> The accusation is that Young-Wan Kwon published the first paper without the consent of the rest of the LK-99 team, listed himself as third author, and left off the other four. Two hours later, the rest of the LK-99 team stuffed as much as they had into the second paper, and released it as soon as possible.
Kwon has already left the company early this year according to recent interviews. Moreover a supposed private communication with Auh [1] does suggest that Kwon was already offered an authorship in the joint 7-author paper but never replied back until the first arXiv submission went public. I don't know what Kwon actually wants out of all of this stunt, but it seems clear that there was already a big gap between Kwon and other authors and this "leak" only surfaced the gap along with LK-99.
> I don't know what Kwon actually wants out of all of this stunt
He may be just a grifter. Or he may have played a key role in the discovery but was going to be put as the 6th author (at best) in the joint paper. If so, he has already gained much more recognition than he would have otherwise.
Yeah, but that is quite amateurish. Just having the paper out first does not establish priority for the Nobel. What you need is the first paper with solid proof. It has happened more than once before that the guys with the second or third paper won the Nobel because the earlier paper was too weak.
To add a concrete example: Randy Hulet at Rice claimed BEC first, then Wieman and Cornell at Colorado, then Ketterle at MIT. Wieman, Cornell and Ketterle shared the Nobel. Hulet was passed over, because his data was judged insufficient to establish his claim.
Kwon has already left the company early this year according to recent interviews. Moreover a supposed private communication with Auh [1] does suggest that Kwon was already offered an authorship in the joint 7-author paper but never replied back until the first arXiv submission went public. I don't know what Kwon actually wants out of all of this stunt, but it seems clear that there was already a big gap between Kwon and other authors and this "leak" only surfaced the gap along with LK-99.
[1] Which has been already removed but the screenshot is available elsewhere. The commentary itself is available in: https://gall.dcinside.com/mgallery/board/view/?id=thesingula...