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The Tui's award for science

All Kiwis are familiar with the concept of a Tui's ad and the phrase "Yeah, right!"

This relays a warranted degree of skepticism in respect to a claim or statement and was brought into the contemporary vernacular by way of a series of advertisements for Tui branded beer.

Well a group of Korean researchers are pretty likely to have qualified as recipients of a Tui's award for their claim to have come up with new superconductor material that exhibits its magical properties at room temperature and without the need to be compressed to dizzying pressures.

As most readers will be aware, supeconductors aren't new, we've been able to create them for many years. Creating a material with zero resistance to the flow of electrons has a huge potential to revolutionise the way we generate and reticulate electrical energy but to date, there has always been a "gotcha".

In most cases, superconducting materials have had to be refrigerated to temperatures that are significantly lower than ambient. Cooling with liquid nitrogen is usually needed to reach the superconducting threshold and this makes them impractical for most applications.

The Korean LK99 product however, claims to be a whole lot different.

If the claims are true, then LK99 is not only the first superconductor that can be used at room temperature (or even up to 100 deg C) and without the need for massive levels of physical compression but it's also very cheap to manufacture from readily available compounds.

The problem however, is that it requires an awful leap of faith to believe the claims being made.

Fortunately we'll soon know if this was just a case of some over-enthusiastic researchers mis-interpreting their data or an actual scientific breakthrough of mind-shattering importance.

The process for creating this superconductor has been well documented and right now there are people all over the world attempting to reproduce the experiments involved. If they succeed then I suspect it will be Nobel Prizes all round in Korea. If they fail then it'll be another Ponns and Fleischmann momoent.

Actually, a quick check reveals that some early third party results are in, and things aren't looking too flash for the Koreans...

A Chinese group has succeeded in creating samples of LK99 but so far they've seen no signs of the Meissner effect, something that would be expected from a superconductor.

Another researcher however claims to have verified that effect.

Those who are fluent in Korean (and who isn't) can download the paper from this website and browse to their heart's content.

I'm pretty sure that back when P&F were touting their cold fusion breakthrough that other researchers claimed to have duplicated their results, only to later retract those claims when it became clear that there was no over-unity energy production to be seen.

Even if this turns out not to be an example of good science bringing us a revolutionary breakthrough in physics, it will have been yet another remarkable display how hope can trump expectations, at least in the short term.

My prediction?

The Koreans have invented a room-temperature superconductor... Yeah, right!

Carpe Diem folks!

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