It's hard to imagine how this could be faked short of digital manipulation, and it seems implausible that it would be a known high TC superconductor because it would warm up too fast. Absent the former explantation, I'm starting to believe this is real. Also, it's not like all the author's are unknown hacks. Hyun Tak Kim has about 10k citations (Google scholar, which sometimes combines people who have the same name though) and authored a paper in scientific reports which got L&K interested in collaborating with him. The guy seems to know superconductivity so I'm feeling rather optimistic about this.
That one is clearly rotating. Magnetic levitation with a rotating field is not too difficult (you can get levitating flower pots as cheap novelty toys) but the sample in the new video appears fully static.
The object that is rotating is a magnet. It's not what we're seeing with the flake which appears to be flux pinned.
If this is fake, it's a very well-done fake. I'm feeling 60% sure that LK-99 is RT superconductor at this point. It has theoretical support now since last weekend.
It can easily be faked, using a technique that would destroy the poster's career. It's one thing to not do something to the letter, and another to commit blatant fraud. Most career academics would not burn their career for the lulz.
Not an expert, but my understanding is that magnet configuration could not create a stable levitation for pyrolytic graphite - you need an array of magnets, e.g. https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1010/1010.5761.pdf
Doing a quick sanity check on youtube videos, every example I can find of it levitating involves use of magnet arrays as well.
> Hyun Tak Kim has about 10k citations (Google scholar, which sometimes combines people who have the same name though) and authored a paper in scientific reports which got L&K interested in collaborating with him.
It appears he was a latecomer to the project, mostly borrowing his reputation to the trio of anonymous, non anglosphere native original authors.
Let's be less cynical. Nothing to do with borrowing reputation.
The original authors have something. They don't have the expertise in condensed matter physics to really know what. They don't know how to report results and what results would be conclusive. Their work is simply not convincing, and if they were experts they would also not be convinced.
That's why they brought in another collaborator who is an expert. But because the paper was released early it's clearly a mess. You can see the big quality improvement though just between the two drafts.
It's not cynism. The disagreement about authorship apparently was motivated by someone in the original team being pushed aside to open a slot for the well connected "10k citations" guy. It's a old problem academia still fails to address. See:
Indeed. But if further investigation reveals the situation to be what it appears to be, this would follow a long list of similar occurrences, the likes of César Lattes and Jocelyn Bell.
Seriously? To me this looks like a chip of graphite glued to an invisible thread. The way the object moves is not what I would expect from magnetism (see second 10 for instance)
This is what a pinned superconductor looks like. Here is a video I made of some YCBO over a small magnet: https://nt4tn.net/random/superconductor.mp4 you can see it settle back back when I move it with tongs (until i push hard enough to get it to snap into a new orientation).
If I had a magnet that was much bigger than the superconductor it would look even more similar (less 'pivoty').
Excellent video, really very nice. I like it how you forced the flux pinning by punching a hole in the middle of the superconductor, that makes it all much more visible. You can practically visualize the fieldlines escaping through the middle and becoming an elastic pivot connected to the magnet.
It's not that weird, it just looks weird if you don't have any idea of what is going on. But it's fairly logical if you get the principle behind it. Nullc's excellent video below shows a much clearer example.
How can it look like something that is ostensibly invisible? It's not swinging around like a pendulum, so what exactly are you seeing that makes you think it looks like an invisible string?
What accounts for the smooth “settling” into place after the last touch around 10s?
I have no idea what I’m talking about, but in other flux pinning demonstrations the sample seems to oscillate around the fixed point. That smooth settling looks like some sort of damping, like maybe a force that increases with distance, like maybe spring tension.
(Of course, “we have no idea” is an acceptable answer if that turns out to be the case.)
Air resistance seems like a reasonable explanation for the dampening. Furthermore if it's not pure and only partially superconducting, the dampening could be due to magnetic fields forming eddy currents in the sample.
> (Of course, “we have no idea” is an acceptable answer if that turns out to be the case.)
Good hypotheses both! “We’ve never been able to pin something this size before” covers a lot of wiggle room. So to speak.
(FWIW I’m thrilled about the possibility of a rtrp drop this year, and I have to assume 'pera is as well. But this video doesn’t look just like flux pinning we’ve seen before. It’s visibly a little different in a way that wants explanation. I wouldn’t come out the gate calling it a hoax, but I’d feel better about not doing that if the basis for skepticism were at least acknowledged.)
But you haven't explained how it looks like that. It could be that, but it looks like it's floating. What is it about the appearance of this thing which has you believing there is a string?
If there is a magician on the stage, you can safely presume there is no actual magic involved, even though you do not know how exactly the trick works.
