Exotic new superconductors delight and confound • Hacker News Board

Re: Exotic new superconductors delight and confound

#71

Post by nine_k » Sun, Dec 15, 2024, 5:34 AM UTC

jmyeet wrote: post #60

nine_k wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mechanical properties are very important, too. Able to bend, able to be cut, able to withstand mild shocks and vibration without fracturing. Something you can make actual wires from, at least at some stage. This, superconducting at liquid nitrogen temperature, would produce a revolution. Transmission lines alone would be huge.

> Transmission lines alone would be huge. Transmission lines are a great example of competing demands. Copper is a better conductor so why do we use aluminium? Because of weight. And weight is a huge factor in supporting large cables over long distances. Metals are also ductile, which is important for a cable to hang in gravity under its own weight, be moved by the wind and so on. Assumedly exotic crystals wouldn't h…

I suppose that power lines may start looking more like pipelines. These can be above-ground is the actual piping is not heavy, on lower pylons with a reduced span. Liquid nitrogen is lighter than water, does not need high pressure, and the insulation is mostly styrofoam.

The voltage can be substantially lowered, because high currents don't lead to high losses; the current may be made as high as practical, near to the limit of the material's superconducting state.

Re: Exotic new superconductors delight and confound

#72

Post by zahlman » Sun, Dec 15, 2024, 7:58 AM UTC

jmyeet wrote: post #60

nine_k wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mechanical properties are very important, too. Able to bend, able to be cut, able to withstand mild shocks and vibration without fracturing. Something you can make actual wires from, at least at some stage. This, superconducting at liquid nitrogen temperature, would produce a revolution. Transmission lines alone would be huge.

> Transmission lines alone would be huge. Transmission lines are a great example of competing demands. Copper is a better conductor so why do we use aluminium? Because of weight. And weight is a huge factor in supporting large cables over long distances. Metals are also ductile, which is important for a cable to hang in gravity under its own weight, be moved by the wind and so on. Assumedly exotic crystals wouldn't h…

>Lastly, the GP is correct: liquid nitrogen is incredibly cheap. It's basically the cost of drinking water.

Hold on, what? How?? Reaching that temperature seems like a difficult task; and what's used as a source of pure nitrogen, anyway? Is there some clever trick to separating it out from the air?

Re: Exotic new superconductors delight and confound

#73

Post by Ygg2 » Sun, Dec 15, 2024, 1:17 PM UTC

philipkglass wrote: post #66

Ygg2 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think we'll really see a superconductor that ticks all the boxes. Reality is too noisy for such effects to take hold. If there was I think evolution would have already used it by now.

Do you mean biological evolution? There are a vast number of useful materials that terrestrial organisms cannot evolve because they're incompatible with the chemical/physical conditions inside living things. Organisms never evolved the use of aluminum structures, for example, even though aluminum has many useful properties and is more terrestrially abundant than carbon.

High temperature superconductor could in principle be inside an organism, because it's not fixed to a specific element. And energy savings would be immense.

Re: Exotic new superconductors delight and confound

#74

Post by ranger_danger » Fri, Dec 20, 2024, 4:48 PM UTC

steveoscaro wrote: post #45

Question - is this a field ripe for breakthroughs using advancing AI capabilities? Or not likely because LLMs haven’t ingested much data that could help reason in this field (or whatever reason)?

traditional LLMs do not reason