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seewhydee | 2 years ago

Yeah. I would argue that he displayed some bad science of his own. He kept harping on about how the LK-99 paper didn't show resistivity going down to exactly zero, but had a residual resistivity. But that is exactly what you would have seen with a mixed phase sample with some superconductor and some normal material. It took proper scientific detective work to distinguish the possibilities, not this kind of silly snark.

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hn_throwaway_99|2 years ago

I didn't interpret his criticisms that way at all, and given that his criticisms with both the resistivity graph and the not-Meissner effect turned out to be exactly correct, I'd give him a bit more credit.

As someone who remembers the original cold fusion debacle well, this felt exactly the same to me: announce a result with a ton of unnecessary hype and fanfare (I mean, the closing sentence in the paper was just absurd in my opinion) without first trying to (a) at least call up some experts in superconductivity to get their opinion, or at least (b) write a paper with less of a "new era for humanity" tone. This smelled 100% of these researchers chasing glory without a modicum of introspection. I thought the most important part of the video is where the professor said that scientists are taught that when they get weird results, their first instinct should absolutely be to question it: what could have gone wrong? how could my experimental setup have been flawed? These researchers showed none of that appropriate skepticism.

thrdbndndn|2 years ago

What do you mean by "turned out" though?

The video is published merely 1 day ago, when the consensus that "LK-99 isn't it" had already been formed, and these points have been long discussed by other scientists and random people on Internet long time ago.

There is nothing newsworthy about these points; they're even borderline hindsight.