There were people complaining in earlier threads that bigger publications haven't been reporting on LK-99 — this article is a perfect distillation of why. It is already significantly outdated, missing out on multiple interesting findings that were posted yesterday which would almost certainly have resulted in a much different piece had they been available when it was reported out and sources asked for comment.
I'm absolutely ready to be disappointed by LK-99. Some sort of fraud, some sort of experimental error, something interesting that's still not a real superconductor, a real superconductor but a quirk of the material means that it'll never scale past being a parlor trick, whatever.
However, Nature weighing in that way feels premature to me. It's been what ... 2 weeks? If that? Somehow it just feels that something as momentous as a plausible room temperature superconductor should take a bit more time to rule out as a fake. Unless there's some pretty blatant fraud involved where they're literally levitating it with a string.
Nature feels like the sort of publication where their job is to have the final say after all of the dust has settled. Participating in hot takes with a negative conclusion just feels like they're hedging their bets. If it turns out to be false then they can say that they were right at the beginning. If it turns out to be true, then everyone will be so excited that they'll forget about anything nature came out with.
Meanwhile, wikipedia feels like it has pretty objective reporting on things that are actually happening more or less as they're happening. It just doesn't have a narrative to go along with it.
> If it turns out to be true, then everyone will be so excited that they'll forget about anything nature came out with.
Will people forget about Nature making fun of the researchers that are working trying to replicate the thing?
I did expect nobody to publish anything until there's more certainty, and I did not expect any early publication to have any lasting impact anyway. But this piece is well, pretty heavy handed. I'm not sure people won't hold a grudge.
The simulation is just testing the release. They haven't decided whether or not to make it real yet. There's a lot of bureaucracy involved. Even doing this initial test caused a lot of debate as it's deemed too early. If it launches, it requires a lot of updates on the backend to expand.
There seems to be a group of people who have appointed themselves the science police. If you are excited about a tantalizing phenomenon that has yet to withstand expert scrutiny, you can expect to hear from them!
I do not understand this mentality. There is no conflict between these two statements:
- LK99 cannot be considered a proven superconductor until there have been multiple replications that withstand expert scrutiny.
- The evidence that is freely available on twitter and elsewhere right now is worth getting excited about.
Look, this isn't like Covid, where at least there is some public interest served by a skeptical approach to treatments. At least for the next six months or so, LK99 is an almost purely scientific topic with almost no wider implications.
But people love to clutch their pearls - I have read twitter commentators claiming they are concerned that amateur replicators may get lead poisoning! Lead, while dangerous, is not polonium or something - there are plenty of reasons people choose to tolerate some exposure (recreational shooting, civil aviation, fishing...), all of which I would consider less compelling that what may be the biggest scientific breakthrough in decades. I do not think people are truly concerned about lead exposure, I think they want people to "stay in their lanes". An attitude that I find detestable.
The fact that such a (possible) enormous breakthrough is within the reach of chemistry amateurs is wonderful! Everybody who has the equipment, knowledge, and inclination to attempt a replication should do so, and if you do, I hope you will post videos online so I can cheer you on.
I am very bullish on LK99, but it is of course with the caveat that it needs replication. I am not seeing anyone not saying that. One of the big exciting things about it has been that there HAS been some replication, between simulations and science. This article is too incredulous and does get a bit of “science police” feel.
In the 1800s people were often inventing and researching in their garage labs, we need more amateur science not less.
That depends on how it all crashes. If it was fraud, then yes. But there are ways in which it can crash that would result in more funding to rule out spurious or transient effects that by themselves suggest interesting areas of research.
But yes, the chance of a 'superconductivity winter' is definitely there. What surprises me is how this whole thing has blown up. People that would not be able to tell a copper wire from an aluminum one are talking about superconductors. That really gets me, why the sudden massive interest?
> People that would not be able to tell a copper wire from an aluminum one are talking about superconductors
i know this was hyperbole, but I think the fact that it is almost certainly false is important.
I think the reason that people are so excited is that you can learn the basic facts about superconductivity in a few hours on wikipedia. The basics are not that complicated: Superconductors have zero resistance below a critical temperature, are diamagnetic due to induced eddy currents that cancel out magnetic fields, and the high temperature ones exhibit "flux pinning" where magnetic field lines can get stuck at defects in the material, leading to stable levitation.
Having learned all this over the past week, I certainly don't consider myself an expert. I'm well aware I don't know 10% of what a first year physics grad student probably knows. But it's enough to follow along, and ask basic questions. Its _okay_ for people to do this even if they aren't remotely qualified to make final judgments about LK99.
To me it seems no more improper than someone talking excitedly about the rocket equation or orbital mechanics even though they don't have an aerospace degree.
As for why the sudden massive interest? Why wouldn't there be massive interest? Its a huge potential breakthrough, with multiple claimed reproductions already, and, most astonishingly, it could have been discovered (though not understood) in the 19th century! Maybe even earlier! Of course the fact that something so basic was just lying around waiting to be found is generating interest!
I know what you're getting at but your list isn't the 'basics', those are the symptoms. It's like saying you understand the basics about cancer because tumors grow and people die. It doesn't even begin to scratch the surface and it certainly isn't the basics, it is just the part that laypeople (myself included) see when looking from the outside in.
The 'basics' not being so simple is exactly why the search for conveniently usable superconductors is an ongoing thing after a century. Copper wire was solved on the day we needed it, and even if it would not have worked we would have had a whole bunch of fall back materials available.
I didn't say "the basics of superconductor theory" I said "the basic facts about superconductors", and I stand by my claim that those facts are enough to form an opinion about LK99 that is "above the noise floor", if you will.
Ermm, no, that was a literal quote, as you can see from your own comment halfway up the page.
And those bits aren't nearly enough to form an opinion about LK99, it may be enough to form an opinion about what the appearance of a generic, cheap room temperature super conductor might do for the world from a lay persons perpective. But it doesn't say anything about LK99.
I think there is a number of reasons this blew up, but I think the biggest one is the lack of good news.
We all see weirder weather than we used to and man made climate change is implicated.
War in Ukraine.
Tensions with China.
Political turmoil in the U.S. with small minorities driving the news cycle with crazy talk.
We just got through COVID, and hopefully end of the inflation scare.
Housing prices suck the hope out of most on a daily basis.
Suddenly, a miracle material seems to appear that could change the game at so many levels, not owned by one corporation or country. And its a magnet, and everyone loves magnets....its the one things we've all experienced that feels like magic...and that magic was going to save us.
This is how I feel. I chose to have children with the knowledge that there is a very real possibility that they may inherit a hell scape when I’m dead. The thought of them having the possibility of a better future combined with finally having something positive to hope for fills a void that I believe many people share.
Interesting, there may be something to your observation. It also explains why you get these 'fireman rescues cat' news articles, even when there is plenty of other news, most of it very negative. And guess what then gets talked about.
I think we are witnessing that animosity right now, and if I understand correctly, it seems to be the result of (allegedly) fraudulent claims that people got excited about, e.g. Ranga Dias.
But I have seen absolutely no evidence that anybody is acting in bad faith here, and so I see no reason to treat this the way we ought to treat fraud.
> Lead, while dangerous, is not polonium or something - there are plenty of reasons people choose to tolerate some exposure (recreational shooting, civil aviation, fishing...)
The synthesis of LK-99 involves powdered lead salts. There's quite a lot more hazard in handling those than there is in handling metallic lead in the course of shooting/fishing.
This seems like a rather bad faith article. While there are certainly people overhyping LK-99 (and prediction markets seem to have a higher chance of success than one would expect), the general sentiment about the material I find online is that it's probably the cold fusion of our time. The hype is because of the potential groundbreaking results, and the fact that the material is unusual even if, as is most likely, it turns out not to be a room temperature superconductor.
As for the videos, are the people posting these joke videos trying to imply that the videos we're seeing of partial levitation (including one put out by an actual Chinese lab) are fake? One can point out that the videos are likely merely evidence of really good diamagnetism without pretending they're hoaxes.
> LK-99’s purported superconductivity drew immediate scrutiny from scientists. “My first impression was ‘no.’” says Inna Vishik, a condensed matter experimentalist at the University of California, Davis. “These ‘Unidentified Superconducting Objects’, as they’re sometimes called, reliably show up on the arXiv. There’s a new one every year or so.” Advances in superconductivity are often touted for their potential practical impact on technologies such as computer chips and maglev trains, but Vishik points out that such excitement might be misplaced. Historically, progress in superconductivity has had tremendous benefits for basic science, but little in the way of everyday applications. There’s no guarantee a material that is a room-temperature superconductor would be of practical use, Vishik says.
As someone who loves Nature, I would like to commit a dash of heresy. A manufacturable, room temperature superconductor with a low current density wouldn't lead to maglevs, but it would revolutionize the world. It would be one of the starkest turning points in human history.
Most of the heat generated by a CPU is generated shuttling electrons back and forth. A superconductor instantly changes the calculus and, depending on whom you ask, makes processors 500x more efficient. And that's just the start.
The before/after is so stark that it's really hard to game out all of the consequences, but it's quite obvious that it instantly changes the cost of running these massive AI models as well as the cost of doing highly detailed FEM simulations.
Even if some of the properties are replicated, the strangeness of this material puts us on track to that world. It's incredible what it could be. I'm extremely excited!
> it's quite obvious that it instantly changes the cost of running these massive AI models as well as the cost of doing highly detailed FEM simulations.
This seems pretty overstated. Developing the tooling to build chips takes years, there is good reason to think that even if this material does revolutionize chip efficiencies, it will be years at least before we start producing those chips and probably years more before that production scales to fully supplant the existing production infrastructure.
> A superconductor instantly changes the calculus and, depending on whom you ask, makes processors 500x more efficient. And that's just the start.
I'm excited too, but "instantly" is not how I'd describe retooling semiconductor fabrication to include a new material. Besides, nobody has claimed that you can dope silicon with it.
But since we're dreaming, I'm hoping it'll make doing plasma physics cheaper (via simpler superconducting magnets) which will then make nuclear fusion power plants feasible.
Aren’t CPUs prone to quite a lot of current flow even in their off state? If I’m not mistaken that’s the biggest energy draw in case of large servers, but I am no expert on hardware nor physics.
> … despite the fact that many materials — including graphene, frogs and pliers — can exhibit similar magnetic behaviour.
This is a dishonest argument. Frogs and pliers don’t levitate on a typical magnet in ambient conditions, so you can’t say the behavior is ‘similar’ just because ‘everything levitates in a strong enough magnetic field’.
If your measuring stick can’t distinguish these two significantly different behaviors, it’s a useless measuring stick.
Also, more generally, the logic of science is statistics, not Boolean logic. We all know that
[(p —> q) and q]
doesn’t logically imply p, but still observing q makes p more likely when thinking probabilistically.
