I think somewhere along the line we've lost track of the actual discovery. LK99 may not be a superconductor, but there still seems to be something novel about it. It's not just a "normal"...
I think somewhere along the line we've lost track of the actual discovery. LK99 may not be a superconductor, but there still seems to be something novel about it. It's not just a "normal" material. So I think in a month or so when this is all concluded, there will still be interesting discoveries to be made about LK99.
I'm not sure that there is. It's possible that the observed partial "levitation" wasn't even from diamagnetism but boring ol' ferromagnetism. Indeed, all of its "interesting" properties (partial...
So I think in a month or so when this is all concluded, there will still be interesting discoveries to be made about LK99.
I'm not sure that there is. It's possible that the observed partial "levitation" wasn't even from diamagnetism but boring ol' ferromagnetism. Indeed, all of its "interesting" properties (partial "levitation", phase-transition-like change in resistivity/magnetic susceptibility) might be explained by contaminants in the material. At any rate, I'm not sure that pursuing LK99-like materials would be any more fruitful than pursuing those materials condensed matter folk already study.
Speaking personally as a physicist, I've transitioned from optimistic about LK99 to almost irrationally annoyed at Kim et al. They've been studying this material for like 20 years, and at least one of them (Hyun Tak Kim) is a research professor. It's hard to excuse how sloppy their work was.
Roughly like this? I'm thinking there should be a firewall between preprint servers and mass media. Non-peer-reviewed research is fundamentally different from peer-reviewed research and should be...
Exemplary
Speaking personally as a physicist, I've transitioned from optimistic about LK99 to almost irrationally annoyed at Kim et al.
I'm thinking there should be a firewall between preprint servers and mass media. Non-peer-reviewed research is fundamentally different from peer-reviewed research and should be treated accordingly. It shouldn't habitually end up in mass publications without the appropriate amount of skepticism. You'd think science journalists would've learned this during the 'rona years...
I don’t think this is a fair criticism. The media spent only a little time on this story. It was social media that went nuts, and it happened organically. People just want to talk about tech,...
I don’t think this is a fair criticism. The media spent only a little time on this story. It was social media that went nuts, and it happened organically. People just want to talk about tech, maybe it was cathartic after watching Silicon Valley startups blow up or congressional investigations about aliens: give me something physical. And since everyone deep down knew the odds were low, it was harmless fun. Plenty of real, respect scientists got in on the fun and did real replication attempts too, you can’t blame that on the media.
Normally preprints are only of interest to those in the loop -- and least in physics. Usually, the only time I see preprints make big press when it's a large collaboration that is making an...
It shouldn't habitually end up in mass publications without the appropriate amount of skepticism.
Normally preprints are only of interest to those in the loop -- and least in physics. Usually, the only time I see preprints make big press when it's a large collaboration that is making an announcement. Since there is a lot riding on their reputation, they usually are pretty well vetted, however. The Higgs discovery is probably the biggest example in the past decade.
Yeah, and in those cases that's kinda fair. Any physicist you might interview at your local university will probably vouch for such a paper, and there's a lot of good physicists that are vouching...
Yeah, and in those cases that's kinda fair. Any physicist you might interview at your local university will probably vouch for such a paper, and there's a lot of good physicists that are vouching for it by having their name on it. Those kinda things are fine, those are not really my concern. Though to be fair I didn't have them on my mind at all when writing my above post.
But "petty" preprints, the business as usual kinda papers? We wouldn't be in this mess if science journos would've just stayed clear. Same as with a bunch of the misinfo during covid.
I do wonder where the cross-contamination happens. Surely Journalists aren't prowling arxiv for spicy papers? Is it twitter? Science journalist follows a bunch of scientists, who will talk about these, assuming that their followers are mostly people in the field. Science journalist is then probably a lot more excitable than the scientists upon reading that paper, chaos ensues.
I can't imagine university press releases about half-cooked preprints. Surely not.
It wasn't just journalists and the public getting piqued interest in this, it was brought up and debated for a while in my own group meetings, so I wouldn't be surprised if the combination of a...
I do wonder where the cross-contamination happens. Surely Journalists aren't prowling arxiv for spicy papers?
It wasn't just journalists and the public getting piqued interest in this, it was brought up and debated for a while in my own group meetings, so I wouldn't be surprised if the combination of a hot-button topic and chatty scientists at the water cooler which caused this thing to blow up a bit. I mean, I was here posting plenty of comments about it keeping the discussion going so I can't just blame the public for hyping things.
