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

arxiv.org

221–230 of 1001 posts

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

#221
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yea, Eliza is a far worse chat bot than ChatGPT… More seriously AI has made lots of things better, it’s really the hype cycle that’s disappointing. More FPS in games just isn’t as exciting as self driving cars. But by the time you can buy a level 5 self driving car the technology will be pedestrian.

An L5 self driving car is decades away. The needle hasn't moved on that one.

Nothing we have currently moves closer to that. Just doing more of the same of the current models will not get you there.

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

#222
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure it depends on jurisdiction, but in the US, you can't patent a material, only a method to make it. If I recall correctly, their patent for method covered a wide range of constituent elements, but left off gold. I would feel pretty bad for them if they genuinely discovered an RTP superconductor but that omission prevents them from becoming billionaires. But more likely the issue is that their current method ha…

It would be good for countries to put a bounty on these sorts of things. That would encourage this sort of research. Better yet would be to offer partial payouts for failed efforts if research is made public. This is probably more relevant for pharmaceuticals though.

The patent system sort of is the bounty for inventions. If you discover something new, you get first dibs at making money off if.

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

#223

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.

Fair point, I felt most people would have their own list. Powered flight, semiconductors, commercially competitive solar cells, antibiotics, sterile procedure. Etc.

Democratization of the free internet, a more informed populace through free education, a generation of coders and computer adepts, robust journalism and investigation, a space that incentivizes knowledge rather than capital or status, society about the exchange of important ideas rather than flippant goods, ad infinitum

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

#224

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.

Efficiency of food production

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

#225

I'm not too familiar with this space. Could someone explain how big of an impact to the world this discovery is? What does the future of this technology look like over the next 5 years?

Not an expert in the area, but being passingly familiar with other major advancements and the timelines it's taken them to move from discovery to day to day use.

Let's say we got a massive wave of independent replication of superconductivity tomorrow - at least enough to convince Big Money to move in, and it all ends up being For Real.

The next steps are figuring out the other properties of the material, with a big one being 'how ductile is it', how to produce it in large enough quantities to be useful, if the underlying mechanisms here can be applied to other compositions that allow us to make RTAPS with better properties, etc.

Depending on those results determines the range of applications it is suitable for out of the box, how much we can make at what cost, etc. We've got minimal details to go on there. It's a ceramic, so it's probably not super ductile, but we have some experience in making those be useful via making them into a tape, a la YBCO. Can we do the same thing here? Who knows!

There's a timeline where all of these questions end up favorable and 10 years from now we see RTAPS in all sorts of day to day applications - we might find out that with one small trick we end up with big pure samples of LK99 with easy production methods. There's a world where all these answers aren't favorable, and it takes 10 years for it to show up in specialized applications (which are still huge for science and humanity!), and trickles bit by bit to more use cases over another few decades.

I would guess that a decade-ish is really the earliest window for significant impact to humanity - we're probably going to spend the next year at minimum figuring out what all the deal is with LK99, and then it'll take a few years to even really start making cool experimental stuff in labs, and then you have to actually productize things using it, etc.

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

#227

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…

that's me! i call myself a fake network engineer because there is simply too much info to retain, my brain just won't retain things i'm not constantly doing, so i have a complete understanding of maybe 20% of things but outside of that comparing to other configs and pattern matching are my main ways of solving problems and to be fair for my job (fixing network faults) like 90% of faults i've seen before and can fix, for 10% i can't i'm lucky that i have escalation points

at the same time i do feel like pattern matching limits my growth, if i had a complete understanding of a majority of networking principals id be much higher up in my career

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

#228
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this actually true?

We would first need to build a superconducting track for the hover scooters (containing magnets) to ride on. Assuming we ever figure out how to mass produce the superconductor inexpensively. Perhaps if the track were arranged in a grid-like pattern, the scooter could use superconducting electromagnets to accelerate and steer.

I would actually welcome scooters that only work on specialized tracks. Walking safely on the sidewalk will become as easy as staying away from those tracks.

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

#230

I get the idea of superconductivity at room temperature in theory. But I don't have enough knowledge to understand in real terms, how will the world change if this is true?

It means we won't lose MRIs when the earth finally runs out of helium as they require liquid helium to run the superconductors that generate the magnetic field. We're running out of helium with no way to replenish it. Helium is the only element on the periodic table which is a non-renewable resource on Earth.

So MRIs will get much cheaper, and they could end up being as cheap as taking an x-ray today.

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