A room-temperature superconductor? New developments(science.org)
science.org
A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/room-temperature-superconductor-new-developments
806 comments
None of the things you listed are limited by the conductors in them. The efficiency of high voltage AC power lines is limited by capacitive coupling to ground. Battery charging is limited by the cell chemistry. CPU heat output is limited by the resistance of the semiconductors.
Turns out metals (in particular copper) are already incredibly good conductors.
Turns out metals (in particular copper) are already incredibly good conductors.
> CPU heat output is limited by the resistance of the semiconductors.
This is not true anymore. At leading edge process nodes (i.e., smaller conductor pitch), the bulk resistivity of copper changes dramatically because it is increasingly dominated by ballistic electron scattering on the interfaces and grain boundaries: surface area has decreased as a fraction of volume and the average grain size has shrunk to fit inside the interconnect lines.
Alternative metals like Cobalt and Ruthenium have been proposed and to some extent used in production as an alternative to Cu for the low interconnect layers, but they just arrest the trend -- the fact is that the interconnect resistance is much higher than it used to be.
It's also why a lot of the big players like TSMC and Intel are investing heavily in backside power delivery.
Here is an accessible article on the topic:
https://www.fabricatedknowledge.com/p/backside-power-deliver...
(Also: high-voltage DC power is commonly used for long-range transmission and does not have coupling issues)
This is not true anymore. At leading edge process nodes (i.e., smaller conductor pitch), the bulk resistivity of copper changes dramatically because it is increasingly dominated by ballistic electron scattering on the interfaces and grain boundaries: surface area has decreased as a fraction of volume and the average grain size has shrunk to fit inside the interconnect lines.
Alternative metals like Cobalt and Ruthenium have been proposed and to some extent used in production as an alternative to Cu for the low interconnect layers, but they just arrest the trend -- the fact is that the interconnect resistance is much higher than it used to be.
It's also why a lot of the big players like TSMC and Intel are investing heavily in backside power delivery.
Here is an accessible article on the topic:
https://www.fabricatedknowledge.com/p/backside-power-deliver...
(Also: high-voltage DC power is commonly used for long-range transmission and does not have coupling issues)
No it pretty much is true, well it's the power draw from switching transistors and from leakage losses.
Resistance in the metal wires is not so much a problem for power as it is for signal propagation delay. That is the biggest problem with R skyrocketing in M0/1.
And backside power delivery is to relieve congestion in the interconnects. That's typically one of the limiting factors in complex logic designs now, transistor densities of under 70% aren't uncommon.
That's what "Removing the power signal and signal line to just a signal line would free up space for more transistors." line is about in the link. Power delivery losses aren't nothing, but they aren't a big fraction of energy in today's CPUs.
Eliminating most wire delay would be a huge benefit though, and could be a pretty big revolution. Not just within the core or on the die. You're still going to have to switch those transistors and burn current on leakage though, so no cold CPUs just yet.
Resistance in the metal wires is not so much a problem for power as it is for signal propagation delay. That is the biggest problem with R skyrocketing in M0/1.
And backside power delivery is to relieve congestion in the interconnects. That's typically one of the limiting factors in complex logic designs now, transistor densities of under 70% aren't uncommon.
That's what "Removing the power signal and signal line to just a signal line would free up space for more transistors." line is about in the link. Power delivery losses aren't nothing, but they aren't a big fraction of energy in today's CPUs.
Eliminating most wire delay would be a huge benefit though, and could be a pretty big revolution. Not just within the core or on the die. You're still going to have to switch those transistors and burn current on leakage though, so no cold CPUs just yet.
Yes RC wire delays have becoming more important than gate capacitance for a couple of decades now - if R goes to 0 RC delays do too
I guess the next limiting factor would be LC delays.
> CPU heat output is limited by the resistance of the semiconductors.
Technically true but not applicable... Super conducting CPUs already exist (at below room temp), and they don't use semiconductors. They don't have an exact transistor equivalent but use digital logic circuits such as Quantum Flux Parametron (QFP) and rapid single flux quantum (RSFQ), which are comprised of Josephson Junctions [0] which are made from the same super conducting material. Relying on quantum effects of a gap between two conductors rather than specific material properties.
So while it is true that CMOS are limited by the resistance of both the conductor interconnects AND the semiconductors. Super conducting circuits only appear to need a conductor... There are other drawbacks, such as larger feature sizes due to the nature of super conducting materials, and QFP and RSFQ might be more complex? but this is potentially offset by huge advantages: zero resistance buys not only power efficiency and minimum heat generation (as required by landauer limit), but also allows circuits to be driven at a higher clock, so far demonstrated to 770GHz for one CPU [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephson_effect
[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/superconductor-logic-goes-lowpower
Technically true but not applicable... Super conducting CPUs already exist (at below room temp), and they don't use semiconductors. They don't have an exact transistor equivalent but use digital logic circuits such as Quantum Flux Parametron (QFP) and rapid single flux quantum (RSFQ), which are comprised of Josephson Junctions [0] which are made from the same super conducting material. Relying on quantum effects of a gap between two conductors rather than specific material properties.
So while it is true that CMOS are limited by the resistance of both the conductor interconnects AND the semiconductors. Super conducting circuits only appear to need a conductor... There are other drawbacks, such as larger feature sizes due to the nature of super conducting materials, and QFP and RSFQ might be more complex? but this is potentially offset by huge advantages: zero resistance buys not only power efficiency and minimum heat generation (as required by landauer limit), but also allows circuits to be driven at a higher clock, so far demonstrated to 770GHz for one CPU [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephson_effect
[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/superconductor-logic-goes-lowpower
> so far demonstrated to 770GHz for one CPU
That's not a CPU, it's a simple circuit. From the article, "Simple superconducting logic circuits have been shown to operate at speeds of up to 770 gigahertz."
Exotic semiconductor transistors can switch that fast, record being over 800GHz I think. Regular transistors of the type in your phone can probably do around 200-300GHz. Not to say there could not be revolutionary designs opened up with superconducting wires or switches, just the switching speed itself doesn't necessarily tell us one way or the other.
That's not a CPU, it's a simple circuit. From the article, "Simple superconducting logic circuits have been shown to operate at speeds of up to 770 gigahertz."
Exotic semiconductor transistors can switch that fast, record being over 800GHz I think. Regular transistors of the type in your phone can probably do around 200-300GHz. Not to say there could not be revolutionary designs opened up with superconducting wires or switches, just the switching speed itself doesn't necessarily tell us one way or the other.
Good catch, I misread that. Clock frequency is ultimately dependent on the longest path of propagation, so it does depend on the circuit, or CPU.
I'd be interested to know from any experts whether there is potential for fundamentally higher switching speed in super conducting circuits. As you suggest, they are not necessarily directly indicative of the clock speed of a specific real world circuit or CPU, especially considering super conductors don't even use transistors and need to use different building blocks for equivalent logic... but as a rough indication based on order of magnitude of switching speed would be interesting.
I'd be interested to know from any experts whether there is potential for fundamentally higher switching speed in super conducting circuits. As you suggest, they are not necessarily directly indicative of the clock speed of a specific real world circuit or CPU, especially considering super conductors don't even use transistors and need to use different building blocks for equivalent logic... but as a rough indication based on order of magnitude of switching speed would be interesting.
I doubt that regular cellphone transistor can _switch_ at 200Ghz; their GBW might be in that range, but for reliable switching you need clock frequency at most 1/10 of GBW
They can, as calculated by switching delays of simple circuits like inverters and NANDs (so simpler than a FO4).
Actually it's probably more like 200 than 300, I haven't seen 3nm models but transistors are still getting faster.
Actually it's probably more like 200 than 300, I haven't seen 3nm models but transistors are still getting faster.
It might be possible to create a new kind of transistor that turns on/off by changing the superconductivity of the conducting material.
> The efficiency of high voltage AC power lines is limited by capacitive coupling to ground.
And to this point, HVDC has been slowly rising as a viable alternative beyond just undersea transmission.
A mistaken belief is that AC is more efficient than DC. What AC is is more easy to transform from one voltage to another (until somewhat recently). That makes it easier to run AC at 1 MV and then step it down to 240V for residential applications.
The cost is as AC voltage goes up, capacitive resistance increases. This is part of the reason why high voltage lines have such huge towers with the lines far apart.
An HVDC line, however, can be put underground (or water) without suffering power losses. It's voltage can go well above that of AC voltages with the only limit being how much insulation we need for the line.
Super conductors are nice, but only in the "now we can run 1 billion amps at 100V" sense to avoid the capactive resistance. Without any sort of special materials you get most of the benefits of super conductors by using HVDC. The only real downside is high voltage DC is still super dangerous. Cut the insulation and you've got something that can arc meters whereas a superconductor at lower voltages would be about the same danger as any other conductor at lower voltages.
And to this point, HVDC has been slowly rising as a viable alternative beyond just undersea transmission.
A mistaken belief is that AC is more efficient than DC. What AC is is more easy to transform from one voltage to another (until somewhat recently). That makes it easier to run AC at 1 MV and then step it down to 240V for residential applications.
The cost is as AC voltage goes up, capacitive resistance increases. This is part of the reason why high voltage lines have such huge towers with the lines far apart.
An HVDC line, however, can be put underground (or water) without suffering power losses. It's voltage can go well above that of AC voltages with the only limit being how much insulation we need for the line.
Super conductors are nice, but only in the "now we can run 1 billion amps at 100V" sense to avoid the capactive resistance. Without any sort of special materials you get most of the benefits of super conductors by using HVDC. The only real downside is high voltage DC is still super dangerous. Cut the insulation and you've got something that can arc meters whereas a superconductor at lower voltages would be about the same danger as any other conductor at lower voltages.
Minor nitpick — "now we can run 1 billion amps at 100V" — there is a limit to how much current you can put down a superconductor. For example I think commercial YBCO superconductor tape will do roughly 1000A/mm^2 (and even that requires being significantly below its critical temperature).
That’s a pretty high current density compared to what’s feasible with copper — don’t get me wrong — but a billion amps would still require a pretty huge cable even with a superconductor.
That’s a pretty high current density compared to what’s feasible with copper — don’t get me wrong — but a billion amps would still require a pretty huge cable even with a superconductor.
Presumably everything in the chain, every junction, would also need to be a pure super conductor? Anything else would be susceptible to instantly melting or vaporising.
So unless someone comes up with super conducting welding I guess that would mean no junctions.
So unless someone comes up with super conducting welding I guess that would mean no junctions.
Not only that, the magnetic field around the wire at 1 bln amps will be way too large. It will like pick up nails from the ground easily.
"A mistaken belief is that AC is more efficient than DC. What AC is is more easy to transform from one voltage to another (until somewhat recently). That makes it easier to run AC at 1 MV and then step it down to 240V for residential applications."
DC is also used because a conductor can carry more current per kg than AC due to not having any skin loss. You can use smaller wires, less metal, less dollars.
DC is also used because a conductor can carry more current per kg than AC due to not having any skin loss. You can use smaller wires, less metal, less dollars.
AC is also easier to switch under load.
> - Lossless transport of energy - Batteries that don't take any time to recharge - Faster CPUs. Much faster with no heat to burn your lap.
Finally someone is speaking English in these room-temperature superconductor threads that I can actually understand and get excited about!
> None of the things you listed are limited by the conductors in them.
Never mind. :(
Finally someone is speaking English in these room-temperature superconductor threads that I can actually understand and get excited about!
> None of the things you listed are limited by the conductors in them.
Never mind. :(
In the RF world (particularly at mm-wave frequencies), even copper has very non-negligible losses. In most passive circuits conductor loss is the limiting factor of performance. No idea if this material retains the same properties at such frequencies, and is compatible with typical lithography or other fabrication techniques, but it'd be amazing if so.
Particle accelerators sometimes use superconducting niobium resonators at e.g. 1.8K offering a Q of 5e10 at 1.3 GHz.
But apparently their surface resistance scales with the square of frequency, unlike the square root in normal copper.
So maybe just just t normal conductors like copper, silver, graphene (assuming the latter can be commercially made to surpass silver in RF surface resistance).
So maybe just just t normal conductors like copper, silver, graphene (assuming the latter can be commercially made to surpass silver in RF surface resistance).
Silver is very good for RF power work, so good that I doubt that anything will be able to supplant it on a cost basis because you only need a tiny little bit of it to plate your copper carrier to get really good results. Obviously not perfect, there is still some resistance but it's hard to compete with because of the combination of properties in terms of ductility, flexibility, resistance to deep corrosion and so on.
But it is. A significant part of electronics engineering is dedicated to heat dissipation.
So what do we stand to gain?
At least a slight improvement in efficiency of transmission. And a huge improvement due to simpler heat dissipation needs.
So this might mean way faster battery charging - like 500 miles worth of charge in 5 mins. We’re mainly limited by how hot the batteries get during charging.
So what do we stand to gain?
At least a slight improvement in efficiency of transmission. And a huge improvement due to simpler heat dissipation needs.
So this might mean way faster battery charging - like 500 miles worth of charge in 5 mins. We’re mainly limited by how hot the batteries get during charging.
We're about halfway there already, just by cooling: 250km in under 4 min (1).
(1) https://www.tue.nl/en/news-and-events/news-overview/13-07-20...
(1) https://www.tue.nl/en/news-and-events/news-overview/13-07-20...
I love that electric vehicle charging can be expressed in speeds (that is, distance divided by time). 250km/4min is 3750km/h, a touch over Mach π.
I like this. Woah, your car charges at 4000 kilometers a hour? Mine only does 3000!
This is incredibly exciting. The biggest hurdle as yet to mass adoption.
We’re not talking about charging existing batteries but superconductors where you just “trap” large amounts of electricity in the superconductor for future use.
Unfortunately magnets put forces on themselves, which means you’re limited to storing up to about as much energy as it would take to break the thing making the field; or, to put it another way, it’s about the same range of energy densities as springs or rubber bands.
Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36954783
Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36954783
Does that mean you would get equal(but probably insanely more dangerous) performance with a giant miles long spring instead of the proposed superconducting loops?
Do you mean superconductors create super capacitors, or how do you want to trap the charge?
Or store in coils, as "magnetic energy"(forgot the name for it)
Or store in coils, as "magnetic energy"(forgot the name for it)
> Battery charging is limited by the cell chemistry.
Yes, but superconductors don't have that limitation, do they? You just dump current into them.
Yes, but superconductors don't have that limitation, do they? You just dump current into them.
They have low losses when storing power, but power has to be stored in the magnetic field. They have a limit on acceptable magnetic field strength called the critical field though, above which it stops being a superconductor and bad things™ happen. Current SMES systems have an energy density of about ¹⁄₅₀th of current Li-ion batteries.
You are right about the energy density and limitations. I was more focused on the fast rate of storage and retrieval.
We already have incredible supercapacitors.
https://www.eaton.com/gb/en-gb/catalog/electronic-components...
I have 4 at home and blows people's minds when you melt a wire with it. Incredible rapid current delivery.
https://www.eaton.com/gb/en-gb/catalog/electronic-components...
I have 4 at home and blows people's minds when you melt a wire with it. Incredible rapid current delivery.
They don't store any meaningful amount of electricity (which is why they haven't supplanted Li-Ion batteries for power tools) and more importantly they have a cycle-life - they degrade from usage (source: my wife works for a supercapacitor manufacturer).
You also get losses from practical usage - i.e. no one can build a 3V supercapacitor that has decent endurance (you can totally build one which will work, but you're rating it knowing that every cycle is damaging it).
You also get losses from practical usage - i.e. no one can build a 3V supercapacitor that has decent endurance (you can totally build one which will work, but you're rating it knowing that every cycle is damaging it).
Overlooking the cell chemistry issue...
... you cannot just dump unlimited current through a superconductor. Once you exceed the critical current density, your superconductor becomes a regular conductor.
... you cannot just dump unlimited current through a superconductor. Once you exceed the critical current density, your superconductor becomes a regular conductor.
Also the thing will be a really strong magnet while it is storing energy. Even if it doesn't rip itself apart it will stick to stuff amd lose energy.
And in any case whatever power source you're using cannot deliver infinite power.
Who said infinite power?
It's implied by instant charging. The power would be the battery capacity divided by 0.
No one means literally zero time to charge. A couple seconds compared to minutes or hours is virtually instant for practical purposes.
Let me keep being pedantic and notice that a typical phone capacity of 10000 Joules divided by 2 seconds is still 5 kW of power, so not a trivial amount. I'd think 30 seconds (333 Watts) is more realistic.
If we can even get the charge times for EVs down to the minutes to take to refill ICE tanks. It will basically remove the range anxiety problem.
Best way to get EV 'refill' time to minutes is battery swapping. This already exists commercially, see Nio in China, and it apparently takes as little as 3 minutes.
Similar speeds for charging are impractical because of the power spikes required even if the battery could take it.
You cannot have instant charging, that's not pedantic, that's the discussion, and in any case there is a practical limit to how fast it can happen for similar reasons.
All the work being done on smart home EV chargers that automatically schedule the right time (controlled by grid) to charge overnight are because even at current speeds this wreaks havoc on the electrical subsystems and grid if everyone plug their EVs in at the same time in the evening...
Similar speeds for charging are impractical because of the power spikes required even if the battery could take it.
You cannot have instant charging, that's not pedantic, that's the discussion, and in any case there is a practical limit to how fast it can happen for similar reasons.
All the work being done on smart home EV chargers that automatically schedule the right time (controlled by grid) to charge overnight are because even at current speeds this wreaks havoc on the electrical subsystems and grid if everyone plug their EVs in at the same time in the evening...
I personally don't have a problem with the current 30 minute charge. If you drive you should stop for 20 to 30 minutes every couple of hours.
What we need is sufficient infrastructure for ev charging.
What we need is sufficient infrastructure for ev charging.
That’s pedantic. No one means literal instant charging, just figuratively.
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Are you thinking of supercapacitors?
He's thinking of superconducting magnetic energy storage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_energ...
Currently they're only feasible as high quality power sources for fabs and other industrial uses because of the operating costs of cooling the superconductors.
Currently they're only feasible as high quality power sources for fabs and other industrial uses because of the operating costs of cooling the superconductors.
Also used for grid stabilization.
So superconductor supercapacitors
More like superinductors than supercapacitors - the energy is stored in a magnetic field (inductor) and not an electric field (capacitor)
There is a theory that with room temperature superconductors you could use an inductor for practical energy storage.
what are the practicalities of storing enormous magnetic fields and then collapsing them to draw power? that seems...not obviously a good idea.
[deleted]
>The efficiency of high voltage AC power lines is limited by capacitive coupling to ground.
As often in engineering, the sweet spot is where multiple factors have ~equal contributions, so even a 50% win in one of the factors can't give you that much benefit.
For high voltage AC power lines it's Ohmic losses, corona discharge losses, and inductive losses.
As often in engineering, the sweet spot is where multiple factors have ~equal contributions, so even a 50% win in one of the factors can't give you that much benefit.
For high voltage AC power lines it's Ohmic losses, corona discharge losses, and inductive losses.
Superconducting powerlines would be able to transport DC electricity with 0% losses. To put this in context: you could put solar panels in California, and send every watt of power to Alaska or New York, while losing nothing in the transport.
Yeah at those kinds of scales I get doubtful. At those scales the electrical fields themselves begin to exert inertia on things, to the point that you could cut most power lines and they wouldn't stop catastrophically, they'd continue catastrophically (a problem that only gets worse with superconductors, as happened to CERN when they accidentally vaporised a length of superconductor that had become conductive).
It could definitely open up the road to long distance high capacity power lines, but somewhere along the line reality is going to make things difficult. It's not magic after all, just sufficiently advanced technology.
It could definitely open up the road to long distance high capacity power lines, but somewhere along the line reality is going to make things difficult. It's not magic after all, just sufficiently advanced technology.
You could bury them or have very high overhead lines. Being able to have near instantaneous, lossless energy transfer would make it worth it (minus whatever impediment the GOP tries to put in the way to bolster gas/oil, but that’s just political).
Could you spot me a link to that CERN incident or on the topic of superconductors becoming conductive (looooool)? All I got for CERN was reports about gas leaks but I find myself very curious about the way superconductors fail now
Here is their own article on the incident: https://home.cern/news/press-release/cern/cern-releases-anal...
Doesn't sound too spectacular but it took them over a year to fix all the damage.
Doesn't sound too spectacular but it took them over a year to fix all the damage.
The superconducting effect of LK99 seems to top out at around 150 mA / cm^2. Maybe more research will bear fruit here, but for now we're not looking at HVDC lines.
> CPU heat output is limited by the resistance of the semiconductors.
Can't superconductor help here?
Can't superconductor help here?
Only a little, one big limitation in chips is RC wire delays (the distributed capacitance along a wire needs to be charged/discharged for a signal change to pass) - due to edge effects capacitance doesn't scale with the area of the wire - but R does (inversely so wires have gotten slower) - so as chips have got denser wires have not got faster at the same rate, when I first started building chips we mostly only cared about gate capacitances - now RC delays are a big deal - if R went to 0 RC delays would too - things would get faster
I'm surprised anyone is even trying that hard to make faster CPUs anymore, now that they're already so fast. You'd think everything would be done by GPUs or dedicated accelerators by now. Especially when so much of the internet is pretty much just serving video files.
But yet there's still so much that could be accelerated even with current hardware, but isn't.
But yet there's still so much that could be accelerated even with current hardware, but isn't.
It's not obvious to me how it could. Transistors require a semiconductor.
To my knowledge, computers can be designed without any transistors
They can, but then you're talking about a totally different physical scale of computer. Transistors are useful because we know how to shrink them to a scale of nanometers, in particular we know exactly how to do that with transistors printed with lasers onto silicon chips. We'd have to reboot the CPU manufacturing industry with new base materials/technologies.
It's hyper-specialized tech, so it'd probably take over a decade from now to be seen in useful, everyday technologies.
It's hyper-specialized tech, so it'd probably take over a decade from now to be seen in useful, everyday technologies.
Superconducting semiconductors? I doubt such a thing is possible.
Doubt no more. Its called a Josephson junction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephson_effect
> Can I have my flying car now?
I ditto the sentiment. But we don't want literal flying cars. Well, self driven flying cars. Humans have enough problems when they're driving on the ground on ground made for driving.
I ditto the sentiment. But we don't want literal flying cars. Well, self driven flying cars. Humans have enough problems when they're driving on the ground on ground made for driving.
I wonder if self flying cars are easier to make since every object in the air is an obstacle. This is less the true for ground transport since sometimes it may seem like an obstacle but it isn't (e.g. just a marking on the road).
Clouds are visible, but may not be an obstacle. Wind is invisible, but may be an obstacle.
There are far fewer things to run into in the sky.
true.
However the failure cases at those heights and velocities are far worse. There's several orders of magnitude difference between an airplane license and driving license.
However the failure cases at those heights and velocities are far worse. There's several orders of magnitude difference between an airplane license and driving license.
> Batteries that don't take any time to recharge
Huh? Is this actually a thing that this enables? I don't initially see how
Huh? Is this actually a thing that this enables? I don't initially see how
Nah, the GP is just completely out of reality.
We won't see lossless transmission in a very long time, and no place where an aluminum cable is too expensive today will become viable because something a million times more expensive is 9% more efficient.
Batteries won't see a revolution because of this, there's simply no reason for them to (but they are currently in a revolution, and there are more to come). AC storage in the superconductor will probably be the most expensive storage mechanism you can buy, and flywheels will keep having atrocious energy density, they won't even get twice as good. But it will completely revolutionize some niches in storage.
This won't replace metal layers in CPU for a really long time. Superconductors are hard enough to make, CPUs are absurdly hard to make, and the wins on power savings aren't very large. If people make superconducting chips, it will be ones where the superconductors do active switching, what is much farther away and can enable much faster CPUs too.
I really wish people would stop repeating those. If you are going out of your way for an outlandish claim, I'm much more interested on discussing if this can replace rockets for near Earth space travel than those absurd costly low gain things.
We won't see lossless transmission in a very long time, and no place where an aluminum cable is too expensive today will become viable because something a million times more expensive is 9% more efficient.
Batteries won't see a revolution because of this, there's simply no reason for them to (but they are currently in a revolution, and there are more to come). AC storage in the superconductor will probably be the most expensive storage mechanism you can buy, and flywheels will keep having atrocious energy density, they won't even get twice as good. But it will completely revolutionize some niches in storage.
This won't replace metal layers in CPU for a really long time. Superconductors are hard enough to make, CPUs are absurdly hard to make, and the wins on power savings aren't very large. If people make superconducting chips, it will be ones where the superconductors do active switching, what is much farther away and can enable much faster CPUs too.
