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A Paper Posted Last Month Claims To Have Achieved Superconductivity at Room Temperature, But Other Physicists Say the Data May Be Incorrect (vice.com) 163

Posted by msmash from the finding-the-truth dept.
dmoberhaus writes: Last month, two Indian physicists posted a paper to arxiv claiming to have demonstrated superconductivity at room temperature. If this paper is legitimate, it would represent a breakthrough in a problem that has existed for superconductivity for 100 years. Understandably, the paper shook the physics world, but when researchers started digging into the data they noticed something wasn't quite right -- the noise patterns in two independent measurements exactly correlated, which is basically impossible in a random system. The Indian researchers have doubled down on their data, and things only got weirder from there. This is a look inside what could be the biggest drama to happen in physics in nearly a decade.
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A Paper Posted Last Month Claims To Have Achieved Superconductivity at Room Temperature, But Other Physicists Say the Data May B More

A Paper Posted Last Month Claims To Have Achieved Superconductivity at Room Temperature, But Other Physicists Say the Data May B

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  • The researchers either jumped the gun or faked the results.

    • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It's India, my guess is on faked results. It turns out curry powder is not a superconductor after all.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The easy answer is accidental duplication of one input location. If two sensor locations were mis-wired or the collection software had a typo so that one was recorded twice while another was ignored, that would get identical noise in two columns and the appearance of immeasurably fast communication between two locations.

      The hard answer is accidental room-temperature superconductivity. It's also the fun answer.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by johanw ( 1001493 )

        Occam's razor tells us that cheating indians is the most probable explaination.

        • Re: No (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Well... maybe.

          But the problem with Occam's razor is it will say everyone cheated. If the test for validity is what is easier to believe, hard work may be lost by the wayside.

          • At this point, they can produce raw data (and a plausible explanation for an honest mistake), admit they duplicated a dataset, or keep quiet.

            Only the first will really help them, science is rough on cheaters that get caught while still living.

            Cartman: 'I'm sorrry' isn't going anywhere...Maybe inside India, if they are brahmin.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

            Occam's razor says everyone cheated, until "everyone" is more than a couple of people.

            Anybody who believes a single claim, or a single paper, is a sucker.

    • The researchers either jumped the gun or faked the results.

      I think they jumped the shark...AND the gun... AND faked their results.

    • Perhaps their room‘ is at the southpole.

  • That's old news (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ecuador ( 740021 ) on Thursday August 16, 2018 @03:49PM (#57139682) Homepage

    I seem to remember several years ago researchers in Fairbanks, Alaska had already achieved room temperature superconductivity. The trick was to turn of central heating as I recall...

    • I seem to remember several years ago researchers in Fairbanks, Alaska had already achieved room temperature superconductivity. The trick was to turn of central heating as I recall...

      LOL.. I think even -80F would be a revolution for Physics, but I like the joke.

  • Vice? (Score:3)

    by Train0987 ( 1059246 ) on Thursday August 16, 2018 @03:50PM (#57139698)

    Is Vice really a valid source for news like this?

    • Is Vice really a valid source for news like this?

      What do you mean by "news like this"? This is a non-story.

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Is Vice really a valid source for news like this?

      Yes.

      I'm guessing that you reason to even ask this is that you feel (politically/ideologically) uncomfortable about some of their reports . However, reporting on reality doesn't take our feelings or biases into account. FWIW, I've not yet aware of anything that Vice has reported inaccurately.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Mashiki ( 184564 )

        FWIW, I've not yet aware of anything that Vice has reported inaccurately.

        You haven't been paying attention then. Take their freakout over Cyberpunk 2077. Their claim that "free speech is only a far-right issue." Their flip-flopping on outrage mobs(it's okay to go after roseanne, but not gunn). Their cutting of their Jordan Peterson interview, and re-arrangement of sections to paint an ideological narrative, and editing to take replies out-of-context. The nice little bit of bullshit with Namoi Wu, and doxing her, then reprting her to a government that has a stance against sam

  • Evidence (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Evidence secured!

