I believe there’s no way to stably suspend an object on permanent magnetic fields, so if this is stable and doesn’t fall down then it’s hard to argue superconductivity isn’t involved.
There are diamagnetic non-superconductors like pyrolytic graphite that can also evade Earnshaw's theorem, but this would be the first metal with this strength of diamagnetism at room temperature AFAIK.
Pyrolitic graphite can evade Earnshaw's theorem only with either specific magnet array shapes or with rotation, they still can't stably levitate on a regular dipole without rotation.
You mean the ones with a DeLorean or whatever? Those are powered closed-loop-control devices. Or the spinning tops (Levitron etc.?) Those are dynamic and fall down when they stop spinning.
True, but only trapped within alternating N/S permanent magnetic poles... so it's possible to fool other people, but you won't be fooled yourself. Just don't use that magnetic setup. Superconducting materials will levitate in the field of a single magnetic pole.
So far, from my understanding, the sample size of the material has been small enough it's been difficult to rule out resistance from corrosion on the contacts of the sensors, though I seem to recall a post not too long ago on here about resistance below the threshold of measurement around 100 degrees k.
The compound must be tricky to synthesize with a good degree of purity- I think we'll learn quite a bit more if someone manages to get a bigger sample than a flake the size of the point of a needle.
The paper shows a clear phase transition to diamagnetism as the material is cooled. That would be seen in superconductors and not in regular diamagnetic materials. I'm not aware of any that have that kind of phase transition. Though since we're in weird territory here, it's important to note some weird non-superconductor behavior that's beyond regular diamagnetism might be going on as an alternative explanation. But it is weird.
ETA: also, in the presence of a magnetic field, that transition temperature decreases. That's pretty huge. Unless this paper is fraudulent, I take this as the biggest positive evidence so far that something besides simple diamagnetism is going on. And, cards on table, with the assumption that the paper is not fraudulent, this pushes my odds above 50% for the first time.
They got about 50 degrees C, but note that the bulk sample and the more pure tiny sample are different.
It definitely contributes to the general feel that however this works, it's an inefficient synthesis that's problematically generating the material we want.
It certainly makes me wonder if something like molecular-beam epitaxy would be able to directly grow a more pure sample (but I imagine that's expensive and time-consuming to setup, plus not really what we're hoping for if we want to use lots of it).
326K (+127 deg F) and 340K (+152 deg F) for their less and more pure samples respectively. And, yes, if it's a superconductor as we understand them, that's the temperature at which it would have zero resistance as well.
It's obviously a hyperbole. But if we once were to use these SCs to transport energy from solar farms in Sahara, it might have to operate in that temperature range.
Five meters down in the desert you're under 25 degrees year round. It's the average that matters for soil temps, not the peaks. You can approximate this by taking the average air temperature and defining the surface as the top five meters. Below the 10 meter mark the day/night cycle influence is pretty much negligible (but that would be more costly).
LK99 isn't necessarily a stand-in for helium cooled superconductors - if all SC were equivalent to any other, YBCO and similar would have been enough to make MRIs significantly cheaper - LN2 is easy and cheap to produce.
Can one know how many people are in that market? When prediction markets where mentioned early during the LK-99 story, I looked a bit around out of interest, which platforms exist, which topics they cover, how many people participate in that markets. Where I could find the number of predictors, it seemed pretty underwhelming - one, ten, fifty, a hundred, I think the highest I ever saw was a bit over a thousand, but even then less than a hundred or so where using real money, the majority was using play money. Did I miss the place where everyone is? Is this to expected because the are so many topics you can bet on? Are the resulting prices still meaningful even with a small number of predictors only?
I wanted to bet 10$ or so, but the two links above both seem to be some sort of cryptocurrency thing. I dunno, isn’t there a way to gamble on the future that isn’t so… shifty?
How did I imply that there are many real money prediction markets, that was exactly my question, did I miss the ones where everyone is or are prediction markets just not that popular and that is why even the big ones do not have a large number of predictors.
There is just one real working prediction market: Polymarket. However, it is currently illegal to use in the US, because of old laws. This can be circumvented with cryptocurrency, but most Americans still won't use such a hack. Which strongly limits the popularity of Polymarket, as US Americans happen to be the people who are most interested in prediction markets.
There are also the prediction ... platforms Metaculus and Manifold, which are legal in the US, since they only use made-up internet points instead of real money. I'm not sure whether this even hurts their accuracy compared to Polymarket though.
If enough people cared, you could probably make the same argument that got sports betting into a place of legality and get at least some subset of prediction markets legalized.
The sportsbook argument was that sports betting involves more than random chance - knowledge of the game, the players, etc. effectively turn it into a matter of skill.
I doubt there are enough interested parties to bother for prediction markets, though.
Magnetic transitions as a function of temperature are not unheard of, and it makes sense for them to depend on external field (they are magnetic after all). Lanthanum cobaltite for example has transition from diamagnet to paramagnet, likely due to change of spin state (see, e.g., [1]). I'm not saying that's what's happening, but transition (if it is there, hastily written papers tend to have subtle inaccuracies) doesn't rule out non-SC diamagnetism
First it shows a temperature graph vs moment, as they heat it it loses the diamagnetism around the temperature LK99 is said to be superconducting.
Second only a superconductor will have net-zero field, which means "stable" levitation. In the video they approach the sample with the magnet and flip it while the piece is mostly "in place". A regular diamagnet generates a external field that "follows" the field applied so it would likely move sideways, that is why to "levitate in place" a diamagnet people normally use a Halbach array.
EDIT: A Halback array is made alternating the poles N-S of the magnet, so that forces of repulsion created by the diamagnet cancel. This is why you will see people using multiple magnets when levitating pyrolytic graphite.
They have quantitative magnetization-versus-temperature data taken using a PPMS (an automated physical property measurement system). It shows strong evidence of some kind of diamagnetic transition at ~ 320K. It seems very likely now that this material has some kind of interesting magnetic property, whether or not it's due to superconductivity.
>we successfully verify and synthesize the LK-99 crystals which can be magnetically levitated with larger levitated angle than Sukbae Lee's sample at room temperature. It is expected to realize the true potential of room temperature, non-contact superconducting magnetic levitation in near future.
Aaaand we’re back!
I’m really trying to remain (reasonably, not ideologically) skeptical but if this is legit this is a huge step towards confirmation.
At this point, even if this doesn’t turn out to be the holy grail this seems like it would still be a very big step/promising avenue for research on the path right?
IANA physicist, so grain of salt etc. but yes, I agree with your assessment - even if not as impressive as we're all hoping, at the least we have a very promising new vein of superconductor research to mine (as it were).
In other words: even the downside here is great, and the upside is...
It still hasn't been a week. Giving a bunch of these teams and one's with no announcements yet an additional year will hopefully lead to some very exciting findings
Korean scientists embody key cultural values: (Jeong) fosters deep bonds and commitment to their work; (In-gan-mi) encourages inherent honesty and sincerity; (Che-Myun) upholds honor, discouraging dishonesty; and Confucianism instills respect, loyalty, and duty. These values shape their dedication to research integrity and professional conduct.
I choose to believe!
It’s a breath of fresh air reading about actual revolutionary science happening.
The deluge of news about non-replicable results, fabricated data, overhyped press releases from both academia and industry had become really depressing. For once after a long time it’s the real deal.
Even if this is not a RT superconductor, it’s now evident that the original authors didn’t cheat and are not crackpots as initially suspected by most.
Agreed. It's felt like so many of the technological marvels have either happened quietly (e.g. the reductions in chip size) or in the past (e.g. all the physics breakthroughs of the 1900s). Like ChatGPT, this seems to have the characteristics of being both accessible and completely novel.
What is interesting is that assuming it all pans out these are all in entirely unrelated fields. That sets the stage for a whole raft of follow on inventions. Similar to how the telephone + basic electromagnetism led to radio, tv, radar, transistors and ultimately to computers small enough to be practical for businesses, the internet, cell phones and so on.
My grandmother was born in a house without running water, no sanitation and no phone. That's just a bit over a century ago. The rate of change on an annual basis isn't all that large, a decade and you'll see big changes, our world can't be compared at all to 120 years ago in terms of luxury, communications, personal energy budget, food, travel options etc. Still, there are large areas of the planet where the last 120 didn't bring any progress and there are those where they actually went backwards, not rarely to our (the western world for me) benefit.
The last 20 are already mindblowing to me, to the point that I am a bit overwhelmed. Just reading to keep up with all of the tech developments is basically impossible today.
In terms of basic tech, other than CRISPR what are you thinking of? Smartphones + internet are important, but are more combinatorial. Early quantum computers are cool, but niche (and even if perfected, seem to have application for breaking PKI). Reusable rockets are great, but not fusion. The standard model is locked in, at least up to LHC energies modulo sensationalist PR.
GPUs have been huge, unlocking so much more compute than was possible with CPUs. Most of the burgeoning AI industry is thanks to that cost decline, which is only getting started.
Every field of science has had breakthroughs in the last decade or two. Even superconductors (check out 'H2S', though it isn't without problems), medicine, genetics, quantum computers I'm not yet all that impressed with but they're too early stage to be really judged, the energy transition is really happening (sub-subject: the price of solar and wind power), semiconductors (every time we think it's over...), GPS (check out how it works under the hood), so much in materials science that I can't begin to keep up, phased arrays, lidar, the insane increase in computational power that you can stick under your desk, battery tech (one more breakthrough there and we will see all kinds of effects on other fields as well), solid state lasers the size of grains of sand, fiber optic transmission rates, the James Webb (ok, 'old tech' by now, but that's one impressive thing they pulled off there, especially the delta between the hot and the cold side of it) and on and on.
As for the future:
Fusion would be huge, but I'm not all that hopeful for cost efficiency there once you get to net power out but I'm not going to talk down the people that are doing the work and the research. And yes, the basic physics seems to be pretty stagnant, we're really waiting for a unification of the two major fields there but even if we do get that unification it may not lead to new practical tech, it could simply nail things down once and for all without moving the needle in terms of costs, speed or new materials science. It may have some implications for various computer models used in those fields and it probably would have impact on astronomy.
Yeah, recently I've remembered my computer from 1995 had about 1GB HDD. Now I can much more cheaply buy a SSD which will transfer 7GB/s. Mind boggling.
I paid 2500 $ for a 500 MB harddrive and $750 for 64 K RAM at some point. To me the world we live in is utter science fiction, and yet, every morning I seem to wake up and it is all still there.
Im posting this reply from my mainstream smartphone: a pocket supercomputer with a 4K 60Hz HDR video camera. I’m chock full of designer vaccines and can watch a catalog of almost all the movies ever made on demand tonight. I listened to an podcast in my EV on the way to work. And SpaceX probably launched 60 satellites this week on the 14th flight of a rocket that flew home afterwards.
Things have been moving along.
edit: comments are quibbling about the fraction of all movies ever I can see on a paid streaming service. This is like complaining about that the meals and elbow room are not wonderful on a $400 flight from LA to London. It's a goddam miracle and you're still grumbling. Please tell me now how your $12/mo Spotify account doesn't have the June 1972 Grateful Dead New Jersey show your mom was at, and is thus near worthless. I spent $12 in 1980s money on single album in my youth.
Let me amend my grossly hyperbolic statement and say I could stream on demand more movies than I could ever watch even if I did nothing else the rest of my life, including many but not all of the good ones. Now the statement is strictly true, but did this make my contribution better?
I feel we will eventually outpace our own means of destruction. The next big step is getting self-sustaining colonies off Earth, which will do wonders for our ability to survive as a species. The biggest threat is perhaps nuclear weapons and climate change, in my opinion.
I actually feel like the biggest threat we face is a collapse of world order and another world war, even conventional coupled with a degradation of humanism. These lead to a global decay of basically everything, including our ability to outpace our own means of destruction and an entire inability to address climate change. The global environment becoming increasing toxic to our age’s life, including humans is I think ultimately the end of our line.
>can watch a catalog of almost all the movies ever made on demand tonight.
You must have one hell of a different streaming services experience from that of most people today if you can pull this off without engaging in a fair bit of torrenting and general piracy.
Yeah, regular consumer streaming might cover "movies still popular enough but not so new that they're only in theaters." However "all the movies ever made" is a significantly higher bar.
No you just decide what movie you want to watch and pay $4 to rent it on demand. Very common experience available to anyone with a smart TV or connected streaming device.
