In theory, science is an entirely rational and transparent undertaking. Scientists gather data, form hypotheses, and then collect more data to find out which hypothesis is correct. That’s the idea, anyway. In practice, real-life science is messy and often opaque. Data can be ambiguous. Scientists can be bull-headed. The process of shifting consensus has always been as much about politics and intellectual fashion as about theory and data. Now throw in social media, fanboy culture, preprint archives, and virality — you have a world that breeds all kinds of oddities that can pop up, disappear, and reemerge like quantum virtual particles. All sorts of wild discoveries are bouncing around the information ecosystem before any peer-reviewed journals are able to sort out whether they’re real. And scientists aren’t even all on the same page as to whether this is a good thing or not.
An iteration of flash-mob science erupted last summer, when Twitter users began hyping the work of a South Korean team that said it had discovered a material that was superconductive at room temperature and pressure. Bolstering the claim was a video showing a chunk of material partially levitating. As we reported at the time, if the findings were replicated, it would have massive practical implications for things like levitating trains and quantum computing.
Then the story collapsed. After numerous teams around the world jumped in to try to replicate the study, they found that the material — a crystal of copper, lead, and phosphate called LK-99 — appeared to not be a superconductor after all; its strange magnetic effects were probably caused by a more mundane phenomenon called diamagnetism. “Many things are diamagnetic: plastics, graphite, humans,” says Leslie Schoop, a professor of chemistry at Princeton. “There is a famous experiment where they made a frog float over a giant magnet.” Within a week, the story faded.
Or did it? Not everyone had given up hope. In China, several teams were working with a similar material, called copper-substituted lead apatite, that had a similar chemical formulation to LK-99. This month they released a paper onto the preprint server arXiv in which they reported that while it didn’t superconduct at room temperature, it showed evidence of doing so at temperatures that could be achieved by a normal household freezer, which itself would be a huge breakthrough. Twitter was abuzz once again.
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