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Flux Pinning in sample of LK-99?

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348 points by kochie 2 years ago · 224 comments

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semajian 2 years ago

It's hard to imagine how this could be faked short of digital manipulation, and it seems implausible that it would be a known high TC superconductor because it would warm up too fast. Absent the former explantation, I'm starting to believe this is real. Also, it's not like all the author's are unknown hacks. Hyun Tak Kim has about 10k citations (Google scholar, which sometimes combines people who have the same name though) and authored a paper in scientific reports which got L&K interested in collaborating with him. The guy seems to know superconductivity so I'm feeling rather optimistic about this.

  • thecopy 2 years ago

    According to this video: https://twitter.com/xmal/status/1300754522218913799 it is possible to have stable levitation using a copper plate below the magnet.

    OP's video has two stacked metal objects – could the lower one possibly contain copper?

  • stavros 2 years ago

    > It's hard to imagine how this could be faked short of digital manipulation

    So, it's easy to imagine how this could be faked.

    • ynniv 2 years ago

      It can easily be faked, using a technique that would destroy the poster's career. It's one thing to not do something to the letter, and another to commit blatant fraud. Most career academics would not burn their career for the lulz.

    • marcosdumay 2 years ago

      I guess the point is, it can be a fabrication, it can be something very important, and it can't really be anything in between.

    • ncr100 2 years ago

      Alternatively, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrolytic_carbon is discussed in the Twitter thread by the OP as a possible explanation of "not superconductivity" . . .

      • cthalupa 2 years ago

        Not an expert, but my understanding is that magnet configuration could not create a stable levitation for pyrolytic graphite - you need an array of magnets, e.g. https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1010/1010.5761.pdf

        Doing a quick sanity check on youtube videos, every example I can find of it levitating involves use of magnet arrays as well.

    • semajian 2 years ago

      Well, yes

      • stavros 2 years ago

        I'm holding a small basket until one of the reputable labs reproduces this. Anonymous videos on Twitter are a bit too anonymous for me.

  • Qem 2 years ago

    > Hyun Tak Kim has about 10k citations (Google scholar, which sometimes combines people who have the same name though) and authored a paper in scientific reports which got L&K interested in collaborating with him.

    It appears he was a latecomer to the project, mostly borrowing his reputation to the trio of anonymous, non anglosphere native original authors.

    • light_hue_1 2 years ago

      Let's be less cynical. Nothing to do with borrowing reputation.

      The original authors have something. They don't have the expertise in condensed matter physics to really know what. They don't know how to report results and what results would be conclusive. Their work is simply not convincing, and if they were experts they would also not be convinced.

      That's why they brought in another collaborator who is an expert. But because the paper was released early it's clearly a mess. You can see the big quality improvement though just between the two drafts.

  • totetsu 2 years ago

    The flake is a magnet, and a known type two liquid nitrogen cooled superconductor is inside the blocks at the bottom?

  • pera 2 years ago

    Seriously? To me this looks like a chip of graphite glued to an invisible thread. The way the object moves is not what I would expect from magnetism (see second 10 for instance)

    • nullc 2 years ago

      This is what a pinned superconductor looks like. Here is a video I made of some YCBO over a small magnet: https://nt4tn.net/random/superconductor.mp4 you can see it settle back back when I move it with tongs (until i push hard enough to get it to snap into a new orientation).

      If I had a magnet that was much bigger than the superconductor it would look even more similar (less 'pivoty').

      • sph 2 years ago

        If only all videos of LK-99 (and UFO sightings for that matter) came in such high, crisp resolution. Thanks.

      • jacquesm 2 years ago

        Excellent video, really very nice. I like it how you forced the flux pinning by punching a hole in the middle of the superconductor, that makes it all much more visible. You can practically visualize the fieldlines escaping through the middle and becoming an elastic pivot connected to the magnet.

    • nicpottier 2 years ago

      Have you watched other videos of flux pinning? This sure looks like those to me, it's a weird phenomenon.