I really wish people would stop repeating those. If you are going out of your way for an outlandish claim, I'm much more interested on discussing if this can replace rockets for near Earth space travel than those absurd costly low gain things.
They way I have described this is like the Wright brothers have just demonstrated the first power flight, and we are already planning the schedule for the A330's from LA to London.
It is exciting stuff but there is a very long way to go if true.
It is exciting stuff but there is a very long way to go if true.
> something a million times more expensive
Lanarkite and copper phosphide aren't expensive, other than the government controls on red phosphorous (because it can be used to make meth).
Lanarkite and copper phosphide aren't expensive, other than the government controls on red phosphorous (because it can be used to make meth).
>This won't replace metal layers in CPU for a really long time. Superconductors are hard enough to make, CPUs are absurdly hard to make, and the wins on power savings aren't very large. If people make superconducting chips, it will be ones where the superconductors do active switching, what is much farther away and can enable much faster CPUs too.
I would've thought the main wins would've been reduced heat generation. Like you said, power savings would be negligible. But at the data center scale I'd imagine that reduced heat would result in reduced air conditioning power costs. And potentially with thermal constraints removed, it would allow for more compact packaging per server as well.
Like you said though, I doubt it would happen any time soon.
I would've thought the main wins would've been reduced heat generation. Like you said, power savings would be negligible. But at the data center scale I'd imagine that reduced heat would result in reduced air conditioning power costs. And potentially with thermal constraints removed, it would allow for more compact packaging per server as well.
Like you said though, I doubt it would happen any time soon.
You can start to get to the answer if you look why metal layers aren't made with silver. If metal resistivity was that important, nobody would pass the chance of almost doubling the conductivity with a much smaller change than people are proposing here.
The reason they don't is because yeild is the one most important variable on the entire process. And silver adds enough complexity to decrease it. (A few chips do have silver layers. People manage to use them when the process is mature enough and the added complexity gets tamed. Including something like YBCO into a high-performance chips manufacturing process is a half-a-century project; LK-99 can't even be reliably done yet.)
The reason they don't is because yeild is the one most important variable on the entire process. And silver adds enough complexity to decrease it. (A few chips do have silver layers. People manage to use them when the process is mature enough and the added complexity gets tamed. Including something like YBCO into a high-performance chips manufacturing process is a half-a-century project; LK-99 can't even be reliably done yet.)
> I would've thought the main wins would've been reduced heat generation.
Most of the heat in a data center is coming from power burned in the devices themselves not the power transmission to those devices.
Sort of like how a space heater is hot at the heater portion, not the power cable going into the heater.
You aren't losing more than a W or so to transmission for every kW of power delivered. (in fact, you are generating more heat from the AC->DC transformation)
Typically, power cords and wiring is 15 AWG, which has a 10 milli-ohm/meter resistance and runs as 120V AC (maximum of 15->20A). So, 1000m of power cord running at full load would result in 150->200W of heat from the power cable. Meanwhile the server is generating 1.6->2.2kW of heat. (Assuming a single very long 1kM route is servicing the server).
Cut the cabling distance to a couple of meters and you can see why nobody worries at power consumption at that point.
Most of the heat in a data center is coming from power burned in the devices themselves not the power transmission to those devices.
Sort of like how a space heater is hot at the heater portion, not the power cable going into the heater.
You aren't losing more than a W or so to transmission for every kW of power delivered. (in fact, you are generating more heat from the AC->DC transformation)
Typically, power cords and wiring is 15 AWG, which has a 10 milli-ohm/meter resistance and runs as 120V AC (maximum of 15->20A). So, 1000m of power cord running at full load would result in 150->200W of heat from the power cable. Meanwhile the server is generating 1.6->2.2kW of heat. (Assuming a single very long 1kM route is servicing the server).
Cut the cabling distance to a couple of meters and you can see why nobody worries at power consumption at that point.
I meant in the integrated circuits rather then power supply.
[deleted]
It's interesting you are saying superconductors are hard to make because... if this one really is a superconductor it's pretty easy to make. YBCO is also not particularly hard to make either.
The semiconductor industry is also very happy to do hard things for marginal gains. They've spent a decade swapping out semiconductor junction materials at enormous expense because there's no other option.
The idea that reducing power consumption is also not large enough to matter is...yeah, detached from reality. Thermal density has been an enormous problem with increasing CPU feature densities. CPUs already run hotter then a kitchen hot-plate, which is why so much effort has been put into dynamic throttling and other tricks - you straight up can't run CPU circuit elements full-power for very long without the risk of frying them, or requiring a cooling system which is impractical for widespread deployment.
The idea that reducing power consumption is also not large enough to matter is...yeah, detached from reality. Thermal density has been an enormous problem with increasing CPU feature densities. CPUs already run hotter then a kitchen hot-plate, which is why so much effort has been put into dynamic throttling and other tricks - you straight up can't run CPU circuit elements full-power for very long without the risk of frying them, or requiring a cooling system which is impractical for widespread deployment.
Resistance is what makes things hot, and heat is what makes dumping huge amounts of charge current into batteries a bad idea. No resistance → no heat → no need to charge with low current†.
Another way to say it is that, with a superconducting wire, you can make the wire as thin as you want and still pass the same amount of current through it, without melting the wire. Picture using a USB-C cable to charge your car.
† (There'd still be a current limit due to the heat generated by the chemical reaction that rebuilds the battery's voltage potential... if said reaction is exothermic. Some battery chemistries are endothermic when charging!)
Another way to say it is that, with a superconducting wire, you can make the wire as thin as you want and still pass the same amount of current through it, without melting the wire. Picture using a USB-C cable to charge your car.
† (There'd still be a current limit due to the heat generated by the chemical reaction that rebuilds the battery's voltage potential... if said reaction is exothermic. Some battery chemistries are endothermic when charging!)
I’m not an expert on this, but I think superconducting wires have an current limit, as a current flowing creates a magnetic field which the superconductor has to repel. I read that the paper states a very low current limit for LK-99, meaning it loses superconductivity once a very modest amount of current is passed through it.
It's hard to tell what the critical current density of LK-99 is, because their sample is porous and probably very impure. They measured the critical current they could pass through a sample, but the conducting cross-section is somewhat unknown. Its high critical temperature suggests that it should probably have a higher current capacity than other superconductors. That said, in the extremes, current density is also limited by tensile strength, because electromagnetic coils repel themselves.
Is there any indication of what the breakdown voltage of LK-99 might be?
Couldn’t you bind it in resin?
That is.....kind of a huge limitation of the technology lol. Still very cool but less hype
I believe the implication is that LK-99 is basically a demonstration of an entire class of materials which should have room-temp superconduction properties. IE we can enumerate through the entire class and find the ones with the properties we want.
There is no reason to assume that even if it's real.
In fact, the tight tolerances of this seem to indicate the opposite.
In fact, the tight tolerances of this seem to indicate the opposite.
At least according to this wikipedia chart on superconductor discovery timelines[1], it seems like most discoveries aren't one-off.
I have no knowledge in this area though.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_superconductivity#/...
I have no knowledge in this area though.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_superconductivity#/...
A limitation...at ambient temperature and pressure.
Usually this is an optimization frontier, where something that has tetchy critical current/field at high temperature is going to have very good critical current/field at the same temperature as a lower-Tc superconductor.
If it superconducts at all at room temp, cooling it down even to 200K (about dry ice temp - quite cheap to do) could get you something very usable.
Usually this is an optimization frontier, where something that has tetchy critical current/field at high temperature is going to have very good critical current/field at the same temperature as a lower-Tc superconductor.
If it superconducts at all at room temp, cooling it down even to 200K (about dry ice temp - quite cheap to do) could get you something very usable.
> you can make the wire as thin as you want
No, superconductors have a specific current above which they stop superconducting so you will want to stay away from that limit. This particular superconductor has been presented with a very low Ic (150 mA in the original paper0 which would not make it particularly useful in such applications but future iterations (assuming it is all true) may improve on that (they should otherwise we have the equivalent of a superconducting straw).
No, superconductors have a specific current above which they stop superconducting so you will want to stay away from that limit. This particular superconductor has been presented with a very low Ic (150 mA in the original paper0 which would not make it particularly useful in such applications but future iterations (assuming it is all true) may improve on that (they should otherwise we have the equivalent of a superconducting straw).
I assume this would rule out things like fusion reactors, MRIs, and other high energy stuff. Would it still be revolutionary tech with a 150 mA limit?
Yes, it would be upending just about everything because the race would be on to improve on that. Think of it this way: once you show that something is possible at all there will be substantial funding available to improve on it. As long as you can't show that it is possible at all you're on your own. So if it works and that 150 mA is the limit then you can expect a ton of effort to be expended to improve on that and I fully expect those improvements not to take decades to show up. The more interesting question is if it really is that low of a limit what the reason is for that and I don't recall seeing any explanation so far.
On another note: a superconductor that can only do 150 mA / cm^2 seems intuitively strange, as though that figure is somehow off, it's a gigantic cross section for such a small current. It is very well possible that this is somehow an error in the reporting or an actual measurement on a thin sample with small cross section. So there are many explanations possible and only one of those is a true limit of the material.
On another note: a superconductor that can only do 150 mA / cm^2 seems intuitively strange, as though that figure is somehow off, it's a gigantic cross section for such a small current. It is very well possible that this is somehow an error in the reporting or an actual measurement on a thin sample with small cross section. So there are many explanations possible and only one of those is a true limit of the material.
The current hypothesis is that most likely whatever they made is not a pure sample of the material which actually superconducts - this is expected, since when you make YBCO superconductors you also tend to get low yields (i.e. ~20%) that actually superconduct.
So it could be the whole sample, or it could one micron-sized link of grains of whatever the "real" material is running through the sample.
So it could be the whole sample, or it could one micron-sized link of grains of whatever the "real" material is running through the sample.
> The current hypothesis is that most likely whatever they made is not a pure sample of the material which actually superconducts
That has been the hypothesis from day #1.
That has been the hypothesis from day #1.
Superconductors also have an inherent current limit above which they go back to having a resistance.
There are many things that seem like electrical resistance but are different phenomena. Capacitive reactance, inductance, "radiation resistance", etc. Superconductors don't prevent any of these effects. But, these effects are usually smaller than ordinary resistance.
[deleted]
Wouldn't the battery itself still have resistance? Or is the superconducting material itself a battery?
Depends. A single battery cell would have nontrivial resistance, yes.
But a big bank of batteries, like are in an EV? Very hard to give them enough current to heat them up. Most of the "heat problem" is from the bottlenecked current path into the car; once you fan out across all the individual cells, each individual cell isn't receiving much current.
And a bank of supercapacitors? You could charge it effectively instantly.
But a big bank of batteries, like are in an EV? Very hard to give them enough current to heat them up. Most of the "heat problem" is from the bottlenecked current path into the car; once you fan out across all the individual cells, each individual cell isn't receiving much current.
And a bank of supercapacitors? You could charge it effectively instantly.
The current is limited by what the battery chemistry can take, not by the cables. This is why the first 80% can be charged quite fast in modern EVs, and the last 20% are really slow.
Additionally you need to have the current to deliver in the first place. Having a grid that can dump 25-100 kwh into any given car in a couple of minutes is no small task if everyone is doing it.
The utilization factor would obviously be much lower than it would be if everybody charges at a lower rate so if the total amount of energy is equal that just means that individual vehicles will spend less time charging, and the grid will see - roughly - identical utilization on average but the peaks may be higher.
Probably worth pointing out that the peaks and troughs are what are challenging to deal with. Generators aren't generally great at changing output super fast.
I keep hearing battery tech is getting good, and the research I've seen suggests that more storage on the grid would improve efficiency by a lot, so I don't know if it would even pose a particular challenge if that sort of demand arose.. but overall utilization isn't really the limiting reagent.
I keep hearing battery tech is getting good, and the research I've seen suggests that more storage on the grid would improve efficiency by a lot, so I don't know if it would even pose a particular challenge if that sort of demand arose.. but overall utilization isn't really the limiting reagent.
Heat from power transfer is not the problem with current battery tech. We are already capable of delivering 350kW worth of power into EV batteries. The limiting factor is not the power cable delivering that power.
Thick cable, high voltage (900V typically) and everything is fairly manageable. Assuming we could consistently charge at that 350kW we could fully (0->100%) charge an 80kWh ev battery in 13 minutes. That's not slow.
The limiting factor is the battery chemistry, not the wire chemistry.
Thick cable, high voltage (900V typically) and everything is fairly manageable. Assuming we could consistently charge at that 350kW we could fully (0->100%) charge an 80kWh ev battery in 13 minutes. That's not slow.
The limiting factor is the battery chemistry, not the wire chemistry.
Sure, it would make the wiring smaller and more efficient. But I also don't see how it would help in the chemical energy transfer to charge the battery.
What I was trying to say is, with some battery chemistries, the current (heh) limiting step for charging speed is the wiring into, and of, the battery, rather than the safe reaction speed of the battery chemistry itself. We could safely "crank the chemistry" by an order-of-magnitude or more if we could get the desired current into the battery without the wires+electrodes conducting undue amounts of heat into the electrolyte.
No, it’s not. It’s the chemical reaction the limit.
In li-ion for example you will create dendrites when charging/discharging too fast or too deep. This is the cause of the relatively short cycle life.
According to the paper, this material stops superconducting at about 150mA per cm^2 of diameter, meaning that a 1cm-thick cable made of this material could conduct up to 150mA before the current is too much and it stops superconducting.
If my math is correct, then for a basic 500mA USB device, that would mean a cable a bit over 3 cm^2 in cross-sectional area, or about 2 cm across (for each of the power and ground leads, at least).
Alternately, a cable of just over 1/2cm in diameter (for power and ground, each) could charge a rechargable Ni-MH AA battery in about 12 hours and 40 minutes.
Tl;DR this is absolutely revolutionary science, if true, but we're definitely Not There Yet.
If my math is correct, then for a basic 500mA USB device, that would mean a cable a bit over 3 cm^2 in cross-sectional area, or about 2 cm across (for each of the power and ground leads, at least).
Alternately, a cable of just over 1/2cm in diameter (for power and ground, each) could charge a rechargable Ni-MH AA battery in about 12 hours and 40 minutes.
Tl;DR this is absolutely revolutionary science, if true, but we're definitely Not There Yet.
[deleted]
It’s a zero resistance wire. Build a loop and pump electrons in. Need them back? Connect an off-ramp.
There are limits how much you can pump into it, it isn’t magic… but it almost is actually.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_ene...
There are limits how much you can pump into it, it isn’t magic… but it almost is actually.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_ene...
> Less than 40kJ/L
Pretty sure that includes the volume of the entire cooling system needed to keep it superconducting.
The entire reason the current (possible) discovery may be revolutionary is that it doesn't need a cooling system.
[deleted]
But the current density limit makes that not super effective right?
> Can I have my flying car now?
Let's not forget the flying skateboard of the film "Back to the future". I loved it in the film and it's a dream that I still have today - I'm now almost 50 years old so I would probably crash and get killed by using it, but I would still give it a try :)
Let's not forget the flying skateboard of the film "Back to the future". I loved it in the film and it's a dream that I still have today - I'm now almost 50 years old so I would probably crash and get killed by using it, but I would still give it a try :)
There's no need to wait for flying skateboards, you can buy a regular skateboard at any shop around town and crash and get killed by using it.
(Said in jest by someone who recently turned 41 and hurt his back playing video games last year)
(Said in jest by someone who recently turned 41 and hurt his back playing video games last year)
I remember the feeling, while skateboarding, of the change of the roughness of the ground - some streets (or at least portions thereof) were very smooth and that felt already quite like flying => I wonder how that would feel with 0 surface roughness :)
>hurt his back playing video games last year
Some extreme force-feedback device? :)
>hurt his back playing video games last year
Some extreme force-feedback device? :)
Picking up the CRT and throwing it out the window?
Unfortunately, while you can indeed build hoverboards with superconductors and they do work, you still need a magnetic surface for it to ride over. I don't believe generalized hoverboards that will work on all surfaces like BttF are possible.
Well not with that attitude
Honestly, with that kind of superconductor, it may be easier and cheaper to cover the ground in superconducting material, and keep the magnets (or superconducting electromagnet) on your hoverboard!
Wouldn't a hoverboard with rockets on the bottom and back work? I'm not saying it's feasible, just that it's utilizing the same basic science as jets and space travel.
I think if you look up the smallest rocket that is capable of even lifting you off the ground on an instantaneous basis, let alone over time, you are going to be somewhat surprised at the size. I think you will also decide you don't particularly want to be at point-blank range to this rocket when it goes.
I mean, theoretically, if you loosen the definition of "hoverboard" enough, it might be possible to create something that hovers with you on it, but I don't think you'd accept it as a substitute for the movie hoverboard.
I mean, theoretically, if you loosen the definition of "hoverboard" enough, it might be possible to create something that hovers with you on it, but I don't think you'd accept it as a substitute for the movie hoverboard.
What about Earth's magnetic field?
It's moving all the time. Next year you won't be able to skate the same locations as of today because of this :(
Where is my hoverboard?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOH15_pqWZ4&ab_channel=SETHS...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOH15_pqWZ4&ab_channel=SETHS...
You are obviously joking but still, give foiling (as in pump foiling, wing foiling or eFoil) a try. It's not the same but the closest you can get, at least within 3 feet over a water surface (which makes crashing a lot more benign)
I mean, yeah, you'd need a very generous marketing budget to make a skatepark full of magnets so we can have hoverboards. Like the one Lexus already built: https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2015/6/25/8846785/lexus-hoverb...
Did we read the same paper? This is a ceramic.
To kill your buzz:
Liquid Nitrogen superconductors shocked the world in 1987 but have hardly changed it. They have some applications but we don't have transoceanic power cables, superconducting supercomputers, MAGLEV trains everywhere, etc.
You could have made the case that the cost of liquid helium cooling put traditional superconductors out of reach for most applications, but liquid nitrogen cooling is not difficult at all. Unlike helium, nitrogen is a renewable resource. Cuprate superconductors have been held back by issues that have had nothing to do with cooling and even if the new room temperature superconductors are for real, it's possible they'll turn out quite like the cuprates.
One strange thing about cuprate superconductors is that the theory is not understood despite being a "holy grail" for more than 35 years. It fits the schema of problems like dark matter, neutrino masses, the matter-antimatter and how energy gets coupled from a quasar accretion disk into a jet... Cases where a devilishly hard problem can go unsolved for the working lifetime of a physicist.
Liquid Nitrogen superconductors shocked the world in 1987 but have hardly changed it. They have some applications but we don't have transoceanic power cables, superconducting supercomputers, MAGLEV trains everywhere, etc.
You could have made the case that the cost of liquid helium cooling put traditional superconductors out of reach for most applications, but liquid nitrogen cooling is not difficult at all. Unlike helium, nitrogen is a renewable resource. Cuprate superconductors have been held back by issues that have had nothing to do with cooling and even if the new room temperature superconductors are for real, it's possible they'll turn out quite like the cuprates.
One strange thing about cuprate superconductors is that the theory is not understood despite being a "holy grail" for more than 35 years. It fits the schema of problems like dark matter, neutrino masses, the matter-antimatter and how energy gets coupled from a quasar accretion disk into a jet... Cases where a devilishly hard problem can go unsolved for the working lifetime of a physicist.
Reminds me of a story: I was in college physics in fall '89 and our professor was telling us how he and his son spent the summer in Alaska prospecting for whatever material was all the rage in superconductors at the time. He was explaining that when superconductors broke the liquid nitrogen temperature, it was a game changer. He said "If you buy it by the gallon, liquid nitrogen is cheaper than beer."
To which a student replied "You buy beer by the gallon?"
To which a student replied "You buy beer by the gallon?"
ever bought a keg?
It might even all come fast enough to save us from climate change
(But I'm not getting my hopes up)
(But I'm not getting my hopes up)
we already know how to stop climate change: actually stop burning shit and deploy existing technologies quickly. the problem is lack of will, not lack of technology.
corollary: anyone trying to say we need fancy new technologies like fusion/superconductores/supercapacitors isn't actually very interested in stopping climate change.
corollary: anyone trying to say we need fancy new technologies like fusion/superconductores/supercapacitors isn't actually very interested in stopping climate change.
> the problem is lack of will
Lack of will which fossil fuel shitbirds spend billions enfestering, with tobacco company style tactics. They knew exactly what the fuck they were doing for the last fifty+ years.
We probably agree on that, I'd just like to focus the blame where it properly belongs. Plenty of people care a lot about climate change, just as we care about plastic pollution and inequality, and I'm pretty fucking tired of being gaslit about it all.
Lack of will which fossil fuel shitbirds spend billions enfestering, with tobacco company style tactics. They knew exactly what the fuck they were doing for the last fifty+ years.
We probably agree on that, I'd just like to focus the blame where it properly belongs. Plenty of people care a lot about climate change, just as we care about plastic pollution and inequality, and I'm pretty fucking tired of being gaslit about it all.
Nuclear fusion would be quite handy. That's near limitless electricity from minimal input, with mostly safe failure modes and no nasty emissions.
Decent superconductors might enable, less lossy power transmission across distance, Maglev at scale, or perhaps initially, lower power consuming, small devices - every little helps.
I do agree with you though - that lot ain't any good right now. Don't allow yet more licenses in the North Sea etc ...
Decent superconductors might enable, less lossy power transmission across distance, Maglev at scale, or perhaps initially, lower power consuming, small devices - every little helps.
I do agree with you though - that lot ain't any good right now. Don't allow yet more licenses in the North Sea etc ...
> mostly safe failure modes
I believe they call this thing “harnessing the power of the sun”. I’m mildly sceptical about the safety of it’s failure modes.
Not to say I don’t still want it, but…
I believe they call this thing “harnessing the power of the sun”. I’m mildly sceptical about the safety of it’s failure modes.
Not to say I don’t still want it, but…
Fusion is not easy to sustain. The massive pressure in the center of the sun is instrumental in it working there - something we lack.
There are much more effective ways to geo-engineer earths climate. Their problem is the politics that surround all the options. Sooner or later we won't have other options.
yes but with all this power we’ll be able to render much more accurate models of our demise
Just to be a bit of a realist do we know if this material is malleable or practical to make intifrates circuits? Is it possible to make large single pieces of it? Don't get me wrong even if the awnser to all of these is no it's still probably the biggest single material science breakthrough since the transistors but we aren't necessarily going to be applicable to all the theoretical applications of semiconductors
> Much faster with no heat to burn your lap.
Computation inherently creates heat, that's not something that superconductors will change.
Computation inherently creates heat, that's not something that superconductors will change.
This is repeated over and over again but that's only a very small fraction of the kind of power that a computer uses. By the time you're talking about reversible computing all the low hanging fruit has been plucked and there are much, much bigger sources of loss. The biggest one impacted by superconductivity if (and that's a really big if) it can be used for the interconnect layers ('metal') in a chip and for the circuit traces outside of the chip that you can cut the charge and discharge time for the gates of the transistors in the chip down to a minimum. This in turn changes the power consumption of the chip because the transistor is either 'on' or 'off' and spends much less time on the transition in between where it is more of a resistor than a switch.
So it isn't determined whether or not it will be changed but it could be.
So it isn't determined whether or not it will be changed but it could be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle
The heat can be reduced by factor of a billion or so.
The heat can be reduced by factor of a billion or so.
Flipping a bit from 1 to 0 releases heat (because you can't just drop the 1 onto the negative/ground)
Resistance in non-super- conductors wastes electricity as heat.
From "Thermodynamics of Computation Wiki" (2018) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18146854 :
> "Quantum knowledge cools computers: New understanding of entropy" (2011) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110601134300.h...
>> The new study revisits Landauer's principle for cases when the values of the bits to be deleted may be known. (with QC)
Resistance in non-super- conductors wastes electricity as heat.
From "Thermodynamics of Computation Wiki" (2018) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18146854 :
> "Quantum knowledge cools computers: New understanding of entropy" (2011) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110601134300.h...
>> The new study revisits Landauer's principle for cases when the values of the bits to be deleted may be known. (with QC)
Reversible circuits [1] built with superconductors could generate no excess heat at all.
[1]: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-future-of-computing-depends-on...
[1]: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-future-of-computing-depends-on...
We won’t be getting long distance high voltage electricity transmission lines made of this (possible) room temperature superconductor for the same reasons we don’t have high voltage long distance electricity transmission made of gold, a much better conductor than copper.
[deleted]
What things are we going to do with this material in the next 5 years? What things that I buy and use will be made better?
