[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.

[michaelt]

> 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.

Well, I've heard the name LK-99 is from the initials of discoverers Lee and JH Kim, and the year of discovery (1999).

So I don't buy that they were under great time pressure due to fear of getting scooped. Surely they'd have mountains of samples if they've been making it for 24 years?

[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...

[7373737373]

I guess that's why stories are so important - they contain this information - how and why things happen(ed), instead of just what happened and when

[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.

[nemo44x]

Limited samples and the ones they have are extremely impure could be a reason. There’s super conductivity in them but method to make them is unrefined.

[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.

[mdip]

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, I guess. I'm not at all surprised there's this much drama around this. It sounds like it's a matter of a little time and we'll know what's going on.

   > Einstein's Relativity was called "fake Jew science".

Thankfully, along the way, we discovered that "Jew Science" is quite good. I imagine an alien civilization visiting the Earth at that time trying to make sense of the arguments being given as to why one particular race/nationality's science is better than another's ... I think we'd find our answer to the Fermi paradox, maybe.