The Korean team needs to disclose any alternative formulations or just accept failure and move on.
When the authors/executives of a private research company are making fraudulent affiliation claims to established corporations and research universities it's actually very warranted to be dismissive of their claims in the absence of supportive evidence. Especially when there is growing evidence suggestive of failure.
This is not the behavior of ethical scientists and suggests malice.
Faking affiliation and refusing to provide supportive evidence both smell like a fundraising scam (i.e. running out of money and need to raise more to continue research seems like the simplest explanation for this behavior).
https://web.archive.org/web/20230806081911/https://koreajoon...
This is, in fact, the opposite of ad hominem.
Ad hominem would suggest we are attacking the claim based solely on the author's credibility. In fact, multiple independent replication experiments failed and theoretical models suggest it doesn't work.
So instead of attacking the authors the question is should we be trusting them at their word, and the answer which is reasonably based on credibility seems to be no.
We're separately discussing the author's credibility as the claims cannot be verified by anyone but the authors. One example of a time we do this is the "disclosures" section of any academic publication.
Are you arguing someone with a conflict of interest and history of making fraudulent arguments should not be placed under heightened scrutiny?
Combining both available evidence and author credibility is completely valid and leads one to the conclusion that this is incorrect until proven otherwise. It's not like we're solely dismissing the claim because the authors have poor credibility.
The original claims only need to be rigorously verified once. As it currently stands the original claims are claimed to have been partially replicated. What's needed now is the rigor.
The issue is that trying to prove a negative is very hard in this case.
It is similar to me saying that there is a type of cat that floats, although most don't. It is very hard to prove me wrong because even if you find 1M cats that do not float, it doesn't mean that there is a type of cat you missed to find.
All we can say is that we tried to find cats in a thorough way and none of them float.
When that happens, it is often standard to turn the argument over to the one that is claiming that cats float -- prove that you have a cat that floats, rather than relying on me to prove that no cats float.
This is why people are saying we need to do an analysis of the SC sample from LK. If it is super hard to produce, but we can confirm that they made one, then it is true. Otherwise, it is probably best to assume that the claim isn't true.
If it can't be verified, it remains an unverified claim, not necessarily a falsehood.
We have an unverified claim of a significant discovery released in a pre-print that was taken on good-faith and replication experiments were attempted.
This has resulted in what can be described as a very thorough and publicized review process by multiple researchers qualified to serve as reviewers. As this was all done in good faith it is effectively analogous to the scientific standard of blinded peer review as no one was considering the author's credibility.
The conclusion of multiple reviews has been the equivalent of "recommend rejection, invitation to resubmit with major revisions". Major revisions being verification of superconductivity in the sample they possess and further details regarding synthesis and yield as what has been described is clearly not working as claimed.
The relevance of author credibility is for a confidence estimation that a superconductor has been discovered at this time. Obviously, if this was Argonne or [peer] one would be more confident than in a private research corporation with a history of claiming false affiliations to notable research institutions. This is not an ad hominem attack, it's a credibility assessment.
The current state is we have a flawed and effectively rejected manuscript making a significant claim. Looking at the authors credibility is an attempt to remain optimistic but this also points to low confidence.
They apparently weren't actively researching that material between 1999 and 2018.
“Put up or shut up” is a very valid stance in the face of extraordinary claims backed by dodgy evidence. They are not obligated to anything, but then we don’t have to take them seriously. The mere fact that they’ve sat on it for 20 years and don’t have anything solid after seriously working on it for 4 years is strange.
So far, the community has responded as it should, with a proper mixture of excitement and skepticism, which results in renewed interest in lead apatites (which is fine, apatites are great). But when questions keep piling up, “we have the proof but we’re not going to share” is bound to cause some frustration.
No scientist can do real work if they are constantly distracted by random internet folk like this.
They had sent out some samples prior to this whole debacle, including to KENTECH (a Korean university focusing on energy technology), but are waiting to send out more samples specifically because they want to get a peer-reviewed article out there before they start sending them out to a broader audience.
I'm not saying LK-99 is a RTAPS, and current evidence seems to indicate it is almost certainly not one, but the broader LK-99 team seems to have been attempting to follow the normal process the whole time.
It should also be noted that the team most likely did not intend to disclose any information already.
"Currently, two papers concerning LK-99 are available on the preprint service arXiv, which does not conduct peer review, and a related past study was published in the Journal of the Korean Crystal Growth and Crystal Technology in April 2023. Kim has only co-authored one of the arXiv papers, while the other is authored by his colleagues at QERC, some of whom also applied for a patent on LK-99 in August 2022. Both papers present similar measurements, however Kim says that the second paper contains “many defects” and was uploaded to arXiv without his permission. In that paper, the work is described as opening a “new era for humankind”." - From the New Scientist
The "second paper" referenced here is actually the first that was published, in which Young-Wan Kwon is the third author. If Hyun-Tak Kim states that this paper was not published with his permisison it seems like Young-Wan Kwon prematurely published it on arxiv to be the third author. The other paper was submitted by Hyun-Tak Kim just two hours later, listing himself as the third author.
Furthermore, Young-Wan Kwon isn't related to the Q-Centre anymore as he resigned from the function of CTO.
Except that such pre-prints far outnumber the supportive pre-prints, are from verifiable scientists at reputable institutions, are in agreement with each other, and are not making claims of a shocking scientific breakthrough.
As there is no substantial evidence to support superconductivity claims it's reasonable to dismiss them until said group decides to provide evidence. If you recall the burden of proof is on the one making the claim.
> It is just frivolous to say whether LK-99 is superconductor or not for now.
I don't think it's frivolous given the distraction and resource-sink this has been.