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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

#391

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

VagabundoP wrote: post #359
cornel_io wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We 100% know why airplanes of every shape and size stay aloft, and can calculate lift/drag extremely accurately based on the geometry of the plane and the airflow, in both steady state and much worse conditions. We have great approximations for steady state that make perfect sense and simplify the situation greatly and make it more understandable without simulation, even if they gloss over some details. Where are you…

Yeah, but what about Bumblebees. Yeah, didn't think so. ;)

They figured that one out too... Something to do with vortices...

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

#392

Post by The_Double »

The strangest thing to me is that apparently this material has been developed years ago, the video of a piece floating was uploaded 3 months ago, and apparently it's easy to produce more samples, but the papers still reads like they have been thrown together in less than a week. (English might not be their first language, but the presentation of the figures is also poor) And it also seems like they haven't spent that time by doing high quality experiments. Surely if you have found a magic material that can change the world you would spend more effort than this on doing experiments and publishing a good paper as soon as possible.

The low quality video and poorly presented graphs are reminiscent of Victor Ninov's fraud.

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

#393

Post by jahnu »

The_Double wrote: post #392

The strangest thing to me is that apparently this material has been developed years ago, the video of a piece floating was uploaded 3 months ago, and apparently it's easy to produce more samples, but the papers still reads like they have been thrown together in less than a week. (English might not be their first language, but the presentation of the figures is also poor) And it also seems like they haven't spent that…

I read somewhere once that deliberately poor quality graphs are sometimes used so that readers cannot extract the precise values from them. This could be to obscure fake or real data.

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

#394

Post by stu255 »

shirleyquirk wrote: post #360
scythe wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It may not come as a complete surprise that the economics of metals are more complex. Aluminium, was so expensive until the Hall/(that other guy) process was developed, that it was used for jewellery [1]. Even today it's expensive and difficult to reduce Al ore to metal, which is a supply side problem. [1] https://www.bellandbird.com/products/aluminum-bangle

75% of aluminium supply is from recycling aluminium products.

The economy sort of has a "working capital" quantum of aluminium which also grows steadily from aluminium mining.

Lots of metals have very different and complex supply structures and thus completely different $$$ / volume curves for their supply.

Understanding the $$$ / volume curve of commodities is not something that is commonly considered when people try and predict the future. Mining a billion tonnes of Aluminium from an asteroid for example and safely landing it on Earth can never be profitable because the $$$ / volume curve for Aluminium is $0.00 at billion tonne volume.

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

#395

Post by stu255 »

beowulfey wrote: post #390
dllthomas wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we know whether the mechanism was proposed before or after observing the results? If they found the material because of the theory, then I think it's very relevant.

Someone who speaks Korean may have to go through the original paper. It is LK-99 though; I wonder if they tried 99 other combinations first!

No,

Lee and Kim first discovered the material in 1999 and have spent 20 years doing other things in between getting help to figure out how to isolate LK-99 and reproduce the correct grain structure.

They eventually got a world class physical chemist, Kwon.

There is now a huge bust up within the team, hence the muddled race to publish and claim credit.

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

#396

Post by tomtom1337 »

jahnu wrote: post #393
The_Double wrote: post #392

The strangest thing to me is that apparently this material has been developed years ago, the video of a piece floating was uploaded 3 months ago, and apparently it's easy to produce more samples, but the papers still reads like they have been thrown together in less than a week. (English might not be their first language, but the presentation of the figures is also poor) And it also seems like they haven't spent that…

I read somewhere once that deliberately poor quality graphs are sometimes used so that readers cannot extract the precise values from them. This could be to obscure fake or real data.

This is true, but from personal experience, academics are terrible at including high quality images. My colleague would screenshot an image from some visualisation software and paste it in to her paper in MS Word. Then that image would get copied or screenshotted into a different word document, and so on, and the quality would deteriorate.

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

#397

Post by gus_massa »

dllthomas wrote: post #241
akjssdk wrote: post #54

Earlier 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.

Do we know whether the mechanism was proposed before or after observing the results? If they found the material because of the theory, then I think it's very relevant.

Somewhat similar compounds are superconductors, so it's possible that a wrong theory gave them a lucky hint to modify an old superconductor into the new superconductor.

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

#398

Post by rob74 »

shirleyquirk wrote: post #360
scythe wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It may not come as a complete surprise that the economics of metals are more complex. Aluminium, was so expensive until the Hall/(that other guy) process was developed, that it was used for jewellery [1]. Even today it's expensive and difficult to reduce Al ore to metal, which is a supply side problem. [1] https://www.bellandbird.com/products/aluminum-bangle

TIL! Aluminium is an extremely useful metal, but I would never have thought it would be used for jewelry - I mean, it's not enough for the metal to be expensive, it also has to look and feel desirable, which soft and dull Aluminium definitely doesn't. If you have ever held Aluminium cutlery in your hand, it just feels cheap compared to stainless steel (not to mention silver).

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

#399

Post by rob74 »

stu255 wrote: post #394
shirleyquirk wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may not come as a complete surprise that the economics of metals are more complex. Aluminium, was so expensive until the Hall/(that other guy) process was developed, that it was used for jewellery [1]. Even today it's expensive and difficult to reduce Al ore to metal, which is a supply side problem. [1] https://www.bellandbird.com/products/aluminum-bangle

75% of aluminium supply is from recycling aluminium products. The economy sort of has a "working capital" quantum of aluminium which also grows steadily from aluminium mining. Lots of metals have very different and complex supply structures and thus completely different $$$ / volume curves for their supply. Understanding the $$$ / volume curve of commodities is not something that is commonly considered when people tr…

Now I'm curious where that recycled aluminium is coming from? My guess would be mostly from airplanes and beverage cans...

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

#400

Post by earthboundkid »

tomtom1337 wrote: post #396
jahnu wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read somewhere once that deliberately poor quality graphs are sometimes used so that readers cannot extract the precise values from them. This could be to obscure fake or real data.

This is true, but from personal experience, academics are terrible at including high quality images. My colleague would screenshot an image from some visualisation software and paste it in to her paper in MS Word. Then that image would get copied or screenshotted into a different word document, and so on, and the quality would deteriorate.

My wife is an academic and I often see her screenshoting to move an image from one document to another. Seems like a UI failure that the system can't detect this use case and move high quality backing images through the clipboard.
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