[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUczYHyOhLM

[2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5472374/

You're correct, and this highlights a problem I often see in discussions: "efficiency" just is a measure of benefit/cost. Without knowing the units of benefit and cost, people aren't making meaningful statements when they say "efficient". The important efficiency of transmission lines is capacity per dollar, not capacity per material, and no material requiring lab crystallization is going to be remotely competitive in capacity per dollar.

I suppose I didn't expect that we necessarily had like, the "absolute most efficient that could be made" (if that is something substantially more complicated at a materials-science level than "some simple-to-make-alloy"), but I hadn't imagined that it was a substantial difference. (I think I had imagined that they were... copper wires with like, surrounding metal tubes, or something? I hadn't thought much about it.)

Could you either say, or give my a search term I should look up in order to read, a little more about the trade-off being made between materials cost and efficiency of transmission lines?

So popular science wraps it in a "what you could do with it. maybe. possibly." Or what it means. And commenters have latched onto it, but a lot is said with an air of confidence, of just-so. "Oh uh, superconductors, conducting is passing electricity from one end to the next, super is like really good, uuh uh uh... I know, what about power lines from the Sahara to Europe so they can build solar collectors down there!"

Same with exoplanets, the actual science is "yeah the luminosity of this star drops by 0.0003% at a cycle of 300 days and we're getting some photons that indicate there may be hydrogen molecules", pop sci turns that into "EARTH-2 TEEMING WITH LIFE DISCOVERED, GENERATION SHIP WHEN?"

Which seems ideal to me. Very educational.

They achieved this fusion by creating a container of material that produced massive amounts of xrays when it was bombarded by a high powered laser. These xrays caused another container's surface to ablate at such a rate it compressed its interior to the point that fusion was achieved.

However, this being a weapons lab, they created the experiment to model the secondary device in an H-Bomb. The secondary is theorized outside the Top Secret world to be a cylindrical tamper of (enriched?) uranium. One hypothesis in the public sphere, is its the primary device's Xrays that cause this to ablate at such a rate and that the inside is compressed to achieve fusion. The purpose of the fusion is primarily for the neutrons it generates, which are used to cause a massive amount of fission in the tamper, producing the majority of the energy. For example, if replace the uranium with another non-fissile material, and you have a "neutron bomb".

The reason the breathless hype annoyed me is that at no point was usable energy the desire of the test. In fact, the test solely was to feed real world data back into the supercomputer models, so that we know how our existing stockpile of weapons would work or even perhaps to find optimizations. We know this mechanism of ablation causing fusion works, we've known for 60+ years, all we're doing is doing it in a lab.

I'm not sure why there is this need to hype these events, like fusion or LK-99 so much. It seems that being a naysayer is reacted to as if the naysayers are explaining a magician's tricks. As if we don't hype these events the public will lose interest, or even our children will drop out of STEM careers.

Would a cheap room temperature superconductor bring any benefits here?

Can you point me in the direction to learn more about this?

I don't think this was at all what this saga was about. People essentially turned a physics experiment into social media drama and science had nothing to do with it.

I also don't think the 'academic incentrive structure' has fallen out of alignment with the actual goals of science, despite the fact that people keep saying it, and in particular not in condensed matter physics.

If anything this whole thing showed two things: 1. Science works fine, 2. Please keep it to the actual scientists instead of turning it into yet another discipline dragged on Twitter. I know it's an unfashonable thing to say these days, but 99.9% of people have literally nothing to contribute to a debate about bleeding edge physics research, despite that apparenly everyone feels entitled to have an opinion on it.

Did it though? Nobody published this, which is good, right? And then Max Planck Institute gave the most conclusive answer, and they're the most prestigious replicator-to-be mentioned, so that also sounds good right?. And now, Mr. L and Mr. K will not receive funding for this material, because it decisively failed to publish, which is also good?

I don't know. It sounds like the academic incentive structure worked really well here.

I saw people become enamored with a Russian anime cat girl on twitter.