Important correction… the catalog of movies is likely significantly smaller than all the movies ever made… the ongoing removal of new movies for business reasons and the market fragmentation mean that reduced profits are leading to corner cutting with respect to the size of stream catalogs, licenses cost money… pirating via torrents while larger also has diminishing returns as you step outside the mainstream movies, unless your lucky and find someone diligently sharing bandwidth to keep content online happens to share an interest in that niche… we’re rapidly losing access to an entire generation of analog only media as people throw source material into the trash and corporate stewardship of original recordings slowly fails one papercut at a time for the decades it will take for work to enter the public domain and be properly archived by the people trying to hold onto all of this.
We could have maglev trains and superconducting supercomputers and copyright will still be deleting our culture to “save money” for corporate copyright owners to increase their profit margins.
I pay a commercial service for pirated content and have access to over 50,000 movies alone. Then there are tens of thousands of tv shows. I can request shows. It gives me access to all major streaming services content. Anything I have ever searched for is there. Shows from around the world and all around feels like unlimited content. Cheaper then Netflix and I definitely feel I am getting great returns for my money. One day we will look up to pirates for saving our culture.
It is a plex share I don’t really want to draw attention to the company sharing so don’t want to share the site directly but just go to reddit and search for plex share and start looking. Lots of different ones some paid some free. Some tailored to anime some tailored to other genre.
It took a few minutes sleuthing to validate that my gut reaction of "but there's way more than 50000 movies" was right ... But thanks to UNESCO statistics (http://data.uis.unesco.org/) I've got the sad truth.
Your 50,000 movies is a lot but its not even half of the movies made since 1995 that UNESCO were able to reliably cite data for. I can't deep link to the exact spreadsheet of data but it's under the culture data section and its feature film statistics. The total number of feature films (which will exclude some things like short films and other stuff based on various data processing considerations) produced around the world between 1995 and 2017 is at least (because there are likely more movies shot than produced) 107,432.
Assuming your "over 50,000" is the usually marketing line and being generous and assuming its somewhere between 50,000 and 55,000 movies, then if true that's approximately half the "feature films" produced between 1995 and 2017...
A a sensible lower bound extrapolation based on the data is in the range of half a million feature films (again recognising this data is likely excluding things we would on average collectively call a movie), making your service closer to 10%... or possibly even lower...
Over 50,000 movies feels like a lot until you dig into how much media we make as a species. That's just feature films, likely only ones with a theatrical release (I don't think I can reliably translate a lot of the source documents even if I wanted to validate the source data criteria myself, hence I'm using the weasel word "likely"), meaning its excluding a LOT of film/movies, and its only for 1995 to 2017, covering an era where the "amateur film" scene was rapidly exploding due to falling costs of the technology behind recording, editing, and distribution a "movie"...
None of this is to tear down the effort of hard working preservationists... both legal and illegal. I agree with the archivists I've had conversations with, whose collective opinion can be summed up quite simply. "Any copy is better than no copy."
The last 10 (20?) years I noticed a notable shift in public consciousness about scientific progress and that we as a species are moving in an upward trajectory towards a brighter feature.
One of my favorite movies of all time is “Contact” mainly because of how damn _hopeful_ it portrays humanity. I want to live in that world, not the gloom and doom “we’re ruining everything around us” that is so often shown in recent media.
And the whole thing is perplexing to me because as you’ve put it, we _are_ living in the future! There is soo many great things happening around us, but people seem not to notice - not just the technological things you’ve mentioned - but societal too.
Like because of recent developments in economy theory, the world altering global shut down due to corona did not end with a great depression like event for the whole world, and that alone to me is simply a miracle.
Human longevity studies have now reproducibly able to reverse aging _in primates_ - human trials starting this year!
Feminism has become all but mainstream, unlocking like 50% more of human ingenuity.
Urbanism studies have finally popularized environments where people can live happily and sustainably their entire lives, while there have always existed places in the world that are “nice” to live in one way or another, we’re kinda getting the science down why, and starting to popularize it a little (strongtowns).
Its just a crazy good time to be alive, there are countless problems all around us but they are actually getting solved at least somewhere, instead of banging our collective heads against the wall, one can just look for how it has been successful handled somewhere else and try to replicate!
You are just repeating the same incredibly boring 'Tesla fanboy' things that Joe Rogan likes to say every now and then to create the illusion he's smart, up to date and edgy, which is the exact reason you don't sound smart at all.
For me from how the saga of 1st paper and 2nd paper started I had a feeling that something really unique has been found and the drama and politics is because of trying to claim the glory of it not because it was fake.
You know, most of that stuff you hear about are bad takes on science. Science has moved into the realm of trying to understand complex systems with a lot of noise and with unknown variables. There will be a lot of misses; but that is how sausage gets made.
Exactly, it's like sifting a mountain of ore looking for diamonds. The original Korean team has essentially been doing a slightly guided brute force search in a domain that they thought was promising doing 100's or even 1000's of experiments. It's a clever approach: you have a real problem because the parameter space is so large but if you get 'close enough' to pick up an anomaly that might help you home in on something that is really promising. I'd love to see their notebooks and everything they tried. This is pretty much how we first got electric light: endless failures and then one success.
Well steady on there. The problem people have with bad science is not that there are misses, it's that there's no way for them to reliable decide when they've had a hit and so they end up inventing fraudulent pseudo-science. What's happening with LK-99 is science as people tend to imagine it working. Hypothesis -> experimentation -> replication -> theory.
But that sort of science seems to be quite rare. Most science people are exposed in their daily lives is of the Francesca Gino variety, and that's not merely "a lot of noise with unknown variables", that's "nobody will care if we don't do real science so let's not bother".
Why are folks trying to prove that this material is a superconductor in roundabout ways, like levitation, dimagnetism, etc? What is the reason they don't just test to see if electrical current flows without resistance? Surely there is something I am missing here.
They do both. But measuring the resistance of something that is that small is super hard because it will be close to zero anyway even if it isn't superconducting. So a larger sample would give much more conclusive results.
I have heard people much more knowledgeable than me say that measuring true zero resistance is actually quite difficult and takes some degree of specialized equipment, especially with such small samples. That may be part of it.
Just getting the probes to connect reliably is tricky. depending on how large the superconducting features are it may be anywhere from just difficult to next to impossible to do accurately (for instance, if the size of the superconducting features is smaller than the probe size).
The difference now is that we're seeing a premature preprint being replicated in real time.
Even in that paper, the authors note: "The way the samples have been prepared seems
to be of crucial importance: Michel et al. [21] obtained a single-phase perovskite by mixing the oxides
of La and Cu and BaCOa in an appropriate ratio
and subsequent annealing at 1,000 ~ in air. We also
applied this annealing condition to one of our samples, obtained by the decomposition of the corresponding oxalates, and found no superconductivity." And you can see that in their resistivity/temperature graph of samples prepared using different protocols.
Considering how that preprint has sparked interest in other research institutions and multiplied the resources allocated to the problem, I would say this publication was not premature, it's most other research results that are late.
The paper was leaked early. The team wanted more time to get more attempts at producing it and improving their yield. The paper also wasn't generally up to their writing standards. It's essentially an early draft that was leaked.
Right, if our best regular conductors (used in your ohmmeter) are ~10^-8 and superconductivity is (by convention) less than 10^-11, one can see right away the simple regular methods won’t work and some cleverness is needed.
> superconductivity is (by convention) less than 10^-11,
Ah, so you're saying that superconductivity is not actual zero resistance, but something close to it, and in fact only a factor of 1000x less resistive than the best conductor?
If that is so, this is something that I had previously thought would make a lot more sense to me.
But in that case it's not intuitive to me how SMES is possible with a 0% discharge rate. Shouldn't a significant fraction of the electrons looping around the coils be lost after many loops? (I know very little about electricity, as you can probably tell, never mind superconductors).
The conductors of your ohmmeter are not that important, though. You can work around that by using four-terminal sensing, and you can of course also calibrate your probes by directly touching them together. Even if your ohmmeter conductors have a resistance of several ohm, you could still get an accurate measurement if your tool has a high enough resolution.
A bigger issue is going to be sample size. A 1mm-diameter 1mm-long rod of silver has a resistance of about 20 μΩ (or 2e-5) at room temperature. That's already getting tricky to measure with lab-grade equipment without pushing insane currents through it, let alone anything even smaller. If you want to measure a 1m-diameter 1m-long silver rod (which would be 0.02μΩ or 2e-8) you could just push a few thousand amps through it and reliably measure that using a household multimeter in the mV range - but do that with a small sample and it'll evaporate.
> Even if your ohmmeter conductors have a resistance of several ohm, you could still get an accurate measurement if your tool has a high enough resolution.
Not that low in range though, you will end up seeing thermal noise that dwarfs your measurement.
> a badly attached probe could also result in zero resistance for example
No, a badly attached probe would usually show a larger resistance, not a
smaller one. That's actually the easiest error to make, making improper contact with the sample. The resistance is measured indirectly using a reference
current. So you'd measure a higher resistance or a break rather than
zero if a probe were not attached correctly (unless the two voltage
probes are touching but that would normally speaking be spotted).
The diamagnetism is simply easier to verify using an impure or small sample.
It's apparently hard to measure zero vs extremely low resistance with the two probe setup you are imagining (I guess because the probes and wires aren't superconducting, so most of the resistance in the circuit is not in the sample). The graphs I have seen are all made with a four probe setup [1], where a constant current is run through the outer probe pair and the voltage across the inner pair is measured. If the inner probes have contact issues, the voltage (and inferred resistance) drops, potentially to zero.
That’s what he said. You inject a known current and measure the voltage drop across the item you want to measure the resistance of, and then use ohms law
I sort of don’t get this either. If your testing equipment is introducing resistance can you not “tare” or calibrate your measurements by measuring the equipments current flow in a direct circuit between probes to determine its base resistance then introduce your sample and measure the difference? The resistance in a serial circuit is additive, no?
The parasitic resistance will be orders of magnitude larger than your sample resistance, any detector capable of detecting the sample resistance would be completely swamped out by it.
They are measuring voltage, not resistance (the resistance is computed). It's impossible to measure resistance without current and some voltage across the resistance, and while the parasitic effects are small the resistance we're talking about (and hence the voltage across that resistance) is so small that second order effects introduced by the probe wires can have a real effect, for instance if the probe wires have a higher resistance that makes them more susceptible to electric fields, which in turn would show up as a voltage. So this is anything but trivial.
If you pick your reference current properly this effect should be extremely small. It will have a little bit of effect but nothing that you should normally have to worry about.
In a four probe setup you are measuring voltage, not resistance. But you are right that the measurement can still influence the results when the voltages measured are tiny.
The way to think of this is simple: you can't measure anything without subtle joining the circuitry that you are measuring and that has an effect on the properties of the circuit as a whole for which you have to compensate. In this case: the voltage measurement is going to consume a tiny bit of power and that is due to the resistance of the measurement apparatus even if it isn't in the main current path but a secondary one. But the people that do these kinds of measurements tend to be well aware of this and will pick their measurement gear and reference current to minimize the chances of that happening.
That's right. The standard way to measure resistance without being sensitive to contact resistance is called the four-terminal method, see (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-terminal_sensing). You drive a current using two outer wires, but then detect the voltage across the sample using a different pair of wires. You'll measure zero voltage if it's superconducting, since V=IR. Or if one of the probe wires became detached.
The first LK-99 paper used this method to claim zero resistivity, but people complained that if the inner probes lost contact, that would also be consistent with their data. This criticism doesn't totally make sense to me, since the apparent superconductivity came and went in the expected way as they changed an external magnetic field. I don't understand how a loose terminal could mimic that figure (I think it was in figure 1).
It also doesn’t make sense to me because you would expect they didn’t just say “omg super conductivity!” on their first measurement and presumably measured more than once, verified connections, and generally assumed scrutiny would be high on any claim and (from what I’ve read of the history so far) the reason it’s from 1999 and published now is they didn’t believe it was real to begin with but believed it was a measurement mistake. This doesn’t mean others should be credulous and replication is crucial. But it seems to beggar reality to assume they made such an amateur mistake. I would assume outright fraud first.
One case in which you can see something similar to SC transition is percolation, where the sample is mix of regular metal and insulator, and you (accidentally) connect current contacts to metal but voltage probes to insulator [1]
You drive current through the outer probes. The inner probes measure voltage and are not driven. When measuring non-zero resistance, you can vary the driving current to confirm the voltage you measure also varies linearly (ex thermal effects, capacitance of the material etc.). When measuring zero resistance, you can't distinguish vs a voltage probe error.
With the current fabrication process, they're only getting a chunk with LK-99 particles sprinkled in. Since nobody yet knows how to fabricate a pure chunk of LK-99, it'll be hard to measure the true resistance of LK-99.
