8 ms·
Ask HN: Why is LK-99 public?
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 ?
- pestatije 3y agoTheyre going to have patents assigned...if they keep it secret someone else could get them first
- addandsubtract 3y agoThankfully, scientific research is one of the last bastions not completely overrun by capitalism.
- MrPatan 3y agoIf the rock floats, it will be the biggest indictment against the current way of doing research you can possibly imagine.
- optimalsolver 3y agoCould you elaborate?
- _flux 3y ago99 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. 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. Like for a decade ;).
- mrabcx 3y agoThe Wikipedia page lists the publication history, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99#Publication_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99#Publication_history and the initial paper and patent history go back to 2020.
- m-i-l 3y agoAnd according to Wikipedia LK-99 was "discovered" back in 1999, hence the name. It isn't clear if it was also first manufactured back then, but assuming it was, 24 years does seem an awfully long time to notice these allegedly simple signs of room temperature super-conductivity (e.g. if you put a magnet near it then it is said to float as per Meissner effect).
- Qem 3y agoIt appears one of the discoverers feared he wouldn't be properly credited, and rushed the publication. See https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/15b27wn/the_story_behind_the_invention_of_lk99_reads_like/ https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/15b27wn/the_st... Perhaps his fears were founded. A few hours later in fact his name was suppressed in a second version of the paper.
- beardyw 3y agoA theory I read was that because at most 3 people can share a Nobel prize, one rushed it out naming just two others. Subsequent versions have named about 8.
- TekMol 3y agoIm still trying to wrap my head around superconductors. 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? If CPUs were made from material without resistance, would they stay cold? How much of the heat a CPU expells is inevitable? 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? So many questions...
- catboybotnet 3y ago>Where did the energy go then? Through the circuit. Heat is energy loss. The heat comes from the resistance. No resistance, no heat. To be more specific, the heat is from the kinetic energy of electrons bumping into the conductive material; no collision no heat.
- TekMol 3y agoLets make a simple Gedankenspiel with only a wire made from LK-99 and a bunch of electrons sitting on the left end of the wire. After a moment, the electrons will be spread out evenly through the wire, right? So after a moment, the energy that was stored in the system (When all electrons were on the left) is lost. If no heat is emitted, where did the energy go?
- gambiting 3y agoNowhere, it's still there - a loop of superconducting wire would also be a perfect energy storage because the electrons would just keep going around without any loss(it would be an extremely small capacity storage though, superconductors lose their superconductivity at high enough amperage which is basically what introducting more energy into the system would be).
- baq 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_energy_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_energ...
- jl6 3y agoI'm just a bystander with no understanding of the specifics, but there are lots of general reasons why it might happen this way: 1. The discovery was in a university research context, where publishing results is normal practice. 2. Maybe publication was mandated by the funding source. 3. Maybe it's not yet certain that it's a breakthrough and they want more eyes on it to help validate. 4. Maybe they want to be publicly acknowledged as the discoverers, for future patent/prize/fame purposes. 5. Maybe it's so early stage, or with so many practical limitations, that it is not yet ready to be industrialized. 6. Maybe the recipe is so simple that there's no realistic way to contain knowledge of it. 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. No need to invoke conspiracy.
- thevania 3y agoas 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
- b800h 3y agoDoes that mean the patent should start from 1999?
- _flux 3y agoPatents start from the day they are applied from, right? They just kept it secret until they applied for it. So the patent starts from 2020. Anyway, I wonder how important that patent https://patents.google.com/patent/KR20210062550A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/KR20210062550A/en is in the end, as it seems their way of manufacturing it is not very effective anyway and it might even be possible to find nearby compounds with similar properties.
- objektif 3y agoI have similar thoughts. If this is real it is hard to believe that Korean government was not involved in it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- MrPatan 3y agoThis is a great question, we need more of it. 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!
- ahmadmijot 3y agoIf 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.
- Heliosmaster 3y agoit's simply not published in a peer-reviewed journal, but it is published on arXiv, as per definition of 'publishing', i.e. "the business of making books, magazines, or newspapers available to the public" (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/publishing https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/publishi...)
- ahmadmijot 3y agoTrue, but in academia and R&D, when researchers talk about "publications" they always refer to peer-reviewed journal publication unless stated otherwise.
- XorNot 3y agoBecause the world does not work like conspiracy theorists think it does. 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. 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.
- varjag 3y agoNitpick: transistors were broadly used before microprocessors and still have thousands of uses that have nothing to do with computers.
- XorNot 3y agoOf course: but the point remains, the transistor by itself wasn't really useful - certainly not the first transistor. It took the resources and creativity of a nation to figure out what it could do, and to make it cheap enough for its advantages to create revolutionary technology with it: otherwise vacuum tubes "would do" - and did - for a very long time. A secret program of transistorized electronics would've been of no use at all: since all the advantages came from making them ubiquitous and cheap.
- doubleg72 3y ago"the transistor by itself wasn't really useful" Not to sound like an ass, and I know it is early yet here on the East coast of the US, but damn this is the most ignorant thing I have read on the internet all day! Not sure what hole you need to have your head up to not realize the impacts of the transistor that don't involve the microprocessor.
- P_I_Staker 3y agoThis is harsh, but I agree. It's baffling to me that he doesn't seem to understand this point. WTF. I've gotten in trouble on hackernews pointing this stuff out, but this is a MASSIVE cultural problem on this site! All these SW nerds just baffled that anything exists outside their universe. (and I'm sw too) The transistor was such an immediately obviously useful invention, it immediately became the toast of the town AT LEAST a decade before the first microprocessor.
- armchairhacker 3y agoWell, it was leaked so… Also, we have no clue if the US or other military has already discovered and been using this and for how long. 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… 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
- TMWNN 3y ago>Also, we have no clue if the US or other military has already discovered and been using this and for how long. Highly relevant: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36967333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36967333> and <https://np.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/15fy1xw/superconductor_patent_cites_navy_patent_created/ https://np.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/15fy1xw/superconductor...>
- gadgete 3y agoThe technology is over a hundred years old, people have merely been refining it, spending their entire careers. There will be rivalry. 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. This is exactly how collaborative, peer-reviewed scientific research should be. Public.
- mrtksn 3y agoIt 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. 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. 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). Here is a thread on the history of the development of the substance: https://twitter.com/8teAPi/status/1685641634892128256 https://twitter.com/8teAPi/status/1685641634892128256
- michaelt 3y ago> 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. Or it's just public science funding working as it's supposed to - scientists with high-impact findings get rewarded with citations, prizes, tenure and further research funding. To me it's no mystery why an academic researcher would want to publicise findings like this - I'm surprised they didn't rush to publish it 20 years ago!
- Symmetry 3y agoA 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. Plus, the initial publication seems to have stemmed from dissension within the group. There's no way they could have kept this secret.