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Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

arxiv.org

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Re: Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

#401

Post by andbberger »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #292
ChuckMcM wrote: post #129

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. Anti-gravity 2. Light year capable transport 3. Inertia dampers 4. Mass scale carbon capture technology 5. Robots to prepare space for habitation 6. World recognition to manage resources globally

> 4. Mass scale carbon capture technology

one of these is not like the others. direct carbon capture works now with the slight caveat that we would have to build 10x our current power supply in fission plants to power them. coccolithophores are an appealing route in principle, but research into their lifecycle and use for sequestration would be a quotidian pursuit for thousands of labs around the world, given funding.

Re: Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

#402

Post by rvcdbn »

andbberger wrote: post #393
rvcdbn wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an anthropic line of reasoning over Everettian branch universes where you can actually expect these types of highly unlikely events to happen more often than chance alone would predict if they promote futures with more Born-rule weighted observer-moments.

nonsense.

I said "there is a line of reasoning...", I didn't say I fully believe it. It definitely depends on a lot of pretty speculative ideas. I'm happy to discuss this further if you'd like to point out exactly which parts of the argument you object to.

EDIT: I continue the conversation with ChatGPT to try to poke holes in the argument if you’re interested: https://chat.openai.com/share/19871222-9810-4a25-9604-8e690b...

Re: Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

#403

Post by pineaux »

anovikov wrote: post #385
nindalf wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Auctions, sanitary towels, retirement, banking, disposable razor, sewing machine, canned food, interchangeable parts, antibiotics, solar cells, postage stamp, light bulb, pencil, air conditioning, insurance, dwarf wheat, spreadsheet, cold chain, double entry book-keeping, S-bend, infant formula, clocks, public key cryptography, passports, batteries, printing press, video games, GPS, contraceptive pill, shipping conta…

Passports are not a good invention. They are a dystopian evil we grew to take for granted and even see as something that exists for our own benefit. Before WWI there were no passports and no need for them. Those were Good Old Days that are not coming back. It's weird to see some people seeing some kind of benefit in them.

The Gestapo popularized passports. Think about that for a while.

Re: Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

#404

Post by someplaceguy »

bobmaxup wrote: post #35

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99#Replication_attempts This Wikipedia article has a good summary of the replication attempts to date (including this paper).

Reading further below, I'm actually amazed by all the theoretical studies that have already been done from first principles (all apparently supporting the possibility of superconductivity). That's a pretty fast pace for science!

Re: Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

#405

Post by fooker »

postalrat wrote: post #94
cypherpunks01 wrote: post #21

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.

How would you prove there isn't any water in a cup?

That's a really good way to reason about the difficulties.

Re: Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

#406

Post by concordDance »

scarmig wrote: post #15
ufo wrote: post #6

Seems to be the same one that had a video a couple of days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36953396 Back then, many asked if this was superconduction or merely diamagnetism. Does the new paper shine any light on this question?

The paper shows a clear phase transition to diamagnetism as the material is cooled. That would be seen in superconductors and not in regular diamagnetic materials. I'm not aware of any that have that kind of phase transition. Though since we're in weird territory here, it's important to note some weird non-superconductor behavior that's beyond regular diamagnetism might be going on as an alternative explanation. But…

> this pushes my odds above 50% for the first time.

Time for you to make some money then? :D

https://polymarket.com/event/is-the-room-temp-superconductor...

Re: Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

#407

Post by mort96 »

someplaceguy wrote: post #386
frisco wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, if our best regular conductors (used in your ohmmeter) are ~10^-8 and superconductivity is (by convention) less than 10^-11, one can see right away the simple regular methods won’t work and some cleverness is needed.

> superconductivity is (by convention) less than 10^-11, Ah, so you're saying that superconductivity is not actual zero resistance, but something close to it, and in fact only a factor of 1000x less resistive than the best conductor? If that is so, this is something that I had previously thought would make a lot more sense to me. But in that case it's not intuitive to me how SMES is possible with a 0% discharge rate.…

No, I believe it's literally zero but we don't have a measurement apparatus with infinite precision so we need some cut-off.

Re: Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

#408

Post by XorNot »

hwillis wrote: post #383
nocoder wrote: post #139

I get the idea of superconductivity at room temperature in theory. But I don't have enough knowledge to understand in real terms, how will the world change if this is true?

You can't get CT scans very often, because they hit you with large doses of ionizing radiation. Ultrasounds are low-resolution spotlights; you shine them at a particular spot to diagnose something specific. With this you could get an MRI at your annual checkup. You could diagnose all number of diseases like that, not to mention 95% of cancers. Each year your scan is automatically compared to the previous year, and an…

> We might eventually transition away from AC power entirely.

This is actually a really good point I hadn't fully considered, but it's right: the primary reason we use high voltage anywhere is because it minimizes resistive losses (and the reason we use AC is because it's easy to transform between voltages).

But most of the stuff in my home doesn't need high voltage - it's all running at 5V or 12V. Or it's a motor which is magnetically driven and depends solely on magnetic field strength (which is independent of voltage).

If all your conductors have zero resistance, then high voltage is obsolete. You could safely run a residential property on 12V power. Home electrical hazards would a thing of the past.

Re: Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

#409

Post by cthalupa »

hinkley wrote: post #392
scarmig wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

326K (+127 deg F) and 340K (+152 deg F) for their less and more pure samples respectively. And, yes, if it's a superconductor as we understand them, that's the temperature at which it would have zero resistance as well.

So that’s within the range of off the shelf cooling equipment to maintain superconductivity. Any speculation if that’s consumer, commercial, or industrial off-the-shelf? Sounds like we may be talking running an MRI off of a mini split system.

LK99 isn't necessarily a stand-in for helium cooled superconductors - if all SC were equivalent to any other, YBCO and similar would have been enough to make MRIs significantly cheaper - LN2 is easy and cheap to produce.

Re: Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

#410

Post by konschubert »

someplaceguy wrote: post #141
ChuckMcM wrote: post #129

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.

Penicillin. Vaccines.
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