Chad admonished me for yesterday’s post on superconductors — and rightly so.

I scanned the article and assumed it was a blog about superconductors, and was quoting a press release. So the lack of a reference didn’t set off any alarms — citations aren’t always given. But I didn’t notice the bit near the end about patent protection, despite the yellow highlight, which indicates it’s not affiliated with academic research. When I Googled on the topic, hoping to find a better summary, I saw several links, quoting what I had assumed to be the same press release. But in reality, all of those sites were just linking back to the original source, and none of this has even passed the preliminary hurdle of peer-review. And it seems that this is a guy working in his garage, doing this as a hobby. That doesn’t make the results wrong, but since people familiar with high-temperature superconductivity haven’t reviewed the work to look for obvious errors, and nobody has corroborated the results, one can’t provisionally accept that it’s right, either. Not being demonstrably bad science doesn’t make it good science.

So I shouldn’t have linked to it. I screwed up (and I’m sure I’ll do so again, somehow. I’ve seen me do it.)