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

arxiv.org

411–420 of 1001 posts

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

#411
post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm unsure if we want people living forever. While disease, illness, and senility are terrible things, as soon as people can live forever we will have eternal dictatorships (or people trying for it) as well as other questions of perpetual inequality. "Death renders all equal".

Also there’s a massive philosophical quandary in there too. If people could live for much longer then they’re likely disincentivised to procreate due to worries of overpopulation and then, in one way of thinking, you’re hypothetically depriving a line of offspring of lifetimes they’d otherwise have if you’d had what we consider a normal lifespan now. Yes I realise there are probably an infinite number of takes on thi…

> you’re hypothetically depriving a line of offspring of lifetimes they’d otherwise have.

I don't want to open a can of worms, but... about 40 milion people are aborted each year...

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

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Also, air conditioner. It made huge difference to allow for intellectual work at the places which are otherwise too hot.

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

#413
post #92

So far lab replication efforts are: Two from HUST: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV14p4y1V7kS/ https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV13k4y1G7i1/ One by USTC https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Ex4y1X7ix/ this tiny sample can stand on its pointy side. One by Qufu Normal University https://www.zhihu.com/zvideo/1669820225079070720 One with THU background but claims a personal project https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV14z4y1s7V…

Most Western European researchers have been on vacation the past few weeks.

I don't fault them for failing to synthesize room-temperature superconductors while they were relaxing in some resort in Turkey or Thailand.

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

#414
post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But other than that, what the Romans have ever done for us?!

Apart from the aqueduct, sanitation, roads, irrigation, medicine, education, wine, public baths and public order - the Romans didn’t really do much at all.

As i see it, Romans mainly gave us idea of "rule-based society" on which entire Western world stands. Even as Romans themselves made a joke out of it in their later history. But the idea was so transformative that even subsequent barbarian kings that ravaged Roman Empire after it's downfall, did not seek to formally overthrow it - rather, they pretended (with varying levels of plausibility) to lawfully inherit and rule it, or parts of it.

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

#415

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…

That's just a list of good inventions. GPS, disposable razor, many of these are not impactful enough to be "black swan but good". And things like clocks and batteries were slowly refined over many, many years, so they don't fit either.

You make no sense. Observe:

> And things like clocks and batteries were slowly refined over many, many years, so they don't fit either.

Everything started with a thought, or a discovery. What happens after is irrelevant. The event, that kicks off Dramatic Change(tm), is at the start.

> That's just a list of good inventions.

No. It isn't just a list of good inventions. Ignoring that it's not all inventions, you seem to lack the understanding of the impact. For example:

> Antibiotics

A discovery. It literally changed how humanity moves forward. One of the whitest swan moments in human history.

> public key cryptography

It took until 1975 for someone to figure this out and it changed how we exchange information, legitimize ourselves and deal with our privacy.

> contraceptive pill

The invention of the pill was an event that had massive impact on how Humanity moved forward.

> printing press

The invention of mass production of books lead to the first information explosion, dramatically changing humanity's future.

What you're doing here is mixing your ignorance of the impactfullness of some of the things on the list, with your own personal idea of what's "great", or however you want to call it.

Even if I agree that not everything on that list is equally meaningfull in terms of impact, some of them are really fucking high up the ladder, just like room temperature superconductors.

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

#416

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.

Without being intentionally snarky, the same logic applies to measuring current and voltage. What is observed is an effect of zero resistance, not zero resistance itself (whatever that would mean).

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

#417
post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Thanks, that makes sense.

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

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good one would be "productive AI." People forget, but a short while ago, AI was treated as something where being actually useful was perpetually 20 years away, and the real-world status of it was exemplified by a chatbot like Eliza.

When AI was 20 years away, people seemed more optimistic about it than now when its inevitable transformative societal impact is seemingly right around the corner, are you sure this is the kind of example they were going for?

This is mostly due to "they're taking our jobs!".

Which actually highlights a problem in our society that we have to work to be able to afford living instead of living to be able to work on something more meaningful than earning money.

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

#420

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…

Also, air conditioner. It made huge difference to allow for intellectual work at the places which are otherwise too hot.

It's already in there.
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