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Big doubt. People have self-published shit like this a lot over the past decade or two. Usually it turns out to be a measurement error if it goes anywhere at all. Post again when this is peer-reviewed.
Edit: A month on, here's Nature's autopsy. The big question for me is why this one went viral when most USOs just fade into obscurity.
If would be one hell of an error, if so, to get measurements across several different properties and temperature ranges that were all consistent with superconductivity.
But even if true, we can make lots of things in very small quantities in laboratories that are far too expensive for practical manufacture. That's where engineering will come in.
If would be one hell of an error, if so, to get measurements across several different properties and temperature ranges that were all consistent with superconductivity.
You're right, maybe it's fraud, at least partly.
I understand it's very hard to measure the conductivity of a microscopic crystal attached to other different crystals, which is why a lot of less-than-solid claims about high-temperature superconductors get made.
Here's a video of a macroscopic piece of the material magnetically levitating.
Sure, it could be faked, but that would be a bit more than the usual "massaged the numbers a bit to discover a really small effect" stuff.
At first sight, it looks fake:
As I said, it could be faked. But that fakery would involve a very deliberate premeditated fraud and when it is found out (as it will be in short order with something this extreme) the three researchers involved in this would be completely ruined. What are they gaining out of this that would be worth it?
Also, if they're rigging up a complete fake, why would they half-ass it? If your first take has the fake superconductor fall down why not delete that one and do another take where it doesn't?
I'm not saying this video is proof, I'm saying that this is not some Em-drive situation where the results are so fine and fiddly that it's only barely peeking through the data and it could be a result of tiny errors and wishing really hard. The comment I was responding to was talking about how difficult it is to measure the properties of microscopic crystals and I was pointing out that this is a big ol' chunk of stuff being poked around with the tip of a finger and hovering millimeters over a magnet. This is going to be straightforward to verify.
Edit: Found the companion article that's specifically about the levitating sample.
Welp, here's Nature delivering the verdict. Pretty much on the schedule I expected, and here's the update I'd promised myself I'd do.
LK-99's amazing properties are Cu2S's amazing properties. It's a chunk of stuff with embedded copper sulphide. Like I said, it's hard to verify the properties of one material mixed in with other materials, and in this case they didn't even try very hard.
Here the microscopic crystals were the impurities not the "superconductor", but it's the same issue.
Sadly, yeah, this appears to be a solid case against LK-99.
But this is all I ever wanted. This is not validation for all the negative-nellies who were instantly dumping all over the possibility that LK-99 could have been superconductive before these further tests were done. When these sorts of apparent breakthroughs are made the proper response is to do as these people publishing in Nature did - take it seriously enough to actually check it out. That's the only way to avoid missing out on the actual breakthroughs.
Oh yeah, replication is critical. If it had been real this would have changed everything, even more than reported. Higher temperature superconducters can carry more current and withstand stronger fields than lower temperature ones, so a RTSC might be able to replace Li-ion batteries as well. They probably should have done a more rigorous test if they thought they really had something; most of these USOs don't get replicated because nobody has the funding to spend time on them, they basically got lucky it went viral.
This is not validation for all the negative-nellies who were instantly dumping all over the possibility that LK-99 could have been superconductive before these further tests were done.
I'm in this picture. Like I said, it's far from the first time. It's pretty much the same as a guy claiming he saw bigfoot, you can't prove him wrong until you search the same patch of forest, but it's a lot of effort to do that after 1000 unsuccessful searches and I think it's entirely valid to just go "yeah right, give me more evidence before I bother".
If it's 1000 unsuccessful searches for the same thing, then sure, I wouldn't have much hope for search #1001. But LK-99 was a new material of a type that hadn't come up in this context before, and there's no reason to assume that room-temperature superconductivity is literally impossible.
Heck, the Em drive had plenty of reason to think it was literally impossible, and IMO it was still worth the effort that went into checking it out. We've been wrong about impossibilities before.
I think the main thing that bothered me is that for a lot of people it wasn't "give me more evidence before I bother”. It was "give me more evidence before anyone else should bother." They seemed outright hostile to the notion that we should be checking this out, often jumping straight to "it's a scam, they're trying to do a fraud." It doesn't sound like you were in that camp so you're probably not in that picture after all. Perhaps just a bit out of frame to the side, but that's okay. :)