imagine this - the government took over and covered up with "not working" theory. Maybe a key ingredient is missing which was not mentioned in the original paper.
LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
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Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#372imagine this - the government took over and covered up with "not working" theory. Maybe a key ingredient is missing which was not mentioned in the original paper.
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Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think a different way to frame this is that an Internet discussion will involve people with opinions across the spectrum. I don’t think this is about pleasing “these people”, but about recognizing which attitudes are useful and which are not. Encountering some mix of all of the above is a product of the diversity of people involved in the conversation, and not necessarily “these people” wanting it both ways.
My framing is fine, in my biased opinion. Saying, "You can't please these people about this" is essentially the same as saying "Their attitude about this is not useful" - though one might be more polite. Maybe I went amiss, maybe I need perspective, but I don't see why a consideration for a re-frame is necessary if one still gets their point across; albeit maybe with more "passion" than necessary.
> These folks STILL want the ESSENCE of a shared respect and excitement...But when these same folks see a glimpse of collective curiosity...they long for the days of opacity and "mature handling of scientific consensus".
You are claiming that it's the same group of people holding incongruous viewpoints.
My point was that this is likely an illusion caused by the communication medium, i.e. "these people" represent a myriad of individual viewpoints, which may not align because I think "A" and you think "B". Not because I think "A" and "B".
To frame it in this way doesn't allow for a useful exploration of the issue. It casts aside an entire group instead of examining the roots of the problematic behavior. It also creates a straw man - the person who believes both things incongruously, when this person doesn't seem likely to exist, or at least seems likely that this is a rare stance.
> Saying, "You can't please these people about this" is essentially the same as saying "Their attitude about this is not useful"
These are saying very different things. One discards the entire person on the basis of a view you disagree with. This is a road to nowhere. The other allows an examination of the actual behavior, which is arguably far more important if there's a case to be made that someone should change their behavior.
"Oh, you're one of those people" gets you nowhere. "The problem with this line of thinking/attitude is that it limits the potential for public excitement and involvement with the process..." gives you and the person who disagree something to work with.
This isn't about being polite. This is about choosing whether the point is to explore the nature of the problem, or to complain about a group of people.
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#374They should have also included a quote from CISR an Indian lab that go there about the same time as many of the American labs https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.03544
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#375I found Thunderf00t's video on LK-99 to be funny because he pointed out something no one else did: In almost all applications of superconductors, they don't use high-temperature ones for one simple reason: Material properties. Most high-temp superconductors (including LK-99, he was assuming it was one, since he's not qualified to say one way or the other) are a ceramic. The ones that see use in the LHC, for instance,…
>In almost all applications of superconductors, they don't use high-temperature ones for one simple reason: Material properties. The problem is that this is not true anymore. It was true when I was in high school. Modern methods of manufacturing cuprate superconductors have been applied to the largest-scale projects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holbrook_Superconductor_Projec... https://publikationen.bibliothek.kit.…
All these use metallic (or ceramic-like with metallic properties) super conductors, though. That was the point: the material properties. If it's not metallic or exhibiting metallic-like properties (e.g. BSCCO), the practical usefulness is limited.
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
>“I was like, wait a minute, I know this temperature.” This is an incredibly funny quote out of context, and the absurdity of it betrays an extreme domain expertise.
There's probably plenty of "computer numbers" you'd recognize immediately. ("It stops working after 65,535 seconds? Wait a minute, I know that number.")
Oh yeah, definitely. I almost included "December 31, 1969" as an example (wait a minute, I know that date!), but decided it wasn't arcane enough.
I think a lot of IT/CS people have almost parasocial relationships with powers of two that seem very silly to outsiders.
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#377It’s disappointing news but the excitement and amount of replication on this paper was pretty fun to witness and experience. To me the most interesting part was everyone talking about potential consequences, uses, the order of magnitude improvements we’d see in certain costs or areas. Pumps, MRIs, power grids, chips, etc. Great reminder what materials science can do to some underlying economics.
