• cyd@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    This is one of the more lazy (yet arrogant) commentaries on the LK-99 affair. Yes, the material turned out not to be a superconductor, but this was proven by several labs doing clever and painstaking detective work in record time. This guy doesn’t engage with any of that and only points to a few bad graphs in the original Korean papers, complaining that they’re shoddy work. Yes, the graphs were bad, and this was already widely noted weeks ago, so his complaints are far from novel insights.

    But the point is that there were bit that were hard to explain away, which meant you couldn’t outright dismiss the claims just from looking at the Korean papers. This was why all those labs raced to try and replicate. And then people worked out how the phase transition in Cu2S, together with ferromagnetic impurities in the samples, conspired to produce fake “smoking gun” signals of superconductivity. This was done by actual empirical science, not just the surface level complaining offered in this video.