Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

631–640 of 906 posts

Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

#631

Post by CamperBob2 »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #478
Roark66 wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, people should stop panicking about lead that much. You know there is this fairly common hobby people have, it's called casting bullets. With lead. I've done it, I know many people that do it regularly and they're all fine. Furthermore, shooting ranges are full of lead in the ground. The laws around here(Poland) require a cleanup by specialised companies every few years and a concrete slab to separate the l…

Yes lead in the ground isn't all that scary. Lead in your body is a concern. So don't blow lead smoke over your neighbors house.

This post is what happens when chemistry sets don't contain anything more hazardous or interesting than marshmallows.

Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

#632

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

XorNot wrote: post #326
marcosdumay wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Photoshop. On reality, you would need a good computer with a large set of sound emitters just outside of the screen and a huge lot of tries. It would be a project for a small team and many months of work. Or maybe a few transparent wires and less photoshop. I do think the easiest way to fake a video like that would be to use a cool superconductor and change the atmosphere so nobody notices its temperature.

Complicated fakes wouldn't masquerade as scientific papers though. The FTL neutrino comes to mind, where it turned out to be a misconnected fiber optic cable - but everyone involved was genuine. The bits and pieces of this certainly look like little are being genuine, so the new question is what non-obvious mistake could they be making?

The FTL neutrino paper was not a fraud, but a genuine error. The publicity was practically, “This can’t be right, but here’s what we saw.”

Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

#633

Post by lucubratory »

waldothedog wrote: post #611

I generally understand that superconductivity under normal human conditions is desirable, but could someone summarize what this material might be used for near-term, and what this might lead to? If this is comparable to the development of the transistor, what are the analogous vacuum tubes that I am living with today?

If it works as advertised, it would make a fantastic toy. Various different types of levitating toys would now be possible that would have previously required liquid nitrogen on hand. A lot of CEOs are probably going to have very pretty and novel floating desk ornaments. Not really a great toy for children or general consumption due to the lead content, though.

For all of the big use cases people mostly talk about when referring to room temperature superconductivity, like very cheap and easy MRIs, lower losses in power grid transmission, more powerful motors, cheaper and easier nuclear fusion (potentially necessary for commercial viability), this material as-is won't be suitable because it can't deal with that much current. We would need to explore this new family of materials and try to find one that maintains the superconductivity but significantly increases critical current and critical Tesla.

That said, this material could be genuinely revolutionary for consumer electronics and computation. Increasing computational energy efficiency on the chip level is going to be really valuable, but it's also probably going to take a long time to make it into actual electronics. Although, it is encouraging that the process for making this is similar to processes that are already used widely in industry, even in semiconductors specifically.

Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

#634

Post by mdip »

willis936 wrote: post #536
gerdesj wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I were a lad ... I remember the first superconductors (long predicted) being announced in the mid '80s. They stayed high on the nerdy headlines for quite a few years. Excitable write ups in New Scientist for us civilians. Nuclear fusion was still 50 years off but room temp superconductors were only a few years off (nope). I went to a posh school in Oxfordshire in the mid to late '80s and my physics class (form)…

Those mid 80s high temperature superconductors are now mass produced for NMRs and fusion startups. I don't think it's given that all superconductor breakthroughs will require 40 years to get to that point and there's good reason to believe they won't (startup penalty, industry bootstrapping, market finding, etc. have all been completed).

   > I don't think it's given that all superconductor breakthroughs will require 40 years to get to that point
Absolutely right. People generally understand that "collective human knowledge[0]" grows but they think of it as a linear system. The speed at which knowledge grows accelerates -- not at an even pace -- but I'd wager somewhere near exponentially in a lot of places.

And each discovery can change our understanding of other things/accelerate discovery in other areas.

[0] So much as such a thing can exist

Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

#635

Post by fnordpiglet »

pohl wrote: post #458
thehappypm wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've just proven (if true of course) that it's possible at all. That is a massive, massive leap. And once it's possible, it won't be long until it's optimized. We've seen this everywhere -- transistors were once huge and now nanometers; solar cells have improved in every where; batteries are cheaper and better than ever.

