Well, just to push back a little on any impression some might get from this episode of the health of science (all IMO of course)

Most things aren't subjected to replication attempts like this, largely because I think people have a decent amount of self-interest in getting on top of this material as early as possible if the claims are real, and, the manufacturing of the material is relatively trivial. In science in general, game changing technologies or techniques can get replication attention like this, but overall a lot of "discoveries or findings" just aren't challenged as there is no real incentive to do so as a researcher, to the point that often you'll get pushback if you try to publish a failed replication study.

And, lots of replications of an experiment mean teams are more likely to run into different problems at different times and solve them in parallel. It shakes the bugs out faster.

yea interesting! It's definitely the arc I'm hoping for here ...

that either the material is tougher to make than the papers suggest, or,

to get into my fantasy land, the material they made is a superconductor but they don't really know why or how to make it the way they did as it was kinda some accident they weren't in control of. If true, it would make whatever is left of the material rather valuable and subject to some drama I'd imagine.

That tracks. Superconductor physics isn't my field (shock, gasp) but I do recall reading Chu's 1-2-3 paper way back when, in which the purpose of physical compression during synthesis of the samples was laid out in some detail.

One fraud happened and therefore everything with the word "conductor" in it is fraud afterward? The Jan Schon scandal was about single-molecule semiconductors, which have nothing to do with lead apatite superconductors.

I did not know this story! Thanks! Important precedent it seems in framing a foundation of scepticism.

I was, and am, skeptical, but I also must admit, the potential breakthrough is teasing my psyche with that feeling of just wanting it to be real. A part of me hopes that maybe it will still end up confirmed by other peers, but, granted, it was a low chance even when the news first came out.

From that article:

“The general public seems oddly pumped about how ‘easy’ the 4-day, multistep, small batch, solid state synthesis is,”

The process is a 3-stage heating-holding-cooling process which they haven't published the precise temperature profile for. The papers also claim only 4 samples were ever made in total, 2 of them got (destructively) analyzed by gas spectroscopy and crystallography, while of the other 2, one got further temperature annealed, and both got electrically characterized.

Chances are, they themselves don't know exactly how they got what they got, and may or may not be capable of producing more samples.

I imagine they only have a few grams of the stuff. And they're not highly motivated to be debunked immediately

It is notoriously hard to replicate things in labs, especially with material science.

This was attempt to do it within 2 days of the paper being published.

To add to that, the original researchers apparently had 10% successes rate in their lab, they wanted to perfect it before publishing their paper.

Bad luck was that it leaked, so to make sure somebody else doesn't get credit for their work they published what they had within hours.

It likely will take months before this will be verified.

What, one failed experiment about 15 minutes after the paper was first published is sufficient grounds for declaring the technology a bust is it?

Room temperature superconductor. Not semiconductor, that's something different.

With it we can build all sorts of otherwise impossible technologies.

Batterys with massive charge capacities that last weeks.
Stupidly high speed hover trains.
Electrical wires that don't heat up with use, don't waste energy, and can never electric you.
Body armour that actually repels bullets.

Probably some kind of horrific bomb.

A room temperature superconductor would allow 100% efficiency for energy transmission and allow all sorts of technologies like cheap maglev trains using flux pinning for example.

You know how your phone and computer heat up when doing something intensive? This happens due to the resistance inside it. Superconductors would allow this electricity to pass through with virtually no resistance, generating no heat.

room temperature semiconductor