This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit sub.thursdai.newsFirst of all, let me address this from the get go, I’m not a material scientist! I am pretty good at finding information in twitter’s incredibly noisy info stream. (hey, this is how I bring you AI updates every ThursdAI) Since LK-99 is potentially groundbreaking and revolutionary, I’ve compiled a twitter list of everyone who I found credible, interested and a source of new information, and there’s now over 1.5K followers to this list alone!Since this clearly is interesting to a lot of you, I reached out to a few prominent people on this list, and asked them to join a twitter space, to try and stitch together an update on the current state of LK-99, replication attempts, history and lore, as it stands a week after the original papers release. If you found this interesting, you’re the type of person who wants to stay up to date, feel free to subscribe and keep this Substack alive!First of all, let’s do some level setting. Superconductors are real, we’ve used them in MRI machines for example, but the currently available superconductors need extremely low temperature and high pressure to well.., and the promise of a room temperature and ambient pressure superconductor is the holy grail of energy use. For a breakdown on what superconductors are, and what they can mean for the world, I strongly recommend this thread from Andrew Cote (published presciently a full two weeks before the LK-99 paper) or watch this incredible breakdown: July 22nd, the LK-99 arXiv day! On July 22nd, two papers describing “worlds first room temperature superconductor” were uploaded to arXiv: 2307.12008 - Sukbae Lee, Ji-Hoon Kim, Young-Wan Kwon (submitted by Kwon)and after 2 hours and 20 minutes another paper was uploaded2307.12037 - Sukbae Lee, Jihoon Kim, Hyun-Tak Kim, Sungyeon Im, SooMin An, Keun Ho Auh (Submitted by Hyuntak Kim)You may notice that the first two authors on both papers are Sukbae Lee and Ji-Hoon Kim, and in fact LK stands for Lee and Kim and 99 in the LK-99 name stands for the year 1999 they have started research on this.You may also notice that YW Kwon who submitted the first paper, is not included on the second one, and in fact, is no longer part of the Quantum Energy Research Institute (Aka QCentre) where he was a CTO (he’s no longer listed on the site) If this shakes out, and SC is replicated, there’s definitely going to be a Netflix series on the events that led to YW Kwon to release the paper, after he was no longer affiliated with QCentre, with limited information so let’s try to connect the dots (a LOT of this connecting happened on the ground by Seo Sanghyeon and his friends, and translated by me. Their original coverage has a LOT of details and is available in Korean hereLet’s go back to the 90sOn the LinkedIn page of Ji-Hoon Kim (the page turned blank shortly before me writing this), JH Kim showed that he started working on this back in 1999, and they estimated they have a material that contained “very small amount of superconductivity” and together with Sukbae Lee, in 2018 they have established QCentre to complete the work of their Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at Korea University, the late Choi Dong-Sik (1943-2017) who apparently first proposed the LK-99 material (following the 1986 bonanza of the discovery of high temperature superconductors by IBM researchers).Fast forward to 2017, a wish expressed in a last will and testament starts everything again Professor Choi passed away, and in this will requested follow-up research on ISB theory and LK-99 and Quantum Energy Research Institute is now established by Lee and Kim (LK) and they continue their work on this material. In 2018, there’s a potential breakthrough, that could have been an accident that led to the discovery of the process behind LK-99? Here’s a snippet of Seo Sanghyeon explaining this:Kwon Young-Wan the ex-CTOKwon is a Research Professor at Korea University & KIST, is the third auth