Originally published at: South Korean scientists announce room-temperature superconductor: "a brand-new historical event that opens a new era for humankind" | Boing Boing
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This would be pretty fucking cool. So I’m going to assume it’s either fraud or an error.
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Ha! I’m not impressed. Call me when they have a room temperature super-fluid!
Actually this would be amazing but healthy skepticism, of course.
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Too good to be true. Next, I’ll hear a cheap commercial fusion power plant was just put online, the orange guy is in jail and banned from all future elections and I won the billion-dollar Powerball lottery.
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Not just that, but per the IFL article it’s not even clear if the paper has been submitted to a journal for peer review yet, let alone published. So it’s still pretty early to even start getting optimistic about this.
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Big if true. That would be a giant leap forward in developing commercial grade fusion reactors.
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The media, every time there’s a “breakthrough” in superconductors or cold fusion.
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I just want to point out that, if this paper is real, and these researchers just publicly posted the formula for making a room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor, that would make it the single greatest contribution to the public good since…I dunno, the wheel, maybe?
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Something does not make sense, I would expect the temp to be 276 Kelvin or -276 Fahrenheit or Celsius. The current claim would mean it is cool-able with liquid water!
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
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The key point about room temperature superconductors is that they aren’t cool
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Exactly.
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I’d like to announce that I, also, have discovered a room temperature superconductor. The room happens to be on Neptune, making it somewhat inconvenient. But that’s a transportation issue. This is science.
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This is a pre-publication paper with troublesome qualities already being pointed out. There’s no independent verification, and I doubt there ever will be. I’d be THRILLED to be wrong on this, but right now the evidence is in favor of “another big fat fraud.”
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“We believe that our new development will be a brand-new historical event that opens a new era for humankind”
Wow, if true, we might even have a couple years of neat new gadgets before climate change destroys civilization! Cool!
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Yeah everything about the claims seems highly suspicious. If something sounds too good to be true, it’s just not. Especially considering the incredible lack of evidence, even if it were true this is not how you do your science and its not how you talk about your research.
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IF it’s true (and I’m as sceptical as everyone else here) it would be such a monumentally important discovery that you could excuse the researchers getting a bit giddy about it.
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Now my blow dryer won’t work at all
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And it’s not even using any rare materials, lead copper phosphate could actually be scalable if it checks out.
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I disagree, these half baked announcements do more harm to science communication than good. You’ll get more noise and straight up faked results, there’s a reason why things have to go through peer review. Even legit research can be flawed and have bad results and data, presenting unsubstantiated results as fact is just not the way to do things especially in a world where science research is derided by lay people that don’t know what they’re talking about.
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