Overall I found the article to be very dismissive of weak evidence and also shortsighted when considering the potential applications that we can’t think of right now (even if those are not the typical hoped-for applications like efficient power transmission).
I'm pretty sure the parent comment just dunked on you by demonstrating a deep well-read understanding of the underpinnings of both logic and statistics.
You're commenting on the wrong site (or just ignoring the rules & spirit of discussion) if you thought it necessary to tell someone they got "dunked on".
On the matter of probability and science, I like how Karl Popper put it, although I can't find the text now so I must report it from memory. His point was that scientific hypothesis formation is an instance of inductive generalisation while probabilistic inference is a form of abductive reasoning, and so using probability to support an inductively derived hypothesis is basically supporting a guess, with another guess.
Statistics of course is not the same as probability. Personally I think statistics is a bunch of hooey.
Confidence intervals are not an appropriate tool for something like this. This isn’t an effect size of dubious magnitude. It’s a simple claim that something either exists or it does not.
Why does the tone of this sound just like the January 2020 articles saying "weird nerds on twitter freaked out about viruses in china when they should be worried about the flu?"
Yeah, this article has all the smacking of major news players with egg on their face. Like that front page of a magazine with Jeff Bezos on it mocking him for starting AWS.
> that a compound of copper, lead, phosphorus and oxygen, dubbed LK-99, is a superconductor at ambient pressure and temperatures above 127 °C (400 Kelvin).
No; it's claimed to superconduct at temperatures up to 127 °C. They didn't perform tests above 127 °C.
> They didn't perform tests above that temperature.
Right, exactly, they're claiming that Tc is above 127°C. The claim is that it's a superconductor at (some) temperatures even higher than what was tested. It's also still a superconductor at temperatures below.
When publications put out things like this it reminds me of why I can't trust them. They're writing this article for clicks and attention and to feed that side of society that constantly pulls us down about what's not possible while the publication makes money from taking the other side of a issue. It's plain corruption.
FTA: "Evan Zalys-Geller, a condensed matter physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, says that the resistance measurement wasn’t sensitive enough to distinguish between a zero resistance superconductor or a low-resistance metal like copper."
I have little knowledge of the field, but as an EE, I would have thought that making sure that you are actually able to measure the effect you are trying to prove would be step zero in an experimental setup, no?
People overestimate their ability to run high quality scientific experiments.
I think a perfect example was the claim of faster than light neutrinos (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_ano...). it was experimental error. CERN sent a team of smart EE/physics folks to debug it quickly. This is consistent with my estimate that 90% of all physics labs aren't capable of building, running, and interpreting state-of-the-art scientific measurement and discovery.
I still think it won't be replicated, but on the off chance we've got the real deal on our hands, science publication will have changed forever and this article will have aged very poorly.
This article is like what a high school student would write for their essay: quote some dudes' speech without actually explaining anything and call it a day. Those speeches are my proofs because they say so. Room temperature superconductor is useless because someboby said that on twitter! Seriously every argument in this article is flawed.
Nature is now just whining cuz one arxiv publication got everyone excited. That's what it feels like after reading this poor quality article published by nature
Don't forget it was Nature that published Ranga Dias' fraudulent superconductor papers. LK-99's confirmed properties already infinitely more valuable even if it isn't a superconductor.
It's because people aren't excited about the science. They're excited about the speculation, the gossip, and the potential result. That is literally antithetical to the entire process of proper science, and the exact kind of behavior/mentality that most scientists hate due to how it warps things like funding.
Science is the process. It's taking your time, proving your work, and most importantly, replicating your results.
Is the gossip about LG's involvement and the leaked-ness of the paper and the death bed dying breath parts really taking center stage here? I've come across that stuff but the focus of the excitement really seems to be on "will it replicate".
Tbf, it’s not scientists who make the funding choices. Those are political decisions made by bureaucrats and functionaries and that whole process is totally opaque/fucked.
> It's because people aren't excited about the science. They're excited about the speculation, the gossip, and the potential result
I think you could argue that the initial spark of intuition-- the thing that makes you go "huh. Let me look into this more" before gathering evidence and peer review, is one of the most important steps of "the science"
You don't get to have public interest in science without public interest in science drama and gossip. Humans being what they are, it's unreasonable for you to expect otherwise. There is not a single topic for which the public has an interest in the thing but no interest in the gossip and drama surrounding that thing.
> That is literally antithetical to the entire process of proper science, and the exact kind of behavior/mentality that most scientists hate due to how it warps things like funding.
Have you considered that the way we “do science” is actually a broken process made of absolute bollocks?
It is true, yet I can't reconcile the fact the overall excitement and optimism this generates, vs. the lukewarm and skepticism towards news about advance in other hard problems such as fusion, battery, self-driving, space exploration, cancer treatment, Alzheimer treatment.
I get that disappointment in the past make people jaded. Weren't there false hope in superconductor as well? Or are people here too young to have experienced that?
There's a lot of people in here arguing like there's some significant faction of people that truly believe we've got enough proof that we have an RTAPS and are somehow negatively impacting their life because of it.
I'm excited enough about this that I've read about 3500 HN comments on the subject over the past few days. I've talked about it with friends of various levels of science literacy. I've seen it come up in various discords, IRC channels, etc.
And... I'm not seeing any real amount of people doing that. The twitter crowd is largely people just memeposting with "FLOAT THE ROCK!", places like HN have a bit more technical discussion about it, lots of other places it comes up in conversation and people shrug and go "huh that might be cool hope it works out tell me in 6 months"
But even as someone with enough free time this week to read all these comments and engage in the discussion so much, it's not like I'm sitting here expecting 15 years from now we'll all be living in a superconductor wonderland. If I had to make a bet one way or the other, I'd probably bet it won't be. But that doesn't mean this whole thing isn't fun and entertaining.
We've got some potentially world altering thing that is potentially real, and replicating it is easy enough that we have engineers and scientists all over the world doing it in public. Most of these kind of things require lots of funding, labs with advanced tools, access to exotic materials, etc. Instead, this time, we get to watch it on Twitter, Bilibili, etc.
It's possible for people to recognize that this is a potentially world altering discovery and be hyped about the process and visibility we have in it, as well as realize that the most likely outcome at this point is "LK99 does some weird diamagnetic stuff that looks cool but probably isn't actually an RTAPS"
It's posts like this that make me think of Roosevelt's Man in the Arena speech. It's easy for folks on the sidelines to criticize and say "what's so hard?" It's for the best who the folks rolling up their sleeves, doing the hard work don't see/hear it. There are tons of teams working at this from multiple angles, both trying to prove and disprove it.
It's only been a few days! The fact that cutting edge science from a pre-release version of a paper isn't going perfectly doesn't mean much. Give them time. Eventually we will have more solid answer.
I am a material scientist. Everyday, I see failed attempts to replicate samples. Slightly different compositions, slightly different heat treatments, subtle differences in crystallographic texture or the arrangement of inclusions that unexpectedly change the properties of your material in mysterious ways.
And I know nothing about superconductors, I am talking about steel, a material that we have worked with for centuries, it's in the first chapter of every textbook and is practically everywhere.
YES! This is exactly my experience. Even if I do stuff myself it is often very hard to get to consistency, there are almost always more variables in play than the ones that I'm initially aware of. I've seen seasoned pros driven to despair by things that 'worked in the lab' but that they could not replicate outside of it for want of a simple oversight. Sometimes the line between success and failure is hair-thin, you can be almost there and never realize it.
Because if it is superconducting they only have tiny tiny superconducting chunks in a much larger sample that isn't. A couple of superconducting grains of sand in a rock, basically. Separate them out, try to test them on their own while ignoring all the rock parts, well that's difficult.
I suspect that what they actually have is some incredibly tiny superconducting crystals suspended on a material that is almost identical except for the placement of a few atoms. Very hard to work with.
1 Copper atom
25 oxygen atoms
6 Phosphorous atoms
9 lead atoms
There are many ways to arrange these constituents.
It’s hard to create the environment where they want to go exactly where you hope over a large volume. Sometimes this level of precision requires atomic control of layer growth and extreme temperature management. That’s why the methods list days between steps to get the atoms diffusing, and that’s for a few micrograms of material.
The steps are simple, but it seems to be quite finicky and there are almost sure to be sensitive to important factors that we don’t have clarity on yet. If it turns out to be definitively shown to be real
It is simple as in doesn't require expensive materials or tools or a particularly long process. It can nevertheless be tricky to execute correctly and depend on luck
You don’t understand. Real science happens on Twitter. Real scientists are the startup founders who make grandiloquent threads about Arxiv pre-publications. Academia doesn’t work at all. Actuallly, academia’s scientists are just jaded. We’re so much smarter than them. You need to root for LK99 to be real so we can live in the post-scarcity techno magic utopia. If you spread FUD the rock wont levitate. Extraordinary claims only require trivial amount of suggestive evidence. Did you hear an anon cat girl already made a Gundam robot in her kitchen out of the stuff? Maybe if you squint hard enough and try 999 times it’ll work the 1000th. Epistemic standards don’t matter. What matters is to be excited and enthusiastic. That’s what science is really about. We’re all in this together folks. What an adventure.
Irrespective of your view on the Nature article and the current online activity, it is useful to remember that much like Epistemic standards, HN also has standards.
At the bottom of this page you will find a Guidelines page with an "In comments" section:
" Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
You were both not entertaining and added nothing to the discussion.
As much as I agree with you, people are excited for the potential of an extraordinary result, and in my view this article's tone is completely out of place for a publication with the historic weight and impact of Nature.
Oh, I see you're embracing a rather unconventional perspective on science and academia. While it's true that social media platforms like Twitter have provided new avenues for scientific discussions and collaboration, it's essential to consider the potential downsides of context switching and chasing after every shiny new experiment.
Research and replication are crucial components of the scientific process. Context switching too frequently can indeed lead to wasted time, as researchers may not have the opportunity to delve deeply into a particular topic and build upon existing knowledge. Replication is essential for validating findings and ensuring the reliability of scientific claims.
While some interesting discussions may occur on Twitter, it's important not to dismiss academia entirely. Academic institutions provide an environment conducive to rigorous research, peer review, and collaboration, which are fundamental aspects of advancing scientific knowledge.
Did anyone notice the description for the image at the top of the article? My understanding is that this description is nonsense, but I am an amateur and would love some clarification:
“A superconducting magnet is cooled by liquid nitrogen, producing a strong magnetic field that causes the magnet to levitate.”
Like superconductors don’t float because they’re a “strong magnet” they float because they reject all magnetic fields beyond the London depth and this somehow leads to levitation. Right??
Is the producing part correct? My understanding is that once cooled they reject magnetic fields, not produce them. According to wikipedia:
"The Meissner effect (or Meißner–Ochsenfeld effect) is the expulsion of a magnetic field from a superconductor during its transition to the superconducting state when it is cooled below the critical temperature. This expulsion will repel a nearby magnet."