      • jacquesm 2 years ago

        It's not that weird, it just looks weird if you don't have any idea of what is going on. But it's fairly logical if you get the principle behind it. Nullc's excellent video below shows a much clearer example.

    • tester457 2 years ago

      This video describes quantum locking as strings going through a superconductor.

      https://youtu.be/8GY4m022tgo?t=957

    • mcpackieh 2 years ago

      How can it look like something that is ostensibly invisible? It's not swinging around like a pendulum, so what exactly are you seeing that makes you think it looks like an invisible string?

      • Cushman 2 years ago

        What accounts for the smooth “settling” into place after the last touch around 10s?

        I have no idea what I’m talking about, but in other flux pinning demonstrations the sample seems to oscillate around the fixed point. That smooth settling looks like some sort of damping, like maybe a force that increases with distance, like maybe spring tension.

        (Of course, “we have no idea” is an acceptable answer if that turns out to be the case.)

        • mcpackieh 2 years ago

          Air resistance seems like a reasonable explanation for the dampening. Furthermore if it's not pure and only partially superconducting, the dampening could be due to magnetic fields forming eddy currents in the sample.

          > (Of course, “we have no idea” is an acceptable answer if that turns out to be the case.)

          Of course.

          • Cushman 2 years ago

            Good hypotheses both! “We’ve never been able to pin something this size before” covers a lot of wiggle room. So to speak.

            (FWIW I’m thrilled about the possibility of a rtrp drop this year, and I have to assume 'pera is as well. But this video doesn’t look just like flux pinning we’ve seen before. It’s visibly a little different in a way that wants explanation. I wouldn’t come out the gate calling it a hoax, but I’d feel better about not doing that if the basis for skepticism were at least acknowledged.)

      • pera 2 years ago

        The thread is horizontally positioned, left to right, not vertically.

        • mcpackieh 2 years ago

          But you haven't explained how it looks like that. It could be that, but it looks like it's floating. What is it about the appearance of this thing which has you believing there is a string?

          • incrudible 2 years ago

            If there is a magician on the stage, you can safely presume there is no actual magic involved, even though you do not know how exactly the trick works.

            For actual flux pinning, the first thing you would do is show what happens if you put the thing upside down. It should stick. Even if it does not, you would show that it does not.

            • mcpackieh 2 years ago

              The point of the illusions in a good magicians act is that they look like magic. If the illusions look like invisible strings/etc, then they were poorly done. Even if you know there must be a string, it shouldn't look that way.

              So what I'm saying is that even if it's reasonable to deduce that this supposed magnet is being suspended from a string, it doesn't look like it is. If it is fake, it's a well-done illusion not a shoddy illusion.

              • incrudible 2 years ago

                Whether it "looks like it's on a string" is highly subjective. Suppose I primed you by saying: Look at this speck of dirt on a string, does it look like a speck of dirt on a string to you?

                https://imgur.com/a/AY1oaIO

                In all likelyhood, your answer would be: Yes, it does.

                It's clear however that a lot of us (myself included) don't want to see a speck of dirt on a string. They want to see history in the making.

        • gabesullice 2 years ago

          Finding a thread that small would be a feat of its own. I wonder if your eyes might be getting tricked by the watermark?

lucubratory 2 years ago

1. This video is originally from an anonymous Douyin account. There is no verification that it is associated with a real replication attempt, from traditional academia or citizen science. There is a previous video on the channel showing the partial levitation more common to LK-99, but it likewise has no particular evidence it's not just a flake of pyrolitic graphite. It is claimed to be associated with a specific person but no evidence is provided. There is no reputation to be lost if this is a fake.

2. In the video, while the effect dynamics look quite good for flux pinning, there is some really concerning artifacting on the alleged LK-99 piece while it bounces. Specifically, it looks like it may be attached to a taut horizontal string that has then been edited out, but they didn't successfully rotoscope over the parts very close to the alleged LK-99 piece during specific moments. This could just be a compression artifact, I have never seen one like this but apparently this is a capture of a capture by the time we can access it, and I don't use Douyin or Bilibili so I wouldn't have a lot of familiarity with what their compression artifacts look like.

