• Bobert@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Except the top comment on the Hacknernews thread suggests otherwise.

    Edit for reply that won’t post otherwise:

    It is absolutely laughable to assume that Chinese researchers wouldn’t forge a discovery for financial gain. Millions, if not Billions, have flooded into companies who are even adjacent to cutting edge superconductor manufacturing in just this week since the first news broke of LK-99. They are putting themselves in the running for hundreds of millions of investment dollars. And if they so cared for the process they would submit to a proper peer review before attempting to post “proof” of anything on a TikTok-esque video platform.

    • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      This particular replication attempt appears to be Chinese, yes. But it makes no sense for Chinese researchers to be deliberately faking the replication of some unrelated Korean scientists’ supposed fraud (which makes no sense to be fraud in the first place). What could they possibly gain from it aside from the ruination of their own reputations as well?

      I could believe that LK-99 is not actually truly classically superconductive, but instead has a bunch of weird properties that suckered its creators into thinking it was. It seems unlikely but eh, maybe. Weird things pop out of the universe sometimes. But it’s really implausible that this is all a deliberate fraud. If you’re going to make fraudulent claims about inventing a new kind of superconductor the last thing you’d make up is something that anyone can make for themselves with a few basic ingredients and a pottery kiln. That ultra-high-pressure room temperature superconductor is the perfect counterpoint - it was so hard to replicate that it took ages to show it was fake.