How do you explain the almost three orders of magnitude drop in resistance in Fig. 6d in one of the original articles ( https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.12037.pdf ) with a few LK-99 particles sprinkled here an there? There must be a current path along which more than 99.8% of the material is in the supposed superconducting state. So the particles almost touch but not quite yet?
I think the more likely explanation is that the particles do touch each other but the interface is not superconductive. In other words, it is a polycrystalline material, and most of it is LK-99, but the grain boundaries are not a very good conductor. In conventional superconductors grain boundaries don't disrupt superconductivity because they are 3D superconductors, but in this allegedly 1D superconductor the superconducting channels in most cases don't meet at the grain boundaries, so the current has to overcome the resistance of some material that is almost an insulator.
If that is the case it will be difficult to produce a material that is macroscopically superconducting. But I hope researchers will be able to make single crystals that are large enough for resistance measurements so that finally it can be determined if this material is a superconductor or not. For practical uses the best result that can be achieved with this material may be a metal-LK-99 composite where the LK-99 particles lower the resistivity of the metal by 50-90%.
I believe that with the synthesis method proposed by the Korean team, i.e. by the chemical reaction between a certain kind of lead sulfate with copper phosphide, the chances of progress are slim.
The Korean team appears to have been stuck for several years by the lack of reproducibility of this synthesis method. While it was a great discovery that has shown that this material must have some very interesting properties, perhaps even superconductivity at ambient temperature and pressure, in order to be able to measure its properties and be able to evaluate the possible practical applications, a much more precise method for enforcing the desired crystal structure is required, than mixing powders and baking them into a ceramic.
Perhaps such a method for producing samples with deterministic properties would be to develop first a method to grow monocrystals of the special kind of lead phosphate that forms the base crystal structure, maybe by drawing the crystals from melt.
Once monocrystals of this kind of lead phosphate are available, they could be doped with copper, e.g. by ion implantation. By controlling and varying the parameters of the process, e.g. the angle of incidence and the velocity of the ions and the thermal profile used for annealing, it is likely that reproducible samples can be produced, where the copper ions substitute lead in the useful places and not in the others.
By this method it would be possible to produce only thin layers of LK-99, but that should be enough to enable the characterization of the material.
Moreover, because LK-99 is very fragile, it is unlikely that it could be used to make cables or coils. Practical uses where LK-99 would be deposited as thin films are much more likely.
As an alternative to ion implantation, which might be able to produce thicker layers, perhaps once monocrystals of the base lead phosphate are available it may be possible to develop some method of chemical vapor deposition, to grow epitaxially a layer of LK-99 over the base crystal, but with such a method it is less obvious if there is any way to control which lead atoms are substituted, though this may depend on the orientation of the base crystal.
Drawing from melt to achieve a consistent crystal orientation was my first thought as well.
Looking at the Griffin paper, the Pb(2) site is described as being 1.08eV 'more energetically favorable'. I am having trouble understanding what this means.
Years back I did MOCVD semiconductor fabrication research, I never reached a mastery of it but I am still trying to leverage that understanding here.
During growth, adatoms that incorporate into proper crystal lattice locations enter a lower energy state compared to those in imperfect locations. The energy state is lower in the sense that it requires more energy to remove them from that location. Hence careful control of temperature allows you to selectively favor incorporation into these low energy locations e.g. choose a temperature high enough to remove adatoms from 'imperfect' locations but low enough to not remove them from 'perfect' (low energy) locations.
So when the author says 'energetically favorable' am I to understand this means the Pb(2) location represents a lower energy state (i.e. more difficult to remove Cu from this location) or the opposite? Or something else entirely?
>Most likely, the material LK99 as reported in [1-3] is a heterophase structure, with co-existent non-superconducting constituents. This may yield superconducting droplets surrounded by nonsuperconducting material...
>In fact, I find that Cu on this Pb(2) is 1.08 eV more energetically favorable than Cu on the Pb(1) site, suggesting possible difficulties in robustly obtaining Cu substituted on the Pb(1) site.
The paper from Dr. Griffin at LBNL suggests copper atoms have to be placed in a specific (but less likely) position in the molecule to result in the desired flat band characteristic. Also, the original authors and the labs who were able to replicate LK-99 are reporting they had to make multiple batches to even find a tiny piece that shows levitation. This suggests that you just have to be very lucky to produce a sample with high enough concentration of LK-99 to observe levitation.
If we can somehow confirm that LK-99 is truly a room temperature superconductor, billions of dollars of R&D fund will pour in to improve the fabrication process. When the first transistor was invented, people probably weren't imagining that we'll be mass producing them in nanometer scale in the future. Or maybe LK-99 will be stuck in a lab like graphene. Who knows?
The good news is that we should know within a few weeks if rock surgery is effective. If that works they can increase the purity and sample size without needing to find a new creation process
There are a ton of suggestions floating around already on how the efficiency could be improved and some of those are very clever and involve using the superconducting properties of the individual grains to help sort them out from the bulk material.
From a purely scientific angle, so presumably less amenable to mass production, why doesn't anyone use FT-ICR mass spectrometers to assemble say a unit cell?
There is a good classic primer on FT-ICR, mostly focused on analysis (mass spectrometry) but also mentioning activation energies for reactions and measurement of kinetics etc.
If you dunk a bunch of chemicals (for simplicity think wet chemistry) in a vial, all reactions and side reactions are simultaneously occuring, so one has little control over what happens on an atomic scale.
FT-ICR can be used to observe the state AND to manipulate the state. Its like having a compact particle collider, but instead of the high (TeV) energy in CERN etc. its just chemical energy levels.
It happens in high vacuum, so low densities of species, hence not amenable to mass production.
But the instrument is both eyes and hands: one can identify the frequencies corresponding to each ionized molecule, and selectively energize or de-energize specific species to encourage or prevent main and competing reactions, by pumping or damping specific frequencies.
One may build up a molecule in elementary steps and eject finished molecules. Those steps can occur at the same time in the same vessel. Its like having a miniature digitally controlled chemical plant, without having to redo all the pipework if you decide to use a different pathway here or there.
My understanding is that synthesis of the exactly right crystal structure is very hard (for every 10 lead atoms, 1 - the exact right one - needs to be substituted with copper), so the samples are small and inhomogeneous. As a result measuring resistivity won't be illuminating until large amounts of perfect material can be produced.
It's a limitation of the most basic approach to the problem (measuring resistance), but not a limitation of every approach (such as measuring current).
You can inject a current into a superconducting coil and take measurements of the resultant magnetic field as the current circles for an indefinite period of time. I'm not able to see how this approach analogizes to water in a cup.
I don't think that works as advertised: Any measurement of the current will likely produce a magnetic field itself -- for example from the current in a Hall probe. This current will induct a small, opposite current into the superconducting coil. So the current will go down.
And even if not, what you would need is to measure the change of the field over time. This has finite resolution, so you can't distinguish no resistance from very very small resistance.
There are several tests that have been ongoing over decades doing exactly this. The small loss of current during measurement occurs, but you only engage with the field intermittently, and you can calculate approximately what the loss should be.
Yes it could be some tiny resistance, but the same issue occurs with the resolution/accuracy of the voltage or current measurement you would make.
Exactly my point. You cannot measure that the resistance is exactly zero, you can "only" give an upper bound. The upper bound depends on your approach, but no approach can give you a zero upper bound.
Would one method (assuming a pure sample) be to pass a high current through it and measure if it heats up? I know nothing about this, but that would be my first guess.
Because (like someone explained very well in another HW notice) you can't measure zero ohms. Any device to measure resistance ALWAYS would have a minimal value that can measure. It's far more easy to detect superconductivity using the weird things that does all superconductors in presence of magnetic fields (ie, levitation).
Without being intentionally snarky, the same logic applies to measuring current and voltage. What is observed is an effect of zero resistance, not zero resistance itself (whatever that would mean).
The korean guy say this is a 1d superconductor (as opposed to 2d sheet or 3d, which means you would need a single line of superconducting molecules from end to end. Its likely why it doesn't float all the way as only parts of it has these and scattered all over the chunk of solid.
However, if they perfect 1d production, they can layer in a bunch of them to create a quasi 2d or 3d superconductor.
There have been quite a few papers about LK-99, but the only thing I want to see is whether we observer sudden drop of resistance to zero below the critical temperature that is well above the room temperature at ambient pressure or not. So far, I haven't seen one.
That's not a trivial measurement with a small sample.
Typically you measure resistance that small like this:
+<-------sample------>-
---------p p--------
The + and - leads send a reference current (using something called a 'current source[1]', a specialist supply that cranks the voltage up and down to maintain a steady current, within some arbitrary range, usually from a few mV to 10's or even 100's of volts) that you pick (not so low that you won't get a voltage, not so high that you exceed the expected maximum current for the cross section that you are measuring)
down the two leads to the sample and then you measure the
voltage across the two points 'p' using the other two
leads. This is similar to using a shunt for measuring a
current, only now you are interested in the resistance of
'sample'. It also elegantly rules out accidentally measuring the resistance of the probe wires and has the added advantage that you can measure the voltage almost without drawing a current (though at such low resistance you have to take great care to ensure that your measurement doesn't consume a disproportionally large chunk of the reference current). If 'sample' is a nice fat chunk of material you
can expect an accurate result because it will be easy to attach to in a reliable way, you can use a lot
of current and the sample is large enough to have a resistance
high enough that the voltage you are measuring is well outside
of the noise. But for a small sample the resistance is almost
always going to be very small and the difference between a few
nanovolts and zero are hard to distinguish. So that's why
you won't be seeing any conclusive measurements of the real
resistance (or zero) until larger samples can be made, long
enough to show a sizeable voltage drop or none at all.
This can take a while. With the current fabrication process, they're only getting a chunk with LK-99 particles sprinkled in. Since nobody yet knows how to fabricate a pure chunk of LK-99, it'll be hard to measure the true resistance of LK-99.
I hope Smith charts become less required learning. When I was in school, I could not wrap my head around them. I should look at them against. (Yes, of course you’d still need to account for traditional loads)
Reading further below, I'm actually amazed by all the theoretical studies that have already been done from first principles (all apparently supporting the possibility of superconductivity). That's a pretty fast pace for science!
Magnus Carlson said that if you tell him there’s a winning move on a chess board he could find it very quickly, because his focus becomes extremely narrow.
I wonder if something similar is happening here. Since the scope was defined as LK-99, it becomes a narrow query instead of a broad one.
This is not just telling someone there's a winning move. It's telling them that X is a winning move and they just have to verify that X is indeed one. Many, many problems are such that it's difficult to find a solution but easy to verify one.
I know nothing about this but I stay curious. Just like Navier-Stokes equations can be proved with numerical approximations, can this be verified even if we never solve it?
I'm not too familiar with this space. Could someone explain how big of an impact to the world this discovery is? What does the future of this technology look like over the next 5 years?
Superconductors have applications in computers, MRIs, maglev trains, and power transmission to name a few.
Superconduction at room temp would all for less current consumption due to resistance inside the metal layer for chips, letting them run cooler and faster.
MRIs use massive, supercooled magnets. If you can do the same at room temp, you could potentially have a portable or much smaller and more efficient MRI.
If you can levitate an object, you can use a lot less power running electromagnets to run things like maglev trains.
If you have power lines that have zero resistance, you can reduce wasted energy. Power lines will actually sag under heavy load due to heat and cause outages or forest fires, this could be avoided.
Anything that uses an electric motor can use a smaller more efficient motor, id expect big changes in e.g. electric cars, but also probably things like robotic actuators getting smaller and more efficient.
Also there are superconductor based batteries that are very efficient, would would become a thing, likely revolutionising batteries.
I think with a solid verification of superconductivity at room temperature, we probably don't see anything in 5 years, just because the production is so hit or miss. But I do think we see massive investment and research on this line of materials and different production techniques. Going from Science to Engineering and making this a thing you have plant making. I think its a 10+ year thing but its big.
Not an expert in the area, but being passingly familiar with other major advancements and the timelines it's taken them to move from discovery to day to day use.
Let's say we got a massive wave of independent replication of superconductivity tomorrow - at least enough to convince Big Money to move in, and it all ends up being For Real.
The next steps are figuring out the other properties of the material, with a big one being 'how ductile is it', how to produce it in large enough quantities to be useful, if the underlying mechanisms here can be applied to other compositions that allow us to make RTAPS with better properties, etc.
