Terence Tao on Nostr: I don't have domain expertise to directly comment on the potential #LK99 room ...

I don't have domain expertise to directly comment on the potential #LK99 room temperature superconductor, except to say that the experts that I have talked to are currently quite skeptical. But I can draw one analogy with my experience with mathematical research. A typical math research project consists of months of proposed attacks on a problem, resulting in all sorts of failures or partial successes, until enough experience and intuition is gained to locate the correct approach (or to realize that one needs to modify the problem, or work on a completely different project). However, when the time comes to write up the work, usually the failed or partial attempts are not mentioned at all, except perhaps as brief motivation for the final successful approach. This has some sense to it - a reader is likely to be more interested in the approach that worked than the approaches that didn't quite work - but can give the mistaken impression that good mathematics consists entirely of correct arguments, and that disclosing the failures one had to attempt before locating the correct approach is somehow shameful. But such failures are in fact enormously instructive, and I wish our culture was more open to sharing them.

With LK99, I have seen it reported that the initial announcements were released prematurely, while the research was still in the "partial success at best" stage. As such, the work fares poorly if judged by the usual standard of "successful, completed research", and criticism is due if one or more of the authors were presenting it as such. But as "research in progress, accidentally revealed to the public", I am inclined to be charitable, and wait for the science to play out.