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, the claim was definitively falsified. 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.