Basically, I am pretty sceptical about this video in specific. I do think LK-99 is more likely than not at this point, but I also think it's more likely than not that this specific video is not real.

I also think it's extremely likely that as LK-99's profile raises and VFX editors get more familiar with what exactly a real video should look like, convincing fakes are going to be produced and go viral. The most common way this happens is that the VFX artist does it as an exercise and shows a few people without ill intent, but the video is then reposted by other people a few times until it reaches a wide audience who has no chance of knowing its origin. However, there are some scammers/influencers who are good with VFX and can fake a video themselves.

Basically, be a little bit careful about video, and things you should want are: the camera is moving around the piece and not static, the light changes during the video, the pieces themselves are moving, you see the pieces getting set up or finished later, and there's stuff moving all around the object to make strings less likely.

  • delabay 2 years ago

    All great reasoning. Unfortunately I believe it's a fake from an Occam's razor standpoint: it's too short and precisely framed.

    It's trivial to record a video 20x longer with a moving POV without revealing IP or secrets, but far from easy to product 20x more doctored vfx.

    • sudosysgen 2 years ago

      Not really true. It depends on how you do your CGI, if you have a setup with camera tracking and a 3D compositing pipeline as well as some sort of particle system for the dynamics, you could produce an infinite amount of VFX. It really depends on the specifics of how you set it up.

  • cpleppert 2 years ago

    I looked at the highest quality and the artifacting is just crazy here. There are no artifacts around the instrument at all, just on the supposedly levitating rock. The quality on this and the other video from the user looks like its very good so I don't really buy this.

    The context here is rather strange as well, the same user uploaded another video that no one would believe actually demonstrated the meissner effect. Its a very small magnet on just a piece of paper. Did the user try again with this video?

  • irthomasthomas 2 years ago

    Yeah, why on earth would you use only a wide angle lense to film something microscopic? You would zoom in close to your amazing discovery. But, this way, the interesting thing is a only a few pixels, and can easily be computer generated. Every video I've seen has some logical flaw like that.

  • klysm 2 years ago

    Those tiny “artifacts” look like they’re smaller fragments of particle stuck to the big one to me

kzrdude 2 years ago

Nitter: https://nitter.net/Andercot/status/1687740396691185664

  • kzrdude 2 years ago

    Alternative video link here, but it's in chinese so no idea if it gives any more information about the source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37010498

    • yorwba 2 years ago

      The video is watermarked 炼丹师阿翔 (Alchemist Axiang), which is also the username of the Douyin video, so I think that's the closest to the original source we can get. (The tweet claims Bilibili as the source, but it was apparently a live stream and 炼丹师阿翔's Bilibili account currently only has a previous video without full levitation. https://bilibili.com/video/BV1sM4y1H7MX )

  • Kiro 2 years ago

    OT but why do I need to press "enable this playback" and reload the page to view the clip? What does it do?

    • trashburger 2 years ago

      HLS is a way to serve a video in chunks over HTTP. It's how livestreams are implemented in most places. Twitter serves videos in HLS chunks, but Nitter doesn't want to proxy it to you because videos take a lot of bandwidth. In order to let you choose whether you want to connect to Twitter servers, it first asks you whether you want to enable playback.

    • meibo 2 years ago

      Because they want to avoid sending your IP to Twitter if you aren't going to watch the video, and the way to do that without JS is to only render the video embed if you actually request it.

arecurrence 2 years ago

In the lk99 subreddit, a higher res video was posted https://www.douyin.com/video/7263715495256378659

phreeza 2 years ago

Someone linked to this on the manifold market: https://imgur.io/a/AY1oaIO it does look a bit weird to me but I am not expert enough to tell if this could be explained by optical/compression effects.

