We finally have a <strike>room temperature superconductor</strike> modern scientific process

Rapid reproduction efforts and open debate are a pleasure to follow

My next substack can hardly be on any topic other than #LK99, the claimed room temperature superconductor. It uses the naming scheme of a virus, with the year of discovery in its name, and it does appear to have started a pandemic of sorts.  I will reflect on what has happened so far, but my post is not about whether or not the claim of superconductivity is reliable. (A great source to check the current status of the effort is the LK99 Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99 ).

Instead, I invite you to marvel at the amazing scientific process happening in front of our eyes, the open debate, the instant reporting on both progress and failure. The thrill of it all and how we should remember this feeling while it lasts. What I would like to ask is that you close your eyes, and imagine that we do this as a matter of routine, within our community and without the bitcoin bros pumping us up. I think it would be amazing.

(Rene Magritte - The Castle of the Pyrenees, 1959, borrowed from

https://twitter.com/nikolaskaralis/status/1686643504506687489)

My first reaction was skeptical, same as for many physicists (though not all!). I never veered far from this skepticism though at times new revelations left me wondering if this could be it after all. Don’t get me wrong, I want there to be room temperature superconductors. As a physicist who took 5 different courses on superconductivity, I certainly recognize this as one big dream we have. (We even justify building quantum computers because they may one day help us discover a room temperature superconductor!).

I am a verified longtime fan of superconductivity - here is me in graduate school almost hugging the plaque.

As an aside, this kind of a ‘big if true’ admission by a skeptic is a self-trap. You give up polemic ground simply by admitting to this. First, since it is potentially big, then it is certainly worthy of attention (an argument for getting it accepted into an impact factory like Nature). Second, if potentially big, does it matter if it is not rigorous? Surely the inconsistencies and unfilled blanks can all be figured out in due course! Now is not the time for all that, now is the time to deliver the big claim to the masses. This is why I don’t recommend, if you are still refereeing papers for journals, to ever put any admission of impact in your reports, especially if your real point is that the claim is not true.

The reason I dismissed the arXiv article when it first appeared was just because I have already been exposed to many poor quality reports in the prior years claiming room temperature superconductors. This looks to my eyes like another UFO sighting.

Other people also took issue with the data quality in the original preprint from the Q-Centre in Korea, which I agree looks sloppy. Though there is no law against having a functioning UFO in your barn for 20 years, and wanting very much to share the news, but only taking very blurry and zoomed out pictures of it as proof. I personally would not have taken that route and instead tried to get clearer data first. But as long as there is enough transparency, accurate description of findings and unimpeded replication attempts I am fine with any data.

The UFO analogy is very current as well. We just witnessed a big scandal on ‘ambient’ superconductivity from Rocherster. The problem there was in a sense opposite: that of a fairly polished and superficially comprehensive data set that convinced the key people, such as referees and editors. But the work was done in secrecy, and it was very difficult to get data out of the authors. According to Wikipedia, Nature rejected the LK99 paper, while in the same period of time they published Ranga Dias’s claims from Rocherster. We now know that Ranga Dias’s work is unreliable. It will be hilarious if it turns out that LK99 is real and Nature did not recognize it instead pushing hard for Rochester. Along with the New York Times, which have since joined the LK99 train.

In fact, the ‘superconductor of the summer’ provided an amazing comeback opportunity for Kenneth Chang of the New York Times, who was just a week prior not able to let go of Ranga Dias and his made up reports. I wrote a separate substack about that. Sweet work by the NYT titling department on this one too. If it is the ‘superconductor of the summer’ then I understand why it is low pressure, but at the same time why is it not chill? (Sorry for the quality of jokes, this is Substack not Twitter where all the top jokes still live, see below.)

Open Debate

While the immediate attention is obviously on what is going to happen with multiple verification efforts, and whether or not the dream of room temperature superconductivity comes true, I want to promote something absolutely beautiful that is happening in our solid state physics community, and how this in itself could lead to many more wonderful and ultimately real discoveries if we keep going this way.

