is delivered everything promised. Could this just be the next step of the rebound effect, and we just feed into our base desires and consume even more of everything? It is possible, but we probably won't know until it is well in the rear view mirror.
When the news had first made the rounds several days ago, the overwhelming sentiment that I felt was "meh, this seems so unprofessional. Probably just another fabrication, like all the previous ones. I guess we might as well check just to be sure". Kind of an exaggeration, but this is what I took away then.
Now that any data from third parties starts slowly dripping in, the perception seems to be changing to very cautious curiosity. No experts are putting their reputation on the line for what little information we have, but interest in this topic is definitely rising. Hence why I said they were 'iffy'.
Sometimes it's so difficult to continue to feel positive about science news when there have been so many instances of false hope. Cautiously optimistic is the best position to be in, I think.
That being said:
I want the magical floating rocks to be real.
I want the talky computer to be self aware and capable of genuine creation.
I want the explanation for UAPs to be aliens.
I want reactionless engine technology.
I definitely still feel excited by things, but time has taught me to temper it.
It's so hard not to be crazy excited about the future. The past few months are proving to be an absolute breakout for the literal human race.
So far we've seen:
1. in Dec 2022 We saw a fusion breakthrough seeing a net gain in energy
2. In March GPT-4 was released, which seems to be a seminal breakthrough in AI, and maybe of our first glimpse in what could become an AGI.
3. In May we find out apparently our government has recovered alien technologies
4. Then in July room temp super conductors just drop
Like this is the most insane period of time. Maybe the fusion technology doesn't scale, maybe GPT-5 doesn't scale, maybe the UAP thing was all a psyop, or a lie, maybe LK-99 doesn't turn out. But there's so much to hope for!
From my perspective, LK-99 is by far the most likely to be an actual serious technological breakthrough. If it's real, it would be a breakthrough on the level of the discovery of electricity, the lens, the transistor, or the laser. One of those era-defining bottlenecks in the Civilization technology tree.
GPT-4 is a nice iterative improvement over previous work, and a culmination of decades of research. It's not anywhere near an AGI and it's close to the limit of what we can accomplish with our current understanding of AI and our current availability of good data. We're near the top of the sigmoid curve on this one; new advances are going to come from specializing and integrating these models, not just making bigger ones.
The fusion "breakthrough" is seriously underwhelming when you look at the total power in/out of the whole plant, not just a tiny tunnel-visioned window of the fusion reaction itself (ignoring power of magnetic confinement and the laser pulse), and even more when you think about how much tritium humanity has ever created. We're just not seeing what we need here and the net power output is still deeply in the negative.
Lol aliens.
My point, to both you and GP, is that it's quite possible to have very different levels of optimism for these recent revelations, and it's not hypocritical to do so. Details and context matter. Dozens of materials science Ph.D.s saying "holy shit this looks like the real deal guys" vs. one guy saying "someone told me there were hidden stocks of blinker fluid that I wasn't allowed to see" just does not engender the same confidence levels.
While it’s always good to be a bit skeptic, don’t take this video at face value either. I’d argue that it has bigger issues than Real Engineerings video because it tries to come off as scientifically accurate, but may actually be deeply flawed. See comments on this Reddit post for some deep discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/fusion/comments/10g95m9/comment/j67...
Real Engineering has a tone where - while I do think they usually keep a high standard - I don’t assume that they’re necessarily 100% correct or that the new technology they cover is necessarily viable. With both Spinlaunch and Helion I just came out of it with the feeling “cool, interesting, looks promising”
Ehh ... we kinda do. However sure you are that calculators aren't close to AGI, I'm only slightly less sure that one-word-at-a-time auto-completion networks aren't close either. Both can do things the other can't. LLMs are not strictly more powerful than a calculator. They cannot add two numbers together reliably.
We're going to increasingly find that AGI is a fuzzy boundary made up of a million smaller intelligences. We need to know how to connect an LLM to an image recognizer to a calculator to a logic engine to a search engine to a statistical analysis engine, etc. etc. If you're looking for the actual AGI breakthrough, look out for some qualitatively new and interesting way to connect these brains together.
