this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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No I wasn’t. Source?
If you do a Google search for LK-99 you'll see a whole pile of news articles from the past two days. A preprint was posted on arXiv and everything exploded. There are labs all over the world working on reproducing the material and testing it right now, and it's a pretty simple thing to make so we'll have a solid answer likely within a week.
Looking at it, this paper was falsified in 2020, then they pulled it down, then another author was added to it and leaked to a publication and now the leaking party is claiming the paper is incomplete so you can't actually reproduce the results. Frankly, it sounds like someone ran out of grant money.
Everything I've seen says that the 2020 paper was rejected, not falsified. It had been submitted to Nature shortly after Diaz's now-likely-fraudulent superconductor research had been accepted and turned out to be controversial, so it's understandable that Nature was gun-shy of superconductor papers. Do you have any references to its falsification? A paper can be rejected for many reasons other than falsification, indeed I would think most rejections are not for that since peer review doesn't include independently replicating the results.
What it feels like to me is that the authors were panicking over the possibility of getting "scooped." They've been working on this stuff for decades and had often gone without funding so that seems like less of an urgent concern to me.
Wikipedia said data was falsified https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99 so that's where I took that information from.
Emphasis added. The paper that had falsified paper was by a different researcher and was about a completely different putative superconductor. Only Dias' paper appears to be based on falsified data. There's no indication that the LK-99 paper is based on falsified data. Unfortunately LK-99 is suffering guilt by association simply because both of these things are about room-temperature superconductors, but they share nothing in common with each other beyond that broad topic.
Ah, I skim, read it, and missed that they were talking about a completely different material and paper. Honestly, fairly silly of Wikipedia and rare to bring up something that isn't really related to that specific topic.
It explains why Nature might have been quicker to reject another paper about room temperature superconductivity than they otherwise would have been. But yeah, it's a little misleading stuck in there like that.
The confusing part specifically is "Similarly-presented research" which doesn't say why it's similarly-presented. It sounds like looking into it that it's just "both were room temperature superconductors" but it could have also meant that "both are about LK-99", "both are from the same university" or something like that. It's ambiguous.
Very cool!