This was vapid, consumptive entertainment. Which is perfectly fine, let's just not pretend it's better than the bachelor because science. Replace Chad had a date on love island with Anime cat girl did the science things, and that's about where we're at.

Has it, though?

The South Korean paper claimed to have found "The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor". It took a month for researchers around the world to essentially debunk this.

Science works by peer review, yes, but that should have never been a claim to begin with. They were blinded by excitement of the results and eager to publish the paper, instead of being conservative and making sure they got everything right.

Now it's clear that they missed several key aspects that seem trivial in retrospect. It's just sloppy science.

Sure, this caused much excitement in science nerds everywhere, and the media got more ad impressions, but overall I wouldn't qualify this particular event as "super healthy".

Coincidentally, or not, this[1] is currently on the front page.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37137405

There's a lot of modern physics, chemistry, biology that is uncritically accepted which I think deserves a somewhat higher bar of skepticism than RTSC

There's absolutely no evidence of a hoax. The original authors were sloppy and overeager, not malicious.

There are a lot of details to consider. Does it makes sense? Who published it? Did that team has a gopd track record? Where was it published? Did somepne else used the paper as a base for a new paper? How long/much would it take to try?

Only after that, researches decide to try it or just send it to the paper bin.

It is not that useful. Electromagnets are used when we need something like that at scale, such as in maglev trains. Permanent magnets have their uses, but we have plenty of others that are as strong as this, and plenty of others that are much stronger than this. I suppose we will investigate it’s properties and we might find something interesting, but almost certainly not because of its magnetic properties.

My long term pessimism comes partly from the fact that I know what is behind the magical technologies that are supposed to save us, which is why I am very skeptical about them. I am also very doubtful about our ability to make the right decisions in difficult times and under severe constraints. But hey, I do have a cool, interesting, and enjoyable job.

When I was young, I wanted tu buy a blue LED but it was too expensive. Now I have white LEDs everywhere.

Laser pointers are nice too.

During COVID there were multiple cases like this where a study got a lot of hype and discussion from non-experts and turned into "the science says X", when in fact the science was as of yet extremely unsettled. Sure enough, as the experts came to a consensus it rarely matched the public's initial perception, which led to a lot of confusion, conspiracy theories, and fingerpointing.

Science-as-spectator-sport is fun, but I worry about the impact it will have on society as a whole and on the execution of science in particular. How many research decisions will be influenced by the possibility of going viral? How many bad decisions will be made as a result of pressure from millions of non-experts who briefly become armchair X-ologists?

I feel like this line is doing a lot of lifting in your comment.

The problem is that as lay people we are completely unequipped to gauge a claim like this. I followed along on HN and there were plenty of posts by people who were giving LK-99 crazy odds of success, fueled in no small part by viral videos of outright hoaxes from pseudonymous "researchers."

It's fun, in a science fiction-y way, to speculate on what a material with the supposed properties might have meant for the world, but the degree of skepticism that should have been applied was lacking for many.

There's a tendency on HN and similar forums to devour new developments - almost a fanaticism about learning the newest/latest/best before the general public. But in this case, a truly extraordinary claim had been proposed, and it was even published without the researchers' consent. There was precious little reason to give it any attention at all at that phase.

If people had viewed LK-99's properties as "almost surely science fiction" all along, I could find myself agreeing with you, but that's really not how this played out. Sadly this event showed there's a market for hyping up weak claims that people will be poor at evaluating, and I guess we can probably expect more of them.

This is probably because people (i) were not aware that there had been many other hypes about RTSC before but less publicly visible all proved to be false, (ii) not being able to accurately judge the technical quality of the initial evidence, (iii) uncritically believing that the data in the initial preprints was proof for superconductivity because their authors said so.

What the general public does not see it the regular flood of papers that pretend to change the world and that turn out to be bogus. So, from an insider point of view, the issue is that what we are supposed to avoid (crack pot theories becoming mainstream or getting too much traction) happened in a spectacular fashion. So a lot of people get excited about nothing and then end up distrusting the scientific process itself (“they don’t know what they’re doing”, “they make everything up”, “they write a lot of nonsense”, etc).

