It’s clear lk-99 has created a lot of buzz, but this really puts it into perspective how shady the “discovery” really is. I really really want to be wrong about my doubts though.
@crow Not really sure how someone faking it would expect things to work out. Someone could decide they could get a bunch of clout and followers by faking it. But at some point they get shown to be a fraud then they lose any following they had. Are the people who claim to have discovered something notable before this or could they just be riding a wave for a min for a quick buck? I guess there have been cases in more proper scientific circles of faked results.
Reporting on it is kinda whatever as that's kinda just talking about what someone else claimed.
Another possibility is that some other mechanism is at work or there is a fault in the test setup. At that point the person making the claim could be wrong but not necessarily aware of it. Maybe due to a lack of knowledge.
To me it seems that it would be worth it to repeat such groundbreaking tests before publishing the results just to avoid such negative press? Especially, if the material in question was relatively simple to produce.
However I know nothing about how this type of research works normally so ¯\(ツ)/¯
Didn't it come out that the paper was sent to preprint without consent of all the authors? If we want to steelman their case, it could be that they're still finishing up documenting and studying some dependent variables for the recreation process.