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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)

Posted by msmash on 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.

3 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. That's old news by Ecuador · · Score: 5, Funny

    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...

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  2. Invent a way to verify this by DickBreath · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!

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    I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
    1. Re: Invent a way to verify this by c6gunner · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.