I was waiting for the first line of the article to be 'LK-99 is not a superconductor... It's an ultraconductor!' Alas, today is just not my day.
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LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
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Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#692It’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 think it’s fair to say that even as a failure, it’s likely to stimulate much more attention, funding, and research in the area of high temperature superconductors going forward. That’s great.
Please explain the mechanism by which a short lived twitter craze among web developers will translate into increased “attention funding and research”
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#693Earlier quoted context omitted.
It also wouldn't change much in MRI (formally NMR) -- it's also very limited on other factors
I mean, both NMR spectrometers and medical MRI machines would be a hell of a lot less complex without the cryostat. If you remove that, those things become... really, just tubes wrapped in various coils connected to a software defined radio of average quality.
The hardware for RF and Gradients alone isn't that cheap was my thought
Also you can't just write off the fringe field.
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#694Sixty 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
As Philip points out, Sabine Hossenfelder’s quick summary on LK-99 2 weeks ago punched large holes into this whole thing in less than 5 minutes. I wish media outlets presented skeptic viewpoints instead of just hype.. but that doesn’t sell.
LK99 - A new room temperature superconductor? https://youtu.be/RjzL9cS3VW8
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#695LK-99 was actually an amazing litmus test.
You can absolutely dismiss the opinions of anyone who acted excited about it.
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#696It’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…
I felt a similar way with the news of the fusion 'breakthrough' around 6 months ago. "Fusion power is here! All we need to do is engineering!".
They achieved this fusion by creating a container of material that produced massive amounts of xrays when it was bombarded by a high powered laser. These xrays caused another container's surface to ablate at such a rate it compressed its interior to the point that fusion was achieved.
However, this being a weapons lab, they created the experiment to model the secondary device in an H-Bomb. The secondary is theorized outside the Top Secret world to be a cylindrical tamper of (enriched?) uranium. One hypothesis in the public sphere, is its the primary device's Xrays that cause this to ablate at such a rate and that the inside is compressed to achieve fusion. The purpose of the fusion is primarily for the neutrons it generates, which are used to cause a massive amount of fission in the tamper, producing the majority of the energy. For example, if replace the uranium with another non-fissile material, and you have a "neutron bomb".
The reason the breathless hype annoyed me is that at no point was usable energy the desire of the test. In fact, the test solely was to feed real world data back into the supercomputer models, so that we know how our existing stockpile of weapons would work or even perhaps to find optimizations. We know this mechanism of ablation causing fusion works, we've known for 60+ years, all we're doing is doing it in a lab.
I'm not sure why there is this need to hype these events, like fusion or LK-99 so much. It seems that being a naysayer is reacted to as if the naysayers are explaining a magician's tricks. As if we don't hype these events the public will lose interest, or even our children will drop out of STEM careers.
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#697Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I felt a similar way with the news of the fusion 'breakthrough' around 6 months ago. "Fusion power is here! All we need to do is engineering!". They achieved this fusion by creating a container of material that produced massive amounts of xrays when it was bombarded by a high powered laser. These xrays caused another container's surface to ablate at such a rate it compressed its interior to the point that fusion was…
> They achieved this fusion by creating a container of material that produced massive amounts of xrays when it was bombarded by a high powered laser. These xrays caused another container's surface to ablate at such a rate it compressed its interior to the point that fusion was achieved.
You are telling me that a US weapons lab just announced a successful path to a laser triggered pure fusion bomb? Yikes!
Not actually sure if it can be used to ignite more fusion fuel, but if they using this to test secondaries then it sounds like it might.
I really hope we get fusion reactors before pure fusion bombs, as pure fusion bombs are going to be a nuclear non-proliferation nightmare. While it might not be easier to built pure fusion bombs than bombs with a fission trigger, controlling the precursors and knowledge is going to be very difficult.
> "Fusion power is here! All we need to do is engineering!".
I agree with this statement and it has been true of fusion since at least the early 2000s. Don't underestimate the difficulty of engineering. Safe fission breeder reactors are an engineering problem as well, one which humanity has largely abandoned due to repeated failures.
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#698Earlier quoted context omitted.
>We frequently use aluminum wires with a higher thickness to make up for the lower conductivity as compared to copper. Aluminum wires even made it into residential housing when copper was expensive/rare. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminum_building_wiring
Can confirm, my parents had an aluminium telephone line in the UK until it failed and had to be replaced. Moot point as it's replaced with a fibre optic cable now though.
The problem is with their usage as mains power. I think they are considered a fire hazard in older German homes.
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#699It’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.
The most interesting part is one of the researchers believed it was Nobel's prize worthy, went rogue, and submitted a paper with only 3 authors to claim the credit of this invention. Coincidentally, Nobel's prize only awards at max 3 people. Soon after the other researchers realized and published a 6-author paper only hours after. What a drama.
Yes, this really showed me what a great deal of science is nowadays. Backstabbing to publish, get credit/funding, rinse/repeat, so you can continue to marginally exist. Would be nice if we could just return to do actual science, for, you know, science and the advancement of our species.
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#700Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> transmission lines are already pretty efficient and we already choose less efficient materials for cost You're correct, and this highlights a problem I often see in discussions: "efficiency" just is a measure of benefit/cost. Without knowing the units of benefit and cost, people aren't making meaningful statements when they say "efficient". The important efficiency of transmission lines is capacity per dollar, not…
In this context, they are speaking of electrical efficiency, i.e. the amount of power lost to system impedance during transmission, not some abstract concept like effectivity. The efficiency of a transmission line is expressed as a ratio of power received at one end of the line over the power sent at the other.[1]