Thank you for the video link. I knew something like this had to exist and just hadn't seen it yet. I've rambled about it elsewhere, but I feel like every few years we have a "cold fusion", "Em...
Thank you for the video link. I knew something like this had to exist and just hadn't seen it yet.
I've rambled about it elsewhere, but I feel like every few years we have a "cold fusion", "Em drive", etc style discovery that just gets signal boosted by media. It's super disheartening because of how people who believe themselves rational tend to respond (cult of tech basically). They want it to be true so badly that any dissent is treated as heresy and it's just a shame that so many people fall for this over and over again.
Edit-
I'm SO glad he's calling out that this just from the initial glance (the title and the conclusion the charts) is NOT how you do science. I am not a scientist, but I've known many and had a serious respect for the process. My immediate reaction was "uhhh this doesn't read right" (not that I could read the chart but just the title/wording of the paper). It felt like a marketing ploy more than a paper and that always sets off alarm bells.
It absolutely reads like marketing BS. Unfortunately, with "publish or perish" this has crept into science to quite the degree. You oversell your findings s.t. you get published. The unusual thing...
It absolutely reads like marketing BS. Unfortunately, with "publish or perish" this has crept into science to quite the degree. You oversell your findings s.t. you get published. The unusual thing isn't that they did it, it's the degree to which they did.
But yeah. I don't have the background knowledge to know the kind of resistances you'd expect to see in a superconductor, but that graph looks absolutely fishy with that in mind. Basically, that chart is showing a jump in resistance that's kind of expected, but the visual language there makes one think that the resistance below the jump is superconductor-levels of resistance. It's not; it's orders of magnitude higher than that. That's the kind of stuff that peer review will catch. Someone will go "hey, this plot is giving me no useful information. I need to know at which temperature the resistance crosses 10^-5, not 10^-3." and the authors will be very annoyed because it's so much extra work, but they can't get their stuff published otherwise. So they do it, and ooops, that temperature is probably well into the cryogenic ranges and the paper deservedly never gets any appreciable attention.
Ehh, there's gotta be some way for research to percolate into wider society. Science journalists are usually not uneducated idiots, they can sort through some amount of BS themselves. Besides,...
Ehh, there's gotta be some way for research to percolate into wider society. Science journalists are usually not uneducated idiots, they can sort through some amount of BS themselves. Besides, post-peer papers usually offer much less surface area for exaggerations and misunderstandings.
I mean, I agree that there's too much BS that percolates through, but I wouldn't want another layer of indirection in between. After peer review, the rest can be solves with improved journalism standards. But maybe a very tangible suggestion would be for us (society) to also value other work by scientists. Until you've hit tenure, all you have to do is publish as much as possible. Sitting down with a journalist and collaboratively writing a pop-sci piece about your field of expertise is not considered published work. Yet it is useful to society. In general, there's a bunch of stuff that scientists should be doing but aren't doing because it's not what advances your career. Replicating others' studies; reporting negative findings (as in, we tried X and it did not work); teaching; peer review. All these things are important tasks that are second-order priorities at best.
They need to do something like a "peer tagline for journalists" where they discredit all the tropes the media likes to jump to with every discovery. Eg: "NOT LIKELY TO BE PRODUCED AT SCALE"
They need to do something like a "peer tagline for journalists" where they discredit all the tropes the media likes to jump to with every discovery.
"IT'S DEFINITELY NOT ALIENS" is another common one. Remember that hubbub about that slightly odd comet and everyone got their doomsday bunkers stocked back up? I don't think a single astronomer...
"IT'S DEFINITELY NOT ALIENS" is another common one. Remember that hubbub about that slightly odd comet and everyone got their doomsday bunkers stocked back up? I don't think a single astronomer gave a shit.
I don't see how a firewall would work on the open Internet. People are going to talk. A valuable lesson was learned, hopefully, but this sort of thing will happen again when it's forgotten.
I don't see how a firewall would work on the open Internet. People are going to talk. A valuable lesson was learned, hopefully, but this sort of thing will happen again when it's forgotten.
I don't get my hopes up until things are confirmed. I read the headlines, but if it's true the details won't change over time and if it's a load of crap, I saved some time. Like I don't need to...