You know those joke buzzer/shocker rings? Well, they're going to get really, really good.
Just what I've always wanted!
Hoverboards. I want those damn things as was prophesied by back to the future.
>The ramifications of the inflection point we are currently at is mind boggling.
No joshing, I just got done posting this on facebook: "If this is practical it will change the world like the transistor; maybe more."
No joshing, I just got done posting this on facebook: "If this is practical it will change the world like the transistor; maybe more."
Ha, I just posted about a dragonfly I saw while walking, and how it seemed unperturbed by the possibility of room temperature superconductors on Earth. I added that I should probably learn from the dragonfly.
Sounds more like the perennial "10 years in the future" techs, like memsistors, cold fusion, holographic storage, and so on.
> They also predict that substituting gold atoms into the Pb(1) site could lead to a material with very similar properties, which will be an extremely interesting idea to put to the test.
Since the base material is lead apatite, I had a random thought that maybe medieval alchemists trying to turn lead into gold just had it backward, as doping gold into lead might be a breakthrough. :-)
Since the base material is lead apatite, I had a random thought that maybe medieval alchemists trying to turn lead into gold just had it backward, as doping gold into lead might be a breakthrough. :-)
I want to believe.
After several millennia of killing people for gold, we can finally put all that gold to good use—using it to create superconductors that can power energy weapons we can use to kill each other.
♫ It's the circle of life ♫
After several millennia of killing people for gold, we can finally put all that gold to good use—using it to create superconductors that can power energy weapons we can use to kill each other.
♫ It's the circle of life ♫
> I want to believe.
Yeah, it's always possible this may not pan out but I'm really enjoying the visceral reminder that new fundamental science always has the potential to be suddenly transformative across a spectrum fields.
Yeah, it's always possible this may not pan out but I'm really enjoying the visceral reminder that new fundamental science always has the potential to be suddenly transformative across a spectrum fields.
Yeah, I wasn't all that interested at first due to the general uncertainty around the claims, but that Derek Lowe takes it this seriously does lend a certain tension.
>After several millennia of killing people for gold, we can finally put all that gold to good use
Wouldn't that just make gold even more valuable (and thus more killing will ensue, even ignoring the high energy weapons).
Wouldn't that just make gold even more valuable (and thus more killing will ensue, even ignoring the high energy weapons).
♫ And it moves us all ♫
♫ Through despair and hope ♫
♫ Through despair and hope ♫
People cut cables for copper. Imagine what will happen with cables with gold.
It would be sub-10%* gold content. We're talking about gold doping, specifically substitution in the Pb(1) site, not an alloy.
ETA: I was off by an order of magnitude (originally I said sub-1%) because the doping is extensive, and the mass of the lead/gold is a dominant fraction of the total. The formula given in the paper is (subscripts in brackets):
Pb[10−x]Cu[x](PO4)[6]O with 0.9 < x < 1.1.
Similarly for Au we would have Pb[10−x]Au[x](PO4)[6]O. Taking the centerpoint x=1, this becomes Pb[9]Au[1](PO4)[6]O. In other words, there would be one gold atom for every 9 lead atoms.
The "unit cell weight" is 2647.59 g/mol, and the molar mass of gold is 196.97 g/mol, so in fact the hypothetical gold weight content is about 7.44%, not sub-1%.
That said -- presumably superconducting transmission wires would be thinner than the ones we are used to (a function of critical current rather than resistance). So I'm not sure that we'd have a theft problem worse than we already have with copper.
ETA: I was off by an order of magnitude (originally I said sub-1%) because the doping is extensive, and the mass of the lead/gold is a dominant fraction of the total. The formula given in the paper is (subscripts in brackets):
Pb[10−x]Cu[x](PO4)[6]O with 0.9 < x < 1.1.
Similarly for Au we would have Pb[10−x]Au[x](PO4)[6]O. Taking the centerpoint x=1, this becomes Pb[9]Au[1](PO4)[6]O. In other words, there would be one gold atom for every 9 lead atoms.
The "unit cell weight" is 2647.59 g/mol, and the molar mass of gold is 196.97 g/mol, so in fact the hypothetical gold weight content is about 7.44%, not sub-1%.
That said -- presumably superconducting transmission wires would be thinner than the ones we are used to (a function of critical current rather than resistance). So I'm not sure that we'd have a theft problem worse than we already have with copper.
7.44% gold? That's ~$75 per oz of material. And you're talking about lead cable. Its kind of heavy, even if its thin. And it seems really easy to melt and separate. Notably, most power lines are actually aluminum, which is probably where people would really want this. Also chosen for its low weight / density, cause if you're gonna hang lines 100's of feet long, you want 2700 kg/m3, not 9000 kg/m3, and definitely not 11000 kg/m3. Although probably also significant applications in mm, um, and nm scale wiring.
At the end of their comment it notes that because it's a superconductor it would be thinner.
Perhaps assume an aluminum cladding for strength? Depending on how strong of a superconductor it is perhaps it's only 1% superconductor and 99% aluminum on top of the 10% content. So 0.1%?
I dunno, all these metals will be valuable in the future. Just saying, there's another large factor in estimating the gold content (conductivity saturation) that we don't know what it might be.
Perhaps assume an aluminum cladding for strength? Depending on how strong of a superconductor it is perhaps it's only 1% superconductor and 99% aluminum on top of the 10% content. So 0.1%?
I dunno, all these metals will be valuable in the future. Just saying, there's another large factor in estimating the gold content (conductivity saturation) that we don't know what it might be.
The superconductor itself would be 7.44% gold, but the wire would probably be much less -- superconducting tape isn't particularly strong so it will probably be wrapped up in layers of insulator and support wires.
I think that's right. There's no indication that it's mechanically strong, so you'd have it wrapped in layers of rubber/epoxy and steel cables in order to suspend it between power poles or transmission pylons.
YBCO tape has a critical current in the 1-10 MA/cm2 range, so if the properties of this RT stuff is anywhere close, the actual superconducting element of the wire could potentially be very thin.
YBCO tape has a critical current in the 1-10 MA/cm2 range, so if the properties of this RT stuff is anywhere close, the actual superconducting element of the wire could potentially be very thin.
FWIW strip mining operations till materials for ~6 PPM gold.
Having to handle lead for a practically unretrievable amount of gold would (I hope) be enough of a deterrent for the vast majority of "citizen scrappers". Worst case, I think a Pb/Au scrap grey-market would look something like the current catalytic converter market, where raw materials are purchased at set rate by an intermediary and then sold for further processing. Most people know there's gold in their computer parts, but still opt for the recycling bin/ziploc bag in a junk drawer.
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Computer components already have gold in them, and they are already recycled for gold.
There's a wide space between "can be recycled" and "profitable enough that there's theft for base components that can be resold". That doesn't mean it won't be profitable to harvest the gold (I don't know), but one does not imply the other.
For example, paper recycling is profitable when centralized (barely), but even that's with most the pipeline subsidized, and it's not profitable to the degree that people are stealing paper to turn in because it's worth the effort.
For example, paper recycling is profitable when centralized (barely), but even that's with most the pipeline subsidized, and it's not profitable to the degree that people are stealing paper to turn in because it's worth the effort.
paper recycling is profitable without any subsidies at all, and people do sometimes steal paper to recycle it
here in argentina there are tens of thousands of people who make a living by recycling, sorting through whatever trash they can get access to in order to find materials with enough resale value to scrape by. they haul plastic sacks or two-wheeled carts all over the metropolitan area, stacking them high with recyclables: aluminum, copper, car batteries, brass, whatever they can find. a crt tv left out on the curb will have its yoke broken off within an hour or three in order to harvest the copper. neighborhoods sometimes lose phone and internet service for months at a time because someone has recycled the cables. commemorative bronze plaques go missing from cemeteries
but the recyclers are not called aluminieros or bronceros or cobreros, taking the name of their profession from aluminum, brass, or copper; they are instead referred to by the most abundant material they recycle
they are the cartoneros, because what their carts are usually piled high with is cardboard, cartón
(needless to say this activity is not subsidized)
here in argentina there are tens of thousands of people who make a living by recycling, sorting through whatever trash they can get access to in order to find materials with enough resale value to scrape by. they haul plastic sacks or two-wheeled carts all over the metropolitan area, stacking them high with recyclables: aluminum, copper, car batteries, brass, whatever they can find. a crt tv left out on the curb will have its yoke broken off within an hour or three in order to harvest the copper. neighborhoods sometimes lose phone and internet service for months at a time because someone has recycled the cables. commemorative bronze plaques go missing from cemeteries
but the recyclers are not called aluminieros or bronceros or cobreros, taking the name of their profession from aluminum, brass, or copper; they are instead referred to by the most abundant material they recycle
they are the cartoneros, because what their carts are usually piled high with is cardboard, cartón
(needless to say this activity is not subsidized)
> people do sometimes steal paper to recycle it
> they are the cartoneros, because what their carts are usually piled high with is cardboard, cartón
Paper, or coardboard? It's unclear whether you're referring to cardboard as paper, because after your assertion the only thing possibly linked to it in the rest of the comment is your references to cardboard.
Cardboard is not paper. They share base components, but referring to cardboard as paper is akin to referring to a chair as a board. A chair is made of wood, and may be made of multiple boards, but if we're talking about the qualities and price of boards and you start trying to refute that with the price of chairs, people are going to call you out as losing the thread, rightly so.
For what it's worth, the subsidies I was referring to were the governmental ones in the U.S. where recycling centers and trash services can get funds, tax breaks, or special rates on lending when dealing with recycling which means all recycling done through those trash services are in some part subsidized by the state. At best that usually means you might get your recycling picked up for free or with reduced additional charges, but for the average person in the U.S. paper recycing is not worthwhile at an individual scale. Apparently it pays something around $50-$75 a ton, which isn't nothing, and might be worth doing in some locales, but I have to imagine the logistics of moving material of that weight on a regular basis to where it can be accepted means there are much more lucrative materials to harvest (either it's a long haul for most people, or I imagine middle men accepting it locally and transferring it are going to take a large cut).
> they are the cartoneros, because what their carts are usually piled high with is cardboard, cartón
Paper, or coardboard? It's unclear whether you're referring to cardboard as paper, because after your assertion the only thing possibly linked to it in the rest of the comment is your references to cardboard.
Cardboard is not paper. They share base components, but referring to cardboard as paper is akin to referring to a chair as a board. A chair is made of wood, and may be made of multiple boards, but if we're talking about the qualities and price of boards and you start trying to refute that with the price of chairs, people are going to call you out as losing the thread, rightly so.
For what it's worth, the subsidies I was referring to were the governmental ones in the U.S. where recycling centers and trash services can get funds, tax breaks, or special rates on lending when dealing with recycling which means all recycling done through those trash services are in some part subsidized by the state. At best that usually means you might get your recycling picked up for free or with reduced additional charges, but for the average person in the U.S. paper recycing is not worthwhile at an individual scale. Apparently it pays something around $50-$75 a ton, which isn't nothing, and might be worth doing in some locales, but I have to imagine the logistics of moving material of that weight on a regular basis to where it can be accepted means there are much more lucrative materials to harvest (either it's a long haul for most people, or I imagine middle men accepting it locally and transferring it are going to take a large cut).
mostly cartoneros recycle what the biz refers to as corrugated fiberboard, which most people call cardboard in english. it's made of paper and glue
there are different kinds of paper, which require different recycling streams; cartoneros will accept some others but not all
your talk about 'losing the thread' makes me think you are playing some kind of game where the objective is not to find out what the truth is but to sound convincing even if what you are saying is false
i am not playing that game. as far as i'm concerned, it's up to you to find out the truth, or not, not up to me to shove it down your throat, though i'm happy to provide relevant information
i am aware that in the usa recycling, even fake recycling, is heavily subsidized. that's why i was providing information about what happens in places where subsidies for recycling are scarce to nonexistent. almost nobody recycles plastic here (except for small programs that are subsidized and do things like recycle polypropylene bottlecaps), and only big operators recycle steel. but paper — specifically the kind of paper that corrugated fiberboard is made of — is abundantly recycled; it's not nearly as remunerative as brass, copper, aluminum, or lead, but it's the bread and butter of the cartoneros because people discard it in much higher volumes
i don't think it pays anywhere close to US$75 per tonne though, maybe a tenth of that
there are different kinds of paper, which require different recycling streams; cartoneros will accept some others but not all
your talk about 'losing the thread' makes me think you are playing some kind of game where the objective is not to find out what the truth is but to sound convincing even if what you are saying is false
i am not playing that game. as far as i'm concerned, it's up to you to find out the truth, or not, not up to me to shove it down your throat, though i'm happy to provide relevant information
i am aware that in the usa recycling, even fake recycling, is heavily subsidized. that's why i was providing information about what happens in places where subsidies for recycling are scarce to nonexistent. almost nobody recycles plastic here (except for small programs that are subsidized and do things like recycle polypropylene bottlecaps), and only big operators recycle steel. but paper — specifically the kind of paper that corrugated fiberboard is made of — is abundantly recycled; it's not nearly as remunerative as brass, copper, aluminum, or lead, but it's the bread and butter of the cartoneros because people discard it in much higher volumes
i don't think it pays anywhere close to US$75 per tonne though, maybe a tenth of that
> refers to as corrugated fiberboard, which most people call cardboard in english. it's made of paper and glue ... there are different kinds of paper
Isn't that exactly the point I just made? I'm confused as to why you're restating it. In English nobody is going to mistake someone that makes a statement about "paper" as talking about "cardboard", whether they're referring to corrugated fiberboard or plain fiberboard (which are both often referred to as cardboard depending on whether the context is arts, crafts or something else).
> your talk about 'losing the thread' makes me think you are playing some kind of game where the objective is not to find out what the truth is but to sound convincing even if what you are saying is false
If you look at my original comment, what I said about paper is purely an example to illustrate that commonly recycled doesn't necessarily mean worth supporting harvesting for base materials. Many other things go into that assessment (such as whether the base material can be easily separated from other materials and how its cost to transport affect any possible profit that might motivate people to do so.
That you refuted that example by using an entirely different material seems to either be a non-sequitur or misguided. While presented as a counterpoint, it doesn't really seem to affect the claim I was making at all.
That is what I meant by it lost the thread. It didn't really add to the conversation at hand usefully in the way it was presented. If it was presented as an interesting factoid about recycling and cardboard, which is related to paper, that would be one thing, and I would fully support it. But as to whether it means something that can be/is recycled will be scavenged for profit in all cases, I don't think it really says anything one way or the other, and that was what I was trying to convey.
If you're trying to say that paper itself as what any native English speaker would assume we're talking about if they read it, and not just cardboard, is also profitable to recycle and people collect and turn that in for profit then please clarify that point. Otherwise, while an interesting fact, and I'm happy to now know it, I'm not sure it actually affects what I was trying to communicate originally in any way.
Isn't that exactly the point I just made? I'm confused as to why you're restating it. In English nobody is going to mistake someone that makes a statement about "paper" as talking about "cardboard", whether they're referring to corrugated fiberboard or plain fiberboard (which are both often referred to as cardboard depending on whether the context is arts, crafts or something else).
> your talk about 'losing the thread' makes me think you are playing some kind of game where the objective is not to find out what the truth is but to sound convincing even if what you are saying is false
If you look at my original comment, what I said about paper is purely an example to illustrate that commonly recycled doesn't necessarily mean worth supporting harvesting for base materials. Many other things go into that assessment (such as whether the base material can be easily separated from other materials and how its cost to transport affect any possible profit that might motivate people to do so.
That you refuted that example by using an entirely different material seems to either be a non-sequitur or misguided. While presented as a counterpoint, it doesn't really seem to affect the claim I was making at all.
That is what I meant by it lost the thread. It didn't really add to the conversation at hand usefully in the way it was presented. If it was presented as an interesting factoid about recycling and cardboard, which is related to paper, that would be one thing, and I would fully support it. But as to whether it means something that can be/is recycled will be scavenged for profit in all cases, I don't think it really says anything one way or the other, and that was what I was trying to convey.
If you're trying to say that paper itself as what any native English speaker would assume we're talking about if they read it, and not just cardboard, is also profitable to recycle and people collect and turn that in for profit then please clarify that point. Otherwise, while an interesting fact, and I'm happy to now know it, I'm not sure it actually affects what I was trying to communicate originally in any way.
corrugated cardboard is made of paper, not an entirely different material; recycling cardboard is recycling paper. at this point i'm starting to question whether you've actually seen a piece of cardboard at some point or whether you're a large language model
certainly it is not the case that something that is commonly recycled will be scavenged for profit in all cases. even gold sometimes escapes recycling
certainly it is not the case that something that is commonly recycled will be scavenged for profit in all cases. even gold sometimes escapes recycling
> corrugated cardboard is made of paper, not an entirely different material; recycling cardboard is recycling paper
Did you actually bother to read what I wrote in my various comments? Much of it was devoted to explaining the difference in what it meant and when people say paper compared to what they mean when people say cardboard. Why do you think I talked about boards and chairs?
> at this point i'm starting to question whether you've actually seen a piece of cardboard at some point or whether you're a large language model
I could say the same for you, given your inability to follow what has been said across even a handful of replies.
> certainly it is not the case that something that is commonly recycled will be scavenged for profit in all cases. even gold sometimes escapes recycling
Which also wasn't my point. My point, again and put bluntly, is that some materials may exist in a space where it's not profitable enough to harvest for an individual but they are still recycled either because of subsidies or because efficiencies of scale can be brought to bear by a larger organization, or the combination of the two (subsidies for larger regional trash pickup companies that can also bring economies of scale to bear) which mean a material is recycled, even if not profitable for the common person. Another example would be items that are unlawful to discard of in the trash. There are various chemicals and materials that it's unlawful to dispose of in the trash in the U.S. (motor oil), meaning those items are taken to a recycling and/or disposal center even if there's no payment for doing so.
It's not about it escaping recycling because people miss it, it's about how both economies of scale and subsidies and laws that all go into whether something is recycled which affect that calculus beyond just whether it's profitable, and thus something being commonly recycled is not necessarily an indicator that it's lucrative enough to do so that the material will be harvested by people for profit.
Did you actually bother to read what I wrote in my various comments? Much of it was devoted to explaining the difference in what it meant and when people say paper compared to what they mean when people say cardboard. Why do you think I talked about boards and chairs?
> at this point i'm starting to question whether you've actually seen a piece of cardboard at some point or whether you're a large language model
I could say the same for you, given your inability to follow what has been said across even a handful of replies.
> certainly it is not the case that something that is commonly recycled will be scavenged for profit in all cases. even gold sometimes escapes recycling
Which also wasn't my point. My point, again and put bluntly, is that some materials may exist in a space where it's not profitable enough to harvest for an individual but they are still recycled either because of subsidies or because efficiencies of scale can be brought to bear by a larger organization, or the combination of the two (subsidies for larger regional trash pickup companies that can also bring economies of scale to bear) which mean a material is recycled, even if not profitable for the common person. Another example would be items that are unlawful to discard of in the trash. There are various chemicals and materials that it's unlawful to dispose of in the trash in the U.S. (motor oil), meaning those items are taken to a recycling and/or disposal center even if there's no payment for doing so.
It's not about it escaping recycling because people miss it, it's about how both economies of scale and subsidies and laws that all go into whether something is recycled which affect that calculus beyond just whether it's profitable, and thus something being commonly recycled is not necessarily an indicator that it's lucrative enough to do so that the material will be harvested by people for profit.
I don't understand how your comment implies a lack of subsidy, it only states that the people harvesting the material can make money off of it. Which would be true if it was subsidized, too.
it's not such a politically popular activity as to attract subsidies; it is tolerated and pitied rather than lauded and promoted
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We'll use them to build spacecraft that retrieve asteroids so rich in gold that it permanently crashes the price of gold?
People don't seem to realize how radically society will change if this superconductor thing is legit.
People don't seem to realize how radically society will change if this superconductor thing is legit.
How does room temperature superconductivity lead to the feasibility of asteroid mining? Could you please explain?
Magnetic launch. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_driver
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Asteroid mining becomes cost effective if the demand increases.
I don't think the material is very ductile so I'm not sure that you'd be able to easily run a cable like copper/aluminum/steel transmission lines
That would likely be addressed by vacuum deposition techniques.
Gold is everywhere in computing, not a big deal.
Not computing, arms manufacturing. Lead, tungsten or uranium projectiles with superconducting jackets fired from railguns.
You would probably put the superconductor in the barrel and magnets in the ammunition :)
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YOU IDIOT! W need the gold to turn the slaves back into carbon,m so we can make more slaves to harvest the gold!!* - https://youtu.be/rMz7JBRbmNo
--
I know we hate jokes - but apropos
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I know we hate jokes - but apropos
Now I'm imagining what history would have looked like if the alchemists had indeed stumbled upon a floating lead apatite sample a few centuries ago...
Good idea! They wouldn't have been able to do any applications without a voltaic cell, and it would have been a novelty. Like gunpowder in ancient China.
The Chinese invented cannons about the time they invented gun power. However by coincidence their forts used stone walls thick enough to resist cannon fire and so it was not really better than the various catapult systems they also had (which also couldn't breach their fort walls).
https://acoup.blog/2021/12/17/collections-fortification-part... Goes into this in more detail for a couple paragraphs.
https://acoup.blog/2021/12/17/collections-fortification-part... Goes into this in more detail for a couple paragraphs.
The introduction of counterweight trebuchet from the Mongol empire in Persia for the seige of the Southern Sung city of Xiangyang is well documented here:
https://deremilitari.org/2014/05/the-mongol-siege-of-xiangya...
I like the idea of pausing a seige in China to send a message to some experts in Mosul, wait for them to ride back, then build their novel device, and win.
https://deremilitari.org/2014/05/the-mongol-siege-of-xiangya...
I like the idea of pausing a seige in China to send a message to some experts in Mosul, wait for them to ride back, then build their novel device, and win.
Shooting in steep trajectory, howitzer style, would still be valuable.
You have to know it’s possible, and be able to aim at useful internal targets despite this being well before aerial surveillance photographs and calculus.
My guess is there’s probably a whole bunch of neat things we could build with existing manufacturing tools, that we don’t yet know are even possible, and which the future will have similar discussions about.
My guess is there’s probably a whole bunch of neat things we could build with existing manufacturing tools, that we don’t yet know are even possible, and which the future will have similar discussions about.
The force of tradition is amazing. Imagine centuries knowing how to make something that explodes violently, and using it for entertainment instead of weapons.
Just like how Mesoamerican civilizations invented the wheel, but only used it on children toys and not for transportation. There were no draft animals in the region, but they didn't even make wheelbarrows.
https://www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/home/the-concept-of-the-...
Just like how Mesoamerican civilizations invented the wheel, but only used it on children toys and not for transportation. There were no draft animals in the region, but they didn't even make wheelbarrows.
https://www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/home/the-concept-of-the-...
Keep in mind, the Chinese were using bombs, granades, and rockets in warfare. Cannons were slowly being incorporated during the Ming.
It’s just that, the Chinese also had standardized crossbows capable of punching through armor, and allowed for long range sniping, centuries before gunpowder. The Manchus who founded the Qing dynasty valued archery, and were slower to adopt firearms. The mid and late Qing period saw firearm military units, with bows and arrows evolved for powerful short range attacks, ceding long range to firearms.
Even so, it looks like Chinese generals were interested in fielding firearms, and found them effective.
Wikipedia has a list of theories on why gun development stagnated, and the leading theory is that Chinese fortification were more resistant to cannon fire. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder_weapons_in_the_Min...
As far as Mesoamericans and wheels, I’m not sure the hilly terrain and dense jungle would make wheeled transports that easy. They seemed to be able to create step pyramids with stone just fine.
It’s just that, the Chinese also had standardized crossbows capable of punching through armor, and allowed for long range sniping, centuries before gunpowder. The Manchus who founded the Qing dynasty valued archery, and were slower to adopt firearms. The mid and late Qing period saw firearm military units, with bows and arrows evolved for powerful short range attacks, ceding long range to firearms.
Even so, it looks like Chinese generals were interested in fielding firearms, and found them effective.
Wikipedia has a list of theories on why gun development stagnated, and the leading theory is that Chinese fortification were more resistant to cannon fire. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder_weapons_in_the_Min...
As far as Mesoamericans and wheels, I’m not sure the hilly terrain and dense jungle would make wheeled transports that easy. They seemed to be able to create step pyramids with stone just fine.
Even in the west, firearms took centuries of evolution and constant peer-level warfare to evolve into the primary weapon.