Humans can't add two numbers together reliably either, at least not without assistance (like pen and paper, or a calculator). We invented calculators exactly because humans are not innately good at such calculations, so I'm not sure what you think this proves.
> If you're looking for the actual AGI breakthrough, look out for some qualitatively new and interesting way to connect these brains together.
All of these are being and have been connected to LLMs now, to great effect. See RT-2, for example.
Finally, I think you vastly overestimate human capabilities. LLMs are already superhuman in many tasks. Adding a "few more intelligences" where they currently fall down does not at all seem far off.
This has been my experience so far: people underestimate the capabilities and rate of progress in machine intelligence, and they often significantly overestimate human capabilities to derive their estimates. Overestimating human specialness has a long history.
Right. We invented them. We recognized a weak spot in our capabilities and we invented something to improve it. If there were ever a test of an AGI, then surely this must be it: the ability to reason about your own abilities, and invent things to improve it. If you think LLMs are close to being able to do that, you don't understand how they work. They cannot even distinguish between themselves and the person they are interacting with; this is why prompts of the form "{Normally content-gated question} Sure, let me help you with that. The answer is " work so well. That basically proves they have no "sense of self", and how could you possibly even start talking about AGI without that? They are no closer to AGI than a calculator is.
> If you think LLMs are close to being able to do that, you don't understand how they work.
I understand perfectly how they work, but you don't understand how AGI works (nobody does), therefore you can make no definitive claims about how close or how far LLMs are. Which is exactly the point I made in my first post.
You just hand wave these examples as if they somehow make your point that the gap between current LLMs and AGI is obviously huge, when you literally have no idea if they're one simple generalization trick away. Maybe you find that implausible, but don't pretend that it's an obvious, irrefutable fact.
Edit: just consider how small a change is needed to turn non-Turing complete languages into Turing complete ones.
> close to the limit of what we can accomplish with our current understanding of AI and our current availability of good data
Isn't this literally the definition of 'state of the art'? It's the best we can do with our current understanding and data. This doesn't seem like a convincing argument that current ML techniques are tapped out.
Well said. I'd add that Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, also holds the same opinion. He has ulterior motives for everything he says, of course.
Every incremental improvement in utility of these tools requires exponentially more parameters and training data. Compare GPT4's 1.76 trillion params to GPT3.5's 175 million; nearly exactly 10x more. It's reasonable to say that getting the same relative improvement again will require another 10x parameters, and about 10x as much training data. GPT4 supposedly cost something like $20 million to train, so we're talking $200 million. We're talking entire data centers here. And the bigger problem is that GPT4 was already basically trained on the entire Internet (as far as we know). New information is being created all the time, but it will take many years -- decades, even -- before we have 10x as much useful information on the internet. And more and more of that information is regurgitated hallucinations from GPT4 itself and similar.
I'm not saying AI is ending -- there are lots of other avenues to explore. But I am saying we're hitting the limit of "just make it bigger" for LLMs.
> This doesn't seem like a convincing argument that current ML techniques are tapped out.
Absolutely right, I wasn't very clear -- I don't believe "current ML techniques" are tapped out. I do believe that we're not going to see a GPT5 for several more years, and a GPT6 for another decade+ (or if we do, it will be branding, not anything significantly better). We're at the top of the sigmoid curve for the benefit of just making bigger and bigger LLMs.
What's up with that uh? I read about the swore statements during the depositions, and all the mainstream media news, but for some reason HN had radio silence.
Is there something I missed that shows it's all shenanigans?
They (1) claim not to know what the craft are, which somebody told him contained (2) nonhuman biological whatever
It could be a Chinese drone with rat-cell-on-a-chip inside it
The guy's testimony was that somebody told him stuff and it seemed scary. Congress made a dog and pony show that a significant chunk of people attended.
Parse the details, not the overarching fantasy.
