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The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor?

arxiv.org

751–760 of 906 posts

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

#751
post #735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason is pretty obvious and doesn't require any kind of conspiracy. Nuclear can be done safely, we know this, because every single time there has been an accident it's because an operator did something wrong. The problem is that nobody has yet designed a reactor that a sufficiently amoral operator could not make unsafe. Even if you have completely automatic and passive safety features, a bad operator could disab…

> The problem is that nobody has yet designed a reactor that a sufficiently amoral operator could not make unsafe. That's not true. There are many designs (e.g. molten salt reactors) where the operator cannot do anything to cause the reactor to fail. The reason we're stuck with water reactors is mainly politics, and somewhat laziness.

Having a design is very far from having a working and commercially viable reactor.

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

#752
post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will say this, I haven't found the "it's not real" responses very compelling either. I've also found that people who actually work in the field seem less skeptical than knowledgeable people adjacent to the field. If it's not fraud, it's at least something new. Here are the reasons I've seen provided by adjacent folks: Nonscientific objections: * it was published in a low h-index journal (not a scientific objection)…

The trouble with the shown videos is that with a limited perspective, they do look a lot like the sort of single-camera trick that a lot of "free energy" device videos use - e.g. [1] Fortunately if we're dealing with a real effect, this will be easily replicated and proven. But with the fixed perspective of a video, you can create a large number of apparent effects that look real in the constraints of the video forma…

After reading some responses suggesting the authors don't understand how to measure superconductivity, I double checked the senior author's credentials. He is very much a legit scientist but seems to be a relative newcomer to superconducting. There is a long established history of respected and productive scientists entering fields they don't really know anything about and engaging in mild to moderate quackery. In this case, I am now fairly confident that the following is true:

* he and his team did discover a (probably) novel diamagnetic material. * it may or may not have interesting properties * however, it is not superconductive.

According to people who were able to more fully read the "real" paper, the key issue is that their measurements, if taken at face value (and not as due to, e.g., bad contacts with the material) suggest two contradictory things:

* the sample is extremely pure (due to the shape of the first graph).

* the sample has impurities causing it to not exhibit zero resistance, and not to exhibit "full" superconductive properties (i.e. having zero resistance under a magnetic field with increasing strength).

Additionally, since they were never able to measure Tc, they can't show the full Meissner effect as that requires heating up the sample to above its Tc first and then cooling it and flipping it, something you can't do with a diamagnet. By itself the fact that they didn't reach this temperature did not bother me, because I assumed that the senior authors were experts in superconductivity and had made sure that the material simultaneously exhibited other superconductive properties like zero resistance (or close enough when factoring in impurities). The fact that they were so focused on replication and the process was so simple made it unlikely to be fraud.

But, the fact that the first chart doesn't make sense unless the sample were completely pure, plus the lack of expertise they have with superconductors, indicates that it is much more likely measurement error on their parts, in which case it's not clear whether there's any evidence at all for superconductivity right now outside the diamagnetism. Given that there are many room temperature diamagnets known (albeit perhaps none as strong as this one?) and no room temperature superconductors known, this puts the odds that this isn't a superconductor at practically certain, IMO.

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

#753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear power and coal power are both heat engines turning heat into mechanical energy and subsequently electricity. They merely use a different heat source. They share a lot of qualities because of that. They are relatively centralized and best run in a base-load rather than a load-following mode to reduce mechanical stress and increase longevity.

>Nuclear power and coal power are both heat engines turning heat into mechanical energy and subsequently electricity. They merely use a different heat source. Not completely true. There are some experimental nuclear reactors that convert nuclear energy directly to electricity without the heat cycle, such as [Helion]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helion_Energy ).

When presenting working experimental nuclear reactors Helion is not the company that I would use as my example. They are borderline scammy and given their lack of progress they seem to be stuck in the moving the goalposts phase for a long long time now. I wouldn't bet on them ever completing a working reactor that produces net power.

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

#754

One of the authors in a related paper[1] is Hyun-Tak Kim. He has many publications in peer-reviewed journals[2]. One even has > 1500 citations[3]. I can't tell if there is a catch anywhere, this seems pretty legitimate. Also, unlike some previous claims that required sophisticated setup to reproduce, this seems dead simple. I think we will hear from other researchers very soon. 1. Superconductor Pb10-xCux(PO4)6O show…

Okay I can believe super conductivity, but having LK-99 a registered trademark already is where I draw the line.