All of a sudden, numerous excellent experts on various aspects of materials science, chemistry and physics are talking publicly and openly, without the usual awkwardness and inhibition that defines scientific communication. The scientists of your imagination are probably constantly at each other's' throats arguing about the TRUTH, giving each other advice and engaging deeply with each others’ work. Nothing of the sort! Scientists are barely communicating. They get together often, they appear to listen, you get a comment or two on your hour-long presentation, it is usually something neutral or artificially positive.

If anyone has anything critical to say, they rather keep it to themselves. The reason for all this is the secretive business-like model of publishing and funding that favors working in your corner for small personal gain. This is why, for instance, our criticism of various works on Majorana was met with shock and disapproval by the people closely involved - “how dare they talk openly about the problems and disturb the calm and security of doing business”.

So why, in the case of LK99, did multiple people, trained in artificial yet powerful restraint, abandon caution and start speaking out? What made this possible is a rare coincidence of factors:

1. Apart from the superconducting temperature itself, this is all physics with a long history echoing back decades, so there's a large pool of people with something to say.

2. It looks like the synthesis is simple, and the measurements do not require low temperatures or high pressures. Many replications appeared instantly, giving more fuel to the debate with more data to analyze.

3. Huge attention, most dramatically on Twitter which in itself warrants, even if you are skeptical, to put in your 5 cents while there is an audience there for it, even if it is bitcoin bros.

Check out this dude who shows the full spectrum of emotions on LK99.

https://twitter.com/alexkaplan0/status/1684044616528453633

 https://twitter.com/alexkaplan0/status/1688754776199020544

By the way, shout out from a coffee fan here, because he is working at a startup making frozen coffee. Hear me out bruh - room temperature coffee!! No cryogens needed anymore. 

A mysterious social dynamics phenomenon to me was why multiple groups and individuals decided to engage in the reproduction of this particular claim on LK99. My conclusion is that these are mostly not career superconductivity physicists, but chemists and other specialists. They were not exposed to the onslaught of irreproducible claims in this field, and did not have time to grow bitter. They took the Q-Centre results more or less at face value and genuinely wanted to obtain a room temperature superconductor for themselves. There are historical precedents to this being an effective breakthrough method. For instance, Leon Cooper, who explained superconductivity, came to solid state physics from particle physics.

Here are some of the interactions between the scientists that all of this precipitated, and which I hope could become part of our routine process.

Everyone who follows this topic knows that reproduction experiments were not only rapidly added to arXiv, but also livestreamed on Twitch, Twitter, BiliBili and other platforms. Most of the efforts are either partially or fully negative reproductions, which must be disappointing but people nevertheless shared and this is great. I also find it entertaining that some of the videos were posted anonymously and are very likely unreliable (too much of this would obviously be a problem). This is all absolutely fascinating.

I want to highlight how expert physicists joined the discussion of these efforts online, with real-time suggestions, opinions on the results, even lab safety advice! The live experiments were not done in vacuum, people were paying attention to them, and engaging with this! The original data were also scrutinized including some initial data forensics, looking for unusual aspects in graphs. The usual physics clowns also came out of their sheds, but a lot of the discussion was very interesting and educational.

What I like is that people are not afraid to criticize each other publicly, so you can have a full spectrum discussion, not skewed by trying to avoid anything remotely confrontational. Yet it chugs along without major conflicts so far. Part of the reason is perhaps that the authors of the original experiments and of many of the replications are on different online platforms from the commenters, being from different countries. I am sure they are following the discussion but not reacting in real time to it.

Among concerns, the most common is about partial levitation which can be explained by diamagnetism or very plausibly ferromagnetism rather than by superconductivity. Another one dear to my heart is about measurements of resistance. People compare the resistivity of LK99 which should be zero if a full superconductor, to that of copper, which is a low-resistance metal but is not a superconductor, copper wins.

A bitcoin bro trying to understand what this all means, extracting value for the two datapoints where LK99 seems to be beating copper:

https://twitter.com/KaplanAkincilar/status/1686918836820271104

A huge splash was made when Sinead Griffin posted her calculations on arXiv. The mic drop meme and the national lab credentials plus results that seem to not contradict superconductivity in some form were met with absolute ecstasy by the internet.