  • incrudible 2 years ago

    Looks unlike any compression artifact I have ever seen. Two remarkable discoveries in one video! Big, if true.

shawabawa3 2 years ago

This is basically proof of room temperature superconductivity correct? (Of course assuming it isn't a hoax)

  • dmitrybrant 2 years ago

    Assuming everything in the video is real, the only remaining question is: what is the actual temperature of that sample?

    If all of this checks out, then it's a new era.

    • jiggawatts 2 years ago

      Such tiny samples warm up to room temperature very quickly, on the order of a few seconds. In my experience, it's not possible to make such small pieces of YBCO superconductor levitate, they warm up too fast.

      • topynate 2 years ago

        No frost on the sample either. The only way I can think of to fake this in camera is to make the "sample" out of a strong magnet, and make the "magnet" a hollow shell concealing a chilled piece of YBCO!

        • incrudible 2 years ago

          You would be surprised what can be achieved with bit of nylon string and an appropriate camera setup. If this is a most groundbreaking discovery, why waste all that screen resolution on the backdrop?

          • wesleychen 2 years ago

            I think because the minimum focus distance for most phone cameras is around 8 inches so they have to film kind of far away or else it will go blurry.

          • anonymousiam 2 years ago

            I believe the backdrop is there to show ambient conditions.

    • Enginerrrd 2 years ago

      It looks convincing to my naive eyes, but how would you differentiate between this and diamagnetic levitation of something like pyrolitic graphite?

      • cthalupa 2 years ago

        https://twitter.com/Andercot/status/1687748594563268608 seems to indicate that simply diamagnetic levitation cannot create the level of stability shown in this video.

        • Enginerrrd 2 years ago

          I don't think that's right. Diamagnetic levitation is one of the ways you can get around Earshaw's theorem.

          Funny enough this is a quote taken directly from the wikipedia article that Andercot linked, in the "loopholes" section:

          >Earnshaw's theorem has no exceptions for non-moving permanent ferromagnets. However, Earnshaw's theorem does not necessarily apply to moving ferromagnets,[4] certain electromagnetic systems, pseudo-levitation and diamagnetic materials. These can thus seem to be exceptions, though in fact they exploit the constraints of the theorem.

          ...

          >Diamagnetic materials are excepted because they exhibit only repulsion against the magnetic field, whereas the theorem requires materials that have both repulsion and attraction. An example of this is the famous levitating frog (see Diamagnetism).

          • cthalupa 2 years ago

            Sure enough. Which, well, makes sense, since superconductors are "perfect" diamagnets, so them being able to do it seems to necessitate that the greater class of diamagnets on the whole can too.

            The only examples I can find of stable non-superconductor diamagnets involved 4+ magnet arrays, though, or multipole magnets, e.g. https://phys.org/news/2014-08-diamagnetic-levitation-pyrolit... and not dipole configurations like this video seems to show.

          • sudosysgen 2 years ago

            How can a diamagnet be stable on top of a single dipole? Earnshaw's criterion being invalid just means that there is at least one static arrangement of magnetic dipoles that lead to stability. However, if you have a point-like diamagnet resting on top of a single dipole it can't possibly be stable because there is no point at which it will have zero net force and stable higher-order derivatives. You need something like a bowl-shaped magnetic field arrangement for it to stay in a single point, or have the diamagnet itself be shaped something like a bowl over the field.

            • Enginerrrd 2 years ago

              Yeah you bring up a good point... I don't think it can.

              But you CAN do it with concentric rings of magnets. Such magnets seem common for this exact demonstration actually. It doesn't look like one of those in the video though.

    • Arn_Thor 2 years ago

      No, the video contains no information about its conductivity.

  • oxfordmale 2 years ago

    No, it is not yet proof of superconductivity. It also requires measurements of the electric resistance as function of the temperature.

    For now LK-99 is an material that displays some of the superconducting properties at room temperature.

