#Physicists of mastodon, we seem to be converging on the consensus that #LK99 is not a #superconductor after all. How does something like this affect the careers of the authors of the preprint?
@BigEatie Philip Moriarty has a realistic take, I paraphrase: "Nothing wrong with being wrong, that's science, but this is arrogant. And also probably wrong."
https://youtu.be/zl-AgmoZ5mo
Very interesting, thanks for the link.
So Dr. Moriarty's concern is not with the incorrectness of the paper itself, but the arrogance of how it's written, and the seemingly incompetent analysis. I can definitely understand why that can and should affect someone's career.
If you think you have an earth-shattering reesult, what is the proper channel to discuss that. A preprint server seems to be natural, but it also invites the sort of hysteria we've seen here.
@BigEatie Yeah, exactly, pre-print servers are ideal for this kind of thing, but ALSO you need to come in with some humility regardless.
I'm not a postgrad level physicist, but I once had an idea which was, on the face of it, just as revolutionary. Which meant I'd almost certainly made a mistake. So I found an expert in the field, wrote a polite email, he was interested and gave it to his postgrads as an exercise, and they showed why I was wrong in a few days. Nobody submitted a paper.
I'm not sure who the authors of these papers are, as I can't find much information about them, but presuming they are professors in superconductivity I don't think they need the same degree of hedging that a lay person does when approaching a subject such as this. But based on Dr. Moriarty's videos, maybe they're lay people in this field, I don't know.
(1/2)
I also wonder a bit about the charges of arrogance here. It certainly seems arrogant if they are wrong, however if they turned out to be right it sound like excitement at the prospect of a massive discovery. (2/2)
@BigEatie I suspect a lot of what's going on is naivety. It's a cultural cliche that scientists aren't the best at political/social skills, but there's still sometimes truth in that. Plus science is *entirely* about not fooling yourself into believing something because you want to.
When you get heavily in to a very specialist topic it's easy to be too enthusiastic to the point of making claims you can't justify. It's something I still have to consciously check, and I'm pushing 50 years old.
@BigEatie Hey, if you've got a world-changing discovery it doesn't matter how cautiously your paper presents it...
I'm reminded a bit of a 2011 paper from CERN regarding the potential detection of superluminal neutrinos. However, they did take a more cautious approach:
"Despite the large significance of the measurement reported here and the stability of the analysis, the potentially great impact of the result motivates the continuation of our studies in order to investigate possible still unknown systematic effects that could explain the observed anomaly."
(1/2)
@BigEatie @_thegeoff I was about to quote the same passage in response to this discussion (I just dug up the preprint).
I was actually teaching a physics course on data analysis at the time and used this as an example to motivate the importance of error analysis and how to assess significance. But I agree that the OPERA folks approached it with a more reasonable "this is probably wrong" approach (another teachable moment for my class). On the other hand, finding superluminal particles would be a *much* bigger deal (in terms of the impact on our understanding of physics) than finding a room-termperature superconductor, so even more skepticism was warranted in that case.
Even as someone who hasn't studied superconductivity much, it seemed that this group had not really done the sort of exhaustive analysis that's warranted before making such a bold claim. It seemed like they announced prematurely, possibly motivated by Nobel FOMO.
#LK99
