As I've read it, the first lead to the material was 99.
2018 They got funding to research it further,
2020 was a first attempt of publication at Nature that was retracted, further improvements were made until 22/23 were two patents were filled, then suddenly 10 days ago Kwon, one of the co-researchers jumped the gun publishing a paper with the details, on one hand fearing a leak of someone else publishing first as that was too simple to replicate, on the other hand excluding everyone else from the paper and only listing him and Lee/Kim (LK) as authors as a Nobel prize can only be shared by three people. 2.5hrs later LK published again listing other 5 authors but him.
Ultimately I'm glad that the research has seen the light, since I'm of the personal persuasion that there is no single scrap of science that should ever be done in the dark. All research, in a perfect world, would be entirely public and freely and easily accessible.
With that being said, I'm not sure if leaking a paper and selfishly putting your name on it and excluding others so that you win a Nobel Prize doesn't exactly seem "heroic". Certainly beneficial for mankind, but it seems like a self-serving action.
The means justify the end. For all we know Lee and Kim would have sat on this for another year or more. I think that’s very understandable and I can’t fault them for wanting to be certain, given all the nasty things people have been saying about them, but the leak has clearly served humanity better than keeping it under wraps.
> but the leak has clearly served humanity better than keeping it under wraps.
Yeah, advancing human knowledge serves humanity, but unfortunately not really those who are advancing that knowledge. Those with money will just use your invention and make more money, you will have a pat on the back. I wish it was more balanced, we would have a lot of inventions sooner and implemented faster.
If it increases entropy as much as many suspect and it only took 1/3 of a couple humans' lives to open that phase space, the Universe has done what it wanted - to hasten heat-death.
As Hawking once explained, “Since events before the Big Bang have no observational consequences, one may as well cut them out of the theory, and say that time began at the Big Bang.” When cosmologists talk about the universe and its age, it seems to me, as a non-cosmologist, that they’re using terms of art related to their models.
Hawking’s explanation deduces that if the observable universe expanded from a singularity, we would be unable to meaningfully theorize what happened before then, since it would be beyond any form of observation to test the theory. Therefore, a scientific model rooted in observation can describe nothing earlier than the Big Bang.
However, not everything unseen is untrue. If a singularity were to form somewhere in Andromeda tomorrow — in all likelihood, one will — we will still have existed today.
Edit: The initial comment was meant as a lighthearted reply to the universe personification, but I ended up sensing a need to explain the reasoning.
It's not "personification", it's the universe tending toward entropy increasing overall. I don't think I've heard anyone claim that heat death "should have happened" as an argument against it, or what it's supposed to mean in reference to the original post.
There is a singularity in Andromeda, so I don't know why one forming matters
2018 They got funding to research it further,
2020 was a first attempt of publication at Nature that was retracted, further improvements were made until 22/23 were two patents were filled, then suddenly 10 days ago Kwon, one of the co-researchers jumped the gun publishing a paper with the details, on one hand fearing a leak of someone else publishing first as that was too simple to replicate, on the other hand excluding everyone else from the paper and only listing him and Lee/Kim (LK) as authors as a Nobel prize can only be shared by three people. 2.5hrs later LK published again listing other 5 authors but him.