Perhaps a charitable interpretation of that statement is "there are years of work to go from a proof of concept to a usable product". Even if LK-99 is some kind of a superconductor, there are a whole host of daunting technical issues that will need to be solved. For example: how do we get the yield up? How to turn it into a wire? If the material is not ductile, how to form the wire into a useful shape? How to reliably couple to the wire? How does the material age over time and and humidity? How to deposit and pattern it as a thin film?
We have a lot of arrows in our quiver to shoot at these problems -- I would be optimistic that the promising applications of a room temperature superconductor would attract plenty of investment and talent. On the other hand, I imagine it may take years or even decades before we have answers to these hard questions. As the quote says, "there's no guarantee" that we can solve them, because right now we know so little about the properties of the material at this time. Of course, that is no reason to throw in the towel right now!
I don't think it's too hard to imagine that other characteristics of the material could indeed get in the way of practical applications — perhaps brittle-ness or difficulty of manufacture or challenges in making it in the appropriate forms or ...
The original team has been working on it for 24 years (that’s what the 99 in the name refers to). Everyone who expected a clean replication in a week was deluding themselves.
I guess it's not entirely surprising to see this from Nature, but it's been incredible to see how many people across the web try to tear any shred of possibility of LK99 being a real breakthrough because of a lack of replication, but from my understanding the lab it came put of, QEL, commercial research lab, so why would they publish the exact process to be able to create the material especially if they don't even fully understand it themselves
Regardless it is a promising development with the potential to flip several industries on their heads in terms of what is possible with current understandings but also what is possible from the mind of someone who grows up with the internet like those born post 2k with the internet
but i'm glad about that, because it means communication on other platforms are more effective at sharing results than an outdated publishing system that drains people of their livelihood
Replication seem pretty successful to me, 3-4 labs has made the same effect. Nature sound salty they are not really involved in anyway now that results are displayed on social media rather than through journals
This Nature article claimed that two of the Chinese labs attempting replication provided XRD measurements that didn’t at all match what the Korean lab had. I’m not a pro in this field, but XRD gives you insight into the crystalline structure of materials. That suggests that whatever they made might not even be LK-99. I suppose the difference could be other contamination?
Is my understanding right? If so, slightly shocking that these replication attempts are garnering so much visibility.
Speaking of which, here is a new video with Varda - some US engineers who just replicated a bit. Live stream ended 5 minutes ago, not sure how long the video will stay up:
LK-99 with Varda – This Week in Startups [live video]
I don't know what to think. Wasn't there an article earlier today showing the video of the speck of LK-99 standing up in the tube?
Also, why does the chunk in the image levitate in a stable manner? As in, why doesn't it slide off to one side, like it would if you just tried to balance two north ends of a magnet on each other?
My laymen’s interpretation is that superconductors perfectly expel the magnetic field without distorting the field and so can sit in a position that is effectively locked and held in position. I could be completely wrong however.
There's a noticeable distortion of the magnetic field near the superconductor. It's this distortion that keeps the superconductor stable - it's caused currents that appear on the surface which match and cancel* the surrounding field.
*some of the magnetic field penetrates onto the surface of the superconductor, but internally, there's 0 magnetic field within the superconductor.
When a superconductor interacts with a magnetic field, currents generate at the surface of the superconductor that will produce their own magnetic field, which cancels the external one. The superconductor doesn't fall out to the sides because the field gets cancelled and there's no net force acting on the conductor.
There can still be torque (i.e. rotations) for type I superconductors, and type II superconductors when they're fully superconducting. I'm not familiar with how the specific dynamics work though - I'm guessing it's related to gravity?
I think that for true hovering demos the trick is to cool the super conductor to below its critical point while it’s already inside the magnetic field. Then any way you move it will immediately induce a reacting current in the superconductor that will move it back into place. Exactly the same place since it’s a super conductor and has 0 resistance. I think in these demos though it is the fact that one side is heavier and dragging that’s leading it to stay in place
"The first attempts to replicate LK-99, reported in the past days, have not improved the material’s prospects. "
This to me is sort of a summary of Nature's position.
Reframing- there is no reason to change from the default position of skepticism - that the material is uninteresting.
If you ignore the viral hype, and only pay attention to the replication attempts:
They have been rushed.
They lack rigor.
Still, the summation of their findings is reason to think there is something very interesting going on with this material.
I do see some manic hysteria. I understand the urge to push back on that. It's smart to advise people to maintain skepticism. But if you do not think that the replication attempts are an indication that there is something there, I think it's because you have some sort of error in reasoning.
I'm really excited by the hype around it because it's a great demo of how science works in practice in a semi "real-time" fashion. Whenever I share news on it, I always preface that it's still in the replication / validation phases by multiple labs. I don't I've read of anyone so far stating that this is 100% legit.
It's just nice to see the scientific process get carried out - here's something we discovered, and now labs are working to reproduce the result to see if it's an actual thing or not. From my understanding, this stuff generally takes years to validate, but we're getting "immediate" glimpses here and there which makes it really exciting.
I get that the paper hasn't gone through peer review yet, but there's something interesting about the findings that are prompting labs to immediately try to replicate it.
People are just having fun entertaining the very real possible and "believing". What's wrong with that? It is more interesting to just go ahead and say that they are 100% sure LK-99 is real whent here are no stakes. Having differentiated and uncertain opinions all the time gets boring.
Didn't the indian team have a big chunky rock of LK-99? Considering that the majority of researchers can at most create a tiny grain of it where there's still parts of it that aren't levitating, the conclusion to me is that their findings are largely useless.
The gestalt of LK-99 is ironic. It is both a sensation and (hopefully) an almost magical rock, and still "None of the studies provide direct evidence for any superconductivity in the material."
Its a bit surprising to see a journal like nature effectively whine about replication efforts falling short in what’s likely a very temperamental, context / environment influenced synthesis process of a new composition. Its not going to work immediately.
Even if it is a real breakthrough, material synthesis of a new material in any lab, and doing so reproducibly, is tricky enough that I am absolutely not going to infer / conclude from, or pass any comment on any replication efforts this early into the process. Its going to be an iterative process - which means one has to start somewhere.
Some of the quoted folks come across (to me) as just peevish.
Derek Lowe [0] has a far more balanced take on it, IMO.
His article was discussed on HN a few days ago [1].
Natures op-ed articles are very low quality pop-sci trash, unfortunately. It’s made all the more galling because their long form in-depth content is still great.
Guess it’s the price they pay to remain solvent in the clickbait age.
Really all anyone—Nature included—can say at this point is there’s something interesting going on. It may or may not be a super-conductor, but it’s certainly interesting.
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After going through the article, I'm absolutely surprised that one can publish such low effort (oped) articles on nature.com; perhaps lazy me should also give it a shot. Didn't care to check the author's credentials: if he is sort of a big name guy so Nature didn't bother with quality control.
It's been like that since forever. A lot of scientists are so terrified to come across as disrespectful of orthodoxy that they'd never publicly entertain unconventional ideas. The risks of shaming, name-calling ("crackpot", "pseudoscientist", "quack", "fraud", "idiot", "fool") and funding loss constantly loom for a lot of people. And let's not pretend this doesn't have everything to do with money and politics. People and institutions deeply invested in, and cushioned by, status quo norms have every incentive to get nervous about disruption.
I have to admit: I get some satisfaction watching naysayer rationalists get it wrong time and time again. Grumpy, mean people who can't see the big picture for ass but make categorical, reductionist big picture claims (e.g. about impossibilities) under the guise of rationalism, they're quite often just wrong, because the map is not the territory. The longer you cling to a crusty old map, the more likely it is that eventually you'll get lost, though you might never admit it to yourself.
Then there are the people who carefully balance their skepticism with open minded curiosity and a sense of imagination, who are interested and engaged in the social exchange of ideas and perspectives. They're often more quiet, less attention seeking, less worried about determining who's "wrong" and who's "right".
That's why I enjoy Quanta magazine. They profile all kinds of people doing real, interesting, groundbreaking work, people who aren't sitting around playing clout games. They tell stories about the collaborative relationships that make science possible.
And then there's the 99.9% of people who completely ignore the "crusty old map" of science and get scammed by grifters selling them a brand-new fantasy map every other week.
You don't have the right to be curious about anything until you have at least glanced at the real map. And you deserve to be shamed as a crackpot, pseudoscientist, quack and fraud if you are.
silly question - if superconducting materials enable huge advances and apparently many are known to exist at extremely low temperatures, are they actually used in space? Like on satellites? If no - why?
What's even more interesting than the mysteries properties of LK-99 is the kind of response it's brought out. You even see it right here in HN.
Have you ever seen a Youtube video about someone reviewing a Tesla or comparing it to another car? The comments are always full of hostile and vitriolic remarks by people who are personally offended if the video suggests the cup holders on a Model 3 are less than perfection. For some reason, Tesla is surrounded by a cult of personality where it's not just a car, it's a lifestyle.
And bizarrely, something similar is happening with this funny floating rocks. Here we are, on HN, and people in this very thread are calling Nature (Nature!) an "online sensational clickbait magazine" because they want to believe the hype that the rock has properties that they only learned about from Wikipedia a few days prior (and only understood 5% of it, at that)
Is there reason to be excited? Hell yeah. Are all the different replication attempts super fascinating? Hell yeah. Could it be the real deal? It could!
But this has become some weird spectator sport, where you're either a believer or a skeptic, and if you're on a different side than I am then screw you, even if you are Nature.
> calling Nature (Nature!) an "online sensational clickbait magazine"
Not far from the truth, talking as someone who is in the field. Unlike Science, which is published by AAAS, a non-profit, Nature is a for-profit publication. They have an incentive not to miss out on something huge so that they can retain their status as the place to go for big results, but this also means they have an incentive towards selecting more sensational research for publication. That doesn't mean that research published in Nature is bad--often it is excellent--and I'm sure their editorial staff sincerely try their best, but they often make quite bizarre editorial decisions (personal opinion).
That said, Nature attracts far more scrutiny than other journals because of their ability to make and break careers, so many people feel resentment towards them as a result. Not all criticism of Nature is entirely fair.
The important thing to understand is that only the scientific publications in Nature matter. These articles are written by world-class scientists and are taken very seriously. In contrast, the journalism section is akin to any random newspaper. It is generally written by standard journalists and is intended for a mass audience.
Even if the hype over LK-99 comes to nothing it became evident to me several days ago that this research has likely changed scientific publishing permanently—and I'd almost bet on the fact if the research is confirmed.
What made this a such a huge tech event with the world watching on was that the research was on a subject that has captured the imagination of both scientists and the lay public for many decades and that it was posted on arxiv.org website which is open and copyright-free, similarly, we witnessed peer review processes also occurring out in the open and in public for all to see—and essentially in real time! Contrast this with the traditional tech journal process, Nature, Science, IEEE Proceedings, The Lancet, etc. which takes months to publish, and is a closed process not to mention papers being the whim of editors who often reject them (and sometimes very significant ones at that).
