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Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

arxiv.org

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Re: Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

#191

Post by antupis »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #129

For those experiencing this type of "black swan, but good" event for the first time, it is helpful to recognize that the human tendency to believe that all future "big events" will be dystopian downers, is statistically unsound. For a while I've kept a list of the things that could be "good" swan events, but to be fair I didn't have "room temperature superconductor on that list" :-) Other things that could happen: 1)…

I would say that RNA vaccine and chatGPT are two that have happened during my adult life 05->. Iphone and some other innovations were more kinda incremental stuff.

Re: Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

#192

Post by [deleted] »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #150
someplaceguy wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would have been more convincing if you had given real past examples rather than speculative future ones :) Although I'm pretty sure there are plenty that many people can think of, so it doesn't really detract much from your point.

Nuclear weapons. There hasn’t been a full scale war between major powers since.

[deleted]

Re: Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

#193

Post by applied_heat »

voidmain wrote: post #145
jacquesm wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a badly attached probe could also result in zero resistance for example No, a badly attached probe would usually show a larger resistance, not a smaller one. That's actually the easiest error to make, making improper contact with the sample. The resistance is measured indirectly using a reference current. So you'd measure a higher resistance or a break rather than zero if a probe were not attached correctly (unless…

It's apparently hard to measure zero vs extremely low resistance with the two probe setup you are imagining (I guess because the probes and wires aren't superconducting, so most of the resistance in the circuit is not in the sample). The graphs I have seen are all made with a four probe setup [1], where a constant current is run through the outer probe pair and the voltage across the inner pair is measured. If the in…

That’s what he said. You inject a known current and measure the voltage drop across the item you want to measure the resistance of, and then use ohms law

Re: Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

#194

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

amrocha wrote: post #84
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #53

On a completely different front, let's say the paper completely checks out and they have discovered this miracle. How strong are the patent protections on materials science? For example, if someone could replicate the effect with lead + gold, would that be considered a novel material which would not be subject to licensing? Is it the material itself or the method of production?

I hope they're as weak as possible. The worst possible outcome of a room temp superconductor being discovered is stifling innovation to make money off it

Transistors, lithium batteries, leds, etc all enjoyed significant patent protection, but still changed the world.

I yearn for a Star Trek utopia as the next, but we do live in a capitalistic world where I hope that someone can enjoy outsized rewards for upending some previously insurmountable physical barriers.

Re: Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

#195

Post by weard_beard »

CSMastermind wrote: post #179
xvector wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd go as to far as saying GPT-4 is capable of fairly complex reasoning, at least in my experience tossing complicated questions and situations at ChatGPT Plus.

When I was tutoring people in college for their computer science classes I was struck with how some people could do reasonably well on programming assignments and then when presented with anything even slightly novel would be completely unable to reason their way to a solution. A classic tell of this is people handling out of bounds errors in loops by trying to randomly add or subtract 1 from their for-loop parameter…

I predict it’s a visual/spatial form of what it already does with language. It won’t do it until it can see.

There’s all kinds of other things it won’t do until it hears. And touches. Smell and taste might help too I guess!?

As a byproduct it can also be taught truth is what it can verify with sensors.

Re: Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

#196

Post by appplication »

postalrat wrote: post #134
bagels wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't see any references to cups or water in these papers.

If you can't answer the question then you won't ever understand how to measure zero resistance.

Would one method (assuming a pure sample) be to pass a high current through it and measure if it heats up? I know nothing about this, but that would be my first guess.

Re: Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

#197

Post by ben0x539 »

julianeon wrote: post #188
someplaceguy wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would have been more convincing if you had given real past examples rather than speculative future ones :) Although I'm pretty sure there are plenty that many people can think of, so it doesn't really detract much from your point.

A good one would be "productive AI." People forget, but a short while ago, AI was treated as something where being actually useful was perpetually 20 years away, and the real-world status of it was exemplified by a chatbot like Eliza.

When AI was 20 years away, people seemed more optimistic about it than now when its inevitable transformative societal impact is seemingly right around the corner, are you sure this is the kind of example they were going for?

Re: Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

#198

Post by jliptzin »

someplaceguy wrote: post #141
ChuckMcM wrote: post #129

For those experiencing this type of "black swan, but good" event for the first time, it is helpful to recognize that the human tendency to believe that all future "big events" will be dystopian downers, is statistically unsound. For a while I've kept a list of the things that could be "good" swan events, but to be fair I didn't have "room temperature superconductor on that list" :-) Other things that could happen: 1)…

It would have been more convincing if you had given real past examples rather than speculative future ones :) Although I'm pretty sure there are plenty that many people can think of, so it doesn't really detract much from your point.

Antibiotics Electricity Internal combustion engine Flight Li-Ion batteries Radio communication

Re: Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

#199

Post by cthalupa »

HeartStrings wrote: post #166
anonuser123456 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know all those bird scooters people leave lying around cluttering up the sidewalk? With a room temperature superconductor they will become hover scooters cluttering up the sidewalk! And all of the high voltage transmission lines we want to build but can’t because of permitting reasons would have zero energy loss if we actually built them, which we won’t.

Is this actually true?

Yes and no. There's no possible way to have a superconductor be an actual hoverboard out in the broader world - the magnetic field of the earth is just nowhere near strong enough. You can make specialized areas where it would work, though. It's even been done already with LN2 cooled superconductors - https://www.theverge.com/2015/8/4/9091951/lexus-hoverboard-v...

SC could help enable nearly lossless transmission over power in HVDC lines, but HVDC lines are already significantly more efficient than our regular ones and we don't build them for a variety of reasons, so it might not make much of an impact there for regulatory/NIMBY/etc. type reasons.

Re: Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

#200

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

a_bonobo wrote: post #146
icapybara wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) doesn't make a whole lot of sense. A perfect understanding of something doesn't mean you can fix anything wrong with it. 3) has already happened. The AI chat bots aren't very smart, but they're clearly capable of some degree of basic reasoning.

There's a wonderful paper on 1) from a few years ago: https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo... >Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor? >We show that the [neuroscience experimental] approaches reveal interesting structure in the data but do not meaningfully describe the hierarchy of information processing in the microprocessor. This suggests current analytic approaches in neuroscien…

Nothing in biology is as regular and systematic as a microprocessor. Scientists study biology using round-about approaches because there is nothing else available.
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