Friday, January 27, 2017

Metallic Hydrogen?

The big news so far this week is the publication on the possible (key word) creation of solid metallic hydrogen.

If this is true, then this is a significant discovery and confirmation of a prediction from many years ago. Understandably, with the press releases on this work, the popular media have been going ga-ga over this.

 https://phys.org/news/2017-01-metallic-hydrogen-theory-reality.html

https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-scientists-create-metallic-hydrogen-possible-superconductor-ending-043206674.html

 http://www.businessinsider.com/metallic-hydrogen-created-2017-1

However, upon trolling all the various news reports, only the Independent so far has an update on the news story about doubts about this discovery.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/hydrogen-metal-revolution-technology-space-rockets-superconductor-harvard-university-a7548221.html

This is taken from a news report published in Nature:

http://www.nature.com/news/physicists-doubt-bold-report-of-metallic-hydrogen-1.21379

As with ANYTHING in Science, we have to give this a period of gestation before we all jump onto the bandwagon. It needs to be independently verified, and even the authors admit that this needs to be refined even more to produce a conclusive evidence of metallic hydrogen.

Zz.

2 comments:

Douglas Natelson said...

I thought your last paragraph was going to be about how Nature always publishes news articles with comments critical of papers in Science :-) (I kid, I kid.)

soggybomb said...

Science did publish a report in their own magazine communicating the doubts over the report.