[flagged]
That's not how HN works.
It set off the flamewar detector, as foota indicated. We've turned that off now.
The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?
221–230 of 906 posts
Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neither humor nor sarcasm advance interesting conversations on their own IMO.
And yet humor and sarcasm can add spice to the conversation. I really did read the entire paper at the level of detail that allowed me to spot the inconsistency in the font. That was not made up, was substantive and should be corrected before it goes to print. The PS was also very real as the grandparent gets buried under downvotes.
room temperature superconductor does not need 'spice', save the clowning for something trivial
Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depending on the expense of making the new material, it may become actually feasible to build solar panels across Sahara and feed both Africa and Europe with the electricity generated, because transmission will become lossless and physically compact.
Geopolitically infeasible, look at the mayhem caused by nord stream alone
Maybe it could be a stabilizing factor, because the many interests involved would be mostly aligned. However unstable Middle East is, most of the time no oil well is on fire, or in a war zone.
Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?
#224After skimming the paper, it reads like a legitimate paper even though I have zero expertise in the area. That it is in Word instead of LaTeX makes it feel a bit less legitimate to me and they could of course always have some error in there setup. The most notable thing to me was that this was done in a thin film where structural defects are supposedly responsible for strain in the material which in turn enables the…
How much is latex used for papers outside of computer science? Medical researchers I know generally used word for their papers.
Chemists and material scientists that I have met largely use word documents and not LaTeX.
Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?
#225If true, this should dramatically improve the timeline for practical fusion energy, right?
Not necessarily. While obviously it would be nice to not have to cool superconductors, it's not much of a technical challenge. Much more relevant is the strength of the magnets - fusion reactors need very strong magnets which is why they use superconductors, but there is still a limit to how strong they can be made. Unfortunately the higher temperature a material becomes a superconductor, typically the less able it is to handle strong magnetic fields. The extent depends on the type of material it is and there can be other benefits like smaller size that could justify using weaker magnets, so it is still possible it could help, but it's unlikely to be a game changer.
Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtVjGWpbE7k I really need someone to bring me down a notch. This is too exciting!
What material and setup could even fake that result?
A moving magnetic field will move around any conductor, it doesn't have to be superconducting. A better video would be nice.
Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
>"reproduced in 100 laboratories consistently" That's a pretty high bar. Everyone has their own threshold of skepticism, but if NREL announced next week that they followed the recipe and it was superconducting at room temperature, I'd be willing to bet money on it being real.
High indeed, as in "extraordinary". I think that "reproduced at 100 labs" is near the level of reproduction at any university lab, maybe even as a part of students coursework. Which would actually be great, since we don't have trouble reproducing some other important electromagnetic and quantum phenomena, like light diffraction, at an ordinary university lab.
Yes, I'm saying my threshold is a lot lower than reproducibility at 100 labs.
Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, normally when people come up with some BS about room temperature superconducting, they really just mean they've observed one of the indirect effects of superconductivity. "If you put an ohmmeter in my funky circuit, it displays zero!" Which usually just means you've come up with a clever way to break an ohmmeter. Ejecting the magnetic field (the Meissner effect) is a way better sign. I find it very hard to belie…
How long do you think it'll take for the scientific community to determine whether this is fraud, error or the real deal?
Less than a week. It's a simple material to synthesize, and the tests conducted on it are pretty typical with effect sizes that don't require any sophisticated statistics to observe.
Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?
#229This is an unreviewed preprint coming out of South Korea. If it’s reproducible it would be the biggest scientific discovery of the last hundred years. It will literally reshape the world. However, the most likely thing is they made a mistake and the paper will be withdrawn. But imagine if it’s true.
I don't think mistake is a possibility. If it doesn't superconduct at room temperature, the photo of it levitating has to be faked.
Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dunno. A fancy tape or such made out of lead compounds would be a hard sell in comparison to ordinary copper for household wiring. But yes, for serious uses, this will be a big deal if it works out and can be made into a flexible cable. And I’m sure people will work on a less-toxic version.
Losses to resistance inside your home don’t matter much. In your computer they do, but it’s not clear this helps with that. This would enable really long distance electrical transmission, which solves the whole intermittency issue with solar energy.
Long distance electrical transmission will still require huge capital investments and lots of maintenance even if transmission losses are eliminated. And as a practical matter, strategic political concerns will take precedence. In the current political climate it's hard to imagine connecting our grid to potentially hostile nation states which might cut off power supplies to apply pressure during a crisis.