  • kzrdude 2 years ago

    Let's use the word evidence and not proof for each part of the puzzle

  • blablabla123 2 years ago

    I mean based on current understanding a previous video that showed levitation independent of the orientation was already sufficient to show it's not diamagnetic but superconducting. Assuming this is not a hoax actually the very first video together with the paper already shows everything. (Levitation, mentioning of zero resistivity regions)

    Although generally the accepted method is that other labs reproduce it and that the paper passes peer review. Some videos aren't enough.

  • pera 2 years ago

    This is an hoax and it's sad to see people like Sabine Hossenfelder falling for it so easily:

    - video recorder in a kitchen or living room

    - created by some random tiktok account

    - no credentials, no description

    - tagged "mysterious"

    It's hard to understand how anyone would believe this, specially after so many other fakes

    • p-o 2 years ago

      Hoax is quite a strong word where there's been quite a few replication attempts with various degrees of success. Like others have said, we're not sure what this is, but it almost certainly isn't a hoax.

      As for this video, well, it's like all the other ones that came before it, we'll know more once we have more data/videos/replication attempts.

      • pera 2 years ago

        I meant that this video is a hoax. I don't hold any opinions regarding LK-99.

      • mr_mitm 2 years ago

        Some of the other videos were at least from some more or less reputable sources. This one appears to be anonymous, or am I wrong?

    • fallingknife 2 years ago

      I see no indication that it was filmed in a kitchen or living room.

      • fnordpiglet 2 years ago

        In fact I see some serious lab quality glassware in the background. But posting without its provenance is a weird for sure.

        IMO there’s an awful lot of amateur / informal attempts that are promising enough that, while not convincing, are inspiring of hope. But I do wonder how much is fake. But more than a few seem to be clearly not fake, such as the work Varda is posting.

BasedAnon 2 years ago

is it possible in theory that flux-pinning could occur without actually causing superconductivity? because LK-99 seems to be decoupling alot of properties we thought were coupled if I'm understanding correctly?

  • traverseda 2 years ago

    It could be an entirely new hitherto unobserved phenomena, but that seems pretty unlikely. I think that having a bunch of tiny superconductors chunks separated by a regular conductor would explain a lot.

  • jacquesm 2 years ago

    That would require 'new physics'. I think most of the weirdness stems from either (1) sample impurity, (2) an extreme form of that where the active bits are really tiny in a large chunk of inert stuff or stuff with its own electromagnetic properties or (3) being mistaken about it being a superconductor in the first place.

justicz 2 years ago

The post just says the video came from BiliBili. Does anyone know the actual source? I want to believe but this video is suspicious.

fghorow 2 years ago

An oddball question for the device physicists here:

Assume for now (subject to verification, of course!) that this material is a non-Cooper-pair superconductor.

Could one still build Josephson junctions -- and SQUIDs -- from this material?

If the answer is "yes", it's going to make a whole lot of magnetotelluric geophysicists very, VERY happy.

  • zakary 2 years ago

    Can you explain what uses room temp squids and JJ’s would have for magnetotelluric geophysics?

    • defrost 2 years ago

      Better cheaper faster ultrahigh magnetic sensing of magnetic flux and field across a broad dynamic range.

      Typical setups are networked fields of multiple axis sub nanotesla magnetic sensors with processing to reduce noise and subtract interference in order to extract a differential change across time and space to convert to a deep earth image.

      You know, the usual stuff.

      The essential principal is a fixed sensor (network) that records the diurnal (daily) magnetic flux and specifically locals for local 'drag' caused by local features (deep metal deposits, more generally volumes with varying magnetic properties).

eugene3306 2 years ago

Is this material safe to handle?

It feels like this thing soon will start appearing all over ebay and aliexpress

  • foobarian 2 years ago

    I hope it is. It will be a perfect toy for little kids, right along the little ball magnets.

  • makeworld 2 years ago

    It has lead in it.

    • HDThoreaun 2 years ago

      Lead is safe to handle, you just can’t eat it.