  • Invent a way to verify this (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DickBreath ( 207180 ) on Thursday August 16, 2018 @03:52PM (#57139704) Homepage
    If only there was some kind of something-something method by which one scientist could reproduce another scientist's results. Theories could be formed. More experiments tried and reproduced. Etc. Such a thing could be a force that would propel technological advancement forward at an incredible rate.

    If someone can invent some kind of scientific method, they should patent it!

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      You know, it bugs me when people say "well science is not a democracy. Something is either proven or it isn't."

      The scientific method is essentially democratic. One person claims to have done something via an experiment, and that doesn't prove anything. You need a whole bunch more people to do the same experiment....to convince them. And their experiments need to be peer-reviewed. To convince even more people. Eventually, when enough people are convinced, your hypothesis is essentially voted into being

      • At best, it's a merit based plutocracy.

        Not everybody gets a 'vote'. 'Votes' because 'reason', generally result in 'emeritus' status and 'important work' being assigned to keep the fossil busy. Let the old guy teach the freshman.

        Only votes because data are supposed to count. Still true in the real sciences.

        BTW recently doing a little research r.e. a claim made on /. Oxford (fucking) university gives out Masters of Science degrees in 'Women's Studies'. WTF?

        • Oxford (fucking) university gives out Masters of Science degrees in 'Women's Studies'. WTF?

          A quick google suggests it is actually an MSt (Master of Studies) degree in Women's Studies.

          At Oxford, you always used to be able to get an MA as a freebie (basically just by staying alive for a few years after getting your BA and paying a nominal fee) so they needed to have a different award for a Master's degree where you did some actual work, hence the MSt.

          Sorry to spoil the fun.

      • Re: Invent a way to verify this (Score:5, Insightful)

        by c6gunner ( 950153 ) on Thursday August 16, 2018 @09:32PM (#57141220) Homepage

        The scientific method is essentially democratic. One person claims to have done something via an experiment, and that doesn't prove anything. You need a whole bunch more people to do the same experiment....to convince them. And their experiments need to be peer-reviewed. To convince even more people. Eventually, when enough people are convinced, your hypothesis is essentially voted into being a theory.

        That's not at all how that works. A hypothesis is just an idea. A theory has predictive power. We don't vote to turn a hypothesis into a theory; a hypothesis is just the starting point for an experiment. Based on the results of the experiment you may be able to formulate a theory ... and if that theory is valid, you will be able to predict future results. Popularity and opinion are irrelevant; either your theory predicts future outcomes, or it does not.

      • Eventually, when enough people are convinced, your hypothesis is essentially voted into being a theory.

        Science is NOT about convincing people. Science is a process of establishing models that are have predictive power regardless of whether people believe them or not. Eventually people tend to come to a consensus behind models with proven and confirmed predictive power but this is a second order effect and not the actual point of the process. Science is what is true whether or not you believe in it [goodreads.com]. This is why when people use the argument about scientific consensus in regards to climate change they are m

      • You know, it bugs me when people say "well science is not a democracy. Something is either proven or it isn't."

        The scientific method is essentially democratic

        You didn't get what "the people" say there.
        Mainly because you have wrong ideas about science and/or democracy.

        Science is not a democracy because you don't get to DECIDE or COMPROMISE or AGREE on the nature of reality - reality just is.
        You can't argue or vote your or any other way with science any more than you can make a cold fire by coming up with an alternative temperature scale.

        And there's nothing "essentially democratic" about the scientific method itself. It is in fact an autocracy of reality.
        There

      • And their experiments need to be peer-reviewed.

        The peers of idiots are idiots.

    • ...but it really shows that you got modded insightful, instead of funny.

      I realize the sarcasm, but I truly wonder if the ones that modded you up did.

      Anyone should realize the odds of recording the same noise data is essentially nil; on the order of magnitude of the odds of all the air bunching up in one corner of the room suddenly.

      On the same subject, I had an intern work with our group for 6 months; his first task was to measure a set of photopeaks from a scintillator detector.

      He presented an amazing analy

  • No legit explanation (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The researcher who found the unexpected correlation was being overly generous by suggesting it could be evidence of a not-yet-understood process. The green and blue dots from separate test runs match up essentially pixel for pixel. I'm not going to speculate whether it was an innocent error or something worse, but it's clearly not a natural phenomenon.