In this case, I think it turned out to be a good thing. People got excited, some of them thought about possible implication, others managed to pick up some notions of material science. The enthusiasm and activity from people trying to replicate and investigate the material was heart-warming. But yeah, it was bound to finish like that.

> Why would I ever be inclined to feel that there's pie on my face now that we've got fairly strong evidence refuting the claims?

You really, really don’t want to be seen as a crack pot when your funding and career depend on how external people evaluate your work. You also really, really don’t want to have to retract a paper because you’ve missed something obvious. Retraction is a traumatic process even if you are in good faith. This is sidestepped by releasing preprints (so no peer review and no risk of retraction). But at the same time this is a reason why outlandish preprints tend not to be taken too seriously. There is less incentives to get it right.

This should be taken in the context of room temperature superconductors being notorious physics vaporware along with practically useful advances in quantum computers and useful fusion. What these have in common is a sort of holy grail status, where it's obvious they'd be a revolutionary complete game changer. Not that any of these things are obviously impossible, there's just been so many instances of discoveries in these areas that have failed to replicate that there's inevitably a lot of eye rolling in physics when these types of findings are announced.

Kinda buried the lede there. A lot of folks around here and in my own orbit were practicing the former while excluding the latter, or worse, were taking shots at people trying to inject some level of rationality into the conversation. Heck, some folks even went so far as to refer to those types of counterpoints/comments as just a "bizarre reaction"...

I think the public reaction in this case is a symptom of a problem with our information ecosystem that extends beyond science. Just because something is fun to participate in in the moment doesn't mean it's not harmful to the underlying scientific/political/social process.

A significant reduction in room temperature resistance would still be incredible, even if it wasn't a "room temperature superconductor." Might still enable a lot of those "exciting conversations." Just not some binary yes/no computer holy grail.

Also, big effect was scientists went "Whoa. There's a whole mode/regime of resistance change we never really looked at." The modeling papers that came out almost immediately were really interesting. Might still have cool applications.

rock music

Sitcom's live studio audience: "Awwwwwww!"

There is a lesson there: do not make definitive statements about something that is uncertain. There are a lot of interesting things to say about this material along the lines of “it would be cool if it worked, then we could do x or y” while still making clear that this is tentative.

> The whole time LK-99 was in the news, we were wringing our hands about potential uses and the impact it would have on our world. For once it seemed maybe there was hope that we’d see exciting times again with exponential advances in technology. That dream has now been thoroughly eradicated.

Some people did. The materials scientists I know were mostly skeptical with a hint of cynicism or optimism, depending on the individual.

> By the time a true room temp superconductor comes out, it probably won’t be in our lifetimes.

It is difficult to say. We barely understand what makes a material a superconductor. This understanding will improve, and we will do some more systematic studies. Or it might show up in some completely unrelated project, just by chance. It is very difficult to say when this might happen. All we can say is that so far we don’t think that room-temperature superconductors are a physical impossibility. So at least there is hope.

Is it the idea that there might be something great happening, and that we might get the chance to live in exciting times? I could see people wanting to believe in that opportunity.

This is also a great opportunity to demonstrate your understanding on how difficult the scientific process is to your friends.

Telling your friends you have changed your mind on everything you told them earlier because of new evidence should be something you take pride in. Because only true scientists change their minds, and even discard their most cherished theories, based on new evidence.

Y'know those stories on Reddit about people's awful childhoods, like "I needed the toilet in a shop and my parents told me to be quiet, and then when I pissed myself, my dad dragged me outside and beat me for 'embarrassing him'"? Have you noticed the dad comes out of the story looking bad for prioritising his image? Saying "I don't want to tell this to people because then _I_ will look bad" already makes you look bad.

I told my dad LK-99 isn't a superconductor and he said "that's a shame, oh well, exciting while it lasted".

Pride isn’t a good look or smell.

Try humility instead. You may not like to eat humble pie, but others love to watch that.

Also, perhaps some introspection would give nuance to why being wrong bothers you so much.