But to me the most interesting part was that other scientists made efforts to put these results in context and deliver the idea that calculations of this kind, the density functional theory, are not capable of predicting superconductivity. In the old days of like two weeks ago such criticism would be considered very confrontational, though it is absolutely correct and is mostly just de-hyping somebody’s work and highlighting some technical concerns.

While Griffin posted her finished paper on arXiv, when it comes to phonons, vibrations of the lattice that reveal a lot about the viability of a material, we could witness the making of a result in real time. First Florian Knoop posted his initial calculations which hinted that the structure of LK99 is unstable. He then posted more careful results where by his own characterization the material did not look too bad! (meaning only that the reported crystal structure could potentially be viable).

Last but not least, you got treated to several excellent retrospective threads on superconductivity in general, on phenomena that surround it and on searching for higher and higher temperature superconductors.

https://twitter.com/MichaelSFuhrer/status/1686644227885944833

https://twitter.com/JoshuahHeath/status/1686392329375305728

https://twitter.com/NanoscaleViews/status/1684279618356887560

https://twitter.com/InnaVishik/status/1684626054613458944

https://twitter.com/InnaVishik/status/1687597652698116096

Regardless of whether the claim of LK99 turns out to be correct or not, there is enormous value in this experience of working openly and together on something, even if it is just following somebody else’s progress on twitter. In the future, when not so many people are paying attention, there are still huge benefits to talking openly, and even in sharing preliminary half-baked results as long as it is clear what are the circumstances and what approximations were made. This way we get quicker to the truth, answer questions more fully, avoid many mistakes and eventually this is how one of us will give somebody else the billion dollar idea that they would never have thought of. What we may need to give up is a part of our ego, for the joy of working together.

What prevents us from doing this again? No, there will not be a sensational claim made every week, but we can apply this way of working, of doing science, to any problem, big and small, specialized and of broad interest. It has been my dream for a long time to livecast our experiments, nothing prevents me from doing this except the usual - priorities, laziness, attention span… But I think this could be the ultimate way of working, fully in the open, not through secretive and outdated journals, and not even through arXiv but directly peer-to-peer in a public forum.

At least one person inexplicably disagrees that this was overall great and laments the closed door peer review (fortunately there are also people on my side). C'mon, if you need to think about something you can go to your office and write up a note, put it in a manuscript, or a book chapter. That is also fine, but this cannot be the only accepted way of doing science - the way it is overwhelmingly done now. Given all the technology that allows rapid exchange of massive data we are artificially limiting ourselves to the XXth century habits.

SUPER MEMES

Finally, it is an absolute treat and honor that the internet meme machine, still resident on Twitter, has graced superconductivity with its gaze. People came up with really excellent ones. I mean it. 

What a great moment I chose to leave Twitter! Right when you can gain 10k followers for a thread of hot takes on superconductivity… But I am not going back there! I want to explore the longer and quieter form for a while. And to prove that you can also joke on Substack here is one from me:

If LK99 proves real, I hope the government finally realizes that each lab needs to have a dilution refrigerator! 🤡🤡🤡

Here are the memes I collected. Levitation memes:

https://twitter.com/QM_phys_kyoto/status/1686540207536160773

https://twitter.com/WillWorker/status/1686594474732912640

https://twitter.com/bookazoid_/status/1686703325314772992

https://twitter.com/_ooo0OOOO0ooo_/status/1688297654810263552

https://twitter.com/Brice/status/1685101327033237504

 https://twitter.com/thetaimer/status/1687519843522662411

Insider memes:

https://twitter.com/dangaristo/status/1687466188341731328

https://twitter.com/MaximZiatdinov/status/1686411630052102151

https://twitter.com/boundstate/status/1684284268602707968

 

Reflecting on the process:

https://twitter.com/malikmamluke/status/1686750512178167809

https://twitter.com/HalfAcreBTCFarm/status/1686406141733986304

https://twitter.com/ProfPan_/status/1687866820764766208

https://twitter.com/alexkaplan0/status/1687504351756001294

 

Breaking bad memes, one example: 

https://twitter.com/FieldofM/status/1687411454348021760

 

Just purely awesome

https://twitter.com/jbs286/status/1685298792357138432

https://twitter.com/Lynnbee01/status/1684618911969370112

https://twitter.com/DataChaz/status/1687552858520948736