  • They really did achieve it! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    They did achieve superconductivity at room temperature....it is just that the room was on the surface of Neptune

  • First thought is fraud. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Take a look at the green and blue dots in the above graph. They represent the noise measured during two separate experiments run by Thapa and Pandey to test the magnetic susceptibility of their superconducting material.

    So they ran the same experiment twice, and got almost identical noise? I don't have to pull any punches here because I'm not publishing a critique.. but that just strikes me as high evidence of fraud.

    Entirely speculation here, but I'd guess they ran this experiment once, got the result they

    • Let's just call it bad lab quality control techniques and leave it at that.... Maybe they made a mistake? Yea, I don' think so either.

      Look, if you know enough about what you are doing to actually write the paper and get it published, you *should* know enough to actually be SURE your extraordinary claims are true and that you have the necessary data to back that claim up. Maybe I'm just too honest, but I'm not in a hurry to fake test results and draw international attention to my fraud....

      • Well, if what they did really works no one will talk about some errors later on. In that case it is most important to be first, to be faster than the competition who might work on the same thing.
      • It happens too easily that someone else publishes the same thing first. Maybe someone who someone discussed an early idea with, or someone who saw an earlier presentation which goes to the same direction. Also often the whole field of research is just ripe to make that step, because the bits and pieces are already there in form of small steps, or because similar tests are discussed. And there is also the possibility of outright spying.

  • Putting aside whether it's real, TFP [arxiv.org] claims superconductivity occurs at 236K = ~35 below zero in whichever temperature scale suits your fancy.

    That's a bit nippy for my taste.

    • I suppose that would be better described as "non-cryogenic". You can get that cold with just a basic heat pump system, no need for liquid nitrogen (as with "high-temperature superconductors") or liquid helium (as with "conventional superconductors").

    • Never mind the silly phrase in the article about "above temperature of liquid water", having superconductor that functioned at temperature a freon or ammonia based cooling system could reach would be earth-shattering, as in ushering in a whole new era of technology. It would be as big as the invention of the electric motor.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Pembers ( 250842 )

      Yeah, 236K isn't the temperature of any room I'd like to be in for more than a few seconds, but seeing as the current record is around 135K, I'd overlook a bit of hyperbole if the claims hold up.

      • I've lived in Alaska and been outside in -60F weather. Trust me, anything lower than -20F feels the same, although at -60F it's easier to tell where the thin spots in your parka are. (My asshole dad told me, "We're wasting heat here, go outside and bank up the house with snow to insulate it!" So I did. Facemask is mandatory at -60F.)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Pembers ( 250842 )

          anything lower than -20F feels the same

          I'm happy to take your word for that :-) I live in England, where daily life pretty much stops as soon as the temperature drops below freezing.

        • I've lived in Alaska and been outside in -60F weather. Trust me, anything lower than -20F feels the same

          No, no it does not. The coldest temperature I ever experienced was -76F, on my way up to the most northern outpost in the world. I took my gloves off for 2 minutes to record a video, and then spent the next half hour in horrible pain, terrified that I was about to lose my fingers to frostbite.

          The next day we had temperatures around -20F. It felt like a warm summer day in comparison. I even took off my parka.

          • Air velocity makes a lot of difference. Don't touch anything (like your video device), stand in still air without moving, and heat loss will be tolerable for a while.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      Where I'm from, we call that BBQ weather!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Megol ( 3135005 )

      ~35? Ones or twos complement? Word size?

    • Depressing (but down to Slashdot's usual standards) that the first link to the actual paper is well over half way down the list of comments.

      The meat of the objections is also on arxiv at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.029... [arxiv.org] . It would be nice to see the original data, rather than making inferences from graphs, but I guess that'll come out in due course. I will admit to having made similar mistakes myself by mangling data in Excel - which is why I double-check myself on that sort of thing. So I'm not going to

  • Anyone notice less scammer calls lately? (Score:4, Funny)

    by technosaurus ( 1704630 ) on Thursday August 16, 2018 @04:18PM (#57139904)
    Turns out they moved on to "science".
    • Nope. I got a robocall from "+1 1000000" today. Nice of them to be so OBVIOUS about their caller ID spoofing, so I immediately sent it to voicemail. They didn't leave any message.

