Are these guys just trolling? They reference Dr Salvatore Cezar Pais in the patent. The spaceship guy. Surely they're trying to stir the pot with that. https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2023027537A1/en
"Cited by examiner"
A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
761–770 of 821 posts
Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
#762The 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…
We won’t be getting long distance high voltage electricity transmission lines made of this (possible) room temperature superconductor for the same reasons we don’t have high voltage long distance electricity transmission made of gold, a much better conductor than copper.
Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
#763Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't store any meaningful amount of electricity (which is why they haven't supplanted Li-Ion batteries for power tools) and more importantly they have a cycle-life - they degrade from usage (source: my wife works for a supercapacitor manufacturer). You also get losses from practical usage - i.e. no one can build a 3V supercapacitor that has decent endurance (you can totally build one which will work, but you're…
Why do cycles damage supercapacitors? My understanding is that in batteries this is caused by ions not returning to their original spot in the electrodes, but I thought only the electrons moved in capacitors?
Electrostatic force?
Heat?
Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
#764Earlier 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.
I'm not looking at official numbers here, but in my field (academic biotech research) I still don't see much innovation coming out of China. All of what you say is true, yet in academic research China is still far behind the USA in nearly every field. They haven't yet been able to build institutions with the staff, structure, and culture needed. That will likely change in time, but at present the best Chinese scienti…
US academia isn't really funded by the foreign grad student tuitions. It's not even really funded by tuition, as tuition+fees is <30% of total US academia funding. Of course every organization wants to have more money and so they work on those revenue streams, but if all the money from the 5% students which are foreign suddenly disappeared (even ignoring the foreign students whose tuition gets funded by being TA/RA), that wouldn't be a crisis, it would just reduce the profits of the universities and have some administrators be extremely sad about less bonuses.
Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
#765Earlier quoted context omitted.
> CPU heat output is limited by the resistance of the semiconductors. Technically true but not applicable... Super conducting CPUs already exist (at below room temp), and they don't use semiconductors. They don't have an exact transistor equivalent but use digital logic circuits such as Quantum Flux Parametron (QFP) and rapid single flux quantum (RSFQ), which are comprised of Josephson Junctions [0] which are made fr…
> so far demonstrated to 770GHz for one CPU That's not a CPU, it's a simple circuit. From the article, "Simple superconducting logic circuits have been shown to operate at speeds of up to 770 gigahertz." Exotic semiconductor transistors can switch that fast, record being over 800GHz I think. Regular transistors of the type in your phone can probably do around 200-300GHz. Not to say there could not be revolutionary de…
I doubt that regular cellphone transistor can _switch_ at 200Ghz; their GBW might be in that range, but for reliable switching you need clock frequency at most 1/10 of GBW
Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
#766Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The efficiency of high voltage AC power lines is limited by capacitive coupling to ground. And to this point, HVDC has been slowly rising as a viable alternative beyond just undersea transmission. A mistaken belief is that AC is more efficient than DC. What AC is is more easy to transform from one voltage to another (until somewhat recently). That makes it easier to run AC at 1 MV and then step it down to 240V for…
Minor nitpick — "now we can run 1 billion amps at 100V" — there is a limit to how much current you can put down a superconductor. For example I think commercial YBCO superconductor tape will do roughly 1000A/mm^2 (and even that requires being significantly below its critical temperature). That’s a pretty high current density compared to what’s feasible with copper — don’t get me wrong — but a billion amps would still…
Not only that, the magnetic field around the wire at 1 bln amps will be way too large. It will like pick up nails from the ground easily.
Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
#767Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should be measuring that population as a % of their total population. Not sure why you're comparing absolute numbers. China has triple the young people we do, but quadruple the old people that depend on the young people.
Depend on them for what, the cost of a bowl of rice? What is it exactly about 80 year olds that will collapse a country with a brutal government like China has?
Depend on them for retirement, given that most of their wealth is tied up in their busted real estate market.
Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
#768Earlier quoted context omitted.
None of the things you listed are limited by the conductors in them. The efficiency of high voltage AC power lines is limited by capacitive coupling to ground. Battery charging is limited by the cell chemistry. CPU heat output is limited by the resistance of the semiconductors. Turns out metals (in particular copper) are already incredibly good conductors.
We’re not talking about charging existing batteries but superconductors where you just “trap” large amounts of electricity in the superconductor for future use.
Unfortunately magnets put forces on themselves, which means you’re limited to storing up to about as much energy as it would take to break the thing making the field; or, to put it another way, it’s about the same range of energy densities as springs or rubber bands.
Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36954783
Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
#769Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 falsify…
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Re: A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
#770Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look at the actual age distributions rather than collapsing the data into a single number. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
I see a country with triple the young people we do.
It's a mistake to think in terms of the US only. Because unlike China the US doesn't think that way. And if you include the core part of Team America, it's even steven.