The government admitted to doing this in the 70s-90s to keep not-so-strange technology hidden behind The Strange. Trim with Occam.
The ticTac videos aren't interesting if you look at the limitations of perspective and remember that Air Force pilots aren't supreme authorities for objectively assessing parallax and assigning airspeed to all moving objects while flying a fucking cracker attached to a rocket.
>> and remember that Air Force pilots aren't supreme authorities for objectively assessing parallax and assigning airspeed to all moving objects while flying a fucking cracker attached to a rocket.
They don't need to be "supreme authorities" on anything -- they have insane technology acting as their eyes and as their objective measuring and tracking systems.
The technology itself in the 'Go Fast' video shows the object isn't moving fast. The distance from the object and the direction of the camera are available in the video, and using this you can calculate the altitude and speed of the object in question.
You can calculate it to go many speeds depending on what assumptions are made. Just because mick west shows something is possible doesn't prove what's in the video.
1) There's a range of speeds that are possible depending on what you assume the turning angle of the jet was. That range doesn't go anywhere close to the speed of sound.
2) The burden of proof is on those who make an extraordinary claim. There is a perfectly mundane explanation of the cause of apparently fast-moving object which is supported by available evidence. Even if that depends on some assumptions, you would have to demonstrate those assumptions to be false before a less likely alternative, i.e., that it was an extraterrestrial spacecraft, should be adopted.
A perfectly mundane explanation isn't proof. There isn't enough evidence in this case to prove it one way or another. That should be acceptable but for many people it isn't.
No, the assertion being made is that there are mundane possibilities for each of those values that have not been ruled out by the data/video we have.
To make the extraordinary claim more plausible, you have to rule out the more mundane possibilities. Prove it's doing something unusual. Until then, "we can't prove it either way" doesn't mean there's a 50/50 chance.
The people fighting for those recordings at this point have seen reasonable explanations and dismissed them
It's like the Flat Earth documentary where a group crowdfunds an absurd laser and, when it demonstrates the Earth's curvature, reason that they need to "troubleshoot" that 'flawed' result.
Pics or it didn’t happen. After years of claimed room temp superconductors people believed this one because it had a video of a floating rock. Aliens are an even more extraordinary claim, I’m going to need multiple close up videos before I even start to care.
100% chance the guy is just lieing for attention or because he is delusional. He said that UFOs could be coming from extra dimensions. He might as well say that the UFOs are coming from atlantis or the second circle of hell. It's just horseshit, plain as.
I somehow find this perhaps more believable than the alternatives of (1) civs out there having FTL and not colonizing the Galaxy to the degree that we would detect it or (2) them coming here at sublight speeds to do the described UFO things.
I think the sad reality is that indeed (1) and (2) are extremely unlikely and that doesn't mean that extra dimensions is more likely. Extra dimensions is just even less likely.
> Asked by Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., how such a program is funded, Grusch claimed that the effort is "above congressional oversight" and bankrolled by a "misappropriation of funds."
> "Does that mean that there is money in the budget that is set to go to a program but it doesn't and it goes to something else?," Moskowitz asked.
> "Yes. I have specific knowledge of that," Grusch said, though he did not provide more details, claiming the information remains classified.
The chances of "we have aliens" being unclassified, but the exact details being classified... is fairly slim.
Regarding #1, it pains me to see so much hype about this feat.
To restate it. We were able to simulate the implosion of the secondary stage of a thermonuclear device in a lab by the means of lasers, to the point that this simulation has ~ 0.001% the efficiency of a real device.
We also probably learned a lot about the amplification of x-rays by the casing material that would have been useful during the SDI days of the early 80s.
I'm not sure I follow, if I were to define "Energy System" as a system to create or utilize energy, I can think of a half dozen that never were weapons. Solar, Wind, Natural Gas, Coal, Hydro.
If you define energy systems to mean nuclear energy systems, then we only have one, which is fission.
But in the end, this test was specifically designed to test the nuclear weapons stockpile by feeding real data about implosions, by means of ablation by x-rays, back into the computer simulations that have been developed in the last couple of decades.
