“We are not cheating” (YH Kwon superconductor comments)

[ThePhysicist]

Honestly, just send out the samples and have people verify the claims. Demonstrating Meissner effect can be done by a grad student, especially if you don't need a pressure cell or low-temperature setup.

[mhb]

How many samples do you think they have?

[moralestapia]

All of this is just noise.

The experiment has to be reproduced and measured by others.

Then we will know.

[mrtksn]

And if the reproduction is hard to nail due to delicacies in the process, the the inventors should provide samples for analysis.

According to the tweet in question, YH Kwon had samples with him and was willing make them available for investigation but they didn’t have the tools for.

[DyslexicAtheist]

indeed.

this is Satoshi/Wright all over again. All Wright had to do is sign a document with the original key to provide (reasonably) plausible proof that he was indeed Satoshi.

Behavior of grifters always has this constant: infuriate your peers by making excuses and dazzle the outsiders/media with techno-babble. Sit back and watch both camps fight in social media, from where it infects MSM. Once it takes off the 2 camps battling another ensure it stays in the news and the cult that was created ensures their idols (gods) are protected. The public can no longer tell truth from fiction because as they understand "where there's smoke there's fire". At this point the suits and corporate talking-heads promise big returns, so there is no stopping it because money is being made regardless from it being real.

replicate || GTFO

[jpeter]

People wrote 3 days ago that i will take a day for it to be reproduced. Where are the results?

[juujian]

The worst about it is how much of other people's time their wasting. Other folks are trying to verify/disprove their claims. Of course it is some kind of measurement error. Do your due diligence before you claim that you broke physics as we know it. All these people could be spending their time working on something worthwhile...

[mabbo]

Whether or not it's truly what they claim it is, it does seem the scientists believe what they are claiming.

No one spends this much effort trying to get their name associated with a discovery that they know is a fraud.

[oxfordmale]

The cold fusion scandal shows scientists sometimes do fool themselves into believing their own claims, even when lacking rigorous scientific evidence.

Maybe they just have discovered an material with interesting electric properties rather than a super conductor. Time will tell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion

[ssrc]

Well, there's the relatively recent Schön scandal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal

[BSEdlMMldESB]

I hope we collectively figure out that "this idea is exclusively mine" for however long I can keep it secret or get my 'patent rights' enforced is an obsolete idea.

exclusive property over ideas is an old practice that needs to stay back in the 20th century, where it was useful and when the technology was not just here yet

can we have a 21st century digital renaissance yet?

[asimpletune]

Isn’t Kwon the one who was sent by the original pair’s corporate sponsors to supervise them? If so, that makes his behavior all the more bonkers? I really want to understand what he thinks he’s doing by going rogue like this in the year 2023.

It’s like the 19th century race to claim credit for discovering the source of the Nile, except obviously falsifiable due to communication technology.

[notRobot]

I'm out of the loop, can someone please provide ELI5ed context for this?

[resolutebat]

Korean scientists announce room-temperature superconductor. Ridiculous amounts of squabbling over who invented it immediately ensue, even though the jury's still out on whether it even works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99

The part I don't understand is why they don't just FedEx a sample of the stuff to another lab, so they could replicate the results immediately.

[aae42]

Some Korean researchers have released a couple half-baked papers apparently due to some infighting and a Nobel prize grab?

Their claim is for an easily/cheaply synthesized room temperature ambient pressure superconductor. They call it LK-99.

[fouc]

Reads like fanfiction at this point.

[kimorpark]

https://nitter.net/iris_igb/status/1685341730902577153#m

[SunghoYahng]

This is pretty off-topic, but as a Korean, I can tell you that the public mood in Korea has been more of a skeptical one. The public is already making a lot of mockery about it.

[0xbadc0de5]

I'll believe it when I see reproducible results, not before. Anything less is unscientific.

[luca_null]

I can't believe that the most important discovery of my lifetime is surrounded by this cloud of uncertainty.

