This, its utterly shameful. Hot takes here, hot takes there, skepticism here, tell people to calm down there.
Yet not a single replication! China has gone through multiple failed and successful replications so far. And the first US replication is from an amateur.
If LK-99 works out, expect some congressmen to use this as a bludgeoning tool against the state of US public science.
Nanjing University physics professor Wen Haihu said in an interview with The Paper that the news was extremely likely to be false and they only assigned a student to it because many groups internationally were working on replications https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_24024641
"A researcher from the Institute of Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) declined to comment on LK-99, telling the Post that even taking the issue seriously would be ridiculous." https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3229778/coul... (It's unclear to me whether this was before or after the HUST team published their video.)
I don't think it's so much "China good at science, everyone else shamefully bad," but that some institutions (including in China) are more risk-averse, because labs who're already working on something they expect to succeed are less likely to benefit from dropping it to try something unproven.
Not go all conspiracy, but isn’t that also pretty much the playbook you’d run if you were trying to discredit it, to get as much of a jump on the rest of the world as possible? The Chinese government is not exactly known for playing fair.
That requires a government so competent they immediately notice the significance of a claimed breakthrough by a foreign lab and coordinate an information campaign where their leading scientists act all skeptical just like leading scientists in other countries, denying rumours that the Academy of Sciences is working on a replication etc., ... but completely fail to act on similar rumours sparked at the same time by screenshots of a HUST professor getting all excited about his university's replication work in a group chat.
Usually, when the Chinese government is confronted with an unexpected development they want to suppress, the opposite happens: official spokespeople clam up, nobody has a statement ready, related keywords get censored more or less effectively on social media, until an official narrative is revealed that doesn't withstand further scrutiny but survives anyway because such scrutiny is censored as well.
So no, it's pretty much not the playbook they'd run if they were trying to discredit it.
Individual lab heads might do this sua sponte. Think: while everyone else is busy playing replication games you can work on reliably making LK-99 and beat everyone else to the punch on the more valuable patents and engineering glory.
The other thing is that even if LK-99 is finally conclusively shown to be a room temp & ambient pressure SC, there will be lots of important challenges to work on surrounding LK-99, so not being the first to replicate is no tragedy:
- challenges in practical and reliable
manufacturing of LK-99
- challenges in engineering w/ LK-99
- challenges in finding better materials
than LK-99 using similar approaches
If I were in a position where I could devote funding and researcher and lab time into LK-99 research, I might well quietly let others to do the replication work while having my team quietly research practical manufacturing of LK-99 so that we could a) beat everyone else to the punch on practical and reliable manufacturing, b) get the patents for (a).
To be fair, no one in the us has a grant to replicate something that came out this week. Its also the academic summer. A good amount of PIs are probably nowhere near their labs on vacation currently.
> To be fair, no one in the us has a grant to replicate something that came out this week
And yet researchers in other countries managed to find the money this week. That would seem to point to a real relative weakness that's worth thinking about.
Whether it is the result of gatekeeping, bureaucracy, academic squabbling, or something else, a cranky (and hilarious) Russian did better, faster work in her kitchen. Even putting aside professional scientific dysfunction, that seems to indicate a strategic cranky kitchen chemist gap.
Hmm I'm not convinced that the establishment is sitting it out. Isn't it more likely that they are working the conservative process of registering experimental intent and planning only then to be followed by the experiment and only then to be followed by press release? If a bunch of amateurs can spook the old guys into violating well established procedure then id be pretty concerned about their competence.
It's the same in Korea where the research originated.
A bunch of professors belonging to a hastily formed academic committee are trying to monopolize the public debate, quibbling about errors in the arxiv paper and demanding that Lee & Kim turn over samples of LK-99 because the big-name professors are obviously too busy to make their own. It seems that their first priority is to avoid a repeat of the Hwang scandal than to touch any novel research.
Any time the material exhibits a properties inconsistent with superconductors, the to-go explanation is that it's supposedly extremely difficult to manufacture. Not to mention, the original instructions include stuff like "The sealed tube containing the mixed powder was heated in a
furnace at 925°C for 5-20 hours." which sounds a tad bit imprecise.
Don't you think in those conditions it's at least a little bit reasonable to demand samples?
>Don't you think in those conditions it's at least a little bit reasonable to demand samples?
No. Because ultimately they don't owe anyone anything outside of the standard scientific process. They want to get the peer reviewed article published, and have stated that if people still want samples after that they will provide them.
