It is true, yet I can't reconcile the fact the overall excitement and optimism this generates, vs. the lukewarm and skepticism towards news about advance in other hard problems such as fusion, battery, self-driving, space exploration, cancer treatment, Alzheimer treatment.
I get that disappointment in the past make people jaded. Weren't there false hope in superconductor as well? Or are people here too young to have experienced that?
There's a lot of people in here arguing like there's some significant faction of people that truly believe we've got enough proof that we have an RTAPS and are somehow negatively impacting their life because of it.
I'm excited enough about this that I've read about 3500 HN comments on the subject over the past few days. I've talked about it with friends of various levels of science literacy. I've seen it come up in various discords, IRC channels, etc.
And... I'm not seeing any real amount of people doing that. The twitter crowd is largely people just memeposting with "FLOAT THE ROCK!", places like HN have a bit more technical discussion about it, lots of other places it comes up in conversation and people shrug and go "huh that might be cool hope it works out tell me in 6 months"
But even as someone with enough free time this week to read all these comments and engage in the discussion so much, it's not like I'm sitting here expecting 15 years from now we'll all be living in a superconductor wonderland. If I had to make a bet one way or the other, I'd probably bet it won't be. But that doesn't mean this whole thing isn't fun and entertaining.
We've got some potentially world altering thing that is potentially real, and replicating it is easy enough that we have engineers and scientists all over the world doing it in public. Most of these kind of things require lots of funding, labs with advanced tools, access to exotic materials, etc. Instead, this time, we get to watch it on Twitter, Bilibili, etc.
It's possible for people to recognize that this is a potentially world altering discovery and be hyped about the process and visibility we have in it, as well as realize that the most likely outcome at this point is "LK99 does some weird diamagnetic stuff that looks cool but probably isn't actually an RTAPS"
I get that disappointment in the past make people jaded. Weren't there false hope in superconductor as well? Or are people here too young to have experienced that?