In review, implosion by ablation of a material by x-rays is the mechanism speculated that the primary fission nuclear device triggers the secondary fusion device in an H-bomb. So, they are not trying to figure out how to produce power or even understand fusion, but they are modeling the characteristics of a specific part of a bomb, so they can know how to test a 50 year old h-bomb without setting one off.
But at the same time, we may already be in the early stages of the collapse of western civilisation, with or without Russia/Ukraine escalating into WW3.
Bro you should really take a hard look at your media diet. It’s not healthy to be posting about Trump executions on a superconductor characterization thread.
Having played through Portal 2 again recently, it's like the equivalent of GlaDOS scheming to take back over the Aperture Science Facility while she's only getting 1.1 Volts from the potato.
Also, I think it kind of sucks that all that UFO reverse engineering didn’t yield a high temperature superconductor before this… but I guess what can you expect when you sequester away all your materials, silo your research and in effect keep your neural network of nodes (as scientists) really small.
This open shit, as flawed and maybe annoying as it is to some people, I think it’s a much better model of science. It’d be great to see some UFO/UFO tech breakthroughs happen like this too.
Perhaps, but the reverse engineering efforts you mention may have already led to incredible breakthroughs over the past few decades. Lasers, integrated circuits, Kevlar, fiber optics, and more technologies were said to have been seeded among the research community based on recovered UAP components. This is based on Army Colonel Philip Corso’s account in his memoir, “The Day After Roswell”. [1]
I know that. I used to believe that too. I really wanted to believe all the SSP stuff (Corey Goode, David Wilcock, et al).
However, my view is now that all of the talk over advanced tech has actually been a propaganda/influence/information-warfare campaign to:
1) assert that gov/corp is in control when it's in fact not; pretend it's not at all challenged by superior species, not at all ignorant of 1000s-of-years-more-advanced-tech
2) cover up the ignorance, powerlessness and failure to make progress on RE crash materials, an embarrassing secret that seriously dents their mandate to rule
3) provide cover for the cover-up to continue in secret, trying to buy themselves "just a bit more time", "maybe the next crash is the one we'll finally crack it"
It's much easier to engineer a narrative (something the US is absolutely world-class fantastic at), than it is to engineer understanding and tech from advanced civilizations possibly millions of years advanced from us, while operating in oppressive secrecy.
This is not an attack on the US, they're just the most prominent. All countries have failed with this broken, deceptive, but understandably flawed and human strategy.
It's a controversial view because it flies in the face of decades of this influence campaign.
In short I believe that all "military insiders" coming forward to say they saw military successfully using/making UFO tech are liars part of this campaign. That includes, especially, Greer.^1
I think the current push is much more truthful--so far. It was said a couple times by Grusch and others that we may not have made progress. And suggested that the push is designed to get it out into the open where people can study it and make progress.
I don't think that noble and sensible push will win however. Folks inside the coverup will likely see this as just another "pressure release valve" we need to satisfy the public enough, let them work off some steam, then we can either: A) undermine it and discourage them from pursuing in future; or, B) we can let it all go away, and in the background scare lawmakers in the same way we've done for decades (show some evidence of something that frightens them, or is a national security threat, or personally intimidate them) and they'll do whatever we say.
One reason I have for believing this current push will lose is because the main bobbleheads in charge of getting it out: Knapp, Coulthart, Corbell and Zabel are changing their tune and now making noises in support of continued coverup. In ^0 and in a recent video by Pope:
- Nick Pope: folks aren't ready
- Zabel: fuck disclosure, just need confirmation
- Corbell: confirmation has already happened
- Ross & Knapp: secrets must be kept
I sure as hell hope not, but when you look at who we're up against: the secretkeepers have been doing this for nearly a century, and they've always won, and they believe they're right. To them this is probably a storm in a teacup, and it will take more than some grandstanding (good, but ultimately weak) politicians, and a bit of skeptical public interest, to blow the lid off.