Irrespective of whatever outcome eventuates, the contrast between traditional, slow and now-very-expensive scientific publishing with that of this speedy, exciting, open and participatory model that's copyright-free will be obvious to everyone.
Moreover, this is happening at a time when the traditional for-profit scientific publishing has come under enormous criticism with Elsevier and others milking the university and scientific establishments to breaking point and the rise of Sci-Hub as a countermeasure. Whilst academics have been aware of the problem for quite some time the general public has not. This research and how it played out on arxiv.org in just two weeks won't be forgotten easily.
If I were a director of Elsevier and after witnessing what's happened in less than two weeks I'd be damn worried.
This puts Nature's position here as on display in TFA (they don't have to publish everything that is sent in) in a different light. There might be an element of sour grapes here, and if the research is validated then it will have a huge impact on them.
This isn't "Nature's position". This is a freelance science writer's position, and they paid him for the article. Nature wouldn't even weigh in with a real editorial opinion at this point.
It is their name on the masthead. If they don't agree with it they shouldn't publish it. Doing this 'at arms length' allows them to have this under their banner while at the same time being able to say 'that wasn't us'.
There's nothing wrong with this article. I really don't see what you have to complain about. It's broadly factual, and roughly consistent with the mainstream opinion at this point: there is no smoking gun evidence of anything, and the noise being generated by social amateurs is making it hard to find the real signal from the small number of groups competent enough to make useful statements about this "discovery".
Yes, and it serves no purpose other than to get Nature in the position where they can hedge their bets based on rejecting the article earlier and publishing this now just in case it eventually does work out. It's content free from Nature's audience perspective, nobody reading it will think 'hey wow, this is news to me', if they've been at all interested. So it must serve some other purpose because Nature doesn't just publish anything. I was wondering earlier why they would publish it and I think it isn't too farfetched to see this as a deliberate strategy to protect their interests. It's going to be interesting what happens on both sides of the fork: what they will do if after say 3 months there still isn't any very clear replication and when there is. For both of those they have positioned themselves well.
What irks me about it is that it's been all of a week and yet Nature is already deprecating it because the replication efforts fall short. It would seem to me to be a little bit early for that, what did they expect? And sure, we can argue over whether it was nature or the writer that is the root cause here but someone with editorial control at Nature must have felt it was good enough to include, even though it is just premature meta commentary, not science news.
Nature doesn’t need to hedge because their reputation won’t really affected by publishing—-or not publishing—-something on LK-99.
Paul Laterbur, who won a Nobel Prize for MRI after Nature rejected his paper on it has quipped that
"You could write the entire history of science in the last 50 years in terms of papers rejected by Science or Nature."
The “top journals miss good stuff all the time; they publish bad stuff pretty often too. Sorting them out is just really hard.
The article doesn't deprecate LK-99. The article is about the hype surrounding the announcement and its replication results, mainly, but not exclusively by, amateurs in other fields (who seem to have shown that they can make samples that have unconventional properties, but not necessarily superconducting).
It's worth reading about a previous social media science debacle, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_ano... where the observations of neutrinos being faster than light was eventually debugged to some simple hardware errors and naive analysis.
"After the initial report of apparent superluminal velocities of neutrinos, most physicists in the field were quietly skeptical of the results, but prepared to adopt a wait-and-see approach. Experimental experts were aware of the complexity and difficulty of the measurement, so an extra unrecognized measurement error was still a real possibility, despite the care taken by the OPERA team"
No, but they also don't need to try to catch some of the hype while pretending to be immune to that hype. Clearly they feel the need to put LK-99 in at least one article title even if there is no news. That's not their normal standard for articles, at least not as far as I'm aware.
I'm aware of quite a few other scientific debacles, some involving outright fraud, data fabrication and sometimes true believers that even convinced themselves. What is interesting about the Ranga Diaz episode is that it was Nature that published it (and it took two years to retract it):
> So their stance right now is understandable but also a bit self serving.
If there is this hot topic about LK-99, is it not their job to report it to their readers? Not everybody follows social media or has come across this personally. From this point of view, the article seems fair enough roundup of whats been happening.
> It's worth reading about a previous social media science debacle, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_ano... where the observations of neutrinos being faster than light was eventually debugged to some simple hardware errors and naive analysis.
"Debacle?" Some scientists saw something funny, pointed out that it violated known laws of physics, and asked for help explaining the results. They got that help relatively quickly and it was found that, indeed, the neutrinos were not moving faster than light.
If I were looking for a debacle, I'd look for something where there was outright fraud.
Here we have lots of people levitating small black rocks. It's probable that the samples created are impure, but something interesting might well be going on and so it's getting attention. Making things levitate like that is pretty cool, though, even if yes, you can do it with pencil lead (and a different magnet setup, not just a single magnet).
So people are trying to understand it. It's messy, and the results are unclear, but... hey, that's how things go. Sure, I'll wait to call it confirmed until we have a number of labs with good quality samples and expert testing, but I'll also give them time to actually try a few things since there are good reasons to think the synthesis is less easy than is reported.
But I'm not going to hate on people who just wanna see the rocks float, either. And we have quite a few people now with floaty rocks, which is more than enough to keep the average person entertained while the science settles.
Sorry, debacle wasn't the right word. Situation? Event?
In this case it wasn't as simple as asking for help- the team that caused this situation really just wasn't up to the task, and that should have been detected far earlier than their press release announcing faster than light neutrinos.
From https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/24/science/24speed.html
"""Nima Arkani-Hamed, a particle theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, said in an e-mail, “There was no need for a press release or indeed even for a scientific paper, till much more work was done. They claim that they wanted the community to scrutinize their result — well, they could have accomplished that by going around and giving talks about it.”"""
Sure, that's better. I dunno, feels like bikeshedding to worry about the best way of getting help. It's sad that it turned out to be relatively boring (equipment not set up right) instead of any actual scientific discovery, but I'd personally rather see more people having fun and learning to love the process of discovery even when it doesn't pan out. And most things don't pan out, I get that.
This may well not pan out either, but lots of people with little floaty rocks are going to capture people's imagination in a way that a bunch of graphs just don't.
That is completely different. The mini-Natures are still peer reviewed journals with a strict selection process. These journals are usually reasonably high impact, and I don’t think there is evidence pointing towards them having more or less fraud than other journals on that tier. It’s not an amateur slapping a Nature logo on a preprint, which is basically what TEDx is.
What are the flaws? Why is the lay public not allowed to be involved? That sounds like elitist gatekeeping. The truth will come out regardless. Why can't everyone share in the excitement?
Yeah. For everyone watching with excitement, keep in mind that the silicon semiconductor was for years worse in practice than germanium ones, even if it was theoretically better and cheaper. It took advancements in material sourcing, kilns, etc. etc.
Give this material 20 years, and we will see how it fared.
I think this might be a bit exceptional as far as public engagement goes. So I wouldn’t necessarily judge public engagement based on this case.
“Rocks float” vs “rocks not float” is a very easy success criteria for the average person to judge by, lowering the bar for the average person to feel like they can add something to the conversation… so when we add in the potential revolutionary aspects of a room temperature superconductor we have a recipe for significant engagement… it’s even engaging the gawker reflex and people are picking up on it be LK99 is a weird trending topic and people will check to see if it’s an airplane that crashed or something …
In essence it was, by sheer coincidence, bound to go viral… and only because of a number of properties that others won’t have…
While an undergraduate degree in physics puts them above the average person, it’s probably only slightly. The majority of undergraduate physics degrees do not touch on solid state physics or material sciences to this degree. It would be at best a single elective course. And even then in physics and the sciences the area of focus gets so specific I would be hesitant to trust even a graduate degree holder unless they went into that field.
Agreed. I have an undergrad in physics from a top uni, took solid state courses, and worked in a lab specifically studying superconductivity and I dont really feel qualified to comment on this, so a generic undergrad physics degree certainly means jack.
Expertise aside I would argue that an undergraduate degree from a prestigious institution that pivoted to journalism is worse in this era. They have been tokenized and given lots of unearned reputation from their credentials, which biases them to provide the rosiest narrative (which is what the science industrial complex wants), without the years of grinding work or cynicism from management of rocky rapids of fraud and overrepresenting work that at least a grad student had to deal with.
That said, I actually believe lk-99 (let's be clear this is a belief, if strongly held) based on my personal experiences with scientific shenanigans.
I will amend my adjective. "Only very slightly earned reputation". Getting an undergraduate degree and getting a PhD are nothing at all like each other. Yes, coming out of undergrad you might be book smart, but most phds learn at least some amount of street smarts.
That’s all ready much more credible than a lot of people I have seen on social media, for whom a CS degree and reading Wikipedia is enough to weigh in.
I hate to say it, but I agree. Nature has outlived its "legit" branding by leaning too hard into the "product" realm. Most scientists don't want their fundamental work to be sold as a product unless it is a precursor to commercialization of their work. At that point, it becomes advertising rather than science.
When I see Nature pubs, I tend to enjoy the aesthetics of the articles, but discount them a bit to account for the mainstream-ness.
Yeah, I was going to say. I've seen so many (usually legitimate) criticisms aimed at Nature dot com in the past year alone that I saw the domain immediately disregarded the possibility that this should affect my opinions one way or the other.
... I once had someone in publishing try to offer me nature acceptance in exchange for ... things. The outsized role of these journals in the scientific community when reviews could be done in the open is pretty messed up.
>> calling Nature (Nature!) an "online sensational clickbait magazine"
> Not far from the truth
It's very far from the truth; nothing is perfect, but Nature isn't some SEO clickbait. This subthread shows that the reactionary takedowns of everything now even are taking down Nature, of course. They've already discredited much of science, and have a lot of blood on their hands (climate change and vaccines stand out).
LK-99 sensationalism and especially online sensationalism is an excellent example of everything that's bad about rapid communication and the attention economy. A huge number of people suddenly feel a need to have a hot take opinion on cutting edge superconductor research, apparently including nature authors.
There's a false sense of urgency around trying to understand a possible discovery that even if true, wouldn't impact anyone's life for many years, and will probably never be relevant to an actual decision they have to make.
Things will pan out or they won't. What's the rush to form an opinion and hop on a hype bandwagon. I'm probably just a curmudgeon, but the whole thing seems to be more about social signaling than anything else.
Maybe I find it so distasteful because I think the hype and jumping to conclusions is antithetical to real science and understanding.
So in regular one on one in person conversation, you can show your "presence" by uttering a simple "mmhmm" or "yeah" or "I understand" when someone is telling you something above your expertise. Humans like to be heard even if it's just an utterance. There's nothing like this online though. Imagine if we allowed posts on hackernews where you just say "cool" or "mmhmm".
