lol, I wrote a very similar comment here a few days ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43964524
It's true, that paper is nonsense. There's not really much else to say. Preprint servers sometimes publish the sort of stuff that wouldn't pass peer review. (Remember that S.Korean "superconductor" from about two years ago!?) The press should be cautious when writing about it.
Whether it’s nonsense or not, this quote in the critical assessment is concerning:
> If I were a science journalist writing an article about a supposedly shocking development like this, I would email some experts and check to see if it’s for real.
An attitude like that would have us all believing the earth is flat or that the sun revolves around the earth. After all, experts of the time believed both wrongly.
I agree with that comment. Experts can be wrong, of course, but the null hypothesis is that their opinion is 'more correct' than that of a science journalist.
As an aside, nobody really believed the earth was flat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth.
I'd like to revise that comment to, "email the experts to better understand how this finding fits into the current scientific worldview."
We shouldn't take the experts on blind faith, but we definitely shouldn't take the challenges on blind faith either.
Although that paper even made it to PRL. I guess I should have written up some similar nonsense and sent it to PRL, might have improved my career chances.