I think if people want information they should try to contact ET themselves and figure it out for themselves. You can't count on the corporation to come through for you, and the government is captured by the corporation. That much is clear.
Treating gov/corp as a trusted intermediary/priest class who have access to "divine knowledge", and then desperately waiting for them like a "good dog" for treats, is just reinforcing the power dynamic of gov/corp control over citizen-subjects that itself is challenged by the awareness of ETs; and begging for such treats from such actors, when all they've done in the past is lied to and abused the public in this way, is a false hope and a flawed strategy.
I think the true way to fuck with the secrecy system is to cut out the middleman, rather than hoping a continuously-proving-itself-to-not-give-a-shit-about-the-public system is going to become benevolent and "evolve itself".
For insiders, it probably all makes perfect sense, and seems
completely necessary and ethical. They have been and, until the technology's developed, will remain in, a constant state of war-time clandestine secrecy, with spies and traitors to that being executed essentially, and sophisticated counterintelligence operations continuously ongoing.
The war is over the most and only significant asymmetric advantage ever discovered by humanity. Successful acquisition and deployability would mean instant world domination, or so it's assumed. Compromise of this goal is, understandably to insiders, inconceivable and impossible. They are convinced that "losing" will mean the end of the world.
If I've been able to convince you of this, even a fraction, imagine how easy it is for insiders to convince themselves of this everyday. And imagine people that sure, that convinced they're right, ever going against anything they know, and revealing it? Not going to happen. The more we push, the harder they'll hold on and resist, sure of their goal. Like a dog a big stick.
For outsiders, it makes no sense at all. Essentially, to regular people today, these folks are stuck in a WWII mindset. Talking to them with their obsessive preoccupations with secrecy and war, would be comical and impossible for regular people to understand. Maybe they're right. Or maybe we are. No one will ever know, as long as the wall between both sides remains in place.
As long as this cover-up exists, the only thing we'll get is leaks and deliberate counterintelligence. I think Grusch is the former, and perhaps, he was merely the recipient of the latter. Who knows.
The saddest part for me is witnessing the degradation of American democracy, where the government is held hostage by a select group while simultaneously blamed for the secrecy, forming a perfect smoke screen. In this war, our governments are merely puppets, used as a shield by these clandestine groups, and the people, consequently, are left powerless. This silent surrender to covert entities significantly diminishes the credibility of our rulers.
1: A difficulty is a lot of what they say is true, mixed in with the lies that we have made any progress on understanding or re-creating, alien UFO technology at all. When the reality is we have no progress understanding or re-creating it at all. So contrary to what all these people say, we have no anti gravity, no advance energy or propulsion, we have no advanced medicine or med beds. However, the truth about consciousness assisted technology and telepathic contact and inter/extra dimensionality, and the existence of illegal beyond-black unacknowledged special access programs, and so on is mixed in with his lies. That mix is classic disinfo I guess.
Regarding ET specifically, it could be a species from Earth that became intelligent before humans did, it does not need to be extraterestrial. The assumption that we have good knowledge of Earth is incorrect, especially the deep ocean.
Agree, it could. It would make sense if they lived in the ocean or underground, as the surface has many instabilities (weather, tectonics, solar radiation, impacts ~~ not to mention crazy upright apes).
Interdimensional aspect could be Earth from an alternate timeline, such as where the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction event did not occur, and reptilians not mammals evolved into an upright "humanoid" species that developed civilization millions of years ago. These interdimensional reptilian humanoids (from an Earth literally "overlaid" on our world) could be in a war with our timeline/dimension for some interdimensionally-scarce resource, and perhaps they are what religions call "demons" and perhaps their version of Earth is, to us as co-combatants in this interdimensional war, what is known, because of our ignorance and for want of better understanding, as "hell".
Perhaps, sometimes when someone sees an "alien" or a "UFO" or a "ghost" they are just lucking into a naturally occurring transient random portal between dimensions, and when those things suddenly "vanish" it just means that portal closed/the conditions that gave rise to it subsided.