I was with you on the first part. If this proves room-temperature/ambient-pressure is possible at all, that is huge. Not so sure about the "won't be long until it's optimized," though. There are a lot of examples where something seems perpetually 20 years away. I'd advise tempering the transistor-based optimism with just a skosh of fusion energy skepticism.

Fusions problem isn’t feasibility. It’s funding.

Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

#636

Post by XorNot »

lilgreenland wrote: post #581
lilgreenland wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copper does this already. It's not like ferromagnets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sENgdSF8ppA

Well after seeing the second video I'm pretty convinced it's superconductive or a good scam. The effect was probably just not strong enough in the first video.

I'm suspicious of the magnet. Take a real close look in the second video: the paper cuts the image so the seam of the magnet blends with the table. But in the video it looks much more obviously like there's two magnets stacked on top of each other.

Which is a weird thing to do when for superconductors you shouldn't need it, but for pyrolytic graphite levitation you would (to get an N-S pole).

Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

#637

Post by ridgeguy »

foxhill wrote: post #190
ridgeguy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've looked briefly at the materials synthesis (first part of their Supplementary Materials section). I agree with you, the synthesis is trivial. The 10e-5 vacuum is easily reached with a turbopump backed by a mechanical pump, nothing exotic or expensive.

indeed, and i wonder if you could elide the vacuum entirely with a noble gas (presuming the vacuum is required to avoid reactions with atmospheric gases)

Could be, and good idea.

If they're processing in a vacuum to avoid N2 and/or O2 and/or H2O chemistry, then a dry inert gas might be useful.

Heating above 100°C to drive off H2O, followed by a purge with dry Ar might give the desired result without needing a vacuum system.

Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

#638

Post by mdip »

bradleyjg wrote: post #599
willis936 wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those mid 80s high temperature superconductors are now mass produced for NMRs and fusion startups. I don't think it's given that all superconductor breakthroughs will require 40 years to get to that point and there's good reason to believe they won't (startup penalty, industry bootstrapping, market finding, etc. have all been completed).

Those mid 80s high temperature superconductors are now mass produced for NMRs and fusion startups. As alluded to those same pop science magazines promised a fusion future too. Here we are, magazines extinct, with fusion startups using LN2 superconductors. Also: no quantum computers, no space colonies, no flying cars (or even supersonic planes), and twitter/reddit/facebook are worse than Usenet.

   > As alluded to those same pop science magazines promised a fusion future too.
I get it ...

But how many of them predicted their use in ~36,000 advanced medical imagery devices world-wide?

I'd love fusion power (and flying cars), too, but there's a whole lot of interesting technology between "check out my shiny new super-conductor" and "let's use it to contain plasma that's hotter-than-the-core-of-the-sun-kind-of-hot[0]" that we do benefit from[1], today, to not be too disappointed that we haven't quite reached the greatest potentials.

I don't know enough to speak intelligently on any of this -- who knows -- maybe fusion won't be a possibility until even higher-temperature super-conductors are created ... or maybe there's some other "not possible" in the way (until another discovery is made).

[0] And (if I understand things correctly) it's probably really unfortunate that they traditionally require extreme cooling, likely made more complex given the heat involved and almost certainly requiring far more power than would be required if said super-conductors worked at much higher temperatures.

[1] Myself, personally -- and I have a pretty cool 3D file of my brain backed up to my server as a result.

/// apologies: reading this over it sounded a little hostile; that wasn't intended -- I was merely offering a competing perspective, albeit poorly :)

Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

#640

Post by XorNot »

lilgreenland wrote: post #272
solarmist wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The effect is weak, but seeing that it behaves the same by flipping the magnet means that it can't be a standard magnet like we're used to seeing. (If I understood some of the other comments correctly). Other comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36867758

Copper does this already. It's not like ferromagnets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sENgdSF8ppA

It's also suspicious that there's not a control sample of copper in the video. Any scientist trying to be thorough would have controlled for this - shown that you don't get the same effect with just a copper sample as you do with a copper sample that's been coated.
Post reply on HN