Blinded With Science
source link: https://hackaday.com/2023/08/12/blinded-with-science/
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62 thoughts on “Blinded With Science”
To the younglings, the title might be a reference to an oldie song, “She Blinded Me with Science”.
I haven’t seen much discussion of what went wrong.
Did the researchers test their material poorly ? Or did they explain the procedure poorly ?
Is there still a possibility that they did make a new discovery but misunderstood how ?
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alialiali says:
What really went wrong is that media is unable to tolerate the uncertainty of science and so resorts to constantly “calling it”.
We’ve been using adrenaline during cardiac arrest for 120 years and we’re still not sure if it’s worth while (see PARAMEDIC and PARAMEDIC2 trials). Why do we expect to know for sure with LK-99 within a month? Let alone with a year or ten?
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WereCatf says:
The thing that went wrong was that LK-99 is a *ceramic* — you can’t really make anything practical out of that, even if all the other claims were true (and they aren’t, so that’s kind of a moot point).
The paper claims that LK-99 will remove the need to EV batteries, it’ll make maglev trains go billion miles an hour and cost basically nothing, power cabling will have zero losses and so on and so forth, but…..well, for one, EVs need an internal power source or an external one and super-conductive wiring doesn’t remove that need. Maglevs? The biggest problem currently is wind-resistance and super-conductive cabling and magnets wouldn’t remove that. Cabling, then? It’s a ceramic, you can’t make cables out of it because it’s both brittle and it doesn’t bend.
There’s so much wrong with all the claims both in the paper and the ones floating around the Internet, because it being a ceramic is being ignored.
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pelrun says:
It doesn’t actually matter if LK-99 itself is completely unsuitable for any practical use. If it actually shows novel properties, then materials scientists can study it to improve their understanding of the underlying mechanism. Once you know *how* a material can become a room-temperature superconductor, you can then create new materials that combine it with the other properties you actually want.
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DerAxeman says:
It doesn’t show novel properties. Its not a superconductor and diamagnetism is understood.
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pelrun says:
Oh, I guess that means you’ve had physical hands-on experimental time with the original team’s sample, huh?
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DerAxeman says:
The original team refuses access to their original sample and refuses to make more. Every group reproducing the experiment confirms it is only diamagnetic and not a super conductor. If you wish to argue to the contrary I await your proof as the original team is not cooperating.
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Philip says:
The hype was a little rushed, they claimed they have sent samples to 2 other labs for testing, but looking at it from a materialistic standpoint combining Lead and Copper by most accounts would make a worse conductor not a better one.
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combinatorylogic says:
It’s ferromagnetic, not diamagnetic. Which makes it significantly more exciting than originally thought. Mind you, even a new diamagnetic material is quite a significant achievement on its own, but this thing is far bigger than that.
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WereCatf says:
“Once you know *how* a material can become a room-temperature superconductor, you can then create new materials that combine it with the other properties you actually want.”
If only materials sciences worked like that.
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Kryptylomese says:
Yep, higher temperature ceramic super conductors have been around for a long time and they haven’t shown to be useful because you can’t make wires out of them. Even if LK-99 had turned out to be an actual room temperature super conductor, it would change nothing, because it too suffers from the same ceramic material limitations of use.
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Foldi-One says:
Nothing stops you from just not using wires – what is a PCB but a generally brittle failure carrier board that can be a ceramic with some traces on it, so if you can create something like that with a ‘super conductive’ and insulating ceramic selectively laid out… (Probably with machined channel to run something like LN2 though – as ‘high temperature super conductor’ generally still means way below zero and LN2 is pretty cheap)
Just because nobody has yet found affordable/practical ways to use the existing ceramic super conductor doesn’t mean they will never will.
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Dude says:
I don’t know what sort of PCBs you have, but mine are fiberglass and copper, which are not brittle.
The issue with ceramic not being suitable for wires is that for nearly every application where you’d want the superconductor, it is used in some form of a coil, and manufacturing a coil out of a ceramic material is nearly impossible or at least exceedingly expensive.
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Chris Maple says:
Reply to Dude:
I know of 2 forms of ceramic PCBs. One was genuine ceramic, used for hybrid integrated circuits. The other (as I understand it) is ceramic composite where a ceramic replaces fiberglass in a material like FR4. The advantage for large production volumes is that holes can be punched and doesn’t wear out tooling as fast as fiberglass does.
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Dude says:
Would that be the same for FR1 and FR2?
Though plain paper and epoxy boards have a habit of shrinking too much in the oven, which makes them warp, so they can’t be used with most lead-free solder pastes because they require high temperatures.
