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Comment by notfish | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure I understand your point. Are you trying to say that people shouldn’t be paying attention to this? I would personally be horrified if I found out that the paper on the synthesis of a room temperature superconductor went through the normal peer review process instead of letting the world know they discovered something huge.

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My point is why should this unreviewed claim of ambient condition superconductor be exalted as the holy grail and all of the other unreviewed claims of ambient condition superconductor languish in obscurity when they come out? It's definitely not for the strength of evidence!

It's pretty much due to the strength of evidence.

There is no conclusive proof that this is a superconductor on the replications, but the evidence has been on a different level from nearly everything else you'll find on Arxiv since the beginning.

AIUI, things that float in a magnetic field at ~room temperature are moderately common claims, and this is really the only evidence that LK-99 might be a room-temperature superconductor. The published ancillary evidence in the original paper actually raises red flags that isn't a superconductor--the "0 resistivity" domain in their temperature-dependent resistivity plot is (when you realize the units they're using) actually slightly less resistive than regular copper wire, which suggests that the sharp drop in resistivity may be nothing more than a pedestrian phase change in the material.

> things that float in a magnetic field at ~room temperature are moderately common claims

At monopolar magnetic fields weak enough to come from a permanent magnet is a lot rarer.

Almost all superconductor claims come from measuring magnetic resonance or direct resistance measurements. Both are noisy things to measure, and won't get you reliable results.

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