OGWiseman Rambles!
On LK-99, Superconductors, Scientific Uncertainty, Journalism, and Twitter (ahem, "X", rather).
For those not paying rapt attention to science news, “LK-99” may not mean anything. It didn’t to me until approximately July 15th of this year, at which point Twitter (You know what, screw it, I’m not calling it X, what a stupid name. If you’re unaware of the Twitter/X controversy, congratulations, you’re emotionally healthy.) but whatever you call it, it exploded with certainty that this new substance, ominously named LK-99, was in fact a world-changing discovery—A room temperature superconductor.
Some background on this idea, as non-technical as it can possibly be: Normal metallic substances that conduct electricity have a certain amount of electrical resistance, meaning they shed energy into the surrounding environment as they conduct it. However, that resistance lessens in a linear way as the temperature of the substance is lowered. In other words, if you make it colder, it conducts better and more efficiently.
Normal conductors all behave like this, including the ones you’re probably familiar with: Copper, for example. Wire is made of it because it already conducts well at room temperature, and it conducts even better if you cool it down.
Superconductors have a much less intuitive pattern: They (typically) do not conduct electricity at all at normal temperatures, but then, as you lower the temperature, there comes an inflection point where, suddenly, the material ceases to have any electrical resistance at all. You can literally put electricity into a loop of the material and it will go around the loop ~forever, with zero loss of any kind.
In today’s world, such superconductors are very useful. MRI machines, particle accelerators, nuclear reactors—many of our most important and complex machines use superconductors.
The problem is, the inflection point (called the “critical temperature”) for current superconductors is *cold*, like below -200 degrees C even for the flat-out misnamed “High-Temperature Superconductors”. They literally have to use liquid nitrogen or liquid helium to get the material cold enough. That’s why only big, expensive machines can use them!
Thus properly back-grounded, it becomes easy to see both what a “Room Temperature Superconductor” is and why it would be so useful. First the what: A superconductor that has a critical temperature/inflection point higher than Earth’s ambient temperature, which therefore requires no special cooling to do lossless conduction of electricity.
And it’s uses? Start with an electricity grid that can take power from the solar farms built way out in the desert to every home in America with zero loss of energy. Current estimates are that ~5% of electricity generated by the US is lost in transmission, and it doesn’t go nearly that far, plus there are even larger losses in transformers and generators—estimates range as high as 30% overall loss (!) that could be saved.
But it’s way beyond unlocking a new electrical grid. Nuclear fusion. Quantum Computing. Trains that can go from NYC to LA in 20 minutes (that is not a typo). The list goes on, and it is truly the stuff of sci fi.
So that’s what it is. And I read about it in the middle of July and thought “this is incredible, I can’t wait to write about this”. But then I already had things planned for this newsletter space, so I back-burnered LK-99 for a few weeks, but I kept my ear to the internet ground for further news.
A strange thing happened in the coverage. There were a few non-famous people on social media who made jokingly intemperate remarks about how we’d all be living in a superconducting paradise soon, but most people were quite measured. BUT, almost everyone wrote as if *everyone else writing about it* was being insane and all of Twitter (ugh, okay, fine “X”) was jumping to conclusions.
Truly: Journalists could not stop talking about how much social media was talking about this. They made a big thing about it even though prediction markets hardly got above 25% “yes” on the question of whether LK-99 was legit, all the major newspapers were measured, and even sympathetic voices on X were often cautious in their optimism.
In the absence of genuine understanding of the issues at hand, as well as any level of certainty about whether the results were spurious or not, the story became the existence of the story itself. The entire thing took on a political valence, a survey of opinions rather than an explanation of facts.
It’s amazing how much science journalism is this way, and any consumer of such news (“news”) should be aware of this as a red flag—when the story becomes about the excitement surrounding the story, there’s nothing actually happening and it’s best to bide one’s time.
And I’m glad I did. The truth has now reached Wikipedia: As of August 10, the growing consensus if that that LK-99 not only isn’t a room-temperature superconductor, it isn’t a superconductor at all, at any temperature. Whoops!
How this happened: Impurities in the lab that originally produced LK-99, a research team that rushed to publish before they should have for the usual venal and boring reasons, etc. Said team has now called the papers they published “incomplete” and backed off of them. I empathize with the idea that they didn’t think it would get this much attention and they’d have time to update, but given the magnitude of the breakthrough it was pretty dumb to think that.
So we don’t have a superconductor. Sorry to anyone who read this far and didn’t already know the punchline and got really excited for a 20 minute NYC—LA train. Maybe we will one day, maybe there’s no such substance available, maybe there is but we won’t find it, maybe the A.I.s will find it and conquer the stars.
It was fascinating to watch an internet attention swarm develop, instantly resort to irony to grasp the middle ground between freaking out and total skepticism, and then simultaneously judge itself for freaking out and congratulate itself on its skepticism, all in the span of less than a month. That feels like a common, even cliched, 21st-Century cycle, but I swear the cycle time is getting shorter. It used to take so much longer before everyone declared themselves the only sane person on a given issue.
And like any good 21st-century science writer, despite having admitted that I did so for totally banal reasons that have nothing to do with my sagaciousness, I’d like to take this moment to claim credit for the fact that I didn’t publish anything about this until the uncertainty was resolved. Unlike the charlatans who run to X with every little rumor and sound off, I sat on this news for a month and watched deck-building videos on Youtube to make sure I had the story right.
If one day we get a room-temperature superconductor, it will be a breakthrough on a par with the invention of the transistor. Until then, we will just have to be satisfied with the age of miracles in which we already live. It’s ~six hours from NY to LA right now. A hundred years ago it was ~six days by train. A hundred years before that it was ~six months, probably by ship around Cape Horn, and you had an appreciable chance of dying along the way. 20 minutes would surely be nice, but we’ve already gotten most of the way from “how fast can you walk” to “a transporter disassembles your body in NY and reassembles you instantly in LA”. Not bad!
Thanks as always for reading! This was definitely a ramble, but I hope you got something useful out of it. If you did, help me out by liking, commenting, or sharing with others. Have a great week, and I’ll be back next Sunday with another original story!
Richard's question after reading this: "How does Owen have time to read, synthesize and interpret this stuff, much less write an essay about it?" We'd never heard of LK-99 and enjoyed the little journey through its 15 minutes of fame.