> It's pretty arrogant to draw premature conclusions on quick analysis and demand the authors to disclose more information right now, when they are clearly not obligated to anything.
“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.
Nobody mentioned any of this. There are several tools commonly used for communications within the scientific community, including peer-reviewed articles, letters, preprints, and conferences. It’s hardly controversial.
Well, it's important to keep this all in context: They did not want to release the paper, even as a preprint, at this point. The infighting in the group necessitated it when someone went off script and threw up the original shoddy paper, forcing them to release their marginally better one.
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.
“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.