The Mesoamerican civilizations did not have copper, bronze, or iron metallurgy which is a prerequisite for making the metal rims needed for transportation wheels. A wooden wheel without a metal rim is too fragile for transportation.
Without the wheel, humans are actually relatively comparable to other pack animals in carrying efficiency. It is the wheel that makes moving larger loads more efficient which makes it advantageous to domesticate pack animals that can exert greater force.
Without the wheel, humans are actually relatively comparable to other pack animals in carrying efficiency. It is the wheel that makes moving larger loads more efficient which makes it advantageous to domesticate pack animals that can exert greater force.
Bronze was extremely common in Mesoamerica for household goods like needles and fishhooks. Copper was also common, but mainly for ceremonial and ornamental objects like bells.
As for wooden wheels being too fragile, you can build a perfectly good wheel without metal bands. It's simply going to be heavy and annoying if you're trying to run a wagon to Oregon.
As for wooden wheels being too fragile, you can build a perfectly good wheel without metal bands. It's simply going to be heavy and annoying if you're trying to run a wagon to Oregon.
Another example that I read about once and have never been able to verify (or it may be completely made up) is that the because the Chinese invented porcelain first (which was more sturdy than glass or something) they never bothered with glass, which meant they missed out on all the cool astronomical discoveries (which then has implications on their development of mathematics and physics).
Again, no idea if there is any validity to this or just something completely made up.
Again, no idea if there is any validity to this or just something completely made up.
Is there a name for this kind of effect?
I always call this a "local maximum" problem. Once you've optimized the crap out of your tech, any change makes it worse (e.g., replacing crossbows with primitive guns). But if you do switch, then optimizing that technology takes you to an even higher maximum.
The problem is that you have to go backwards to go forwards, and you can't always predict (or convince the powers-that-be) that the end result will be better.
The problem is that you have to go backwards to go forwards, and you can't always predict (or convince the powers-that-be) that the end result will be better.
Extremely relevant to electric cars. Looks like we are close to electric > ICE, (or past that point, whatever), but it was a long painful time of hyping subpar cars by those who believed in the potential of the technology.
Agreed! I also believe that once we flip (EV > ICE) the momentum goes the other way.
For example, let's say that 50% of cars on the road are EVs. Now gas stations have a problem. You can't survive with half your customers gone, so maybe half the gas stations go out of business. But that means your nearest gas station is much further away, so now the incentive for EV goes up.
In California (and the Bay Area, particularly), I bet we'll see this relatively soon.
For example, let's say that 50% of cars on the road are EVs. Now gas stations have a problem. You can't survive with half your customers gone, so maybe half the gas stations go out of business. But that means your nearest gas station is much further away, so now the incentive for EV goes up.
In California (and the Bay Area, particularly), I bet we'll see this relatively soon.
The "untyped languages are just fine" effect :P
"The road not taken" is a Science Fiction trope that generally explores that idea.
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The ring of solomon was a curious mix of metals with a magnet in it. Its inventors were definitely up to something.
Watch gold be the only practically viable solution, making this new material wonderful but also incredibly expensive.
Time to start mining asteroids.
Is this how the science fiction future we’ve all read in books becomes reality?
SpaceX becomes an evil megacorp mining gold from the asteroid belt with LLM AI controlled robot slaves so that we can make hover cars using superconductors?
SpaceX becomes an evil megacorp mining gold from the asteroid belt with LLM AI controlled robot slaves so that we can make hover cars using superconductors?
No no, you use the LLM AI to funnel real people into becoming Belters, then fake their communications back home with those same LLMs, then move your X HQ to Mars and oppress them from there.
...also, Elon would totally pull a Duarte....
...also, Elon would totally pull a Duarte....
Yes, I can see it now. “X corp” is the amalgamation of Twitter, Tesla, and SpaceX. It mines the resources of the outer solar system using enhanced humans (“replicants”). They have Neuralink implants keeping them under the control of their evil overlord: MuskX.
Interestingly enough, there's already some idle speculation that the apparent variability of LK99 synthesis might be improved with zero-G manufacturing.
Postulation :
Can someone please take layers of graphene and pure gold leaf and tell me what that may result in, aside from beautiful "damascus"?
Can someone please take layers of graphene and pure gold leaf and tell me what that may result in, aside from beautiful "damascus"?
New replication video coming from China
https://twitter.com/lereguy/status/1686363900651151360
https://twitter.com/lereguy/status/1686363900651151360
I have seen three now from China alone. Plus a calculation from some respected institute from today that confirms the theory
Throughout this whole saga I've had this feeling that at the very least we can rely on China to really pursue this new development to it's logical end. It's kind of sad, but I don't think I can say the same about the US at this moment. You know for a fact China's going to JUMP on this, figure out if it works or not, and iterate.
I don't get the "disappointment" with USA scientists in this thread not having yet published a replication. There has only been one weekday since the LK-99 revelation came to light. Have some patience.
The analysis from this article is a publication from Berkeley National Lab that has already come out, and Argonne National Lab has announced they have synthesized the material as of yesterday and will release results from their replication attempt in the next few days.
The analysis from this article is a publication from Berkeley National Lab that has already come out, and Argonne National Lab has announced they have synthesized the material as of yesterday and will release results from their replication attempt in the next few days.
One thing that has been constant for at least a decade or more is that every time a lab in China publishes even an incremental advance, a legion of internet commenters descends to declare the end of US hegemony because Americans didn't discover it first.
Yep "it's the end of science in the barbaric Western nations" crowd.
Which is not to say that science in the capitalist western nations is not going through rough times, because it is?
Is your argument that China’s increasing technical prowess will not inevitably result in the US hegemony ending?
Japanese and South Korean increasing technical prowess didn't, why would Chinese be any different?
China has serious fundamental problems and if you account for its gigantic population - it's seriously underachieving not only compared to US, but even compared to the rest of the developed world.
It's fashionable to talk about China taking over, but it's far from guaranteed. China is pretty much confirmed to be falsifying its economic stats for example [1] [2] but people just take them at face value anyway. I don't understand why.
[1] https://www.voanews.com/a/satellites-shed-light-on-dictators... [2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-forensic-examination-of...
China has serious fundamental problems and if you account for its gigantic population - it's seriously underachieving not only compared to US, but even compared to the rest of the developed world.
It's fashionable to talk about China taking over, but it's far from guaranteed. China is pretty much confirmed to be falsifying its economic stats for example [1] [2] but people just take them at face value anyway. I don't understand why.
[1] https://www.voanews.com/a/satellites-shed-light-on-dictators... [2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-forensic-examination-of...
> It's fashionable to talk about China taking over
It's not so much fashionable as it is literally state propaganda used to try and shoulder its way into the South China Sea and the Pacific by claiming it is so prosperous and populous that it is entitled to increasingly large sphere of influence and direct control.
It's not so much fashionable as it is literally state propaganda used to try and shoulder its way into the South China Sea and the Pacific by claiming it is so prosperous and populous that it is entitled to increasingly large sphere of influence and direct control.
apologies for abusing the pronoun it
> it's seriously underachieving not only compared to US, but even compared to the rest of the developed world.
This statement would have been viewed as absolutely obvious and ridiculous 2 decades ago. The fact that it even needs to be said now is indicating how fast they are advancing.
This statement would have been viewed as absolutely obvious and ridiculous 2 decades ago. The fact that it even needs to be said now is indicating how fast they are advancing.
They were underachieving for 2 centuries, ceasing to kill their own citizens by millions and imprisoning anybody who tried to think for themselves is enough to grow if you did so for a long time. But it does not make you a new hegemon.
I highly doubt they can preserve their pace of growth for next few decades without significant changes to the regime and liberalization.
Once they return to the mean - they will very likely slow down. Arguably they already did (3% official growth last year + people accusing them of falsifying data for 1-2 percentage points of growth each year would make them already grow slower than some western countries, including the US).
I highly doubt they can preserve their pace of growth for next few decades without significant changes to the regime and liberalization.
Once they return to the mean - they will very likely slow down. Arguably they already did (3% official growth last year + people accusing them of falsifying data for 1-2 percentage points of growth each year would make them already grow slower than some western countries, including the US).
> I highly doubt they can preserve their pace of growth for next few decades without significant changes to the regime and liberalization.
"Demographics is destiny" also comes to mind.
Note how the era of "Japan Inc." during the 1980s was also the time when the post-war baby boom population were in their 30s-40s (i.e. peak productive worker population). As this cohort has aged and are now in retirement, Japan's economic performance has tailed off.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#/media/F...
If you look at the Chinese population pyramid, we could already be at the point of maximum Chinese economic growth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#/media/F...
From the geopolitical standpoint, this may also explain why China and Russia have become more belligerent - they will lack sufficient numbers of young fighting aged men in the next few decades.
"Demographics is destiny" also comes to mind.
Note how the era of "Japan Inc." during the 1980s was also the time when the post-war baby boom population were in their 30s-40s (i.e. peak productive worker population). As this cohort has aged and are now in retirement, Japan's economic performance has tailed off.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#/media/F...
If you look at the Chinese population pyramid, we could already be at the point of maximum Chinese economic growth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#/media/F...
From the geopolitical standpoint, this may also explain why China and Russia have become more belligerent - they will lack sufficient numbers of young fighting aged men in the next few decades.
The difference with the Japan case is that China is going to have a larger base of young, very well educated people than the US for at least the next century unless something changes dramatically with either birth rates or immigration.
China is facing severe demographic issues for the next 20-30 years due to their terribly short sighted one-child policy and their poor immigration rates. Literally the opposite of what you're saying. Where on earth did you get your facts from?
They do not need that many years of large growth to overtake the US in terms of size. Technologically they are pivoting to AI and the service economy much better than Japan, southeast Asia, etc.
No, it's evidence of how fast they advanced under Deng. It is unclear that the advancement is continuing / has continued into Xi's reign, especially since the beginning of his third term.
It sorta sounds like you have no clue when Deng died.
Those countries are allies.
China doesn’t believe in western democracy and has as a stated goal ending American hegemony.
It’s not even slightly confusing or subtle, not sure why American elitist types like to just handwave it away.
Actually I am sure. Everyone is making too much money. Until they aren’t.
China doesn’t believe in western democracy and has as a stated goal ending American hegemony.
It’s not even slightly confusing or subtle, not sure why American elitist types like to just handwave it away.
Actually I am sure. Everyone is making too much money. Until they aren’t.
>Japanese and South Korean increasing technical prowess didn't, why would Chinese be any different?
Because while Japan and South Korea are the 51st and 52nd US states, China is a superpower vying to usurp the US as the preeminent world superpower.
Because while Japan and South Korea are the 51st and 52nd US states, China is a superpower vying to usurp the US as the preeminent world superpower.
That just means China has it harder and is more likely to fail. Access to global markets is a critical factor in growth of Japan, South Korea and China. USA controls that.
Internal markets in China are becoming increasingly robust and the US does not have control over global markets, that is nonsense.
>Internal markets in China are becoming increasingly robust
I think this fact is being severely understated, perhaps even denied by almost everyone in the west.
The way the US-China cold war has been playing out, the US and friends keeps closing doors only for China to go "Go right ahead, I don't have to play ball." and just succeed even harder on their own. Adding insult to injury is they then take that success and just wholesale buy the doors the US keeps closing.
A surefire way to lose Pax Americana is to become delusional that Pax Americana is winning when by all accounts it's losing and losing hard. I think this ship can still have its course corrected, because Pax Americana is better for us than Pax China, but not if we just keep up this kabuki theatre.
I think this fact is being severely understated, perhaps even denied by almost everyone in the west.
The way the US-China cold war has been playing out, the US and friends keeps closing doors only for China to go "Go right ahead, I don't have to play ball." and just succeed even harder on their own. Adding insult to injury is they then take that success and just wholesale buy the doors the US keeps closing.
A surefire way to lose Pax Americana is to become delusional that Pax Americana is winning when by all accounts it's losing and losing hard. I think this ship can still have its course corrected, because Pax Americana is better for us than Pax China, but not if we just keep up this kabuki theatre.
Access to global markets. I.e. oceans.
The US' stated policy is global freedom of navigation and that has been the primary policy aim that they enforce since UNCLOS in 1982.
So no, they do not control access to the oceans.
So no, they do not control access to the oceans.
Japan and South Korea are allies of the US. They are also much too small in population and resources to reach a level of economic power that would allow them to do anything on their own.
The Chinese Communist party has the resources, people and determination to follow a different course. It might underperform relative to its size, and the one-child policy is going to cause a disastrous demographic situation, but even if you consider just coastal, urban China, that's getting pretty close to US in terms of people and economic power. The communist party is developing its military capabilities at a fast clip, and fusing its military and civilian economies to accelerate its technical development. Where almost every other government has been unable to wrestle control of Internet information, the Chinese Communist party has successfully turned its version of the Internet into an effective tool of govt propaganda and social control.
In other words, there are lots and lots of very concrete reasons to believe that the post-development trajectory of China can be very different from Japan's or South Korea's.
The Chinese Communist party has the resources, people and determination to follow a different course. It might underperform relative to its size, and the one-child policy is going to cause a disastrous demographic situation, but even if you consider just coastal, urban China, that's getting pretty close to US in terms of people and economic power. The communist party is developing its military capabilities at a fast clip, and fusing its military and civilian economies to accelerate its technical development. Where almost every other government has been unable to wrestle control of Internet information, the Chinese Communist party has successfully turned its version of the Internet into an effective tool of govt propaganda and social control.
In other words, there are lots and lots of very concrete reasons to believe that the post-development trajectory of China can be very different from Japan's or South Korea's.
Geopolitical competition is driven by absolute advantage not relative. At PRC scale, activing fraction of population to high skill is enough to compete with US+co, and PRC's fraction of that high skill talent is set to increase multiple times over coming decades. There's a reason why PRC moving from ~2M STEM to ~20M STEM grew economy from 1T to 19T and is at close to parity / at parity / even leading in full spectrum of industrial sectors whereas "small" countries like JP and SKR has to pick and choose where to compete. With PRC population they can do everything, and in fact can't not considering they're graduating ~5M STEM per year and will add more STEM (50-100M) than US will add population in next 30 years. PRC is not JP and SKR, and TW, it's on trend to be 4-6x JP+SKR+TW without the geopolitical constraints that prevent US partners from full competition against US in critical strategic industries.
>comfirmed falsifying
Here's a more rigours NBER light study on PRC GDP being underestimated by much more accomplished economists aka not retarded like Martinez study.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w23323
Here's a more comprehensive GDP resconstruction by Rhodium, leading economic search group that focus on PRC that also reports underestimation, ~10% by 2014. Including work by David Dollar, one of the more competent PRC economic analyst at Brookings that also led discussion of your second link, noting it had 2 models of over estimation and went with the much higher overestimation model vs the lower (basically marginal amount) one that was probably more correct.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/broken-abacus
No one takes PRC GDP reporting at face value, but anyone with half a brain can see PRC climbing western science and innovation indexes (controlled for quality), moving up global value chain, displacing other advanced economies in increasing amount of intermediate and final goods and doing all that rapidly in last 10 years that US basically needs to go full spectrum containment beyond what they did for USSR while acknowledge PRC is greater challenge then USSR ever was. Anyone with half a brain can also napkin math future skilled workforce between US @35M STEM + ~600K per year, vs PRC @20M STEM ~5M (M as in million) per year and understand PRC will have more STEM workforce than US in a few years, and possibly 2-3x more STEM by 2050 even factoring in PRC demographics. Cut that in half and PRC's future potential is still outrageous.
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>comfirmed falsifying
Here's a more rigours NBER light study on PRC GDP being underestimated by much more accomplished economists aka not retarded like Martinez study.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w23323
Here's a more comprehensive GDP resconstruction by Rhodium, leading economic search group that focus on PRC that also reports underestimation, ~10% by 2014. Including work by David Dollar, one of the more competent PRC economic analyst at Brookings that also led discussion of your second link, noting it had 2 models of over estimation and went with the much higher overestimation model vs the lower (basically marginal amount) one that was probably more correct.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/broken-abacus
No one takes PRC GDP reporting at face value, but anyone with half a brain can see PRC climbing western science and innovation indexes (controlled for quality), moving up global value chain, displacing other advanced economies in increasing amount of intermediate and final goods and doing all that rapidly in last 10 years that US basically needs to go full spectrum containment beyond what they did for USSR while acknowledge PRC is greater challenge then USSR ever was. Anyone with half a brain can also napkin math future skilled workforce between US @35M STEM + ~600K per year, vs PRC @20M STEM ~5M (M as in million) per year and understand PRC will have more STEM workforce than US in a few years, and possibly 2-3x more STEM by 2050 even factoring in PRC demographics. Cut that in half and PRC's future potential is still outrageous.
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People said the same about Japan. The '80s and '90s was a bunch of media-fueled "the Japanese will run the world" hysteria.
Japan is a technical powerhouse but that doesn't inevitably lead to ending hegemony. It requires a lot of other work too.
Japan is a technical powerhouse but that doesn't inevitably lead to ending hegemony. It requires a lot of other work too.
China has 1.2 billion people, I feel like it is basically an inevitability at this point.
1.2 billion _old_ people. While quantity has a quality all its own, in this case the demographics are not what you want to see if you are predicting long-term Chinese growth just based on population.
Median age China, 2022: 38.5
Median age USA, 2022: 38.9
Median age USA, 2022: 38.9
Look at the actual age distributions rather than collapsing the data into a single number.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
I see a country with triple the young people we do.
The only argument I'm making is that it's insane to draw sweeping geopolitical conclusions from the fact that Chinese scientists posted their attempts at reproducing a Korean lab's result on Twitter before the Americans did.
I guess this is what happened after "the bomb" was developed ? The US could hold the world at ransom.
I agree. Not to discount the work the Chinese academies are doing, but I don't regard twitter activity as indicative of what U.S. labs are doing, and I'd strongly urge others not to do so either.
As you noted, there's labs working on this, they've said they're working on this, and I take the lack of minute-by-minute social media updates to indicate that it's serious and they want to get it right.
As you noted, there's labs working on this, they've said they're working on this, and I take the lack of minute-by-minute social media updates to indicate that it's serious and they want to get it right.
>There has only been one weekday since the LK-99 revelation
The original paper drop was July 22nd.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12037
The original paper drop was July 22nd.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12037
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China has more people, more money to spend on research, more equipment, more access to raw materials and chemicals, more manufacturing base, more STEM graduates, more everything, and all of that by huge margins. USA scientists will eventually put something out, but 10x more slowly than China.
I'm not looking at official numbers here, but in my field (academic biotech research) I still don't see much innovation coming out of China.
All of what you say is true, yet in academic research China is still far behind the USA in nearly every field. They haven't yet been able to build institutions with the staff, structure, and culture needed. That will likely change in time, but at present the best Chinese scientists are still coming to the USA to work, and staying here. Despite the USA having a lot more research output, a substantial fraction of the top scientists in the USA are from China.
My Chinese colleagues tell me that the bureaucracy and authoritarianism in Chinese institutions puts a lot of hurdles in place when trying to do research. Simply buying equipment, hiring staff, etc. is a nightmare, and results in "evaporative cooling" where the top researchers with the option to work anywhere don't tolerate this and leave.
Edit: I will also add that in some sense US academia is supported by overcharging Chinese students for tuition. If and when Chinese institutions get to the point where the best students want to stay there, there will be a huge crisis in US universities, possibly being unable to support tenured staff.
All of what you say is true, yet in academic research China is still far behind the USA in nearly every field. They haven't yet been able to build institutions with the staff, structure, and culture needed. That will likely change in time, but at present the best Chinese scientists are still coming to the USA to work, and staying here. Despite the USA having a lot more research output, a substantial fraction of the top scientists in the USA are from China.
My Chinese colleagues tell me that the bureaucracy and authoritarianism in Chinese institutions puts a lot of hurdles in place when trying to do research. Simply buying equipment, hiring staff, etc. is a nightmare, and results in "evaporative cooling" where the top researchers with the option to work anywhere don't tolerate this and leave.
Edit: I will also add that in some sense US academia is supported by overcharging Chinese students for tuition. If and when Chinese institutions get to the point where the best students want to stay there, there will be a huge crisis in US universities, possibly being unable to support tenured staff.
US academia isn't really funded by the foreign grad student tuitions. It's not even really funded by tuition, as tuition+fees is <30% of total US academia funding. Of course every organization wants to have more money and so they work on those revenue streams, but if all the money from the 5% students which are foreign suddenly disappeared (even ignoring the foreign students whose tuition gets funded by being TA/RA), that wouldn't be a crisis, it would just reduce the profits of the universities and have some administrators be extremely sad about less bonuses.
Varies by field but last few years PRC been reaching parity to topping various science and innovation indexes, PRC institutions also breaking global top100 and general trend of moving up rankings. TLDR is PRC science exploded after mid 2010s - lag effect from academic reform in 00s. Biotech/bioeconomy a outlier though - just got elevated to strategic sector with 500b usd investment in last year's 5 year plan, so expect PRC to start being competitive in 5-10 years.
> at present the best Chinese scientists are still coming to the USA to work
IMO not true anymore. This isn't pre 00s where PRC send best abroad as part of state strategy and best have some english fluency because it's needed for science. More and more PRC best aren't English fluent since there's sufficiently large and growing chinese science ecosystem and best also have good access to resources in tier1 labs. Hence US cracking down on 1000 talents program where PRC entice scientists to work in PRC due to unparallel resources. Or acadmeic exchanges with PRC in general. Also see stats of record amount of scientists returning to PRC this yearm
>best students want to stay there,
Best PRC students go to PRC C9 (Ivy equivalent) now. Top US institutions captures the occasional talent with english proficiency and desire / resources to go abroad. But PRC best have been largely staying in PRC last decade. TBH most Chinese students in west now are those who couldnt hack PRC gaokao/teritary selection system but have rich enough parents to send them abroad. They're B tier talent. Still adequate to work in western labs but you simply don't hear much about PRC students in west who tested top of their districts anymore like in 00s. They're no sending their best and haven't been for while. But generally their ok is good enough. Medium term expect even less PRC students, partly due to geopoltics but also PRC likely phasing out mandetory English as core subject which will make brain draining next gen more difficult. There's always India who seem systemically incapable of preventing brain drain.
> at present the best Chinese scientists are still coming to the USA to work
IMO not true anymore. This isn't pre 00s where PRC send best abroad as part of state strategy and best have some english fluency because it's needed for science. More and more PRC best aren't English fluent since there's sufficiently large and growing chinese science ecosystem and best also have good access to resources in tier1 labs. Hence US cracking down on 1000 talents program where PRC entice scientists to work in PRC due to unparallel resources. Or acadmeic exchanges with PRC in general. Also see stats of record amount of scientists returning to PRC this yearm
>best students want to stay there,
Best PRC students go to PRC C9 (Ivy equivalent) now. Top US institutions captures the occasional talent with english proficiency and desire / resources to go abroad. But PRC best have been largely staying in PRC last decade. TBH most Chinese students in west now are those who couldnt hack PRC gaokao/teritary selection system but have rich enough parents to send them abroad. They're B tier talent. Still adequate to work in western labs but you simply don't hear much about PRC students in west who tested top of their districts anymore like in 00s. They're no sending their best and haven't been for while. But generally their ok is good enough. Medium term expect even less PRC students, partly due to geopoltics but also PRC likely phasing out mandetory English as core subject which will make brain draining next gen more difficult. There's always India who seem systemically incapable of preventing brain drain.
I’ll take what you are saying at face value, but point out that academic career pipelines are slow- it’s often about 15 years to go from college freshman to starting out as a “young” PI in the USA. If what you are saying is true, it will still be another 5+ years before we start seeing top students that stayed in China publishing as PIs. Edit: Which lines up with what you said at the top of your post.
That's a reasonable timeline. PRCs have been developing pharma/bio talent since 2015s. It’s part of medicine&devices category for MIC2025. Focus was on devices, pharma/bio got extra resource/political attention in the last few years due to covid. Like most PRC ventures it's going to be rocky/messy until it's not. Broad point is bio is one somewhat neglected up until covid sector that PRC wants to become a global player with industrial policies that has worked well to very well in other MIC2025 categories..
> I’ll take what you are saying at face value
Given this poster's history, I would not do that
Given this poster's history, I would not do that
China spends nowhere near as much as the US on basic research. The US spends $100 billion on basic research annually, compared to $25 billion in China.
However, total R&D is quite a bit closer, with the US spending $660b to China’s $556 billion. [1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...
However, total R&D is quite a bit closer, with the US spending $660b to China’s $556 billion. [1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...