At the same time, having watched Oppenheimer recently, when humanity discovered how to split the atom was chaotic too and met with a lot of scepticism.

I guess that's how we work as humans.

[c7b]

> I can't believe that the most important discovery of my lifetime is surrounded by this cloud of uncertainty.

I don't get it, what else would you expect? Any claimed scientific breakthrough should generally be met with a healthy dose of skepticism at first. Competition between multiple or overlapping groups working on the same problem is common, and that alone will often result in some not-so-pretty scenes. Look up eg the story of the discovery of the HI virus. That's what you get when 'only' career accomplishments are at stake. Now add billion-dollar commercial potential to the mix, and I'd say that some nerves starting to unravel is a rather expected outcome.

The good thing is that this is science, and nature doesn't care about any of that. So we'll know soon enough.

[wslh]

> I can't believe that the most important discovery of my lifetime is surrounded by this cloud of uncertainty.

This is because you are a witness and obviously past discoveries are read in books just as a facts. Even when there is a story, the story doesn't have the "resolution" to mimic every hour, day, weeks, etc of the event. And in such great events, even if they don't work but the people involved think they work, there is great greed. Pure Shakespeare?

Borges wrote in Funes the Memorious [1] "Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day; he had never once erred or faltered, but each reconstruction had itself taken an entire day." [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funes_the_Memorious

[2] https://formazione.indire.it/paths/jorge-luis-borges-funes-h...

[oxfordmale]

I recently saw a documentary on the science teams that published the first image of a black hole. A lot of due diligence went into confirming their approach was sound, as getting it wrong would destroy their reputation.

In this case, the challenge is that these are relatively unknown scientists, from a relatively unknown lab. Of course their findings can be genuine, but we need to wait until it has been replicated.

One red flag is that he claimed he had a sample, but nobody could test it. If it is a room temperature, or close to room temperature super conductor, not a lot of equipment is needed. You just need a strong magnet to confirm the Meisnner effect. You can do this with off the shelf neodymium magnets. I have some on my fridge.

Given the historical importance of confirming the super conductivity at room temperature, I am sure you could obtain such magnets from an university department. Personally I would happily pay for an Uber to collect them.

[Waterluvian]

It works well for us. Most of the time the skeptics are right but we rarely read about those times. It’s a feature of this process, not a bug. Not that any individual comment or opinion is useful, but that’s an effect of a common attitude of, “oh yeah? Prove it!”

[bhaak]

> I can't believe that the most important discovery of my lifetime is surrounded by this cloud of uncertainty.

The 1989 cold fusion situation was already mentioned so I point towards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%E2%80%93Newton_calculu... instead.

Even the brightest scientists have egos (maybe even more than the average person) and the prospect of fame and money has clouded the mind of many persons before.

[bigbillheck]

> I can't believe that the most important discovery of my lifetime is surrounded by this cloud of uncertainty.

I'm guessing you weren't alive (or paying attention) in 1989 for the cold fusion stuff.

[jacquesm]

Potentially the most important discovery of your lifetime. Subtle but important difference.

[ajkjk]

You don't really know it's the most important until you have reason to believe it's true, though.

[fouc]

Part of that "cloud of uncertainty" is manufactured, people generating irrelevant analysis for attention.

Given the current facts we just need to wait a few days or a few weeks for replication results. Anything else is entertainment/noise/attention-getting

[wombatpm]

I was in grad school when Pons and Fleischmann published their paper on Cold Fusion. It was exciting and anyone with a lab was trying to confirm or disprove their results. I’m getting similar vibes here.

[3cats-in-a-coat]

Einstein's Relativity was called "fake Jew science". In national newspaper.

But you have to also understand every discovery is met with skepticism, because 99.9999999% of them turn out BS.

Ideally, humanity would cut it out with the idiotic hot takes (both rejecting and glorifying the paper... based on "hunches") and review the paper and try to reproduce. Unfortunately that's hard. While idiotic hot takes are easy.

And we like easy things.