And that's just LK-99. You could easily be just as mistaken about other things. If you start confusing possibles with absolutes things get messy really quickly.

> By the time a true room temp superconductor comes out, it probably won’t be in our lifetimes.

It could happen tomorrow, next week, next year, within the next 500 years or later or even never at all. And that still wouldn't prove that no such thing exists. We just do not know.

Maybe, but I have immensely more respect for someone who can just admit they were wrong compared to someone who bends over backwards to justify their incorrectness.

If you step back and scan headlines a few days, or weeks, or years, after, you find that almost all of it comes to naught. (Not absolutely all of it, there is some real news, and occasionally a story grips and/or surprises.)

You can spare yourself a tremendous amount of cognitive and emotional strain and whiplash by waiting for the dust to settle. And possibly, cultivating a sense for what might actually be significant. (Early stories of a virus in a city I'd never heard of in China growing at 10x a week caught my attention quickly, as one reasonably recent example.) It's possible to get caught with a normalcy bias, though being prepared to quickly revise your priors helps here.

The LK-99 story reminded me a lot news that broke shortly after I'd first come online via the campus Unix network at uni: the Fleischmann–Pons cold fusion paper. There was a lot of excited discussion, and within a few days I had (courtesy of an FTP server --- this was not only pre-World Wide Web, but pre-Gopher, though we had Usenet) an ASCII-text version of the paper, something I excitedly wrote (via snail mail) home about. And ... after a few weeks ... it turned out to be nothing.

Science, mostly, progresses relatively slowly. Big upsets are rare. Extravagent claims (in a hype-driven and grant-driven world) are increasingly prevalent (it was bad enough 35 years ago, it's worse now).

So this time 'round, I scanned the headlines and some of the discussion, but mostly sat the story out.

The generative-AI story (as another recent example) seems more substantial but still somewhat frothy. Though I strongly do expect that far more capable AI techniques could well emerge quite suddenly and to profound effect.

But when you recognise that a story is largely speculation, especially if it's defending a point of view (Business As Usual / status quo or New World Order / this changes everything, or many views lying betwixt and beyond) recongise many of them as strongly motivated and quite often weakly informed.

https://www.google.com/search?q=lk-99&sca_esv=557962971&biw=...

Totally disagree. If anything, this whole episode (debacle?) reinforced the fact that science works and the process played out exactly how the scientific process should work:

1. First, the paper was originally posted on arxiv, meaning it was a pre-print and didn't go through any peer review. So the vast majority of comments I saw on it was "Wow, this would be really cool, if it turns out to be true."

2. Immediately many labs around the world started trying to replicate the results. And very quickly there were some negative results that came back.

3. The thing that I think is so cool is not only did negative results come back, but from TFA people now have a very good understanding of why the initial analysis was incorrect. That's great science.

One may argue that this was really a failure in media communication vs. the actual underlying science, but if anything it teaches appropriate skepticism, especially when a report is initially published, without peer review, without yet being replicated, that ends with the sentence "We believe that our new development will be a brand-new historical event that opens a new era for humankind."

He clearly doesn't think it's worth his time to understand anything about LK-99, its history, or its popularity. It seems like most anybody that watched the fireworks show is more informed than he is. So what's the video about?

The same way he says "this isn't how science is done", you could say also say what he's doing isn't how peer review or journalism is done. What's not being addressed is that this kind of arrogance and appeal to authority is EXACTLY what flat-earthers and the lot are rebelling against, and the solution is not to put up more walls.

There are now potentially 10s or 100s of thousands of people who have seen how the sausage gets made, what kind of pitfalls there are, how measurements can lead to false conclusions, and mistakes can be made; and they're absolutely fascinated by it and want to learn how to do things better.

"An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people."

This doesn't mean that every individual needs to be an expert in every field. You only have to know so much about a given field and the processes within it to develop a degree of confidence in your perspective on who you can trust, and extend that trust to the people they trust.

Mistrust in science is borne of ignorance, but not in the way that you think.

As a PhD physics scientist with a familiarity with this area, I’m glad this got the attention it did and showed science working “as it should”.