For actual flux pinning, the first thing you would do is show what happens if you put the thing upside down. It should stick. Even if it does not, you would show that it does not.
The point of the illusions in a good magicians act is that they look like magic. If the illusions look like invisible strings/etc, then they were poorly done. Even if you know there must be a string, it shouldn't look that way.
So what I'm saying is that even if it's reasonable to deduce that this supposed magnet is being suspended from a string, it doesn't look like it is. If it is fake, it's a well-done illusion not a shoddy illusion.
Whether it "looks like it's on a string" is highly subjective. Suppose I primed you by saying: Look at this speck of dirt on a string, does it look like a speck of dirt on a string to you?
1. This video is originally from an anonymous Douyin account. There is no verification that it is associated with a real replication attempt, from traditional academia or citizen science. There is a previous video on the channel showing the partial levitation more common to LK-99, but it likewise has no particular evidence it's not just a flake of pyrolitic graphite. It is claimed to be associated with a specific person but no evidence is provided. There is no reputation to be lost if this is a fake.
2. In the video, while the effect dynamics look quite good for flux pinning, there is some really concerning artifacting on the alleged LK-99 piece while it bounces. Specifically, it looks like it may be attached to a taut horizontal string that has then been edited out, but they didn't successfully rotoscope over the parts very close to the alleged LK-99 piece during specific moments. This could just be a compression artifact, I have never seen one like this but apparently this is a capture of a capture by the time we can access it, and I don't use Douyin or Bilibili so I wouldn't have a lot of familiarity with what their compression artifacts look like.
Basically, I am pretty sceptical about this video in specific. I do think LK-99 is more likely than not at this point, but I also think it's more likely than not that this specific video is not real.
I also think it's extremely likely that as LK-99's profile raises and VFX editors get more familiar with what exactly a real video should look like, convincing fakes are going to be produced and go viral. The most common way this happens is that the VFX artist does it as an exercise and shows a few people without ill intent, but the video is then reposted by other people a few times until it reaches a wide audience who has no chance of knowing its origin. However, there are some scammers/influencers who are good with VFX and can fake a video themselves.
Basically, be a little bit careful about video, and things you should want are: the camera is moving around the piece and not static, the light changes during the video, the pieces themselves are moving, you see the pieces getting set up or finished later, and there's stuff moving all around the object to make strings less likely.
Not really true. It depends on how you do your CGI, if you have a setup with camera tracking and a 3D compositing pipeline as well as some sort of particle system for the dynamics, you could produce an infinite amount of VFX. It really depends on the specifics of how you set it up.
I looked at the highest quality and the artifacting is just crazy here. There are no artifacts around the instrument at all, just on the supposedly levitating rock. The quality on this and the other video from the user looks like its very good so I don't really buy this.
The context here is rather strange as well, the same user uploaded another video that no one would believe actually demonstrated the meissner effect. Its a very small magnet on just a piece of paper. Did the user try again with this video?
Yeah, why on earth would you use only a wide angle lense to film something microscopic? You would zoom in close to your amazing discovery. But, this way, the interesting thing is a only a few pixels, and can easily be computer generated. Every video I've seen has some logical flaw like that.
The video is watermarked 炼丹师阿翔 (Alchemist Axiang), which is also the username of the Douyin video, so I think that's the closest to the original source we can get. (The tweet claims Bilibili as the source, but it was apparently a live stream and 炼丹师阿翔's Bilibili account currently only has a previous video without full levitation. https://bilibili.com/video/BV1sM4y1H7MX )
HLS is a way to serve a video in chunks over HTTP. It's how livestreams are implemented in most places. Twitter serves videos in HLS chunks, but Nitter doesn't want to proxy it to you because videos take a lot of bandwidth. In order to let you choose whether you want to connect to Twitter servers, it first asks you whether you want to enable playback.
Because they want to avoid sending your IP to Twitter if you aren't going to watch the video, and the way to do that without JS is to only render the video embed if you actually request it.
Someone linked to this on the manifold market: https://imgur.io/a/AY1oaIO it does look a bit weird to me but I am not expert enough to tell if this could be explained by optical/compression effects.
Such tiny samples warm up to room temperature very quickly, on the order of a few seconds. In my experience, it's not possible to make such small pieces of YBCO superconductor levitate, they warm up too fast.
No frost on the sample either. The only way I can think of to fake this in camera is to make the "sample" out of a strong magnet, and make the "magnet" a hollow shell concealing a chilled piece of YBCO!
You would be surprised what can be achieved with bit of nylon string and an appropriate camera setup. If this is a most groundbreaking discovery, why waste all that screen resolution on the backdrop?