  • There are many other problems with the paper. They're claiming it's done using silver and gold, for instance, neither of which have shown any evidence of superconducting at all. It's possible that if you mix them up in the right combination they somehow start superconducting, but it's a really extraordinary claim to add to the room temperature (okay, -35F) superconducting claim.

    Luckily this one should be pretty easy to replicate assuming they're forthcoming about the procedures. If it's not fake they'll b

    • Re:That's not even the only problem (Score:4, Informative)

      by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Thursday August 16, 2018 @05:58PM (#57140418)

      Not that there is any merit to article's claims but

      Silver layer has "proximity effect" on some superconductors, raising the transition temperature.

      There is a superconducting alloy with gold, SrAuSi3

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Sarusa ( 104047 )

        Yeah, silver can enhance a superconductor, and SrAuSi3 fits into the general AMX3 broken spatial inversion symmetry class of superconductors - but with just silver and gold you don't have that BSIS. It's like saying you're producing a steak from just salt and pepper.

        Good points though, I had forgotten about the one with gold component.

        • Yeah, silver can enhance a superconductor, and SrAuSi3 fits into the general AMX3 broken spatial inversion symmetry class of superconductors - but with just silver and gold you don't have that BSIS.

          I can't tell if this is real or trolling. So, good job I guess.

    • Every metal is superconducting at temperatures close to 0K.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Sarusa ( 104047 )

        Not at all. For example, copper, silver, and gold are not superconducting on their own even at (near) 0K. Their lattices are so tightly packed that even though they're decent conductors they can't generate enough Cooper pairs from free electrons.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Megol ( 3135005 )

        No.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mikael ( 484 )

      There's an alloy known as "Electrum" [wikipedia.org]. It's been around since the time of the Pharaohs and was used to decorate the capstones of pyramids as well as to make coins. It's a mix of gold, silver and copper.

      But on the periodic table, none of those elements are superconducting. That's due to those elements only have one free electron in the outer shell and two electrons are required to form a Cooper pair.

      http://www.superconductors.org... [superconductors.org]

    • There are many other problems with the paper. They're claiming it's done using silver and gold, for instance, neither of which have shown any evidence of superconducting at all. It's possible that if you mix them up in the right combination they somehow start superconducting, but it's a really extraordinary claim to add to the room temperature (okay, -35F) superconducting claim.

      Silver and gold are such good conductors because it's hard for moving electrons to excite lattice vibrations. That exact reason makes them a poor candidate for a type 1 superconductor, where lattice vibrations link the electrons in pairs which are then bosons and can flow much more freely.

      The paper claims that their material consists of nanometer sized particles of silver embedded in gold. This is so small that the usual atomic lattices essentially don't exist -- most atoms are at, or very close to, a silve

  • "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." -- George Santayana Anybody remember Fleischmann and Pons? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • While it wouldn't surprise me if the data was falsified (extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidence), here's one possible explanation for those who wish to cling to a glimmer of hope.

    The problem is that the blue and green show the same values, corresponding to 0.1T and 1T, only shifted by a constant small amount in the noise region. But suppose the two susceptibility values were measured as follows: change the temperature to a new value, let things sit a while to be stabilized, then do the 0.1

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      That's not how it works. Instrument noise like that doesn't change slowly. It's random thermal, electrical and sometimes quantum noise that changes on extremely small timescales.

      What you describe would be like taking two pictures with the lens cap on and finding you got the same noise pattern. Oh, but I took them quickly!

  • They have an interesting patent, too (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    "Method for drawing seven perpendicular red lines using only green and transparent ink"

  • If the claim had been based on factual data, it would have been headline news within days. I'd love for this to be true, but I'm not going to hold my breath. My money's on never hearing another word about this again.
  • Who would have thunk it? Hydrogen, a highly combustible element, and Oxygen, which will itself freely burn, combine to together form WATER... Not POSSIBLE say physicists!

  • Lots of claims, no reproducible results.

  • DUH!!!
    Make room temperature nearly absolute zero Kelvin, and you have the answer!

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