[daemontus]

I see a lot of "This must be real, why would labs publish this if they don't think it's real, they have nothing to gain." sentiment on HN lately. Or "Researcher's career would be ruined if they falsely claim to replicate.", and so on. I also want to believe! But I should add a bit of skepticism to the hype :)

- "this could ruin their career": Depends. If they posted completely fake numbers or intentionally fake videos. Sure, that would be bad. But none of this is peer reviewed, and all of this can be retracted. A contaminated sample? Oops, retract. Bad measurement methodology? Oops, retract. Sure, somebody will remember that you made the controversial paper in the first place, but as long as you are not provably fabricating, a lot can be attributed to "an honest error". There are tons of peer reviewed papers out there with errors that completely change the outcome. Does not mean the authors are "finished".

- "they have nothing to gain": Oh, they absolutely do. While "science should be fully objective", funding agencies very much aren't. Obviously, just like VC funding, science funding is not a complete coin toss. But having "the right" team and background is often as important as the idea itself. One way to get the right background is to "touch shoulders with the giants" and one way to get the right team is to be highly visible and attract talent.

So overall, if LK99 is eventually shown to be a superconductor by someone else, you have a lot to gain, even if your own initial study is not perfect.

Let's say your team synthesised something. It looks like LK99 and it has some properties that are not really superconducting but at least a bit unusual. This clearly isn't what you hoped for. Now, do you run a bunch of other controls to see if it is some form of contamination, process error, combination of both... or do you publish a vague click-bait paper on ArXiv and hope that other results will somewhat align with yours?

Finally, I'm not claiming this paper or any other paper intentionally published untrue or misleading results. Just that scientists are also people. They have FOMO, they follow trends, they see what they want to see. As always, big claims require big evidence, and so far we don't really have that. But that does not mean there isn't some truth to the big claims :)

[jpambrun]

A contaminated sample that materially change the composition but still yield a superconductor would be a novel finding.

An error in manipulation leading to an external communication on something this high profile is sure to affect your career. It's like a biologist claiming to have found evidence extraterrestrial life and having to retract. I think I would consider hara-kiri..

[daemontus]

But the thing is... except for the original authors, none of these papers so far really claim to have a room-temperature superconductor, right? They claim "simulated band structure with low Fermi level", or "unusual levels of diamagnetism", or "almost zero resistance up to -100°C (but lack of phase transition)", etc.

Yes, retracting these is still shameful, but it's not a "we found extraterrestrial life" claim. It's a "we received weird signals from a nebula that we don't understand so far" claim.

And yes, a lot of supporting but inconclusive evidence is still supporting evidence. My point is not that (most) scientists would risk lying about replicating a superconductor, but rather that uncertain or inconclusive results with a solid chunk of plausible deniability in a rapidly evolving environment go a long way towards being "in the room where it happened".