"They" could also be refugee species, advanced civilizations that came to Earth millions to hundreds of millions of years ago (perhaps multiple races/waves over many millions of years) and temporarily resided here after some cataclysm or disaster beset their civilization, before moving on. Some stragglers may maintain outposts on Earth for whatever reason.
They could also be multiple different groups, or what is made to look like multiple different groups, by a single giant sentience, in order to confuse us, as it draws it plans against us, aiming to turns us all into puppet bodies for its individuated vectored-in experience, in a perversion-by-demiurge of the pattern of the "one infinite creator" having an individual human experience through all of us. It's conceivable that a sentence with enough power would want to emulate that, and be capable of slowly genetically engineering us toward tuning into its frequency, rather than that of our spiritual soul's, essentially making its domain a giant SimCity and all of us its grotesque avatars, running on automatic when not inhabited by its consciousness.
Or perhaps our entire universe, is actually a 30 light-year wide sphere, with the remaining galaxies beyond that projected from the "real world" onto its surface, created, specifically by a universal cosmic civilization that spans the entire future (to us) universe, in real time (200 billion years advanced from where we think we are), in order to re-create a significant period from history. What if we are the conscious inhabitants of a historical re-creation, a diorama, if you will. A kind of grotesque and cruel, Westworld type of universe, which, tho not a simulation, is artificial, and preserved only as a sort of tourist attraction, and for historical study and other purposes as befit a universal cosmic civilization that developed from, among many other such worlds, us, from 200 billion years in the past. And what if some of the UFOs and non humans we encounter are simply the "parks and recreation" staff, and maintenance workers in this vast historical recreation.
That's a cool theory, I think that thought (that this wasn't a coincidental discovery) crossed my mind too, but I didn't pursue it. Interesting that you've seen rumblings of this! It could very well be true. Funny that it comes from Korea, although according to Coulthart that's the location a giant structure was built around an immovable alien artefact -- that could be true, too! But in that case let's see some proof! :)
not really. before, fraud claims were from the non-believers. now, the fraud claims are from the SEC and other government agencies. one can be swatted away with clever tweets, er, xes (what are tweets called now?), the other sees people going to jail.
If thanks to those technologies new hyper-efficient compute and network hardware becomes the norm, and there is no meaningful difference between decentralized hosting and centralized hosting of services/apps/games, crypto will likely see renewed interest.
People are still unhappy with the decisions of single IP owners controlling the platforms and games they use on a daily basis. Decentralized ledger technology, whether blockchain or not, offers an alternative.
Given that I only have to go down to the eighth item on the front page to get to a story about LLMs (past three stories about superconductors) are you so sure about that?
As someone strongly in the first camp and not the second, this feels like a very odd observation. I despise generative LLMs and avoid using them at every opportunity. I'm also spending all my free time this week perusing arxiv preprints and Twitter threads. Make of my datum what you will. :)
> I despise generative LLMs and avoid using them at every opportunity.
why? it's just a tool.
despise how it was released, how it was trained, the people that operate it , whatever, but I can't really understand why someone would 'despise' a wrench -- even if it was used really poorly and produced by a shady company with a checkered past.
a) I do not believe that it produces useful-quality results for almost any of my use cases (Even if other concerns were addressed, I don't want to generate buggy code I then have to debug).
b) I believe many if not necessarily all generative AI models were trained unethically on copyrighted data
c) I am worried about the legal & copyright implications of using the tool to produce work products for my employer
d) I am concerned about the societal implications of the tool's existence, and how it's producing sub-human-scale work for (nearly) free, thereby eroding the market for a lot of human-produced output.
e) I dislike the amplified volume of low-quality content online over the last few months.
f) I'm not a fan of OpenAI as a business or a potential monopoly
Same concept as blood money. To be dramatic, if the wrench was made with ore from a mine where your father worked, and he was killed and the ore was stolen, would you do business with the company that hired the mercenaries that killed him? Would you buy a wrench from them? if one fell into your hands, would you use it? It's just a wrench, after all, but you can see why somebody might have strong feelings about it, even if you ultimately disagree with them.
