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Comment by raziel2701 | Hacker News Reader

Jesus christ these headlines. Ambient is supposed to mean room temperature and pressure. This alleged superconductor is a high pressure one.

External groups have not been able to reproduce his results.

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> In a little-noticed patent filing, Dias claims to have made a material that superconducts not only at room temperature, but also ambient pressure.

The last is no longer true https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/23/science/room-temperature-...

The preprint is on arxiv but I’m too lazy to find a link

"External groups have not been able to reproduce his results."

The reproducibility crisis is going well. /s

If the patent relates to a novel material, it'd be unreproducible by definition, right?

At least in principle, for a patent to be valid it must be enabling. If other words, someone "of ordinary skill in the field" should be able to read the patent and implement it. If there's not enough information in the patent to be enabling, then a patent court should find it is invalid. Of course the patent system is pretty broken, especially when patent cases are tried by jury, but that's how it is supposed to work.

Patents protect commercial interests of intellectual property. But this is fundamental physics that hasn't made it out of the lab yet, so any lack of reproducible research is an enormous red flag. In many jurisdictions it shouldn't even have been granted in the first place, but patent offices are notoriously bad throughout heavily lobbied western nations.

When theories most experts in the field put a lot of stock in cannot be reproduced, it's a crisis.

When theories most experts in the field are skeptical about or downright disbelieve cannot be reproduced, it's a Tuesday.

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