Science Archives


Comparing LK-99 Superconductor Hype with Outright Frauds

LK-99 Superconductor and Science Frauds Jan Hendrik Schön and Viktor Ninov

Room temperature superconductivity is several notches below cold fusion as the holy grail of technological innovation, but a breakthrough may be close at hand. When LK-99 was revealed to the world by a team in Korea University, it quickly became a hot topic on the Internet. It did end up not being a room temperature superconductor after all, turning out to be less efficient than copper at room temperature. There was quite a fuss and we ended up with a goose egg, but that’s just par for course with science. Meanwhile, there have been plenty of other cases in scientific study where something got hyped up too much, only to end up as fraud. (more…)

Thomas Midgley Wasn’t Just a Well-Meaning Idiot

Dr. Thomas Midgley Jr.

This post is meant to rectify an old blog post I wrote about well-meaning idiots, specifically the inventor Dr. Thomas Midgley, Jr. In that post, I put him in the same category as John Chau, the American missionary who willingly got himself killed by traveling to the Sentinel Islands to preach the Gospel to its infamously solitary natives. But now, I know better. It turns out Midgley wasn’t merely just a well-meaning idiot who didn’t intend any harm, but a greedy asshole who set upon the world his products that poisoned the air. (more…)