Worth noting, even if the material does not end up with full-on superconducting properties, it could easily still represent advancement in the field. One way or another, it does appear to be unusual.
I can pretty easily see someone getting excited about the prospect, being afraid of getting scooped somehow, and so rushing to publish to lock in their fame before all the necessary work has been done. A little unethical, but certainly understandable. And even if mistaken, it’s still another step in the scientific process.
My poor understanding of this situation is that, of the team working on it, one guy was like “We need to hold off on publishing until we’re 100% sure.” Then another guy was like “lol, gonna publish anyway and leave you off the paper.” The hesitant guy gets wind and rushes to publish (with everyone included) so as to at least be included in the process.
Also, there’s a thing about the first published one only had 3 people on it, making it eligible for a Nobel, but more than that does not qualify.
But overall, I agree! It’s not like it being publicized stops them from working on it. They will still be working on it, and it’s definitely a step towards progress. Technological process tends to be lots of small improvements to the same system over time until someone comes up with a huge leap. Then the process begins again by constantly improving on that new technology. Hopefully, this is that next huge leap in energy.
Plus, with their process so far published, more people are able to work on it without starting from scratch. It would suck for the original scientists, but be a net good overall if the early publication led to someone else being able to move farther then them because they now have access to it.
Public stocks is just gambling. Some people gambling on a potential win is a given.
Imo the world will be a better place when stocks is looked at the same way as online poker. Because right now it has this high aura of validity around it which I think it really does not deserve.
What people think will result in this potential superconductor has no real effect or predictive value on reality.
<span style="color:#323232;">The writer is a science commentator
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If you haven’t yet heard of LK-99, where have you been? Over the past week and more, this pebble-sized dark rock — made of lead, phosphorus, copper and oxygen — has pushed social media into meltdown, sent stock markets surging and put Silicon Valley investors into a spin.
Scientists all over the world struggled to make sense of the hallowed lump. One enthusiast livestreamed his effort to bake a replica, with 16,000 Twitch viewers tuning in to stare at a kiln.
According to scientists in South Korea, LK-99 is a room-temperature superconductor that can work at normal pressure. If true, it represents colossal progress. Superconductors are materials that can conduct an electrical current with zero resistance, which means zero energy loss. They generally operate only at impractically low temperatures or fantastically high pressures. MRI machines, for example, use a niobium-titanium alloy cooled by liquid helium to below minus 263C.
But a room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor made from cheap materials would pave the way for perfectly efficient high-capacity power grids, desktop quantum computing, fusion reactors and even levitating trains. Hence the race in Europe, the US, Russia and Japan to find so-called high-temperature superconductors. Any breakthrough would be a Nobel Prize shoo-in.
But there’s a catch: proof remains elusive. Superconductivity, first discovered in 1911, is notoriously difficult to confirm in the lab. Mistaken sightings are so common they are nicknamed USOs, or Unidentified Superconducting Objects.
An electrical current, essentially a flow of electrons, is a messy affair — a bit like a dance floor of rowdy partygoers attempting a conga. But below a critical temperature, many materials become superconducting: the electrons abruptly pair up and begin to move smoothly. It is as if the partygoers disappear amid clouds of dry ice — and instantly reappear as pairs of ballroom dancers gliding effortlessly in unison.
There are two giveaway signs of that transition: first, measured resistance drops to zero; and, thanks to a curious phenomenon called the Meissner effect, a superconductor will levitate above a magnet.
On July 22, a preprint — a draft scientific paper that has not undergone peer review — surfaced, claiming that LK-99 had met both tests. Scepticism was immediate. The researchers, from the Korea Institute of Science and Technology and the country’s Quantum Energy Research Centre, were respectable but not superstars. The method for making this miracle material — bearing the initials of two authors, Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim — seemed incredibly simple, including use of a pestle and mortar, but lacked detail. A linked video appeared to show partial, rather than full, levitation.
Strangely, another paper by Lee and Kim quickly followed, this time with four other authors. As Scientific American notes, critics pointed to graphs featuring an oddly scaled axis, though a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California said the Korean claim was theoretically plausible. One team in China reported limited success at replication; another in India reported failure.
The matter is not yet closed but the odds seem unfavourable. A hastily convened verification committee set up in South Korea issued a cautionary note on August 2, suggesting a lack of concrete evidence.
Given superconductivity’s history of false dawns, our trusty pebble, now with its own Wikipedia page, is most likely to be an unremarkable rock with accidentally interesting properties. But what a gripping spectacle — one that tells us less about physics and more about the collective human need, even among scientists and investors, to dream.
It’s not worded like that at least. It looks like he dares anyone that want to argue for that it is gambling to look at that link. But as you say, the link points to clear gambling practices. 🤷
I think there is a point for professional investors checking balances, shorting fraudulent companies etc.
But especially private investors will always be behind the wave and at that point it really is gambling since they don’t have a chance against the nanosecond high-speed trades from banks that have a direct cable to the marketplace.
If you are buying stock in such magnitudes you also have voting power over how the company develops which is no small factor
If you see two competing companies of which one is doing something that you think is stupid and the other is doing something way better then you should be able to give them money for their development and at the same time have a chance to partake in it.
It’s just that as a normal person you won’t be fast enough for that since a lot of the potential is already calculated and priced in a second after the announcements.
Daytrading and betting on huge growth is just gambling - I completely agree. But the kind of long term value investing like for example Buffet is doing has it’s place
Yes, betting a larger or smaller amount on something, and to what degree you are invested, both in terms of emotion and percentage of your wealth, does not change the fact that its still gambling.
But you now also have the additional disgusting allowed custom of that you can just buy up others work. You can be at a workplace, put all your energy into it, then a rich entity can come it and buy it all up and kick you out and/or burn it to the ground. What this entity is compromised of, a single person, many, or another corporation, is not necessarily smarter and just because it has a lot of wealth will not make better decisions.
I would say its the opposite. The larger an entity is, the more disjoint and the more dumb decisions are made. Working as a software consultant for both small and large corporations. The small dumb ones die out, the large dumb ones survive in spite of their choices, not because of it.
Authority bias is without awareness affecting any human. The more we recognize it, the more we can keep our ideas grounded.