I don't think that's right. Diamagnetic levitation is one of the ways you can get around Earshaw's theorem.
Funny enough this is a quote taken directly from the wikipedia article that Andercot linked, in the "loopholes" section:
>Earnshaw's theorem has no exceptions for non-moving permanent ferromagnets. However, Earnshaw's theorem does not necessarily apply to moving ferromagnets,[4] certain electromagnetic systems, pseudo-levitation and diamagnetic materials. These can thus seem to be exceptions, though in fact they exploit the constraints of the theorem.
...
>Diamagnetic materials are excepted because they exhibit only repulsion against the magnetic field, whereas the theorem requires materials that have both repulsion and attraction. An example of this is the famous levitating frog (see Diamagnetism).
Sure enough. Which, well, makes sense, since superconductors are "perfect" diamagnets, so them being able to do it seems to necessitate that the greater class of diamagnets on the whole can too.
The only examples I can find of stable non-superconductor diamagnets involved 4+ magnet arrays, though, or multipole magnets, e.g. https://phys.org/news/2014-08-diamagnetic-levitation-pyrolit... and not dipole configurations like this video seems to show.
How can a diamagnet be stable on top of a single dipole? Earnshaw's criterion being invalid just means that there is at least one static arrangement of magnetic dipoles that lead to stability. However, if you have a point-like diamagnet resting on top of a single dipole it can't possibly be stable because there is no point at which it will have zero net force and stable higher-order derivatives. You need something like a bowl-shaped magnetic field arrangement for it to stay in a single point, or have the diamagnet itself be shaped something like a bowl over the field.
Yeah you bring up a good point... I don't think it can.
But you CAN do it with concentric rings of magnets. Such magnets seem common for this exact demonstration actually. It doesn't look like one of those in the video though.
I mean based on current understanding a previous video that showed levitation independent of the orientation was already sufficient to show it's not diamagnetic but superconducting. Assuming this is not a hoax actually the very first video together with the paper already shows everything. (Levitation, mentioning of zero resistivity regions)
Although generally the accepted method is that other labs reproduce it and that the paper passes peer review. Some videos aren't enough.
Hoax is quite a strong word where there's been quite a few replication attempts with various degrees of success. Like others have said, we're not sure what this is, but it almost certainly isn't a hoax.
As for this video, well, it's like all the other ones that came before it, we'll know more once we have more data/videos/replication attempts.
The source[0] seems to be the Douyin (TikTok) user 炼丹师阿翔[1], who also posted a different LK-99 demonstration video[2] a few days ago that shows similar results to previous demonstrations by other researchers.
Yes but what research institute are they affiliated with? For all I know this is an pseudonymous TikTok user who is good at faking videos. Why should I take this for anything but complete fiction?
Certainly not making any claims of the legitimacy, just providing the original sources. There doesn't seem to be any attribution besides the anonymous account.
The Chinese subtitles in the first demonstration claim "further efforts will be made to reduce impurities", then the subsequent video claims "technical details will be published once they are properly organized and documented".
In fact I see some serious lab quality glassware in the background. But posting without its provenance is a weird for sure.
IMO there’s an awful lot of amateur / informal attempts that are promising enough that, while not convincing, are inspiring of hope. But I do wonder how much is fake. But more than a few seem to be clearly not fake, such as the work Varda is posting.
is it possible in theory that flux-pinning could occur without actually causing superconductivity? because LK-99 seems to be decoupling alot of properties we thought were coupled if I'm understanding correctly?
It could be an entirely new hitherto unobserved phenomena, but that seems pretty unlikely. I think that having a bunch of tiny superconductors chunks separated by a regular conductor would explain a lot.
That would require 'new physics'. I think most of the weirdness stems from either (1) sample impurity, (2) an extreme form of that where the active bits are really tiny in a large chunk of inert stuff or stuff with its own electromagnetic properties or (3) being mistaken about it being a superconductor in the first place.
> He posted on his personal social media, According to public information, he is an assistant engineer in the Department of Metallurgical Engineering and Materials of Wuhan University of Science and Technology, and is also a doctoral candidate at the school.
Better cheaper faster ultrahigh magnetic sensing of magnetic flux and field across a broad dynamic range.
Typical setups are networked fields of multiple axis sub nanotesla magnetic sensors with processing to reduce noise and subtract interference in order to extract a differential change across time and space to convert to a deep earth image.
You know, the usual stuff.
The essential principal is a fixed sensor (network) that records the diurnal (daily) magnetic flux and specifically locals for local 'drag' caused by local features (deep metal deposits, more generally volumes with varying magnetic properties).
