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Kenneth Chang's avatar

In the past six years, I've written five articles mentioning Dias's work. Is that an unreasonable hype deluge? Three of those were about papers published in Science (metallic hydrogen) and Nature (CSH and lutetium hydride superconductors). I would not have written about any of these had they not passed peer review. I'm not blindly accepting that everything in Science and Nature is true, but if I'm a "random journalist…without having much expertise in your field," it would be pretty presumptuous of me to think I am a better judge of the science than the reviewers who are presumably experts in the field.

My article about lutetium hydride "enthusiastically" included this in the third paragraph:

This week’s announcement is the latest attempt in that effort, but it comes from a team that faces wide skepticism because a 2020 paper that described a promising but less practical superconducting material was retracted after other scientists questioned some of the data.

From the torrent of tweets going nuts over the Korean superconductor claims, it's evident to me that most people have never heard of Ranga Dias (or why a room-temperature superconductor would be significant), and those who have (like you) would have known about his work anyway if I had never written any of my articles.

As for "After all, he sits on top of the science journalism pyramid and other science journalists likely take cues from him," hahaha. Dan Garisto, for example, has written more than I have (and done a really nice job) in Nature and elsewhere, and he's certainly not following my cues. As far as I can tell, Ranga Dias hasn't been covered by the Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, etc., so I wonder who exactly _is_ taking cues from me.

And if you have a good story about Majorana fermions that you think should be covered by the New York Times, let me know.

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Jorge Hirsch's avatar

It is also not accurate that "in the case of Dias’s work, the community has done a great job being skeptical, or openly critical and proactively so, for a long time. Physicists, by and large, have not been fooled by this.” There were a couple of critical preprints early on (late 2020) about the resistance data in the CSH paper by Dogan and Cohen and Frank Marsiglio and myself, but by and large everybody else seemed to believe it, as evidenced by the large number of citations it was getting and invited talks that Dias was giving. In September 2021 I started raising questions about the susceptibility, and then Dirk van der Marel and I in January 2022 and thereafter raised more questions. Who else was being “skeptical”? Nobody publicly at least, perhaps so privately. The next public “skepticism” was James Hamlin’s arxiv paper in October 2022, after Nature had retracted the paper. So "But the community saw through Dias’s claims early on” is not accurate, nor is it accurate that "he has also been criticized at numerous conferences and workshops that took place away from the eyes of the press and the internet.” As late as the Summer of 2022 there were 2 conferences where Dias gave invited talks and nobody raised questions (other than I in one of them). It is not accurate that "physics has done a great job on this particular case of misconduct”. And certainly it is not accurate that “Nature did a decent job” on this, it did in fact a poor job in retracting the CSH paper without addressing the clear evidence that Dirk and I had given them showing data fabrication.

The subtitle of Chang’s "New Room-Temperature Superconductor Offers Tantalizing Possibilities” did say "it comes from a team facing doubts after a retracted paper on superconductors.” and the article I think did a reasonable job in describing those doubts including the thesis plagiarism that James uncovered.

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