As always, this is why peer-review is taken in such high regard. Replicate, replicate, replicate.
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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Well, just to push back a little on any impression some might get from this episode of the health of science (all IMO of course)
Most things aren't subjected to replication attempts like this, largely because I think people have a decent amount of self-interest in getting on top of this material as early as possible if the claims are real, and, the manufacturing of the material is relatively trivial. In science in general, game changing technologies or techniques can get replication attention like this, but overall a lot of "discoveries or findings" just aren't challenged as there is no real incentive to do so as a researcher, to the point that often you'll get pushback if you try to publish a failed replication study.
And, lots of replications of an experiment mean teams are more likely to run into different problems at different times and solve them in parallel. It shakes the bugs out faster.
our compound shows greatly consistent x-ray diffraction spectrum with the previously reported structure data
Uhh, doesn’t look like it to me. This paper’s X-ray diffraction spectrum looks pretty noisy compared to the one from the original paper, with some clear additional/different peaks in certain regions. That could potentially affect the result. I was under the impression from the original paper that a subtle compression of the lattice structure was pretty important to formation of quantum wells for superconductivity, so if the X-ray diff isn’t spot on I’ll wait for some more failures before calling it busted.
yea interesting! It's definitely the arc I'm hoping for here ...
that either the material is tougher to make than the papers suggest, or,
to get into my fantasy land, the material they made is a superconductor but they don't really know why or how to make it the way they did as it was kinda some accident they weren't in control of. If true, it would make whatever is left of the material rather valuable and subject to some drama I'd imagine.
That tracks. Superconductor physics isn't my field (shock, gasp) but I do recall reading Chu's 1-2-3 paper way back when, in which the purpose of physical compression during synthesis of the samples was laid out in some detail.
Wait, did people actually believe this was real? I’d seen it faked before, so was a bit jaded at the news.
Glad to have peer reviews!
One fraud happened and therefore everything with the word "conductor" in it is fraud afterward? The Jan Schon scandal was about single-molecule semiconductors, which have nothing to do with lead apatite superconductors.
Scientific fraud is a weird phenomenon that many do not intuitively see coming. That it happens at all is worth keeping in mind, as well as the manner in which it is done. When a new finding seems to good to be true, it helps to remember that it may just be so.
In this particular case, my feeling is that an unhealthy lab dynamic led to a small group of people get carried away with their excitement. I'm betting fraud hasn't happened here, but rather scientific negligence in the pursuit of glory. All my relatively uninformed speculation of course ...
From what I've gathered the group of 3 comprise one elder and former supervisor and two former graduate students. Don't underestimate the weird sway a scientific elder can have on younger researchers, nor the strange psychology that can develop around the pursuit of one's legacy. Competing with Einstein and Nobel prize winners can be a helluva drug, and the elder/senior research can influence all sorts of decisions and aspects of the research through the amount of deference the receive from the younger researchers.
As for the two younger researchers, without knowing where their careers are up to, they're probably fairly desperate to get more papers and grants, as all researchers are. Once you've started a project, you want something out of the time you've spent on it. If you've dived in on a long shot project that might go no where, you start to really want to find something in there the longer it goes all while sunk-cost fallacies haunt you everyday and pull you along longer and deeper than you really wanted to go. Combined with respect and deference to an elder pushing them along, the young researchers may very well have found themselves in a weirdly confusing space with not entirely healthy mindsets. I'm talking about losing perspective on what matters in terms of research/scientific integrity as well as managing resources for the sake of their life and career and how much trust they have for their research group on the whole, where a good deal of weird suppression followed by dramatic outbursts in an unhealthy mental health sense can happen.
Now that is all speculation, of course, but I write it just to illustrate that these kind of situations can occur, especially in science/research, and it's helpful to be aware when dramatic confusing things like this situation arise.
That’s fair, I could’ve easily been wrong!
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I did not know this story! Thanks! Important precedent it seems in framing a foundation of scepticism.
Unfortunately it’s a 3 part (~2.5 hour) series, but I thought it was worth the time. Definitely made me wary on the topic LOL
I was, and am, skeptical, but I also must admit, the potential breakthrough is teasing my psyche with that feeling of just wanting it to be real. A part of me hopes that maybe it will still end up confirmed by other peers, but, granted, it was a low chance even when the news first came out.
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From what I have heard, it's not supposed to be that expensive or even difficult to make. They should have sent actual samples of the material to a dozen different universities from a batch they share their own data measurements about. Save everyone a lot of time about doubts that it's manufactured correctly.
From that article:
“The general public seems oddly pumped about how ‘easy’ the 4-day, multistep, small batch, solid state synthesis is,”
The process is a 3-stage heating-holding-cooling process which they haven't published the precise temperature profile for. The papers also claim only 4 samples were ever made in total, 2 of them got (destructively) analyzed by gas spectroscopy and crystallography, while of the other 2, one got further temperature annealed, and both got electrically characterized.
Chances are, they themselves don't know exactly how they got what they got, and may or may not be capable of producing more samples.
I imagine they only have a few grams of the stuff. And they're not highly motivated to be debunked immediately
but if it were real, they were claiming it could be manufactured easily, so making some samples to send out to research labs would not be too difficult
Right. And they haven't. Now what may we deduce about their confidence in these results?
