The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'closeup purple crystal.'
A few months ago, the scientific community was shaken up by a claim of room temperature superconductivity. A team in Seoul led by Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim at the Quantum Energy Research Centre developed a material called LK-99, reportedly made from copper, lead, phosphorus and oxygen. They claimed LK-99 had superconducting properties. This would have major implications, so researchers around the world began trying to replicate the experiments. So far, no one has been able to do this successfully. And now, it's looking more and more like a misinterpretation of material properties was responsible for the original claim.
From a Nature article about it:
The reaction that synthesizes LK-99 uses an unbalanced recipe: for every 1 part copper-doped lead phosphate crystal — pure LK-99 — it makes, it produces 17 parts copper and 5 parts sulfur. These leftovers lead to numerous impurities — especially copper sulfide, which the Korean team reported in its sample. [Prashant] Jain, a copper-sulfide expert, remembered 104ºC as the temperature at which Cu2S undergoes a phase transition. Below that temperature, the resistivity of air-exposed Cu2S drops dramatically — a signal almost identical to LK-99’s purported superconducting phase transition. “I was almost in disbelief that they missed it.” Jain published a preprint on the important confounding effect.
Other researchers synthesized transparent purple single crystals of LK-99, totally free from confounding impurities. The crystals displayed minor ferromagnetism and diamagnetism, but no superconductivity. Electrically, they were insulators with very high resistance. Following these developments, the scientific community seems ready to lay the claim of room temperature superconductivity to rest.
If high temperature superconducting materials are indeed possible, I think we'll probably identify the first one in the next five years. The reason I expect this so soon is the increasing sophistication of AI, modeling software, and imaging tech. These things together are setting up a situation where materials with all kinds of properties can be designed by AI instead of by humans.
It's also possible that room temp superconductors already exist in some black budget lab somewhere. There may even be a secret effort to suppress the tech in the mainstream scientific community. I kind of doubt that's the case. But they'd clearly have military applications, so you never know.
For a long time, I followed claims of free energy devices very closely. I learned that it's possible to pull small amounts of electrical energy directly from the atmosphere using the right antenna. I also learned that claims of free energy devices are typically false. The two biggest claims I encountered were Stoern and BlackLight Power.
Stoern had various gizmos that it claimed produced free electricity. They arranged a few public demonstrations and never convincingly demonstrated their gizmos. BlackLight Power (now Brilliant Light Power) claimed to have discovered a whole new kind of hydrogen called a hydrino. They raised tens of millions on the promise that they could produce endless free energy thanks to hydrinos. Although hydrinos aren't actually a thing, I haven't heard about anyone going to jail over this.
These days, I approach all extraordinary claims with caution. It's not that breakthroughs don't happen. Our whole society is built on the breakthroughs of the past. But true breakthroughs, like high temperature superconductivity or zero point energy, are rare events. Claims that are extraordinary but false are much more common.
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