The important thing to understand is that only the scientific publications in Nature matter. These articles are written by world-class scientists and are taken very seriously. In contrast, the journalism section is akin to any random newspaper. It is generally written by standard journalists and is intended for a mass audience.
Even if the hype over LK-99 comes to nothing it became evident to me several days ago that this research has likely changed scientific publishing permanently—and I'd almost bet on the fact if the research is confirmed.
What made this a such a huge tech event with the world watching on was that the research was on a subject that has captured the imagination of both scientists and the lay public for many decades and that it was posted on arxiv.org website which is open and copyright-free, similarly, we witnessed peer review processes also occurring out in the open and in public for all to see—and essentially in real time! Contrast this with the traditional tech journal process, Nature, Science, IEEE Proceedings, The Lancet, etc. which takes months to publish, and is a closed process not to mention papers being the whim of editors who often reject them (and sometimes very significant ones at that).
Irrespective of whatever outcome eventuates, the contrast between traditional, slow and now-very-expensive scientific publishing with that of this speedy, exciting, open and participatory model that's copyright-free will be obvious to everyone.
Moreover, this is happening at a time when the traditional for-profit scientific publishing has come under enormous criticism with Elsevier and others milking the university and scientific establishments to breaking point and the rise of Sci-Hub as a countermeasure. Whilst academics have been aware of the problem for quite some time the general public has not. This research and how it played out on arxiv.org in just two weeks won't be forgotten easily.
If I were a director of Elsevier and after witnessing what's happened in less than two weeks I'd be damn worried.
This puts Nature's position here as on display in TFA (they don't have to publish everything that is sent in) in a different light. There might be an element of sour grapes here, and if the research is validated then it will have a huge impact on them.
This isn't "Nature's position". This is a freelance science writer's position, and they paid him for the article. Nature wouldn't even weigh in with a real editorial opinion at this point.
It is their name on the masthead. If they don't agree with it they shouldn't publish it. Doing this 'at arms length' allows them to have this under their banner while at the same time being able to say 'that wasn't us'.
There's nothing wrong with this article. I really don't see what you have to complain about. It's broadly factual, and roughly consistent with the mainstream opinion at this point: there is no smoking gun evidence of anything, and the noise being generated by social amateurs is making it hard to find the real signal from the small number of groups competent enough to make useful statements about this "discovery".
Yes, and it serves no purpose other than to get Nature in the position where they can hedge their bets based on rejecting the article earlier and publishing this now just in case it eventually does work out. It's content free from Nature's audience perspective, nobody reading it will think 'hey wow, this is news to me', if they've been at all interested. So it must serve some other purpose because Nature doesn't just publish anything. I was wondering earlier why they would publish it and I think it isn't too farfetched to see this as a deliberate strategy to protect their interests. It's going to be interesting what happens on both sides of the fork: what they will do if after say 3 months there still isn't any very clear replication and when there is. For both of those they have positioned themselves well.
What irks me about it is that it's been all of a week and yet Nature is already deprecating it because the replication efforts fall short. It would seem to me to be a little bit early for that, what did they expect? And sure, we can argue over whether it was nature or the writer that is the root cause here but someone with editorial control at Nature must have felt it was good enough to include, even though it is just premature meta commentary, not science news.
Nature doesn’t need to hedge because their reputation won’t really affected by publishing—-or not publishing—-something on LK-99.
Paul Laterbur, who won a Nobel Prize for MRI after Nature rejected his paper on it has quipped that
"You could write the entire history of science in the last 50 years in terms of papers rejected by Science or Nature."
The “top journals miss good stuff all the time; they publish bad stuff pretty often too. Sorting them out is just really hard.
The article doesn't deprecate LK-99. The article is about the hype surrounding the announcement and its replication results, mainly, but not exclusively by, amateurs in other fields (who seem to have shown that they can make samples that have unconventional properties, but not necessarily superconducting).
It's worth reading about a previous social media science debacle, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_ano... where the observations of neutrinos being faster than light was eventually debugged to some simple hardware errors and naive analysis.
"After the initial report of apparent superluminal velocities of neutrinos, most physicists in the field were quietly skeptical of the results, but prepared to adopt a wait-and-see approach. Experimental experts were aware of the complexity and difficulty of the measurement, so an extra unrecognized measurement error was still a real possibility, despite the care taken by the OPERA team"
No, but they also don't need to try to catch some of the hype while pretending to be immune to that hype. Clearly they feel the need to put LK-99 in at least one article title even if there is no news. That's not their normal standard for articles, at least not as far as I'm aware.
I'm aware of quite a few other scientific debacles, some involving outright fraud, data fabrication and sometimes true believers that even convinced themselves. What is interesting about the Ranga Diaz episode is that it was Nature that published it (and it took two years to retract it):
> So their stance right now is understandable but also a bit self serving.