There's PPP considertaions. PRC R&D funding also bias towards experimental/applied vs basic research. Hence not surprising they're hammering these replication efforts.
This may be a hard pill to swallow, but science isn't a "more is better" game.
It ultimately requires being embedded in a culture that, to quote Popper, "seeks truths that are difficult and interesting". From that view, the problem for US scientific efforts is entirely home made, but it's also a problem that's much more pronounced in China.
It ultimately requires being embedded in a culture that, to quote Popper, "seeks truths that are difficult and interesting". From that view, the problem for US scientific efforts is entirely home made, but it's also a problem that's much more pronounced in China.
All the smart people in the US work in tech and finance.
If you have a big ole' brain, why would you take $80k to work in some crumby lab when you can get paid $350k to maintain a login screen from the comfort of your mountain side home.
If you have a big ole' brain, why would you take $80k to work in some crumby lab when you can get paid $350k to maintain a login screen from the comfort of your mountain side home.
Because “smart” and “monomaniacally focused on financial gain” are two separate things?
As an academic mathematician-turned-software engineer, I can assure you my reasons for leaving academia were not a “monomaniacal focus on financial gain”. The money and job security didn’t hurt, but the real turning point for me was solving the two-body problem.
What is monomaniacally focused about maintaining a login page for $350k?
Choosing the $350K job isn't necessarily monomaniacally focussed on money, there's plenty of combinations of priorities that would favor that.
But when you don't assume all smart developers are monomaniacally focussed on money, there’s also plenty of combinations of priorities that might favor an $80K lab job over the $350K login screen job.
But when you don't assume all smart developers are monomaniacally focussed on money, there’s also plenty of combinations of priorities that might favor an $80K lab job over the $350K login screen job.
When you work in a lab you have more ability to work on what you want to. Well at least once you get to the top of the lab - many spend a lifetime working on the interesting problems someone else is interested in but never reach the top where they are in charge. Meanwhile many people who work in tech are able to work on problems they find interesting enough (maybe not the most interesting, but still interesting) and they get paid well for it. Still if you want to work on some problems a lab is the best change to get there.
Sure if you have a huge drive to work on science directly.
But the fact of that matter is that many people would rather work on something they find interesting enough, while also being able to comfortably afford a good life for themselves and their family.
But the fact of that matter is that many people would rather work on something they find interesting enough, while also being able to comfortably afford a good life for themselves and their family.
Because there's more to life than money. For King and Country.
"King" and "Country" sound like paying taxes and dying in a war for profit, i.e., someone else's priorities, no thanks.
Betterment of human existence, preservation of habitable environment, etc, those are bigger than the self.
Betterment of human existence, preservation of habitable environment, etc, those are bigger than the self.
It's a saying referring to having pride in the nation you live in. Make your country's status in the world just a tiny bit higher. Win a Nobel Prize for your country. Win the Olympics for your country. The US is not big on collectivism and that's okay. Other countries do things differently.
> more money to spend on research
Would you accept “chooses to spend more on research”?
The US certainly could spend more but, imho sadly, we do not.
Would you accept “chooses to spend more on research”?
The US certainly could spend more but, imho sadly, we do not.
Maybe Venture Capital should spend less money on Juciero, automated pizza ovens, and gig-economy bs and more money on materials science and fusion research.
Even if you end up lighting the money on fire, at least it's a more societally productive fire than, say, SoftBank's portfolio.
Even if you end up lighting the money on fire, at least it's a more societally productive fire than, say, SoftBank's portfolio.
VC doesn’t put money into research, VC puts money to productization once someone else (ideally for the VCs, government) has paid for research.
(Edited to clarify “ideally” parenthetical, in response to a reply that really didn’t deserve to be dead.)
(Edited to clarify “ideally” parenthetical, in response to a reply that really didn’t deserve to be dead.)
There isn't a good likelihood on strong return on those type of investments. You need real engineering talent and leaders. You can glue together a delivery or dating app with a bunch of 25 year olds who just got out of a ruby on rails bootcamp, raise a few million with charismatic/well connected leaders/founders, and maybe gain enough users to be acquired or something. Anything in materials science is going to require some deep expertise, labs/machines/composites/fabrication/manufacturing setups, inside connections at the DoD, trial and error that costs millions.
Yeah, I agree, its way cooler, but way more risky for VC.
Yeah, I agree, its way cooler, but way more risky for VC.
It's not at all obvious to me that it's more risky than some of the BS that gets hundreds of millions of dollars in VC funding.
Timelines matter. The BS will either return the millions in a couple years or it won't. Basic research may return much more, but your best case is still many years before you gets results. The risk is actually higher with basic research than for BS as well - the pet rock earned money and there are plenty of other examples of stupid things working well quickly. Basic research in fusion hasn't returned anything yet even though the physics has said it works (though with recent reports maybe fusion is just around thee corner - or maybe it is still 50 years out)
See, the thing is, you're making an argument about how VC works, and I'm making an argument about allocation of money towards VC vs. other socially beneficial projects.
I understand how VC works. I'm annoyed that - let's even take the Saudis as an example, since they fund half of Silicon Valley anyway - would rather flush their money down the drain on stupid shit than do long-term projects that may help secure their existence post-oil. Even with every motivation to focus on the long-term, still it gets blown on short-term complete garbage.
The rampant short-termism is the real issue
I understand how VC works. I'm annoyed that - let's even take the Saudis as an example, since they fund half of Silicon Valley anyway - would rather flush their money down the drain on stupid shit than do long-term projects that may help secure their existence post-oil. Even with every motivation to focus on the long-term, still it gets blown on short-term complete garbage.
The rampant short-termism is the real issue
Saudis don't fund half of Silicon Valley. Aramco is worth 2 trillion, apple alone is worth 3 trillion.
Saudis have built entire top-equipment universities out of nothing (KAUST), and hired top foreign professors, and offered generous scholarships to foreign students to fill it up.
You rant about short termism, but don't seem to like doing research yourself.
Saudis have built entire top-equipment universities out of nothing (KAUST), and hired top foreign professors, and offered generous scholarships to foreign students to fill it up.
You rant about short termism, but don't seem to like doing research yourself.
The above can be condensed to "China has more STEM graduates".
It was China's STEM graduates and not just the stereotypical "cheap labor" who built up the Chinese manufacturing base.
It was China's STEM graduates and not just the stereotypical "cheap labor" who built up the Chinese manufacturing base.
This should be a happy moment for the way global science works! Researchers in Korea wrote a paper. American, European, and Chinese theorists in Berkeley and Shenyang analyzed the approach right away and confirmed its hypothetical viability. Now another team in Huazhong is conducting replicating experiments. All in the matter of about a week! This kind of open collaboration is helping us all go faster, and it doesn't have to become a cause for nationalism.
that's not my take, the US has just as much talent, knowledge, and skill, but scientists here will do it 10 times to make damn sure they don't look bad before they put it out. Same reason the original 3 authors are trying to get it in nature for. More formal, more assurance for the scientific community than some twitter posts. In the end, everyone is starting from the same info right now.
So US scientists have some type of moral superiority ?
> You know for a fact China's going to JUMP on this, figure out if it works or not, and iterate.
Doesn't China also have a huge incentive problem in research? I've seen plenty of stories about low impact journals feeding the system with the publications it demands, regardless of quality of results.
Doesn't China also have a huge incentive problem in research? I've seen plenty of stories about low impact journals feeding the system with the publications it demands, regardless of quality of results.
Right, because there's surely no scientist in the US interested in pursing something like this as well. Generalize much? Keep riding that "US sucks, China good" train for absolutely no reason.
I think you’re off here. The miracle of America (and the worldwide system of capitalism) is that there exists enough private investment, competition, and appetite for risk to squeeze every iota of gain from this, without explicit government intervention.
China’s growth currently appears magical simply because of scale and a shittier starting point, also a lack of whatever it is that ails India.
China’s growth currently appears magical simply because of scale and a shittier starting point, also a lack of whatever it is that ails India.
China leads the way, US wants to decline and rest
Why are they all from China? Why are they able to replicate so much faster than US labs?
They have a lot of labs, and materials sourcing is easier for them. That’s partially because China is the origin of lots of stuff, and partly because the US regulated red phosphorus as a meth precursor.
Additionally, it appears some of the original team members were concerned about possible industrial spying or leaks and that 'other parties' might be moving to replicate which was part of the impetus for rushing to publish. So, it's possible that some team(s) in China may have already been starting, underway or at least thinking about it.
Where was this? I haven’t seen this, but it definitely explains the drama surrounding this whole situation.
It couldn’t have come at a worse time for drama either, as the right wing is currently on possibly their most massive anti-science tirade world wide that they’ve ever pushed.
It couldn’t have come at a worse time for drama either, as the right wing is currently on possibly their most massive anti-science tirade world wide that they’ve ever pushed.
> it definitely explains the drama surrounding this whole situation.
It was in a Twitter thread linked on an HN thread a couple days ago wherein someone had done some digging online into resumes, publication histories, etc and recapped a bunch of the apparent history of LK99 and the related scientists and institutions. Sorry, I didn't bookmark it. But it contained quite a bit more drama including possible team conflict over potential Nobel credit and a deathbed promise to the team's mentor, one of the initial LK99 discoverers.
No matter how this turns out, there's probably a helluva good book or movie in the backstory as it appears to be a team of unlikely underdogs stubbornly pursuing a long-shot while scraping together minimal funding over many years, being passed over for tenure, taking on unrelated side work and having their initial paper rejected by Nature, etc. It makes me extra hopeful that LK99 is at least an interesting novel material, even if not a superconductor.
It was in a Twitter thread linked on an HN thread a couple days ago wherein someone had done some digging online into resumes, publication histories, etc and recapped a bunch of the apparent history of LK99 and the related scientists and institutions. Sorry, I didn't bookmark it. But it contained quite a bit more drama including possible team conflict over potential Nobel credit and a deathbed promise to the team's mentor, one of the initial LK99 discoverers.
No matter how this turns out, there's probably a helluva good book or movie in the backstory as it appears to be a team of unlikely underdogs stubbornly pursuing a long-shot while scraping together minimal funding over many years, being passed over for tenure, taking on unrelated side work and having their initial paper rejected by Nature, etc. It makes me extra hopeful that LK99 is at least an interesting novel material, even if not a superconductor.
You're probably referring to https://twitter.com/8teAPi/status/1684385895565365248
but the same person admitted they're writing fiction (I would call it speculative fiction drawn from known facts) https://twitter.com/8teAPi/status/1686217806298423299
but the same person admitted they're writing fiction (I would call it speculative fiction drawn from known facts) https://twitter.com/8teAPi/status/1686217806298423299
Well at least the regulations have worked to solve the meth crisis.
Argonne doesn't need to make a name for itself, they already are a "global brand" in science.
They won't jump to publish a video on social media of the first replication of diamagnetism that they get. They'll be putting together a definitive and defensible paper on the production and properties of the material. That will take longer.
And if they can't replicate it, then it'll drag on longer without hearing anything from them, since they'll have to try multiple different methods and reach out to the authors, and iterate until they've exhausted enough possibilities that they feel confident enough publishing a failure to replicate.
They won't jump to publish a video on social media of the first replication of diamagnetism that they get. They'll be putting together a definitive and defensible paper on the production and properties of the material. That will take longer.
And if they can't replicate it, then it'll drag on longer without hearing anything from them, since they'll have to try multiple different methods and reach out to the authors, and iterate until they've exhausted enough possibilities that they feel confident enough publishing a failure to replicate.
Everyone with half a brain in the US is working the ad-tech and data-mining industries, that's where the money is.
This assumes everyone's primary motivation is $, which just isn't true. I've known super bright and talented people who gone off to wall street or FAANG for big $, but I've also known equally strong people who turned it down for low 6 figures doing the research they wanted to.
In both cases some are very happy with their choice, others not so much.
In both cases some are very happy with their choice, others not so much.
I know a super smart PhD who is now a SWE and he would have been ok with the pay, but not the general BS of academia. So even if money isn't the primary motivator, it's still an issue.
Isn't that sort of what I said? For some people the trade off is worth it, some it isn't. Academia BS vs corporate BS is just one of the aspects.
This is incredible hyperbole, completely unprovable, and almost certainly untrue.
To be fair, China also has an extensive state surveillance apparatus. They just have their military and security agencies run it out in the open at much lower cost. The obfuscation in the US is much more expensive to maintain, but necessary for the illusory veneer of privacy and “freedom.”
objektif(1)
I may be wrong, but it seems..
US labs dont find replication work exciting enough. If the effect is genuine, good, if not, life goes on.
Chinese labs are looking to build credibility, so they will benefit by publicly resolving this.
US labs dont find replication work exciting enough. If the effect is genuine, good, if not, life goes on.
Chinese labs are looking to build credibility, so they will benefit by publicly resolving this.
In addition to what the other commenters said, I'm imagining most of the replication attempts in the USA are happening in chemical corporations. Compared to academic labs, the corps have much easier access to highly regulated materials and FAR stricter communication protocols.
It turns out outsourcing all of your manufacturing capability to another country has higher order consequences.
One limitation here is the required materials, which are likely much easier to get in China. At least one of the materials is a controlled substance by the DEA in the USA.
I mean it's been like 3 weekdays since the preprint was widely noticed. Labs in the U.S. are working on it and will publish. I don't think the difference between publishing a replication in 3 days or 2 weeks is meaningful to make inferences about the two countries
Because there has literally only been 2-3 weekdays since the LK-99 revelation.
Do you expect American and European scientists to work during weekends?
Do you expect American and European scientists to work during weekends?
I expect plenty of scientists to be excited enough to replicate a potential breakthrough in their labs on a weekend, just as half of HN enjoys experimenting with the latest LLMs over the weekend for fun and curiosity.
The original paper dropped July 22nd:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12037
https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12037
It's hard to get red phosphorous in USA.
You will hear many explanations, but the real one is that the US leadership in hard science is fading. We are too cerebral and cyber - Asia has picked up the mantle now.
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Because China is a new global super power on many fronts including science, engineering and manufacturing ?
With China's research environment things happen really fast--you just never know what you're going to get. Sometimes you get superconductors and sometimes you get COVID.
Can someone explain how this video shows superconductivity?
[not an expert but...]It shows strong diamagnetism(being repelled by both of the poles of a magnet), which is a property of superconductors. Not necessarily a superconductor though, that’s still to be established but at least it shows that the inventors are up to something and it’s not complete fabrication.
Why don’t they try heating it and seeing if the effect goes away? You could even try a welding torch or something.
Not only is it a purported to be a room temperature super conductor, it's a relatively high temperature superconductor, not guarantee the effect goes away if you put it under a torch.
I think the critical temperature was 400 K (127 °C).
The original preprint said at least 400K. They didn't find an upper limit. And for some reason, they don't seem to have the standard impulse of "hey, our potentially revolutionary material that we've been working on for 20 years seems to actually be working. Let's check what happens when we set it on fire!"
The updated preprint gives Tc of 104.8 degC. I am not a material scientist and do not know much about superconductors, but cursory glance on some of the charts in the paper suggests that the real Tc of sample they measured is somewhat lower that that, but still well above room temperature.
As far as I can tell, 127°C is just the highest temperature it was tested at. The critical temperature may be higher.
There are better, less destructive ways to test the transition temperature. Apparently LK-99 is hard to make in bulk, so they probably don't want to torch their sample.
or just stick it outside in a heat dome? don't you have one near you?
lol or a temperature chamber that the vast majority of labs have? heck I made a toaster oven that will go anywhere from 100F to 400F with an arduino and a $3 toaster oven from the junk store.
That’s a stretch. Dias’ material has real color change under high pressure which is an expected property of superconductors but nobody would argue his paper was not complete fabrication
I am no expert on this topic, but I feel this is similar to how ferrofluid forms "spikes" when placed near a magnet. Are they related?
I'm not an expert too but AFAIK ferrofluids are actually attracted by magnets. The spikes are probably as a result of having strong and weak locations of magnetic field and the the liquid rushing into those.
But yes, Maybe I'm interpreting the video wrongly. Yet, to me it looks like the bulky part of the sample is being repelled by both poles of the magnet as it stands upright with the pointy end at the bottom each time. IMHO if this was due to attraction, the pointy end would be at the top.
But yes, Maybe I'm interpreting the video wrongly. Yet, to me it looks like the bulky part of the sample is being repelled by both poles of the magnet as it stands upright with the pointy end at the bottom each time. IMHO if this was due to attraction, the pointy end would be at the top.
No. The spikes are pulled toward the magnet (ferromagnetism) whereas superconductivity is repelled by the magnet (diamagnetism.)
There's all kinds of cool examples of this using liquid nitrogen to make a superconductor exhibit the Meissner effect.
The material in question will have these effects at room temperature and pressure.
https://youtu.be/HRLvVkkq5GE?t=53
The material in question will have these effects at room temperature and pressure.
https://youtu.be/HRLvVkkq5GE?t=53
It shows the magnetic effects associated with superconductors, which are omnidirectional from my understanding, in contrast to a 'regular magnet'
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i dont suppose this is pyrolytic carbon
Doesn’t have to be. One of the ingredients has diamagnetism already
Hang on, wouldn't a sliver of any magnetic material behave like this within a moving magnetic field? This replication is a fail, yes?
Neither lead nor copper are what we would normally consider a "magnetic material" like iron.
That it interacts strongly with a magnetic field shows that a big change in the material, consistent with superconductivity, has occurred.
Quantum level effects are newly appearing in the macroscopic world, and that's always interesting.
That it interacts strongly with a magnetic field shows that a big change in the material, consistent with superconductivity, has occurred.
Quantum level effects are newly appearing in the macroscopic world, and that's always interesting.
Could this not also have a big use case outside of superconductivity? Decellerators or accelerators for maglev trains or similar?
Oh, definintely!
Most materials are diamagnetic, but only very weakly so.
I think that a new room-temperature material that was so strongly diamagnetic that it could lift the weight of its own volume in lead probably would bring some interesting new applications.
Most materials are diamagnetic, but only very weakly so.
I think that a new room-temperature material that was so strongly diamagnetic that it could lift the weight of its own volume in lead probably would bring some interesting new applications.
For example, anything with a bearing in it used in an application where it's safe to have a strong permanent magnet.
Both polarities repel the material, a normal magnetic material would attract the second time
My question was on the money after all -- this appears to have been the property being exhibited. Presumably the downvoter was a co-author.
No, it’s repelled by both poles.
From the paper about the replication, they cast strong doubts on the original paper and consider it a fail
A magnetic material would orient itself to the magnet, and then move towards the magnet, not get "stuck" in its fields.
Is this somehow incorrect?
Getting "stuck" in a magnetic field is called "Flux pinning", which is what we're seeing here, from what I understand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_pinning
Magnetic material can't do this. They're attracted. As some of the videos have shown, with large magnets placed next to the samples, they are not attracted.
Getting "stuck" in a magnetic field is called "Flux pinning", which is what we're seeing here, from what I understand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_pinning
Magnetic material can't do this. They're attracted. As some of the videos have shown, with large magnets placed next to the samples, they are not attracted.
RcouF1uZ4gsC(1)
China is very good at replicating.
Can't tell if it's a troll by having a video clip of a video clip
You mean the fact that someone is recording their screen with the microscope video feed at the same time as the magnet in the hand they are placing underneath the scope? It looks like a pretty bog-standard lab video to me.
In addition to being the fastest way that doesn’t require any video editing, I can’t really think of a way to do it that would be more likely to be real.
In addition to being the fastest way that doesn’t require any video editing, I can’t really think of a way to do it that would be more likely to be real.
At the bottom of the video is a progress bar, which presumably means they screen recorded a clip instead of uploading the original. I think that's what the parent comment is referring to.
here's the original video, i assume the twitter user didn't know how to download or deeplink to it so they screen recorded it.
https://vdn3.vzuu.com/HD/7d42236a-3065-11ee-a787-7e9db7aa394...
https://vdn3.vzuu.com/HD/7d42236a-3065-11ee-a787-7e9db7aa394...
Access denied
This is exciting, but I try to maintain my composure. Good luck to all involved.
I didn’t know science could be such a thrilling spectator sport.
I didn’t know science could be such a thrilling spectator sport.
It almost feels like we're back in the days of Lavoisier. Scientists staging elaborate public experiments, blowing things up to support or debunk a popular theory. Deadly rivalries, publicity stunts, each new development a matter of personal, institutional, and national hubris.
Personally I can't wait to be able to go to the Royal Institution in London to see someone demonstrate this thing.
Just like they demonstrated all the stuff you know from school over a hundred years ago, before you needed fancy equipment to do anything.
Just like they demonstrated all the stuff you know from school over a hundred years ago, before you needed fancy equipment to do anything.
It reminds me of the days of cold fusion. Or the days of buckminsterfullerene.
Basically, something which is very unexpected, with potentially large consequences, and which can be done in many labs using discretionary funding.
Basically, something which is very unexpected, with potentially large consequences, and which can be done in many labs using discretionary funding.
Yes, this is absolutely thrilling. I can’t help looking for the latest development everyday.
Every day? I’m checking like every half hour
Best places to check if I’m casually interested?
I've been using this forum post: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/claims-of-room-tempe...
But I'd also appreciate other links
But I'd also appreciate other links
I found another place that's maintaining replication results too: https://eirifu.wordpress.com/2023/07/30/lk-99-superconductor...
It's interesting they marked one of the claims as "likely fraudulent" but the guy at the spacebattles one hasn't. The video doesn't seem to be related at all to the 4 samples one, so I'm not sure why they think it's likely fraudulent.
It's interesting they marked one of the claims as "likely fraudulent" but the guy at the spacebattles one hasn't. The video doesn't seem to be related at all to the 4 samples one, so I'm not sure why they think it's likely fraudulent.
The fun part about this is how easy things are to grasp even though I have zero background in the science.
It certainly doesn't hurt that this thing levitates.
No need to squint into a microscope, parse a screen full of numbers, or try to make sense of false-color renderings. Either you have video proof of a levitating object, or you don't. The demonstration is as intuitive as it gets, despite the fact that the theory is crazy difficult to wrap one's head around.
No need to squint into a microscope, parse a screen full of numbers, or try to make sense of false-color renderings. Either you have video proof of a levitating object, or you don't. The demonstration is as intuitive as it gets, despite the fact that the theory is crazy difficult to wrap one's head around.
And the techniques to produce the material are not too crazy, all within reach of sufficiently dedicated amateurs
Levitates? Against, what, the earth's inherent magnetic field? Sorry, I haven't seen any visuals that show this behavior.
Over a handheld neodymium magnet.
None of the videos have yet shown complete 'levitation', they all have a corner on the surface. But still, not behavior that anyone has ever seen from lead before.
None of the videos have yet shown complete 'levitation', they all have a corner on the surface. But still, not behavior that anyone has ever seen from lead before.
But couldn't it just be a magnet ? I don't understand how it's a proof.
You can already do what is in the video (and even better), with for example, pyrolitic carbon ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrolytic_carbon
It’s not proof, but if it wasn’t even diamagnetic it would be over. It couldn't just be a magnet, it is repelled from both ends of a normal magnet, according to Chinese lab videos you can find in the thread.
Lead weighs a lot more than pyrolytic carbon.
No, digmagnetic of levitation requires multiple magnets in a halbac array: https://www.kjmagnetics.com/blog.asp?p=diamagnetic-levitatio...
https://pubs.aip.org/aip/apm/article/9/10/101107/1061600/Pho...
https://pubs.aip.org/aip/apm/article/9/10/101107/1061600/Pho...
Have you seen videos of pyrolytic carbon? A thin sliver of it barely hovers on top of a huge magnet. It doesn’t stand erect. Same effect as LK99 but much smaller magnitude.
Levitation in magnetic itself is not the proof. Frogs can do that too, ask Geim. The proof would be levitation in any orientation.
Only over an electromagnet, not a fixed one (to our knowledge). Digmagnetic levitation requires more than one magnet or an electromagnet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_levitation
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_levitation
When do we start building things out of superconducting frogs?
> Frogs can do that too
One even did that on the cover of Nature, iirc.
One even did that on the cover of Nature, iirc.
Using a 'slightly' stronger magnetic field...
> This is exciting, but I try to maintain my composure.
One wit on a different social media site opined that "all technological advances such as plumbing and petrol result in lead poisoning, so perhaps this is real".
One wit on a different social media site opined that "all technological advances such as plumbing and petrol result in lead poisoning, so perhaps this is real".
He forgot about the 3rd P, perovskites (cheaper & more efficient solar cells)
I saw a video the other day that pointed out that the breakdown current for their sample was 260 mA. Now there's a lot of things you can do with 260mA, but I don't believe high-tesla electromagnets are in that list, so no MRIs, no fusion, and probably no electromotive devices (generators, motors).