I don't get my hopes up until things are confirmed. I read the headlines, but if it's true the details won't change over time and if it's a load of crap, I saved some time. Like I don't need to read articles saying that it's rumored Trump will be indicted because I can read the actual indictment when it comes out.
Having knowledge of the cold fusion debacle from decades ago has always been helpful. Labs were reporting successful replications, plans were being made, and then suddenly "oh no wait it's just...
Having knowledge of the cold fusion debacle from decades ago has always been helpful.
Labs were reporting successful replications, plans were being made, and then suddenly "oh no wait it's just bad methodology". More recently we had the EM Drive.
I know we had a lot of "but room temp superconductors DON'T violate physics as we know it!" comments in the discourse, which is true, but it doesn't change that the pattern was the same. Sketchy initial data that is VASTLY overhyped leading to all sorts of speculation and bad science as people jump on the bandwagon and the media gets their views/clicks. Followed by "oh wait nope" down the line as the serious researchers finally have their say.
It sure looks like this is awful for the industry because it just reinforces bad behavior and nonsense. We've always had an issue with overhyping science, as it's just slower than the short attention span of media wants, but it's just become an industry of regurgitated nonsense for clicks.
Oh, like I said, I started as an optimist; I just slowly transitioned to annoyed when it became clear that the results could all be explained by sloppiness. In that sense, I think the comparison...
Also, it's important to remember that almost EVERY single scientific discover in the last 100 years was met with people just like you who got irrationally annoyed and initially they completely disregarded the person's research.
Oh, like I said, I started as an optimist; I just slowly transitioned to annoyed when it became clear that the results could all be explained by sloppiness. In that sense, I think the comparison to Einstein is unwarranted. Einstein wasn't merely some outsider with a radical idea; he was someone intimately familiar with the physics of the day. Lee et al have proved themselves to be the former but not so much the latter. As another physicist put it:
“They come off as real amateurs,” says Michael Norman, a theorist at Argonne National Laboratory. “They don't know much about superconductivity and the way they’ve presented some of the data is fishy.”
Edit: of course, I agree with the rest of your sentiments.
I suppose anything is possible, but some replication attempts seem to have observed diamagnetism. It's clear that most of the samples being tested are each somewhat different from each other (due...
I suppose anything is possible, but some replication attempts seem to have observed diamagnetism. It's clear that most of the samples being tested are each somewhat different from each other (due to the sloppiness you mentioned), so while we can't observe consistent results, as long as someone observes diamagnetism, that's a point in favour of this being an interesting material to study (once they actually figure out how to consistently create the same material).
Well, the operative word is "seems". To quote from the paper I linked, This explanation appears to be consistent with the paper you linked by Liu et al: That said, I'm not an expert in this field!...
I suppose anything is possible, but some replication attempts seem to have observed diamagnetism.
Well, the operative word is "seems". To quote from the paper I linked,
Although some magnetization measurements have suggested that samples may be diamagnetic in small magnetic fields (10 Oe) [5–7, 11], the increase of this diamagnetic response with increasing fields (to the extent of levitation against gravity) has not been demonstrated. It should be noted that diamagnetism, which is a common presence in many insulators, is inequivalent to the Meissner effect. In some ferromagnetic systems, when the direction of the external magnetic field is opposite to the direction of the internal magnetization of the material, a seemingly diamagnetic signal may be detected under a small magnetic field.
This explanation appears to be consistent with the paper you linked by Liu et al:
Another highly interesting aspect of the report of Lee et al. [3] is the large diamagnetism, ~-7.4×10^-4 emu/g at a small measuring magnetic field of 1 mT (10 Oe). [...] At a large magnetic field of 0.5 T, our [LK99] powder exhibit a paramagnetic behavior (Figure 12).
That said, I'm not an expert in this field! Perhaps it really is worth studying. But then again, maybe not?
Edit: see also this parody arxiv listing from 2016 in which they "prove" that household coins and washers are superconductors. The partial "levitation" in fig 3 looks suspiciously similar to that demonstrated by Lee et al.
I think they're a bit negative on the potential of superconductors, but the big thing here is that it's not looking good for LK99.
I think somewhere along the line we've lost track of the actual discovery. LK99 may not be a superconductor, but there still seems to be something novel about it. It's not just a "normal" material. So I think in a month or so when this is all concluded, there will still be interesting discoveries to be made about LK99.
