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LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

nature.com

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Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#341

Post by twic »

nvm0n2 wrote: post #166
darth_avocado wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Jain, a copper-sulfide expert I would have never known that people are actual experts in one material. This is impressive.

https://www.quora.com/In-Tesla-and-SpaceX-how-much-of-the-te... A number of years back I had an email from a bloke called Elon Musk. I was vaguely aware of who he was but not very. At the time I was the global expert in a very weird alloy (the market for it was perhaps 5 or 10 tonnes a year. A very weird and minority interest alloy). It was aluminium scandium, which the Russians had developed to compete with Nasa’s u…

Scandium-aluminium alloy was popular for bicycle frames briefly in the 2000s. On-One made a frame wittily called the Scandal from it. I have a Scandal frame, but it's a second generation one where they dropped the scandium but kept the name!

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#342

Post by dekhn »

tsimionescu wrote: post #314
dekhn wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Room temp Superconductors, along with fusion, would affect the economy profoundly. What the exact effect on rent would be is hard to predict but under the "post-scarcity society" mental construct, having infinite energy at zero cost (amortized) would presumably make the price of housing change.

The point is that room temperature superconductors only matter if they have several other properties - they have to be ductile (easy to mold into wires), have good material resistance, maintain their superconductivity under high enough currents, and be cheap enough to produce. A ceramic room-temperature superconductor, like LK-99 would have been, is not a promising material at all, since it's extremely costly to make…

I was talking about a hypothetical RTSC that was amenable to industrial scale, not LK-99. Even so, merely knowing that RTSC with poor properties existed, would lead to massive search of the nearby (and other) spaces for better properties.

See the history of glass optimization- hundreds of years of poking around with terrible quality glass, then a revolution during the Schott era, to modern day Gorilla Glass. Or silicon- the initial transistor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Replica-of-first-transist...) was not something you could shove into a missile, that took 15 years to develop. To today's modern ICs which approach the atomic limits of semiconductor manufacturing.

The hope is that the initial RTSCs will follow a similar path, obvious there no guarantee

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#344

Post by dekhn »

maleldil wrote: post #311
dekhn wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Room temp Superconductors, along with fusion, would affect the economy profoundly. What the exact effect on rent would be is hard to predict but under the "post-scarcity society" mental construct, having infinite energy at zero cost (amortized) would presumably make the price of housing change.

How would room temperature superconductors lead to a post-scarcity society?

makes it easy to deliver power from huge centralized fusion reactors to the edge. It is neither sufficient, nor necessary, but could be a useful thing to have.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#345

Post by kaba0 »

worrycue wrote: post #119
Waterluvian wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it perilous to treat an entire community as it if has one voice. Ie. "the HN discussion" as a singular entity with a singular binary state on its skepticism. Someone else could equally claim that the HN community was super pessimistic and skeptical about it, because I certainly saw a lot of that too! While a convenient abstraction, it plays into our biases to notice and remember only some of the discourse. Plu…

The excitable people are certainly “loud” though. The last few weeks with the LK-99 hype combined with the usual ChatGPT stories, I actually started feeling that maybe the site should be renamed Hype News. > but that it's odd when there's people who treat an optimistic outlook as an error. IMHO it’s best to treat any extraordinary claim as BS until proven otherwise as it’s very easy to concoct BS claims. If we take e…

I am perfectly capable of managing, simply unknowns, it doesn’t have to have an actual boolean value. Treating it as bullshit is not the correct approach - sure, there is a healthy amount of skepticism, realism to have, but while RTSC is a too nice to be true goal, it is not fundamentally against any known laws, I would retain my bullshit behavior to faster than light travel, the daily tesla-free-energy-for-the-world, etc. kind of low-effort ones, and even in their case would hold a tiny 0.001% chance of my skepticism being wrong.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#346

Post by m3kw9 »

dralley wrote: post #41

Honestly, I feel bad for the original authors, who were correctly holding out for stronger evidence but were forced into publishing early by the actions of a third party going behind their backs. I hope they don't experience undue blowback because of this.

This gives them an out actually

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#347

Post by araes »

Waterluvian wrote: post #11
thinkingkong wrote: post #2

It’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.

Agreed! There's this bizarre reaction I see from many where they see the excitement and curiosity and hopefulness as a form of error and source of embarrassment. When mixed with an open mind and reasonable skepticism, it's a powerful opportunity to get people engaged in imagining a different world. I had all kinds of exciting conversations about what a validated, commercially viable LK-99 could produce. Why would I e…

Another point is: It's properties might still be interesting (possibly amazing, just not a superconductor).

A significant reduction in room temperature resistance would still be incredible, even if it wasn't a "room temperature superconductor." Might still enable a lot of those "exciting conversations." Just not some binary yes/no computer holy grail.

Also, big effect was scientists went "Whoa. There's a whole mode/regime of resistance change we never really looked at." The modeling papers that came out almost immediately were really interesting. Might still have cool applications.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#348

Post by avereveard »

dralley wrote: post #41

Honestly, I feel bad for the original authors, who were correctly holding out for stronger evidence but were forced into publishing early by the actions of a third party going behind their backs. I hope they don't experience undue blowback because of this.

I wonder why it was so difficult for the original authors to get a pure sample, it's not like it took 10 years to create these larger crystsal.

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#349

Post by samstave »

Can one make a micro-fluidic-slurry that is pumped through a tube surrounded by a C style cup of magnets.

The slurry is passed through super cooling nodes to keep it at sub temp.

and an a reverse C shape coupler is the drive - so you draw the lead/push the lead but you can maintain the coolant in a much more pulsed way?

Middle out.

C meets C in the CC (but with mirrors)((and magnets)) [Assume you have never evaluated how a roller-coaster works]

Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor

#350

Post by OJFord »

throwaway4220 wrote: post #220

“ Derrick van Gennep, a former condensed-matter researcher at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who now works in finance ” This is always sad to see but I get it

And I get why you say that, but also way more people want PhDs (or even to work in academic research) than the system supports.

i.e. you have not only to resist the industry moneybags, but also defy odds anyway

It's like being a former actor (of undisclosed repute) turned waiter if Hollywood A-list pay was not great (and B-list awful).

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