It adds no value to the conversation. So rather than being quiet and being silent or adding no perceived value to the convo, we come up with misguided opinions because "at least someone needs to hear me" is a thought that goes through our minds.
This is a more articulate description of something I’ve been thinking of for a while. Tweets, and maybe just internet comments in general, are like a stream of consciousness momentary thought response. Rarely is it a fully formed opinion, but instead it’s an instantaneous opinion that might have left as quickly as it came. Someone insults my cup holders, and I kind of like my car, the cup holders are fine, but for an instant I feel slighted. Then I see they have so many upvotes, and their wrong opinion is being spread. Now it’s my duty to inform the world of the quality of these cup holders, and defend my honor. They can’t just be wrong, they have to be completely wrong, so out comes the exaggerated response. And then, as quickly as it came on, it’s forgotten, and I don’t even notice the next time I use the cup holders that they are kinda shit.
That’s common, but it’s also an artifact of how few topics people are experts in.
The chances of two people on HN happening to both be experts in superconductors or even condensed matter physics / automotive design / … is higher than normal. But there’s a rapid drop off in expertise so most people commenting don’t really understand the specifics.
So, rather than people arguing about the tradeoffs of cup holder placement and material choices etc it just devolves into “Ug like tribe! Things good! Back off!”
With Tesla it seems to revolve around who has Tesla stock, who drives one, who doesn't and who doesn't have Tesla stock and then finally there is your personal attitude towards Elon Musk. That gives you an eight way fight with every faction behaving utterly predictable. I suggest we enumerate the factions and add them to our bios that way we can at least discount that factor.
I think this is a really good analogy for exploring my emotions on the topic.
There are people who make utterances because they want to show they are paying attention, and there are people who make them because they cant stand not being heard. To me, the latter is more distatsefull than the former.
I think it is gross that in the attention economy, the drive for existential validation is reduced to posting "cool" to be seen, and clicking an upvote feels like being part of a conversation. In some sense they are, but it just a very streched and hollow manifestation of human interaction and participation.
My likely arrogant and possibly hyprocirtical conceit that I think what I post into the void is more interesting and substantial than "cool". Still, that doesnt change my feeling on the subject.
This is why I love love love reaction icons. First used these a lot in Slack but now I want them on everything. People can feel like they've acknowledged something (and even provided their sentiment to it if they want) without having to feel like they need to provide an opinion.
100% agreed. Reaction emojis are a huge innovation in online participation, and they serve a lot of the same functions as non-speech behaviors do in group conversation.
I'm in one large Slack where people have contributed an extensive library of custom reaction emojis and it's great. The place has a strong culture and a lot of great in jokes all expressed in relatively few pixels of screen real estate and relatively few seconds of comprehension. It also diverts a lot of energy from what would otherwise be low-value comments.
That seems to be their theoretical use, much like the downvote is theoretically supposed to be their inverse.
In practice though, it seems that the users of most online communities seem to treat them as an "agree or disagree" button, with dissenting opinions typically being either forced out of a thread or languishing due to the upvote-downvote tug of war generally suppressing a comment's rankings.
> Things will pan out or they won't. What's the rush to form an opinion and hop on a hype bandwagon
Because it's fun and exciting watching smart people from around the world collaborate/compete around an interesting and world-changing idea.
It's cool and good that many people are invested and interested in science and technology.
I think it's a mistake to think that the only people with useful opinions are experts in the field. While still leaving much to be desired, Science education has gotten much better in the last 50-60 years and i find I've been pleasantly surprised how discerning the public is about bad science recently.
The thing about this experiment is that it really is accessible. It's something most people could imagine themselves doing and the observable is fairly clear we with like a few minor caveats with simple things to try that even refute those! People are resonating with that.
Let them for gods sake.
Plus the elegant simplicity should give the result and the amateur replications more credence and yet we have these weird kneejerk reactions against them by scientists who act seemingly threatened, I wonder if that is just insecurity about their own corpus. Any scientist who won't admit to having some stinker data that they pushed through is probably lying or has like, one publication. And many have a career that is all stinkers.
Maybe I didn't articulate things very well. I'm for fun and excitement, and think following and learning about science does both of those.
What I think is weird is the need to feel that you as an individual are part of the action or moment, and insert yourself into it. It's kind of like the person who watches the football game on TV and thinks that their personal ritual and enthusiasm will change the outcome.
It's weird that people feel an urgent need need to converge on an opinion about superconductivity experiments as if there opinion will shape the future outcome and make it so
You essentially want people to stop being people. We are for want of a better term meme machines and we pass on information that we find interesting, gives us hope or makes us feel better and we avoid the opposite because it eventually makes us feel worse.
Yes but we can try to be selective about what we treat as a meme. People have that ability, although it is diminishing with the speed of communication these day.
Maybe. I think the point is valid but in the traditional media there is plenty of ways in which the incentives and rewards lead to pathological behavior, especially with TV but also with some forms of print.
I totally agree that there are always incentives at play! I'm not even trying to make the claim that they're worse, although I do believe that.
One of the new incentives more at play with modern media is using a sense of social visibility, community, and belonging as a reward. Well sometimes true, I think that for the most part it is false or at least very shallow.
Someone shouting at or praising a book, newspaper, or TV rarely felt like they were part of something bigger and making a difference.
New Media enables these feelings in a way that I think is exaggerated, and leads to a different type of pathological Behavior.
To take an example, I think that some people, on some level, feel that posting some mundane comment about superconductivity makes them feel more part of the science, history, and Society. It is a subtle satisfaction of a need to validate ones on existence. I know this all sounds very Freudian, and it probably is. But my central objection is that this gratification is just a new form of junk food for the mind, leaving people malnourished and ultimately dissatisfied.
It's basically a psychological trap, like someone satisfying their need to learn with a tweet instead of reading a book. Not everything needs to be a book, but some people trick themselves into thinking they're a scholar after reading a tweet.
That's true. It is something I'm observing with kids around me: they don't learn from books, they hate to read, but they consume video like there is no tomorrow, wherever and whenever they can. Inane stuff, but also really bad stuff as well as good stuff. Getting them to be selective is hard, but it is far less hard than to try to get them to read.
I really struggle with this, I would love to get my kids to read more (they are the ones I can influence the easiest) but it's very much an uphill battle. Their peer group is just like them, and 'reading is for old people' is pretty much how that whole generation sees it. They may well be right and I'm probably tilting at windmills but I'll keep trying. I wouldn't know how to get through life or run a business without my literacy and ability to write, it's what allows me to absorb knowledge far faster than I could do from any other means of communication. Video, in comparison, sucks. It is so low in information density that unless the subject is something where video actually enhances the information it is a distraction and bloat.
Yeah I think that's another way of viewing what I'm saying. Different levels of information density I'm fine with, but what concerns me is that the median itself is rarely conducive to nuance and detail. Even some of the top tier educational videos gloss over things that make the conclusions conditional or even completely incorrect. It has the appearance of authoritative knowledge, but if you take it at face value you'd have a completely inaccurate understanding of the subject matter. I'm a scientist myself and watched what I thought was a fascinating and detailed 30 minute video about power transmission last night. I had a question so I clicked through to written description of the phenomenon which explained it in one paragraph and completely invalidated the video.
I worry about my kids in the world if people lose the expectation of detail
I think there is justifiable view here that people these days are getting more and more addicted to making prediction. We predict everything but we forget most of it will be just a coin toss cause for every 1 factor we consider, 100 more are unconsidered.
It's sad that the current assumption is that we have no power to change ourselves or our world. We're not machines, we are human beings, agents; we control what we do.
I think more and more people are using politics as some sort of substitute for sports and/or religion, especially post-pandemic when a lot more people were exposed to political ideas when spending time online.
There definitely is an attention economy… I would go further and say people are addicted to consuming news.
But this
> A huge number of people suddenly feel a need to have a hot take opinion on cutting edge superconductor research, apparently including nature authors.
I don’t understand. People are going to share their thoughts. Most wont be experts. So what? Is someone supposed to stop this? Are no one but experts supposed to care? Or try and make sense of it?
You're right. Of course, getting excited on the media is fine. But people are acting as if their words can help protect something from someone, which is disconnected from reality. Things unfold either way, regardless of whether people care about it or not. The real future is not sympathetic to predictions.
Recently Nature and Ars published articles about LK-99, and in both cases it seems to me that a) they couldn't allow themselves to keep silence about a hot topic; b) they successfully didn't answer a question is it a real room temperature superconductor or what. They did exactly what I expected them to do, they described the current state of affairs with all its uncertainty.
And based on this I do not think that they felt the urgency to choose an opinion. At least they didn't choose between "yes" and "no".
As for twitter and reddit I personally didn't bother to look what happens there. I see here on HN people who reduces the issue to a question is it a real thing, ignoring issues like the rules of science dictating what must be done before science can reach a conclusion. I believe it is much worse on reddit, where people generally have less insight into how science works as a social institution.
> Maybe I find it so distasteful because I think the hype and jumping to conclusions is antithetical to real science and understanding.
People have a lot of fun generating and watching videos of different levitating objects. They have a lot of fun arguing about these videos. It has nothing to do with science, though they can believe otherwise. I'm ok with that. It is better then when they choose an other topic to agrue. Something from social or political issues is much worser.
I don't know why but this comment sort of unveiled to me how much useless hype I had for this topic. Of course you're right, it's just so easy to indeed get this sense of urgency, even though it's not really a good use of time (even for entertainment).
This. My small brother tried to explain to me, an electrical engineer, why this will change the world.
I then had to give him a rundown of things that would need to happen before there ever could be a widespread adoption of the material in common household wiring. First it needs to replicate, then a lot of research has to happen on the properties, then manufacturing processes have to be explored and created, suitable insulator materials have to be found, the price point of the sold wire has to be low enough, ...
Hope for a better future is a good thing, but WHY does it always have to come in the form of technological silver bullets these days? Because then we don't have to change our way of living?
Don't get me wrong, a room temperature, ambient pressure superconductor would be revolutionary and (provided it can be manufactured and used without a ton of hassle) it would transform the world. But it would still probably take two decades and there are so many other fronts on which we as a humanity have failed.
Well the whole argument feels kind of clickbait and premature. Arguing that replication efforts fall short, after less than a week of attempts, feels pretty weird. Why even weigh in on things right now if you're Nature? How many of their best papers have been replicated so quickly (it is approaching zero) or conclusively. It shouldn't be a surprise that the fastest pre-release papers that are attempting to replicate it, are mostly from labs looking for publicity or from people who are just excited. Research teams that need more time for a rigorous replication effort are still working and likely will be for awhile. This is a silly thing for Nature to talk about and it makes them look like they're going the clickbait route to take advantage of the hype around floating rocks.
I wanna smoke what the gatekeepers are smoking. “No, you don’t understand science! It can come only from fancy journals. You cannot test the properties yourself!”. Meanwhile Varda goes brrr.