If there is this hot topic about LK-99, is it not their job to report it to their readers? Not everybody follows social media or has come across this personally. From this point of view, the article seems fair enough roundup of whats been happening.
> It's worth reading about a previous social media science debacle, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_ano... where the observations of neutrinos being faster than light was eventually debugged to some simple hardware errors and naive analysis.
"Debacle?" Some scientists saw something funny, pointed out that it violated known laws of physics, and asked for help explaining the results. They got that help relatively quickly and it was found that, indeed, the neutrinos were not moving faster than light.
If I were looking for a debacle, I'd look for something where there was outright fraud.
Here we have lots of people levitating small black rocks. It's probable that the samples created are impure, but something interesting might well be going on and so it's getting attention. Making things levitate like that is pretty cool, though, even if yes, you can do it with pencil lead (and a different magnet setup, not just a single magnet).
So people are trying to understand it. It's messy, and the results are unclear, but... hey, that's how things go. Sure, I'll wait to call it confirmed until we have a number of labs with good quality samples and expert testing, but I'll also give them time to actually try a few things since there are good reasons to think the synthesis is less easy than is reported.
But I'm not going to hate on people who just wanna see the rocks float, either. And we have quite a few people now with floaty rocks, which is more than enough to keep the average person entertained while the science settles.
Sorry, debacle wasn't the right word. Situation? Event?
In this case it wasn't as simple as asking for help- the team that caused this situation really just wasn't up to the task, and that should have been detected far earlier than their press release announcing faster than light neutrinos.
From https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/24/science/24speed.html
"""Nima Arkani-Hamed, a particle theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, said in an e-mail, “There was no need for a press release or indeed even for a scientific paper, till much more work was done. They claim that they wanted the community to scrutinize their result — well, they could have accomplished that by going around and giving talks about it.”"""
Sure, that's better. I dunno, feels like bikeshedding to worry about the best way of getting help. It's sad that it turned out to be relatively boring (equipment not set up right) instead of any actual scientific discovery, but I'd personally rather see more people having fun and learning to love the process of discovery even when it doesn't pan out. And most things don't pan out, I get that.
This may well not pan out either, but lots of people with little floaty rocks are going to capture people's imagination in a way that a bunch of graphs just don't.
That is completely different. The mini-Natures are still peer reviewed journals with a strict selection process. These journals are usually reasonably high impact, and I don’t think there is evidence pointing towards them having more or less fraud than other journals on that tier. It’s not an amateur slapping a Nature logo on a preprint, which is basically what TEDx is.
What are the flaws? Why is the lay public not allowed to be involved? That sounds like elitist gatekeeping. The truth will come out regardless. Why can't everyone share in the excitement?
Yeah. For everyone watching with excitement, keep in mind that the silicon semiconductor was for years worse in practice than germanium ones, even if it was theoretically better and cheaper. It took advancements in material sourcing, kilns, etc. etc.
Give this material 20 years, and we will see how it fared.
I think this might be a bit exceptional as far as public engagement goes. So I wouldn’t necessarily judge public engagement based on this case.
“Rocks float” vs “rocks not float” is a very easy success criteria for the average person to judge by, lowering the bar for the average person to feel like they can add something to the conversation… so when we add in the potential revolutionary aspects of a room temperature superconductor we have a recipe for significant engagement… it’s even engaging the gawker reflex and people are picking up on it be LK99 is a weird trending topic and people will check to see if it’s an airplane that crashed or something …
In essence it was, by sheer coincidence, bound to go viral… and only because of a number of properties that others won’t have…
While an undergraduate degree in physics puts them above the average person, it’s probably only slightly. The majority of undergraduate physics degrees do not touch on solid state physics or material sciences to this degree. It would be at best a single elective course. And even then in physics and the sciences the area of focus gets so specific I would be hesitant to trust even a graduate degree holder unless they went into that field.
Agreed. I have an undergrad in physics from a top uni, took solid state courses, and worked in a lab specifically studying superconductivity and I dont really feel qualified to comment on this, so a generic undergrad physics degree certainly means jack.
Expertise aside I would argue that an undergraduate degree from a prestigious institution that pivoted to journalism is worse in this era. They have been tokenized and given lots of unearned reputation from their credentials, which biases them to provide the rosiest narrative (which is what the science industrial complex wants), without the years of grinding work or cynicism from management of rocky rapids of fraud and overrepresenting work that at least a grad student had to deal with.
That said, I actually believe lk-99 (let's be clear this is a belief, if strongly held) based on my personal experiences with scientific shenanigans.
I will amend my adjective. "Only very slightly earned reputation". Getting an undergraduate degree and getting a PhD are nothing at all like each other. Yes, coming out of undergrad you might be book smart, but most phds learn at least some amount of street smarts.
That’s all ready much more credible than a lot of people I have seen on social media, for whom a CS degree and reading Wikipedia is enough to weigh in.
