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

> You can build a pretty good mental model of flight with either simplified mechanism, but you end up underestimating performance by a fair bit.

I've never hear of a good mental model built on Bernoulli's Principle. They are either:

- Wrong

- Give no intuition

The key question is /why/ air moves faster on one side, and once you get away from the misconception of same time, I've never heard an intuitive argument.

Redirecting air down:

- makes complete sense

- can be demonstrated by sticking your hand out the window of a car

- works with flat airfoils (sails, kites, etc.), and explains those well too

And the shape of the wing comes in from wanting the leading edge parallel to incoming airflow, and the other edge parallel to outgoing airflow. On a sail, I can adjust the shape. On a steel wing, I can't much, so I make a shape which works across different angles of attack.

All of the other mechanisms, you can gradually work in from there to get accurate models. Toss in air moving to the low-pressure area, and having momentum, and you get why helicopters are less efficient than planes, as well as vortex shedding. It all builds up.

As a corollary, Bernoulli tells you where air moves faster, but that follows from lift. Not the other way around. At least in any model which fits the human brain.

Oooh fresh Derek Lowe, awesome

Enough of all the UFO nonsense, this is what matters for the future

> If these data reproduce, the superconductivity of this material seems beyond doubt.

> Another welcome feature is that their procedure for preparing LK-99 seems quite straightforward. You can bet that furnaces in solid-state materials labs around the world have been cooking yesterday and today to try to reproduce its synthesis and the properties, and we should be hearing about the results of these experiments very soon.

You might also say it's the only type of claim science recognizes. Though, whatever or how strong a claim is, the question is how important is what is proven and will it lead to real superconductive materials.

In the Vsauce video "Do Chairs Exist?" (I highly recommend it!), Michael talks about the concept of vagueness and how defining boundaries can lead to paradoxes. While it was primarily dealing with an ontological perspective, the linguistic perspective of a particular line has always stood out to me. Perhaps it makes a bit more sense in context of the full 40-minute video, but it is:

>"Composites are causally redundant. Believing in chairs is like believing that, while yes, the burning gas from my stove completely describes why the water in a pot boils, there’s ALSO a magical invisible substance called boil-o that comes out of my stove that does the same thing as the flame at the same time, and if there was no boil-o, the flame would warm the water just the same, but there IS boil-o... Chairs are no more real than boil-o. Composites over-determine what happens in the world."

Like your example with lift and fluid dynamics, simple explanations like "plane pushes air downwards" or "faster flow sucks the plane upwards" might be insufficient, but they're at least useful to the layman. It also reminds me of how Richard Feynman answered the question, "What is the feeling between 2 attracted magnets?" by explaining that it would be impossible to give a complete answer. Feynman pointed out that when you ask why two magnets attract each other, there are different levels of understanding depending on your background knowledge. For someone with no knowledge of physics, the simple explanation would be the existence of a magnetic force causing the attraction. However, delving deeper into the question raises complexities that can be challenging to explain.

Feynman highlighted the difficulty of answering "why" questions in general. Explaining magnetic attraction in terms of something else that we are more familiar with, like rubber bands, would be misleading and circular, as it ultimately comes down to electrical and magnetic forces. He acknowledged that some aspects of the natural world may need to be accepted as fundamental elements without a more profound explanation.

This is echoed in the Vsauce video, where defining boundaries and attempting to explain everything can lead to paradoxes and vagueness. The concept of "boil-o" illustrates how composites, like chairs, can over-determine what happens in the world and our own perception, making their actual explanation even more elusive.

By whom, if no one orders the ingredients to run the tests?