I'm not sure that there is. It's possible that the observed partial "levitation" wasn't even from diamagnetism but boring ol' ferromagnetism. Indeed, all of its "interesting" properties (partial "levitation", phase-transition-like change in resistivity/magnetic susceptibility) might be explained by contaminants in the material. At any rate, I'm not sure that pursuing LK99-like materials would be any more fruitful than pursuing those materials condensed matter folk already study.
Speaking personally as a physicist, I've transitioned from optimistic about LK99 to almost irrationally annoyed at Kim et al. They've been studying this material for like 20 years, and at least one of them (Hyun Tak Kim) is a research professor. It's hard to excuse how sloppy their work was.
P.S. Here's another article on this subject:
Roughly like this?
I'm thinking there should be a firewall between preprint servers and mass media. Non-peer-reviewed research is fundamentally different from peer-reviewed research and should be treated accordingly. It shouldn't habitually end up in mass publications without the appropriate amount of skepticism. You'd think science journalists would've learned this during the 'rona years...
I don’t think this is a fair criticism. The media spent only a little time on this story. It was social media that went nuts, and it happened organically. People just want to talk about tech, maybe it was cathartic after watching Silicon Valley startups blow up or congressional investigations about aliens: give me something physical. And since everyone deep down knew the odds were low, it was harmless fun. Plenty of real, respect scientists got in on the fun and did real replication attempts too, you can’t blame that on the media.
Normally preprints are only of interest to those in the loop -- and least in physics. Usually, the only time I see preprints make big press when it's a large collaboration that is making an announcement. Since there is a lot riding on their reputation, they usually are pretty well vetted, however. The Higgs discovery is probably the biggest example in the past decade.
Yeah, and in those cases that's kinda fair. Any physicist you might interview at your local university will probably vouch for such a paper, and there's a lot of good physicists that are vouching for it by having their name on it. Those kinda things are fine, those are not really my concern. Though to be fair I didn't have them on my mind at all when writing my above post.
But "petty" preprints, the business as usual kinda papers? We wouldn't be in this mess if science journos would've just stayed clear. Same as with a bunch of the misinfo during covid.
I do wonder where the cross-contamination happens. Surely Journalists aren't prowling arxiv for spicy papers? Is it twitter? Science journalist follows a bunch of scientists, who will talk about these, assuming that their followers are mostly people in the field. Science journalist is then probably a lot more excitable than the scientists upon reading that paper, chaos ensues.
I can't imagine university press releases about half-cooked preprints. Surely not.
It wasn't just journalists and the public getting piqued interest in this, it was brought up and debated for a while in my own group meetings, so I wouldn't be surprised if the combination of a hot-button topic and chatty scientists at the water cooler which caused this thing to blow up a bit. I mean, I was here posting plenty of comments about it keeping the discussion going so I can't just blame the public for hyping things.
Thank you for the video link. I knew something like this had to exist and just hadn't seen it yet.
I've rambled about it elsewhere, but I feel like every few years we have a "cold fusion", "Em drive", etc style discovery that just gets signal boosted by media. It's super disheartening because of how people who believe themselves rational tend to respond (cult of tech basically). They want it to be true so badly that any dissent is treated as heresy and it's just a shame that so many people fall for this over and over again.
Edit-
I'm SO glad he's calling out that this just from the initial glance (the title and the conclusion the charts) is NOT how you do science. I am not a scientist, but I've known many and had a serious respect for the process. My immediate reaction was "uhhh this doesn't read right" (not that I could read the chart but just the title/wording of the paper). It felt like a marketing ploy more than a paper and that always sets off alarm bells.
It absolutely reads like marketing BS. Unfortunately, with "publish or perish" this has crept into science to quite the degree. You oversell your findings s.t. you get published. The unusual thing isn't that they did it, it's the degree to which they did.
But yeah. I don't have the background knowledge to know the kind of resistances you'd expect to see in a superconductor, but that graph looks absolutely fishy with that in mind. Basically, that chart is showing a jump in resistance that's kind of expected, but the visual language there makes one think that the resistance below the jump is superconductor-levels of resistance. It's not; it's orders of magnitude higher than that. That's the kind of stuff that peer review will catch. Someone will go "hey, this plot is giving me no useful information. I need to know at which temperature the resistance crosses 10^-5, not 10^-3." and the authors will be very annoyed because it's so much extra work, but they can't get their stuff published otherwise. So they do it, and ooops, that temperature is probably well into the cryogenic ranges and the paper deservedly never gets any appreciable attention.