Consensus was that this would lead to more people interested in the field and what actually does work.

There’s heaps of sloppy science out there. There are massive structural issues in how science is done.

There’s obviously not enough money or prestige in condensed matter physics if Phil thinks this is a bad hoax and it’s bad for Science.

Within the space of a month this was resolved. It wasn’t even published. Go to pharma, medicine, vet, ag and you will see hoaxes that last years. Reviewers who don’t have any relevant knowledge. Journals which won’t retract until you threaten to sue them. Universities that will take no disciplinary action against hoaxers at all. LK-99 was almost debunked in a single media cycle.

The people who have taken this to reduce the credibility of science rather than these fallible humans who succumbed to their impulse for fame didn’t give science any credibility in the first place.

EDIT: shout out to our favourite website retraction watch. Anything you read there remember, that’s science working and some Scientist somewhere who likes being right has vanquished their enemy in the academy. https://retractionwatch.com/

As for the "audacity of HN" - this site is a very bizarre mixture of a relatively small number of working scientists, a lot of people without much scientific background who are very interested in science, and get-rich-quick startup types who are sniffing around for the next breakthrough they can turn into money. That mix leads to weird dynamics when it comes to how scientific activities get discussed.

What is the medias representation of the future now? A burning shithole, no future. It's depressing and not true. I enjoyed the few days of excitement, I want us to go back to having an optimistic outlook on the future of humanity.

Shaming laypeople and the media for not being scientifically literate enough to navigate quickly-releasing literature on quantum mechanics isn’t good for science either. It stifles curiosity, and this kind of take is what hinders people from taking an interest in science in the first place. What’s important is that as new information comes in, those same laypeople are willing to take in that new information, which is exactly what happened.

Science isn’t perfect and in this case, the process worked exactly as designed.

There was some drama between the authors, the science was sloppy and the writing inappropriate, but AFAIK, no faked data, no secrecy, they gave away their recipe in a way that allowed for reproduction attempts, and a few weeks later, we have a convincing explanation. Stupidity, not malice.

It's not wrong to be excited, but there is a sort of fatigue which builds up, like the boy who cried wolf.

In the background you'll have heard older voices whisper warnings about the previous time.

For the next ~10 to 20 years people will shout "Remember LK99" for every overly-grandiose severely-lacking scientific paper.

Then a new paper will hit the right mix of attention-chasers and ignorance.

I'll be there, just whispering warning.

The results weren't formally published.

The failures of science are the papers that are outright fraud and as such are cunningly crafted to deceive and it actually works, and we believe falsehoods to this day - which I think we agree on being the failure of science.

This however was not. Yes the paper shouldn’t have been published. But it was. Etc. As humans are wont to do. Science didn’t happen in the news - excitement happened in the news. Human failures and bias reigned. Yet Science happened in the lab. That is victory.

Yet, the fact there are failures in no way impugns the victories.

The paper wasn't published, despite the phrasing in the nature article. arXiv is effectively a moderated blog

The materials and hardware required to make LK-99 are within the reach of a high school. It's really simple and doesn't require anything more than a very hot oven (hotter than a domestic one, but still very common). If it'd turned out to be a real superconductor anyone who wanted to make it could have done.

They're saying that LHC does not use a ceramic, and therefore high-temperature, superconductor; instead they use metallic (cooled) superconductors because they can be molded.

"In almost all applications of superconductors, they don't use high-temperature ones. [...] The ones [the superconductors] that see use in the LHC, for instance, aren't [high temperature superconductors]."

It just has a sentence in the middle of it that confuses you into thinking their antecedents are "the HTSCs" and "ceramic" instead of "the SCs" and "HTSCs".

Probably not. Being crystalline and being a ceramic are completely unrelated. Standard superconductors like niobium-tin and niobium-titanium are crystalline metals (intermetallic alloys). The vast majority of metals are crystalline, to the point that when a company tried to make a metallic glass a couple of years ago (under the name Liquid Metal), it made quite a bit of noise.

Other comments from more informed people indicate it’s unlikely that this will yield anything useful though.