LK-99 is an online sensation but replication efforts fall short
nature.com
nature.com
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.
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.
Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36994214
Andrew McCalip demonstrates synthesis of LK99 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36997821
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
They did in fact say "The basics are not that complicated".
Now please look at the previous sentence, which contains the full version: "the basic facts about superconductivity"
You quoted the short version, then gave a rebuttal that doesn't really hold up when you consider the long version.
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.
So yeah. That's my diagnosis.
Because if this is real it's basically science fiction come to life.
In the 1800s people were often inventing and researching in their garage labs, we need more amateur science not less.
these guys claimed big, but their equipment couldn't generate temperatures above 127C (Celsius), basically just a bit more than a tea kettle.
they seem to lack the hardware, and super-computing power required to model and simulate the molecular dynamics.
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.
I'm sorry, FROGS!?
I looked this up and it's very fun: https://www.ru.nl/hfml/research/levitation-explained/diamagn...
Lots of objects are diamagnetic, including human beings, and can potentially be made to float in a strong magnetic field.
- the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize for frog levitation:
- the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on graphene.
After that, where do you go? Write poetry? Go start a turkey farm?
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_computing
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!
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.
Superconductors do not have zero inductance.
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.
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).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Thompson_Jaynes
"Jaynes strongly promoted the interpretation of probability theory as an extension of logic. "
Oh, sorry, I didn't realise this was a dick-waving competition.
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.
No; it's claimed to superconduct at temperatures up to 127 °C. They didn't perform tests above 127 °C.
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.
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?
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.
Also mainstream science: no stop talking about us!!
What's the bfd? This isn't IV bleach for COVID... So what if tiktokers are suddenly talking about the quirks of BCS?
Nature is just bitter imo because they passed on an article that the public was fascinated by because as the authors put it "trauma".
They are reacting just like all the publishers who passed on JK Rowling because no one wants to read a fantasy book a girl wrote.
This is like YouTube telling people not to watch Cobra Kai on Netflix because they passed on it.
Science is the process. It's taking your time, proving your work, and most importantly, replicating your results.
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"
I'd be more sympathetic to this had scientists not done such a terrible job of distributing the funding my taxes pay for
Have you considered that the way we “do science” is actually a broken process made of absolute bollocks?
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.
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.
Or it's just a regular diamagenetic material.
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.
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.
Things are hard.
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?
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"
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.
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.
“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??
"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."
"There’s no guarantee a material that is a room-temperature superconductor would be of practical use, Vishik says."
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!
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
Is my understanding right? If so, slightly shocking that these replication attempts are garnering so much visibility.
LK-99 with Varda – This Week in Startups [live video]
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?
I don't know what this new thing is, but isn't 'locking'/'pinning' a known characteristic of superconductors otherwise?
that's the whole point of the 'train track' demo they do with cold superconductors for college kids.
*some of the magnetic field penetrates onto the surface of the superconductor, but internally, there's 0 magnetic field within the superconductor.
It's a defect (where small amounts of the field aren't expelled) that allows for the pinning to happen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type-II_superconductor#Flux_pi...
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?
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.
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.
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].
[0] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/room-temperature-s...
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.
They Heated Powdered Lanarkite And Copper Phosphide Crystals In A Vacuum-Sealed Tube At 1200K For 5‒20 Hours And You Won't Believe What Happened Next
“OMG CRYSTALS AT 1200K! Will it EXPLODE?!?”
<insert pic of host with gobsmacked face looking at camera on a background of an explosion over some generic stock image of quartz>
Hold on to your hats, because this experiment is not for the faint of heart!
The Setup That Changed EVERYTHING!
In a lab that must be filled with geniuses, scientists placed powdered lanarkite and copper phosphide crystals in a vacuum-sealed tube and heated them to a scorching 1200K. They left it there, cooking and brewing for 5‒20 hours, and what happened next is something straight out of a sci-fi movie!
The Birth of a Miracle: RTSC!
The result? A Room-Temperature Superconductor (RTSC) that has the potential to revolutionize our entire world! Imagine limitless energy, ultra-fast transportation, and technology that seemed impossible until now!
But Wait, There's More!
This isn't just your everyday scientific breakthrough; this is a game-changer, a mind-bender, a reality-twister! Are you ready to live in a world where RTSCs are the norm? The possibilities are ENDLESS!
Why This Changes EVERYTHING!
Think of electric cars that charge in seconds, trains that float on air, and devices that never run out of juice! This isn't just a leap; it's a quantum jump into the future!
The Scientists Behind the MAGIC!
