351–360 of 821 posts
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People cut cables for copper. Imagine what will happen with cables with gold.
Gold is everywhere in computing, not a big deal.
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Maybe Venture Capital should spend less money on Juciero, automated pizza ovens, and gig-economy bs and more money on materials science and fusion research. Even if you end up lighting the money on fire, at least it's a more societally productive fire than, say, SoftBank's portfolio.
There isn't a good likelihood on strong return on those type of investments. You need real engineering talent and leaders. You can glue together a delivery or dating app with a bunch of 25 year olds who just got out of a ruby on rails bootcamp, raise a few million with charismatic/well connected leaders/founders, and maybe gain enough users to be acquired or something. Anything in materials science is going to requir…
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I want to believe. After several millennia of killing people for gold, we can finally put all that gold to good use—using it to create superconductors that can power energy weapons we can use to kill each other. ♫ It's the circle of life ♫
People cut cables for copper. Imagine what will happen with cables with gold.
People don't seem to realize how radically society will change if this superconductor thing is legit.
I still have a very, very hard time understanding what all of this means. Is there an easy to understand explanation for a room temperature superconductor?
I'm not expert, but I think about it like this: Resistance is the tendency of a material to convert electrical energy into heat. Higher resistance means more of the electrical energy is converted to heat per "time". A superconductor then has the cool property of being able to carry electrical energy without converting any of it into heat. That's obviously cool for energy transmission, but it also enabled some other c…
This isn't really accurate because increasing the resistance of a resistor in a given circuit will actually decrease the amount of heat dissipated.
W = IV where I = V/R plug that in we get W = (V/R)V = V^2/R
So Watts = Volts^2/Resistance. Increase resistance, decrease watts.
Its better to just say that resistance converts voltage to heat, and leave it at that. Also is why in the orginal paper (and other superconductor work) they measure voltage drop across the conductor. No voltage drop(loss) = no resistance.
> They also predict that substituting gold atoms into the Pb(1) site could lead to a material with very similar properties, which will be an extremely interesting idea to put to the test. Since the base material is lead apatite, I had a random thought that maybe medieval alchemists trying to turn lead into gold just had it backward, as doping gold into lead might be a breakthrough. :-)
Watch gold be the only practically viable solution, making this new material wonderful but also incredibly expensive.
How likely is this to lead to breaking all encryption by enabling way bigger superconducting quantum computers with way more qubits than are reasonable nowadays? Is this just going to turn into cyberwar on steroids?
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I don't get the "disappointment" with USA scientists in this thread not having yet published a replication. There has only been one weekday since the LK-99 revelation came to light. Have some patience. The analysis from this article is a publication from Berkeley National Lab that has already come out, and Argonne National Lab has announced they have synthesized the material as of yesterday and will release results f…
China has more people, more money to spend on research, more equipment, more access to raw materials and chemicals, more manufacturing base, more STEM graduates, more everything, and all of that by huge margins. USA scientists will eventually put something out, but 10x more slowly than China.
It ultimately requires being embedded in a culture that, to quote Popper, "seeks truths that are difficult and interesting". From that view, the problem for US scientific efforts is entirely home made, but it's also a problem that's much more pronounced in China.
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Levitates? Against, what, the earth's inherent magnetic field? Sorry, I haven't seen any visuals that show this behavior.
Levitation in magnetic itself is not the proof. Frogs can do that too, ask Geim. The proof would be levitation in any orientation.
One even did that on the cover of Nature, iirc.
This is exciting, but I try to maintain my composure. Good luck to all involved. I didn’t know science could be such a thrilling spectator sport.
I saw a video the other day that pointed out that the breakdown current for their sample was 260 mA. Now there's a lot of things you can do with 260mA, but I don't believe high-tesla electromagnets are in that list, so no MRIs, no fusion, and probably no electromotive devices (generators, motors).
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They have a lot of labs, and materials sourcing is easier for them. That’s partially because China is the origin of lots of stuff, and partly because the US regulated red phosphorus as a meth precursor.
Additionally, it appears some of the original team members were concerned about possible industrial spying or leaks and that 'other parties' might be moving to replicate which was part of the impetus for rushing to publish. So, it's possible that some team(s) in China may have already been starting, underway or at least thinking about it.
It couldn’t have come at a worse time for drama either, as the right wing is currently on possibly their most massive anti-science tirade world wide that they’ve ever pushed.