I disagree. I get pissed off when revolutionary scientific news is brought to me only to turn out to be some bogus crap. I don’t care about the replication and peer review process, it’s not fun, it’s banal. I would much rather have preferred to learn about LK-99 once it was confirmed to be a room temp superconductor, and if it wasn’t then I’d rather never hear about it. Now I have to walk back explanations I gave to…
> Now I have to walk back explanations I gave to various people and explain LK-99 actually isn’t special at all. I will look like a god damn idiot.
There is a lesson there: do not make definitive statements about something that is uncertain. There are a lot of interesting things to say about this material along the lines of “it would be cool if it worked, then we could do x or y” while still making clear that this is tentative.
> The whole time LK-99 was in the news, we were wringing our hands about potential uses and the impact it would have on our world. For once it seemed maybe there was hope that we’d see exciting times again with exponential advances in technology. That dream has now been thoroughly eradicated.
Some people did. The materials scientists I know were mostly skeptical with a hint of cynicism or optimism, depending on the individual.
> By the time a true room temp superconductor comes out, it probably won’t be in our lifetimes.
It is difficult to say. We barely understand what makes a material a superconductor. This understanding will improve, and we will do some more systematic studies. Or it might show up in some completely unrelated project, just by chance. It is very difficult to say when this might happen. All we can say is that so far we don’t think that room-temperature superconductors are a physical impossibility. So at least there is hope.
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#378It’s disappointing news but the excitement and amount of replication on this paper was pretty fun to witness and experience. To me the most interesting part was everyone talking about potential consequences, uses, the order of magnitude improvements we’d see in certain costs or areas. Pumps, MRIs, power grids, chips, etc. Great reminder what materials science can do to some underlying economics.
This is precisely what put me off in these discussions. Not the idea that we might have found a room-temperature superconductor - that part was exciting. It's the part where people confidently talked about its applications without realizing that they probably wouldn't revolutionize CPU performance (Josephson junctions don't seem to work well as non-cryogenic temperatures for reasons unrelated to superconductivity), power grid transmission (transmission lines are already pretty efficient and we already choose less efficient materials for cost), or energy storage (LK-99 would likely have a fairly modest current limit before it stops superconducting).
LK-99 would have interesting applications, known and unknown, but we have a pretty good understanding of superconductors based on 100 years of practical research, and I find this kind of instant punditry pretty tiresome.
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#379I found Thunderf00t's video on LK-99 to be funny because he pointed out something no one else did: In almost all applications of superconductors, they don't use high-temperature ones for one simple reason: Material properties. Most high-temp superconductors (including LK-99, he was assuming it was one, since he's not qualified to say one way or the other) are a ceramic. The ones that see use in the LHC, for instance,…
Why can't regular conductors be used as such glue? i.e. you mix the ceramic superconductor powder into, say, molten copper, and make the wires out of the mix. The result would be copper wires with bits of superconductor in it. The result won't be superconducting per se, but should have less resistance than pure non-superconducting material which might be useful for certain applications.
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#380It’s disappointing news but the excitement and amount of replication on this paper was pretty fun to witness and experience. To me the most interesting part was everyone talking about potential consequences, uses, the order of magnitude improvements we’d see in certain costs or areas. Pumps, MRIs, power grids, chips, etc. Great reminder what materials science can do to some underlying economics.
This is precisely what put me off in these discussions. Not the idea that we might have found a room-temperature superconductor - that part was exciting. It's the part where people confidently talked about its applications without realizing that they probably wouldn't revolutionize CPU performance (Josephson junctions don't seem to work well as non-cryogenic temperatures for reasons unrelated to superconductivity), p…
Interesting, from what I saw a lot of people got informed on why those overly confident predictions were drek - I don't know that I have seen a claim go unchallenged.
Which seems ideal to me. Very educational.