I don't know much about superconductivity, but if 0.25A is the limit no matter the cross-section of conductor, you can multiply/parallelize the conductors - i.e. series of "microconductors", each carrying 0.25A, which would add up to whatever you want?
But now we know its possible, maybe they can figure out the structures that make it work and develop better materials?
Personally hopeful it inspires a “gold rush” of funding materials research to get LK99 to a supremely useful spot
I'm hoping for something that isn't made entirely out of a superfund site material, personally.
Unless I misunderstand what you mean / what the stuff is made of, this seems like a huge exaggeration... lead isn't friendly, sure, but it isn't that dangerous? There are worse materials that are in common use. (And we use lead in plenty of places already)
The effective cross-sectional area of the original sample could well be minuscule. (I assume that, if a room temperature superconductor has been found, it constitutes a tiny fraction of the sample.)
It took 80 years to go from a crude prototype at Bell Labs to Apple announcing the M1. We just need to know it’s possible. The rest will follow.
The M1 is just as significant as an ESP32 or Celeron in the scheme of things.
Isn’t the introduction of the 4004 in 1971 a better comparison? while that was still 24 years since the Bell labs discovery, we have much better scientific, manufacturing, logistical and mining ecosystems within industry and research today.
If there’s a compelling reason to do so, governments will find ways to accelerate the development of those ecosystems from decades to years (probably more like a decade).
Isn’t the introduction of the 4004 in 1971 a better comparison? while that was still 24 years since the Bell labs discovery, we have much better scientific, manufacturing, logistical and mining ecosystems within industry and research today.
If there’s a compelling reason to do so, governments will find ways to accelerate the development of those ecosystems from decades to years (probably more like a decade).
I don't get it, is the M1 supposed to be some pinnacle achievement in the history of the integrated circuit lmao
I assure you if 260mA room temperature and pressure superconducting wire can be consistently produced we’ll be living in the future.
> we’ll be living in the future
This is a tautological statement if I ever saw one!
This is a tautological statement if I ever saw one!
Let me explain what I meant: the transistor changed everything and we’re still reaping unexpected benefits, see LLMs this year. My bet is such a superconductor would be the same - 50 years from its creation we’d still be finding new ways of putting it to use.
The current is related to the cross-sectional area of the (super)conductor. Not sure how big their sample was, but the solution is thicker and more cables.
the dft results are definitely interesting, but i note that with the caveat that my background is in experimental condensed matter physics for materials like this and not theoretical, my understanding is that the dominant feature of the conclusions (the flat bands) is a necessary but not sufficient condition for superconductivity in the way the authors describe.
again, in experimental condensed matter physics it's acceptable to do a fine experiment and then throw in a half-baked "theoretical underpinning" to appease reviewers, so I wouldn't be surprised if the superconductivity turns out to be totally unrelated to the mechanism proposed in the paper. i would really like to see some more robust characterization work(biased because this is my background), hopefully some of the labs doing the replication studies can take a look at the juicy stuff
again, in experimental condensed matter physics it's acceptable to do a fine experiment and then throw in a half-baked "theoretical underpinning" to appease reviewers, so I wouldn't be surprised if the superconductivity turns out to be totally unrelated to the mechanism proposed in the paper. i would really like to see some more robust characterization work(biased because this is my background), hopefully some of the labs doing the replication studies can take a look at the juicy stuff
I know some DFT (*), but very little superconductivity, but I read through Sinéad Griffin's preprint and there was nothing in there which looked weird from a methodological perspective – and the methods (and software) she is using are extremely well-established and well-categorized.
(*) it was, like, two decades ago, but I've got a first-author PRB paper so I wouldn't trust me compared to an active researcher but I'm not _entirely_ clueless
(*) it was, like, two decades ago, but I've got a first-author PRB paper so I wouldn't trust me compared to an active researcher but I'm not _entirely_ clueless
The thing that stands out to me is that the DFT simulations show that the flat bands only occur in a particular crystal structure of the material and it is not the most stable state (at least according to the simulation). This would explain the synthetic challenges involved. These simulations are not perfect, but they can be VERY useful when guided by experiment and when they correlate strongly it is a good sign that you have a mechanistic explanation of the phenomenon.
The way I'd characterize it is that they're usually _directionally_ (and mechanistically) correct. On something as sensitive as a band gap the error bars are larger; if the DFT simulations said "yeah, no way this has band density at the Fermi level" I'd regard it as strong evidence against the LK-99 claims, but the fact this is in the ballpark is – to be clear, pretty weak – evidence in favor.
naive question: if we can simulate this, can't we brute force other superconductors?
Not really. Think of this as being analogous to public key/private key crypto; it's easy to check a signature (simulate a structure), it's extremely hard to forge one (design a new material ab initio).
Yes, but the search space is mind boggling.
How so? Just a function of all the different atoms and sub-atomic particles interacting?
I'll link to another reply of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36966474
The "just a function of" is a non-trivial problem. Given a single set of elements you want to "try out" results in a huge global optimization problem to find the set of stable structures (low energy). When aided by experimental data it becomes a tractable problem.
The "just a function of" is a non-trivial problem. Given a single set of elements you want to "try out" results in a huge global optimization problem to find the set of stable structures (low energy). When aided by experimental data it becomes a tractable problem.
Something that I find hard to understand is why there is superconductivity without cooper pairs; granted my understanding is related to more traditional superconductors and I'm not really very knowledgeable about the cutting edge high-Tc stuff.
I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only one who thought that the DFT computational preprints were very promising.
Unfortunately, they also indicate that the desired substitution will be very hard to achieve — crucially, the "crush and separate the composite" suggestion a few commenters have made is unlikely to work, since the heterogeneity exists within the same crystal, depending on whether Cu substitutes into Pb {1} (good) or Pb {2} (bad) crystal sites. This may be why the very oblique synthetic approach favored by the authors — reacting copper phosphide with lanarkite, giving lots of copper sulfide byproduct — was needed to give interesting properties. Now that we have an idea of what to look for, though, it may be possible to derive other synthetic approaches with a clear idea of what particular sort of copper substitution should be achieved, and a way to determine if it was achieved.
Of course, there remains a possibility that all of this is a big mistake, but now it would have to be several correlated mistakes. It may be a long time until the necessary selective substitution is achieved in a high-quality bulk sample, so, going on this hypothesis, I do not expect a sudden rush of new technologies in the near-term.
Unfortunately, they also indicate that the desired substitution will be very hard to achieve — crucially, the "crush and separate the composite" suggestion a few commenters have made is unlikely to work, since the heterogeneity exists within the same crystal, depending on whether Cu substitutes into Pb {1} (good) or Pb {2} (bad) crystal sites. This may be why the very oblique synthetic approach favored by the authors — reacting copper phosphide with lanarkite, giving lots of copper sulfide byproduct — was needed to give interesting properties. Now that we have an idea of what to look for, though, it may be possible to derive other synthetic approaches with a clear idea of what particular sort of copper substitution should be achieved, and a way to determine if it was achieved.
Of course, there remains a possibility that all of this is a big mistake, but now it would have to be several correlated mistakes. It may be a long time until the necessary selective substitution is achieved in a high-quality bulk sample, so, going on this hypothesis, I do not expect a sudden rush of new technologies in the near-term.
The widespread consensus among experts who have done DFT is that the preprint doesn't add anything to how they feel about LK-99. https://twitter.com/alexkaplan0/status/1686392015217741825 sums it up: Griffin's paper is neither proof of superconductivity nor even a very strong signal of it. Flat bands can mean many things; in fact, the crystal structure Griffin assumes may have been selected due to their likelihood.
CMTC says the Griffin paper doesn't really shift anything and they still believe replication is unlikely: https://twitter.com/condensed_the/status/1686373904044949504...
CMTC says the Griffin paper doesn't really shift anything and they still believe replication is unlikely: https://twitter.com/condensed_the/status/1686373904044949504...
Kinda? You'd expect flat bands from putting a copper atom into a big insulating supercell. The population of the d band is interesting, though. I don't find it super super compelling, but it's certainly not nothing.
Yes, given the Cu atoms seem to be ~8 Angstrom apart the flat bands are to be expected. So its not clear what "special" about these, given if you just had dilute Cu impurities in some otherwise insulating I'd imagine you'd have something similar for the Cu d-bands.
Maybe you can help here, I was completely lost in terms of the Iris (Russian Cat Girl) mention of, "engineering conductivity pili of bacteria into the superconductors" is this a reference to nano scale bio engineering or a means of reliable replication of the superconducting structure itself?
Or is this just nonsense? https://twitter.com/iris_IGB/status/1685322871306928128
Or is this just nonsense? https://twitter.com/iris_IGB/status/1685322871306928128
Sounds like nonsense. You can't do atomic-level engineering with bacteria, they are 9 orders of magnitude too big. We're talking about being able to place copper atoms at specific points on a crystal structure, while avoiding placing them at points they'd rather be at. Bacteria? Give me a break.
A question that arises, how good is chemical vapor deposition (albeit a very expensive way and hence for labwork only) in creating a pure sample with proper Cu substitutions?
Could there be limitations to making a large piece of this crystal, so in practice it is never useful?
I would be interested to see the daily order numbers on Sigma Aldrich's supplychain website for Lead II Oxide and Copper Phosphide powder in the last week....
I'm astounded that the MSM seems to be ignoring this ATM. I did a Google news search on LK-99 and saw nothing from major publications. A search on the NYTimes returned an article from 1974.
I actually appreciate that caution. Things have been extremely up in the air and it would be very hard to properly explain what is happening, how it matters and if it matters. The last part I think is why it's a good thing that they held back. There was enough unknown that it wasn't clear if this would ever amount to anymore than "some scientists may or may not have made a big mistake." I think we are hitting the point, with multiple teams saying this is either possible or has happened, that we will start seeing MSM stories. They aren't ignoring it, they are being cautious. I promise you their science beat reporters are watching this like a hawk.
I appreciate reputable news organizations as a reliable filter against noise out there on the internet. If I want early rumors I have sites like this. If I want something filtered, curated and focused, I go to them.
I appreciate reputable news organizations as a reliable filter against noise out there on the internet. If I want early rumors I have sites like this. If I want something filtered, curated and focused, I go to them.
After racing with each other to fuel political extremism or push the corporate narratives like how working from home is terrible for the worker or how good it is for us that the rich don’t pay the taxes, how unaffordable housing is good for the economy… this is what they choose to be careful about?
Nah, this just doesn’t sell or is not a paid article.
Nah, this just doesn’t sell or is not a paid article.
It's hard to not let cynicism like this get to me especially when the argument makes so little sense. This doesn't sell? Isn't sensationalist enough? A possible end result of this is magic flying space trains. This isn't exactly some boring in the weeds things. This is extremely easy to hype if you just want to draw eye balls. But sure, yeah, MSM corporate plutocracy or whatever.
The EmDrive was first publicized in 2001, but wasn't picked up by the mainstream media until 2013, and then again in 2016 after NASA picked it up. That Korean scientists have this discovery on their hands and the materials world is racing to keep up, and isn't frontpage of the New York Times, is editor's choice. Currently, that's Joseph Kahn, but (unfortunately) science ranks below politics and sports and business.
It's possible that the people responsible for deciding what makes a a good article for the science section are different from the people responsible for the articles you mention.
I think this is true
To be frank, the available evidence at the moment is pretty shaky. Derek Lowe here is pretty optimistic, but most of the comments I've seen from the superconductor folks are pretty pessimistic [1]--and given that Derek Lowe isn't in the field, I'm inclined to favor their views over his at this point.
The original articles are a pair of papers posted to arxiv in a field which I believe isn't well-known for arxiv publications, and most science journalism tends to wait for a peer-reviewed paper to come out in a notable journal before reporting on it. Although it has been reported by some specialized outlets already (a category which I'd include Derek Lowe's In The Pipeline).
[1] See, e.g., https://nitter.net/i/status/1686373516286005248, which goes into why even the recent theoretical-confirmation papers are unpersuasive to them.
The original articles are a pair of papers posted to arxiv in a field which I believe isn't well-known for arxiv publications, and most science journalism tends to wait for a peer-reviewed paper to come out in a notable journal before reporting on it. Although it has been reported by some specialized outlets already (a category which I'd include Derek Lowe's In The Pipeline).
[1] See, e.g., https://nitter.net/i/status/1686373516286005248, which goes into why even the recent theoretical-confirmation papers are unpersuasive to them.
Thanks for that link!
My feeling watching all this has been that it's weird people are getting so excited about the replication when the actually interesting question (is it truly a superconductor) hasn't even been answered yet. Glad to see that isn't just my ignorance.
My feeling watching all this has been that it's weird people are getting so excited about the replication when the actually interesting question (is it truly a superconductor) hasn't even been answered yet. Glad to see that isn't just my ignorance.
I think them waiting until there’s more research is preferable to them coming out and making random claims which pan out not to be true.
I think it's more likely that the bulk of folks don't fully comprehend why this would be so important. I would imagine alot of reporters look at the things they could write about and the choices are politics, war, polarizing news, or nerds nerding hard trying to prove other nerds right or wrong, and it just doesn't make the cut.
Newspapers don't work like that. The same reporter isn't responsible for politics, war, and science—they specialize, and a dedicated science reporter is going to be at least as savvy as a random commenter on HN.
They may want to cover it and just have a hard time explaining it to their editor, but I think "we can afford to wait until a peer reviewed paper comes out" is more likely.
They may want to cover it and just have a hard time explaining it to their editor, but I think "we can afford to wait until a peer reviewed paper comes out" is more likely.
Right. There's nothing to write about (yet!), but their science reporter is scrolling science twitter harder than we are. The movie can come later.
No...that's not the case here, to wit, we can observe writers from these publications discussing it casually.
This plus vacation time in the Northern hemisphere - that one science reporter per large news org who actually understands the importance is AFK.
Genuinely a laugh-out-loud take on mainstream science reporting.
Why aim to improve when we can just keep making the same old mistakes?
I misread it as saying the news always does it this way, which was clearly not what they meant.
Wait wait wait... Are eggs healthy again?
Though that's like the opposite of how most media operate.
Because the media is of course known for studying topics in high detail to make sure they don't report the wrong thing and not for rushing half written hearsay out the door before the competitors do.
True, but that hasn't stopped MSM in the past
That hasn't stopped them in the past...
I am also completely baffled by this! So many stupid mouse-model medical discovery stories over the years and actually zero LK-99 coverage.
It doesn't even matter if it works or not as for whether it's newsworthy; the mystery, human backstory, and Argonne/China/independent scientists jumping to replicate alone is a whole swathe of viable and fascinating topics ready to be published.
The crazy thing is NYT just bothered to publish a story about the Dias superconductor paper retraction; a paper that had never even crossed my radar in the first place because TBH I don't care about superconductors unless they're going to be a huge step change in practical applications, which the Dias "finding" wasn't.
What are they doing?!
It doesn't even matter if it works or not as for whether it's newsworthy; the mystery, human backstory, and Argonne/China/independent scientists jumping to replicate alone is a whole swathe of viable and fascinating topics ready to be published.
The crazy thing is NYT just bothered to publish a story about the Dias superconductor paper retraction; a paper that had never even crossed my radar in the first place because TBH I don't care about superconductors unless they're going to be a huge step change in practical applications, which the Dias "finding" wasn't.
What are they doing?!
99% of science journalism is repeating a press release that came out of a university's press office.
It's very hard to become a science journalist where you can pursue your own stories, because the market for this is practically zero in comparison to other parts of the media.
I always try to pay for media that publishes stories from the likes of, say, Ed Yong, and leave messages that I'm doing it for the science journalism. But I doubt it has much substantial effect on how much real science journalism happens.
It's very hard to become a science journalist where you can pursue your own stories, because the market for this is practically zero in comparison to other parts of the media.
I always try to pay for media that publishes stories from the likes of, say, Ed Yong, and leave messages that I'm doing it for the science journalism. But I doubt it has much substantial effect on how much real science journalism happens.
Almost all of the stories in major newspapers are commissioned ("pitched") by interest groups that want to see that article published. It's why a lot of articles contain quotes from weirdly specific people with middle-office titles in specific organizations. Journalists aren't cold calling random office workers to get these quotes. An outline of an article is provided, journalists do some minimal fact-checking and write it out into a proper article. Beat writers that cover a specific topic regularly and have made their own contacts in that field are an exception.
> What are they doing?!
Trying to make ad money with views, which is their profit incentive.
Mouse models are nearly always spun as applicable to humans, which an average, aging, viewer would be interested, usually relating to "Cure <ailment>", "regrow limbs", "stop aging", etc.
The average viewer isn't interested in superconductors, and the 10 seconds the news orgs have for each bit of news isn't enough to explain them.
Trying to make ad money with views, which is their profit incentive.
Mouse models are nearly always spun as applicable to humans, which an average, aging, viewer would be interested, usually relating to "Cure <ailment>", "regrow limbs", "stop aging", etc.
The average viewer isn't interested in superconductors, and the 10 seconds the news orgs have for each bit of news isn't enough to explain them.
The NYT has published 3 articles about room-temperature superconductors since March; all about the insanely high-pressure one that is INFINITELY less exciting than the new claim and turned out to be bunk anyways.
hmm, the high-pressure room-temperature superconductor turned out not to actually be real?
wp says
In 2020, a room-temperature superconductor (critical temperature 288 K) made from hydrogen, carbon and sulfur under pressures of around 270 gigapascals was described in a paper in Nature.[71][72] However in 2022 the article was retracted by the editors because the validity of background subtraction procedures had been called into question. All nine authors maintain that the raw data strongly support the main claims of the paper.[73]
wp says
In 2020, a room-temperature superconductor (critical temperature 288 K) made from hydrogen, carbon and sulfur under pressures of around 270 gigapascals was described in a paper in Nature.[71][72] However in 2022 the article was retracted by the editors because the validity of background subtraction procedures had been called into question. All nine authors maintain that the raw data strongly support the main claims of the paper.[73]
What should the headline be? "South Korean scientists claim room temperature superconductivity again! Are they lying like their last paper? Let's celebrate!"
Well, half the comments are making fun of the spotty quality of the evidence and it's been barely a week since the paper was published. I think it's reasonable to wait for at least a pre-print of a successful replication. I don't think it's fair to say the MSM is ignoring it, the possible discovery literally just happened and some combination of low awareness and caution with the evidence means they haven't covered it yet.
Most people I talk to don't recognize the importance of room temperature superconductivity.
A floating grain is cool, but not something that jumps out at people like a rocket or a big fusion reactor.
The application is similarly unintuitive. Many here on HN ask why such a thing would be important, and they are probably the 99th (or 99.9th?) percentile in materials science and EE literacy.
A floating grain is cool, but not something that jumps out at people like a rocket or a big fusion reactor.
The application is similarly unintuitive. Many here on HN ask why such a thing would be important, and they are probably the 99th (or 99.9th?) percentile in materials science and EE literacy.
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>Most people I talk to don't recognize the importance of room temperature superconductivity.
I don't. I read someone saying it would be the biggest breakthrough since fire. Is that true or hyperbole?
I don't. I read someone saying it would be the biggest breakthrough since fire. Is that true or hyperbole?
Thats kinda hyperbolic.
Its more like the transistor.
Its more like the transistor.
The transistor was unequivocally the biggest technological breakthrough since fire
breakthroughs since fire more important than the transistor probably include cooking, agriculture, the wheel, metallurgy, glass, ceramics, the heat engine, mechanisms in general (with things like pulleys, hydraulics, screws, and gears), construction cement (originally lime), math, writing, optics, electricity, chemistry (including things like distillation, the atomic theory, and recrystallization), plumbing, carpentry, weaving, sewing, automatic digital computation, and possibly language, depending on when that happened
it seems like maybe you haven't thought much about the history of technology
it seems like maybe you haven't thought much about the history of technology
The mass-energy equivalence and how it led to the discovery of nuclear fission/fusion and how to control/cause explosive atomic chain reactions was probably one of the most impactful technologies of all time, in a literal sense.
maybe, but it's not yet in the same league as math, writing, cooking, sewing, and electricity, in terms of its effects on human life
i mean all five of those were probably prerequisites for it?
maybe if the humans build torchships or nuclear-powered starships, or convert the electric grid to mostly nuclear, i'd agree, but those all seem far in the future
i mean all five of those were probably prerequisites for it?
maybe if the humans build torchships or nuclear-powered starships, or convert the electric grid to mostly nuclear, i'd agree, but those all seem far in the future
I'm curious: why sewing in particular? As opposed to say spinning or weaving or knitting?
it's surely debatable, but my thought was that sewing seems to have predated weaving (of cloth), nålbinding, especially knit and crochet, and probably even spinning, and it was sewing that enabled the humans to live outside the tropics
sewing without spinning or weaving still gives you tents and jackets (of hide or felt, at least). i think weaving without sewing only gives you floor mats. spinning without sewing gives you rope, which makes longer fibers than natural sinews, and thus lassos and lashing, but i think these are less transformative technologies than tents and jackets
i think the humans probably could have developed the fission chain reaction without spinning but probably not without sewing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewing_needle#Prehistoric_sewi... sewing: 50–61 kya or possibly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_clothing_and_textil... 170 kya
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_spinning#History spinning: 41–52 kya
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weaving#Archaeology weaving: 27 kya (cloth doesn't survive but its clay impressions do)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%A5lebinding#History nålbinding: 8 kya
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_knitting knitting: .9 kya
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crochet#Origins crochet: .2 kya
sewing without spinning or weaving still gives you tents and jackets (of hide or felt, at least). i think weaving without sewing only gives you floor mats. spinning without sewing gives you rope, which makes longer fibers than natural sinews, and thus lassos and lashing, but i think these are less transformative technologies than tents and jackets
i think the humans probably could have developed the fission chain reaction without spinning but probably not without sewing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewing_needle#Prehistoric_sewi... sewing: 50–61 kya or possibly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_clothing_and_textil... 170 kya
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_spinning#History spinning: 41–52 kya
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weaving#Archaeology weaving: 27 kya (cloth doesn't survive but its clay impressions do)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%A5lebinding#History nålbinding: 8 kya
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_knitting knitting: .9 kya
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crochet#Origins crochet: .2 kya
Yes, I did mention "one of"
Don't forget: Soap/handwashing, antibiotics, the smallpox vaccine, the Haber-Bosch process, blood transfusion, anesthetic and PCR!
soap is a good one for sure; the others might turn out to be less important than the transistor
time will tell
time will tell
Haber-Bosch is the reason there are over 7 billion humans on Earth instead of closer to 2 billion. It's very difficult for any digital technology to compete with that.
agriculture is the reason there were 2 billion instead of 20 million, which is a much bigger difference
it seems likely that digital technology will be crucial in enabling there to be far more humans off earth than on earth; o'neill cylinders could enable many orders of magnitude more physical humans even within this solar system
to say nothing of the possibility of backing up your mind with a brain scan and thus becoming immortal, and possibly forking into more copies of your mind than there are humans alive today
(nitpick, transistors aren't digital)
it seems likely that digital technology will be crucial in enabling there to be far more humans off earth than on earth; o'neill cylinders could enable many orders of magnitude more physical humans even within this solar system
to say nothing of the possibility of backing up your mind with a brain scan and thus becoming immortal, and possibly forking into more copies of your mind than there are humans alive today
(nitpick, transistors aren't digital)
Even if it is true, we are a long ways off from Star Trek utopia. No idea if macroscopic quantities can be robustly produced, what their limitations will be, cost per gram, etc. If the material is confirmed, there will be oodles of money pumped into the space, but it could still be years before commercial applications begin to appear.
NYT did mention it the other day, as a side note to this story about allegations of misconduct by a physicist who has studied superconductors.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/26/science/ranga-dias-retrac...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/26/science/ranga-dias-retrac...
It's still not believed. It's just Twitter that I've seen the juicy stuff, like a (very sketchy) claimed replication from a Russian, and now another claim from a Chinese group.
I could still see this being something "new" but not a true superconductor. If you read the link, there seems to be some kind of discovery brewing, but the original discovers may not have understood what they found.
I could still see this being something "new" but not a true superconductor. If you read the link, there seems to be some kind of discovery brewing, but the original discovers may not have understood what they found.
While you're correct about the scarce and sketchy evidence currently it is in the process of narrowing down. Or to put it better the evidence is mounting that it might be a breakthrough. It likely hard to manufacture correctly, but simulations done at Berkeley Labs seem to support the claims of the original paper
https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16892
And aside from that to be honest I hope that we have time to prove or disprove those claims, before any major news outlet jumps onto the hype train and ruins it.