Half of twitter shitposting about FLOAT THE ROCK and a bunch of curious scientists and engineers attempting to replicate this doesn't fundamentally change this equation. If it's a superconductor now, it'll be a superconductor in 6 months.
None of the media hype or unwashed masses treating this as science entertainment should significantly impact the process they are going through. Assuming they've got an RTAPS, they'll get the Nobel Prize regardless of whether or not they satisfy everyone's curiosity right this moment or a year from now. Assuming they don't have one, well, that'll get found out too.
This is very ambiguous. So, everyone can make samples in their kitchens, but unfortunately, the researchers don’t have enough samples to provide, right? Researchers have their own primary responsibility to prove it, not the public. And this was not a debatable issue before the LK-99 bomb.
They’ve said they will provide samples after peer review. Which seems fair doesn’t it? How can they complete their paper and peer review without the samples? And if the samples get damaged they will be regret ever handing them over. If you were in the same situation you’d make the same decision.
I and everybody else would love them to hand over the samples for external testing, but it’s their samples so they can do whatever they want with it, and the rest of the world just has to pound lanarkite while we wait.
But I heard that in the interview, Dr. Kim said they have various samples that have different magnetization properties. It doesn’t make sense that they have only a few samples, ironically. I’m sorry, but this makes me think that they are trying to move the public some other way.
Judging from the Korean-language interviews making the rounds today, there seems to be some sort of political tension between the researchers and the so-called verification committee. There's disagreement about whether anyone actually demanded samples, or whether it was just a polite request...
I have a hunch that this might have something to do with the late professor Chair (Choi?) who came up with the idea back in the 90s, and whose last wish his disciples claim to be following. Chair was a sort of outcast in the superconductor research scene, and the methodology his disciples have been using are also, um, unorthodox at best. Someone might stand to lose a lot of credibility if the verdict goes one way or another. We know there's been tension even inside the team, as one of the three men named in the first paper was dropped from the second paper. At this stage, I'd be more concerned about these internal tensions and personal grudges than any attempt to manipulate the public at large.
Now I understand what's going on in South Korea. Okay, this is more political than I thought. But the problem is, the researchers even didn't send the sample abroad to prove it. Even though they had many requests for a week. This doesn't make sense, and that kind of background story is not helpful in solving this.
It would not be a normal part of the process for people to be demanding samples just because there was a preprint posted on arxiv. It's a weird situation and they don't owe anyone any of these samples.
They say they want to share samples after they get a peer reviewed paper published. That's not a weird position to be in. If it wasn't for the hype around this, they wouldn't be in this position.
Let the process play out like it normally does, and if none of the replication attempts pan out, they can provide the samples after the peer review. We'll still care about RTAPS even if it takes another year for a sample to be provided.
This case is something different. Because everyone reviewed their Arxiv papers and found that there’s no meaningful figure for the resistivity. And even magnetization data was not matched between two Arxiv papers. Now, here is where we are. After these reviews, they never updated their data to solve this issue, but they decided to let other guys do their experiment instead of them. The easiest way to solve this is to plot the resistivity data again on a logarithmic scale. And this takes less than a minute because they have raw data. This is a very uncommon situation in the scientific community.
> gone through multiple failed and successful replications so far
The "successful" replications are partial. No one knows how to make a large enough sample of LK-99 that can be tested to definitely show superconductivity (or not) at room temp and ambient pressure.
IMO the most bullish research done yet is the theoretical research.
> If LK-99 works out, expect some congressmen to use this as a bludgeoning tool against the state of US public science.
I hope for the same here in Germany. It's way past time we actually deal with the sorry state of science funding and academia in general across the Western world.
Yeah and it's not just the US but also France/UK/Germany/Canada, all the western countries usually held in high regards for science, the lack of enthusiasm (for lack of a better word) is rather disappointing. I don't think I've seen a single university lab in these countries announced "hey we're trying to replicate this as well".
They don't have the funds to do so any more. Everything is just project based grants, which often enough aren't even enough to run a project to completion. And professors have to chase grants and do other bullshit paperwork in an awful lot of their time.
Given the international reach of the US' War on Drugs, is red phosphorus also controlled in other nations? Being denied access to the precursors needed makes replication far harder.
Yet not a single replication! China has gone through multiple failed and successful replications so far. And the first US replication is from an amateur.
If LK-99 works out, expect some congressmen to use this as a bludgeoning tool against the state of US public science.