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A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

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Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#331

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

brucethemoose2 wrote: post #289
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.

Most people I talk to don't recognize the importance of room temperature superconductivity. A floating grain is cool, but not something that jumps out at people like a rocket or a big fusion reactor. The application is similarly unintuitive. Many here on HN ask why such a thing would be important, and they are probably the 99th (or 99.9th?) percentile in materials science and EE literacy.

Even if it is true, we are a long ways off from Star Trek utopia. No idea if macroscopic quantities can be robustly produced, what their limitations will be, cost per gram, etc. If the material is confirmed, there will be oodles of money pumped into the space, but it could still be years before commercial applications begin to appear.

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#332

Post by Ajay-p »

animatedb wrote: post #73
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…

Superconductor means low resistance. Low resistance means less loss due to heat on a wire. Room temperature superconductor also means more efficient magnets for motors, coils, ending up in cars, MRI machines, etc.

And the issue being that it takes a lot of energy to super cool those superconductors, and thus they can only be used in highly specialized applications. A room temperature superconductor would be like any other conductor, just much, much better.

Thanks to everyone. I understand this much better.

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#333

Post by fallingknife »

ska wrote: post #323
ta1243 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone with half a brain in the US is working the ad-tech and data-mining industries, that's where the money is.

This assumes everyone's primary motivation is $, which just isn't true. I've known super bright and talented people who gone off to wall street or FAANG for big $, but I've also known equally strong people who turned it down for low 6 figures doing the research they wanted to. In both cases some are very happy with their choice, others not so much.

I know a super smart PhD who is now a SWE and he would have been ok with the pay, but not the general BS of academia. So even if money isn't the primary motivator, it's still an issue.

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#334

Post by geon »

SimbaOnSteroids wrote: post #210
bilsbie wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don’t they try heating it and seeing if the effect goes away? You could even try a welding torch or something.

Not only is it a purported to be a room temperature super conductor, it's a relatively high temperature superconductor, not guarantee the effect goes away if you put it under a torch.

I think the critical temperature was 400 K (127 °C).

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#335

Post by ajuc »

CPLX wrote: post #325
natechols wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that has been constant for at least a decade or more is that every time a lab in China publishes even an incremental advance, a legion of internet commenters descends to declare the end of US hegemony because Americans didn't discover it first.

Is your argument that China’s increasing technical prowess will not inevitably result in the US hegemony ending?

Japanese and South Korean increasing technical prowess didn't, why would Chinese be any different?

China has serious fundamental problems and if you account for its gigantic population - it's seriously underachieving not only compared to US, but even compared to the rest of the developed world.

It's fashionable to talk about China taking over, but it's far from guaranteed. China is pretty much confirmed to be falsifying its economic stats for example [1] [2] but people just take them at face value anyway. I don't understand why.

[1] https://www.voanews.com/a/satellites-shed-light-on-dictators... [2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-forensic-examination-of...

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#336

Post by dirtyid »

jlmorton wrote: post #322
orangepurple wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China has more people, more money to spend on research, more equipment, more access to raw materials and chemicals, more manufacturing base, more STEM graduates, more everything, and all of that by huge margins. USA scientists will eventually put something out, but 10x more slowly than China.

China spends nowhere near as much as the US on basic research. The US spends $100 billion on basic research annually, compared to $25 billion in China. However, total R&D is quite a bit closer, with the US spending $660b to China’s $556 billion. [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...

There's PPP considertaions. PRC R&D funding also bias towards experimental/applied vs basic research. Hence not surprising they're hammering these replication efforts.

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#337

Post by zgluck »

ygjb wrote: post #236
declan_roberts wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it's more likely that the bulk of folks don't fully comprehend why this would be so important. I would imagine alot of reporters look at the things they could write about and the choices are politics, war, polarizing news, or nerds nerding hard trying to prove other nerds right or wrong, and it just doesn't make the cut.

This plus vacation time in the Northern hemisphere - that one science reporter per large news org who actually understands the importance is AFK.

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#339

Post by xwdv »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #295
themagician wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to believe. After several millennia of killing people for gold, we can finally put all that gold to good use—using it to create superconductors that can power energy weapons we can use to kill each other. ♫ It's the circle of life ♫

People cut cables for copper. Imagine what will happen with cables with gold.

Gold is everywhere in computing, not a big deal.

Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments

#340

Post by cududa »

arcticfox wrote: post #218
t3rabytes wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't seen a particularly great explanation that explains why this is such a positive discovery that is copy/paste/digestable. No MSM outlet is going to run this story unless they can say an impact.

There are a ton of them on Twitter.

Yes and many of them are completely wrong.

I keep seeing people saying "CPU's that don't generate heat". How exactly would that work? When a transistor turns off/ switches to 0, where does it dump the electrons? Hint: into heat

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