> One may argue that this was really a failure in media communication vs. the actual underlying science
the scientific process and scientists here are innocent, media not so much in my eyes.
The media is often wrong about many things. Sometimes due to ignorance. Others negligence. And occasionally its malicious. If anyone figures out how to fix that without destroying freedom of the press they should get a nobel.
That said, I really loved that Sixty Symbols video for a couple reasons:
1. First, Moriarty was pretty much exactly spot on in his skepticism: the reduction in resistivity is not the behavior you'd expect to see in a superconductor (turned out to be due to copper sulfide impurities), and that the floating in a magnet behavior is not that surprising and could be due to diamagnetism.
2. I wasn't previously that familiar with diamagnetism beyond a vague "I remember hearing about that", so this whole thing led me known the wikipedia rabbit hole to find out about diamagnetism which was really interesting to me.
3. Professor Moriarty explains "this is not how you do science" (bad science by over-hyped press release is at least as old as cold fusion) and gives very good advice on how you should do good science in an age of Arxiv.
https://www.google.com/search?q=lk-99&sca_esv=557962971&biw=...