I’m not sure how significant this is. They basically said ‘we read your study and it didn’t make sense to us, nor did the video’. There was no attempt at replication. Which would be fine and all, except that others have reported varying degrees of success in their replication attempts, indicating there’s at least a little fire behind the smoke.
You’re right, they basically released a statement thay they’re incredible skeptical but they will test things further to see.
That being said the company thay initially release the video like about who it worked with to develop this compound, and one or two of the people who conducted the research released the report without the approval of the whole team. So there are some tell tale signs of a scam or half truths here.
I am hoping that this compound actually is a room temp super conductor, because it would revolutionize so many industries, but things aren’t looking great lol.
Inability to replicate results does not disprove anything. Ability to replicate results does prove something.
The production of LK-99 is not so refined to be consistent, so results will vary.
That’s not how science generally works. It’s not up to others to disprove your results. It’s up to you to prove results to them.
You generally do this by very carefully explaining what you did and what the results where. Then others can follow your instructions and get the same results.
If they don’t get the same results you haven’t proven anything.
Nobody said these researchers have proven anything. It is how science works because it’s how logic works.
Inability to prove something doesn’t mean it has been disproven. All it means is that it has not been proven.
You are turning things on their head.
If the claim can’t be replicated. it lacks evidence/proof.
Without evidence the claim is baseless. It does not have to be disproved to be considered baseless.
Ergo lack of poof is consequentially the same as being disproved in the long run. The claim is considered false.
This happens all the time, for instance the cold fusion claim in 1989, was never disproved, but it couldn’t be replicated. So it is now considered false, ergo the result is similar to being disproved, because there is no evidence it is considered false.
As I said, at this point nothing has been proven or disproven, so you’re agreeing with me that the claim is baseless.
However, lack of proof is not the same thing as being disproven at all. Disproven means it has been proven to not be true.
If I make a claim and say that it’s possible to combine flour, eggs, and milk and bake for some period of time to get a cake, that is true. At this point it has not been proven or disproven by anyone.
If you try to replicate my result and use 5 lbs of buckwheat flour, 1 egg, and 2 gallons of milk, it will not result in a cake. That does not mean you have disproven my claim. It means your replication failed. There are countless ways mess up baking a cake. We’re talking about quantum mechanics here and the precision of an oven.
If one other person tries it and succeeds in a cake being created, that does prove my claim to be true.
The issue here is that the process for making LK-99 is not deterministic at this point. Disproven means proof that it’s wrong. Lack of proof means, well… lack of proof.
lack of proof is not the same thing as being disproven at all.
Yes it is, lack of proof makes the claim baseless, the default for a baseless claim is to consider it false. Ergo the result is the same as if it actually was disproved.
But that’s not the problem here, you are reversing the burden of proof. The burden of proof is always with the one who has the claim. If he is not able to describe a process where the results can be replicated, it will ultimately after enough trials, be considered a false claim.
There is nothing in that process about actively disproving the claim.
How do I go about disproving something then?
It’s extremely hard to disprove things in general as opposed to proving them, unless you’re dealing with math or logic.
Basically, repeat the experiment under a wide range of conditions, and show that the conditions for success, if any, are far beyond the original claim. I always loved the ‘mythbusters’ approach: if one bible can’t stop a bullet, how about two bibles? ten? where is the cutoff between true and false?
We have seen a bunch of samples float, and we have seen papers detect no superconductivity on samples that don’t float. The missing damning evidence would be a paper that manages to produce samples that do float but aren’t superconducting. Instead we are getting a slow trickle of reasons why other causes for the material to float are less and less likely, while superconductivit in lk99 is still perfectly plausible. Not to mention the various theoretical papers that also seem to indicate very high temperature superconductivity is plausible to expected in lk99.
On top of all that there is a second group that has a prepub paper showing high temperature superconductivity.
For this to turn into a nothing burger either all the various observed cases of levitation would all have to be wrong somehow, or despite all theoretical expectations this material would have to be diamagnetic, while also being a high temperature superconductor (which is a pretty rare combination of properties on top), or the paper measuring high temperature superconductivity would have to be wrong and still despite all theoretical expectations this material would have to be diamagnetic not superconducting even though our (admitedly flawed) models indicate the reverse.
The onus is on the researchers making the extraordinary claims.
Extraordinary claims require solid proof. That’s like science 101.
And their proof is the report they already put out. A refusal to examine or test the proof doesn’t mean it’s invalid. That’s Science 102.
It may be invalid, I myself am extremely skeptical, but in this situation it absolutely is possible to prove that the process described doesn’t work, that’s what replication studies are for. Replicating the experiment and reporting on the results is vastly more valuable than “Your study didn’t make sense to us.”
It’s not a remotely extraordinary claim though.
They claim to have found an unreliable, method for generating impure samples of a superconductor type predicted by a 40 year old theory.
One member of their group jumped the gun on publishing before the people that did the bulk of the work were ready, so the others released more detailed info on what they had so far.
As with most of these breakthroughs, the real news comes weeks or months later after it was actually proven. It isn’t hard to push out a junk paper, what is hard is to have that junk paper replicated by others.
Further, they were shown to be liars. FTA:
Meanwhile, the Quantum Energy Research Centre was found to have falsely named local companies and research institutes as partners on its website on Thursday.
The company shut down its homepage that day.
[…]
However, LG Innotek said that it “has no connection whatsoever” with Quantum Energy Research Centre.
“We have asked the Quantum Energy Research Centre to remove our company’s logo from its website, and to explain how it has been misappropriated,” the electronic device part supplier said.
Samsung SDI and Samsung Electro-Mechanics confirmed that “no official request has been made [from Quantum Energy] for partnership.”
Strange, making claims so large that there’s no way they couldn’t be investigated and verified. Using names of companies that are either completely unconnected with them or have not been officially approached, in order to achieve a level of apparent credibility. What could be the end game of such an endeavour, attention? Fake it till you make it?
Maybe they wanted to shift the market in their favor. Get enough armchair investors interested and you could pump and dump relevant investments.
Strong possibility
I dunno how much money there is in lead futures, but I guess, maybe?
Could always pivot to a dry cleaning transactional holding company
Sad trombone
From the little I’ve read, it seems that the compound having zero electrical resistance CAN be replicated, but at -163°C, not at room temperature which is what the original paper claimed.
So, progress… potentially.
Also that some of the simulation suggest superconductivity when doped and with the right crystal formation, so hopefully other research will be better.
Cold fusion all over again
Anton Petrov put out a really nice video on this one.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=WV2AexANG34
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Too good to be true :(