To put it in perspective: millions of people in the US regularly handle ammunition and shoot firearms at indoor ranges. Those contain lead in many forms: the projectile itself, lead fulminate in the primer compounds, lead suspended in the air after firing, etc.
You make sure to have adequate ventilation, don’t touch your face, and wash your hands when you’re done. It’s important, yes, but not really that big a deal.
This is to create a risk reduction mechanism for investing in capital to make this at scale, which will cost on the order of $100-500M to scale for world use through trial and error.
If IP is ignored, no business will invest in the initial experiments due to first mover disadvantage in game theory.
Not a patent attorney, but as far as I know: The patent is currently pending (as in, being evaluated to see if it will be granted). Once it is granted in one country it can be expanded to multiple countries within a couple of months, given that the first country is part of the Patent Cooperation Treaty. So if an invention is marked “patent pending”, you know you will have the risk of being sued by said company at some time in the future if you copy the invention.
Forgive me, I know little about these things, but what’s the relationship between this phenomenon and the quantum locking seen in other super conducting magnets, this looks as described as “pinned”, what would allow it to behave like the famous video of the magnets levitating around that circular track: https://youtu.be/Ws6AAhTw7RA
Superconductors will resist moving at any direction where the magnetic flux gets weaker, stronger, or changes direction. That's why they get described as "pinned".
Other diamagnets do that too, but in a decaying way that allows for movement. They usually rotate or move slowly sideways.
No other kind of magnetism show similar behavior. They either attract or repel all the way in.
It's possible that I misunderstand, but I think the title is a little inaccurate. Flux pinning goes beyond just levitation. In the embedded video we can see that the sample is not just levitating freely above the magnet, but it levitates above a certain fixed point. After gently poking the sample we can see it returning to its original position and orientation.
> “ Specifically they were one of the last believers of long-forgotten Russian theory of superconductivity, pioneered by Nikolay Bogolyubov. The accepted theory is entirely based on Cooper pairs, but this theory suggests that a sufficient constraint on electrons may allow superconductivity without actual Cooper pairs. This requires carefully positioned point defects in the crystalline structure, which contemporary scientists consider unlikely and such mode of SC was never formally categorized unlike type-I and type-II SC. Professor Tong-seek Chair (최동식) represented a regret about this status quo (in 90s, but still applies today) that this theory was largely forgotten without the proper assessment after the fall of USSR. It was also a very interesting twist that Iris Alexandria, "that Russian catgirl chemist", had an advisor who was a physicist-cum-biochemist studied this theory and as a result were so familiar with the theory that they were able to tell if replications follow the theoretical prediction.”
A very large quantity of discoveries in science are a combination of "well, that's odd" and the "sheer luck" associated with the circumstances producing that statement.
(This isn't a commentary on the truthfulness of the superconductor claims.)
There is a combinatorial number of different materials out there. They chose a particular small subset of them that they predicted might have some interesting properties and, over two decades, discovered one that may have those properties.
Most hypotheses are wrong, and even if they turn out right it may well be a case of being right for the wrong reasons. Regardless, this is top tier research: unglamorous, uninstagramable drudgery guided by intellect. Sure, there's luck involved, but research always involves luck.
This is a very odd question to me. All research is essentially this may or may not work. That's why you test it. In a sense finding something cool is a very large part luck.
Does it matter? Even "rigorous" research depends on luck in many cases, because there are so many unknowns. Theory helps reduce the search space, but there are situations when a brute-force attack is the most efficient way to answer the all-important question: is this real?
The sample most probably sticks to a flexible membrane above the magnet (to something like a transparent contact lens - one can even clearly recognize a round circumference on the magnet plate surrounding the green junk).
What I like most about this development is that, suddenly, folks with "CEO " or "Founder " in their Twitter bio look uncool, while folks with "<hardscience>" in their twitter bio are uber cool.
Note to pedants: yes yes, the Venn diagram has an intersection.
It's something pretty standard for funded start-ups because the rest of the ecosystem that they operate in expects it. If it is two guys in an attic it's cringe (see my 'you are not the CEO article') but if you have picked up some funding and employ 20 people I totally get why you would do that.
It is kinda funny once you get used to it. When there is bad news they say “it’s so over” and good news “we’re so back”. The emotional rollercoaster on LK-99 is pretty intense and these phrases capture that for people. I get it at this point.
Life on twitter teeters on the edge separating intense excitement and horrific despair, and “we are back” means we’ve switched from one side to the other again
Funny you mention this. I've decided just today to begin a full week of no Twitter or YouTube. To keep myself on top of my addictions, rather than fully succumbed to them. Props to you for deleting your account and going all in.
