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In theory, science is a completely rational and transparent enterprise. Scientists collect data, formulate hypotheses, and collect more data to find out which hypothesis is correct. Anyway, that’s the idea. The reality is that real science is often messy and opaque. Data can be ambiguous. Scientists can be bullish. The process of changing consensus always involves not only theory and data, but also politics and intellectual fashion. Throw in social media, fanboy culture, preprint archives, and virality. We now have a world where all kinds of strange things breed, appearing, disappearing, and reappearing, like quantum virtual particles. All kinds of outlandish discoveries are floating around the information ecosystem before peer-reviewed journals can tell whether they’re real or not. And scientists don’t agree on whether this is a good thing.
This iteration of flash mob science erupted last summer, when Twitter users began promoting research by a South Korean team that announced it had discovered a material that is superconducting at room temperature and pressure. Supporting this claim was a video showing a partially floating mass of material. As we reported at the time, this discovery, if replicated, would have enormous practical implications for things like levitating trains and quantum computing.
Then the story fell apart. Numerous teams around the world joined in to replicate the study, and found that the material – a copper, lead and phosphate crystal called LK-99 – does not appear to be a superconductor after all. did. The strange magnetic effect is probably caused by a more mundane phenomenon called diamagnetism. “Many things are diamagnetic, including plastics, graphite, and humans,” says Leslie Shoup, a chemistry professor at Princeton University. “There was a famous experiment where a frog was floated on top of a giant magnet.” Within a week, the story was gone.
Or did you do it? Not everyone had given up hope. In China, several teams were studying a similar material called copper-substituted lead apatite, which has a similar chemical composition to LK-99. This month, they published a paper on the preprint server arXiv in which they reported that while they are not superconducting at room temperature, they show evidence that they are superconducting at temperatures achievable in a normal home freezer. Breakthrough. Twitter is buzzing again.
“Two Chinese laboratories working on replicating LK-99 appear to have discovered a room-temperature superconductor.” I have written Christian Cale in an X post that received 4.1 million views. “It’s more like ‘room temperature’ than room temperature. The paper says 250K, which is -10 degrees Fahrenheit or -23 degrees Celsius. If this is true, that’s still a significant number.”
California-based engineer Andrew McCallip was featured last year for his DIY efforts to replicate the LK-99. wired The magazine published a photo of a voltmeter with the needle pointing to “We’re So Back.”
Many scientists who make a living studying superconductors rolled their eyes at the reproduction of the extraordinary claims about LK-99. Peter Armitage, a professor of physics at Johns Hopkins University, says there’s no reason to think these materials show any promise. “The chance that they discovered anything to do with superconductivity is almost zero. Based on prior knowledge, House Lint predicted that he could be the same high-temperature superconductor as LK-99. “I do,” he says. “The original motivation was flawed, the experimental work was sloppy, and when examined, previous data showed no evidence of superconductivity at all. So why expect anything interesting to happen with this class of compounds?” Can it be done? I think this work should be completely ignored.”
“So far, most scientists (including myself) have remained silent on Twitter, and for us it’s clearly nothing,” Shope says. “Based on the data I have seen, there is no good reason to suspect that this class of materials has the potential for high-temperature superconductivity.”
But not everyone is so pessimistic. “This is a very interesting result,” says theoretical physicist Sinead Griffin of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “Two independent teams appear to have come together and produced similar results. My experimental friends say their work is of high quality. One will be replicated after peer review. It means there is a need.”
When asked about his intuition on whether the superconductivity claims will come true, Griffin said: Let me just say that it is very difficult to synthesize. ”
One reason worthy researchers can think so differently is that the field remains full of unanswered questions. At very low temperatures, within a few degrees of absolute zero, superconductivity phenomena are fairly well understood. According to quantum physics, electrons can form a type of distributed mutual identity called Cooper pairs. This common identity allows him to connect countless hundreds of billions of electrons into one entity, allowing current to flow without loss of energy. Something similar should happen in high-temperature superconductors, but no one has yet come up with a theoretical mechanism to explain it. This means that it is not yet possible to create superconducting materials from first principles, in the way that, for example, pharmaceutical companies try to make drugs by building molecules that function through known biochemical pathways.
“New types of superconductors are almost always discovered by chance; they are rarely predicted in advance. And in some cases, the mechanism of superconductivity may be completely different from our previous understanding.” Yes,” Shope said.
One of the main types of well-studied superconducting compounds is copper oxide ceramics, which were discovered in the 80s. To date, the mechanisms by which they function are not well understood. “People thought there was an upper limit to the temperature at which superconductivity would develop, but copper oxide ceramics have significantly exceeded this limit,” Shope says. “So while we can’t rule out the possibility of finding room-temperature, atmospheric-pressure superconductors, we don’t have a very good idea of where to look for them.” Currently, we don’t know the temperature at which solids exhibit superconductivity. has no theoretical upper limit.
Some researchers have lamented the social media frenzy that ensues over unreviewed research posted on sites like arXiv, but the speed with which new discoveries spread makes it worth the occasional hassle of preprint servers. Some researchers feel that there is. “There’s a problem with overhyping something that hasn’t been peer-reviewed,” Griffin says. “But peer review also has serious problems. The longest my peer review process was was two and a half years. So you can’t rely on peer review to make rapid progress.”
Given the large gaps in our current understanding, it is quite possible that one or more materials exist that exhibit superconductivity at room temperature and pressure, but the only way for anyone to find it is with patience, It’s a combination of patience and luck. In other words, it’s very likely that one day some little-known research team in the world will publish a report on a preprint server claiming to have made a world-changing discovery, and it will turn out to be true. Sho.