I’m a lay person, and I’ve been beating the skepticism drum on this since day 1. If someone had actually discovered a room temperature, ambient pressure superconductor, their notes would be meticulous and precise, they would have replicated their results multiple times before publishing anything at all, and they’d already be lining up untold scores of investors. In other words, anybody that discovers how to do this is going to be debilitatingly rich forever. And they’re going to treat it as such.
Instead, what we got was much more akin to the press coverage of this year’s latest perpetual motion machine. What I don’t know is whether the people that originally announced LK-99 knew it wasn’t what they claimed, or they were confused but hopeful. In other words, were they hucksters looking for attention, or innocently ignorant and hoping someone could clarify.