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

https://twitter.com/8teAPi/status/1685294623449874432

by electricships • 3 years ago

72 61 3 years ago

twitter.com

fouc2• 3 years ago

Reads like fanfiction at this point.

luca_null• 3 years ago

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.

Waterluvian• 3 years ago

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!”

ajkjk• 3 years ago

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

3cats-in-a-coat• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

wslh• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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

jacquesm• 3 years ago

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

fouc2• 3 years ago

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

oxfordmale2• 3 years ago

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.

nemo44x2• 3 years ago

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.

c7b• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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?

bigbillheck• 3 years ago

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.

bhaak• 3 years ago

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.

wombatpm• 3 years ago

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.

moralestapia• 3 years ago

All of this is just noise.

The experiment has to be reproduced and measured by others.

Then we will know.

mrtksn• 3 years ago

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.

jpeter• 3 years ago

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

viraptor2• 3 years ago

It's in progress https://nitter.net/skdh/status/1684917544103116800 There will be a live stream once the material is ready apparently.

Related Twitter space recording available https://twitter.com/andrewmccalip/status/1685465431317114880

(That's the only one I'm aware of. There may be more)

fnordpiglet• 3 years ago

My understanding is it’s 4 days minimum and the ease of reproduction was mostly a HN/twitter hallucination.

DyslexicAtheist• 3 years ago

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

smcl• 3 years ago

In Wright's case what's funnier is that after his little trickery in his attempts to prove he's Satoshi (which fell to bits immediately), he was willing to go to extraordinary lengths to keep up the act. He came up with some Back To The Future style excuse for not being in possession of certain keys saying that he'd somehow split them into N parts and had arranged for some bonded courier to show up at a given day (which obviously didn't happen). Additionally he fought against the estate of a former business partner, persuaded the judge that he was Satoshi and therefore worth billions and owes the estate $100m in damages:

Following a three-week trial in late 2021, a jury found Wright liable for conversion but awarded Kleiman's estate US$100 million in damages while Kleiman's estate had sought upwards of US$25 billion at trial. Wright took the position that verdict served as a vindication of his role in inventing bitcoin and stated that he would not appeal the jury's findings

Really childish stuff.

juujian3• 3 years ago

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...

greggsy• 3 years ago

Their tests aren’t wasted. Negative validation adds to the corpus.

ncallaway2• 3 years ago

Do your due diligence before you claim that you broke physics as we know it

Do room temperature semi conductors break physics as we know it? I didn’t think they contradicted known physics, which is why so many people were researching them.

What known physics do they break?

notRobot• 3 years ago

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

resolutebat• 3 years ago

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.

ble378• 3 years ago

Bc that's not how independent scientific verification works. Other labs need to replicate it themselves to avoid/reduce any bias from the original experiment.

aae42• 3 years ago

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.

0xbadc0de5• 3 years ago

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

asimpletune• 3 years ago

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.

mabbo• 3 years ago

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.

oxfordmale2• 3 years ago

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

Riledcat• 3 years ago

Ning Li’s superconductor anti-gravity claims are another good comparison. Very senior scientist, big claims, no repeatable results by any other teams. 30 years on and still no antigravity effect.

ssrc• 3 years ago

Well, there's the relatively recent Schön scandal.

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

BSEdlMMldESB• 3 years ago

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?

ThePhysicist• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

How many samples do you think they have?

techdragon• 3 years ago

This is fundamentally the major problem.

It’s obvious there’s a limited number of samples and they potentially don’t feel like they have a complete grasp on how to reliably produce more using their current level of knowledge regarding the process they used to create the first one… sometimes science involves luck. They have been working on this for years, I can completely believe a non-trivial portion of that time was spent trying to go from a fluke to having at least some ability to produce samples that demonstrate superconducting properties.

They may have only a half dozen samples of varying purity and quality…

The samples may not be particularly “strong” and given the powder based process involved may be too brittle to safely “send” and thus require careful hand courier delivery like a fresh organ for transplant, just without the urgency…

It’s entirely possible they may be mistaken and it’s not a superconductor, but these people are not fools, so I’m inclined to “give them enough rope” and to let this all play out and see where the either falter and the falsehoods exposed by the absence of any further evidence, they are are shown their mistakes once others get their hands on samples, other’s reproduction proves them correct, or their samples are studied by others and the evidence from their paper proves to be correct regardless of novel theories regarding the mechanism of superconductivity involved.

Science is a process, and to be honest it’s fun watching how fast people are pouring on the gas and trying to find out if this is real or not … stark contrast to the abject scepticism and shoestring budgets given to many innovative potential ideas.

kimorpark• 3 years ago

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

SunghoYahng• 3 years ago

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.

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

Related Stories