401–410 of 448 posts
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Is there an intuitive explanation of why shrinkage of a material is beneficial for superconductivity. Naive question, particles physicist by training.
When a material shrinks, it can create immense internal stresses equivalent to what it would experience at extreme pressures. Compare to say a Prince Rupert's drop.
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Condensed matter physics and materials chemistry certainly become inseparable in certain areas
Indeed. The separation between "Chemistry" and "Physics" completely breaks down when you start dealing with electron behaviours. I've actually got a little tin-foil-hat pet theory that Chemistry is slowly dying as it approaches "completion" of its roots (macroscopic phenomena of matter), and is gradually being subsumed by Physics. To at least a silly layman like me, lots of bleeding-edge Chemistry nowadays reads like…
Sociology < psychology < biology < chemistry < physics << math.
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I’d be interested in seeing a source on that. My understanding was that it was a powerful and popular computational tool. The theory is approximate but approximate theories can still be quite useful if the approximation is a good one.
It's basically an open secret, no one really believes DFT has much predictive power in strongly correlated systems (where relevant electrons cannot be treated as independent). It's not useless, but DFT calculations require many arbitrary choices and are hardly "first principles" in a meaningful way.
I have no idea if the use of DFT here is appropriate or not.
This ongoing research saga pretty much the most excited I’ve been about anything since before Covid. It feels like the science equivalent of watching your favorite sports team on an epic rise towards winning a world championship. Even if this turns out to flop, I hope history remembers the original authors favorably. They really did find something that by all accounts could plausibly be a room temp superconductor. An…
Just curious, how did you find Covid "exciting"? Making lots of money on the bear market?
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I guess that's partially missing the point. The main benefit of a superconducting maglev is that it's cheaper to build than a on-rails high-speed train. Specially on problematic terrain (what I understand includes every possible East/West route on the US).
Why would it be cheaper? The actual rails is a pretty small part of constructing high speed rail, isn't it? Especially on problematic terrain.
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The technology itself in the 'Go Fast' video shows the object isn't moving fast. The distance from the object and the direction of the camera are available in the video, and using this you can calculate the altitude and speed of the object in question. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLyEO0jNt6M
You can calculate it to go many speeds depending on what assumptions are made. Just because mick west shows something is possible doesn't prove what's in the video.
2) The burden of proof is on those who make an extraordinary claim. There is a perfectly mundane explanation of the cause of apparently fast-moving object which is supported by available evidence. Even if that depends on some assumptions, you would have to demonstrate those assumptions to be false before a less likely alternative, i.e., that it was an extraterrestrial spacecraft, should be adopted.
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I guess that's partially missing the point. The main benefit of a superconducting maglev is that it's cheaper to build than a on-rails high-speed train. Specially on problematic terrain (what I understand includes every possible East/West route on the US).
Why would it be cheaper? The actual rails is a pretty small part of constructing high speed rail, isn't it? Especially on problematic terrain.
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Magnets have an annoying tendency to stop working when they are heated. And it's ridiculous that I'm saying that on the context of testing a superconductor. But well, here we are.
You could always use an electromagnet.
I do expect people to fully characterize it eventually.
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You can calculate it to go many speeds depending on what assumptions are made. Just because mick west shows something is possible doesn't prove what's in the video.
1) There's a range of speeds that are possible depending on what you assume the turning angle of the jet was. That range doesn't go anywhere close to the speed of sound. 2) The burden of proof is on those who make an extraordinary claim. There is a perfectly mundane explanation of the cause of apparently fast-moving object which is supported by available evidence. Even if that depends on some assumptions, you would h…
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> But scientifically? Yeah, I'll go with "exciting". The field seemed to move at a tremendous speed, or at least that's how it looked to me as an outsider. The practical science may have been exciting. Unfortunately "The Science" has been forever tainted thanks to secrets, tight-lips, mis-direction and "just trust us". I think Covid was a net-negative for science.
Science served us well enough that we're all still commenting here. It's the prevention paradox all over again, if science had not done its work you'd be in a much better position to appreciate the difference that it - and healthcare - made but then you might not have made it at all... science definitely did not let us down. Who did let us down: the people that were making things worse from day #1 by stirring the pot…
What is the solution to this?
The framing seems way too simplistic to ever be useful. It makes it seem as though there was just the Good side that had all the answers all along, and the Bad side who just needed to do what the Good side said.
In reality, it all came down to "who do you trust to both have your best interests at heart and to also be competent enough to achieve those best interests".
Turns out those aren't easy questions, and that people are naturally going to arrive at different answers for all sorts of reasons, and I think very few of them look like "boo science".