Depending on those results determines the range of applications it is suitable for out of the box, how much we can make at what cost, etc. We've got minimal details to go on there. It's a ceramic, so it's probably not super ductile, but we have some experience in making those be useful via making them into a tape, a la YBCO. Can we do the same thing here? Who knows!
There's a timeline where all of these questions end up favorable and 10 years from now we see RTAPS in all sorts of day to day applications - we might find out that with one small trick we end up with big pure samples of LK99 with easy production methods. There's a world where all these answers aren't favorable, and it takes 10 years for it to show up in specialized applications (which are still huge for science and humanity!), and trickles bit by bit to more use cases over another few decades.
I would guess that a decade-ish is really the earliest window for significant impact to humanity - we're probably going to spend the next year at minimum figuring out what all the deal is with LK99, and then it'll take a few years to even really start making cool experimental stuff in labs, and then you have to actually productize things using it, etc.
So, these folks replicated the material and it does highly unusual things, is that right ? It had seemed the fabrication process was still very dodgy and unreliable, this team got it to work independently?
My layman understanding is that this paper states the team replicated LK-99, and confirmed that it has a property of a super-conductor - this particular type of magnetic levitation.
i wonder if this will become the next version of hopium, where we struggle to refine a material that can actually be used in a wide enough temperature range to operate outside.
The initial paper claimed superconductivity up until 400 K (127 °C or 260 °F), so I think if that's the case it would be able to withstand outdoor conditions just fine
Indeed, operating temperature seems to me less of a concern.
Considering how difficult it‘s been to produce LK-99 so far, some skepticism on being able to manufacture the material in mass is warranted, I think.
Still, exciting! I’m hopeful :)
Considering how people are making it at all, within days, with demonstrably poor instructions, seems to suggest manufacturing in mass has massive hope, once some time is given for refining the process.
Also consider just how many people will be working on this with nation-state budgets. It has such general applications that nearly every field tangentially connected to electricity or magnetism would be interested.
It wouldn't be like the investment in something that would be similarly revolutionary but with a less certain end game like fusion.
On a completely different front, let's say the paper completely checks out and they have discovered this miracle. How strong are the patent protections on materials science?
For example, if someone could replicate the effect with lead + gold, would that be considered a novel material which would not be subject to licensing? Is it the material itself or the method of production?
I'm sure it depends on jurisdiction, but in the US, you can't patent a material, only a method to make it.
If I recall correctly, their patent for method covered a wide range of constituent elements, but left off gold. I would feel pretty bad for them if they genuinely discovered an RTP superconductor but that omission prevents them from becoming billionaires.
But more likely the issue is that their current method has lots of room for improvement and someone else finds one that is substantially better.
ETA: apparently wrong, can patent composition of very novel materials.
If someone else is wrong and you know more, it would be great to share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn. But please don't post unsubstantive putdowns—they just make everything worse.
I hear you - but there are two problems with that argument.
(1) the internet is, to a first approximation, wrong about everything - so while posting "Wrong" tells us that you disagree with the GP, it doesn't tell us anything about who's actually right;
(2) shallow dismissals like "Wrong" have a degrading influence on the threads - they don't just encourage others to post more of the same, but worse. Basically, either your comments are contributing to improving the discussion culture or they're worsening it - there isn't really any level ground.
You can overcome both (1) and (2) by respectfully and substantively explaining why the other commenter is wrong. Then we all can learn something. Maybe (hopefully) even the other commenter can learn something.
If you don't want to do that or don't have time, it's better to post nothing than to just post "Wrong". That way you don't have a negative impact a la (2), and per (1), the internet is wrong about everything anyway, so you're basically just leaving things the way you found them.
Some indication of where to go for further information is preferable to none.
Consider that HN has ~5 million MAU and that a comment without clarity is confounding many people. Writing and communications generally is a service to the reader not the author.
If you don't have time to look up the precise source, a note along the lines of "I don't have time to find the direct link ..." or "I recall but cannot source ..." would help, along with where generally is the best direction to start looking.
Returning to that comment later to clarify/expand is also useful.
That's kind of my thinking - there is almost no chance they stumbled upon nirvana + did it in the best or most efficient way. There must be many possible optimizations to the chemical structure + fabrication techniques.
Is it possible that the inventors do not receive a dime of royalties?
I don't want to caveat a bunch of stuff with "IANAL" but I am not.
However, they have told me what I interpreted to mean that if someone improves it but uses it then they need to license the underlying patent. That just makes sense, it's required in order to implement their concept.
And in reverse the original company can keep doing whatever they want as long as it isn't covered by the referencing patent. Makes sense to me there too, if they come up with some other clever way to make it good enough more power to them. There's no reason for them to pay some other people who patented something they don't use.
You can get a composition of matter patent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_of_matter) for something shockingly novel, and this might be. It's super hard to find anything that would qualify, but I've been awarded them before for materials science research.
You can write stuff down generally enough that it's hard to make small changes and get around it. I did a lot of "1-10%" stuff in the claims.
Oh, that's weird. They missed all the other noble metals besides silver too. No platinum, rhodium... those things have really really interesting orbital structures, I'm surprised they're worth leaving out of something so tricky when it might be important. Strange.
The only thing I can think of is that they did it and know that those noble metals don't work very well, and so they're getting everyone else to follow a wild goose chase down a very expensive rabbit hole while they already have a better approach.
... but the tech doesn't look that developed. Very strange.
It could be that they found something incredible by chance and they’re at the limits of their personal capability to further understand and refine. The fact that they’ve known about this for over 20 years suggests maybe. It’s not a bad thing if they are, they’ve already taken one of the biggest leaps. New teams with fresh eyes and varied backgrounds will look at the problem space and undoubtedly see room for refinement.
Agreed, that's what makes the omission odd. Normally you'd expect them to list any candidate that they have any possible reason to think might be relevant, especially if they aren't entirely sure what is going on.
Is that clearer what I mean? I think the only reason to exclude those things is if they were super confident they weren't a good idea for some reason we don't know. Or they just... forgot? That would just be very surprising.
I'm no patent lawyer, but there is literally a US patent-office category covering "material" for exactly this kind of invention. Section 505 - "Superconductor Technology: Apparatus, Material, Process".
> This is the generic class for subject matter involving (a) superconductor technology above 30 K and (b) Art collections involving superconductor technology. Apparatus, devices, materials, and processes involving such technology are included herein.
I have been SWE for 30 years. My youngest is off to college and I immediately enrolled in a masters program, apparently because I want to understand QFT which no amount of my own reading without doing much homework has enabled.
It means "art" in the broad sense of "prior art" (e.g. a creative endeavor), not art in the sense of MoMA or the Louvre. Though both kinds of art are beautiful in their way.
Maybe success in life and science isn't about becoming a billionaire?
Even so - if this works out, their prizes and paid speaking gigs will cover a very comfortable life if that's what they want. I'm not sure why they should be entitled to more than that.
Hey Jacques, It's been fun watching your comments on this, you're very knowledgable. :) I had a question, I see some "we made a totally perfect/pure LK-99 it didn't work" - is pure/perfect what they should be going for, to me perfect/pure != correct, however I knew literally nothing about this subject till this week so I have no idea what I'm talking about. Thank you.
I really couldn't tell you what they should be doing, but I'd love for the original samples to be tested by another lab. That seems to me the easiest way to verify the original claims and reduces the uncertainty introduced by the lack of good process documentation and the chance that even the original researches do not quite know how they did what they did, assuming it is all true. The fact that that hasn't happened yet is the biggest source of my continued skepticism, at the same time my optimism is powered by the partial results of the other labs. It's a very strange combination of data, not unlike other things in the past that did not pan out but only time will tell which way it will all resolve.
I think a Nobel is pretty much guaranteed at this point.
They'll make a ton of money either ways. Maybe not billionaire level, but they'll be venerated wherever they go, will be granted countless prizes, will sit on the boards of important companies, and have their pick of academic jobs - all of it entirely deserved, of course.
I hope they're as weak as possible. The worst possible outcome of a room temp superconductor being discovered is stifling innovation to make money off it
I'm generally anti-patent, but if there were any valid case for patents, this is it. Long, hard labor to discover something entirely new that has massive uses for society.
I'd rest my hopes on them not being dicks about it, not on them not getting benefit from it.
Why do people ask for raises though? It is somewhat rewarded, but some people don't work long and hard and still have more money. Those working long and hard, having a big useable result want to be rewarded a little more.
Aren't these results mostly luck driven though? Lee and Kim were lucky to go to that university in Korea, lucky that their professor researched superconductor theory, and lucky that the professor's theory was correct.
At the same time, other researchers around the world weren't so lucky.
But because we don't know what's going to pan out without trying it out, the other researchers are just as integral to the process of discovery.
Is it fair to reward Lee and Kim for their luck, and let everyone else get screwed? Wouldn't it be more fair to make sure everyone is appropriately compensated to begin with?
> Wouldn't it be more fair to make sure everyone is appropriately compensated to begin with?
Yeah, it would be the perfect solution. Problem is how to agree on that, currently we have a market telling everyone what their "appropriate" compensation is.
I honestly can't comprehend how anyone wound think having a monopoly on a material is valid. They will make money without being the cartel of the superconducting sector.
Patent have reasonable terms. They will have a 20 year head start and then everyone will be competing with them. It's something that will be free in the same lifetime as the researchers, most likely. It's not abusive like current copyright that locks ideas for two generations.
Just to be clear: you're arguing that it's actually a good thing to deliberately slow down application of a revolutionary technology, so that people can make money?
yes, the time frame is limited enough that people can have an incentive to innovate, without being brutally oppressing. we're not locking civilization into the stone age for multiple generations while coros become filthy rich, it's just 20 years and then it's free game for everyone.
now, if it were to death + 75 years, or whatever inane number is copyright today, you'd hear a different story from me. but it is not.
Do you think that having a monopoly on some invention will prevent widespread usage of that invention? Like, "yeah, we invented fully clean carbonless way of making energy for 1% of current prices, but no one will have it"? Currently it just means that the creator of widely usable technology will have some percentage of money for others using his invention instead of others making all the money from his invention while he has a pat on the back.
Yes, I do think that, because that is literally what has happened before.
Companies price their offerings so that the global north will buy it, and the global south will have to pay proportionately extortionate amounts, with no relation whatsoever to the cost of production or research.
Yes, because this is partly why everyone keeps working so hard to produce a revolutionary technology. This is also the way it works with drugs, we have just been through a pandemic and a lot of people made a ton of money over their inventions, rightly so.
The pandemic where governments in the global south were fleeced by pharma companies, while the global north enforced patents and let millions of people die? Which, by the way, is still happening in a lot of poor countries that just don't have the money to afford the vaccines.
Not to mention the fact that the vaccines were developed with public money.
Yeah, the pandemic where rich countries had developed economies capable of producing such vaccines, which they then donated massively to poorer countries [1] or sold to other countries at reduced price. If these companies did not exist, or if they had no profit motive, no one would have had vaccines.
It wouldn't necessarily have to be a monopoly. There's such a thing as compulsory licensing and statutory licensing. That is, government(s) could decide that the patent is valid, but anybody can use it (without needing the patent holder's permission), as long as they pay the patent holder. And the government could decide to set the price.
Transistors, lithium batteries, leds, etc all enjoyed significant patent protection, but still changed the world.
I yearn for a Star Trek utopia as the next, but we do live in a capitalistic world where I hope that someone can enjoy outsized rewards for upending some previously insurmountable physical barriers.
Sure, and millions of people die of preventable diseases in the global south every year because pharmaceutical companies deem it profitable to let them die, and because the global north enforces their patents.
You don't know how it's gonna go. The scientists are going to be fine, they have their careers guaranteed and will receive many prizes for their work.
They don't need a monopoly on a world changing material too.
Why would patent be the root cause, they should have access to 2003 level of medicine. If patent was the only thing holding them back, you'd see them having 2000s level of healthcare, which wasn't bad by any stretch.
Why compete if someone will just steal your product?
It would just be a waste of time and money.
Imagine you spend two years and $100,000 to make a invent a clever handheld MRI for the super conductor just to have 100 companies Steal Your Design. You would have been better off watching Netflix
Inventions are still subject to patents. If you make a handheld MRI then others shouldn't be able to steal it from you unless they design their own. The material itself is what shouldn't have a patent on it.
Reading comprehension mate, cmon, don't assume bad intent.
Setting aside the needless dig, if you agree that there is utility in some patents, consider now that LK 99 could be example of a whole group or class of compounds, with thousands of permutations that requires significant work to discover, refine, and industrialize. If the compound needs an additive to be able to be manufactured at scale, should that also be unpatentable?