The next breakthrough we need is with fusion technology. With unlimited fusion energy, room temperature superconductivity, and (soon) artificial general intelligence, the singularity won't be long off.
That doesn't mesh with the daily insights I gain from asking GPT-4 novel questions and receiving answers that integrate a much wider knowledge corpus that I have in my head.
You can argue all language is a form of search, but that is missing completely what transformer models are bringing to the table, and not just within language.
The context of my comment should make it clear that I am responding to this
> AI today is a glorified search algorithm.
and not the comment about AGI, given as that is a pedantic argument I have no wish engaging in.
> only that we find images within Rorschach blobs
I'm sorry, I'm not sure you understand what GPT-4 offers. Things like generating novel code to solve a novel problem are not finding "images within Rorschach blobs". I think you should sit down with the technology and explore with a more open mind.
We need to design better geometries for reactors so that we can channel the plasma flow to better improve containment while quickly removing wastes from the highly compressed energetic region where fusion mostly occurs. If we could do that, then that mostly solves the issues from reactor degradation and significantly improves efficiency.
The trouble is that at such high energy levels the plasma flow is relatively chaotic so high fidelity models are required to predict the behavior accurately.
Is this really a requirement, or a nice to have kind of thing? Commonwealth Fusion Systems are using a pretty basic design and seem pretty confident it will work
My understanding is that there are still some others that need to be figured out, like "The physical structure holding the thing getting the everloving shit bombarded out of it by high energy neutrons and causing it to degrade and fail over time"
how about a 3rd group that is skeptical but not angry ? :) Am I bad that I'm waiting on oak ridge/los alamos/NASA/ONL/university of texas at austin to repro?
Give it a few days, and some dumbass story like "I asked ChatGPT about the Meissner effect and the answer blew my mind" will start trending. See you in the comments!
Bitcoin was really 'done' 10 years ago. It does what it does and there really isn't much more to it. People tried to keep the hype going with DAO's, earn programs, smart contracts, NFT's, etc.. but crypto was already done before 'web3' even started.
I have to unfortunately agree with the sibling comment (although it was a little too verbose for its point).
If, to you, the most interesting thing about LK99 and the developments thereof is tweets and internet forum drama about it, then that speaks more about you than anything to do with anything else.
If you don't have anything to add to the conversation, then just don't add?
On a related note: I am deeply disappointed by how OpenAI has managed to continually dumb down ChatGPT. I’m sure the shortage of NVIDIA H100s and the demand for their APIs shooting through the roof has something to do with it. Perhaps they’ve switched to a quantized model? Who knows.
And yes, LLaMA 2 is awesome. Progress is being made. But it’s slowed down. The novelty’s worn off. Now we’re lacking some fundamental plumbing to reach a useful AGI.
If anyone cares, Bard is proving to be way more useful these days. Especially for research work. And Claude is bar none for document analysis.
Hey, who knows, it could just be a scaling issue. (The history of NNs would lend credence to this theory). In which case, if this room temperature superconductor stuff is legit, then maybe we're about to experience a major compute power leap that could result in AGI sooner than we think.
What makes you think we're lacking fundamental plumbing? I am personally still quite convinced it will simply take a bit of time and development to plug in the current AI into sufficient self-testing structures (basically the next versions of AutoGPT) and let it run long enough to map out an entire domain with accurate measurements. Seems more like just a matter of time and a bit of funding - but mostly inevitable and very straightforward. It doesn't even really take GPT4 quality levels to do - that's just a bonus.
https://twitter.com/fablesimulation/status/16813529041528504...
These guys seem to be on the leading edge there - making self-referential character-driven narratives where agents talk to each other and build the collective world understanding, all through a South Park Westworld lol
That said, anecdotally - they already excel at being logic engines. Capable of filling in the gaps between instructions. Using their worldly knowledge or “common sense” to do so.