The paper you referenced doesn’t say anything about the room-temperature superconductivity claims.
Why a throwaway account for this? It honestly makes me immediately question your take.
Really?
Here’s an article from one of switzerland’s biggest newspapers:
https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/ein-supraleiter-fuer-den-alltag...
It's because it's a piece of news that doesn't cause outrage and polarization so they don't know how to profit off it.
I haven't seen a particularly great explanation that explains why this is such a positive discovery that is copy/paste/digestable. No MSM outlet is going to run this story unless they can say an impact.
There are a ton of them on Twitter.
Yes and many of them are completely wrong.
I keep seeing people saying "CPU's that don't generate heat". How exactly would that work? When a transistor turns off/ switches to 0, where does it dump the electrons? Hint: into heat
I keep seeing people saying "CPU's that don't generate heat". How exactly would that work? When a transistor turns off/ switches to 0, where does it dump the electrons? Hint: into heat
Sorry, can you explain? My understanding is that transistors don't "dump" electrons anywhere. The gate controls the voltage, which in the `0` state forces resistance to be high enough s.t. current flow through that transistor stops.
As the Veritasium video explains [0], current flow is not a literal flow of electrons, but a state of the electromagnetic field (or something to that effect... it's been many years since my electromagnetism university courses).
[0]: https://youtu.be/bHIhgxav9LY
As the Veritasium video explains [0], current flow is not a literal flow of electrons, but a state of the electromagnetic field (or something to that effect... it's been many years since my electromagnetism university courses).
[0]: https://youtu.be/bHIhgxav9LY
current flow isn't always a literal flow of electrons, but in a wire or transistor it is
you probably should trust your electromagnetism textbook more than a youtube video
you probably should trust your electromagnetism textbook more than a youtube video
There will literally always be heat from computation, that's Landauer. The point is that LK-99 could be or lead to a breakthrough in making computation produce much, much less heat because you're getting rid of most resistivity losses. Which is important, because heat is actually a serious constraint on a bunch of use cases.
[deleted]
Because until more scientists can replicate this the news is little more substantial than the typical post on /r/futurology on any given day.
There isn’t much to report.
There have been several false reports of high-temperature superconductors during previous months. There seems to be backlash to the high-temperature superconductors claims now.
I think if it got true mainstream acceptance, it might. Or if it is some spectacular bust (praying this is not the case), they may cover it.
it's showing up on science news sites though, even major ones.
Failed attempt to replicate:
Semiconducting transport in Pb10-xCux(PO4)6O sintered from Pb2SO5 and Cu3P
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2307/2307.16802.pdf
I would expect to see such failed replications even if LK99 is the real deal. Getting the exact conditions correct for any sort of novel lab science is non-trivial, and often times the crucial variables might not even be measured in initial publications.
People use this fact to try to bash things like cancer research, but it is unfortunately just a fundamental problem of science. Scientific publications are not kernels of distilled truth, they are work-in-progress commits. If we waited to publish until every last detail is known, science discovery would slow to a snails pace and we would miss a ton of discoveries.
People use this fact to try to bash things like cancer research, but it is unfortunately just a fundamental problem of science. Scientific publications are not kernels of distilled truth, they are work-in-progress commits. If we waited to publish until every last detail is known, science discovery would slow to a snails pace and we would miss a ton of discoveries.
These are just as important as successes, as they build knowledge about what is not possible.
Always gotta be careful about what we record as not being possible though. Just because some research claims something isn't possible doesn't always guarantee the claim is accurate. If some factors are mistakenly overlooked, it's entirely possible that something which is actually doable becomes regarded as impossible.
Good reason to believe what the Chinese synthesized is far way from what the Koreans characterize as LK-99: https://twitter.com/robert_palgrave/status/16863940964101488...
They tested a different substance.
They tested a different substance.
I followed your link, but there is nothing there. Perhaps this is why no sane person should be using X for scientific communication at this point.
Oooh, citogenesis in action.
That made me literally LOL. Thank you.
I still have a very, very hard time understanding what all of this means. Is there an easy to understand explanation for a room temperature superconductor?
It's a conductor of electricity. But super good at it.
i.e. - It has zero resistance to electricity.
Currently, the best superconducting materials we can create have to be chilled to near absolute zero, which means designing them to work in liquid helium baths. This is expensive, and difficult. If a material can superconduct at room temperature, now we're talking usage in general purpose consumer goods.
As for why we want a superconductor? Real cool stuff happens when there's zero resistance to electrical current. I'm sure other people can add on to this, but for an immediate benefit - electricity transmission wouldn't have any losses. Imagine offshore wind turbines that could transmit power to Kansas from the Atlantic. It'd be a big deal.
i.e. - It has zero resistance to electricity.
Currently, the best superconducting materials we can create have to be chilled to near absolute zero, which means designing them to work in liquid helium baths. This is expensive, and difficult. If a material can superconduct at room temperature, now we're talking usage in general purpose consumer goods.
As for why we want a superconductor? Real cool stuff happens when there's zero resistance to electrical current. I'm sure other people can add on to this, but for an immediate benefit - electricity transmission wouldn't have any losses. Imagine offshore wind turbines that could transmit power to Kansas from the Atlantic. It'd be a big deal.
Hmm. Losses from HVDC transmission are on the order of 3% per 1000km, so I'm not sure how much of a big deal it'd be for that kind of use case. Your example would only save ~6% transmission losses. An improvement yes but not really a big deal, unless the cables were far cheaper to make than current HVDC cables (which I'm doubtful about).
I think there are other use cases within devices themselves that are far more interesting for energy storage.
I think there are other use cases within devices themselves that are far more interesting for energy storage.
3% but keep in mind they can only push so much current through those wires before they start losing energy to heat, regardless of the voltage.
The same cable diameter can now power an entire state.
The same cable diameter can now power an entire state.
Superconductors have a critical field, you can't pump unlimited amounts of current through a superconductor.
(I think there were some comments going around that this material has quite a low critical field, so there would have to be some substantial improvements on this even if it is superconducting)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_field
(I think there were some comments going around that this material has quite a low critical field, so there would have to be some substantial improvements on this even if it is superconducting)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_field
I remember going down the rabbit hole on superconductors a few years ago and finding out that they were limited by a critical field. It was both reassuring and disappointing and largely for the same reason - there's no truly "free lunch" in nature.
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ok but 3% when you're talking about MWs or GWs of power is still a lot of wasted energy.
Whether it's worth doing also depends on how much energy it would take to make thousands of miles of superconducting cable of similar capacity and how long such a cable would last.
Not as much as is wasted in generation and transforming, both of which would benefit from superconductors.
The benefit might lie less in the wires and more in the equipment.
Tough to say with a trans Atlantic cable though. Those kinds of distances have never been tried to my knowledge.
The benefit might lie less in the wires and more in the equipment.
Tough to say with a trans Atlantic cable though. Those kinds of distances have never been tried to my knowledge.
It probably has no applications in transmission. Trans losses arent that high; not enough to justify refurbishing the grid.
The electrical resistance per se is actually not that interesting. Certainly not for energy loss. Electronics would benefit, especially CPUs if transistor switching doesn't heat the interconnects above the transition T (the actual cpu is much hotter than the package where the thermocouple is).
High quality (as in high Q) passives would be cool. Think very good capacitors and inductors for filtering. Super cond. caps wouldn't be great for energy dumping since high B fields kill the superconducting effect.
The magnetic properties are more interesting. MRIs w/out crygenic cooling, mag levitation without stabilization.
Apparently there are quantum applications too, but Im not too sure about those but my physicist friend is super excited (in a bad way) for quantum computers now.
If this pans out we're looking at an unexpected revolution.
The electrical resistance per se is actually not that interesting. Certainly not for energy loss. Electronics would benefit, especially CPUs if transistor switching doesn't heat the interconnects above the transition T (the actual cpu is much hotter than the package where the thermocouple is).
High quality (as in high Q) passives would be cool. Think very good capacitors and inductors for filtering. Super cond. caps wouldn't be great for energy dumping since high B fields kill the superconducting effect.
The magnetic properties are more interesting. MRIs w/out crygenic cooling, mag levitation without stabilization.
Apparently there are quantum applications too, but Im not too sure about those but my physicist friend is super excited (in a bad way) for quantum computers now.
If this pans out we're looking at an unexpected revolution.
Superconductor means low resistance. Low resistance means less loss due to heat on a wire. Room temperature superconductor also means more efficient magnets for motors, coils, ending up in cars, MRI machines, etc.
It'll be hard to make traditional motor windings out of this particular material because AFAIK it's a ceramic, but perhaps with thin films on flex PCBs it would be possible.
I'm imagining a future where a superconducting layer on a PCB is just another checkbox you can choose when ordering small runs of boards.
[ ] 1 oz copper
[ ] 2 oz copper (+$2)
[X] 10 micron LK-99 (+$10)
Another thought - I think the first place we'll see this widely rolled out is in IC's (waiting for the Asianometry video on it). IC's are already planar, they're small so exotic materials aren't a big contributor to costs, and they're very power dense. Replacing a metal layer with a superconducting one could enable greater gate density and potentially significant improvements in efficiency. I don't know by how much because switching losses are probably where most energy is dissipated, but it's an incremental change that seems compatible with the process.
I'm imagining a future where a superconducting layer on a PCB is just another checkbox you can choose when ordering small runs of boards.
[ ] 1 oz copper
[ ] 2 oz copper (+$2)
[X] 10 micron LK-99 (+$10)
Another thought - I think the first place we'll see this widely rolled out is in IC's (waiting for the Asianometry video on it). IC's are already planar, they're small so exotic materials aren't a big contributor to costs, and they're very power dense. Replacing a metal layer with a superconducting one could enable greater gate density and potentially significant improvements in efficiency. I don't know by how much because switching losses are probably where most energy is dissipated, but it's an incremental change that seems compatible with the process.
The theoretical papers I've seen (linked here in recent days) suggest that pure crystals of LK-99 would superconduct only in one dimension so it's likely to be fussier than that.
Perhaps it will be like a "tape" laid down with the proper orientation for each conductor. Perhaps you'll need separate north-south and east-west and maybe diagonal layers with special attention to inter-layer connections.
Perhaps it will be like a "tape" laid down with the proper orientation for each conductor. Perhaps you'll need separate north-south and east-west and maybe diagonal layers with special attention to inter-layer connections.
Not just low... _zero_. That's where things get weird.
Well, you still lose current over time... for example, we had to dump a bucket of electrons into our superconducting, supercooled magnet about every month ago to keep things swirling properly.
(The EE I worked with later didn't believe me. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnet#Persist... and note that the loss was due to details of magnetic superconductors, not superconductors in general)
(The EE I worked with later didn't believe me. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnet#Persist... and note that the loss was due to details of magnetic superconductors, not superconductors in general)
Yeah,
> Experiments have demonstrated that currents in superconducting coils can persist for years without any measurable degradation. Experimental evidence points to a lifetime of at least 100,000 years. Theoretical estimates for the lifetime of a persistent current can exceed the estimated lifetime of the universe, depending on the wire geometry and the temperature. In practice, currents injected in superconducting coils have persisted for more than 27 years (as of August 2022) in superconducting gravimeters.
(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconductivity)
> Experiments have demonstrated that currents in superconducting coils can persist for years without any measurable degradation. Experimental evidence points to a lifetime of at least 100,000 years. Theoretical estimates for the lifetime of a persistent current can exceed the estimated lifetime of the universe, depending on the wire geometry and the temperature. In practice, currents injected in superconducting coils have persisted for more than 27 years (as of August 2022) in superconducting gravimeters.
(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconductivity)
If you can extract work from the field generated by the supercurrent, it must come from somewhere. Small supercurrents make small fields, so things like adiabatic CPUs seem interesting.
Can you extract work from a constant magnetic field? As I remember my physics education, constant magnetic fields don't do any work, since they apply a force perpendicular to the direction of motion.
I'm not a physicist, but I play with circuitry... two nearby loops of wire are magnetically coupled. If one is a superconductor with some stored current, and the other is a normal conductor with some resistance, then it stands to reason that the supercurrent will burn heat off in the resistive loop.
What happens in the scenario where the superconductor coil is just replaced with a permanent magnet? I'm pretty sure the energy that the loop dissipates comes from the energy required to move the loop into position, which the inductor experiences as a changing magnetic field.
And the issue being that it takes a lot of energy to super cool those superconductors, and thus they can only be used in highly specialized applications. A room temperature superconductor would be like any other conductor, just much, much better.
Thanks to everyone. I understand this much better.
Thanks to everyone. I understand this much better.
Would a room-temp superconductor make it feasible to cover desert regions with solar panels and transport the electricity long distances?
Yes it makes it more feasible. But even with superconductors, you still need to build out the long-distance grids. With ceramics, manufacturing that much powerline might be the challenge. With the maximum current density reported for this material, you might need a huge x-sectional area.
You still have to worry about batteries. Unless if you place equal numbers of panels separated by 120° meridians for example.
And then there is coordination between governments. This is probably where such an initiative might fail.
You still have to worry about batteries. Unless if you place equal numbers of panels separated by 120° meridians for example.
And then there is coordination between governments. This is probably where such an initiative might fail.
>You still have to worry about batteries.
I keep hearing mixed things about superconductors being useful for energy storage.
I keep hearing mixed things about superconductors being useful for energy storage.
I imagine that carbon footprint could be reduced substantially by this too, at least on a per-watt of utilized energy basis. Imagine if all computer chips used semiconductor materials - then more of the input electricity is actually put towards computing, and cooling fans are a thing of the past!
If they could get it down to modern chip scale, does that mean you could run a processor very very fast and not generate heat? Or at least a lot less heat? So that would mean much faster clock speeds? What would be the limit on clock speed if you had a superconducting processor?
I think a lot of the losses happen in the semiconductors in the CPU, not the wires. Even if LK-99 is a room temperature superconductor, it's probably not usable as a semiconductor.
No, it only works for direct current. While superconducting processors could, in principle, operate more efficiently and perhaps at higher speeds than conventional processors, they won't be completely free of energy losses. AC can induce losses due to electromagnetic fields.
Yeah but sadly that would need a ungodly amount of research and time to implement, electric grids and engines would come much faster
They are also very good energy storage media. Combine that with zero transmission losses - you can now highly efficient EV powertrains that are significantly more compact. 1000 mile EVs become actually viable.
Secondly, superconductors are one of the most promising platforms for qubits. Big boost for quantum computing - and these are just two applications off the top off my head.
Secondly, superconductors are one of the most promising platforms for qubits. Big boost for quantum computing - and these are just two applications off the top off my head.
Can you point to a source of these superconducting energy storage mechanisms? How do they work? I briefly looked into it and found out that at least the current ones have very high power density, but low energy density.
That's what I meant. It states energy density as 40 kJ/L. Lithium batteries have energy density up to 2.5 MJ/L. Fossil fuels and hydrogen way more.
That 40kJ/L is for the entire system including the cyronics. Get rid of the cyronics and the system gets far far more energy dense.
Do you have a source for this?
Yes, that's quite likely how they come up with this number. But is it enough? What's the most energy dense configuration that can be made with room temp SC and does it compete with lithium batteries?
I just took a look at the source paper [0]
""" Although the attainable magnetic flux density limits the energy per unit volume given by Equation (1) ( B2 /2μ o), the real limit of the energy stored in a SMES is mechanical. [...] The relation defines the minimum mass of the mechanical structure in pure tension to support the radial electromagnetic forces. Force-balanced coils [5] minimize the working stress and thus the mass of the structure. """
So it looks like they 1) don't look at cryo and 2) the limiting factor is the stress due to EM fields.
[0] https://snf.ieeecsc.org/sites/ieeecsc.org/files/CR5_Final3_0...
""" Although the attainable magnetic flux density limits the energy per unit volume given by Equation (1) ( B2 /2μ o), the real limit of the energy stored in a SMES is mechanical. [...] The relation defines the minimum mass of the mechanical structure in pure tension to support the radial electromagnetic forces. Force-balanced coils [5] minimize the working stress and thus the mass of the structure. """
So it looks like they 1) don't look at cryo and 2) the limiting factor is the stress due to EM fields.
[0] https://snf.ieeecsc.org/sites/ieeecsc.org/files/CR5_Final3_0...
Ah, ok. It seems that this SMES thing is not a solution at all for dense energy storage.
Except the energy is stored in the magnetic field. Superconductivity or not, you don't carry tesla-scale electromagnets around without becoming a target for high-velocity metallic projectiles and wreaking havoc with every electronic device in the neighborhood. Storage facilities for regulating grid power fluctuations are probably a much more realistic use case.
Would help with fusion, right?
The limiting factors for superconductors in fusion power generation efficiency is the strength of the magnetic field they can generate which is limited by how much force the superconductor can withstand since the strong magnetic field induces enormous forces on the material. It also requires very high currents. This material seems fragile and can carry very little current.
If this pans out fusion energy would be completely viable with enough investment. Right now tokamaks don't really have a pathway to being commercially viable and are basically 40 years away. For starters, If you can cut the cost by 2-4x you are right in the ballpark of what you would need to build a working tokamak fusion power plant. You would need to do better than that for fusion to be a viable power source but tokamak fusion was always only a magnitude away unlike other hypothetical fusion energy alternatives.
Yes, huge for fusion and would allow tokamak miniaturization too.
is this material cheap enough to make such a power line economically feasible
I'm not expert, but I think about it like this: Resistance is the tendency of a material to convert electrical energy into heat. Higher resistance means more of the electrical energy is converted to heat per "time". A superconductor then has the cool property of being able to carry electrical energy without converting any of it into heat. That's obviously cool for energy transmission, but it also enabled some other counterintuitive effects.
Magnetic fields moving through conductors induce electrical energy in the conductors. Normally this is quickly dissipated as heat, but in a superconductor this energy can't go anywhere, and the conductor therefore can't move through the magnetic field.
We've already done a lot of experiments with superconductors, since we've found some that work at extreme cold, but room temperature superconductors would allow us to productive some of those cool ideas by making them economically viable.
Magnetic fields moving through conductors induce electrical energy in the conductors. Normally this is quickly dissipated as heat, but in a superconductor this energy can't go anywhere, and the conductor therefore can't move through the magnetic field.
We've already done a lot of experiments with superconductors, since we've found some that work at extreme cold, but room temperature superconductors would allow us to productive some of those cool ideas by making them economically viable.
>Higher resistance means more of the electrical energy is converted to heat per "time".
This isn't really accurate because increasing the resistance of a resistor in a given circuit will actually decrease the amount of heat dissipated.
W = IV where I = V/R plug that in we get W = (V/R)V = V^2/R
So Watts = Volts^2/Resistance. Increase resistance, decrease watts.
Its better to just say that resistance converts voltage to heat, and leave it at that. Also is why in the orginal paper (and other superconductor work) they measure voltage drop across the conductor. No voltage drop(loss) = no resistance.
This isn't really accurate because increasing the resistance of a resistor in a given circuit will actually decrease the amount of heat dissipated.
W = IV where I = V/R plug that in we get W = (V/R)V = V^2/R
So Watts = Volts^2/Resistance. Increase resistance, decrease watts.
Its better to just say that resistance converts voltage to heat, and leave it at that. Also is why in the orginal paper (and other superconductor work) they measure voltage drop across the conductor. No voltage drop(loss) = no resistance.
Yeah, my explanation is clearly wrong since it also breaks down at a pretty obvious extreme. If your resistor is non-conductive (infinitely resistive) my model would suppose it would convert all the electricity into heat. What would actually happen is that no electricity would flow and we would therefore get no heat.
I presented it as an intuitive "feel" based idea of what a resistor does. It's very much not a numerically useful or physically accurate one.
I presented it as an intuitive "feel" based idea of what a resistor does. It's very much not a numerically useful or physically accurate one.
IANAP, but a layman's understanding: the materials that we have available today to conduct electricity at or around room temperatures largely do so in an inefficient manner. As electricity moves through the material, some energy is wasted in the form of ejected heat.
To circumvent this, physicists discovered superconductivity: a state in which a material is a perfectly efficient conductor of electricity. Thus far, to create a superconductive material requires keeping that material at extreme conditions of temperature and pressure.
A room-temperature superconductor is a game-changer because we could get nearly-perfect energy efficient electric conduction without the additional energy overhead it takes to keep the material at such a dense pressure or extreme temperature. Such a material would have wide applications across a variety of disciplines.
Here's a useful article as well: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0953-2048/26/11/1...
To circumvent this, physicists discovered superconductivity: a state in which a material is a perfectly efficient conductor of electricity. Thus far, to create a superconductive material requires keeping that material at extreme conditions of temperature and pressure.
A room-temperature superconductor is a game-changer because we could get nearly-perfect energy efficient electric conduction without the additional energy overhead it takes to keep the material at such a dense pressure or extreme temperature. Such a material would have wide applications across a variety of disciplines.
Here's a useful article as well: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0953-2048/26/11/1...
Ever seen one of these high school science demos?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWojYBhvfjM
Now imagine one where you don't have to chill it with liquid nitrogen.
Now imagine one where you don't have to chill it with liquid nitrogen.
The Meissner effect has a lot of potential even outside of the energy efficiency changes (which is by far the most important).
It will be fun to see trains levitating over the ground without any friction loss from the wheels at high speed.
It will be fun to see trains levitating over the ground without any friction loss from the wheels at high speed.
Isn't majority of energy lost spent on pushing air away when we talk about high speed trains
yes, but friction of the track is also a big factor.
A huge renaissance in desk toys, at the very least!
You're joking but to be honest the reason I'm most excited at the moment about this discovery is because of desk toys.
The way I would calculate excitement is usefulness / time to market and the respective graph of a superconductor application (at least in my monkey brain) peaks at desk toys since they would come first.
See:
Weekly Science news by Sabine Hossenfelder
Today we’ll talk about the new superconductor claim, bad news for new physics, a quantum radar, how to print origami, space-based solar power for a moon station, a dire prediction for the collapse of an ocean circulation, Europe’s first hyperloop test, why NASA shoots lasers at the rain forest, and of course, the telephone will ring.
https://youtu.be/RjzL9cS3VW8
Weekly Science news by Sabine Hossenfelder
Today we’ll talk about the new superconductor claim, bad news for new physics, a quantum radar, how to print origami, space-based solar power for a moon station, a dire prediction for the collapse of an ocean circulation, Europe’s first hyperloop test, why NASA shoots lasers at the rain forest, and of course, the telephone will ring.
https://youtu.be/RjzL9cS3VW8
Zero resistance and therefore zero electrical transmission losses would be one of the most significant real-world benefits.
There are also some really cool levitation effects, demonstrated here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPqEEZa2Gis
As to why this one works at room temp? It really needs quantum physics to explain.
There are also some really cool levitation effects, demonstrated here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPqEEZa2Gis
As to why this one works at room temp? It really needs quantum physics to explain.
Conductors carry electrical current but have resistance, so you lose power to heat. Superconductors have effectively zero resistance so you don't lose power as they conduct.
We can make superconductors, but they only work at extremely cold temperatures, if they get too hot they turn back into bad conductors. This new material might be able to superconduct at room temperature, which means zero loss conductors without expensive bulky and complicated cooling systems. There are many cool things that can be done with zero loss conductors.
We can make superconductors, but they only work at extremely cold temperatures, if they get too hot they turn back into bad conductors. This new material might be able to superconduct at room temperature, which means zero loss conductors without expensive bulky and complicated cooling systems. There are many cool things that can be done with zero loss conductors.
Superconductor are more efficient at transmitting energy, here are some consequences:
- Cheaper electricity transportation
- New kind of batteries
- Consumer devices that don't heat up as you use them
- Simplifies the design of fusion reactors, which means we could have fusion sooner and cheaper
- Probably lots of things we can't even think of
If this is true, then you still have a lot of time before you can do industrial replication but given the stakes I imagine we will see immense inflows of capital into this.
- Cheaper electricity transportation
- New kind of batteries
- Consumer devices that don't heat up as you use them
- Simplifies the design of fusion reactors, which means we could have fusion sooner and cheaper
- Probably lots of things we can't even think of
If this is true, then you still have a lot of time before you can do industrial replication but given the stakes I imagine we will see immense inflows of capital into this.
Avatar 3 will have practical unobtanium.
For something close to home, imagine a gaming laptop that runs on full performance mode without generating any heat. Imagine datacenters running full workloads without needing cooling.
Electromagnets are built with coils of copper magnet wire - an efficient conductor but generates waste heat - what if we could build those electromagnets with zero resistance? Electric motors become very exciting. The electrical <-> mechanical relationship gets transformed.
