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A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

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Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#271

Post by rodoxcasta »

chrisco255 wrote: post #200
flimsypremise wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zero loss of energy to heat in any of the conductors. You're not making the battery more efficient, you're making everything else more efficient.

That's not going to produce a 20x gain in efficiency. The primary problem with electric cars is energy density in the battery itself. Maybe if mag-lev cars are possible, you could get that kind of gain from the reduced friction.

If your loss goes from 5% to 1%, you have to deal with 80% less heat. So you can make 3x smaller motors. All the powertrain of these machines will be hugely simplified.

That's no small deal, but in the grand scheme of things that a hot superconductor can give us.. I mean, this can (possibly, with decades of research) give us fusion, quantum computing, etc.

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#272

Post by recrof »

ReptileMan wrote: post #243
declan_roberts wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Meissner effect has a lot of potential even outside of the energy efficiency changes (which is by far the most important). It will be fun to see trains levitating over the ground without any friction loss from the wheels at high speed.

Isn't majority of energy lost spent on pushing air away when we talk about high speed trains

yes, but friction of the track is also a big factor.

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#273

Post by AlexandrB »

roywiggins wrote: post #72
declan_roberts wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3% but keep in mind they can only push so much current through those wires before they start losing energy to heat, regardless of the voltage. The same cable diameter can now power an entire state.

Superconductors have a critical field, you can't pump unlimited amounts of current through a superconductor. (I think there were some comments going around that this material has quite a low critical field, so there would have to be some substantial improvements on this even if it is superconducting) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_field

I remember going down the rabbit hole on superconductors a few years ago and finding out that they were limited by a critical field. It was both reassuring and disappointing and largely for the same reason - there's no truly "free lunch" in nature.

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#274

Post by dameyawn »

codeulike wrote: post #161
digdugdirk wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a conductor of electricity. But super good at it. i.e. - It has zero resistance to electricity. Currently, the best superconducting materials we can create have to be chilled to near absolute zero, which means designing them to work in liquid helium baths. This is expensive, and difficult. If a material can superconduct at room temperature, now we're talking usage in general purpose consumer goods. As for why we…

Would help with fusion, right?

Yes, huge for fusion and would allow tokamak miniaturization too.

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#276

Post by wilg »

declan_roberts wrote: post #180
deeg wrote: post #165

I'm astounded that the MSM seems to be ignoring this ATM. I did a Google news search on LK-99 and saw nothing from major publications. A search on the NYTimes returned an article from 1974.

I think them waiting until there’s more research is preferable to them coming out and making random claims which pan out not to be true.

Genuinely a laugh-out-loud take on mainstream science reporting.

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#277

Post by furyofantares »

Bjorkbat wrote: post #256
1attice wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've fallen for the Fundamental Attribution Error. It's not HN; it's the world that's driving this. 1. GPT-4-grade AI is a genuine, holy-smokes innovation that is already driving massive changes in education (universities are having to redesign all their writing assignments,) entertainment (SAG-AFTRA strike,) and the tech industry (the sudden disappearance of thousands of jobs, and the concomitant socioeconomic dem…

I don't know, I haven't really seen the same level of interest from my "normie" friends that I've seen among the HN-adjacent crowd. None of them seem to be aware of LK-99, let alone care about it. Meanwhile, the GPT hype has worn off, and on that note, none of them seem to be aware that there's a difference between GPT-4 and ChatGPT. The former is this vague, nearly non-existent thing. They're aware of the actors/wri…

Yeah, HN is always gonna be quite a bit further along than mainstream in terms of both depth and detail, and living a bit in the future (and as a result of this, more speculatively.)

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#278

Post by marshray »

verytrivial wrote: post #217
drexlspivey wrote: post #8

New replication video coming from China https://twitter.com/lereguy/status/1686363900651151360

Hang on, wouldn't a sliver of any magnetic material behave like this within a moving magnetic field? This replication is a fail, yes?

Neither lead nor copper are what we would normally consider a "magnetic material" like iron.

That it interacts strongly with a magnetic field shows that a big change in the material, consistent with superconductivity, has occurred.

Quantum level effects are newly appearing in the macroscopic world, and that's always interesting.

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#279

Post by joefigura »

fallingknife wrote: post #49
7moritz7 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen three now from China alone. Plus a calculation from some respected institute from today that confirms the theory

Why are they all from China? Why are they able to replicate so much faster than US labs?

I mean it's been like 3 weekdays since the preprint was widely noticed. Labs in the U.S. are working on it and will publish. I don't think the difference between publishing a replication in 3 days or 2 weeks is meaningful to make inferences about the two countries

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#280

Post by wilg »

sandworm101 wrote: post #32
firatkizilboga wrote: post #4

I want to believe

And a great many people also want you to believe. Just remember: don't give anyone any money, not until this is properly verified.

> don't give anyone any money, not until this is properly verified

Instructions unclear: can't buy lunch.

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