It’s also ironic that a publication so concerned with patience in science is so quick to dismiss experiments “falling short.” Like…it’s been a week. Chill. This is the most public scientific enthusiasm that I’ve seen in years. Let people have fun. Experience wonder and magic and mystery and awe and failure. That’s what science is about.
The original team submitted a paper about LK99 to Nature in 2020, and it was rejected. The editorial may not be interested that other labs research the material, decreasing the number of verification trials.
There's been a few "over-eager" findings these last few years. Skepticism is warranted; if LK-99 is a superconductor it will still be one after six months' peer review.
Sure. No one reasonable is seeing this and deciding they need to go investing their life savings in whatever adjacent stocks they think will take off. Skepticism is fine.
The Nature article is still weird in tone, though, since there's been plenty of interesting results that have been replicated. LK99 is a weird material, at the very least. That it's weird in a way that somewhat implies it could be an RTAPS makes it plenty interesting.
I've seen a lot of discussion around LK99 in a bunch of different contexts, and the portion of people that are treating it like anything more than entertaining curiosity at this point is extremely low - so this article really reads as the authors being upset that other people are having fun in their domain. That's what comes across as gatekeeping.
Or the concerns around "amateur" reproduction - who is trying to reproduce this without any understanding of how to operate the equipment or some understandings around basic chemistry and physics? These private reproductions are being done by engineers, chemists, physicists, etc. - I haven't seen anything to indicate that people with no business doing these experiments are rushing out there to try it.
It's just a very strange to be written in the tone it is and make these points. It seems very divorced from the reality of the situation, which is basically a whole lot of people on twitter memeing "MAKE ROCK FLOAT"/"WE BACK"/"ITS SO OVER", people on more technical/science oriented forums having the sorts of discussions we see on HN, and most the population sitting around waiting to see if anything useful comes of this.
Having worked in a solid state lab that focused on synthesis and imaging characterization of various substrates including superconductors, being an engineer does not make you not an amateur.
Please read my comment again. I am not saying engineers (of the sort attempting replication) are more than amateurs when it comes to superconductors, I am saying they are not amateurs around relatively mundane equipment.
> who is trying to reproduce this without any understanding of how to operate the equipment or some understandings around basic chemistry and physics?
The engineers replicating it are at places that already had this equipment. They weren't using it to try and make floating rocks, but they didn't have the furnaces, etc., sitting around for the hell of it, and they're going to be aware of basic precautions like "Don't eat your lead and don't breathe it in in vaporized form when pulling it out of a 1000C furnace."
I do not understand the idea that people already using this equipment day to day for other purposes are somehow at significant risk while attempting to synthesize LK-99
I do not mean this in a hostile way, but I fucking hate this take.
There are plenty of people who get EXTREMELY excited when shit turns out to be true. There's this sterotype of boring serious people who never have fun and don't enjoy what everyone else is enjoying and it's just wrong.
There are people in the industry who are going to go fucking nuts if this is true, but they're not dancing in the streets because this is the equivalent of "is katy perry pregnant? Our pictures maybe sorta show a bump!".
To be clear, if that kind of gossip is your life, that's fine, but even then you're probably about to read a shitload of ill informed speculation based on suspicious evidence, with undeniable proof 3-6 months away. You've seen this thing literally hundreds of times before, and see nothing to be excited about because it's just noise. If there's a baby in 6 months, great, if not, "yeah maybe" is about the extent of the information.
Science is done slow because you need to prove things. Even with this material being "easy" to replicate by the standards of the field, it still doesn't happen overnight (and to my amateur understanding in part because of a lack of detail).
So while I can't speak for the person you're replying to, I can damn sure say I find nothing about this exciting (more embarrassing that so many people have turned this into a cult following, much like the cold fusion claims on steroids), and will be one of the first people to be extremely excited when we have confirmation.
This is not "watching the process" happen. It is "speculating on the process at every single step no matter how suspicious because the process isn't fast enough for you"
There's plenty of real scientists doing real science with this. It's pretty dismissive to talk about university labs full of PhDs posting preprints and videos and all of that and liken them to TMZ style reporting.
People bring up the cold fusion stuff repeatedly, and that's also bizarre - Muon stuff aside, cold fusion wasn't thought to be possible under our understanding of physics when that craze happened. That's a lot of what was so weird about it. On the other hand, there's absolutely nothing in our understanding of physics that makes a RTAPS impossible.
I would agree with the idea that not being excited about this at this point in time doesn't make you a curmudgeon. But saying "I do not mean this in a hostile way" doesn't mean much when you proceed to be hostile and disparaging towards people. The tone of your comment doesn't change at all if you replace "I do not mean this in a hostile way, but" with "You morons"
It's this kind of excitement of possibility that drives people to work on ideas like this in the first place. Thousands of people tuned into Andrew McCalip's twitch stream of an oven, just because of the possibility that something world-changing might come out. I'm sure lots of those viewers, many of them young people who are in the prime years of forming interests and career choices, have never even heard of superconductors before last week, and now are soaking up all the information they can on the topic. That's awesome.
Was the hype leading up to the moon landing also a waste of time, just because it was just "gossip" until boots hit the surface? Such a joyless take.
I am somewhat adjacent to businesses that sell superconductors. I get tired with every premature take I see, including Nature's. However, I am quite optimistic with LK-99. It has had a different scent from the beginning than prior STP SC claims. More than optimistic, I am excited because of this scent of legitimacy. The level of conspiracy necessary at this point to make LK-99 a nothingburger is a bit big for my taste. It's too soon to say exactly what we have on our hands here, but it is exciting. Anyone denying that without a novel argument has a suspect agenda imo. It needs further replication and methods development and it's only been a week.
It’s only been a week and we have had already multiple confirmations of important properties from several independent sources.
Given that it’s quite unlikely that they are all producing fraudulent results I would say that something strange seems to be really happening with this novel material.
But it is hostile. It also shows a lack of emotional control at least on par with the people that are openly enthusiastic and possibly much worse. At least they are having fun...
> Watching the process happen in real time is fun and exciting.
YOU ARE NOT WATCHING THE PROCESS.
The people who have spent their lives on superconductors and who have the expertise to replicate and conclusively evaluate these claims so far haven't said anything publicly. They are presumably busy doing the actual hard work.
What you're doing is watching is a side show full of influencers on social media.
I can open my rss feed for hep-ex today and read something like this:
Which is due ultimately to the work of over 1,000 people on the LHCb collaboration (two of them now deceased), but the conclusions are just "agrees with the standard model" so the result of the very good work done grinding away at the problem has no headline generating potential. Most of the people here fawning over the excitement of science done in the open wouldn't ever bother trying to read that kind of paper, and probably don't know that sharing physics preprints over the internet dates back to before the Web existed (and to before most of them existed).
we could have been sitting around now talking about breaking new experimental results from LHCb that call into question the standard model, you have to actually do the work to check. and you have to check a lot of unexciting results in order to find one which is groundbreaking (which is actually what the authors of the LK-99 paper claim to have done over decades before finding this one material).
I can’t really think of any over eager findings in the past years. Plenty of fluffy university press releases and the perpetual 20 years from now. But this is the first fundamental breakthrough that has had any stick. Skepticism is always warranted but the other results like the university of Rochester superconductor was met with extreme skepticism at first (and has been shown to be warranted). Lk99 had the combination of big result, AND importantly “easily” testable, despite low yield rates.
And yet, even with all your "years of training, education and experience", the said for-profit publisher is writing such low- quality science journalism articles. It's been only weeks and the article in a maliciously dismissive tone suggests all the replication efforts are in vain and pointless. Is this expected behavior from scientists?
I am well-aware of the very high publication standards of Nature.
I don't care it's a for-profit business. I don't care if, in the end the studies disprove the hyped claims. All I'm saying is this kind of shoddy poor-quality stuff isnt something I expect from someone actually serious about real science
You think years of training, education and experience don't occur outside fancy journals? You believe it's not "science" if it's not published in Nature? Wow.
I will respond with your low quality response with another low quality response.
> You think years of training, education and experience don't occur outside fancy journals?
Literally nothing I said was about this.
> You believe it's not "science" if it's not published in Nature? Wow.
Also literally nothing I said was about this.
We have a fun little situation where HN people, most of which barely know anything about superconductivity, or physics, or really anything outside of their webdev bubble, think that their random opinions on random news articles means anything. A 10 minute read of Wikipedia is now considered expertise. Obviously the random news article with low quality information is proof that room temp superconductivity is a real thing.
It's the exact same feeling I have when I read HN talking about aviation, which I have a strong background in. It's pretty clear most HN people have absolutely no idea what they're talking about.
The trick is to get good at identifying the people that are correct and ignoring the people that don't know what they are saying.
It is hard, but once you can do that it is superior to listening to the experts only. The problem with people who are recognized as experts is that they have a high likelihood of wanting status and power. So while they may be experienced and smart their intentions may not be pure.
> The trick is to get good at identifying the people that are correct and ignoring the people that don't know what they are saying.
You need expertise yourself in order to do that. Otherwise you are easily misled.
> The problem with people who are recognized as experts is that they have a high likelihood of wanting status and power. So while they may be experienced and smart their intentions may not be pure.
Where do you get any information then? How do you get through your day?
People can have various motives and still provide accurate information. The motives don't completely dominate them, they have other motives, and we can read critically.
But if they lack expertise, they can't provide accurate information.
> The problem with people who are recognized as experts is that they have a high likelihood of wanting status and power.
In order for this to have any useful predictive power, you have to also demonstrate that "the people who are correct" don't want status and power, and also that the set of people who are correct doesn't overlap with the set of experts.
> > You think years of training, education and experience don't occur outside fancy journals?
> Literally nothing I said was about this.
Yes you did. Here is a copy of the comment you responded to:
""I wanna smoke what the gatekeepers are smoking. “No, you don’t understand science! It can come only from fancy journals. You cannot test the properties yourself!”. Meanwhile Varda goes brrr.""
You responded to that comment with:
""Yes, years of training, education, and experience is now "gatekeeping"""
The implication of your comment was that it's not gatekeeping to say that science can only come from fancy journals, because it takes years of training, education and experience to get to those fancy journals - and those years of bla bla are somehow an exclusive property of being in a fancy journal.
> We have a fun little situation where HN people, most of which barely know anything about superconductivity, or physics, or really anything outside of their webdev bubble, think that their random opinions on random news articles means anything. A 10 minute read of Wikipedia is now considered expertise. Obviously the random news article with low quality information is proof that room temp superconductivity is a real thing.
This was directed at me, as if I had presented myself as some kind of expert on superconductivity, or implied that I have some kind of valuable opinions on superconductivity. Where did I write anything that could be inferred in that direction? Nowhere! I disparaged your journal-worshipping, predatory-business-supporting, anti-science attitude. That's all. I didn't provide any opinions on superconductivity.
