It’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.
LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
521–530 of 754 posts
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#522Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aluminum vs Copper is not that simple. Aluminum has worse conductivity for the same area, but area is in no way fixed. And aluminum has actually better conductivity than copper for the same weight. You just have to make the cables a bit thicker.
I think the relevant metric here is conductivity for the same cost.
In other cases it is more important to reduce resistance, not so much because of the power loss but because of what the power loss means: the generation of heat that may be difficult to remove.
Of course you can get around those problems at extra cost, but it is more than a straight up comparison of the material cost of the conductor.
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#523Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that true for RTSCs? In the last month of this saga, every time I saw someone comment on some amazing new technology that RTSC would enable, another expert would chime in and explain why that’s not actually possible or feasible for various reasons. The only convincing gain I’ve seen is a ~10% drop in power transmission costs. But obviously this can’t be right because of how excited everyone gets about it.
If RTSCs turn out to be viable, they would reduce power transmission costs by maybe 10% for our current infrastructure. That's just because we don't build power lines over distances where the losses would be much greater than that, because it doesn't make sense. But they would also enable new infrastructure beyond what is currently feasible, because we could transport power over much longer distances without any incr…
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#524Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try challenging climate science, even in a valid way, and see how popular it is on reddit or HN or twitter. Even my above comment now has a negative score which sort of proves my point. note: i don't deny climate science but like any science there are ways to challenge it
> Even my above comment now has a negative score which sort of proves my point. Tone matters and your tone matches up really well with someone trying to “gotcha” the people around them, which is obnoxious. > i don't deny climate science but like any science there are ways to challenge it Not successfully.
Never?
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#525Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#526Earlier quoted context omitted.
Again, this sounds an awful lot like the creationist rhetoric a few decades ago. > "Try challenging evolutionary biology, even in a valid way, and see how popular it is". All crackpots think they're under siege and that their ideas are unfairly dismissed. Their ideas are "valid" (because they say so), so why are those ideas being dismissed without due consideration? You hear the same rhetoric from anti-vaxxers, creat…
Calling groups “crazy” to dismiss their arguments is a classic ad hominem .
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#527Sixty Symbols released a video about this yesterday, and in it professor Philip Moriarty is less than impressed with the whole ordeal. I haven't been paying attention, I'm too jaded and skeptical and assumed from the start that there was something wrong and much hype about nothing. Bad Science and Room Temperature Superconductors - Sixty Symbols: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl-AgmoZ5mo
The video really rubbed me the wrong way. I guess it's a persona he's putting on for the YouTube channel, but that "tough minded skeptic" bit is way over the top. He spent all his time criticizing various problems with the LK-99 paper that were indeed problematic (and widely commented on elsewhere), but didn't necessarily falsify the claim (e.g. they might have come from having mixed phase samples). And he did not ta…
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#528Earlier quoted context omitted.
Again, this sounds an awful lot like the creationist rhetoric a few decades ago. > "Try challenging evolutionary biology, even in a valid way, and see how popular it is". All crackpots think they're under siege and that their ideas are unfairly dismissed. Their ideas are "valid" (because they say so), so why are those ideas being dismissed without due consideration? You hear the same rhetoric from anti-vaxxers, creat…
Calling groups “crazy” to dismiss their arguments is a classic ad hominem .
> Try challenging climate science, even in a valid way, and see how popular it is on reddit or HN or twitter.
It is an attitude that is a hallmark of cranks of all forms who think they've pierced the veil, but almost inevitably they have fallen for some distorted thinking that they can't see beyond due to the limitations of being trapped in their own head and echo chamber.
I would add that logical fallacies like ad hominem are only useful up to a point. In the real world, once a group of people advance N obviously false arguments, they will lose credibility and their N+1th argument will be treated less seriously. I don't think the N+1th argument should ever be entirely ignored, but these people can't expect to be up on a podium presenting to a climatology conference if they have a long history of advancing ludicrous and/or dishonest arguments and have no deep expertise in the domain.
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#529Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#530Sixty Symbols released a video about this yesterday, and in it professor Philip Moriarty is less than impressed with the whole ordeal. I haven't been paying attention, I'm too jaded and skeptical and assumed from the start that there was something wrong and much hype about nothing. Bad Science and Room Temperature Superconductors - Sixty Symbols: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl-AgmoZ5mo