For anyone interested, there is a forum thread which is the closest thing we have to a live blog, along with the thread author's opinions on how veritable the claims of each party currently known to try and replicate the study are.
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I think it will be a while before we know what's really happened.
Something I find striking is the question of where their original material is and where's the video evidence of them testing it?
If I allow myself to be somewhat conspiratorial, I'd imagine that they know the material they made may have been somewhat accidental and that any further progress may depend on analyzing the material itself to determine what makes it work, which means they may want to keep its location somewhat secret.
Otherwise, I'm inclined to think that there's something funky going on within the dynamics of the research group and that not one of them is entirely on top of everything that happened with the material and so the evidence got mixed up and foggy.
It is notoriously hard to replicate things in labs, especially with material science.
This was attempt to do it within 2 days of the paper being published.
To add to that, the original researchers apparently had 10% successes rate in their lab, they wanted to perfect it before publishing their paper.
Bad luck was that it leaked, so to make sure somebody else doesn't get credit for their work they published what they had within hours.
It likely will take months before this will be verified.
10% success rate suggests there's some hidden factor they haven't discovered themselves yet, might influence the success rates of other labs. (assuming of course the claim is not fabricated)
That's often how it goes. Something doesn't do what you expect, so you have to keep trying new things until you figure out why it wasn't what you expect.
It's a shame that it so far seems that this superconductor experiment was a bust, but even still, I'm happy to see the scientific process at work.
What, one failed experiment about 15 minutes after the paper was first published is sufficient grounds for declaring the technology a bust is it?
No but a previous history of making shit up and falsifying data along with a failure to replicate?
They don't have a history of making stuff up. Just because one group did doesn't automatically mean everyone else is. The probability that something is made up doesn't change just because somebody previously did or did not make something up.
Jeez you seem like you have some personal vendetta against this lab
For the last twenty-some years, yeah. Unfortunately. People love to hate on stuff.
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Ok, what is the importance of a room temperature semiconductor.
Room temperature superconductor. Not semiconductor, that's something different.
With it we can build all sorts of otherwise impossible technologies.
Batterys with massive charge capacities that last weeks.
Stupidly high speed hover trains.
Electrical wires that don't heat up with use, don't waste energy, and can never electric you.
Body armour that actually repels bullets.
Probably some kind of horrific bomb.
Probably some kind of horrific bomb.
It looks like the big technological leap in relation to 'How can we use superconductors to hurt things' is to use them in making advanced EMP devices. It doesn't seem like anyone has figured out any other obvious use cases for them that massively change or improve upon the other horrific devices that we've already come up with.
In regards to potential for use in war crimes, it could be a lot worse.
One thing I could think of would be miniaturized railguns. A large part of the bulk in rail guns at the moment is the cooling system for the electro magnets and capacitors to deal with inefficient power delivery.
A room temperature superconductor would fit both problems.
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Room temp superconducting magnets should make motors and power generation a bit more efficient. Magnetic plasma confinement gets a shit load easier as well.
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These are some of the dumbest proposed applications I've ever seen for this. You have no idea what you're talking about.
That's not a nice thing to say. I bet they —and everyone— could learn from getting some of the myths dispelled, instead of just getting insulted.
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Wires that wouldn't electrocute us?
Is it because we would have resistance and it wouldn't so it'd ignore us?
Yes basically.
You get electrocuted when you touch a bare copper wire because the human body is less resistant to electricity than copper (your nervous system is optimized to not be resistant to electricity). Electricity would prefer to go through you than the cable.
But your nervous system still has some resistance, and you can't get less resistance than zero resistance, so regardless of what you're doing, the electricity would prefer to stay in the superconducting cable.
For the same reason you could also submerge the cable in water and nothing would happen.
The reason all this is very useful is that currently in order to prevent everybody getting electric shocks you have to insulate the cable in rubber. If you could safely make bare cables you could save an awful lot of rubber.
This has so many errors. Copper is a far better conductor than people. Set up a multimeter for resistance across your skin if you're dubious, it'll be in the kΩ per cm. Current will flow if a potential difference is present, regardless of whether there is a less resistive path available. Also the material in question is a metal oxide, not a metal. It's brittle. So making it into a cable in the first place will be incredibly difficult and expensive. And even in their own paper they showed a limiting current of something like 400 mA, which is not suitable for high power applications.
Your skin actually has quite a lot of resistance especially compared to a copper wire, while it's definitely bad news for a current to be flowing through your nerves it would need to get there first. Current doesn't really 'choose' a particular path either; if you have a potential difference V between two points the current will take all paths available between them and Ohm's law I = V/R tells us that the current will be greatest through the path with the least resistance. The reason you don't get a shock when you touch a properly insulated wire is that the path that includes your finger also includes the resistance R of the insulation which is very high so correspondingly I is very low.
A room temperature superconductor would allow 100% efficiency for energy transmission and allow all sorts of technologies like cheap maglev trains using flux pinning for example.
room temperature semiconductor
You know how your phone and computer heat up when doing something intensive? This happens due to the resistance inside it. Superconductors would allow this electricity to pass through with virtually no resistance, generating no heat.
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