Published findings fail to replicate all the time all over science. The responsible thing is to suspend judgement until it has been independently verified a few times, especially if it's a result from a field in which you are not up to date with the latest findings.
I have a degree in theoretical physics and I feel I'm not qualified to judge this finding.
> Published findings fail to replicate all the time all over science. The responsible thing is to suspend judgement until it has been independently verified a few times, especially if it's a result from a field in which you are not up to date with the latest findings.
Completely agree. Even if the replications are not immediately published in Nature, they can be valuable.
The most bizarre is people who view this as a fight between underdog citizens and established big science, ignoring that the most useful commentaries and replication efforts are coming from universities and big science labs.
(And no, a photo on Twitter of some unspecified speck levitating over an unspecified magnet-looking device posted by an unknown individual does not prove anything. If the topic was anything else, HN would've been filled with "Gah stupid non-technical people, when will they understand that you can't believe everything on the internet?")
That's a tricky one. Yes, it doesn't prove anything. But if that same person would show you a battery and an electric light and the fact that the one can power the other you'd have no qualms about saying that that video is real and proof of the existence of electricity because you've already accepted that as a fact and any evidence that confirms it can safely be added to the huge pile that already exists.
But let's just for the moment go back 112 years when your average laboratory was less well equipped than today's lab of mid sized university and people were doing groundbreaking research all over the place. Including superconduction. So we are all less likely to believe the 'underdog citizens' because anything they can do the labs can do that much better. But the underdog citizens apparently excel at marketing themselves, rather than that they excel at science and replication is something they are sometimes quite good at (Nile Red for instance is in that category). So as long as they aren't doing original science I think we maybe should lump them into the 'preponderance of evidence' class and if enough of those unknown individuals all report consistent results then it may count for something, more so if you know one of them yourself and are allowed to inspect the results. But for a global audience it shouldn't hold as much weight as a replication by a well known university with a good reputation, especially if they supply samples for others to test. (Because I think with this substance testing it properly is a lot easier (while still challenging) than manufacturing it properly.)
Sure serious amateurs can do serious science too. However, I have less reason to believe in their results, a priori, because the internet is full of cranks, while University Lab's have proportionally few. So a claim from a lab becomes an extraordinary claim from some rando on twitter, and thus the rando needs to provide extraordinary evidence.
I see those youtubers for the most part as well meaning science popularizers, I can't get my kids to read books about the history of science but they'll watch videos about all kinds of interesting stuff all day long if I let them. So they do serve a role and if that's all they contribute then I'm fine with that. But I would come down harshly on anybody that would fake it just for clicks or that would interfere with actual science by spouting unsupported bullshit (this happened a lot during the pandemic).
I think it's a matter of priors. If a Youtuber shows, say, how to make non-Newtonian fluid from starch, then it's much easier to accept it at face value, because we already know such a thing exists, and what would they gain by faking it.
On the other hand, if another one shows room-temperature superconductor which may or may not actually exist, then (1) we don't know if it's true yet, and (2) it's pretty obvious why someone may want to fake it to get their five minutes of internet fame.
That narrative explains perfectly why this engenders such immediate kneejerk emotional reactions. It's a fly-trap for reactionary crackpots, who are rife in technical circles such as ours.
It's as if it were custom designed for people who believe their technical/scientific genius is overlooked, who are crying out for some validation.
By and large, we are technically skilled people who work in a field where we're wage-slaves for stanford educated billionaire MBA types whose "big idea" that the media drools and fawns over is "a juice-maker, but, like, netflix... somehow" - no wonder we feel like engineers and scientists are this put-upon class with a massive victim complex.
The issue is that this article shouting "failure" is just as prematurely as the loyalists crying "success." Anger drives clicks and Nature knows that it's angering the loyalists, especially with outright falsehoods in the article:
> graphene, frogs and pliers — can exhibit similar magnetic behaviour.
>
> Frustrated by the atmosphere of hype, some scientists have taken to mimicking the levitation videos with everyday materials suspended by string and other props
Why aren't the scientists levitating frogs above rare earth magnets to make fun of the videos? Because you need superconductor magnet, not a rare earth magnet, to do that. This is a blatant internal inconsistency, and shows that this article is garbage.
Don't trust the loyalists, don't trust the sensationalists, trust science.
The author of the article is a freelance science journalist not really an expert in this space, so I think it is reasonably appropriate to be dismissive of their perspective since they aren't a researcher in this space and probably cherry picked the evidence they wanted for their story.
I'm excited by the potential of LK-99 and I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be a red herring, but I'll wait for the scientific community to sort it out versus paying attention to a non-expert journalist who is weighing in so strongly on the matter this early in the game.
At the risk of going off on a tangent, this is not at all unique to Tesla nor fans of the company. This happens to Apple fans, Google fans, etc. Someone likes something a lot, someone else comes along and is offended by the blind support and decides that they have to hate it in order to bring balance to the world. Ta-da! Now we have two vitriolic groups of people calling the other side a cult or bunch of haters.
Tesla stans are for sure annoying as hell. So are the haters, though. Equally bad, as far as I'm concerned, since neither side has any appreciation for nuance.
This is just how humans are. You pick something you like and then you support it fully. Rewind time to 10,000 years ago or whatever. You're out distance-running animals to exhaustion, and your friend trips and breaks their leg. You stop the hunt and carry them back to your village. You go out tomorrow and hunt without them, and give them some of the food you caught anyway. Someone says "man this guy is lazy, let him starve!" They are ruthlessly taunted for going against the group. The broken leg guy recovers and society moves on. It didn't have to be that way. You could have watched someone break their leg and say "that sucks bro, enjoy dying" or you could have gone along with the "this guy is lazy, let him starve!" cries. Both are rational actions that many other species would take, but for humans, evolution didn't favor that. (Probably because an adult human is a pretty big sunk resource cost. 9 months of gestation to have 1 kid!)
The end result is that we still have these instincts. We want to belong to a group to receive its protection if something goes wrong, and we want to support our group so the members know they're getting the protection they crave. The end result is that in a world without life or death consequences at every turn, we naturally apply this to shit that doesn't matter like rocks. Same brain, different problems.
I'll also add, this is what science is. People say stuff. Other people test it. Everyone shares their results. Is there a better system?
It's the choice you make; 'it's just how I am' is a weak defense. It's surprisingly trendy to say bad behavior is inevitable. Human's have been biologically the same for ~300,000 years, but our behavior has changed dramatically. Behavior in different places right now varies greatly.
Also, is there factual or expert basis for this theory?
> people in this very thread are calling Nature (Nature!) an "online sensational clickbait magazine" because they want to believe the hype
This article is not in Nature the academic journal. This is an opinion published in the news section of nature.com the website. Two entirely unrelated things.
The article references two kinds of sources: arXiv posts, which get numbered footnotes; and posts on other websites, which get inline links. One of those links is allocated to some guy on Twitter making fun of unconfirmed levitation videos. There are no links to any of those videos.
Clearly, the author considers scientists publishing videos of their work less deserving of attention than making fun of those scientists. I think that reflects badly on their character, and badly on nature.com for hosting it.
(Also, an article published on 2023-08-04 should be able to refer to an arXiv post from 2023-08-03: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01516 even if they don't like citing videos.)
There’s a real kernel of truth to what you’re saying but don’t you think calling something a “cult” is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy? You’re turning this into an “us vs them” thing when it never should have been one, by your own assessment. There’s no better way to politicize something than to group people based on some reductive binary belief and generalize about said group.
Your reasoning might as well be applied to the Church of Scientology or most Ponzi schemes. Calling those for what they are does make the members close ranks.
Some things really are cults. I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. Maybe there’s some foul play in “prediction markets” and that kind of crap, but what you’re suggesting with these comparisons is that this entire phenomenon is some deliberate ruse…
Nothing I've said suggests deliberate ruse. It's entirely possible for a cult to be created completely honestly by people who believe in it. Most medieval heresies are an obvious example.
Of course, calling communities or groups cults makes them close ranks. The question raised is should you do it if they are indeed cults (or merely cult-ish).
That depends on your goals. I think Richard Dawkins is an excellent example of what can happen when you focus too much on the means and not enough on how you package the message, in the end you will see your goal become more distant rather than less.
Nature isn't clickbait, but it is not the best journal when it comes to accurately reporting the truth. As we used to joke in grad school, Nature was a great journal to publish the hottest incorrect results, or to write op-eds that influenced old scientists in England.
At the same time I find the incredible enthusiasm and desire to extrapolate the simplest reports into powerful narratives (as a subset of HN people discussing LK-99 do) very depressing. I guess everybody has to go through t heir own Pons and Fleischman or Jessie Gelsinger moments before they understand just how much hype there is in next-gen science.
Maybe it's because I'm getting older, or maybe the users on HN have really changed, but having been an HN member for over 10 years now, I cannot recall a time when it was so regularly swamped by people with an almost religious fervor about the topic du jour. Just in the last few months it was third-party reddit apps, and now this. In my eyes, the quality of conversation has degraded markedly with many comments more appropriate for Twitter (how many variations of "We're so back!!" must be posted?).
Of course many people will disagree with me here, but I'd love to see mute functionality added to HN. If there's anything I've learned from Twitter, it's that when a forum gets big enough, proactively moderating your own experience is essential to enjoying it and cut down on the noise.
despite all the bad things and random people using it for ego and stuff, its the best thing that can really happen to tech nowadays.
With all the AI/chatgpt news, a bunch of people got involved in what you call "spectator sport", leading to a whole new set of opportunities and growth, people who would never touch a pc or new software related tech, got involved, others invested, other simple became consumers and every single bit of it its good for the market.
Imagine you are a 15 y.o student right now browsing tiktok with no interest in chemistry whatsoever and suddenly you see a video about this superconductor and you get all hyped and next thing you know is that the student who had no interest on chemistry, now is passionate about it.
If all the LK-99 thing is a fiasco, at least we can say that it somehow helped getting the attention of people who would actually keep investigating and maybe do find the actual superconductor we need. And this can be said about every subject like this.
So yeah, I'm okay getting some random people having nonsense internet discussions.
It is very strange and there must be a deeper reason. I don't know if this is
- Retail shareholders doing grassroots PR
- Some kind of "magical technologism", belief that the rapid technical gains of the 20th century are the natural state of things; unwillingness to accept that future improvements in material science, computer science, chemical science will be more marginal
- Shallow press coverage and overenthusiastic fans who have a disproportionate impact on online discourse
It isn't strange or unique at all. We live in times where people feel they need to have a position on everything. A strongly held belief. A stand. And people feel they need to adopt it early and then make every piece of information fit that selection.
It is destructive. We see it on every topic now, even entirely banal things.
