Hi everyone, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Today is August 2nd, 2023, and I wanted to make a quick video to talk about something that has taken the world by storm. It's actually a great example of good science.
So, what I'm going to do is share my screen here, and we’ll go through something together.
Okay, so superconductivity is a very important concept. For over 100 years, material scientists have been chasing materials that can act as superconductors at higher and higher temperatures. When you make things very cold—close to absolute zero—some materials start developing superconductive properties. If you’ve ever had an MRI, they use liquid helium to cool the magnets, allowing them to perform their MRI magic. Superconductors could lead to major innovations in quantum computers, fusion reactors, and more.
There’s a lovely video map of superconductivity from the Domain of Science YouTube channel. The creator has a beautiful diagram and goes through it piece by piece. I’ll link the video here for you guys. It explains what superconductivity is, why it’s interesting and awesome, and why it could be the biggest single invention since the birth of the transistor.
This is the paper that started the conversation. Researchers in Korea published the first room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor. Room temperature and pressure from the everyday environment would mean an instant Nobel Prize. You’ll notice there are three authors; there can be up to three authors when it comes to the Nobel Prize if they publish something like this. This was clearly a paper written to be first to market. There’s a patent that has apparently been filed, and there’s a bit of controversy surrounding whether this is real or not.
What’s important is the process. Right now, the Wikipedia page is being updated with information about replication attempts. This is really the most important aspect of science and the scientific method, which has been somewhat lost by modern scientism—the cult of trust and authority in science. It doesn’t matter if you have a PhD or not, or if you’re at Harvard; your reputation doesn’t matter. Science is an observational field. A claim was made, and the claim in the paper suggests that something that could change all of society in the 21st century has just been created. They provided a recipe in the paper for how to replicate it and shared their results.
What’s happening in real-time is that groups throughout the world—in China, the United States, Australia, South Korea, and others—are starting to attempt to replicate it. Some people are having success, while others are not. Why? It’s very possible that the formula in the paper is just a little off, similar to old-school martial arts instructors who hid certain secrets. Other researchers have been able to replicate some aspects, and theoretical studies have shown some confirming evidence.
The point about science is that it’s about replication. You make a claim and leave enough trails in the design of your claim for someone else to replicate it. If they can replicate it, it’s good science. This process is exciting to witness in real-time. We live in a world where everything is often opinion-based—people tend to judge based on personal feelings about the researchers rather than the science itself.
This is not how science works. There’s a recipe here; we followed it. Can we replicate it? It’s the responsibility of the authors of the paper to communicate with those doing the replication work, providing them with the full recipe and guidance to achieve the same results. That’s the social contract in writing a paper like this.
Now, because there are some very prominent organizations, like the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, involved, we should see results in the next five to twenty days. By the end of August, we should have a definitive statement on whether these results are replicable or not. But the point is that this is the scientific process.
Getting into the cryptocurrency space, it’s the exact same concept. Protocols, formal methods, and claims about TPS and performance should provide evidence that is verifiable. If someone claims a certain TPS rate, you should be able to run that node on your side and replicate it. Otherwise, it’s not real. This is how we move away from scientism and the cult of "trust the science." You need the ability to conduct the experiment or know of a third party who can independently verify the same claims.
It’s so cool to see this happening in real-time, where researchers are directly trying to replicate results instead of dismissing them because they believe such a thing isn’t possible. Let’s follow this closely and hope for the best. Cheers!
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