The variables that lead to its formation are not all accounted for yet. The process is understood, but it doesn’t always work. So there must be something missing every now and then.
Wild guess is that the dopant that creates wells doesn't always end up where it should. The paper that claimed superconductivity in layers of graphene at very particular angles also seems to be very sensitive. A similar one claimed graphene with alkanes was observed to superconduct. Perhapes whatever impure hydrocarbon they were using held the sheets at the perfect angle. All the quantum wells these things are claiming to rely on seem terribly difficult to arrange perfectly enough to work consistently. Assuming any of them ever did.
No indeed. Lots of this in our history. You can't do most of electronics without semiconductors. But, if you have no idea what's going on you can make some rudimentary electronics experiments work - unreliably - without knowing that - e.g. the "Cat's whisker" crystal radio technology. The reason this actually works is because it's a semiconductor, but since you don't know what those are yet, you just know if you fiddle about with a fine wire and certain types of crystal, sometimes it does what you wanted, and if it doesn't keep fiddling with it until it does.
I'd imagine early history of sugar products is the same. Today you can precisely control the temperatures and so you can engineer getting exactly the desired products from sugar, but if you're not so good at either measuring or keeping careful control of temperature, you get... something. It's sugar so in most cases it's delicious anyway, but if you wanted fudge but you've made toffee you may be disappointed. With practice you can "eyeball" it without better equipment, like the cat's whisker, but with better equipment an idiot with no experience can make it do what they wanted because the numbers were correct.
Samurai sword making took what, a thousand years of trial and error? The forgers had no idea how making steel worked, they just found a way to make it work.
I have repeatedly read that Japan has poor quality iron, but what exactly does that mean? Iron is an element, so all of the reserves were in an unfortunate oxide requiring sophisticated refining? Just low total abundance?
Notably phosphorus is very hard to get rid of when it's in your metal. Before better metallurgy, the best steel worldwide was made out of low-phosphorus ores.
Getting a pure ingot of iron is no simple task if you don't have access to a good furnace. So you'll end up with 'bad' (impure) iron if it doesn't come out of the ground in reasonably pure chunks.
Or bread… have you ever thought what must’ve gone through somebody’s head to think of grinding all those cereals, adding random stuff, and baking it? How the heck did anybody come up with that??
Yes, based on the materials and type of process, it seems like the default assumption should be, if it's real at all, it's going to be a tweaky, unreliable process at first. A more surprising result would be if the published process reliably works 100% of the time.
The theory is the crystal structure induced by oxidation and vibration is responsible for the superconducting effect. They literally dropped and cracked the quartz ampoule by accident and produced the sample.
Its not enough to produce the material itself, it seems it is an emergent property of the structure and formation of the material similar to piezoelectric effect?
>So they have a batch of the material as proof, but no idea how to exactly reproduce it?
No, we don't know how to reproduce it, with "we" being everyone not on the South Korean team.
The papers everyone is trying to work from to replicate this are the "leaked" arXiv papers. That actual peer reviewed paper is still in process, and presumably that one includes more information on how to replicate the material.
Given the sheer amount of samples material scientists may produce I imagine accidentally hitting your target characteristic through impurities rather than direct formula may happen more often then they care to admit. That being said even if they haven't actually narrowed down on the exact formula knowing it can even happen in the first place is a major discovery