      • crote 2 years ago

        Handling lead tends to result on lead being on your hands, which has a nasty tendency to result in lead being on your lunch if you are not careful.

        • Ancapistani 2 years ago

          Basic safety precautions are fine.

          To put it in perspective: millions of people in the US regularly handle ammunition and shoot firearms at indoor ranges. Those contain lead in many forms: the projectile itself, lead fulminate in the primer compounds, lead suspended in the air after firing, etc.

          You make sure to have adequate ventilation, don’t touch your face, and wash your hands when you’re done. It’s important, yes, but not really that big a deal.

          • zarzavat 2 years ago

            Given that the effects of lead tend to be a subtle change in mental state, and show up months or years later, we really don’t know that it’s fine.

  • naillo 2 years ago

    Would that be legal, considering they have a patent (pending) for it? Not denying it won't appear anyway just curious

    • mensetmanusman 2 years ago

      It is illegal in places that have rule of law.

      This is to create a risk reduction mechanism for investing in capital to make this at scale, which will cost on the order of $100-500M to scale for world use through trial and error.

      If IP is ignored, no business will invest in the initial experiments due to first mover disadvantage in game theory.

      • Iulioh 2 years ago

        >If IP is ignored, no business will invest in the initial experiments due to first mover disadvantage in game theory.

        Not if you belive that

        • mensetmanusman 2 years ago

          This has been shown to be historically true, because startup costs can be tens to hundreds of million in R&D.

          The business that spends will have their workers immediately poached if they don’t have IP protecting their initial startup costs.

    • TheAceOfHearts 2 years ago

      I'm not sure how it works, but this was the first result:

      > Patents are territorial and must be filed in each country where protection is sought.

      [0] https://www.stopfakes.gov/article?id=Is-My-US-Patent-Good-in...

      • jtwaleson 2 years ago

        Not a patent attorney, but as far as I know: The patent is currently pending (as in, being evaluated to see if it will be granted). Once it is granted in one country it can be expanded to multiple countries within a couple of months, given that the first country is part of the Patent Cooperation Treaty. So if an invention is marked “patent pending”, you know you will have the risk of being sued by said company at some time in the future if you copy the invention.

    • piltzintec 2 years ago

      Dude with something this important to humanity give everyone involved a couple million then let it run wild

PUSH_AX 2 years ago

Forgive me, I know little about these things, but what’s the relationship between this phenomenon and the quantum locking seen in other super conducting magnets, this looks as described as “pinned”, what would allow it to behave like the famous video of the magnets levitating around that circular track: https://youtu.be/Ws6AAhTw7RA

  • marcosdumay 2 years ago

    Superconductors will resist moving at any direction where the magnetic flux gets weaker, stronger, or changes direction. That's why they get described as "pinned".

    Other diamagnets do that too, but in a decaying way that allows for movement. They usually rotate or move slowly sideways.

    No other kind of magnetism show similar behavior. They either attract or repel all the way in.

im3w1l 2 years ago

It's possible that I misunderstand, but I think the title is a little inaccurate. Flux pinning goes beyond just levitation. In the embedded video we can see that the sample is not just levitating freely above the magnet, but it levitates above a certain fixed point. After gently poking the sample we can see it returning to its original position and orientation.

amelius 2 years ago

Can anyone explain if the specimen was found through rigorous research or just sheer luck?

Because it is starting to seem like it's the latter.

  • gonehome 2 years ago

    No idea if accurate but there was this which is interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36996337

    > “ Specifically they were one of the last believers of long-forgotten Russian theory of superconductivity, pioneered by Nikolay Bogolyubov. The accepted theory is entirely based on Cooper pairs, but this theory suggests that a sufficient constraint on electrons may allow superconductivity without actual Cooper pairs. This requires carefully positioned point defects in the crystalline structure, which contemporary scientists consider unlikely and such mode of SC was never formally categorized unlike type-I and type-II SC. Professor Tong-seek Chair (최동식) represented a regret about this status quo (in 90s, but still applies today) that this theory was largely forgotten without the proper assessment after the fall of USSR. It was also a very interesting twist that Iris Alexandria, "that Russian catgirl chemist", had an advisor who was a physicist-cum-biochemist studied this theory and as a result were so familiar with the theory that they were able to tell if replications follow the theoretical prediction.”