Who are these wizards of the lab, these alchemists of the modern age? We bet they're celebrating with champagne and confetti, knowing they've just turned the world upside down!
Want to Know More?
Dive into the nitty-gritty, the ins and outs, the secrets behind this jaw-dropping experiment that has everyone talking! The future is here, and it's wilder than you ever imagined!
Conclusion: Get Ready for a Brave New World!
This isn't science fiction; this is science FACT! The creation of an RTSC from powdered lanarkite and copper phosphide crystals isn't just a footnote in a textbook; it's a headline that's screaming, "The future is NOW!"
So buckle up, dear reader, because the world as you know it has just been SUPERCHARGED!
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.
You might as well never get excited about anything if that's your perspective. Watching the process happen in real time is fun and exciting.
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"
The "fucking hate" kinda negates the first half of the sentence.
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"
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.
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...
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:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.01468.pdf
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).
And the paper that shows it looks a lot more like I'd expect good science to look:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.03110
Difference between science and spectacle.
we didn't know that before it was published.
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).
How many billions of dollars do you spend on colliders that don't disprove the Standard Model before stopping?
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.
> 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 have a degree in theoretical physics and I feel I'm not qualified to judge this finding.
Completely agree. Even if the replications are not immediately published in Nature, they can be valuable.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
- 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
Or maybe all three?
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.
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.
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.
No comment on this particular story :)
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.
It may be, I don't know. This particular journalist has an undergraduate degree in Physics from Columbia - https://dangaristo.com/about/
That's not exactly subject-matter expertise, but it's also not a standard journalist.
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.
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.
If you weren't so involved in the field, would you even care?
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".
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.
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"
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):
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2801-z
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.
"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.
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.”"""
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.
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.
That ship's long since sailed, see all those 'Nature Whatver' journals.
Why can I tell you what it says without even reading the headline?
The lay public becomes far too overinvolved.
The problem arises, when journalists publish some bad interpretation or oversimplification. That's where the review is needed.
“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…
Give this material 20 years, and we will see how it fared.
Content on arvix is copyrighted by the authors, who then choose one of the available licenses to allow redistribution under (mostly CC ones).
Nature markets it to a mass audience? A mass audience reads Nature?
Off-topic, but if this opinion you wrote wasn’t yours, then who else’s opinion were we to assume it would have been?
> 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).
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.
A similar example are election nights. People already voted, the result is in the box, we could simply wait and announce the result.
But seeing the numbers rise like an ongoing fight is going on makes for a more entertaining evening!
Don't get me wrong, I'm for fun, excitement, and curiosity.
What turns me off is that once the shallow well of real information depleted, how quickly people switch to speculation, Hype, and attention seeking
I would also say that in addition to diminishing cost and discretion, there are changing incentives/rewards structures with online communication.
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.
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.
I worry about my kids in the world if people lose the expectation of detail
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.
The people who have spent all their lives researching superconductors have yet to weigh in on this at all.
Publicly. But they are saying stuff and it isn't all negative but very, very carefully hedged and qualified.
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.
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
I mean heck, I could have not written this post.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
Might not impact it hardly at all.
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?
https://twitter.com/gbrl_dick/status/1685811395273830401?t=z...
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.
Two decades is a lot of time. Transistors or airplanes got to a useful form much faster, in a less wealthy world with many fewer engineers.
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.
Considering the hype, I actually find HN comments relatively cautious and patient, this is a pseudonymous internet forum after all.
(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?")
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.)
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.
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.
It’s not to say LK-99 is real, but the Nature article contributes 0 extra information
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.
Better to see LK-99 hype in TikTok/YouTube feeds than celebrity gossip or Musk's impulse tweets or whatever. The more science goes around, the better.
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.
(I don't have a horse in this race)
To be fair, Nature is considered a fairly 'sensational magazine' in the Computer Science world.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.)
Welcome to the Internet in 2023...
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.
Have you ever been to Reddit? I think you’ll find a whole new world (or landfill?) there.
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.
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.
Identity politics has metastasized everywhere.
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'.
Not to disagree with your point. Just that Nature is not a good example to illustrate it.
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.
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.
You'd be remiss not to mention the much more virulent cult of anti-personality surrounding Tesla.
There are always 3 sides. The 2 sides, plus the side making observations about the sides.
Social media / internet environment just makes it so for everything. Over it.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
[1] You’re Not Going to Superconduct At Room Temperature
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.
Uh no? Usually it’s a comment like this at the top and the thread is full of irrational Tesla hate.
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.e. there's plenty of great news to mine here)
For most of my adult life, any newspaper article that quotes a PhD has reliably been about how we're all fucked.
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.
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.