What about the scientist who spent 23 years to develop lk99? There's a lot of solutions within the existing patent system. If governments wanted, they could simply offer them a stupid amount of money for the patent and open source it.
I see where you're coming from, you want the scientists to get paid rather than just whatever large corp manufactures the compound.
And I don't disagree with you, I think the scientists should get rewarded too. I just don't want access to technology that could help people to get held back by money, as it does with pharmaceuticals.
> let's say the paper completely checks out and they have discovered this miracle. How strong are the patent protections on materials science?
If it's literally a room-temperature superconductor, the present state of the law is irrelevant. China won't play by the rules. If Korea tries to corner it in the West, the rules will be replaced. (This would have been true had the inventor been French or American, too.)
Completely my train of thoughts. And it is not only china. Patents are based on laws and laws serve a society... If that does not work anymore (obviously after a long and broken process) the law changes.
Even without any change in law there'll be a seemingly endless swarm of "I can't believe it's not butter" almost the same varieties appearing and having to be knocked down (if possible) for infringement.
As long as there's profit to be made that exceeds the cost of delaying legal action and any eventual fines levied against what may turn out to be near bankrupt shell companies.
This makes me so happy for my children and their children. God bless those scientists and all scientists that push our species forward. I'm so lucky to be in my prime at the same time AGI and superconductors become a reality. Wow.
If this thing really was super conducting, they should be able to rotate the sample upside down from flux pinning right? That's why this thing is probably just a magnet and not a superconductor??
All of the "it floats" videos are unattributed leaks or come from less-than-reputable sources.
The reputable sources only ever show videos of the sample touching the magnet.
From what I'm reading, several different types of materials can angle themselves like this from a magnet, but only Type II superconductors will float above a single monolithic magnet.
Until we see a confirmed video from a reputable source of a visible gap between the sample and the magnet, it's not confirmed that LK-99 is superconducting.
The problem is that no one has a pure sample of LK-99, only chunks of rock containing small areas of LK-99. So even if LK-99 is a true RT superconductor, we're only going to see levitation on the side of the chunk that has a high enough concentration of it. It's like trying to evaluate a diamond by poking at a rock that might or might not have any diamonds buried inside. It must be really frustrating.
So yeah, I hope there's a better way to evaluate this substance than "it floats!"
That's not what is meant by coherence, what is required in a quantum computer is for multiple qbits to maintain states coherent to each other. Current quantum computers operate in the milikelvin range for a reason, despite superconductors working at 1000x higher temperatures.
It won't have a direct impact on quantum computing. People make qubits out of superconducting materials that become superconducting at 4K or higher, but you have to cool them to around 0.03 K for them to really work well as qubits. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_quantum_comp....
But there could very well be indirect applications! This would be very very interesting for the physics community, and surely lead to other new things.
> Why are't more labs outside China making LK-99 and publish videos?
some possibilities:
- they have not been able to conclusively replicate anything and don't want to publish a negative result for fear of someone else publishing a conclusive positive result later.
- they are more careful to publish something that they are not (yet?) 100% sure about
- they don't care so much about the whole 'science in the spotlight' thing and prefer to go the traditional route of publishing after peer review of one or more papers rather than to make YT videos and having to fend off a barrage of interaction
Yes, good points though the money angle is debatable.
The USA and Europe are 'on average' also more pro-science than the rest of the world, but I think the East has the edge in education and comes across as more focused on progress. Probably this is underpinned in part because they have a ton of very hard problems that need solving and in the 'rich West' people are much less driven because their lives and the lives of their families are on average already quite plushy.
It makes you wonder what could happen in Africa and Latin America once they embrace education and science.
I didn’t want to get into it too much but I wrote that Chinese people are on average, more pro-science because they’re less religious or that their religion does not strongly contradict with science.
I’m guessing your parents’ HK church friends are Christians?
Yeah I'm not disagreeing with you at all, it's the Christianity and Hong Kong's post-colonial legacy.
The mainland Chinese social order is secular. The technocratic state, the CCP, had a lot to do with that. I would actually argue that technocracy is a superficial form of scientific culture.
Because all of these replications aren't contributing much; they're bare bones efforts with little to no scientific insight. Not one of these papers is conclusive in terms of showing evidence for it being a superconductor. None of them even contribute meaningfully.
This happens in machine learning all the time. Low quality papers rush in after every major release and announcement in order to be first. But in the long term they're meaningless because it takes time to do a good job.
Good labs don't want to announce half done maybe results. They want to announce conclusive comprehensive high quality results they can stand behind. That's what moves science forward.
Plenty of labs are working on lk-99, but they won't publish this sort of half assed analysis.
These studies help enthuse people though. I welcome them. Not for science but potential. Tells me that something is there, rest is on experts as you said.
> Why are't more labs outside China making LK-99 and publish videos?
Good rigorous science takes time to produce. It can take anywhere between several months to a year or more, and the career implications for rushing something out that is later found lacking is not great.
While it's true that good science often takes time, I believe it's not necessarily the whole picture. In fast-paced and rapidly evolving fields like this one, swift and open sharing of progress can be incredibly valuable. This is evident from the recent developments in AI and large language models (LLMs), where real-time collaboration and data sharing have led to exponential advancements.
> the career implications for rushing something out that is later found lacking is not great.
On a tangent, this idea of reputation keeps on coming up in this whole discussion and I am burdened by it in a way I don't fully understand. The way people have talked, if this LK-99 doesn't work out, then it is almost as if those who published this did something _morally_ wrong. Well, morally wrong is not quite true, but the way people talk about it tanking their reputation it feels like such a strong statement. Is there some way we can focus on the science and not get bogged down in the very human reputational part of this whole thing? It's almost as if a good chunk of the scientific community don't care about the benefits the science brings but the reputational benefits.
A scientist's career depends on their reputation. For them to have the best opportunities, they need everyone to have the highest respect for the quality of their work. If they damage their reputation, it could ruin everything they've spent decades working toward.
Of course they care about science itself, but there's a limit to what risks they'll be willing to take when it affects them personally.
For people with a relatively low reputation (or no reputation, i.e. unknown), taking a risk is not a bad move. They have less opportunity, and there's a chance the risk might pay off and boost their reputation.
For people whose reputation is already good, the risk is less worth it. They don't stand to gain as much, and they could lose a lot. So they're less likely to do it.
This is an good point. I think there is a difficult balance to strike between open communication and adding confusing noise to the scientific literature. Partly for historical reasons, there is an expectation that published science is correct to the best knowledge of the authors. Since writing, publishing, and reading papers takes a lot of time and effort, there are advantages to this precedent. I work in physics, and I can tell you that if we published all of our half-baked and often wrong ideas, we would waste a lot of people's time, at worst sending people down blind allies that we would soon rule our ourselves. I suppose tying reputation damage to publishing incorrect or misleading results is then part of the incentive structure that keeps publication quality high. At the extreme, there's was one recent LK-99 paper that had an obvious glitch in their data, and instead of taking a bit more time to debug it, they just posted the paper and speculated about what was going on. If that's how much you're rushing, how do I know I can trust your data?
But there are costs to this. There are big gaps between what people discuss with colleagues and what gets published, and the is no forum to publish partial or negative results, except maybe conferences. Ideally published papers stay at a very high bar, but there are other forums to publicly share work in progress. In a way Twitter is becoming this.
Working in science is different from working in other fields in that you work with things that are not well known, where a lot is unclear and your job is to move information out of this murky regime out into the light.
This means it's really easy to just claim something, that will be really hard for others to verify.
And wrong claims are incredibly common. It's easy to delude yourself through all sorts of biases or good old sloppy work.
That's why, when scientists talk to each other, they need to know that the other person is a serious scientist and won't pollute their mind with nonsense.
If you develop a reputation for making baseless claims, people will stop including your claims in their own thoughts.
It's a direct side effect of reputation and funding being closely correlated: if your reputation is that you put out stuff that doesn't work you won't get funded. This is dumb, but that's how the world works. That's why you almost always see the 'more research is needed' line in various papers, it is most helpful when seeking for funding that one paper will lead to another. But (unfortunately) negative results aren't nearly as often published, and that is because they will not get cited as much in follow on papers. It's all the result of metrics based meta analysis of papers, aka the 'impact factor' (which, no kidding is a copyrighted term), once that got established that became the thing that science partially optimized for.
During the 'golden age' of science, the time of the Royal Society the fields weren't specialized at all and the publication mechanism was scientists sending each other interesting stuff by post. At that time there was no meta analysis at all and there was so much low hanging fruit that the 'gentleman scientist' could make big breakthroughs in their home laboratories. But as that low hanging fruit decreased the educational paths required before being able to do meaningful science became longer and longer, then specialization set in and the costs of doing science went up. That's how we arrived at grants used to fund science.
> That's how we arrived at grants used to fund science.
A lot of these gentleman scientists were independently wealthy aristocrats that didn't need hand-outs. The fact that we don't to a meaningful extent have that sort of leisure class anymore is arguably a much bigger reason we need grant funded science these days.
It could be argued there a bit of a replication of the pattern in the space race between Musk and Bezos, but they're missing the sort of well education the aristocrats of yore would have had[1]. They employ a lot of people to do the actual dirty work, but that's not really a big difference from back then either.
> It's a direct side effect of reputation and funding being closely correlated
This sheds some light on it to me. I guess what partly surprises me is that people seem to care more about reputation than just a means for improving the signal to noise ratio in papers or as a estimate on what will give you your biggest bang for your buck.
The other issue I see come up is the idea that if there is no signal to noise filter, then a scientist might "waste their time," either reading the paper or trying to replicate. But to me, it sounds a little bit like trying to avoid actually doing science. And peer reviewed papers don't imply excellent quality either. You should evaluate papers on their merits. It is your job, as a scientist, to evaluate the most productive approaches based on the merits of the science being done, not based on reputation.
>Good rigorous science takes time to produce. It can take anywhere between several months to a year or more, and the career implications for rushing something out that is later found lacking is not great.
By my count, 18/20 top universities for chemistry research is in China. The first US university in chemistry is MIT at 23.
One of the attempts is by USTC, the second best university in the world for chemistry research according to the Nature link.
China's lead in chemistry research is also translating directly to real world applications. For example, CATL and BYD combined own more than 50% of the car battery market. Six of the top 10 car battery makers are Chinese companies. [0]
It's not surprising that most of the first replication attempts are from China.
I think for a lot of people this whole saga is probably the first time that they realize that a ton of original work is done in Asia, rather than that it is just our manufacturing hub. They have to adjust their mental model to account for a view of Asia that is in important ways outstripping the West in terms of resources and combined brain power. The amount of scientific output in Asia is astounding, and the number of active scientists dwarfs the numbers in the West. If they would switch to stop publishing in English it would be quite amusing.
You inferred logic that was never present in my reply. It's a correlation/causation error. As it is fully possible for things to happen in China that are not caused by the specific character and nature of Chinese people; pointing out that something has happened in China is not an implication that it's caused some the special nature of Chinese people or Chinese society.
If you go out of your way to look for uncharitable ways of interpreting what others are saying, you will find them.
Instead of going on the offensive and taking such an uncharitable interpretation as a given, if you truly can find no charitable interpretation[1], maybe ask for a clarification rather than jumping to conclusions about unspoken implications.
Lmao, all that implied was that rushed papers don't have time for in depth analysis, only reproducing the material without further insight. Which is absolutely true; we're not super-human, it takes time to replicate the material and then time to disseminate why/how it works.
> Why are't more labs outside China making LK-99 and publish videos?
Red phosphorus, one of the ingredients in the synthesis, is a controlled substance in the US. Might be delaying everyone while they fill out the paperwork with whoever their supplier is.
I guess it's a mix of
- It's a good opportunity to gain visibility by working something grabbing the news. 1st room temperature superconductor, that's big
- (Under)graduate lab interns can be thrown onto any crash projects at will without much repercussion or resistance, boss is boss and should not be subject to questioning
I did a post-doc in China, so that's my sample size N=1 piece of cheap opinion
Young researchers in China often face intense competition and pressure. While they are generally well-funded in the short-term, even more so than their counterparts in the US or Europe, the lack of long-term career security can be challenging. They must continuously chase after every potential scientific breakthrough, like LK-99, not just out of passion or curiosity, but as a necessary step for survival in their career.
Furthermore, the system in China offers many awards, grants, and titles that are tied to age. These are not just for prestige but are critical for progressing in their career. This situation adds another layer of urgency and competition among young researchers.
I imagine over the next few weeks there'll be an explosion of efforts to replicate if it's truly that straightforward to produce for reasonably-equipped labs.
