All that Andrew McCalip needed for his thirty fourth birthday was a cargo of purple phosphorus. It was a tricky request—the substance occurs to be an ingredient for cooking meth and is managed by the US Drug Enforcement Agency—but in addition a necessary one, if McCalip was going to comprehend his dream of creating a room-temperature superconductor, a holy grail of condensed matter physics, in his startup’s lab over the following week. It required 4 components, and thus far he had entry to 3.

His followers on X (that’s, Twitter, post-rebrand), provided concepts: He may soften down the heads of a pile of matchsticks, or attempt to purchase it in pure kind off Etsy, the place the DEA won’t be trying. Others provided connections to Eastern European suppliers. They had been deeply invested in his effort. Like McCalip, many had realized a couple of potential superconductor known as LK-99 earlier that week by means of a put up on Hacker News, which linked to an Arxiv preprint by which a trio of South Korean researchers had claimed a discovery that, of their phrases, “opens a new era for humankind.” Now McCalip was amongst these racing to duplicate it.

Superconductivity—a set of properties by which electrical resistance drops to zero—usually seems solely beneath frigid or excessive stress circumstances. But the researchers claimed LK-99 exhibited these qualities at room temperature and atmospheric stress. Among the proof: an obvious drop in resistance to zero at 400 Kelvin (127 levels Celsius) and a video of the fabric levitating above a magnet. The authors, led by Ji-Hoon Kim and Young-Wan Kwon, proposed that this was the results of the Meissner impact, the expulsion of a magnetic area as a fabric crosses the edge of superconductivity. If that had been true, it may certainly result in a brand new period: resistanceless energy traces, sensible levitating trains, and highly effective quantum devices.

On X and Reddit, giant language fashions glided by the wayside. The new star was condensed matter physics. Online betting markets had been spun up (the percentages: not significantly good). Anons with a unusually subtle information of digital band construction went to conflict with techno-optimistic influencers cheering on an obvious resurgence of technological progress. Their mantra was seductive, and perhaps somewhat reductive: a return to a time of leapfrogging discoveries—the lightbulb, the Manhattan Project, the web—the place the impression of scientific discovery is tangible inside the span of a human’s earthly presence. “We’re back,” as one X consumer put it.

Experts are uncertain. Multiple variations of the LK-99 paper have appeared on-line with inconsistent information—reportedly the results of warring between the authors concerning the exact nature of the declare. The researchers aren’t well-known within the area, and their evaluation lacks primary exams usually used to substantiate superconductivity. Spurious claims are additionally so widespread within the area that physicists joke about USOs—“unidentified superconducting objects”—a play on UFOs. (Most latest sighting: a room-temperature, high-pressure materials from a University of Rochester lab that has been dogged by accusations of plagiarism and rigged information.) There are extra seemingly explanations for the levitation, explains Richard Greene, a condensed matter physicist on the University of Maryland, together with magnetic properties within the compound in its regular, non-superconducting state. The betting markets most likely had it proper: Odds are the brand new period will not be but upon us.

But the declare remains to be price testing, Greene provides. In his lengthy profession learning superconductive supplies, he’s seen advances come from outsiders with puzzling papers that explored unfamiliar forms of compounds. That contains, within the Eighties, a category of supplies that exhibited superconductivity above the boiling level of liquid nitrogen (–196 levels C), making approach for all types of functions, from magnetic resonance imagery to tokamaks for nuclear fusion. Plus, as a result of physicists perceive the mechanics of solely sure types of superconductivity, a seemingly unusual or inconsistent end result can’t instantly be discounted. Perhaps it’s simply one thing no one has seen earlier than.