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

arxiv.org

61–70 of 1001 posts

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

#61

I'm not too familiar with this space. Could someone explain how big of an impact to the world this discovery is? What does the future of this technology look like over the next 5 years?

Superconductors have applications in computers, MRIs, maglev trains, and power transmission to name a few.

Superconduction at room temp would all for less current consumption due to resistance inside the metal layer for chips, letting them run cooler and faster.

MRIs use massive, supercooled magnets. If you can do the same at room temp, you could potentially have a portable or much smaller and more efficient MRI.

If you can levitate an object, you can use a lot less power running electromagnets to run things like maglev trains.

If you have power lines that have zero resistance, you can reduce wasted energy. Power lines will actually sag under heavy load due to heat and cause outages or forest fires, this could be avoided.

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

#63
post #59

On a completely different front, let's say the paper completely checks out and they have discovered this miracle. How strong are the patent protections on materials science? For example, if someone could replicate the effect with lead + gold, would that be considered a novel material which would not be subject to licensing? Is it the material itself or the method of production?

I'm sure it depends on jurisdiction, but in the US, you can't patent a material, only a method to make it. If I recall correctly, their patent for method covered a wide range of constituent elements, but left off gold. I would feel pretty bad for them if they genuinely discovered an RTP superconductor but that omission prevents them from becoming billionaires. But more likely the issue is that their current method ha…

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

#64

On a completely different front, let's say the paper completely checks out and they have discovered this miracle. How strong are the patent protections on materials science? For example, if someone could replicate the effect with lead + gold, would that be considered a novel material which would not be subject to licensing? Is it the material itself or the method of production?

Or what if AI assists in generating the discovery? “AI” meaning anything from a transformer model to brute-force breadth-first search with heuristics.

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

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. It's felt like so many of the technological marvels have either happened quietly (e.g. the reductions in chip size) or in the past (e.g. all the physics breakthroughs of the 1900s). Like ChatGPT, this seems to have the characteristics of being both accessible and completely novel.

I feel like the host of “in 30 years we would have X” made 40 years ago are suddenly manifesting.

Im posting this reply from my mainstream smartphone: a pocket supercomputer with a 4K 60Hz HDR video camera. I’m chock full of designer vaccines and can watch a catalog of almost all the movies ever made on demand tonight. I listened to an podcast in my EV on the way to work. And SpaceX probably launched 60 satellites this week on the 14th flight of a rocket that flew home afterwards.

Things have been moving along.

edit: comments are quibbling about the fraction of all movies ever I can see on a paid streaming service. This is like complaining about that the meals and elbow room are not wonderful on a $400 flight from LA to London. It's a goddam miracle and you're still grumbling. Please tell me now how your $12/mo Spotify account doesn't have the June 1972 Grateful Dead New Jersey show your mom was at, and is thus near worthless. I spent $12 in 1980s money on single album in my youth.

Let me amend my grossly hyperbolic statement and say I could stream on demand more movies than I could ever watch even if I did nothing else the rest of my life, including many but not all of the good ones. Now the statement is strictly true, but did this make my contribution better?

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

#66
post #59

On a completely different front, let's say the paper completely checks out and they have discovered this miracle. How strong are the patent protections on materials science? For example, if someone could replicate the effect with lead + gold, would that be considered a novel material which would not be subject to licensing? Is it the material itself or the method of production?

I'm sure it depends on jurisdiction, but in the US, you can't patent a material, only a method to make it. If I recall correctly, their patent for method covered a wide range of constituent elements, but left off gold. I would feel pretty bad for them if they genuinely discovered an RTP superconductor but that omission prevents them from becoming billionaires. But more likely the issue is that their current method ha…

That's kind of my thinking - there is almost no chance they stumbled upon nirvana + did it in the best or most efficient way. There must be many possible optimizations to the chemical structure + fabrication techniques.

Is it possible that the inventors do not receive a dime of royalties?

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

#67

If this thing really was super conducting, they should be able to rotate the sample upside down from flux pinning right? That's why this thing is probably just a magnet and not a superconductor??

you'd hope that if we know that, the actual scientists confirming this stuff know that too

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

#68

It’s a breath of fresh air reading about actual revolutionary science happening. The deluge of news about non-replicable results, fabricated data, overhyped press releases from both academia and industry had become really depressing. For once after a long time it’s the real deal. Even if this is not a RT superconductor, it’s now evident that the original authors didn’t cheat and are not crackpots as initially suspect…

For me from how the saga of 1st paper and 2nd paper started I had a feeling that something really unique has been found and the drama and politics is because of trying to claim the glory of it not because it was fake.

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

#69
post #59

On a completely different front, let's say the paper completely checks out and they have discovered this miracle. How strong are the patent protections on materials science? For example, if someone could replicate the effect with lead + gold, would that be considered a novel material which would not be subject to licensing? Is it the material itself or the method of production?

I'm sure it depends on jurisdiction, but in the US, you can't patent a material, only a method to make it. If I recall correctly, their patent for method covered a wide range of constituent elements, but left off gold. I would feel pretty bad for them if they genuinely discovered an RTP superconductor but that omission prevents them from becoming billionaires. But more likely the issue is that their current method ha…

You can get a composition of matter patent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_of_matter) for something shockingly novel, and this might be. It's super hard to find anything that would qualify, but I've been awarded them before for materials science research.

You can write stuff down generally enough that it's hard to make small changes and get around it. I did a lot of "1-10%" stuff in the claims.

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

#70
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure it depends on jurisdiction, but in the US, you can't patent a material, only a method to make it. If I recall correctly, their patent for method covered a wide range of constituent elements, but left off gold. I would feel pretty bad for them if they genuinely discovered an RTP superconductor but that omission prevents them from becoming billionaires. But more likely the issue is that their current method ha…

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