    So it might be an old hypothesis brought back?

  • sidlls 2 years ago

    A very large quantity of discoveries in science are a combination of "well, that's odd" and the "sheer luck" associated with the circumstances producing that statement.

    (This isn't a commentary on the truthfulness of the superconductor claims.)

    • amelius 2 years ago

      Yes, but that doesn't answer the question ...

      • mensetmanusman 2 years ago

        Yes it does, the answer is both, but with the caveat that there were people focused on rolling the dice of luck to search for this.

  • scarmig 2 years ago

    There is a combinatorial number of different materials out there. They chose a particular small subset of them that they predicted might have some interesting properties and, over two decades, discovered one that may have those properties.

    Most hypotheses are wrong, and even if they turn out right it may well be a case of being right for the wrong reasons. Regardless, this is top tier research: unglamorous, uninstagramable drudgery guided by intellect. Sure, there's luck involved, but research always involves luck.

  • rowanG077 2 years ago

    This is a very odd question to me. All research is essentially this may or may not work. That's why you test it. In a sense finding something cool is a very large part luck.

  • kijin 2 years ago

    Does it matter? Even "rigorous" research depends on luck in many cases, because there are so many unknowns. Theory helps reduce the search space, but there are situations when a brute-force attack is the most efficient way to answer the all-important question: is this real?

  • mytailorisrich 2 years ago

    Many things were discovered out of luck in the course of research.

  • mcpackieh 2 years ago

    Trying lots of stuff for years and years until something works, aka rigorous research and sheer luck.

  • overnight5349 2 years ago

    Those two options are not mutually exclusive

skecpical222 2 years ago

The sample most probably sticks to a flexible membrane above the magnet (to something like a transparent contact lens - one can even clearly recognize a round circumference on the magnet plate surrounding the green junk).

amai 2 years ago

So lk-99 is supposed to behave like a type-II superconductor? Is this expected for a room temperature superconductor?

incrudible 2 years ago

The most likely explanation: This is a speck of dirt on a string filmed as an attempt to manipulate the prediction markets.

kimorpark 2 years ago

Elsa zhou says the wust student denied he posted it so authenticity cannot be confirmed. Assume fake video 4 now

38 2 years ago

non crap link:

http://farside.link/twitter.com/andercot/status/168774039669...

xqcgrek2 2 years ago

These grainy and blurry videos from China are simply not credible.

keepamovin 2 years ago

What I like most about this development is that, suddenly, folks with "CEO " or "Founder " in their Twitter bio look uncool, while folks with "<hardscience>" in their twitter bio are uber cool.

Note to pedants: yes yes, the Venn diagram has an intersection.

  • naillo 2 years ago

    People with <hardscience> in their bio have always been cooler

  • malermeister 2 years ago

    Folks with CEO or "Founder" in their bio have always looked uncool imo.

    • jacquesm 2 years ago

      I meet on average a hundred of those every year and while some of them are seriously uncool the majority is actually very impressive.

      • malermeister 2 years ago

        They can be impressive and there's nothing wrong with being a founder or a CEO (I'm one, too!).

        Putting it into one's bio is what makes it... cringe, as the kids say.

        • jacquesm 2 years ago

          It's something pretty standard for funded start-ups because the rest of the ecosystem that they operate in expects it. If it is two guys in an attic it's cringe (see my 'you are not the CEO article') but if you have picked up some funding and employ 20 people I totally get why you would do that.

m3kw9 2 years ago

It didn’t pin, it bounces, if it was flux pinning it would not bounce when you push it down.

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