Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who said infinite power?
It's implied by instant charging. The power would be the battery capacity divided by 0.
That’s pedantic. No one means literal instant charging, just figuratively.
A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
681–690 of 821 posts
Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
#682Earlier quoted context omitted.
Superconducting powerlines would be able to transport DC electricity with 0% losses. To put this in context: you could put solar panels in California, and send every watt of power to Alaska or New York, while losing nothing in the transport.
Yeah at those kinds of scales I get doubtful. At those scales the electrical fields themselves begin to exert inertia on things, to the point that you could cut most power lines and they wouldn't stop catastrophically, they'd continue catastrophically (a problem that only gets worse with superconductors, as happened to CERN when they accidentally vaporised a length of superconductor that had become conductive ). It c…
You could bury them or have very high overhead lines. Being able to have near instantaneous, lossless energy transfer would make it worth it (minus whatever impediment the GOP tries to put in the way to bolster gas/oil, but that’s just political).
Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
#683The ramifications of the inflection point we are currently at is mind boggling. I had a hard time explaining this last night but we may very well be witnessing the beginnings of a technological transformation era much like when the p-n junction was invented. From the 1940s standpoint it would be hard to envision all we had today. - Lossless transport of energy - Batteries that don't take any time to recharge - Faster…
What things are we going to do with this material in the next 5 years? What things that I buy and use will be made better?
Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
#684Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Battery charging is limited by the cell chemistry. Yes, but superconductors don't have that limitation, do they? You just dump current into them.
Overlooking the cell chemistry issue... ... you cannot just dump unlimited current through a superconductor. Once you exceed the critical current density, your superconductor becomes a regular conductor.
Also the thing will be a really strong magnet while it is storing energy. Even if it doesn't rip itself apart it will stick to stuff amd lose energy.
Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
#685Earlier quoted context omitted.
LK-99 is already patented so even if Elon were making a ton of it, he couldn't do much in his products without licensing it from the creators.
There's probably other similar chemistries that also super conduct at room temperature. Call it the marching tetrahedra of super conductors.
You are likely correct. Now that this has been shown we will probably get a dozen or more of these over the next decade.
I think the winners will be those which are cheaply and reliably made at scale out of common and non toxic elements and have long durability, or if this isn’t fully achievable something close to this goal.
Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
#686Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where was this? I haven’t seen this, but it definitely explains the drama surrounding this whole situation. It couldn’t have come at a worse time for drama either, as the right wing is currently on possibly their most massive anti-science tirade world wide that they’ve ever pushed.
> it definitely explains the drama surrounding this whole situation. It was in a Twitter thread linked on an HN thread a couple days ago wherein someone had done some digging online into resumes, publication histories, etc and recapped a bunch of the apparent history of LK99 and the related scientists and institutions. Sorry, I didn't bookmark it. But it contained quite a bit more drama including possible team confli…
You're probably referring to https://twitter.com/8teAPi/status/1684385895565365248
but the same person admitted they're writing fiction (I would call it speculative fiction drawn from known facts) https://twitter.com/8teAPi/status/1686217806298423299
Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
#687Earlier quoted context omitted.
After racing with each other to fuel political extremism or push the corporate narratives like how working from home is terrible for the worker or how good it is for us that the rich don’t pay the taxes, how unaffordable housing is good for the economy… this is what they choose to be careful about? Nah, this just doesn’t sell or is not a paid article.
It's possible that the people responsible for deciding what makes a a good article for the science section are different from the people responsible for the articles you mention.
I think this is true
Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
#688Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah, the GP is just completely out of reality. We won't see lossless transmission in a very long time, and no place where an aluminum cable is too expensive today will become viable because something a million times more expensive is 9% more efficient. Batteries won't see a revolution because of this, there's simply no reason for them to (but they are currently in a revolution, and there are more to come). AC storage…
>This won't replace metal layers in CPU for a really long time. Superconductors are hard enough to make, CPUs are absurdly hard to make, and the wins on power savings aren't very large. If people make superconducting chips, it will be ones where the superconductors do active switching, what is much farther away and can enable much faster CPUs too. I would've thought the main wins would've been reduced heat generation…
You can start to get to the answer if you look why metal layers aren't made with silver. If metal resistivity was that important, nobody would pass the chance of almost doubling the conductivity with a much smaller change than people are proposing here.
The reason they don't is because yeild is the one most important variable on the entire process. And silver adds enough complexity to decrease it. (A few chips do have silver layers. People manage to use them when the process is mature enough and the added complexity gets tamed. Including something like YBCO into a high-performance chips manufacturing process is a half-a-century project; LK-99 can't even be reliably done yet.)
Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
#689Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
There will literally always be heat from computation, that's Landauer. The point is that LK-99 could be or lead to a breakthrough in making computation produce much, much less heat because you're getting rid of most resistivity losses. Which is important, because heat is actually a serious constraint on a bunch of use cases.
Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
#690Earlier quoted context omitted.
Computer components already have gold in them, and they are already recycled for gold.
There's a wide space between "can be recycled" and "profitable enough that there's theft for base components that can be resold". That doesn't mean it won't be profitable to harvest the gold (I don't know), but one does not imply the other. For example, paper recycling is profitable when centralized (barely), but even that's with most the pipeline subsidized, and it's not profitable to the degree that people are stea…
paper recycling is profitable without any subsidies at all, and people do sometimes steal paper to recycle it
here in argentina there are tens of thousands of people who make a living by recycling, sorting through whatever trash they can get access to in order to find materials with enough resale value to scrape by. they haul plastic sacks or two-wheeled carts all over the metropolitan area, stacking them high with recyclables: aluminum, copper, car batteries, brass, whatever they can find. a crt tv left out on the curb will have its yoke broken off within an hour or three in order to harvest the copper. neighborhoods sometimes lose phone and internet service for months at a time because someone has recycled the cables. commemorative bronze plaques go missing from cemeteries
but the recyclers are not called aluminieros or bronceros or cobreros, taking the name of their profession from aluminum, brass, or copper; they are instead referred to by the most abundant material they recycle
they are the cartoneros, because what their carts are usually piled high with is cardboard, cartón
(needless to say this activity is not subsidized)