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Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor LK-99 preprint revision 2

arxiv.org

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Re: Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor LK-99 preprint revision 2

#71

Post by throwaway69123 »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #42
brunooliv wrote: post #12

What are the implications in general of room temperature superconductors? I just know that they needed typically ultra low temperatures right? But what would be the practical implications?

Anything that uses electricity would use less electricity because you aren’t wasting it as heat. So in theory you could have a ridiculous computer that runs 1000GW of power through it without heating up. Or a flying car. Or power cables that lose nothing during travel. Naturally that’s why it doesn’t make sense. It’s too game-breaking to be possible in normal conditions. Glitching something out by making it basically…

It makes about as much sense than a computer in your pocket that’s not even plugged in being many orders of magnitude better than a computer that takes up an entire room and can barely do on operation a second

Re: Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor LK-99 preprint revision 2

#72

Post by sanxiyn »

maebert wrote: post #67
ajb117 wrote: post #55

I don't know much physics, but is there a reason we should be hoping for superconductivity specifically rather than a cheap material that's just a very very good conductor? Also, even if LK-99 were superconductive, that wouldn't imply it would be useful for computing, right? Surely there are materials that are better conductors than silicon but have mechanical and other physical quirks preventing us from using then f…

A few practical things that we need superconductors for which currently require very expensive cooling: 1) MRIs — could be way cheaper, smaller and more ubiquitous with room temperature superconductors 2) Maglev trains — superconducters expel a magnetic fields that can make things "levitate" (called the Meissner effect). Maglev trains have minimal friction and are incredibly energy-efficient. 3) Quantum computing — m…

MRI is a potential application of room temperature superconductor in general, but not specifically for LK-99. One disadvantage of LK-99 is that it has very low critical current, see patent figure 10.

On the other hand, 300 mA is more than enough for computing applications.

Re: Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor LK-99 preprint revision 2

#73

Post by chrisjj »

joefigura wrote: post #3

I just wrote a comment in another thread that's relevant here too. It looks like the first superconductor paper was released by a rouge researcher, without the agreement of the other two authors or the rest of the LK-99 group. This forced the LK-99 group to rush to publish the official paper, with a cost to quality. The LK-99 group released v2 a week later (on Saturday), and probably will continue to update it. A pre…

> It looks like the first superconductor paper was released by a rouge researcher, without the agreement of the other two authors or the rest of the LK-99 group

Please do cite any evidence, beyond a mere accusation.

Re: Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor LK-99 preprint revision 2

#74

Post by robinduckett »

tdehnel wrote: post #63
huijzer wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) it takes a undergrad to make and measure a superconductor by a Nobel laureate to explain it. Another example of Taleb’s idea that experimentation comes first and theories second. Universities pretend that it’s the other way around but apart from an Einstein it’s usually not.

Not possible. Theory comes first. Scientists need a theory first to know which experiments to do. Any interesting experimental results are interesting precisely because they do not conform to the existing theories. Edit: here's a decent writeup to show what I mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness

So before Isaac Newton, apples would float up off the tree when they fell?

Re: Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor LK-99 preprint revision 2

#75

Post by askvictor »

sanxiyn wrote: post #35
brunooliv wrote: post #12

What are the implications in general of room temperature superconductors? I just know that they needed typically ultra low temperatures right? But what would be the practical implications?

Cooler chips. Chips heat due to resistance, and superconductors have zero resistance (by definition). I suspect this is the company's intended application. The following quote from their patent is very suggestive if you know about semiconductor manufacturing. > In addition, various energy sources used for deposition are not limited to chemical vapor deposition (CVD) using heat, but atomic layer deposition (ALD), sput…

Is the copper or the silicon responsible for most of the heat in a chip?

Re: Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor LK-99 preprint revision 2

#76

Post by __sy__ »

tdehnel wrote: post #63
huijzer wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) it takes a undergrad to make and measure a superconductor by a Nobel laureate to explain it. Another example of Taleb’s idea that experimentation comes first and theories second. Universities pretend that it’s the other way around but apart from an Einstein it’s usually not.

Not possible. Theory comes first. Scientists need a theory first to know which experiments to do. Any interesting experimental results are interesting precisely because they do not conform to the existing theories. Edit: here's a decent writeup to show what I mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness

For the wetter sciences, the answer is somewhere in between. We usually have somewhat of an understanding of the prior theory. We then throw a lot of stuff at the wall…. Oh, this sticks? Eh, why? And then usually some more clever person will come up with reasons for why X works beyond what we already knew. A few years later, the field reaches some sort of consensus around one of the hypothesis.

Re: Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor LK-99 preprint revision 2

#77

Post by sdenton4 »

tdehnel wrote: post #63
huijzer wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) it takes a undergrad to make and measure a superconductor by a Nobel laureate to explain it. Another example of Taleb’s idea that experimentation comes first and theories second. Universities pretend that it’s the other way around but apart from an Einstein it’s usually not.

Not possible. Theory comes first. Scientists need a theory first to know which experiments to do. Any interesting experimental results are interesting precisely because they do not conform to the existing theories. Edit: here's a decent writeup to show what I mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness

Hope the air's good in the tower...

Good science has often proceeded from 'weird' observations, leading to experiments trying to isolate the weirdness. The weird is necessarily outside the zone of existing theory, and requires experimentation to recreate the effect reliably and quantifiably. Once that's done, you can iterate on conjectures and experiments to try to get to the bottom of what's going on.

In reality, I suspect that the divide between theorists and experimentalists is really only a fundamental physics thing. And physics has been more-or-less at an impasse for the last thirty years, so that there are relatively few experiments worth running, and the bulk of the theorists are just (making stuff/rebranding as mathematicians) up because they don't know what else to do.

In other areas, there's so much weird still untouched that you don't get the same division of labor. Take a look at CRISPR - there was a lot of bench work and curiosity-driven exploration involved, simply because there was no theory describing what they were discovering... Or machine learning - the theory is still quite tenuous and mainly follows the experimental results.

Re: Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor LK-99 preprint revision 2

#78

Post by picadores »

brunooliv wrote: post #12

What are the implications in general of room temperature superconductors? I just know that they needed typically ultra low temperatures right? But what would be the practical implications?

Dual batteryloops storing solar energy for years in lightweight constructs that have magnetic fields that can be seen from orbit ..

Re: Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor LK-99 preprint revision 2

#79

Post by sanxiyn »

askvictor wrote: post #75
sanxiyn wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cooler chips. Chips heat due to resistance, and superconductors have zero resistance (by definition). I suspect this is the company's intended application. The following quote from their patent is very suggestive if you know about semiconductor manufacturing. > In addition, various energy sources used for deposition are not limited to chemical vapor deposition (CVD) using heat, but atomic layer deposition (ALD), sput…

Is the copper or the silicon responsible for most of the heat in a chip?

It is the copper.

Re: Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor LK-99 preprint revision 2

#80

Post by prpl »

Tade0 wrote: post #59
xattt wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time to invest in lead futures?

Or buy car batteries while they're still affordable. Lead is less abundant in the Earth's crust than cobalt or neodymium, or even lanthanum.

that really doesn’t mean anything. For one, it’s easy to find and mine lead. Been doing it for millennia
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