• CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
    2·
    1 year ago

    Welp, here’s Nature delivering the verdict. Pretty much on the schedule I expected, and here’s the update I’d promised myself I’d do.

    LK-99’s amazing properties are Cu2S’s amazing properties. It’s a chunk of stuff with embedded copper sulphide. Like I said, it’s hard to verify the properties of one material mixed in with other materials, and in this case they didn’t even try very hard.

    Here the microscopic crystals were the impurities not the “superconductor”, but it’s the same issue.

    • FaceDeer@kbin.social
      2·
      1 year ago

      Sadly, yeah, this appears to be a solid case against LK-99.

      But this is all I ever wanted. This is not validation for all the negative-nellies who were instantly dumping all over the possibility that LK-99 could have been superconductive before these further tests were done. When these sorts of apparent breakthroughs are made the proper response is to do as these people publishing in Nature did - take it seriously enough to actually check it out. That’s the only way to avoid missing out on the actual breakthroughs.

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
        1·
        1 year ago

        Oh yeah, replication is critical. If it had been real this would have changed everything, even more than reported. Higher temperature superconducters can carry more current and withstand stronger fields than lower temperature ones, so a RTSC might be able to replace Li-ion batteries as well. They probably should have done a more rigorous test if they thought they really had something; most of these USOs don’t get replicated because nobody has the funding to spend time on them, they basically got lucky it went viral.

        This is not validation for all the negative-nellies who were instantly dumping all over the possibility that LK-99 could have been superconductive before these further tests were done.

        I’m in this picture. Like I said, it’s far from the first time. It’s pretty much the same as a guy claiming he saw bigfoot, you can’t prove him wrong until you search the same patch of forest, but it’s a lot of effort to do that after 1000 unsuccessful searches and I think it’s entirely valid to just go “yeah right, give me more evidence before I bother”.

        • FaceDeer@kbin.social
          3·
          1 year ago

          If it’s 1000 unsuccessful searches for the same thing, then sure, I wouldn’t have much hope for search #1001. But LK-99 was a new material of a type that hadn’t come up in this context before, and there’s no reason to assume that room-temperature superconductivity is literally impossible.

          Heck, the Em drive had plenty of reason to think it was literally impossible, and IMO it was still worth the effort that went into checking it out. We’ve been wrong about impossibilities before.

          I think the main thing that bothered me is that for a lot of people it wasn’t "give me more evidence before I bother”. It was “give me more evidence before anyone else should bother.” They seemed outright hostile to the notion that we should be checking this out, often jumping straight to “it’s a scam, they’re trying to do a fraud.” It doesn’t sound like you were in that camp so you’re probably not in that picture after all. Perhaps just a bit out of frame to the side, but that’s okay. :)