To go back a couple of decades, I remember a high school History teacher bizarre asking the class if they were for or against abortion of all things...it was a very strange class where he was riffing and we were talking about commonly held positions through time. He asked me and I answered that I didn't know enough about the topic, hadn't really thought about it enough, and don't really feel in a position where I should have a stance on it. He laughed and called me a fence-sitter and said I took the coward position. This was a profound experience for me, and it comes to mind in many situations like this.
The whole LK-99 thing looks super neat. I don't have the knowledge, time or inclination to have my ego wrapped in a position on it, and there's absolutely no value or utility in me picking a position, either. I read the updates and it'll turn out however it turns out.
Yes, this polarization is really annoying, it also blinds people because they become too invested in their own team to still change their position given additional evidence.
I think it's in no small part because the news has been so dire for the past few years: pandemic, war in Ukraine, possibility of nuclear escalation, China licking lips at Taiwan, climate change, economy.
Then some news comes along also coincidentally with other weird fun news (UAPs) that's not bad in any ways, and may revolutionize society. Of course they are gonna run with it.
Unwillingness to accept? What evidence do you have that the 20th century was the inflection point in intellectual progress? We have many more brains with much more free time now, not to mention pocket supercomputers, the internet and AI assistance. I expect the pace of discover to increase if anything. Maybe you're just suffering from your perspective of being alive right now, like all those kids on youtube who say past music was so good, because they see a highly filtered and compressed version of the past.
Maybe there is some major strategic investment deal being negotiated to develop advanced chip fab and it's in someone's interest to confuse the strategy with a potential paradigm shift on the horizon.
LK-99 and the UFO hearings have just tanked my already low opinion of so many communities. I know that no matter the field or the training people are susceptible to being overly excited when they're ignorant on a subject, but god it bothers me how much trivial research (ESPECIALLY on the UFO issue) should at least temper expectations if not outright make people more skeptical.
I figured places like HN would be better for that, although not much. Sure seems about the same as the rest of the web. It's just gossip rags for techy people.
What kills me is that LK-99 might actually be a room temp superconductor, but that doesn't mean the straight out crazy beliefs and behaviors were.
> What kills me is that LK-99 might actually be a room temp superconductor, but that doesn't mean the straight out crazy beliefs and behaviors were.
I've been trying really hard to keep an even keel but your point is absolutely valid and I'm in equal parts annoyed by people that categorically reject it and by people that blindly accept it. Science just doesn't work that way, you need to be patient and do the work. But I do hope that it works out, and as a fall back position that it turns out that it works out as a superconductor but not one with practical use. Because that would still open the floodgates for the funding that would either create a RT(AP)S or rule out that one is possible to a very high degree of certainty.
I have no opinion on the topic of LK99, but the nature article posted is not from the world-famous peer-reviewed scientific review, it's from an affiliated science news article.
You are right that there is a lot of hype around that topic, which isn't necessarily warranted, but people would also be right to point out that an article that transform the lack of certainty barely 10 days after the initial article into a reason for doubt is a bit of a clickbait.
I'm all for scientists publishing early, but if the consequence is news organizations and the general public breathing down their necks, I can understand why they don't.
If, and it’s still quite a big if (although it’s getting smaller and smaller everyday) LK-99 room temperature superconductivity is confirmed Nature reputation should be tarnished forever.
They managed to accept not one, but TWO superconductivity papers with one of the authors that was already known for forging results AND they threw in the bin the LK-99 paper.
Looking at the ongoing LK-99 story what is basically certain now is that they are not a fraud and something is really going on given the multiple confirmations of very important properties that are trickling down every day.
Aside from that I’ve been fascinated with superconductors for decades and, while not a scientist, I think that I’ve a decent knowledge of the current theoretical framework around superconductivity.
Given your pretty scathing post, do you understand 5% of the hypothesis around superconductivity or are you just going to side with Nature because of its authority?
> Here we are, on HN, and people in this very thread are calling Nature (Nature!) an "online sensational clickbait magazine" because they want to believe the hype that the rock has properties that they only learned about from Wikipedia a few days prior (and only understood 5% of it, at that)
I did not consider this article to be a particularly great sample for inclusion in a new standard of quality. Nature puts out fantastic stuff but this really isn't it, and if anything it surprises me that they would publish it. At the same time I agree with you about the spectator sport angle, that's highly annoying, both from the 'naysayers' and the 'fanatics'.
Well...the way science is supposed to work is that everyone is an optimistic skeptic until something is known for certain. There is generally a correlation between higher PR effort and likelihood of falling short. This probably originates from incentive structures not aligning with being truthful and allowing work to speak for itself. So people have to drum up the excitement before it is warranted.
> Have you ever seen a Youtube video about someone reviewing a Tesla or comparing it to another car? The comments are always full of hostile and vitriolic remarks by people who are personally offended if the video suggests the cup holders on a Model 3 are less than perfection. For some reason, Tesla is surrounded by a cult of personality where it's not just a car, it's a lifestyle.
Recently, though, it seems that the pendulum has swung and Tesla haters are far more vocal than the fans.
Anyway, whereas brand allegiance in buying a car is somewhat based in emotional tribalism (modern cars are mostly quite good regardless of brand), the same cannot be said about physical phenomena. With cars, there are decades of car advertisements that appeal to emotions but there have been no ads about superconductors.
I've noticed there always an "assembly" period where the inevitable two camps of psychos have yet to form and ideas and hope are floating around everywhere. Then the camps form and who knows what's real, because all available information is skewed by both to support their narrative.
This was especially fun in the early COVID days when it was just data and outbreak tracking. Then it.. well you know.
Science is basically just attempting to delay that calcification, but it happens regardless.
It's been fun learning about this. And I believe it is important and I'm happy people are sharing results mostly without serious bias. So far.
> The comments are always full of hostile and vitriolic remarks by people who are personally offended if the video suggests the cup holders on a Model 3 are less than perfection. For some reason, Tesla is surrounded by a cult of personality where it's not just a car, it's a lifestyle.
You’re doing the same thing they’re doing. Talking about what a small vocal minority does and then declaring it as representative of a majority. For every person doing as you describe there’s a similar number of people who make it their life mission to attack anything related to Tesla.
OTOH, "falls short" is comically absurd after ONE WEEK ! Imagine Nature saying the same thing about a cancer drug ?
The mainstream press is absolutely guilty of clickbaiting this one - instead of lazy "falls short" sorts of headlines, I expect them to talk about the "race to replicate" with infographics showing all the efforts, breaking down what partial-replication means, applications for LK99 depending on what properties its provien to have, and so on.
I think part of the cult-like fascination people have with LK99 is the story behind it: two no-name scientists rejected by mainstream academia (one of them denied tenure) working away in the basement of some random building doggedly pursue an idea and pull off a miracle.
It ties into the anti-mainstream, anti-institution sentiment prevalent online - that stuffy, tenured scientists couldn’t accomplish what two randos pulled off with just grit and determination.
The truth is thought by some to be defined by the winning side of an argument. If you can just defeat your opponents and declare victory, you get to say what's true and what isn't. This works in some areas, but physics remains stubbornly materialistic, at least when it comes to experimentation.
The natural world doesn't care about eloquence or debating skills. Something is either true, or it isn't. I always very much liked that about physics and various other real world skills. You can't trick your way around nature at all. This is also what I always really liked about computer programming: you can't expect the computer to take the blame for your errors, it's always you when things don't work the way you intended. This can get pretty touch, but the machine is patient, it will point out the error of your ways until you fix it, you can't convince it, you can not reason with it, you can only persist in your search for what is wrong. I love that aspect of the digital world.
Any pessimistic/cautious take on a subject bringing excitement and hope for the future is going to be criticized because people want it to be true. This is just confirmation bias at play.
Considering the hype, I actually find HN comments relatively cautious and patient, this is a pseudonymous internet forum after all.
I think people are more annoyed than anything. No one really knows where this is going, signs are promising yet the number of obnoxious contrarians who are quick to dismiss the potential is high. They are far worse than people who really want to believe it's real.
> But this has become some weird spectator sport, where you're either a believer or a skeptic, and if you're on a different side than I am then screw you, even if you are Nature.
Actually it’s great. Sure it’s annoying when people take things too far. But society sorely lacks for interest in science and in general things that make us all better off. I say bring on the enthusiasm and just remind people of the importance of being polite and kind towards one another or at least not mean.
A huge win would be this signaling interest in things that make the world better. Basic research and such rely on public funding and we’d all be better off with more funding going to address such problems than the other places funds go.
When it becomes a spectator sport, it's not longer interest in science, it's just wanting to be part of an in-group. Science includes rationality and that's sorely lacking in most of the discourse around LK-99. The average commentary has as much in common with science as the recent unfounded and unsupported hype around UAPs.
It’s not about reaching everyone. It’s about not turning people off and attracting the otherwise predisposed. It only takes one sour comment to make the fud spread.
I would've thought HN would be the last place where rational skepticism and trust in the scientific method would be confused for "FUD" (a term which has apparently lost all meaning).
My initial comment on that issue which pointed to that fandom was downvoted. I am truly hoping this turns into something as well, but people need to learn to just stand back and wait.
As if physical reality was something that needs to be defended online and the replication won't turn out well if you didn't scold user asshonker3000 foe not believing enough.
And this happened even here on HN, I truly start to loose whatever little faith I had left for humanity.
> Have you ever seen a Youtube video about someone reviewing a Tesla or comparing it to another car? The comments are always full of hostile and vitriolic remarks by people who are personally offended if the video suggests the cup holders on a Model 3
Uh no? Usually it’s a comment like this at the top and the thread is full of irrational Tesla hate.
Except this is not a review. The “other side” is not reviewing, they are just pointing out it’s probably nothing and calling happy people naive, which is the easy and lazy way out.
This is a spectator sport. We aren’t specialists, are we? We are enthusiasts. This is like complaining we are excited about space travel of any kind.
Nature is a mainstream science publication which aims for a wide audience, so relatively speaking, it is definitely more sensationalist when compared to the top journals in the respective fields.
Not to disagree with your point. Just that Nature is not a good example to illustrate it.
Selection criteria bias. I guess I’m in the middle, but I see no reason to comment other than to respond to this to say I haven’t commented… A quick survey of my friends suggest they’re taking a similar wait and see approach.
That’s a super interesting point. I feel like it’s getting at some deep personality trait around optimism/pessimism (or realism as the pessimists would say ;) so perhaps it’s not surprising that it’s so divisive.
Exactly. It is obvious that the techbros are not cool-headed logicians systematically analyzing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally in their attack on truth and reality.
> Have you ever seen a Youtube video about someone reviewing a Tesla or comparing it to another car? The comments are always full of hostile and vitriolic remarks by people who are personally offended
So how do you think we can improve that? It's a very serious question - the anger and mis/disinformation on the Internet is doing great harm, has killed millions and may do far more (via vaccine and climate change disinformation, to start).