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Foldi-One says:
Dude I did say brittle failure which also covers all the fibreglass ones as well – might be pretty impressively durable and flexes quite well but when it goes it does fail in a brittle fashion.
However I was thinking of the many wacky substrates you can find out there for varied reasons, which can include sheet glass even! Lots of times when the default fibreboard isn’t a good choice, maybe service temps, maybe its needing more rigidity, maybe its the conditions in the operating environment, or maybe you just want transparent PCB. Lots of crazy stuff out there and most of the substrates used that are not flexible or the default fibreglass are ceramics of some sort.
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Dude says:
Still, it’s not really a sensible comparison, and mostly irrelevant. Glass fiber is pretty damn bendy, whereas ceramic superconductors – and trying to make wires and coils out of them – is like trying to twist porcelain.
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Pat says:
“Yep, higher temperature ceramic super conductors have been around for a long time and they haven’t shown to be useful ”
HTS superconducting tape is maybe a decade or two old, not a “long time.”
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pelrun says:
The most interesting thing is the wide variety of results coming from the different labs. Which suggests to me that the manufacturing process isn’t fully controlled and the various samples have significant differences in impurities and structure to each other.
I’m reminded of the Fogbank story – where the US had significant problems trying to restart manufacture of a key material used in their aging nuclear weapons. All their samples failed to replicate the properties of the original stuff, and it took millions of dollars and many years of failed attempts before they finally discovered that their modern synthesis techniques were *too good* and excluded a dopant that was in the original material as an impurity and not recognised as being actually critical.
So while it’s still highly unlikely there’s anything world-shattering about LK-99, materials scientists are probably going to have a field day with it for a while until all the details are understood.
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TG says:
Yeah if only the original team would even reply to all the people begging to let them see the “original sample…”
This is basically a sophisticated prank call.-
Pat says:
Pretty much. Especially because there is no single “original sample” – the first paper already says they deposited a thin-film of it, and that’s the actual origin of the superconductivity claim. Which means the ‘floating rock’ in the paper is *not* the claimed superconductor. The bulk resistivity measurements are all way above any standard definition.
The issue with the thin-film superconductor claim is that resistivity is inversely proportional to the thickness, and there’s exactly zero mention of what the thickness is, so it’s really a “trust me bro, it’s a superconductor” claim.
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LordNothing says:
the thing hovered, they got excited, posted a video, the internet got excited, the scientifically illiterate newsmen and the usual youtube clickbait crew ran with it, both to make a quick buck. the news made the scientists excited and mistook the reception as peer review actual. it then took a few days for their humility to kick back in gear. scientists can easily get caught up in their own hype.
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combinatorylogic says:
My 2 cents on what went wrong: Koreans found an exciting new materials with properties one would never expect from such a composition. They misinterpreted what they’ve seen as superconductivity, while the truth turns out to be quite a bit more interesting – it seems to be a previously unknown kind of a ferromagnetic. Still, shame on them for missing the obvious (my first thought upon seeing their videos was “it’s absolutely a composite ferromagnetic and cannot be anything else”), but thanks for discovering something really new in material science.
And think of the applications! The larger crystals of this thing are transparent. Can you think of anything cooler than a transparent magnet?
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Pat says:
The transparent crystal samples have been the ones that were contaminated with small amounts of Fe, hence the ferromagnetism. Any magnet can be transparent if it’s got small and sparse enough bits of iron.
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combinatorylogic says:
Nope, see https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.05143 – they had clean samples, XRD confirmed, no iron contamination, yet strongly ferromagnetic (on a level of a piece of pure iron).
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Pat says:
Where does it say it’s strongly ferromagnetic? That paper doesn’t have any analysis of the sample itself (“Further analysis of our samples will follow.”) : the latter half consists of ab initio calculations, and refer to a *separate* paper regarding soft ferromagnetism. The samples there were not transparent, but “were black
thick pieces with a diameter of 6 mm and a thickness of 3 mm.”
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Pat says:
The simplest explanation is that they’re relatively inexperienced and just got fooled by a tricky situation because they were *looking* for superconductivity. Diamagnetism coupled with a conductive impurity (CuS) that has a phase change resulting in a large resistivity drop (but not to zero) – if you’re looking for superconductivity, that’s going to make you think it.
There are a few questionable things outstanding still – a few videos showing orientation locking which are likely fake, claimed “thin film” resistivity at 10^-10 ohm-cm (with no details on the thin film itself and no other measurement of resistivity that small) which only shows up in the first (three author) paper. Which kindof implies that it’s a dash of inexperience, a smidge of bad luck, and a pinch of fraud.
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