Consistency and Controversy Analysis in the Hype of Room-Temperature Superconductivity

Room-temperature superconductors (esp. LK-99 in the recent) have attracted extensive academic attention in recent years, both in academic circles and among the general public. This topic has spread through a number of social media channels, a plethora of contradiction in information has emerged within social networks. There arises the question on how to analyze the consistency and controversy of such scientific knowledge in the dissemination process, and how this process impact on public cognition on the scientific knowledge. In this article, taking room-temperature superconductor as example, we first designed a large language model based factual consistency detection approach to analyze the consistency between research papers and media reports. Then the consistency between media reports and comments is analyzed, by proposing a novel quantification method for media agenda-setting capability, which evaluates the agenda-setting capability of media based on emotional and positional consistencies. The results indicate that two significant deviations occur when room-temperature superconductor knowledge is spread from specialized fields to the public through the various media. One deviation is due to the specialized nature of room-temperature superconductor knowledge, leading to discrepancies between reported content and factual information in research papers. The other deviation is caused by conflicting knowledge, resulting in disparities between media reports and public perception.