Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm excited about the ball bearings.
New era of sound proofing too: RT superconductors and neodyminium magnets levitating your inner-room separate from the building.
Finally I'll be able to get some good sleep!
Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be
211–220 of 501 posts
Re: Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
In particular, lead is still extremely common in radiation shielding, possibly because the drop in demand for other applications made it so cheap. Lead-lined drywall is the default approach for setting up a radiography, fluoroscopy or CT suite.
> possibly because the drop in demand for other applications made it so cheap Maybe a little bit. But I think it is more that it is a material with heavy atomic nuclei and high density, and thus effective at blocking radiation. And it is also relatively cheap.
Lead is absurdly cheap. One dollar a pound! Cheaper than much more common metals like aluminum or magnesium. So I diagnose a low demand.
They used to talk about using barium cement but it just can't compete, price-wise.
Re: Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd bet the country would be transformed by this. SK universities (SNU, KAIST) would rocket in reputation for solid state physics research. Massive money inflows to the country from production of the material. Deep down I think most of us realize that this will probably turn out to be nothing.
It’s nothing unless it turns out to be something. I’ll draw an analogy to the LLMs and diffusion models that have lately rocked the computer world. These things are straight up science fiction. I would have said computers would have never been capable of art and poetry. It was all fantasy until it was suddenly reality. We’ll probably know if this can be replicated relatively soon. And if it can it will kick off a who…
LLMs were/are massively overhyped though. Like it’s not even close to the sort of transformation they promised. Neat tech yes, world-changing solution to all of our problems? Very hardly, unless a very significant effort is spent (and yet undiscovered tech invented) to eliminate all of its significant practical problems.
Academics (and similarly venture startup founders) like to sort of jump to conclusions along the lines of “discovery was the hardest part - now this thing could enable ... in the next X years” at the end of a paper. And then people spend many decades to actually reduce this to practice. So 90% of work belongs to applications, not technology in on itself.
Re: Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be
#214While we’re waiting for experimenters to reproduce this, it’s worth comparing this amazing announcement to the Cold Fusion affair of 1989[1] It’s notable that the first publications about attempts to reproduce the Cold Fusion experiment all reported positive results. It’s probably because experimenters who got negative results decided they might have done something wrong so they kept trying, and delayed, and they did…
The guys at Falcon Space said they were working on trying to reproduce it today - they said they have everything they need.
This is their channel https://www.youtube.com/@FalconSpace where you can learn more about them
Re: Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Has there been any commentary on that? German, but nevertheless: http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=9a3f8740 "I work in the field [...] we don't believe a word of this. [...] The data set in Fig. 4(b) is also a treat. It is VERY unusual when the heat capacity decreases again at high temperatures. This can happen at low temperatures, but not at high temperatures. [...] My personal assumption is that the authors measured an ins…
A 4-point measurement of an insulator would show zero current, as far as I know. A more plausible idea IMO is that it could be a 4-point measurement of a highly inhomogeneous sample. If the current probes make contact with conductive parts of the sample, and there is a conductive path between them, but one or both voltage probes are not contacting the conductive path, then the voltage measurement would be garbage and…
Wouldn't it be odd for an amalgam of lead and copper to be non-conductive?
I know they were formed from sulfur compounds, but the production process should have eliminated those compounds, and the final forming is done in a vacuum so there shouldn't be any oxide generation to form non-conductive barriers.
I don't know much about the process but shouldn't they be testing resistance in a superconductor?
Re: Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think the actual proposed superconductivity mechanism is the relevant part of this paper. It is much easier to prove that this is superconducting than to prove why. And in a sense it is a bit less relevant. Although developing a working theory for room temperature is also probably worth a Nobel prize, so I am willing to bet some theorists are also running to their blackboards as we speak.
Ding ding ding! We still don't know how bikes work, we have a pretty good but incomplete model for lift on airplanes, and no one has the faintest why Tylenol works. We should figure that out! But we can definitely keep using all the applications until then. (Except for Tylenol, we keep learning how bad that stuff is) EDIT: It won't let me post more, so here's the answers to responses. For sure! https://www.cbc.ca/new…
Nonsense. There's nothing incomplete about our model for lift on airplanes.
Re: Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not necessarily. The "strained crystal" approach probably extends to other elements; mixing Pb and Cu works well since there's a large difference in their sizes, but rare earths might work just as well as Pb.
Can we get those in volumes necessary to do high voltage lines though?
REBCO tape is just starting to be available in volume, and I don’t think availability is raw materials is even close to being a limiting factor.
Re: Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be
#218If this material does just what they say it does, what would it revolutionise? Or as the article talks about, is this just a pointer at other possibilities that would be the real game changers?
Here's a few from the top of my head: - A global power net. No solar power during the night? Just produce it on the other side of the planet. - A superconducting computer. Less resistance when pushing bits around = 500x less power consumption. - A Superconducting magnetic battery. Store power indefinitely with high efficiency.
Not only less power consumption on Computers but a 100x improvement in clock speeds, a 500GHz CPU would be absolutely insane.
Whether or not we can manufacture/shrink the superconductor circuits enough to be competitive with semiconductors is another question, but my naive interpretation is that if you can make the superconductor circuits 100x larger than a silicon circuit, it is still going to have significant advantages.
Re: Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be
#219Researcher on reddit thinks it's probably spurious measurement artifacts, not superconductivity: > I would say they are not faking it, but instead they just don’t understand what they are looking at. Based on what measurements they are doing, as well as how they are doing them, they do not have a good understanding of the standard processes to characterise a superconductor. Also, based on their analysis/discussion, t…
>I would say they are not faking it, but instead they just don’t understand what they are looking at What? How do they get funding and lab space if they can't read their own measurements? Something is fishy here.
They in fact could not get funding and the research is funded by investment money. They explicitly thank their investors at the end.
Re: Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
If i make an analogy to p=np. If someone claimed to have a complex proof, i dont think people would stop and drop everything. If someone claimed to have a constructive solution to p=np, claimed to have implemented it, and put the code on github - yeah i think lots of people would drop everything to run it and see if it works. Im not a physicist, but maybe with the relative ease on making this material (according to o…
For real; the original paper is kinda shitty in terms of data presentation, and there's significant value to make a follow up paper to create data and try to get your name out there.
The author of the paper apparently says it wasn’t supposed to be leaked and that it needs more work, but he stands by his results and will assist anyone trying to replicate, which sounds pretty steadfast to me.