Well the band wagon has turned 180, now it’s fashionable to point out the flaws. My issue with this kind of videos is really, where are you in the early days of the hype, when the public needed cautions the most? A convenient naysayer when all the actual hard works have been done elsewhere

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.

– that guy

You need to forget about the details in order to grasp the essence.

OK, but where are they when the LK99 first came onto scene?

Documentation is different from demonstration. Text (with graph or animation interspersed to unpack unintuitive terms) wins for documentation. Video could be good for demo if presented in a no-nonsense manner.

Now let’s see which youtube “science channels” do a debunk on their own content pushed out a mere month ago.

You guys do know the affordability of the chips you’re using to comment on this is a direct consequence of TSMC “efficiency”, right?

Mind you, the DFT calculation from the Griffin paper is not a proof of LK 99 being a superconductor in any way. What it showed is the (potential) formation of flat bands near the Fermi surface. Band dispersion is associated with the kinetic energy of the electrons, so materials with flat band (and therefore electrons with suppressed kinetic energy) at the Fermi surface are more susceptible to interaction effect (and strong interaction causes all sorts of nonintuitive quantum effects). I’m not a DFT expert in any sense, but from what I’ve heard, it is quite easy to “tune” your model to produce narrow (the limit of which being flat) bands from substitutions (e.g. the Cu substitution in this case) and such, which don’t necessarily lead to superconductivity.

So I’ll take the DFT papers (there are quite a few now) as saying, “hey you want some flat band? Here’s some. We’ve done our part. Now some other theorist, do your magic and conjure up some superconductivity”. It’s a cog in the full picture, if there is a full picture

Getting it to make a sound is (probably) easy but realistically emulating piano action would be really hard. Reputable electronic pianos all mimic real piano mechanics to a degree, e.g., the visible portion of an individual key is only a fraction of its entire length in order to give you the “weight” and “speed” of the real key action, which would be hard to reproduce with e.g. a shorter key + spring. A search of “hammer actions” should give you some idea

The point is there are established conventions among the practitioners on how these are pronounced, and not getting them right says something about the youtuber who may otherwise appear as an expert.

You might be right on how the name ‘Schrieffer’ should be pronounced in its original tongue, but I’ve heard multiple former students and colleagues of Bob Schrieffer pronounce it otherwise to conclude that theirs is probably how Schrieffer himself intended his name to be pronounced.

Yeah, can’t wait to hear economists’ take, or The Economist’s…

Give me a way to physically shut off the microphone (like a camera shield on business laptops), then we will talk.

Strange topics had popped up in my Google feed after l spoke to someone about something I’ve never googled before

Hi Joe Brian

It is waiting for reproducibility is what it is. It won’t matter much if it got published today in some no name journal – a journal is going to gamble just as this youtuber did, for the slim chance of this being true (not saying it isn’t)

Also, a quantum well is just particle in a box. Nothing fancy about it. Guy mentioned tunneling a lot but tunneling happens in metal, semiconductor, and insulator. Doesn’t really mean anything. In fact if you need to tunnel, that means there’s a chance to back scatter, so it won’t be superconducting.

Not to be snobbish or anything, but at this juncture I wouldn’t trust anyone who can’t pronounce arXiv (or Schrieffer for that matter) correctly to explain room temperature superconductivity to me. Hell I barely believe anyone with a materials/physics degree…

Just espresso? Conflict of interest!

/s just in case

While the phenomenon, namely bulk-boundary correspondence, is inspired by topological insulators, the fundamental physics here is rather classical, not quantum. It appears quantamagazine has since updated the title (physics -> physicists), but not the url.

What’s interesting here is they were able to verify the bulk topological characters (winding number around the zero of the wave function, ie the vortex) via observational data. In physics it’s usually the other way around: the edge phenomenon, that is the edge spectral flow, is easier to measure than the elusive phase winding of the bulk wave function.

Incidentally, the original theory paper from Delplace et al came out right after the physics Nobel prize was awarded to topological physics.

In general you’ll be happier if less fxxk is given to someone else’s opinion. I’m not sure how important “someone else” being a parent is, other then maybe the correlation with the time spent with them or the survival resources they had control over, etc.

Very interesting. I wonder what happens if instead of gzip, a lossy compression is used… would mp3 beat jpg?

Very refreshing to see the technical content of the notion of entropy succinctly summarized in the first sentence. Too many articles about entropy fixate on interpreting entropy as “order” or “disorder” without ever giving a precise account of what entropy is.

I agree with ya. I can hear it whenever I intentionally seek it out, even when it’s relatively loud out there. I tend to think of it as some baseline intensity (at some extremely high frequency/frequensies I’ve tried but yet to pin down) my brain perceives, that gets washed out more as external stimuli become stronger. This is partly what prompted me to speak about a reference level of intensity distribution over frequency (and therefore a power spectrum if you will) in the other comment thread. Normal brains have a reference level that adapts to the environmental average. Those of us with tinnitus have some nasty spikes at high frequensies. “Hearing silence”, I speculate, is more of a response to a changing reference level – some of the responses will be the brain compensating for the change and thereby inducing acoustic (?) illusions reported in this work. A tinnitus brain will respond to a receding reference level by focusing again on those nasty frequency spikes.

Having read the NYT article (with the PNAS paper still not available through a certain hub), I think a useful analytical framework would perhaps be to think of silence as a negative space. E.g., take some background noise (this could be the environmental noise averaged over some time scale) at certain overall intensity as “zero” (or reference level), then complete silence will have the same frequency content as that background but with negative intensity. From there one can start talking about various forms of “partial silence” as different spectral compositions of negative intensity. I’d even posit that some of the illusions they discovered would work in a similar fashion with positive intensity boost as well (e.g.two disjoint boosts vs one sustained boost). It is probably more about the frequency content than the intensity relative to the reference level.