There needs to be a firewall between the news and post peer articles, let alone the speculative stuff.
Ehh, there's gotta be some way for research to percolate into wider society. Science journalists are usually not uneducated idiots, they can sort through some amount of BS themselves. Besides, post-peer papers usually offer much less surface area for exaggerations and misunderstandings.
I mean, I agree that there's too much BS that percolates through, but I wouldn't want another layer of indirection in between. After peer review, the rest can be solves with improved journalism standards. But maybe a very tangible suggestion would be for us (society) to also value other work by scientists. Until you've hit tenure, all you have to do is publish as much as possible. Sitting down with a journalist and collaboratively writing a pop-sci piece about your field of expertise is not considered published work. Yet it is useful to society. In general, there's a bunch of stuff that scientists should be doing but aren't doing because it's not what advances your career. Replicating others' studies; reporting negative findings (as in, we tried X and it did not work); teaching; peer review. All these things are important tasks that are second-order priorities at best.
They need to do something like a "peer tagline for journalists" where they discredit all the tropes the media likes to jump to with every discovery.
Eg:
"NOT LIKELY TO BE PRODUCED AT SCALE"
"IT'S DEFINITELY NOT ALIENS" is another common one. Remember that hubbub about that slightly odd comet and everyone got their doomsday bunkers stocked back up? I don't think a single astronomer gave a shit.
We talking about ʻOumuamua? Because even though it wasn't aliens, it was still cool as heck. Or the green comet? That was pretty cool too tbh.
I don't see how a firewall would work on the open Internet. People are going to talk. A valuable lesson was learned, hopefully, but this sort of thing will happen again when it's forgotten.
This mirrors my feelings as well: Hope to annoyance. This isn't the first superconductor goose chase either but I seem to get my hopes up every time.
I don't get my hopes up until things are confirmed. I read the headlines, but if it's true the details won't change over time and if it's a load of crap, I saved some time. Like I don't need to read articles saying that it's rumored Trump will be indicted because I can read the actual indictment when it comes out.
Having knowledge of the cold fusion debacle from decades ago has always been helpful.
Labs were reporting successful replications, plans were being made, and then suddenly "oh no wait it's just bad methodology". More recently we had the EM Drive.
I know we had a lot of "but room temp superconductors DON'T violate physics as we know it!" comments in the discourse, which is true, but it doesn't change that the pattern was the same. Sketchy initial data that is VASTLY overhyped leading to all sorts of speculation and bad science as people jump on the bandwagon and the media gets their views/clicks. Followed by "oh wait nope" down the line as the serious researchers finally have their say.
It sure looks like this is awful for the industry because it just reinforces bad behavior and nonsense. We've always had an issue with overhyping science, as it's just slower than the short attention span of media wants, but it's just become an industry of regurgitated nonsense for clicks.
Oh, like I said, I started as an optimist; I just slowly transitioned to annoyed when it became clear that the results could all be explained by sloppiness. In that sense, I think the comparison to Einstein is unwarranted. Einstein wasn't merely some outsider with a radical idea; he was someone intimately familiar with the physics of the day. Lee et al have proved themselves to be the former but not so much the latter. As another physicist put it:
Edit: of course, I agree with the rest of your sentiments.
Out of curiosity, what aspect of Oppenheimer's research corpus was met with pushback from his contemporaries? I'm not sure he's the best example here.
I suppose anything is possible, but some replication attempts seem to have observed diamagnetism. It's clear that most of the samples being tested are each somewhat different from each other (due to the sloppiness you mentioned), so while we can't observe consistent results, as long as someone observes diamagnetism, that's a point in favour of this being an interesting material to study (once they actually figure out how to consistently create the same material).
Well, the operative word is "seems". To quote from the paper I linked,
This explanation appears to be consistent with the paper you linked by Liu et al:
That said, I'm not an expert in this field! Perhaps it really is worth studying. But then again, maybe not?
Edit: see also this parody arxiv listing from 2016 in which they "prove" that household coins and washers are superconductors. The partial "levitation" in fig 3 looks suspiciously similar to that demonstrated by Lee et al.