This is a great question, we need more of it.
Whenever there's a new piece of information or "news", always stop and wonder who is telling you that, why, and why now. Not enough people do!
Ask HN: Why is LK-99 public?
21–30 of 64 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is LK-99 public?
#22Because the world does not work like conspiracy theorists think it does.
Science is never obviously a breakthrough, people like to talk about and get credit for cool stuff they do, and revolutionary technology isn't necessarily of any benefit if no one knows about it.
This is like asking why the US government didn't keep the transistor a secret: because the transistor is of no use to anyone until people made microprocessors with it, and to do that they needed to first make better transistors.
Re: Ask HN: Why is LK-99 public?
#23Well, it was leaked so…
Also, we have no clue if the US or other military has already discovered and been using this and for how long.
I feel it was going to get out eventually. If you’re using a room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor for things which require room-temperature ambient-pressure superconducting, unless you conceal that you actually need it, people are going to realize. And once the existence is known, many top-tier labs would be analyzing it and trying to discover the manufacturing process like they are now…
The nice thing about academia is that people don’t hide breakthrough discoveries, they post them publicly and get rewarded for that. If real, these people are on track to win a nobel prize and lifelong fame and probably, lifelong funding (though probably not as much, but more than enough to survive). If real and these people hide how to produce, what would they get? Possibly more money, because governments and businesses would buy what they make for a lot and hire for even more. But governments and organizations would also want to kidnap and extort them, and most people would hate them. Meanwhile many, many labs with as much equipment and as talented researchers would be working on reproducing, and taking whatever samples they can get to do so, so their extra opportunities may not even last for long, but their notoriety would
Re: Ask HN: Why is LK-99 public?
#24If I'm not mistaken it's not that they 'published' the finding as in 'publish in a peer-reviewed article' but more like depositing pre-print in a database (arXiv) for not yet peer-review journal.
Re: Ask HN: Why is LK-99 public?
#25The technology is over a hundred years old, people have merely been refining it, spending their entire careers. There will be rivalry.
Assuming it is real, one must consider the perspective of the discoverer. In science, it's a race to publish and this will certainly win a Nobel Prize. That's why scientists publish in communications/letters/preprints.
This is exactly how collaborative, peer-reviewed scientific research should be. Public.
Re: Ask HN: Why is LK-99 public?
#26Im still trying to wrap my head around superconductors. When energy flows from one and of a wire made from a superconductor to the other end, then no heat is produced? Where did the energy go then? If CPUs were made from material without resistance, would they stay cold? How much of the heat a CPU expells is inevitable? Could (non-reversible) calculations be done without creating any heat? If yes, where did the energ…
Well CPU's are made of transistors. So one could ask if it is possible to make a transistor out of a superconductor.
The answer is yes. It is possible to quench a superconductor with an external magnetic field for example and make it an insulator. These things actually do exist but i forgot the name.
But switching that field still requires energy. So while it is possible to build such a CPU there would be still energy required to do any calculations.
Today's CPU's don't heat up because of internal resistance (mostly) but because there is current flowing due to the field effect transistors needing their gate voltages being raised and lowered.
Lowering that voltage means the energy must be vented somewhere which results in heat. That would not change if any part is superconducting.
Re: Ask HN: Why is LK-99 public?
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Where did the energy go then? Through the circuit. Heat is energy loss. The heat comes from the resistance. No resistance, no heat. To be more specific, the heat is from the kinetic energy of electrons bumping into the conductive material; no collision no heat.
Lets make a simple Gedankenspiel with only a wire made from LK-99 and a bunch of electrons sitting on the left end of the wire. After a moment, the electrons will be spread out evenly through the wire, right? So after a moment, the energy that was stored in the system (When all electrons were on the left) is lost. If no heat is emitted, where did the energy go?
Nowhere, it's still there - a loop of superconducting wire would also be a perfect energy storage because the electrons would just keep going around without any loss(it would be an extremely small capacity storage though, superconductors lose their superconductivity at high enough amperage which is basically what introducting more energy into the system would be).
Re: Ask HN: Why is LK-99 public?
#28as the name suggests, it was first synthetized in 1999 and only now the public got to know about it - that's 24 years and we know about it only because of human spite
Re: Ask HN: Why is LK-99 public?
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Where did the energy go then? Through the circuit. Heat is energy loss. The heat comes from the resistance. No resistance, no heat. To be more specific, the heat is from the kinetic energy of electrons bumping into the conductive material; no collision no heat.
Lets make a simple Gedankenspiel with only a wire made from LK-99 and a bunch of electrons sitting on the left end of the wire. After a moment, the electrons will be spread out evenly through the wire, right? So after a moment, the energy that was stored in the system (When all electrons were on the left) is lost. If no heat is emitted, where did the energy go?
Superconducting circuits can still have AC loss. You’re basically describing discharging a capacitor through a superconductor. If there’s no loss anywhere, it will be be an LC oscillator. If there is loss, the energy will dissipate.
Re: Ask HN: Why is LK-99 public?
#30Because the world does not work like conspiracy theorists think it does. Science is never obviously a breakthrough, people like to talk about and get credit for cool stuff they do, and revolutionary technology isn't necessarily of any benefit if no one knows about it. This is like asking why the US government didn't keep the transistor a secret: because the transistor is of no use to anyone until people made micropro…
Nitpick: transistors were broadly used before microprocessors and still have thousands of uses that have nothing to do with computers.