A lot of commenters here are from the West, and the atmosphere between the PRC and the West (particularly the US) at the moment is quite a bit more acrimonious and competitive than it has been historically. It makes sense that people would leap first to essentially "They aren't as smart as us"/"They're less honest than us"/"They're less trustworthy than us" etc. The simplest and most likely correct explanation is that the PRC has a lot more STEM students in absolute terms and even proportionately, more and very well funded labs with very ambitious leadership and "national spirit"/"something to prove" style thinking, and that particularly in chemistry/materials science the PRC is dominant, with a huge proportion of all the highest quality chemistry focused universities, academies etc.
I, too, found it fascinating how every initial reply dodged giving the Chinese credit. Instead, all of them tried every way to paint their publications in a negative light.
Surely, most tech workers have encountered working with highly competent technical coworkers from China? Or that Chinese students in America tend to perform well above average academically?
Why should anyone be surprised that China performs exceedingly well in sciences?
But they have also encountered IP theft and Chinese nationals assaulting local and foreign nationals in countries they are lucky and fortunate to have the right to study in, over protests: https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/australasia/article/3019888/h...
Now I hate that I have to say this (because it should be a given), but _obviously_ this does not apply across the board, but when people experience shocking behaviour like this you can see why they might hold grudges or biases, even when that's wrong to do.
That aside, China & the US (of which are are a lot of Americans on this site) seem to have held a grudge for quite a long time now, on both sides. Which is a shame, because we're all human at the end of the day and especially science should recognise that stupid tribal human concepts like nationalities and borders are meaningless to the big picture.
Not even close. Cold fusion was not something we thought was possible under our understanding of physics at the time (Muon-catalyzed fusion isn't what they thought CF was and there are all sorts of things that make it not really something that we expect to ever be particularly useful for power generation, etc., so not much purpose in talking about it)
Meanwhile, all our known physics have no issue with an RTAPS existing.
1,255 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 402 ms ] threadBecause this one is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earnshaw%27s_theorem
The compound must be tricky to synthesize with a good degree of purity- I think we'll learn quite a bit more if someone manages to get a bigger sample than a flake the size of the point of a needle.
Back then, many asked if this was superconduction or merely diamagnetism. Does the new paper shine any light on this question?
ETA: also, in the presence of a magnetic field, that transition temperature decreases. That's pretty huge. Unless this paper is fraudulent, I take this as the biggest positive evidence so far that something besides simple diamagnetism is going on. And, cards on table, with the assumption that the paper is not fraudulent, this pushes my odds above 50% for the first time.
It definitely contributes to the general feel that however this works, it's an inefficient synthesis that's problematically generating the material we want.
It certainly makes me wonder if something like molecular-beam epitaxy would be able to directly grow a more pure sample (but I imagine that's expensive and time-consuming to setup, plus not really what we're hoping for if we want to use lots of it).
Wow.
For instance:
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Temperature-variation-of...
So...no.
> if the current record were to be decertified then the holder would be a tie at 54.0 °C (129.2 °F), recorded both at Furnace Creek and in Kuwait.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_temperature_recorded_o...
Any speculation if that’s consumer, commercial, or industrial off-the-shelf?
Sounds like we may be talking running an MRI off of a mini split system.
Time for you to make some money then? :D
https://polymarket.com/event/is-the-room-temp-superconductor...
This is a pretty strict version, at 33% now by 2025
https://manifold.markets/QuantumObserver/will-the-lk99-room-...
There are also the prediction ... platforms Metaculus and Manifold, which are legal in the US, since they only use made-up internet points instead of real money. I'm not sure whether this even hurts their accuracy compared to Polymarket though.
The sportsbook argument was that sports betting involves more than random chance - knowledge of the game, the players, etc. effectively turn it into a matter of skill.
I doubt there are enough interested parties to bother for prediction markets, though.
Did that site predate https://xkcd.com/955/ or was it inspired by it?
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09258...
First it shows a temperature graph vs moment, as they heat it it loses the diamagnetism around the temperature LK99 is said to be superconducting.
Second only a superconductor will have net-zero field, which means "stable" levitation. In the video they approach the sample with the magnet and flip it while the piece is mostly "in place". A regular diamagnet generates a external field that "follows" the field applied so it would likely move sideways, that is why to "levitate in place" a diamagnet people normally use a Halbach array.
EDIT: A Halback array is made alternating the poles N-S of the magnet, so that forces of repulsion created by the diamagnet cancel. This is why you will see people using multiple magnets when levitating pyrolytic graphite.
Aaaand we’re back!
I’m really trying to remain (reasonably, not ideologically) skeptical but if this is legit this is a huge step towards confirmation.
In other words: even the downside here is great, and the upside is...
National pride and science are not a very good mix
The deluge of news about non-replicable results, fabricated data, overhyped press releases from both academia and industry had become really depressing. For once after a long time it’s the real deal.
Even if this is not a RT superconductor, it’s now evident that the original authors didn’t cheat and are not crackpots as initially suspected by most.
My grandmother was born in a house without running water, no sanitation and no phone. That's just a bit over a century ago. The rate of change on an annual basis isn't all that large, a decade and you'll see big changes, our world can't be compared at all to 120 years ago in terms of luxury, communications, personal energy budget, food, travel options etc. Still, there are large areas of the planet where the last 120 didn't bring any progress and there are those where they actually went backwards, not rarely to our (the western world for me) benefit.
Back when ITER was the only game in town it looked like workable fusion was never going to happen, but things are looking more hopeful now.
As for the future:
Fusion would be huge, but I'm not all that hopeful for cost efficiency there once you get to net power out but I'm not going to talk down the people that are doing the work and the research. And yes, the basic physics seems to be pretty stagnant, we're really waiting for a unification of the two major fields there but even if we do get that unification it may not lead to new practical tech, it could simply nail things down once and for all without moving the needle in terms of costs, speed or new materials science. It may have some implications for various computer models used in those fields and it probably would have impact on astronomy.
Uh oh, did I just jinx 2043?
Things have been moving along.
edit: comments are quibbling about the fraction of all movies ever I can see on a paid streaming service. This is like complaining about that the meals and elbow room are not wonderful on a $400 flight from LA to London. It's a goddam miracle and you're still grumbling. Please tell me now how your $12/mo Spotify account doesn't have the June 1972 Grateful Dead New Jersey show your mom was at, and is thus near worthless. I spent $12 in 1980s money on single album in my youth.
Let me amend my grossly hyperbolic statement and say I could stream on demand more movies than I could ever watch even if I did nothing else the rest of my life, including many but not all of the good ones. Now the statement is strictly true, but did this make my contribution better?
You must have one hell of a different streaming services experience from that of most people today if you can pull this off without engaging in a fair bit of torrenting and general piracy.
Some examples: https://www.yardbarker.com/entertainment/articles/popular_mo...
We could have maglev trains and superconducting supercomputers and copyright will still be deleting our culture to “save money” for corporate copyright owners to increase their profit margins.
Your 50,000 movies is a lot but its not even half of the movies made since 1995 that UNESCO were able to reliably cite data for. I can't deep link to the exact spreadsheet of data but it's under the culture data section and its feature film statistics. The total number of feature films (which will exclude some things like short films and other stuff based on various data processing considerations) produced around the world between 1995 and 2017 is at least (because there are likely more movies shot than produced) 107,432.
Assuming your "over 50,000" is the usually marketing line and being generous and assuming its somewhere between 50,000 and 55,000 movies, then if true that's approximately half the "feature films" produced between 1995 and 2017...
A a sensible lower bound extrapolation based on the data is in the range of half a million feature films (again recognising this data is likely excluding things we would on average collectively call a movie), making your service closer to 10%... or possibly even lower...
Over 50,000 movies feels like a lot until you dig into how much media we make as a species. That's just feature films, likely only ones with a theatrical release (I don't think I can reliably translate a lot of the source documents even if I wanted to validate the source data criteria myself, hence I'm using the weasel word "likely"), meaning its excluding a LOT of film/movies, and its only for 1995 to 2017, covering an era where the "amateur film" scene was rapidly exploding due to falling costs of the technology behind recording, editing, and distribution a "movie"...
None of this is to tear down the effort of hard working preservationists... both legal and illegal. I agree with the archivists I've had conversations with, whose collective opinion can be summed up quite simply. "Any copy is better than no copy."
One of my favorite movies of all time is “Contact” mainly because of how damn _hopeful_ it portrays humanity. I want to live in that world, not the gloom and doom “we’re ruining everything around us” that is so often shown in recent media.
And the whole thing is perplexing to me because as you’ve put it, we _are_ living in the future! There is soo many great things happening around us, but people seem not to notice - not just the technological things you’ve mentioned - but societal too.
Like because of recent developments in economy theory, the world altering global shut down due to corona did not end with a great depression like event for the whole world, and that alone to me is simply a miracle.
Human longevity studies have now reproducibly able to reverse aging _in primates_ - human trials starting this year!
Feminism has become all but mainstream, unlocking like 50% more of human ingenuity.
Urbanism studies have finally popularized environments where people can live happily and sustainably their entire lives, while there have always existed places in the world that are “nice” to live in one way or another, we’re kinda getting the science down why, and starting to popularize it a little (strongtowns).
Its just a crazy good time to be alive, there are countless problems all around us but they are actually getting solved at least somewhere, instead of banging our collective heads against the wall, one can just look for how it has been successful handled somewhere else and try to replicate!
But that sort of science seems to be quite rare. Most science people are exposed in their daily lives is of the Francesca Gino variety, and that's not merely "a lot of noise with unknown variables", that's "nobody will care if we don't do real science so let's not bother".
https://sci-hub.ru/https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007...
The difference now is that we're seeing a premature preprint being replicated in real time.
Even in that paper, the authors note: "The way the samples have been prepared seems to be of crucial importance: Michel et al. [21] obtained a single-phase perovskite by mixing the oxides of La and Cu and BaCOa in an appropriate ratio and subsequent annealing at 1,000 ~ in air. We also applied this annealing condition to one of our samples, obtained by the decomposition of the corresponding oxalates, and found no superconductivity." And you can see that in their resistivity/temperature graph of samples prepared using different protocols.
Considering how that preprint has sparked interest in other research institutions and multiplied the resources allocated to the problem, I would say this publication was not premature, it's most other research results that are late.
Ah, so you're saying that superconductivity is not actual zero resistance, but something close to it, and in fact only a factor of 1000x less resistive than the best conductor?
If that is so, this is something that I had previously thought would make a lot more sense to me.
But in that case it's not intuitive to me how SMES is possible with a 0% discharge rate. Shouldn't a significant fraction of the electrons looping around the coils be lost after many loops? (I know very little about electricity, as you can probably tell, never mind superconductors).
For high temperature superconductors (50-70+K), it's not literal zero for superconducting mechanisms discovered so far.
A bigger issue is going to be sample size. A 1mm-diameter 1mm-long rod of silver has a resistance of about 20 μΩ (or 2e-5) at room temperature. That's already getting tricky to measure with lab-grade equipment without pushing insane currents through it, let alone anything even smaller. If you want to measure a 1m-diameter 1m-long silver rod (which would be 0.02μΩ or 2e-8) you could just push a few thousand amps through it and reliably measure that using a household multimeter in the mV range - but do that with a small sample and it'll evaporate.
Not that low in range though, you will end up seeing thermal noise that dwarfs your measurement.
Showing diamagnetism is one of the least error-prone ways to demonstrate the superconductor effect.
That’s my understanding anyway.
No, a badly attached probe would usually show a larger resistance, not a smaller one. That's actually the easiest error to make, making improper contact with the sample. The resistance is measured indirectly using a reference current. So you'd measure a higher resistance or a break rather than zero if a probe were not attached correctly (unless the two voltage probes are touching but that would normally speaking be spotted).
The diamagnetism is simply easier to verify using an impure or small sample.
[1] https://www.ni.com/docs/en-US/bundle/ni-daqmx/page/measfunds...
You can mesaure current by electrical fields, but have the same issues as before. Your testing equipment and your very tiny sample sizes.
The way to think of this is simple: you can't measure anything without subtle joining the circuitry that you are measuring and that has an effect on the properties of the circuit as a whole for which you have to compensate. In this case: the voltage measurement is going to consume a tiny bit of power and that is due to the resistance of the measurement apparatus even if it isn't in the main current path but a secondary one. But the people that do these kinds of measurements tend to be well aware of this and will pick their measurement gear and reference current to minimize the chances of that happening.
if the area is small, couldn't it be "badly attached" directly to the other probe?
