Could this be the new 4 minute mile? Will [humanity] evacuate on ourselves? Whatever this may be, it’s exciting.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36940487.
LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor
431–440 of 659 posts
Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor
#432Currently, Cold Fusion used in small scale isotope breeders for medical purposes. One 2kWt breeder with CF can replace 100kWt traditional breeding plant.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36940489.
Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's not fast or efficient - the authors appear to think they invented a very easy to make room temperature/pressure superconductor far over a year ago, and then announced it in a truly silly way with no clear data and no samples.
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Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor
#434It is interesting to see how much of the replication is done by the Chinese and how little is done by the Western countries. Is this the difference between the making-stuff-happen attitude and the sclerotic attitude?
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"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
Assuming LK99 is legitimate, my hope is that the principles that make it work are more broadly applicable - and with that, refined production processes or newer alloys can be found. Simply knowing that it's possible would lead to a huge amount of research immediately focusing on this kind of thing. There's nothing more revolutionary than a discovery of a new class of materials. After all, we often name eras throughou…
> There's nothing more revolutionary than a discovery of a new class of materials. After all, we often name eras throughout our history after them :) (Stone age, etc) I wonder what was involved in the discovery of stone.
2023, the beginning of the... Room Temperature Superconductor Age!
Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
The cold reactor fuses nuclei by virtue of energy input , the other tries to extract energy from a fusion reaction larger than its input. On a complexity level you're looking at 1:10000 difference or worse.
Cold Fusion doesn't work because we are exchanging high-energy particles, which are expensive to produce, for low grade heat in bulk of material. If we will have cheap source of muons, we can change equation. We can drop a tiny bit of Nickel lattice filled with Deuterium, and then strike it with muons from all angles, to create implosion. This will allow us to create tiny blast of hot plasma, which is much easier to…
> If we will have cheap source of muons, we can change equation.
You can make them but the cost in energy is exactly the problem: you will be spending money on energy to make muons at a considerable loss due to the inefficient ways in which we know how to make them (proton beams, which require a huge amount of energy to create), resulting in an insignificant number of particles. If your goal is to get net energy out it would be good to keep an eye on process efficiency from the beginning. Starting off with a billion to one or so conversion loss for step one raises the bar for the subsequent steps considerably.
> Sadly, we have no such cheap source of muons, AFAIK.
Indeed we do not, and that's pretty logical.
Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't work anywhere near room temperature. Fusors operate at 10-30 keV, which is about 100 Million to 300 Million C. The plasma is extremely low density so there is very little power to heat things, and thus these units can safely run on a table top, but the temperature of the ions is enormous.
You are right, nuclear reactions requires enough enormous energy to overcome the barrier OR a heavy particles (muon). However, fusor works at room temperature. It doesn't require preheating to 150MK to start operation, like ITER do.
No, the Fusor does not work at room temperature, the same electric coils that contain the ions also heat the ions. It actually runs substantially hotter than ITER.
Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor
#438Iris Alexandra's twitter is especially enthralling. Seems like so much discoveries and innovation happens from computer science to physics, chemistry and biology all from people with anime profile pictures.
There's a certain subset of people on the intersection of high IQ, high-functioning ASD and LGBT that produces a lot of high impact activity in STEM fields.
I heard from a psychologist that homosexuality is associated with higher creativity (possibly explaining why it wasn't eliminated through evolution/natural selection). That seems true in art anyway, but I am not sure if in science the flamboyant online profiles simply make them more memorable characters or if the association holds.
Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor
#439Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor
#440Earlier quoted context omitted.
This subthread is discussing whether it makes sense to have another lab validate the existing sample before we even try to follow their steps. Neither I nor the person you're responding to are assuming that the sample is what they claim it is, we're simply arguing that it doesn't matter how it was obtained—it's either a room temperature superconductor or it isn't, and if the researchers failed to document the process…
> but also why would they make it, publish a fake process and then go through all this rigamarole? This, from this subthread and directly from the comment I replied to, is what I was responding to. I don’t think I’ve missed some obvious point. I think you just misunderstood which topic I was responding to.
> > How do you know for sure that the existing sample was actually produced by the LK-99 process?
> If the thing exists and someone can make it, the specific process doesn't matter (but also why would they make it, publish a fake process and then go through all this rigamarole?).
You took one sentence out of context, reinterpreted it, then replied to your own reinterpretation. In the context of the full "if" sentence, it's pretty clear that OP was asking: "in the hypothetical situation where they did successfully create a superconductor, why publish an invalid process?"
There are lots of possible answers to this question, but your answer was not addressing that question, it was answering the question "why would they lie about having created it?"
Context matters, otherwise we'd all end up talking past each other all the time.