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Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be

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Re: Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be

#231
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most power loss in a computer comes from MOSFETs, not resistive loss. Which isn't to say that RTP superconductors wouldn't open up wild new possibilities. ETA: wrong

Much of the power consumed, and heat dissipated, by conventional processors comes from moving information between logic elements rather than the actual logic operations. Because superconductors have zero electrical resistance, little energy is required to move bits within the processor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_computing#Fund...

That statement in Wikipedia is flat out wrong and notably isn't citing any source.

Re: Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be

#232

I’m reminded of the paper, just over 10 years ago, that reporting measuring neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light. When published, the authors made it clear: this is probably wrong, but we can’t see where we made a mistake … so what if we’re right and just upended relativity theory? That was turned out to be a measuring error [1]. This one may be the same, though the lead authors publishing two versions…

I don't see the similarities. This upends zero theories. I see similarities in the long line of "STP superconductors for real this time!" claims, but not findings that contradict current physical models.

Re: Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be

#233

I’m reminded of the paper, just over 10 years ago, that reporting measuring neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light. When published, the authors made it clear: this is probably wrong, but we can’t see where we made a mistake … so what if we’re right and just upended relativity theory? That was turned out to be a measuring error [1]. This one may be the same, though the lead authors publishing two versions…

I thought of that too, but the difference is that faster than light travel is impossible according to our understanding of physics, but nothing says that room temperature superconductors are impossible.

Re: Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be

#234
post #212
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I believe that most of the lead used today is a by-product or co-product of mining other more valuable metals like Zinc and silver. Lead is quite abundant in the Earth's crust and found in easy to access deposits.

I think >80% of the current industrial use of lead is for batteries. It's probably still in the top ten most mined metals by dollar value and definitely by mass.

Re: Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be

#235

While 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

[flagged]

Re: Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be

#236
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh really, so why do the Navier-Stokes equations work?

Re: Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be

#237
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is made out of lead. Even if it is useful for transmission, the difficulty of working safely with lead in a factory may mean it is impractical. Or it make leach lead into the real world making it not safe to deploy. Lead is still routinely used in many applications today, either in metallic form, from ICE car batteries, to fishing or hunting gear, or as chemical compound in different kinds of glass. And the sa…

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.

As a young fella, I carried a lot of that lead-lined drywall, it's (obviously) really heavy, and expensive so you got yelled at a lot if you damaged the edges, couldn't just trim it off like normal drywall.

Re: Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be

#238
post #199
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I recall of the original paper, 1-2 hours of actual labor with equipment and reagents many labs already have on hand--although it required 24-48hours in the furnace at each step which is the only reason for the delay and why the article author mentions we should see results tomorrow. So, trivial enough most people in similar labs already spent more time discussing the implications than actual labor/investme…

If it really is as easy as you say then surely every YouTuber with a metal furnace dropped everything to make that 100M view video.

I'm hoping they are. I want to watch them this weekend.

Re: Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be

#239
post #4

Lots of people are saying there should be a quick turnaround time here for trying the replication. I wonder how much it would cost to try and replicate this, in materials, labor costs, and vacuum furnace time/costs. My naive thought is that that labs in general aren't just going to drop everything to try an replicate every instance of someone declaring they've discovered room temperature superconductivity. Seems more…

I think if it isn't replicated by tomorrow, it's dead.

Re: Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be

#240
post #197

This is an extremely useful summarization of the original paper. > The authors believe that the modified/strained structure of their material creates a large number of “quantum wells” between particular lead atoms and the adjacent oxygens of the phosphate groups bound to them, in effect making a two-dimensional “electron gas”. They propose that electron tunneling between these quantum wells, which are between 3.7 and…

> sudden resistivity changes at a critical temperature (bizarrely high though that is in this case) How high? Just wondering if it might eventually be possible to use it in some power/clocking distribution layers of a semiconductor chip without bulky cooling.

127C!
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