The first LK-99 paper used this method to claim zero resistivity, but people complained that if the inner probes lost contact, that would also be consistent with their data. This criticism doesn't totally make sense to me, since the apparent superconductivity came and went in the expected way as they changed an external magnetic field. I don't understand how a loose terminal could mimic that figure (I think it was in figure 1).
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.05871
I think the more likely explanation is that the particles do touch each other but the interface is not superconductive. In other words, it is a polycrystalline material, and most of it is LK-99, but the grain boundaries are not a very good conductor. In conventional superconductors grain boundaries don't disrupt superconductivity because they are 3D superconductors, but in this allegedly 1D superconductor the superconducting channels in most cases don't meet at the grain boundaries, so the current has to overcome the resistance of some material that is almost an insulator.
If that is the case it will be difficult to produce a material that is macroscopically superconducting. But I hope researchers will be able to make single crystals that are large enough for resistance measurements so that finally it can be determined if this material is a superconductor or not. For practical uses the best result that can be achieved with this material may be a metal-LK-99 composite where the LK-99 particles lower the resistivity of the metal by 50-90%.
The Korean team appears to have been stuck for several years by the lack of reproducibility of this synthesis method. While it was a great discovery that has shown that this material must have some very interesting properties, perhaps even superconductivity at ambient temperature and pressure, in order to be able to measure its properties and be able to evaluate the possible practical applications, a much more precise method for enforcing the desired crystal structure is required, than mixing powders and baking them into a ceramic.
Perhaps such a method for producing samples with deterministic properties would be to develop first a method to grow monocrystals of the special kind of lead phosphate that forms the base crystal structure, maybe by drawing the crystals from melt.
Once monocrystals of this kind of lead phosphate are available, they could be doped with copper, e.g. by ion implantation. By controlling and varying the parameters of the process, e.g. the angle of incidence and the velocity of the ions and the thermal profile used for annealing, it is likely that reproducible samples can be produced, where the copper ions substitute lead in the useful places and not in the others.
By this method it would be possible to produce only thin layers of LK-99, but that should be enough to enable the characterization of the material.
Moreover, because LK-99 is very fragile, it is unlikely that it could be used to make cables or coils. Practical uses where LK-99 would be deposited as thin films are much more likely.
As an alternative to ion implantation, which might be able to produce thicker layers, perhaps once monocrystals of the base lead phosphate are available it may be possible to develop some method of chemical vapor deposition, to grow epitaxially a layer of LK-99 over the base crystal, but with such a method it is less obvious if there is any way to control which lead atoms are substituted, though this may depend on the orientation of the base crystal.
Looking at the Griffin paper, the Pb(2) site is described as being 1.08eV 'more energetically favorable'. I am having trouble understanding what this means.
Years back I did MOCVD semiconductor fabrication research, I never reached a mastery of it but I am still trying to leverage that understanding here.
During growth, adatoms that incorporate into proper crystal lattice locations enter a lower energy state compared to those in imperfect locations. The energy state is lower in the sense that it requires more energy to remove them from that location. Hence careful control of temperature allows you to selectively favor incorporation into these low energy locations e.g. choose a temperature high enough to remove adatoms from 'imperfect' locations but low enough to not remove them from 'perfect' (low energy) locations.
So when the author says 'energetically favorable' am I to understand this means the Pb(2) location represents a lower energy state (i.e. more difficult to remove Cu from this location) or the opposite? Or something else entirely?
https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01723
>In fact, I find that Cu on this Pb(2) is 1.08 eV more energetically favorable than Cu on the Pb(1) site, suggesting possible difficulties in robustly obtaining Cu substituted on the Pb(1) site.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16892
The paper from Dr. Griffin at LBNL suggests copper atoms have to be placed in a specific (but less likely) position in the molecule to result in the desired flat band characteristic. Also, the original authors and the labs who were able to replicate LK-99 are reporting they had to make multiple batches to even find a tiny piece that shows levitation. This suggests that you just have to be very lucky to produce a sample with high enough concentration of LK-99 to observe levitation.
If we can somehow confirm that LK-99 is truly a room temperature superconductor, billions of dollars of R&D fund will pour in to improve the fabrication process. When the first transistor was invented, people probably weren't imagining that we'll be mass producing them in nanometer scale in the future. Or maybe LK-99 will be stuck in a lab like graphene. Who knows?
There is a good classic primer on FT-ICR, mostly focused on analysis (mass spectrometry) but also mentioning activation energies for reactions and measurement of kinetics etc.
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/chemistry/research/oconnor/oco...
If you dunk a bunch of chemicals (for simplicity think wet chemistry) in a vial, all reactions and side reactions are simultaneously occuring, so one has little control over what happens on an atomic scale.
FT-ICR can be used to observe the state AND to manipulate the state. Its like having a compact particle collider, but instead of the high (TeV) energy in CERN etc. its just chemical energy levels.
It happens in high vacuum, so low densities of species, hence not amenable to mass production.
But the instrument is both eyes and hands: one can identify the frequencies corresponding to each ionized molecule, and selectively energize or de-energize specific species to encourage or prevent main and competing reactions, by pumping or damping specific frequencies.
One may build up a molecule in elementary steps and eject finished molecules. Those steps can occur at the same time in the same vessel. Its like having a miniature digitally controlled chemical plant, without having to redo all the pipework if you decide to use a different pathway here or there.
You can inject a current into a superconducting coil and take measurements of the resultant magnetic field as the current circles for an indefinite period of time. I'm not able to see how this approach analogizes to water in a cup.
And even if not, what you would need is to measure the change of the field over time. This has finite resolution, so you can't distinguish no resistance from very very small resistance.
Yes it could be some tiny resistance, but the same issue occurs with the resolution/accuracy of the voltage or current measurement you would make.
However, if they perfect 1d production, they can layer in a bunch of them to create a quasi 2d or 3d superconductor.
Typically you measure resistance that small like this:
The + and - leads send a reference current (using something called a 'current source[1]', a specialist supply that cranks the voltage up and down to maintain a steady current, within some arbitrary range, usually from a few mV to 10's or even 100's of volts) that you pick (not so low that you won't get a voltage, not so high that you exceed the expected maximum current for the cross section that you are measuring) down the two leads to the sample and then you measure the voltage across the two points 'p' using the other two leads. This is similar to using a shunt for measuring a current, only now you are interested in the resistance of 'sample'. It also elegantly rules out accidentally measuring the resistance of the probe wires and has the added advantage that you can measure the voltage almost without drawing a current (though at such low resistance you have to take great care to ensure that your measurement doesn't consume a disproportionally large chunk of the reference current). If 'sample' is a nice fat chunk of material you can expect an accurate result because it will be easy to attach to in a reliable way, you can use a lot of current and the sample is large enough to have a resistance high enough that the voltage you are measuring is well outside of the noise. But for a small sample the resistance is almost always going to be very small and the difference between a few nanovolts and zero are hard to distinguish. So that's why you won't be seeing any conclusive measurements of the real resistance (or zero) until larger samples can be made, long enough to show a sizeable voltage drop or none at all.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_source
This Wikipedia article has a good summary of the replication attempts to date (including this paper).
I wonder if something similar is happening here. Since the scope was defined as LK-99, it becomes a narrow query instead of a broad one.
Superconduction at room temp would all for less current consumption due to resistance inside the metal layer for chips, letting them run cooler and faster.
MRIs use massive, supercooled magnets. If you can do the same at room temp, you could potentially have a portable or much smaller and more efficient MRI.
If you can levitate an object, you can use a lot less power running electromagnets to run things like maglev trains.
If you have power lines that have zero resistance, you can reduce wasted energy. Power lines will actually sag under heavy load due to heat and cause outages or forest fires, this could be avoided.
Also there are superconductor based batteries that are very efficient, would would become a thing, likely revolutionising batteries.
Let's say we got a massive wave of independent replication of superconductivity tomorrow - at least enough to convince Big Money to move in, and it all ends up being For Real.
The next steps are figuring out the other properties of the material, with a big one being 'how ductile is it', how to produce it in large enough quantities to be useful, if the underlying mechanisms here can be applied to other compositions that allow us to make RTAPS with better properties, etc.
Depending on those results determines the range of applications it is suitable for out of the box, how much we can make at what cost, etc. We've got minimal details to go on there. It's a ceramic, so it's probably not super ductile, but we have some experience in making those be useful via making them into a tape, a la YBCO. Can we do the same thing here? Who knows!
There's a timeline where all of these questions end up favorable and 10 years from now we see RTAPS in all sorts of day to day applications - we might find out that with one small trick we end up with big pure samples of LK99 with easy production methods. There's a world where all these answers aren't favorable, and it takes 10 years for it to show up in specialized applications (which are still huge for science and humanity!), and trickles bit by bit to more use cases over another few decades.
I would guess that a decade-ish is really the earliest window for significant impact to humanity - we're probably going to spend the next year at minimum figuring out what all the deal is with LK99, and then it'll take a few years to even really start making cool experimental stuff in labs, and then you have to actually productize things using it, etc.
It wouldn't be like the investment in something that would be similarly revolutionary but with a less certain end game like fusion.
For example, if someone could replicate the effect with lead + gold, would that be considered a novel material which would not be subject to licensing? Is it the material itself or the method of production?
If I recall correctly, their patent for method covered a wide range of constituent elements, but left off gold. I would feel pretty bad for them if they genuinely discovered an RTP superconductor but that omission prevents them from becoming billionaires.
But more likely the issue is that their current method has lots of room for improvement and someone else finds one that is substantially better.
ETA: apparently wrong, can patent composition of very novel materials.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(1) the internet is, to a first approximation, wrong about everything - so while posting "Wrong" tells us that you disagree with the GP, it doesn't tell us anything about who's actually right;
(2) shallow dismissals like "Wrong" have a degrading influence on the threads - they don't just encourage others to post more of the same, but worse. Basically, either your comments are contributing to improving the discussion culture or they're worsening it - there isn't really any level ground.
You can overcome both (1) and (2) by respectfully and substantively explaining why the other commenter is wrong. Then we all can learn something. Maybe (hopefully) even the other commenter can learn something.
If you don't want to do that or don't have time, it's better to post nothing than to just post "Wrong". That way you don't have a negative impact a la (2), and per (1), the internet is wrong about everything anyway, so you're basically just leaving things the way you found them.
Consider that HN has ~5 million MAU and that a comment without clarity is confounding many people. Writing and communications generally is a service to the reader not the author.
If you don't have time to look up the precise source, a note along the lines of "I don't have time to find the direct link ..." or "I recall but cannot source ..." would help, along with where generally is the best direction to start looking.
Returning to that comment later to clarify/expand is also useful.
(I do both of these fairly often. And have written ... 612 ... comments with footnotes and references on HN to date: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>.)
Is it possible that the inventors do not receive a dime of royalties?
However, they have told me what I interpreted to mean that if someone improves it but uses it then they need to license the underlying patent. That just makes sense, it's required in order to implement their concept.
And in reverse the original company can keep doing whatever they want as long as it isn't covered by the referencing patent. Makes sense to me there too, if they come up with some other clever way to make it good enough more power to them. There's no reason for them to pay some other people who patented something they don't use.
You can write stuff down generally enough that it's hard to make small changes and get around it. I did a lot of "1-10%" stuff in the claims.
The patent is here for reference: https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2023027536A1/en
And yeah, they left off Au.
The only thing I can think of is that they did it and know that those noble metals don't work very well, and so they're getting everyone else to follow a wild goose chase down a very expensive rabbit hole while they already have a better approach.
... but the tech doesn't look that developed. Very strange.
It could be that they found something incredible by chance and they’re at the limits of their personal capability to further understand and refine. The fact that they’ve known about this for over 20 years suggests maybe. It’s not a bad thing if they are, they’ve already taken one of the biggest leaps. New teams with fresh eyes and varied backgrounds will look at the problem space and undoubtedly see room for refinement.
Is that clearer what I mean? I think the only reason to exclude those things is if they were super confident they weren't a good idea for some reason we don't know. Or they just... forgot? That would just be very surprising.
I'm no patent lawyer, but there is literally a US patent-office category covering "material" for exactly this kind of invention. Section 505 - "Superconductor Technology: Apparatus, Material, Process".
> This is the generic class for subject matter involving (a) superconductor technology above 30 K and (b) Art collections involving superconductor technology. Apparatus, devices, materials, and processes involving such technology are included herein.
https://www.uspto.gov/web/patents/classification/uspc505/def...
Better yet would be to offer partial payouts for failed efforts if research is made public.
This is probably more relevant for pharmaceuticals though.
