Calibration | Sebastian Spicker

2023

1 article

9 Oct 2023 LK-99: Six Weeks That Showed How Physics Works On July 22, 2023, a Korean preprint claimed that LK-99 — a copper-doped lead apatite — was a room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor. Within six weeks, converging null results and impurity studies had rejected the claim. The episode is more interesting for what it revealed about the sociology of science than for the compound itself: how a global community self-corrected at extraordinary speed, and how the media managed to fail at conveying uncertainty despite watching it happen in real time. physicssuperconductivitypreprints