Mastodawn

Meg Jul 29, 2023

This whole #LK99 room temperature superconductor thing is pretty fascinating. Even the cautious scientists are like "probably not real but if it is it'll be world changing" which is.. not something you see every day.

If there's anything that makes me (as an extreme lay person) think it might be real it's that the people behind it are literally fighting over who gets credit, including dueling preprint papers and everything.

If it was a scam or they didn't really believe they had something, you'd kind of expect the opposite? If they're wrong they're fucked. Unlike billionaires (or even millionaires), scientists who tank their reputations really can lose their shirts.

Definitely wish more of the conversations about this were happening in places I can follow from the fediverse though.

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Meg Jul 31, 2023

The weirdest twist in the #lk99 saga so far is a very odd Russian woman on the site formerly known as Twitter (iris_igb) liveposting an extremely kitchen meth lab kind of attempt to reproduce the process while also criticising the methods in the paper and then posting photos of a very tiny possibly levitating rock at the end.

When asked why she's doing it in the kitchen, she snaps back if they'd rather she have to take four hours of transit to the lab.

Anyways, like I said, fascinating lol.

Link to nitter of the thread: https://nitter.net/iris_IGB/status/1685265405386878977

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Hafstorsk Tutiluren Rufsgössen

@megmac I tried following these developments, but x/Twitter/nitter doesn't provide a comprehensible interface for following the developments in s chronological or threaded way. Perhaps I'm just stupid.

I picked up that she tries a new way of cooking this, and that be end she calls herself stupid (perhaps relative to the 99.99th percentile of the population?).

Do you have a reference to where she performs tests of her baked material? Where it would levitate or resistance is measured?

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Meg Jul 31, 2023

@n https://nitter.net/iris_IGB/status/1685731177523449856 is the pictures of the allegedly floating rock (inside the tube). She's not measuring resistance. Doing so seems like it would be challenging with the small fragments she wound up with and in the kitchen lab setup she's doing, but she also said that's the job of bigger labs to measure. Her claimed goal seems to be to poke holes in the synthesis method and then show that her method produced the same result in a visible way. All of that is assuming good faith and taking what she's said at face value. She does seem to know what she's talking about in terms of chemistry though.

I think the "stupid" thing is probably a language barrier and/or dialectical thing. Don't think she meant it literally.

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Hafstorsk Tutiluren Rufsgössen Jul 31, 2023

@megmac Thanks for pointing this out. I didn't realize the specimen was in the tube.

Exciting to watch, this. Hope to have some conclusive confirmation or rejection soon so that I can sleep again. 🙃