Research hype seems problematic

The recent news  [1,2] about room temperature superconductors (RTSC) at relatively low pressures has been getting a lot of attention, both negative and positive. The negative press is coming from the fact that the PI of the study has had questionable research in the past. The PI has also been resistant to requests for sharing data and samples that were synthesized. 

If it turns out that the nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride is indeed a superconductor at ambient temperatures and pressures around 1 GPa this would indeed be a waypoint on the journey toward superconducting materials. For many, 1 GPa may seem fairly high compared to ambient pressure, which is around ~0.0001 GPa. However, the ability to engineer a coating or conduit that wraps and applies suitable compressive pressures to RTSC should be something feasible. You can think of how Corning's Gorilla glass works, which is an alkali-aluminosilicate material that uses some clever surface composition engineering to create gradients of strain to arrest microcracks/pits that form on the surface; this is done by creating compressive stresses in the material. The difference here is you wouldn't modify the RTSC material directly.

Going back to press on RTSC, I'm glad to see there is a lot of debate going on. One thing that appears to be very clear is that the peer review process for these high-impact journals is not very good. Seems to me that such an impactful article would have received the same criticism that is being displayed in the public discourse. Such criticism would have probably made it much more challenging for the authors to publish their findings as they would have had to overcome many requests for raw data by the reviewers, although I'm not sure journal editors entirely support such requests as the reviewer could be a potential competitor. What I like is that there is a lot of community review going on. Independent researchers and groups are eagerly trying to reproduce the findings and we will probably know shortly what the outcome is. Some early preprints/papers [3,4] are indicating they aren't observing the same resistivity measurements as reported in the original work; not looking too good for the controversial PI.

A parallel event that is going on in quantum computing is the ongoing debate and coverage of the quantum computing wormhole publication [5]. I've worked a bit on quantum algorithms for NISQ devices so I'm a little familiar with what can be done using them. I know nothing about research in quantum gravity or EPR=ER, but I can tell you that the initial (seems they've updated it) coverage by Quanta magazine was awfully misleading. The main message that should have been conveyed is that the simplified model being simulated facilitates the mathematical relation between the dynamics of entanglement in quantum systems and wormholes predicted in general relativity. It does not mean that running the quantum device creates spacetime wormholes in the physical lab, however, anyone reading the original article or related popular stories would be inclined to think this is what happened.

This leads me to start thinking about what is going on with hype in research. Why is it that science is becoming about what hype one can generate around the research? I've seen a lot of good posts on Linkedin commenting on this. It appears that it is strongly linked with the prospectus in securing more funding for their research. I assume the thinking behind this is that if funding agencies and program managers get excited, they won't want to miss out on all the fun! Other comments indicate that it's mostly because much of the science being done is actually not that impactful and very incremental, so things get overblown in importance and meaning. Whatever it may be it seems this is going to create huge issues in the future because popular articles on scientific research that overhype will eventually lead to serious decisions that affect both social and economic life for everyone.

References

[1] N. Dasenbrock-Gammon, E. Snider, R. McBride, H. Pasan, D. Durkee, N. Khalvashi-Sutter, S. Munasinghe, S.E. Dissanayake, K.V. Lawler, A. Salamat, R.P. Dias, Evidence of near-ambient superconductivity in a N-doped lutetium hydride, Nature. 615 (2023) 244–250. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-05742-0.

[2] H. Pasan, E. Snider, S. Munasinghe, S.E. Dissanayake, N.P. Salke, M. Ahart, N. Khalvashi-Sutter, N. Dasenbrock-Gammon, R. McBride, G.A. Smith, F. Mostafaeipour, D. Smith, S.V. Cortés, Y. Xiao, C. Kenney-Benson, C. Park, V. Prakapenka, S. Chariton, K.V. Lawler, M. Somayazulu, Z. Liu, R.J. Hemley, A. Salamat, R.P. Dias, Observation of conventional near room temperature superconductivity in carbonaceous sulfur hydride, (2023). https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2302.08622.

[3] P. Shan, N. Wang, X. Zheng, Q. Qiu, Y. Peng, J. Cheng, Pressure-induced color change in the lutetium dihydride LuH2, Chinese Phys. Lett. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1088/0256-307X/40/4/046101.

[4] X. Ming, Y.-J. Zhang, X. Zhu, Q. Li, C. He, Y. Liu, B. Zheng, H. Yang, H.-H. Wen, Absence of near-ambient superconductivity in LuH$_{2\pm\text{x}}$N$_y$, (2023). https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2303.08759.

[5] D. Jafferis, A. Zlokapa, J.D. Lykken, D.K. Kolchmeyer, S.I. Davis, N. Lauk, H. Neven, M. Spiropulu, Traversable wormhole dynamics on a quantum processor, Nature. 612 (2022) 51–55. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05424-3.

Edited 27 Mar, 2023: In the original version it was stated that Gorilla glass is a borosilicate glass, this is incorrect and the post has been updated to reflect that Gorilla glass is an alkali-aluminosilicate.  Corning does produce a product called Willow glass which is a borosilicate.

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