Don't get me wrong, I love the fact that a break through technology is shared with the rest of the world immediatly. Let's assume that it is real.
I can't help but wonder why a so significant discovery is published so soon. Wouldn't the laboratory or even the state in which this discovery was made want to keep it secret, to have this edge over its concurrents ? Akin TMSC for exemple.
Isn't there significant military applications possibles ?
With that in mind, would it be possible that :
1/ that discovery is not new, and better superconductor already exist somewhere ?
2/ the rushed publication would be like a leak, to prevent exactly that ?
I'm just a bystander with no understanding of the specifics, but there are lots of <i>general</i> reasons why it might happen this way:<p>1. The discovery was in a university research context, where publishing results is normal practice.<p>2. Maybe publication was mandated by the funding source.<p>3. Maybe it's not yet certain that it's a breakthrough and they want more eyes on it to help validate.<p>4. Maybe they want to be publicly acknowledged as the discoverers, for future patent/prize/fame purposes.<p>5. Maybe it's so early stage, or with so many practical limitations, that it is not yet ready to be industrialized.<p>6. Maybe the recipe is so simple that there's no realistic way to contain knowledge of it.<p>7. Maybe it's a revolutionary technology that will save the world and the best outcome for everybody, including the researchers, is to get it into as many hands as possible.<p>No need to invoke conspiracy.
It appears one of the discoverers feared he wouldn't be properly credited, and rushed the publication. See <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/15b27wn/the_story_behind_the_invention_of_lk99_reads_like/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/15b27wn/the_st...</a><p>Perhaps his fears were founded. A few hours later in fact his name was suppressed in a second version of the paper.
Well, it was leaked so…<p>Also, we have no clue if the US or other military has already discovered and been using this and for how long.<p>I feel it was going to get out eventually. If you’re using a room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor for things which require room-temperature ambient-pressure superconducting, unless you conceal that you actually need it, people are going to realize. And once the existence is known, many top-tier labs would be analyzing it and trying to discover the manufacturing process like they are now…<p>The nice thing about academia is that people don’t hide breakthrough discoveries, they post them publicly and get rewarded for that. If real, these people are on track to win a nobel prize and lifelong fame and probably, lifelong funding (though probably not as much, but more than enough to survive). If real and these people hide how to produce, what would they get? Possibly more money, because governments and businesses would buy what they make for a lot and hire for even more. But governments and organizations would also want to kidnap and extort them, and most people would hate them. Meanwhile many, many labs with as much equipment and as talented researchers would be working on reproducing, and taking whatever samples they can get to do so, so their extra opportunities may not even last for long, but their notoriety would
It appears that the development and the consequent publication was driven by vanity, that is the researchers really really wanted to claim the glory for their invention.<p>Why I say this? The events of publishing, retracting and re-publishing the original paper happen over drama among the people involved with the discovery.<p>It also appears that that the development wasn't a smooth sail as would a conspiracy may theorists like to describe technological innovations. They had hard dime finding funding and people who believe in them, so having this great epiphany in 1999 then working with the governments to develop it is not a realistic scenario at all. Instead, they grinded for 2 decades and finally got something good enough to show for. Even then, their discovery is still under heavy scrutiny and it might turn out to be a dud(Although, at this point I would bet that they are onto something real).<p>Here is a thread on the history of the development of the substance: <a href="https://twitter.com/8teAPi/status/1685641634892128256" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://twitter.com/8teAPi/status/1685641634892128256</a>
99 in the name comes from the year it was discovered. However, it was only researched more thoroughly during the last few years. It was patented a few years ago.<p>But yes, there was a leak in the form of the first whitepaper published by Kwon who was a former member of the group—so perhaps had it not been for that release then they would still keep trying to enchance the process more before releasing.<p>Like for a decade ;).
Im still trying to wrap my head around superconductors.<p>When energy flows from one and of a wire made from a superconductor to the other end, then no heat is produced? Where did the energy go then?<p>If CPUs were made from material without resistance, would they stay cold?<p>How much of the heat a CPU expells is inevitable?<p>Could (non-reversible) calculations be done without creating any heat? If yes, where did the energy go? There is no way to compute something like 10+20 without "using up" energy, right?<p>So many questions...
The technology is over a hundred years old, people have merely been refining it, spending their entire careers. There will be rivalry.<p>Assuming it is real, one must consider the perspective of the discoverer. In science, it's a race to publish and this will certainly win a Nobel Prize.
That's why scientists publish in communications/letters/preprints.<p>This is exactly how collaborative, peer-reviewed scientific research should be. Public.
A general or corporate exec looking at this from outside has no reason to take this groups claims seriously until it's been validated by the physics community. It took years of effort by multiple Noble prize winners to get the US government to invest in the atomic bomb. And probably getting LK-99 into a form ready for large scale deployment will take more effort than can be provided by the existing group.<p>Plus, the initial publication seems to have stemmed from dissension within the group. There's no way they could have kept this secret.
This is a great question, we need more of it.<p>Whenever there's a new piece of information or "news", always stop and wonder who is telling you that, why, and why now. Not enough people do!
Because the world does not work like conspiracy theorists think it does.<p>Science is never obviously a breakthrough, people like to talk about and get credit for cool stuff they do, and revolutionary technology isn't necessarily of any benefit if no one knows about it.<p>This is like asking why the US government didn't keep the transistor a secret: because the transistor is of no use to anyone until people made microprocessors with it, and to do that they needed to first make better transistors.
The Wikipedia page lists the publication history, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99#Publication_history" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99#Publication_history</a> and the initial paper and patent history go back to 2020.
If I'm not mistaken it's not that they 'published' the finding as in 'publish in a peer-reviewed article' but more like depositing pre-print in a database (arXiv) for not yet peer-review journal.
as the name suggests, it was first synthetized in 1999 and only now the public got to know about it - that's 24 years and we know about it only because of human spite