Even so - if this works out, their prizes and paid speaking gigs will cover a very comfortable life if that's what they want. I'm not sure why they should be entitled to more than that.
They'll make a ton of money either ways. Maybe not billionaire level, but they'll be venerated wherever they go, will be granted countless prizes, will sit on the boards of important companies, and have their pick of academic jobs - all of it entirely deserved, of course.
I'd rest my hopes on them not being dicks about it, not on them not getting benefit from it.
Why do people ask for raises though? It is somewhat rewarded, but some people don't work long and hard and still have more money. Those working long and hard, having a big useable result want to be rewarded a little more.
At the same time, other researchers around the world weren't so lucky.
But because we don't know what's going to pan out without trying it out, the other researchers are just as integral to the process of discovery.
Is it fair to reward Lee and Kim for their luck, and let everyone else get screwed? Wouldn't it be more fair to make sure everyone is appropriately compensated to begin with?
Yeah, it would be the perfect solution. Problem is how to agree on that, currently we have a market telling everyone what their "appropriate" compensation is.
now, if it were to death + 75 years, or whatever inane number is copyright today, you'd hear a different story from me. but it is not.
for compelling emergencies states can already waive patents, so the relevant mechanisms are already in place if anything momentous happens.
Companies price their offerings so that the global north will buy it, and the global south will have to pay proportionately extortionate amounts, with no relation whatsoever to the cost of production or research.
It seems so incredibly reductive to attribute global South issues to patents.
Not to mention the fact that the vaccines were developed with public money.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covax-donations
And you're wrong about the vaccines too. They were mostly developed with public money, private companies just profited off them.
I yearn for a Star Trek utopia as the next, but we do live in a capitalistic world where I hope that someone can enjoy outsized rewards for upending some previously insurmountable physical barriers.
You don't know how it's gonna go. The scientists are going to be fine, they have their careers guaranteed and will receive many prizes for their work.
They don't need a monopoly on a world changing material too.
No MRI, No Fusion, ect.
It would just be a waste of time and money.
Imagine you spend two years and $100,000 to make a invent a clever handheld MRI for the super conductor just to have 100 companies Steal Your Design. You would have been better off watching Netflix
Reading comprehension mate, cmon, don't assume bad intent.
What about the scientist who spent 23 years to develop lk99? There's a lot of solutions within the existing patent system. If governments wanted, they could simply offer them a stupid amount of money for the patent and open source it.
And I don't disagree with you, I think the scientists should get rewarded too. I just don't want access to technology that could help people to get held back by money, as it does with pharmaceuticals.
If it's literally a room-temperature superconductor, the present state of the law is irrelevant. China won't play by the rules. If Korea tries to corner it in the West, the rules will be replaced. (This would have been true had the inventor been French or American, too.)
As long as there's profit to be made that exceeds the cost of delaying legal action and any eventual fines levied against what may turn out to be near bankrupt shell companies.
Wait, I missed that one. Was it yesterday?
The reputable sources only ever show videos of the sample touching the magnet.
From what I'm reading, several different types of materials can angle themselves like this from a magnet, but only Type II superconductors will float above a single monolithic magnet.
Until we see a confirmed video from a reputable source of a visible gap between the sample and the magnet, it's not confirmed that LK-99 is superconducting.
So yeah, I hope there's a better way to evaluate this substance than "it floats!"
But there could very well be indirect applications! This would be very very interesting for the physics community, and surely lead to other new things.
Two from HUST: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV14p4y1V7kS/ https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV13k4y1G7i1/
One by USTC https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Ex4y1X7ix/ this tiny sample can stand on its pointy side.
One by Qufu Normal University https://www.zhihu.com/zvideo/1669820225079070720
One with THU background but claims a personal project https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV14z4y1s7Vo
Why are't more labs outside China making LK-99 and publish videos?
some possibilities:
- they have not been able to conclusively replicate anything and don't want to publish a negative result for fear of someone else publishing a conclusive positive result later.
- they are more careful to publish something that they are not (yet?) 100% sure about
- they don't care so much about the whole 'science in the spotlight' thing and prefer to go the traditional route of publishing after peer review of one or more papers rather than to make YT videos and having to fend off a barrage of interaction
- fear of getting it wrong.
- There are way more STEM graduates in China by a wide margin
- 18/20 of top universities in the world for chemistry research is in China according to Nature, including one of the attempts by USTC (#2 ranking): https://www.nature.com/nature-index/institution-outputs/gene...
- Supply chain is faster in China for chemicals and materials
- China has more money/equipment for this sort of stuff
- China is on average, more pro-science than the rest of the world
The USA and Europe are 'on average' also more pro-science than the rest of the world, but I think the East has the edge in education and comes across as more focused on progress. Probably this is underpinned in part because they have a ton of very hard problems that need solving and in the 'rich West' people are much less driven because their lives and the lives of their families are on average already quite plushy.
It makes you wonder what could happen in Africa and Latin America once they embrace education and science.
There’s quite a lot of anti-intellectualism in the US. Therefore, there’s an equal amount of anti-science.
Meanwhile, every Chinese I’ve ever met is pro-education and thinks highly of science.
I didn’t want to get into it too much but I wrote that Chinese people are on average, more pro-science because they’re less religious or that their religion does not strongly contradict with science.
I’m guessing your parents’ HK church friends are Christians?
The mainland Chinese social order is secular. The technocratic state, the CCP, had a lot to do with that. I would actually argue that technocracy is a superficial form of scientific culture.
This happens in machine learning all the time. Low quality papers rush in after every major release and announcement in order to be first. But in the long term they're meaningless because it takes time to do a good job.
Good labs don't want to announce half done maybe results. They want to announce conclusive comprehensive high quality results they can stand behind. That's what moves science forward.
Plenty of labs are working on lk-99, but they won't publish this sort of half assed analysis.
Good rigorous science takes time to produce. It can take anywhere between several months to a year or more, and the career implications for rushing something out that is later found lacking is not great.
On a tangent, this idea of reputation keeps on coming up in this whole discussion and I am burdened by it in a way I don't fully understand. The way people have talked, if this LK-99 doesn't work out, then it is almost as if those who published this did something _morally_ wrong. Well, morally wrong is not quite true, but the way people talk about it tanking their reputation it feels like such a strong statement. Is there some way we can focus on the science and not get bogged down in the very human reputational part of this whole thing? It's almost as if a good chunk of the scientific community don't care about the benefits the science brings but the reputational benefits.
Of course they care about science itself, but there's a limit to what risks they'll be willing to take when it affects them personally.
For people with a relatively low reputation (or no reputation, i.e. unknown), taking a risk is not a bad move. They have less opportunity, and there's a chance the risk might pay off and boost their reputation.
For people whose reputation is already good, the risk is less worth it. They don't stand to gain as much, and they could lose a lot. So they're less likely to do it.
But there are costs to this. There are big gaps between what people discuss with colleagues and what gets published, and the is no forum to publish partial or negative results, except maybe conferences. Ideally published papers stay at a very high bar, but there are other forums to publicly share work in progress. In a way Twitter is becoming this.
This means it's really easy to just claim something, that will be really hard for others to verify.
And wrong claims are incredibly common. It's easy to delude yourself through all sorts of biases or good old sloppy work.
That's why, when scientists talk to each other, they need to know that the other person is a serious scientist and won't pollute their mind with nonsense.
If you develop a reputation for making baseless claims, people will stop including your claims in their own thoughts.
During the 'golden age' of science, the time of the Royal Society the fields weren't specialized at all and the publication mechanism was scientists sending each other interesting stuff by post. At that time there was no meta analysis at all and there was so much low hanging fruit that the 'gentleman scientist' could make big breakthroughs in their home laboratories. But as that low hanging fruit decreased the educational paths required before being able to do meaningful science became longer and longer, then specialization set in and the costs of doing science went up. That's how we arrived at grants used to fund science.
A lot of these gentleman scientists were independently wealthy aristocrats that didn't need hand-outs. The fact that we don't to a meaningful extent have that sort of leisure class anymore is arguably a much bigger reason we need grant funded science these days.
It could be argued there a bit of a replication of the pattern in the space race between Musk and Bezos, but they're missing the sort of well education the aristocrats of yore would have had[1]. They employ a lot of people to do the actual dirty work, but that's not really a big difference from back then either.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
This sheds some light on it to me. I guess what partly surprises me is that people seem to care more about reputation than just a means for improving the signal to noise ratio in papers or as a estimate on what will give you your biggest bang for your buck.
The other issue I see come up is the idea that if there is no signal to noise filter, then a scientist might "waste their time," either reading the paper or trying to replicate. But to me, it sounds a little bit like trying to avoid actually doing science. And peer reviewed papers don't imply excellent quality either. You should evaluate papers on their merits. It is your job, as a scientist, to evaluate the most productive approaches based on the merits of the science being done, not based on reputation.
Implying that Chinese science is bad?
Chinese universities absolutely dominate in chemistry: https://www.nature.com/nature-index/institution-outputs/gene...
By my count, 18/20 top universities for chemistry research is in China. The first US university in chemistry is MIT at 23.
One of the attempts is by USTC, the second best university in the world for chemistry research according to the Nature link.
China's lead in chemistry research is also translating directly to real world applications. For example, CATL and BYD combined own more than 50% of the car battery market. Six of the top 10 car battery makers are Chinese companies. [0]
It's not surprising that most of the first replication attempts are from China.
[0] https://cnevpost.com/2023/01/04/global-ev-battery-market-sha...
It was true 20 years ago when China had to catch up in everything.
The thinking needs to be updated.
Heck, just look at chemistry publications from top US and European universities. Chances are, there's one or more Chinese names in most of them.
I was only following the logic of the original question and your initial reply.
Original question: Why aren't labs outside of China publishing results?
Your answer: Because good rigorous science takes time to produce.
Logical interpretation of your answer: Chinese universities are producing bad, unrigorous science because they're publishing their findings so fast.
Instead of going on the offensive and taking such an uncharitable interpretation as a given, if you truly can find no charitable interpretation[1], maybe ask for a clarification rather than jumping to conclusions about unspoken implications.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
You go out of your way to look for uncharitable ways of interpreting how others are interpreting your messages.
Red phosphorus, one of the ingredients in the synthesis, is a controlled substance in the US. Might be delaying everyone while they fill out the paperwork with whoever their supplier is.
I did a post-doc in China, so that's my sample size N=1 piece of cheap opinion
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1cY4y1y7ZM
Translation of the title: If room temperature superconductivity is really repeated, I will eat shit
Then this topic became hot in bilibili. Currently the first LK-99 replication video reaches nearly 10 million views.
Young researchers in China often face intense competition and pressure. While they are generally well-funded in the short-term, even more so than their counterparts in the US or Europe, the lack of long-term career security can be challenging. They must continuously chase after every potential scientific breakthrough, like LK-99, not just out of passion or curiosity, but as a necessary step for survival in their career.
Furthermore, the system in China offers many awards, grants, and titles that are tied to age. These are not just for prestige but are critical for progressing in their career. This situation adds another layer of urgency and competition among young researchers.
I don’t know, my fellow PhD students in EU have the same fears.
What would some PhD student in EU who is worried about job security be able to do about it constructively?
* https://twitter.com/andrewmccalip/status/1687288889717989376
* https://twitter.com/CondMatfyz/status/1687051547337781248
I imagine over the next few weeks there'll be an explosion of efforts to replicate if it's truly that straightforward to produce for reasonably-equipped labs.
Surely, most tech workers have encountered working with highly competent technical coworkers from China? Or that Chinese students in America tend to perform well above average academically?
Why should anyone be surprised that China performs exceedingly well in sciences?
Now I hate that I have to say this (because it should be a given), but _obviously_ this does not apply across the board, but when people experience shocking behaviour like this you can see why they might hold grudges or biases, even when that's wrong to do.
That aside, China & the US (of which are are a lot of Americans on this site) seem to have held a grudge for quite a long time now, on both sides. Which is a shame, because we're all human at the end of the day and especially science should recognise that stupid tribal human concepts like nationalities and borders are meaningless to the big picture.
but it's a growing trend anyway.
Twitter is just one of those communication platforms.
I don't fault them for failing to synthesize room-temperature superconductors while they were relaxing in some resort in Turkey or Thailand.
USTC is the second best university in the world in chemistry research according to Nature. [0]
[0] https://www.nature.com/nature-index/institution-outputs/gene...
[0] https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV14p4y1V7kS/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99#cite_note-51
Bookmarking this for the future ;)
Meanwhile, all our known physics have no issue with an RTAPS existing.