Wondering what's happening with the room temperature/ambient pressure superconductor that's had 3x posts here on HN?

It's turning out to be a wild story regardless of the science... which still seems to be valid, although not publicly replicated yet.

I'll see if I can summarize the present situation: A couple of days ago, two papers were posted to arXiv (science publishing repository) describing a room temperature and ambient pressure superconductor created by a Korean team working at an institute in Korea. It looked promising (still does) and many people work on duplicating the results. Such a discovery would be the most important one in physics this century/Nobel prize material.

The papers had some oddities - a cut and paste error, different authors listed between the two, missing some data and neither one was peer reviewed. Nonetheless, the author scientists (some who are well known) stand by their discovery.

Today, how the papers were published with the above issues was discovered. One of the "authors" listed on one of the papers (YH Kwon) is the one who uploaded both papers (apparently without permission from the other authors, and maybe without being an author) to arXiv.

This person apparently is affiliated with one of the corporate sponsors (LG) of the work in Korea, and he came to the team as a condition of funding for the work. When the team decided to start to publish according to the process (they'd been working on this material for a couple of years, doing their scientific due diligence) about four weeks ago, they apparently decided not to give any credit to the industry person because he was just "there" because of funding. The industry person quit the team then, and left the organization.

The remaining team submitted their paper for peer review in a well known journal, where it's working through the process now.

The industry person went on to upload the two papers (one with edited author list) to arXiv, and apparently today gave a speech at an industry conference in Korea taking credit for the work. So, he's not happy with the team and he's apparently trying to take credit.

The rest of the team working on this material stands by their work and is waiting for the proper peer review process to complete on the paper they submitted to the scientific journal to be done, at which point they would (quite properly following the process) publish it.

So here we are, with one rogue scientist doing his best to claim credit for this discovery and bypassing all standard scientific publishing practices, with the non peer reviewed version of the team's paper and an edited/incorrect version of another paper sent out to the world before the original team could publish theirs.

The good news from all this is that all these people (including well known/respected scientists and professors) are behaving not like frauds but as if they've actually discovered what they say they have. This lends credence to the idea that this major discovery in physics and materials science is real and may change the world.

Attempts to replicate the material (called LK-99) are proceeding based on the "unready/leaked" papers and may or may not succeed. If they do not, it's likely when the peer reviewed version comes out that replication by at least one "real" scientific lab will already have been done prior to publication, and the peer reviewed version of the article will have more/more correct information to aid in duplicating the LK-99 material.

Regardless of what happens, this is an amazing story. The link I CCed above is to a Twitter post giving details on the above. There's now a Twitter list being compiled of all the people working on replication and reporting on the drama, see here: https://twitter.com/altryne/status/1685148163223719936

*Edit: Here's the actual list of LK-99 related Twitterers: https://twitter.com/i/lists/1684446795731206144