261–270 of 1001 posts
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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.
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)…
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.
Why are folks trying to prove that this material is a superconductor in roundabout ways, like levitation, dimagnetism, etc? What is the reason they don't just test to see if electrical current flows without resistance? Surely there is something I am missing here.
It’s difficult to rule out external factors - a badly attached probe could also result in zero resistance for example. Showing diamagnetism is one of the least error-prone ways to demonstrate the superconductor effect. That’s my understanding anyway.
The first LK-99 paper used this method to claim zero resistivity, but people complained that if the inner probes lost contact, that would also be consistent with their data. This criticism doesn't totally make sense to me, since the apparent superconductivity came and went in the expected way as they changed an external magnetic field. I don't understand how a loose terminal could mimic that figure (I think it was in figure 1).
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I'm generally anti-patent, but if there were any valid case for patents, this is it. Long, hard labor to discover something entirely new that has massive uses for society. I'd rest my hopes on them not being dicks about it, not on them not getting benefit from it.
I honestly can't comprehend how anyone wound think having a monopoly on a material is valid. They will make money without being the cartel of the superconducting sector.
Why are folks trying to prove that this material is a superconductor in roundabout ways, like levitation, dimagnetism, etc? What is the reason they don't just test to see if electrical current flows without resistance? Surely there is something I am missing here.
I have heard people much more knowledgeable than me say that measuring true zero resistance is actually quite difficult and takes some degree of specialized equipment, especially with such small samples. That may be part of it.
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)…
If my understanding is correct, 2 is nearly solved if we have a room temp ambient superconductor
But yeah I suspect the people who are most excited about this news are fusion power engineers!
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-plasma-ph...
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.
Shoutout to 50 things that made the modern economy, a great podcast/book.
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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.
Sure, and millions of people die of preventable diseases in the global south every year because pharmaceutical companies deem it profitable to let them die, and because the global north enforces their patents. You don't know how it's gonna go. The scientists are going to be fine, they have their careers guaranteed and will receive many prizes for their work. They don't need a monopoly on a world changing material too…
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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.
I interpret 3 as the chat bot requires no prompt from a human. Imagine the chat bot wakes you up in the middle of the night saying, "Hey, sorry to disturb you, but I was thinking... wouldn't eliminating all humans help to reverse the climate crisis more quickly? Just a thought." That is what I think of as number 3 (not actually wanting to kill off humans, but it is thinking on its own, without any prompts and then ch…
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Not quite related to 2) but if the superconductors research pans out, portable high field desktop sized MRIs would be in the bag. Current portable MRIs are all low field (and to a certain extent, somewhat useless).
So far this material (and pretty much all liquid nitrogen ones) can't be used to create MRI sort of fields. There's a reason they all stick with liquid helium.