Considering they've published dozens of papers on these experiments over the past months, it doesn't sound too unusual so far.

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

#755

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is nice to have but just like nuclear power it's a variation on stuff that we already have By that logic a super conductor is just a variation of a conductor. Nuclear power is more distinct from burning coal than any superconductor is distinct from copper wire.

> By that logic a super conductor is just a variation of a conductor. No it is not. The difference between 0.1 and 0.0 can't be expressed in orders of magnitude. > Nuclear power is more distinct from burning coal than any superconductor is distinct from copper wire. Nuclear power is an incredible invention. Unfortunately it has some problems that won't go away by wishing it to be so, and there are many similarities w…

> superconductors ... have the potential to change the world in ways that would be hard to even imagine.

Such as? I do not see how superconductors help with the challenges of Climate Change, food insecurity or danger of nuclear war. What will be the change for the average Joe? Maybe a better electric car?

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

#756

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By that logic a super conductor is just a variation of a conductor. No it is not. The difference between 0.1 and 0.0 can't be expressed in orders of magnitude. > Nuclear power is more distinct from burning coal than any superconductor is distinct from copper wire. Nuclear power is an incredible invention. Unfortunately it has some problems that won't go away by wishing it to be so, and there are many similarities w…

> superconductors ... have the potential to change the world in ways that would be hard to even imagine. Such as? I do not see how superconductors help with the challenges of Climate Change, food insecurity or danger of nuclear war. What will be the change for the average Joe? Maybe a better electric car?

Energy storage and distribution alone can affect all three of your examples and they are very trivial ones. Then there is medicine, possibly a better shot at fusion and so on. Better electric cars are at the bottom of my wish list (because they're still cars). But yes, those too (much lighter but more powerful motors means you can do away with the drive train completely and it would also allow you to get rid of the brakes) assuming the superconductivity can be maintained in strong magnetic fields (not a given).

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

#757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who doesn't follow superconductors, what sorts of things about life/engineering/society would change, how dramatic would it be, and more importantly: which stocks would you pick :)

One thing I can imagine is desktop MRI machines, or, at least, much cheaper and less finicky big MRI machines that don’t take days to chill to operating temperature. Maglevs are also a popular guess - safer, faster, and more power efficient ground mass transport would be a huge thing. Maybe even magnetic rail space launches. And, of course, military applications (the last few examples I mentioned involve acceleration…

Make sure you don't have anything metal lying around your desk.

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

#758

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mob…

The figures I’ve seen for superconducting energy storage are in the regime of “10GWh per km of cable”. Quite a bit more than chemical, in other words, the chief problem being what happens if it quenches. Or the cables break. And cost.

Room temperature super conductors don't quench. Or at least, not until they reach the temperature at which they no longer work as superconductors, which for this one is 127 degrees Celsius.

That does make for an interesting failure mode if anything should every cause a small spot on a longer conductor to reach that temperature...

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

#759
post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> could only cause problems solvable by more superconducting railguns If the projectile is ferromagnetic, or potentially even just diamagnetic, a defense system involving shaped ultra-high intensity magnetic fields becomes conceivable.

When you activate the city shield, all your buildings become projectiles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cities_in_Flight

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

#760

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One, fumes. It's trivial to experimentally demonstrate that solder fume contains almost no lead, the quantity is negligible. Claiming the contrary is the electronics equivalent of saying HTML is a programming language. Please don't do that again. The fume is indeed toxic, but it's due to the VOCs from the flux core, not the lead in the alloy. A more solid (no pun intended) argument can be the hazards of debris. Fur…

> Solder paste and a reflow oven are required for prototyping any circuit boards with surface-mount components (SMT) - basically any modern circuit board today. This is incorrect. You can easily do small scale work with almost all SMT components without solder paste. Solder paste is required for automated assembly processes. But almost anything done by hand can also be done with conventional solder. Source: I worked…

I know two people (one of which is here on HN) who do fairly large BGAs by hand, I wonder if that skill is really that rare. I couldn't do it myself though, I did try but for some reason I can't make it work reliably enough to risk it on stuff that matters.
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