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submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[-] [email protected] 98 points 11 months ago

JUST HAPPENED!!1!11

I’ll believe it when its not just youtube clickbait.

[-] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

I mean, publishing on youtube gets more viewers than publishing in a scientific paper

[-] [email protected] 41 points 11 months ago

I'm not sure that "number of eyeballs" is the metric by which a successful scientific discovery should be judged...

[-] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Nonsense; this is the future.

Everything is shit in the future!

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[-] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

It's not just youtube clickbait, were you not aware of this news before this video?

[-] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago
[-] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago

If you do a Google search for LK-99 you'll see a whole pile of news articles from the past two days. A preprint was posted on arXiv and everything exploded. There are labs all over the world working on reproducing the material and testing it right now, and it's a pretty simple thing to make so we'll have a solid answer likely within a week.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

Looking at it, this paper was falsified in 2020, then they pulled it down, then another author was added to it and leaked to a publication and now the leaking party is claiming the paper is incomplete so you can't actually reproduce the results. Frankly, it sounds like someone ran out of grant money.

[-] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Everything I've seen says that the 2020 paper was rejected, not falsified. It had been submitted to Nature shortly after Diaz's now-likely-fraudulent superconductor research had been accepted and turned out to be controversial, so it's understandable that Nature was gun-shy of superconductor papers. Do you have any references to its falsification? A paper can be rejected for many reasons other than falsification, indeed I would think most rejections are not for that since peer review doesn't include independently replicating the results.

What it feels like to me is that the authors were panicking over the possibility of getting "scooped." They've been working on this stuff for decades and had often gone without funding so that seems like less of an urgent concern to me.

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[-] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago
[-] [email protected] 71 points 11 months ago

It would be cool if these YouTubers could wait til the paper was peer reviewed and its results replicated before shooting their mouth off

[-] [email protected] 50 points 11 months ago

For people put off by the shitty title, the video is actually really good and comprehensive, and sets realistic expectations. It's a shame that these garbage clickbaity titles are a thing.

[-] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

Being a content creator these days is not easy! I forgive him for the clickbait.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Agreed! If it lets people like this guy make videos like this, a little clickbait isn't so bad. I just wish they'd phrase titles slightly differently, like "THIS COULD CHANGE EVERYTHING" would still draw eyes without being a lie.

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[-] [email protected] 36 points 11 months ago

Not to be snobbish or anything, but at this juncture I wouldn't trust anyone who can't pronounce arXiv (or Schrieffer for that matter) correctly to explain room temperature superconductivity to me. Hell I barely believe anyone with a materials/physics degree...

[-] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

Doing that cute "X is chi" thing TeX does is kinda obvious but I have to tell you that it's probably you who's pronouncing Schrieffer wrong. Because Americans can't pronounce German names, not even their own.

Also just wait until your hear the takes economists will have. They're going to set the record for how many fields a single statement can be simultaneously wrong in (including, of course, their own).

[-] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

The point is there are established conventions among the practitioners on how these are pronounced, and not getting them right says something about the youtuber who may otherwise appear as an expert.

You might be right on how the name 'Schrieffer' should be pronounced in its original tongue, but I've heard multiple former students and colleagues of Bob Schrieffer pronounce it otherwise to conclude that theirs is probably how Schrieffer himself intended his name to be pronounced.

Yeah, can't wait to hear economists' take, or The Economist's..

[-] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

I don't see where the person you're responding to said they're American

[-] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

John Robert Schrieffer, one of the original superconductivity guys, is American.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

juncture

at this junction, you mean! wink wink

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[-] [email protected] 32 points 11 months ago

We get one of those about once a year, and none of them have been replicated yet.

[-] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago

Yes, see... it stops working when it leaves their lab.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Then we should build a huge battery right there in their lab and let it store energy for the whole world.

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[-] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago

Will it turn out to be legit, or will it be this generation's cold fusion?

[-] [email protected] 34 points 11 months ago

I recommend looking at the summary on Wikipedia. See the "Response" and "Publication History" sections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99#Publication_history

Similar research has been falsified, the third author of this paper left the university months ago, some authors filed patents on the material years in advance, and the underlying mechanisms haven't been thoroughly explained.

However, they presented it in a way that is EXTREMELY straightforward to reproduce. There's even a live stream on Twitch of someone working on it: https://www.twitch.tv/andrewmccalip So I doubt they'd make a claim that large when it's so easy to disprove, and we'll know for sure in a matter of days, most likely.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

Related to what you’ve posted, the Wikipedia article on room temperature superconductors has a decent history on other claims, which have all turned out to be false or only usable in very specific circumstances: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room-temperature_superconductor

[-] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago

If this gets peer reviewed and confirmed, what would that mean? What applications would this material have?

[-] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

Remote power generation becomes much more useful since you can eliminate transmission losses. Things like covering the Sahara with solar panels to sell energy to Europe become possible to think about.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

what I can think of

No resistance => faster tech, less temp in tech

Hovering things, especially for public transportation

Cheaper mri

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[-] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Maglev could become more common and more effective, but a "no-limit" battery comes to mind (no resistance=infinite charge) which could make each city or nation own an endless reservoir of energy. Goes well with renewables.

Those are just 2 ideas. I'm sure there will be a lot more.

EDIT: ignore the "no limit" battery, that's a mistake. I mixed resistance with charge and made a stupid and wrong statement.

[-] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

How does no resistance lead to infinite charge? I can see it having approximately infinite conductivity sure, but charge? how?

[-] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

Battery chemist here. That guy has no idea what he's talking about.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Yeah I mixed up resistance with charge, superconductors are probably meaningless for batteries.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Sorry, i confused the lack of energy loss from resistance to "charge", so I'm wrong.

It might be more relevant for semi conductors in order to save energy. Maybe railguns.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

that's... not how this works

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[-] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

Yes, not so fast. Only if other teams can replicate LK-99 and they can confirm room temperature super conductivity will it be time to say that this changes something.

[-] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

Call me when its 5 sigma.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

This discovery has potential. At least it's not a totally exotic process to make this LK-99. I bet more researchers are going to jump on it and explore how it will work and where its limitations are.

The click-baityness is a little off-putting about this video. This doesn't solve everything, but it's possibly a big leap in the field of superconductors.

[-] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago
[-] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

260° F?!

If that's true, this would be a huge fucking deal. But most room temperature superconductors don't operate anywhere near what laymen would call room temperature.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

room temperature superconductors don't exist. (well... when/if this paper turns out to be bullshit)

High Temperature Superconductors do, and refer to the fact that they can be cooled with liquid nitrogen, and do not require liquid helium.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

"well actually" room temperature superconductors do exist, quite definitely! ... But only at 100 gigapascals of pressure. https://uspex-team.org/static/file/Troyan2022_ufn227g_High-temperature%20superconductivity%20in%20hydrides.pdf

Still really cool, but not useful for engineering.

I agree that this paper needs to be replicated before we get excited.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

damn, right.

i totally forgot about those, and assumend the mix-up of room temperature and "high-temperature", because "high" is very relative and confused me as well.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

So actual hover boards soon?

[-] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

Superconducting skateboard looks like a reality.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Turns out we were putting Lead into the wrong thing all along.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

But the guy who put lead into gasoline proved how it wasn't poisonous, even washed his bare hands in it! (then died from totally unrelated lead poisoning)

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this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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