Anyone able to infer what volume or mass of this substance they're claiming to have produced? How many unit cells?
The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?
661–670 of 906 posts
Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?
#662Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've forgotten how many times one of the most important thresholds in our times has been bumped up a bit. Now we seem to be offered heaven on a plate. If superconductance can be reliably demonstrated at RTP (you wear a light cotton shirt, instead of 1cm thick fancy weaves involving an awful lot of rubber) then we are laughing all the way to ameliorating climate change. Even if this result is confirmed then I think it…
How would superconductivity help to reverse climate change? Honest question.
I'm not sure what the GP envisions but one thing you could use superconducting materials for that don't require a bunch of extra gear to operate is to store energy in loops of it. This may well allow for a relatively high storage density (but probably not nearly as high as chemical ways of storing that energy but with better efficiency, and for stationary applications density is less of a factor than for anything mobile) with near instant charge/discharge times. Kind of like a solid state version of a flywheel.
That in turn could power an energy revolution which has the potential to reduce carbon based fuel consumption dramatically.
That's SF right now, but there are pathways to very interesting futures unlocked by a material such as the one described in the paper, all of them subject to the usual caveats that it's a 'mere matter of engineering' and that it may prove to be far too costly in practice. And it wouldn't reverse climate change but it could help slow down the acceleration of climate change.
Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?
#663Earlier quoted context omitted.
How powerful is the magnetic field in typical brushless motor? Even if it can’t be used for an MRI machine, it could do wonders for efficient (and/or compact) robotics and electric vehicles. I’m also very curious what kind of inductors you could make for switching power supplies using superconductors.
1.5-2 Tesla you hit the knee of the BH curve and you saturate the steel.
Do you need steel? What about a brushed(Assume some fancy future micrometer gallium filled gap that doesn't wear or something) motor that just has superconducting coils attracting each other?
Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?
#664Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.”
It's my impression, and it seems to be the consensus here that it is very unlikely that this is a mistake. This is either very real or completely fabricated. You don't have a piece of ceramic keeping its distance to a magnet by some unexpected phenomenon or measurement error. And given the easiness in reproducing the study, there doesn't seem to be any point in fabricating it.
The main worry is whether we're dealing with wholly rational actors. People convince themselves they're seeing an effect, and then seemingly completely erratic things to try and prove it on the conviction that with just a bit more effort they'll get it for real.
Like you'd question why someone would photoshop results[1] in a paper, because surely they'd have to realize they're fabricating data, but they go ahead and do it anyway.
The videos are convincing but are they of what they really purport to show? I agree - what would be the point of fabricating it. But weirder things have happened in the breadth of human experience.
[1] https://thenextweb.com/news/who-scientists-used-photoshop-to...
Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?
#665Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you think lead is scary, wait till you hear about carbon dioxide.
I mean, modulo edge cases, lead is a lot scarier than CO2; it's only because of the ridiculously obscene quantities of CO2 being produced that it's a more immanent threat. There's obviously not enough information yet to weigh the value/consequences of the amount of lead used here, but if your measure of whether something is a good idea for mitigating carbon emissions is just "it's not carbon emissions", you're going…
Maybe they could pack it into epoxy encapsulated modules of standard size, so you could always reuse it in another motor or transformer or what have you, assuming you were willing to disassemble the scrapped gadget?
Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?
#666Earlier quoted context omitted.
With room temperature superconductivity doesn't it become possible to turn the magnet on and off far more easily? MRIs would be much safer if they were only energized during the actual imaging process.
To turn the magnet off you need to get the current out, I don't see why raising the temperature would make that easy.
Dump it in a bank of capacitors, send it back when you need it. Or in a superconducting loop...
Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?
#667Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's my impression, and it seems to be the consensus here that it is very unlikely that this is a mistake. This is either very real or completely fabricated. You don't have a piece of ceramic keeping its distance to a magnet by some unexpected phenomenon or measurement error. And given the easiness in reproducing the study, there doesn't seem to be any point in fabricating it.
The main worry is whether we're dealing with wholly rational actors. People convince themselves they're seeing an effect, and then seemingly completely erratic things to try and prove it on the conviction that with just a bit more effort they'll get it for real. Like you'd question why someone would photoshop results[1] in a paper, because surely they'd have to realize they're fabricating data, but they go ahead and…
This is very much the truth. The scariest founders during due diligence are the ones that are totally convincing, true believers and yet utterly wrong. They've even convinced themselves, but that failed to convince mother nature. It can be super hard to detect this.
Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?
#668Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a physicist, it's not a red flag... It's a red klaxon blaring out an alarm. I have only met a few physicists who don't write papers in latex. They are all 65+ and generally work with younger scientists/grad students who prepare the paper in latex for final drafts and submissions.
TeX was written in the 1970s for typesetting when there were no word processors by a computer programmer who couldn’t afford professional typesetting and couldn’t be bothered to learn assembly language so he wrote his own fictional one for his book — the same book he wrote TeX to publish.
Good joke :-)
This is already very tangential, but just for the benefit of anyone who may miss the humour and take the above comment seriously:
- re “couldn't afford professional typesetting”: Knuth was happy when Addison–Wesley approached him, specifically because he liked the high-quality typesetting of their books (like Thomas' Calculus) that he had used as a student. He was happy with the typesetting of the first editions of Vol 1 and 2, and only for the second edition, when the publishers moved from hot-metal typesetting to phototypesetting (that is, when the quality of the best achievable professional typesetting deteriorated), and he learned of the existence of digital typesetters, that he was motivated to come up with his own solution.
- re “couldn't be bothered to learn assembly language” — Knuth was approached by the publisher in the first place, because even as a student he had become a legendary compiler-writer (http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html#7) in multiple machine/assembly languages. In fact, the fictional “MIX” that he created was literally a “mix” of various then-existent machine languages (https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/18117), some binary, some decimal (https://catonmat.net/donald-knuths-first-computer / https://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/KnuthIBM650Appreciation.pdf), and MIX was introduced in the book with:
> There should be no hesitation about learning a new machine language; indeed, the author has found it not uncommon to be writing programs in a half dozen different machine languages during the same week! Everyone with more than a casual interest in computers will probably get to know several different machine languages…
Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?
#669What’s the material used for superconductivity in the paper?
Re: The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?
#670Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tangentially, the US Army has completely stopped using lead in bullets. Their 5.56 NATO ammo has copper where the lead used to be (i.e., inside a brass jacket) which reduces performance because copper is only 2/3 as dense as lead.
Sorry, but this is entirely incorrect. First, terms - brass is not used to "jacket" a bullet. Brass is used as the case material for the cartridge. Steel, and nickel plated steel are some times also used here. "Jacketing" (as in, Full Metal Jacket) refers to the material that wraps around the exterior of the projectile. As far as I'm aware, the material used here is almost always copper, or a copper alloy (cupronicke…
>The US army standard training round is the M193. It is a lead bullet jacketed with copper. Interestingly, it in many ways has better terminal performance than the M855 because this is the bullet the M16 and M4 rifles were designed around
As I understood the standard M4 with 1:7 barrel can't shoot M193 accurately