So the authors are disciples of a professor specialized in superconductor, their own Master and PhD were about superconductor, then they created a lab/company specifically for researching superconductor. This is contrary to my earlier belief that they were just normal chemists/physicists that happened to stumble upon an interesting material.
Unless they're lying through their teeth, it's hard to believe they would not recognize an actual SC when they see one.
Lee was stuck as an adjunct professor for 19 years. Kim thinks that physicists all have their head up their ass and he knows the shortcut to discovering superconductivity. And nature wouldn't publish their paper.
Combined with their inability to accurately measure Tc and a lot of skepticism already out there that their graphs show what they say they do this looks like poor science.
Which is not to accuse them of lying. It looks like they're just not very good, but think they're geniuses.
That graphic isn't saying there's a shortcut, it's basically saying that physicists need to work harder and try many many many many more materials than they do. Not quite trial and error since the classes of materials should be informed by some theory, but far more - multiple thousands per individual.
He states it took 1000 attempts with two steps in the process requiring a "stroke of luck". This doesn't sound like it's going to be easy to replicate or verify.
The fourth step, chromatography, ensures that every height on the test film is a consistent compound, from then on you'd figure out which compound that it is, and reproduce it separately and retest it, which is what they claim to have done.
I love the colorful play-by-play. It could almost be a kdrama.
It's also kind of crazy that one of the authors did over 1000 experiments until he found LK-99, regardless of whether it checks out. Talk about a grind mindset.
Material science can be like that … you’re pretty sure your theory works and your results don’t wildly invalidate it, but they aren’t good enough or are missing a property or something… and it turns out you could very easily have made a bad batch, poorly aligned fibers, badly mixed epoxy, or any number of possible issues… so you try again and again to get it right… sometimes it’s for very little incremental progress in state of the art… other times it might be a Nobel prize winning superconductor.
In undergrad, I spent countless hours with a mortar and pestle, sintering, and annealing to research a particular superconductor, never getting much sleep because I had to wake up every couple hours to make sure nothing had gone awry... It tickles me that they were doing the same thing. Hoping that they get the big win here, for all of our sakes.
Yup. Also tickles me that I might have had better equipment than this team, though we still had to source sample carriers from McDonalds.
The multi-million-dollar measurement apparatus required us to put samples in disposable tubes that cost about a dollar each. They turned out to have the exact same physical properties as a McDonalds straw, so once a week someone made a food run and grabbed a handful on the way out.
He’s just some guy at an aerospace startup who is trying to make some lol.
Problem with his approach is that the synthesis requires some materials that are restricted to academic/scientific labs (like red phosphorus), so he’s probably not going to be first to replicate.
LOL they really renamed it X? I see they even bought x.com which surely they paid some ridiculous amount for, and yet they wasn’t able to spend any cent on original logo, at least X.org logo as an orange O.
Musk has owned the X.com domain since at least 2017. [1] And even that was buying it back from PayPal. X.com was an online bank co-founded by Musk in 1999 which was later on merged into PayPal. [2]
Elon has personally owned x.com for a number of years now. Timeline as I remember it is Elon bought it in the late 90's, it changed hands when paypal merged with Elon's payment company, then he bought it back in 2017ish
Still make me laugh. I doubt the 2017 transfer costed $10. Let’s just recall all the more that domains are never really own, and that seems all the more crazy to my mind. Though I guess that when you let single individuals able to claim indefinitely large amount of ownership, that’s unavoidable waste of resources.
I don’t criticize any individual for simply implementing what the social structure lead them to do. That is, my messages were not meant into "name and shame" any specific person. That’s really the overall social game that I found laughable.
Using a unicode character might have been deliberate. It lets anyone stick your logo on a post on another platform. Allows viral marketing even in places where posting an image is high friction and/or where hyperlinks are banned.
We'll have to wait and see if such a move is a good one...
Elon Musk re-bought the domain 6 years ago, after having originally owned it since 1999, apparently being very attached to it [0]. As for the logo, yeah, I agree there.
Seems to have the right energy
[edit thanks folks] https://nitter.net/i/status/1684433849781202944
Here’s a more colorful play by play as well:
https://nitter.net/8teapi/status/1684586672917565443