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Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor LK-99 preprint revision 2

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Re: Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor LK-99 preprint revision 2

#291

Post by sdenton4 »

blueprint wrote: post #264
sdenton4 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hope the air's good in the tower... Good science has often proceeded from 'weird' observations, leading to experiments trying to isolate the weirdness. The weird is necessarily outside the zone of existing theory, and requires experimentation to recreate the effect reliably and quantifiably. Once that's done, you can iterate on conjectures and experiments to try to get to the bottom of what's going on. In reality, I…

how exactly has physics been at an impasse? this trope is so common now. did you hear it from Weinstein? we've had a metric ton of mindblowing theory emerge in the past 30 years. do you even study physics?

I was careful to say fundamental physics - there's great stuff happening in materials science.

We are in a world where exponentially growing amounts of energy are needed to confirm/deny an increasingly small slice of the standard model. We still don't know what dark matter or energy is (almost literal holes in theory), we haven't figured out how to scale up quantum computers, and we don't have scalable fusion reactors. The cost of progress is growing and the rewards are diminishing; I call that an impasse.

(Arguably we could call the ongoing advances in materials science cases of applied quantum mechanics, with some blurry line with fundamental physics.)

You are right that I'm not a physicist - I'm trained as a mathematician, and these days work in the intersection of machine learning, acoustics, and ecology. Having looked around a lot with impact-colored glasses, I don't see the argument for fundamental physics, but am happy to be wrong.

Re: Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor LK-99 preprint revision 2

#293

Post by beowulfey »

mcpackieh wrote: post #257
beowulfey wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I’ve never thought about it like that before. You’ve done a good job explaining your opinion on this matter! Thanks for the feedback.

I'm not him but I share his confusion. Honestly I can't figure out what sort of point you're trying to make here. What's the point of all the island and pink cats stuff if not to make the point that the researchers didn't have adequate video cameras available to them at the time? jiggawatts's gripe is that the researchers seem generally incapable of effectively using the cameras they already possess (including iphone…

Ha, I'll definitely admit it's not the best metaphor. My point was the last sentence of my original comment: when you're in the heat of discovery, witnessing something for the first time, you are NOT thinking about the quality of the video you are trying to capture! These videos were not intended for public consumption -- they were likely sent to a friend or something, showing the exciting thing they were witnessing.

It just irked me that people are looking at this video and thinking that this is a press release or something.

Re: Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor LK-99 preprint revision 2

#294

Post by retrac »

crote wrote: post #170
sanxiyn wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but computer chips are powered by DC.

At the frequencies computer chips operate, it acts more like AC. Sure, you place some nice bypass capacitors capacitors very close to the chip so you can feed it nice clean DC power, but when you start switching those transistors in the GHz range, the signals inside the chip rapidly start to look a lot like AC. You see the same thing with external signals, like a connection between CPU and memory. Operate the bus at…

The latest versions of USB and PCIe are no longer binary digital signalling at all. It is a modulated radio signal [1] carried over a wire, similar to how DSL and cable modems work. Processor and memory busses will be next to switch over. Most digital systems will probably move in this direction as speeds continue to increase.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-amplitude_modulation

Re: Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor LK-99 preprint revision 2

#296

Post by consilient »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #272
tdehnel wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thinking that something will either happen or not happen if I mix those two substances is not a theory. OK I'll bite. What is it then?

Nothing, just words that don't have any predictive value or convey any understanding of the world. Maybe an example would help clear things up. go into the lab with a 1 lb weight and a 2 lb weight and weigh them together. Saying that the total weight could either equal 3 lb or any value other than 3 lb does not constitute a predictive theory for how the physics of summing Mass works. It might be a theory that a scale…

> Maybe an example would help clear things up. go into the lab with a 1 lb weight and a 2 lb weight and weigh them together.

> Saying that the total weight could either equal 3 lb or any value other than 3 lb does not constitute a predictive theory for how the physics of summing Mass works.

The relevant theoretical background here is hidden in the "weigh them together" step: that there is such a thing as weight, it's described by a single real number, you can measure it in such and such a way, and so on.

You don't notice these considerations when it comes to weight and speed and size because they're hardwired into our brains by evolution. We're not so lucky when it comes to, for instance, the quark mixing angles - we can't even conceive of them without a background theory, let alone start measuring them.

Re: Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor LK-99 preprint revision 2

#297

Post by dang »

realjhol wrote: post #56
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #43

"In no case may a prize amount be divided between more than three persons." [1] Sad state of affairs to expect a reward for brilliance and to have science bottlenecked by a merchant of death. Just the fact that the merchant of death gives "peace prizes" should have made the entire affair laughable a long time ago. Perhaps it's time to move on from this ancient and limited understanding of appraisal, awards. I'm in no…

[flagged]

Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: you've unfortunately been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's not allowed, and we ban accounts that do it, regardless of what they're battling for or against. I've banned this account accordingly. For past explanations on this point see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

Re: Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor LK-99 preprint revision 2

#298

Post by dang »

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #43

"In no case may a prize amount be divided between more than three persons." [1] Sad state of affairs to expect a reward for brilliance and to have science bottlenecked by a merchant of death. Just the fact that the merchant of death gives "peace prizes" should have made the entire affair laughable a long time ago. Perhaps it's time to move on from this ancient and limited understanding of appraisal, awards. I'm in no…

We detached this flamewar tangent from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36953091. Can you please not do this? Your post broke several of the site guidelines, including "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

Re: Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor LK-99 preprint revision 2

#299

Post by [deleted] »

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #43

"In no case may a prize amount be divided between more than three persons." [1] Sad state of affairs to expect a reward for brilliance and to have science bottlenecked by a merchant of death. Just the fact that the merchant of death gives "peace prizes" should have made the entire affair laughable a long time ago. Perhaps it's time to move on from this ancient and limited understanding of appraisal, awards. I'm in no…

[deleted]

Re: Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor LK-99 preprint revision 2

#300

Post by tetha »

sbierwagen wrote: post #275
2bitencryption wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Questions from a total layman- Are the superconductivity properties "all or nothing"? Meaning, if you get the synthesis wrong of the material, would you expect it to be "kind of" superconductive? (I guess, a very low, but non-0, resistance)? Or is it something where it has normal resistance in all cases unless you get it just right , and then it becomes superconducting? One more question - in physics, it seems like s…

It really is authentically zero. No resistance at all. The thing that prevent infinities showing up, or letting us pour gigawatts of power into a single superconducting magnet until it turns into a black hole is that superconductors have a "critical current" over which it falls out of the superconducting state. (At which point it enters the normal, resistive state, suddenly becomes very hot, and boils off all your ve…

> LK-99's published critical current is actually quite low, maybe because of sample purity issues. Hopefully it can be improved, otherwise we might be in the comical situation where room temperature superconductors exist and can be used but the cables end up being too thick and can't compete economically with copper.

This would btw be similar to a proof of P = NP, including the caveat that the best-case runtime of an NP-hard problem is a polynomial of degree 40000. It'd be polynomial runtime, but very much in the "ouch" and "infeasible" territory.

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