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

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.

Comments

First thought is fraud.

[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 wanted, and were incredibly excited. Nobel Prize Time! Then they ran it again, and again, and again.. couldn't replicate the results, but still wanted to publish. So they faked the second set of data, and hoped nobody would notice.

Still it _could_ be something weird... Honestly I hope it is. But realistically this is just fraud, or at best some terrible experimental error.