As revolutionary as this stuff is, it fits within our current understanding of the universe, or maybe a tiny bit outside (for now).
Intelligent interstellar aliens using unfathomable technology, secretly interacting with humans doesn’t.
What you’re asserting at this point is that all of science as we know it is wrong, and everything we’ve built was just incredible, one-in-a-trillion fortune that any of it worked at all.
It’s like looking at a plane or a helium balloon and deciding gravity is wrong.
That’s exactly how revision in science works; incomplete is wildly different from “wrong”, and most of our understanding of science would need to be fully wrong for aliens to do what is claimed they can do, to the point where we would have needed to get impossibly lucky in order to have built the things we have.
Because if reality works in a way that lets little green men fly ships across galaxies and secretly hang out with world leaders, then we’re incredibly wrong about how the universe works.
And the problem with just being okay with our wrongness is that it doesn’t match up with our ability to predict and rely on the science to complete complex engineering projects.
Here’s a math example: it’s like saying 1+1 is sometimes actually fleeb. Easy to imagine, but wholly destructive to the entire concept of math.
>And the problem with just being okay with our wrongness is that it doesn’t match up with our ability to predict and rely on the science to complete complex engineering projects.
But a theory can be false while still being predictively accurate.
Classical mechanics predicts that quantum tunneling should be impossible. But as it turns out, quantum tunneling is possible. So classical mechanics is false - or at least partially false. But classical mechanics is still predictively successful in a wide range of scenarios. So, a theory can be both false and predictively successful.
The most natural way to explain this is to say that classical mechanics is an approximation of a deeper, more accurate theory. Similarly, our current best theories could be approximations of as yet unknown theories - theories that allow for certain phenomena that are currently thought to be impossible.
[Citation needed] - What linked patent? It seems incredibly rude to me to dismiss decades of dedicated research this way. This is a human achievement, it's not right to try to take that away from the people who put so much work into it.
That’s just magic by another name. You believe in magic to assuage your fears and help with a world that can feel too nuanced and complex. Simple answers soothe. That’s something humans have been doing for a long, long time. If it helps, great!
Please. Aliens are only a cover. It is well known that the pentagon has had a supercomputer that reached superintelligence decades ago and has used to slowly tickle advanced technology to the masses.
Don't kid yourself. This is only another smokescreen. In fact Abraham Lincoln after his stunt as a vampire hunter was able to seal god. They know use gods body to slowly extract secrets of the universe.
Even a breakaway civilization of ancient Atlaneans living under Antarctica makes more sense than aliens. Do yourself a favor and look up how far away other stars are, consider how many times astronomers have looked into space and not seen aliens, and then ask yourself why aliens would be so good at cloaking themselves in space but would ostensibly let themselves be seen on Earth itself.
Spoilers: it's not Atlanteans either, it's just a big tangle of hoaxes and self-delusion from people who want to believe.
>The main argument in favour of the non-existence of aliens are religious books.
Not in the slightest, that's the worst strawman against it (and for the record, I am an atheist, so drop this line of argument now before I'm forced to counter-insult you.) Try the Rare Earth Hypothesis. There are only 10^11 stars in the Milky Way galaxy, you don't need to stack up many terms in a "Drake equation" to push the result to near zero in the Milky Way. The Rare Earth Hypothesis is consistent with all empirical observations thusfar.
Furthermore, even if there were other intelligence species like us in our Galaxy, they would be incapable of reaching us just as we are incapable of reaching them. To believe these aliens are visiting Earth you need to explain why you can't see them anywhere except ostensibly in deserts above American military facilities and installations for testing secret aircraft.
>To believe these aliens are visiting Earth you need to explain why you can't see them anywhere except ostensibly in deserts above American military facilities and installations for testing secret aircraft.
FWIW, I think this is a much stronger argument against the existence of aliens than “they don’t fit with our current understanding of physics (which is known to be incomplete anyway)”.
We don’t need to actually see the surface of a planet to know whether or not that planet harbours life capable of space travel depending how far away the planet is.
Unless they took a completely different, or radically faster pathway to interstellar travel.
That's not true. Here's a video from a few years ago [showing a superconductor flux pinning](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSojjjvRCR0). You can see from the video it's moving around. Also if it didn't move when you applied a force to it that would be quite the immovable object.
The superconductor can move because it's staying at a consistent height.
The video linked is also pretty good at showing similar behaviors to the sample of LK99 we see claimed in the video: the superconductor can wobble, shake and does return to it's original position (or tries to) - but it's got a lot more mass.
Yeah, it's jumping back to a fixed position which isn't how I thought the Meissner effect worked. Since this seems to be posted by someone reputable though it's weird they missed that.
