Sixty Symbols released a video about this yesterday, and in it professor Philip Moriarty is less than impressed with the whole ordeal. I haven't been paying attention, I'm too jaded and skeptical and assumed from the start that there was something wrong and much hype about nothing. Bad Science and Room Temperature Superconductors - Sixty Symbols: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl-AgmoZ5mo
LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
451–460 of 754 posts
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#452Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still, if LK-99 had turned out to be an RTSC, that wouldn't necessarily take us any closer to an industrial-grade RTSC. It could just as well be a false lead, an interesting material with some niche applications that would remain more of a curiosity than anything. RTSCs are not like cold fusion - as far as we know, they should be possible, so finding one would not upend science in some huge way. If the ones we find d…
It's like you're arguing with somebody different from me, who said something entirely different from what I said, while also agreeing with my unstated premise, and conditional language.
I take your other comments to imply that finding one RTSC would prove or at least suggest that a path exists to some significant industrial usage of RTSCs down the line. I don't think that's correct, and I'm arguing about why I don't think that's correct. Of course, I may have misunderstood your comments.
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
My goal in criticism is to guide interested players towards more fruitful pursuits. I don't want to see invalid science sucking up all the attention and crowding out legitimate but boring science.
Negative experimental results are valid science, aren't they? If you believe attention is a 0-sum game (I don't, but am trying to understand), why not focus criticism on those people spending time on any number of other pursuits that are even further from fruitful. It just seems like, for whatever your idea of "fruitful" is, there are entire industries and institutions that are focused on taking attention away from f…
After all, the grad students still got together, got drunk, and partied- when they could have been in the lab. Not particularly fruitful, but I wouldn't criticize it.
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
The current generation of mass manufactured high temperature superconducting tape is based on YBCO, which is a crystalline material (presumably what is meant here when saying ceramic). So the argument that superconductors need to be metallic/malleable to be useful doesn't really make a lot of sense.
> presumably what is meant here when saying ceramic Probably not. Being crystalline and being a ceramic are completely unrelated. Standard superconductors like niobium-tin and niobium-titanium are crystalline metals (intermetallic alloys). The vast majority of metals are crystalline, to the point that when a company tried to make a metallic glass a couple of years ago (under the name Liquid Metal), it made quite a bi…
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had heard the parts about "probably wouldn't be a big deal for CPU performance" and "probably wouldn't be great for energy storage", but I hadn't heard the point about "we use less efficient materials for power grid transmission than we could, because of costs". I suppose I didn't expect that we necessarily had like, the "absolute most efficient that could be made" (if that is something substantially more complicat…
Am not the author of that comment, but the fact that comes to mind is that aluminum is used for virtually all transmission and distribution lines - for price reasons - even though copper has better conductivity. If we did discover a room-temperature superconductor, I suspect it would be a while before the cost to produce it in the bulk quantities required for electrical transmission are economically attractive compar…
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not too long ago, a creationist would have sarcastically asked "Does this extend to biology too?", and gone away thinking they had made an actual argument.
Try challenging climate science, even in a valid way, and see how popular it is on reddit or HN or twitter. Even my above comment now has a negative score which sort of proves my point. note: i don't deny climate science but like any science there are ways to challenge it
Tone matters and your tone matches up really well with someone trying to “gotcha” the people around them, which is obnoxious.
> i don't deny climate science but like any science there are ways to challenge it
Not successfully.
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not too long ago, a creationist would have sarcastically asked "Does this extend to biology too?", and gone away thinking they had made an actual argument.
Try challenging climate science, even in a valid way, and see how popular it is on reddit or HN or twitter. Even my above comment now has a negative score which sort of proves my point. note: i don't deny climate science but like any science there are ways to challenge it
> "Try challenging evolutionary biology, even in a valid way, and see how popular it is".
All crackpots think they're under siege and that their ideas are unfairly dismissed. Their ideas are "valid" (because they say so), so why are those ideas being dismissed without due consideration? You hear the same rhetoric from anti-vaxxers, creationists and climate change doubters.
The problem is a lack of perspective. Crackpots of all stripes don't know that they're crackpots. To them, their distorted thought patterns aren't distorted.
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's like you're arguing with somebody different from me, who said something entirely different from what I said, while also agreeing with my unstated premise, and conditional language.
My point, which I believe contradicts yours, is that it's perfectly plausible that 1000 years from now humanity knows about plenty of RTSCs and still chooses copper and aluminum for power transmission and sillicon for transistors etc, because none of the RTSCs are actually useful on an industrial scale - so RTSCs would not have any significant effect on the economy. Of course, the opposite is also perfectly plausible…
Let me rewrite my original sentence that bothered people, so it's a bit clearer. Here's the original:
"""Room temp Superconductors, along with fusion, would affect the economy profoundly. What the exact effect on rent would be is hard to predict but under the "post-scarcity society" mental construct, having infinite energy at zero cost (amortized) would presumably make the price of housing change."""
Change "would" to "could" in the first sentence to make it conditional. Add an additional sentence at the end pointing out that house prices are complex and many factors influence them, and another pointing out that while sometimes we can achieve a property in a material, but fail to realize its industrial potential".
It does seem reasonable to posit that RTSCs, even if they failed to realize their industrial potential- could have an affect on rent. Rent is (to a zeroth order approximation) determined by a wide range of macroeconomic activities, and if we reordered our entire society around improving RTSCs, that could have indirect effect on the cost of housing.
All of that was implicit in my original text- and I had hoped to make that clear- rather than making a strong statement like "rent will go down if RTSCs exist".
Re: LK-99 isn’t a superconductor
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is precisely what put me off in these discussions. Not the idea that we might have found a room-temperature superconductor - that part was exciting. It's the part where people confidently talked about its applications without realizing that they probably wouldn't revolutionize CPU performance (Josephson junctions don't seem to work well as non-cryogenic temperatures for reasons unrelated to superconductivity), p…
I had heard the parts about "probably wouldn't be a big deal for CPU performance" and "probably wouldn't be great for energy storage", but I hadn't heard the point about "we use less efficient materials for power grid transmission than we could, because of costs". I suppose I didn't expect that we necessarily had like, the "absolute most efficient that could be made" (if that is something substantially more complicat…
Copper is expensive so over hundreds of miles you may not want that.