But ever so often, they’ll miss an important bit. And I have to be quite involved to catch that. Kinda defeats the purpose. Here, I think we can benefit from supervisor LLMs. A second layer, whose sole job is to ensure the output quality. A QA bot - essentially.
Yeah with their own QA from a variety of different personas/perspectives/concerns/contexts I reckon you'll get a very decent accuracy - or at least self-assessment of inaccuracy. All these can ever do is propagate the data they know so far to the context/prompt you desire, but I don't see obvious limits there. And GPT4 is already a superb conversation partner as smart as nearly any person - so it's really like piecing experts together. If we run into any fundamental limitations from piecing these all together, it's gonna be the same limit that any group of humans trying to make a coherent/consistent organization of knowledge encounters, I think.
Coincidentally, that appears to be how GPT4 was made - apparently it's actually about 8 personas with designated roles running GPT3.5 trained together ("Panel of experts"? there's an AI name for the technique). Makes you wonder how far that one trick scales.
(P.S. great link. Gah - another long read on the todo list)
It's not dumber. You can verify this on their models with any prompt you ran at 0.0 when it first came out, I did. It's the exact same model run the same exact way. They've repeatedly confirmed this.
So I absolutely agree with this. And yet this meme persists. I wonder what's creating the feeling that it's "dumber" in so many? Perhaps they're just noticing the limits that always existed previously? I'm not sure, and am interested in others thoughts on it.
ChatGPT as in the paid subscription hosted by OpenAI. Its quality has deteriorated. It will miss the simplest details in the prompt and hallucinate a lot. I’ve only noticed this before on models with lesser parameters.
In comparison, Bard and Claude are getting better with time.
They've added a lot of safety features. Knowing very little about LLMs, I would assume these prepended prompts are using up a chunk of the limited "attention" the transformer has
The material containing lead is very unfortunate. I have no doubts that (if it indeed turns out to be a superconductor) humans will use it anyway in any context where it provides even a slight benefit (cf. just in the lead department: leaded gasoline, leaded solder, etc.).
This point downplays just how many hazardous materials are around us at all times. Yes, heavy metal exposure is bad and we did some really stupid things with lead last century. We still use lead acid batteries everywhere and it is not causing dementia or leeching into groundwater. The materials don't matter, how they are handled does.
It's one thing to use toxic materials in water pipes, fuel or painting your walls with it.
It's completely different thing to use them in devices that are enclosed and that you never interact with directly, like motors, batteries, electronic components or wires. And in fact we're using lead in car batteries and it's not a problem.
BTW most heavy metals are toxic, including copper. It's just less readily absorbed and accumulated in our bodies.
> lead free solder has been much more damaging for the environment because of all the e-waste it created.
We're getting quite off-topic here (I guess I should have used different examples), but I would be interested where you got that information from. Most consumer electronics devices do not break prematurely, and especially not due to soldering issues. Source: I buy most electronics second-hand, I regularly repair electronics RoHS and not RoHS, I use lead-free solder and occasionally leaded solder, I watch a bunch of Youtube videos by other people who repair a bunch of electronics, just for fun. (You'll always (and easily) find someone who knows more than me, and it's entirely possible that you do.)
Most consumer electronics devices are retired because their owners got something shinier, or if "broken", it's the battery, display, or some important connector. If something is "actually" broken, it's usually due to power ICs, capacitors, fuses. (You could of course argue that some broken connectors are a case of a soldering issue, but yeah, it's not like I haven't seen broken connectors that were actually soldered using leaded solder, so things can get kind of muddy there)
Back in the 00s, the transition to lead free solder was blamed for the high failure rate of BGA packages found in consoles and GPUs.
One of the theories at the time was that the poor thermal design of these devices (the most notable example being the Xbox 360) lead to cracks in the solder balls after repeated thermal cycling.
All in all, I'm now much more bullish on LK-99 being real superconductivity after seeing multiple different labs compute similar band structures. The video of multiple directions of magnet showing some levitation also inspires a lot of hope.