this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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Technology
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I think it will be a while before we know what's really happened.
Something I find striking is the question of where their original material is and where's the video evidence of them testing it?
If I allow myself to be somewhat conspiratorial, I'd imagine that they know the material they made may have been somewhat accidental and that any further progress may depend on analyzing the material itself to determine what makes it work, which means they may want to keep its location somewhat secret.
Otherwise, I'm inclined to think that there's something funky going on within the dynamics of the research group and that not one of them is entirely on top of everything that happened with the material and so the evidence got mixed up and foggy.
It is notoriously hard to replicate things in labs, especially with material science.
This was attempt to do it within 2 days of the paper being published.
To add to that, the original researchers apparently had 10% successes rate in their lab, they wanted to perfect it before publishing their paper.
Bad luck was that it leaked, so to make sure somebody else doesn't get credit for their work they published what they had within hours.
It likely will take months before this will be verified.
10% success rate suggests there's some hidden factor they haven't discovered themselves yet, might influence the success rates of other labs. (assuming of course the claim is not fabricated)
That's often how it goes. Something doesn't do what you expect, so you have to keep trying new things until you figure out why it wasn't what you expect.