The Big News
I was not active in steemit for a long period. Because I am really busy with work and other stuff. But I cannot stop posting this. Recently a research paper from IISc Bangalore in arXiv preprint came with very high claims. It was about superconductivity. I am by no means an expert in the field. But could not resist posting it. This paper reports room temperature superconductivity in a nanostructured solid composed of gold and silver nanocrystals. The paper title is Evidence for Superconductivity at Ambient Temperature and Pressure in Nanostructures written by Dev Kumar Thapa and Anshu Pandey.
Professor Anshu Pandey's page: http://sscu.iisc.ac.in/faculty/anshu-pandey/
But But!
The interesting thing is that someone in twitter found out discrepancies in their data. IISc is a very reputed institute in India and if this is a case of faking data this is going to be very very bad for the entire science community here in India. The twitter user Brian Skinner has posted his observations about data here in arXiv and posted it on twitter.
The issue
Brian Skinner found that two data series had "same noise" values (other than an offset value). Salute to his golden eyes.
See the blue and green dots. They are identical except an offset.
(Taken from here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.02929.pdf, Author: Brian Skinner)
This points out to the fact that either:
- The data is faked very carelessly
- something exceptional is going on!
- a mistake (which is also possible.)
Anyway Let us wait to see what really happened!
References:
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.08572.pdf (The paper)
[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.02929.pdf (Brian Skinner pointed out data discrepancy here)