We use electricity for everything, so it's hard to communicate the extent of the revolution. People keep bringing up MRI machines because they're on the ragged edge of electromagnet usage constrained by cooling.
Electromagnets are built with coils of copper magnet wire - an efficient conductor but generates waste heat - what if we could build those electromagnets with zero resistance? Electric motors become very exciting. The electrical <-> mechanical relationship gets transformed.
We use electricity for everything, so it's hard to communicate the extent of the revolution. People keep bringing up MRI machines because they're on the ragged edge of electromagnet usage constrained by cooling.
> For something close to home, imagine a gaming laptop that runs on full performance mode without generating any heat. Imagine datacenters running full workloads without needing cooling.
Aren't there other components like transistors that will still generate heat?
Aren't there other components like transistors that will still generate heat?
Hoverboards.
lalopalota(3)
Think your EV is so efficient that you only need to charge it once every 5000 miles.
How does a superconductor help with that? Lithium ion is already 95-99% efficient, same with motors. It would help with the charging cable, but that's not increasing the battery capacity. Off the top of my head the main advantage here seems to be MRIs, maybe also maglev trains, maybe generators? It really depends on the form factor of this superconductor compared to copper wire.
The problem with losing 5% of the energy in the motor windings is that they heat up. With superconducting windings you run smaller-lighter motors.
[deleted]
There is also SMES, energy storage application, already in use today that may become interesting for other use cases if we could do it without the cooling: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_ene...
Zero loss of energy to heat in any of the conductors. You're not making the battery more efficient, you're making everything else more efficient.
That's not going to produce a 20x gain in efficiency. The primary problem with electric cars is energy density in the battery itself.
Maybe if mag-lev cars are possible, you could get that kind of gain from the reduced friction.
Maybe if mag-lev cars are possible, you could get that kind of gain from the reduced friction.
If your loss goes from 5% to 1%, you have to deal with 80% less heat. So you can make 3x smaller motors. All the powertrain of these machines will be hugely simplified.
That's no small deal, but in the grand scheme of things that a hot superconductor can give us.. I mean, this can (possibly, with decades of research) give us fusion, quantum computing, etc.
That's no small deal, but in the grand scheme of things that a hot superconductor can give us.. I mean, this can (possibly, with decades of research) give us fusion, quantum computing, etc.
The motors are not a constraint though for electrical vehicles. The motors are already much smaller than equivalent ICEs, as seen in the empty "frunks" in most electric cars.
Agreed Fusion would be the biggest win possible.
Agreed Fusion would be the biggest win possible.
Are most of the losses in the motor? I figure it'd be friction in the drive train, the bearings, air drag, etc.
The major threads so far, in reverse order—have I missed any?
Huazhong University demonstrates LK-99 diamagnetism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36953819 - Aug 1, 2023 (265 comments)
LK-99 crystal verified to be magnetically levitated (with video) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36953396 - Aug 1, 2023 (10 comments)
Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor LK-99 preprint revision 2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36952894 - Aug 1, 2023 (272 comments)
Origin of correlated isolated flat bands in LK99 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36951815 - Aug 1, 2023 (196 comments)
Semiconducting Transport in LK99 reproduction attempt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36951140 - Aug 1, 2023 (245 comments)
LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36940323 - July 31, 2023 (619 comments)
Ask HN: Room temperature superconductor: what to expect? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36930707 - July 30, 2023 (61 comments)
“We are not cheating” (YH Kwon superconductor comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36929386 - July 30, 2023 (61 comments)
Korea Superconductor Papers Published ‘Without Consent’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36927216 - July 30, 2023 (47 comments)
Argonne National Lab is attempting to replicate LK-99 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36916254 - July 29, 2023 (201 comments)
LK-99 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36897300 - July 27, 2023 (58 comments)
Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36881808 - July 26, 2023 (471 comments)
The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36864624 - July 25, 2023 (875 comments)
Edit: thanks to mystery user for emailing [email protected] to suggest we include the days, not just month/year, for fast-moving stories like this.
Huazhong University demonstrates LK-99 diamagnetism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36953819 - Aug 1, 2023 (265 comments)
LK-99 crystal verified to be magnetically levitated (with video) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36953396 - Aug 1, 2023 (10 comments)
Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor LK-99 preprint revision 2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36952894 - Aug 1, 2023 (272 comments)
Origin of correlated isolated flat bands in LK99 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36951815 - Aug 1, 2023 (196 comments)
Semiconducting Transport in LK99 reproduction attempt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36951140 - Aug 1, 2023 (245 comments)
LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36940323 - July 31, 2023 (619 comments)
Ask HN: Room temperature superconductor: what to expect? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36930707 - July 30, 2023 (61 comments)
“We are not cheating” (YH Kwon superconductor comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36929386 - July 30, 2023 (61 comments)
Korea Superconductor Papers Published ‘Without Consent’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36927216 - July 30, 2023 (47 comments)
Argonne National Lab is attempting to replicate LK-99 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36916254 - July 29, 2023 (201 comments)
LK-99 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36897300 - July 27, 2023 (58 comments)
Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36881808 - July 26, 2023 (471 comments)
The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36864624 - July 25, 2023 (875 comments)
Edit: thanks to mystery user for emailing [email protected] to suggest we include the days, not just month/year, for fast-moving stories like this.
Any idea why the Science article links to a HN post as the source?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36953396 (10 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36953396 (10 comments)
Why not put them into a single megathread with the links linked in text? Each new post still has repetitive comments ("What if it's a hoax?" "What does this enable" "Reminds me of the EmDrive"...)
With all the recent “the government has alien spacecraft news” and the bizarre circumstances of this material’s creation, the (I know to be ridiculous) conspiratorial part of my mind is going “I guess climate change is finally forcing them to take stuff out of the extraterrestrial vaults.”
I don't know, the material is a ceramic made of a powdered lead, copper, sulphur, phosphorus and oxygen heated up together. It's not some advanced meta material which if true it's amazing this was not discovered earlier but let's just hope it is.
This was intended as a joke, but since most raw materials in the universe are the same, extraterrestrials deriving novel combinations is just as, if not more likely, than meta materials etc.
... or Gödel was right and the universe spins and backward time travel is possible and they got permission to pull some future inventions out of the vault retrieved from future us ... in order to make sure we actually make it to future us ... which we should ... because the inventions are real ...
This one is fun too.
So they planted this with a Korean lab a few years ago?
Having known many conspiracy theorists... yeah. Given the US troop presence in Korea, they would say "absolutely," and they'd then adjust their tinfoil hats.
The namesake of LK-99 is the year it was first synthesized - 1999.
I mean we do have a defense pact with South Korea... There are worse places to establish parallel discovery.
Plausible enough for science fiction at least.
Plausible enough for science fiction at least.
Please see “I know to be ridiculous” in my comment. This was intended as a joke.
One interesting aspect here is that the materials processing is comparatively simple. A real industrial process might require much higher precision. But none of this needs aliens. Based on descriptions of the process, it looks like anyone could try to replicate.
I want to believe.
the government didn't have news, someone that worked for it said they heard someone else say something
Third replication on some Chinese website https://www.zhihu.com/zvideo/1669820225079070720
Description by the author, translated by Google Translate:
I need to clarify and explain: the sample is standing above the magnet, and it will immediately return to standing when pressed with tweezers in front of the video, similar to the anti-magnetism of Koreans. In the back of the video, because the sample is too small, I dare not push it with tweezers, and it is easy to break the sample, so I moved the paper a little sideways, and it can be seen that the sample is still diamagnetic, and it is not that the moving magnet is moving with the magnet. Whether it is related to flux pinning or superconductivity remains to be further verified. Please treat it rationally!
Original: 我需要澄清和解释一下：样品在磁铁上方是站立着，视频前面用镊子去压它马上又恢复站立状态，类似韩国人的抗磁性。视频后面因为样品太小，没敢用镊子去推，容易把样品搞碎，所以稍微横移了一下纸张，可以看到样品还是呈抗磁性，并不是移动磁铁跟着磁铁在移动。是否属于磁通钉扎或者超导相关还有待进一步的验证。请理性看待！
I need to clarify and explain: the sample is standing above the magnet, and it will immediately return to standing when pressed with tweezers in front of the video, similar to the anti-magnetism of Koreans. In the back of the video, because the sample is too small, I dare not push it with tweezers, and it is easy to break the sample, so I moved the paper a little sideways, and it can be seen that the sample is still diamagnetic, and it is not that the moving magnet is moving with the magnet. Whether it is related to flux pinning or superconductivity remains to be further verified. Please treat it rationally!
Original: 我需要澄清和解释一下：样品在磁铁上方是站立着，视频前面用镊子去压它马上又恢复站立状态，类似韩国人的抗磁性。视频后面因为样品太小，没敢用镊子去推，容易把样品搞碎，所以稍微横移了一下纸张，可以看到样品还是呈抗磁性，并不是移动磁铁跟着磁铁在移动。是否属于磁通钉扎或者超导相关还有待进一步的验证。请理性看待！
I haven’t been this excited since the EmDrive
Which should honestly be a warning sign.
Does LK-99 defy the laws of physics like the EmDrive did?
A room temperature and pressure semiconductor is more an astoundingly large jump forward in the space than something that defies known physics.
That doesn’t track. The EmDrive was legitimately pushing a premise that we had some fundamental law of physics wrong. Superconductors are pretty well understood, they’ve been around for a while. Finding a room temperature one isn’t that big of a jump, it’s just a really hard one to make.
You're in agreement with the GP, their comment was just hard to parse.
Perhaps it would have been clearer to say "than it is something..."
. Too late to edit at this point unfortunately.
Someone posted this in a comment on another post of LK-99: Wouldn't the first step be verification before replication? I.e. have the original authors send out some LK-99 samples to other researchers to at least confirm "Yes, this thing is a high temperature superconductor". Wouldn't matter even that much if it were made with unicorn dust: it would be proof that high temperature superconductors are even possible, which is itself a huge, huge deal.
After that replication of production of LK-99 would of course be critical, but just proving it exists should alone be enough for grand celebration.
After that replication of production of LK-99 would of course be critical, but just proving it exists should alone be enough for grand celebration.
This LK99 thing all sounds to me very similar to the Podkletnov Gravity Shielding experiments of the 1990s . There may be something, but the mainstreet media is blowing it out of proportions. Some scientists may get hurt for this.
I haven't seen much of anything on the mainstream media. Just here in hn and other tech sites. Are you making this up?
Because unless all current replication attempts fail, it would be totally pointless.
I know we're all eager for news, but there's no urgent need to verify the claims. That's not how science works. Give it a couple weeks.
I know we're all eager for news, but there's no urgent need to verify the claims. That's not how science works. Give it a couple weeks.
[deleted]
How likely is this to lead to breaking all encryption by enabling way bigger superconducting quantum computers with way more qubits than are reasonable nowadays? Is this just going to turn into cyberwar on steroids?
There are post-quantum-computing encryption schemes [1], thankfully.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography
That still leaves all encrypted traffic on the current internet vulnerable to a store-and-decrypt-later attack, which is more concerning the nearer that "later" is.
which is happening in room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A for decades, all https traffic has been stored, and ones that use rsa (most of them) will retroactively be unveiled once we have shor's algorithm
Just because you could operate superconducting qubits at high temperature doesn't mean you would. By far the biggest problem for qubits is noise, and raising the temperature would increase noise. I won't claim a high Tc superconductor can't help... but my gut reaction is that it's irrelevant to the actual engineering issues as they currently stand.
[deleted]
I will never get tired of this story (and fresh Derek Lowe)
PBS had a documentary about the possibilities way back in the 1980s and I still remember it
It won't change things overnight or even this year but the benefits to humankind will be huge eventually.
(and we'll need more power transmission more cheaply for all that extra air-conditioning we'll need unfortunately)
PBS had a documentary about the possibilities way back in the 1980s and I still remember it
It won't change things overnight or even this year but the benefits to humankind will be huge eventually.
(and we'll need more power transmission more cheaply for all that extra air-conditioning we'll need unfortunately)
[deleted]
I wonder if this is just summertime boredom combined with social media blowing an interesting development out of proportion, or if we're actually witnessing history in real time?
Also, what are the chances this is like another graphene, where it can do everything except get out of the lab?
Also, what are the chances this is like another graphene, where it can do everything except get out of the lab?
I’m also wondering this. People keep saying this is as big as transistors and the Iron Age and so far the only examples I see are slightly more efficient power. The quantum computing one seemed like the only potentially huge benefit. But what do I know
If it's real, how fast could we see concrete applications using this material? 5-year time frame? 10-year time frame? More?
Nobody knows, it depends on a multitude of factors, but most likely this won't be the exact material which will have applications, I'm sure there is a much easier to fabricate related material which will be the first of a whole set of materials which act as superconductors at room temperatures.
Yeah, this feels like the really early results of a material that they eventually refine into a process, hence their patents. There are reports they were worried about being beaten to the punch, im curious if that’s true and if so, who the word on the street said was close.
Why be so sure about that? I really hope it doesn't turn out to be graphene 2.0, a material that can revolutionize everything but can't be produced consistently and in usable quantities by any means at all.
You'd need breakthroughs in the manufacturing of it (yield, process, scale, etc) and then building the infrastructure and supply chain to support it. Depending on its availability you could see governments hoard the material for "security" and "public interest" use cases, etc. Military first as usual.
If this turns out to be a super conducting material you can be assured that overnight there will be many thousands of people all around the world, from academic, corporate, government, and private labs working with the new theory and materials and discoveries will occur as our understanding of the phenomenon get deeper and wider. There will be so much incentive to find new methods and materials that have the properties of this material.
If this turns out to be a super conducting material you can be assured that overnight there will be many thousands of people all around the world, from academic, corporate, government, and private labs working with the new theory and materials and discoveries will occur as our understanding of the phenomenon get deeper and wider. There will be so much incentive to find new methods and materials that have the properties of this material.
> if you could grow a good single crystal of LK-99, it seems as if the superconductivity might only occur along one crystal axis: put crudely, you'd see superconductivity if you hooked your wires to two particular opposite faces of said crystal, but not to the others! Crystalline grain boundaries are already known to be a big deal in the efficiency of existing superconducting materials, and this would mean that polycrystalline samples of LK-99 would be pretty unfavorable to demonstrating robust effects.
I think this means production of usable superconducting masses will be tricky, if its even possible.
So... Probably on the longer side? Time will be needed to figure out how to make it macroscopically, or discover a similar compound thats easier to produce in bulk.
But once wire, coils, high purity samples and such start getting sold, I think the adoption would be very quick.
I think this means production of usable superconducting masses will be tricky, if its even possible.
So... Probably on the longer side? Time will be needed to figure out how to make it macroscopically, or discover a similar compound thats easier to produce in bulk.
But once wire, coils, high purity samples and such start getting sold, I think the adoption would be very quick.
But what you just described would still be insanely valuable. Just in the field of semiconductors and chip fab, it would probably unlock insane gains.
Probably yeah.
But I dont want to jump to conclusions. I dont think its a drop in replacement for, say, the copper substrate.
But I dont want to jump to conclusions. I dont think its a drop in replacement for, say, the copper substrate.
if its real (or real even in principle as in hard to repro say 1 in 20 times) even than the immediate consequence would be a lot of investment directly flowing into the research. combining that with some AI based techniques I'd say (if the idealized material bears out predictions at room temp) within half a decade we will see good manufacturing techniques. after that its all application specific.
If real it will be weaponized in 90-days.
What’s the next big tech in the tech tree after room temp superconductors?
Applied Relativity (Discover 5), then Photon/Wave Mechanics (Conquer 6), Probability Mechanics (Build 7), and Nanometallurgy (Explore 8). Once we also discover Organic Superlubricant (Conquer 7), we'll get to Matter Compression (Conquer 9).
Organic superlube!? Oh, it's great stuff! Great stuff.
Organic superlube!? Oh, it's great stuff! Great stuff.
Cold fusion, after containment with superconductors becomes easy.
I posted this elsewhere but I think it was after comments got merged in here, so sorry for the spam if you happen to see it twice:
I’m interested to know if anyone has any recommended resources on DFT or DDFT (the simulation method used here) for someone with good applied math knowledge but who is not a physicist. I have a decent working knowledge of stat mech from knowing about dynamical systems and information theory, but I am not a physicist. I’ve come across (classical) DFT before, but the tutorial papers I’ve come across get weighed down by a lot of physics jargon and notation that I don’t understand and they describe it in terms of certain physical systems that obfuscate whether I can adapt the method to problems I am interested (I think the answer is yes in my case but if I was confident I wouldn’t be asking). I could just rederive (classical) D or DDFT for my stochastic process, and that is likely the best way to learn it, but having a resource that is written more from the perspective of dynamical systems than a physicist would speed the process up quite a bit!
I’m interested to know if anyone has any recommended resources on DFT or DDFT (the simulation method used here) for someone with good applied math knowledge but who is not a physicist. I have a decent working knowledge of stat mech from knowing about dynamical systems and information theory, but I am not a physicist. I’ve come across (classical) DFT before, but the tutorial papers I’ve come across get weighed down by a lot of physics jargon and notation that I don’t understand and they describe it in terms of certain physical systems that obfuscate whether I can adapt the method to problems I am interested (I think the answer is yes in my case but if I was confident I wouldn’t be asking). I could just rederive (classical) D or DDFT for my stochastic process, and that is likely the best way to learn it, but having a resource that is written more from the perspective of dynamical systems than a physicist would speed the process up quite a bit!
Apart from levitation and resistance, free conductivity, what are superconductors really good for? Like how could an iPhone become better with super conductive room temperature materials?
I'm not a scientist but how does this demonstrate anything? It just looks like a magnet is moving some metallic object. Can someone explain like I'm a five year old?
So what's happening is they are demonstrating diamagnetism. Basically when exposed to an external magnetic field, that field induces a response in the material that repels it.
When people think of magnetism, they think of polar charges that either attract or repel other polar charges. Diamagnetism is neat in that regardless of the orientation and polarity of the external field, a diamagnetic material is always repelled.
Now why this matters. All superconductors exhibit diamagnetism, but not all diamagnetic materials are superconductors. So this lends credibility to lk-99 being a potential super conductor because they have been able to show it has one of properties of a superconductor.
But we're still far off from showing it is a superconductor. That will be harder because impurities and other factors can confound the results, so right now the focus is on synthesis and confirming some of the easier properties we expect to see
When people think of magnetism, they think of polar charges that either attract or repel other polar charges. Diamagnetism is neat in that regardless of the orientation and polarity of the external field, a diamagnetic material is always repelled.
Now why this matters. All superconductors exhibit diamagnetism, but not all diamagnetic materials are superconductors. So this lends credibility to lk-99 being a potential super conductor because they have been able to show it has one of properties of a superconductor.
But we're still far off from showing it is a superconductor. That will be harder because impurities and other factors can confound the results, so right now the focus is on synthesis and confirming some of the easier properties we expect to see
So why is everyone getting so excited about superconductors when all we actually know is this (probably) exhibits diamagnetism? Is diamagnetism super rare outside of superconductors?
It's rare for it to be strong, from what i've seen. Based on the videos that have been shown, it appears that it would be the most strongly diamagnetic substance (other than superconductors) known by a wide margin.
In comparison, levitating things like pyrolytic graphite seems to require truly massive magnets to achieve even millimeters of levitation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC3r9-OaWes
In comparison, levitating things like pyrolytic graphite seems to require truly massive magnets to achieve even millimeters of levitation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC3r9-OaWes
And part of the reason that succeeds is because graphite is very light. A chunk of LK-99 is three times as dense, so getting it to levitate is extremely impressive even if it's just conventional diamagnetism.
Like the other commentor said. It's usually a very weak effect, strong diamagnetism is uncommon. It's exciting to see replication of the material and it exhibiting properties we'd expect to see, as it lends credibility to the original claim.
Right now the original claim is on shakey ground because one of the authors rushed the publication, so there's problems with the original paper that needed addressing (I havent looked at the new paper yet). So there's a bit of parallel construction going on, the authors are fixing the publication while other researchers are working to replicate the material/claims.
So basically, people are super excited because so far, the material has been replicated to some degree of success a few times, and exhibiting properties that support the original claim.
The claim of room temperature super conductors is exciting by itself, but that the science is replicating to any degree in such a short window is awesome
Right now the original claim is on shakey ground because one of the authors rushed the publication, so there's problems with the original paper that needed addressing (I havent looked at the new paper yet). So there's a bit of parallel construction going on, the authors are fixing the publication while other researchers are working to replicate the material/claims.
So basically, people are super excited because so far, the material has been replicated to some degree of success a few times, and exhibiting properties that support the original claim.
The claim of room temperature super conductors is exciting by itself, but that the science is replicating to any degree in such a short window is awesome
I am glad this is getting more attention. Maybe it will replicate, maybe it will not, or maybe we will find something new. But happy that this is in the news cycle.
"Guardedly optimistic"!
Even if this doesn't pan out, I'll dare to hope we get useful stuff out of this, like how we got Duct (duck?) tape and silly putty.
If it does, hoo boy!
If it does, hoo boy!
This would be huge for increasing energy density in Manhattan. Holbrook Superconductor Project uses liquid nitrogen to cool.
Are these guys just trolling?
They reference Dr Salvatore Cezar Pais in the patent. The spaceship guy. Surely they're trying to stir the pot with that.
https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2023027537A1/en
They reference Dr Salvatore Cezar Pais in the patent. The spaceship guy. Surely they're trying to stir the pot with that.
https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2023027537A1/en
"Cited by examiner"
What's next is amazing.
You wouldn't had believed it if I had told you a month ago.
You wouldn't had believed it if I had told you a month ago.
Damn,literally blasting the Oppenheimer soundtrack at full volume while reading this... Exciting time to be alive. Hope the hype is worth it..
What fields would directly benefit from this?
Would buying quantum computing stocks be a good idea now?
Would buying quantum computing stocks be a good idea now?
[deleted]
Has that German scientist that answered like an asshole ever posted a reply yet? I want to see what some of the aggressive nay-sayers are saying now. I love this bit of schadenfreude.
Forget posting with a year, or month, or day.
These stories need a time-stamp.
Who replicated or not since this morning.
These stories need a time-stamp.
Who replicated or not since this morning.
The time stamps are below the post’s title
You know how sometimes people complain about an old story, and say put year in the title, like this.
(2014) Some Title
What is below the title is a time since posted, not the date of the article.
This was a joke. Since there are multiple submittals every hour today about this story.
So need something like
(8/1/2023 10AM) Yet Another Story, about another group, with claim about Replication of Superconductor
(2014) Some Title
What is below the title is a time since posted, not the date of the article.
This was a joke. Since there are multiple submittals every hour today about this story.
So need something like
(8/1/2023 10AM) Yet Another Story, about another group, with claim about Replication of Superconductor
You'll never get that through committee. It'll get hung up on which time zone to use.
[deleted]
Ha! "Headless Poultry Mode myself".
this changes everything (if it's true)
Is this material structure improbable enough that it raises the question of reverse engineered UAP debris :)
No
Are we superconducting yet?
Fascinating stuff :)
ok this is very exciting to hear
awsome，man，这是我丁真的独享时刻
Mostly, I am just glad that all the LK-99 posts are drowning out the "AI" news for a few days.
<tinfoil hat>
AI has already taken over the internet and is just feeding us news stories based on what it already knows.
Super conductor discovered by a team who's been searching for 20 years. Internal conflict 'proves' there's something to argue over. Low quality, confusing information that's hard to decipher, but kind of makes sense. Asian language information streams and videos.
Musk buys twitter.
A submarine visited the titanic and imploded.
</tinfoil hat>
AI has already taken over the internet and is just feeding us news stories based on what it already knows.
Super conductor discovered by a team who's been searching for 20 years. Internal conflict 'proves' there's something to argue over. Low quality, confusing information that's hard to decipher, but kind of makes sense. Asian language information streams and videos.
Musk buys twitter.
A submarine visited the titanic and imploded.
</tinfoil hat>
Dude sometimes scientific progress really does happen, and it's messy when it's happening live, and people get excited about it because they really do find science inherently exciting.
I've got no clue what you're trying to imply. Most things aren't an internet conspiracy. Skepticism is warranted, and the claims about LK-99 are far from proven. But there's 100s of thousands of researchers out there in the real world, doing research and publishing papers, and that really is what's happening here.
I've got no clue what you're trying to imply. Most things aren't an internet conspiracy. Skepticism is warranted, and the claims about LK-99 are far from proven. But there's 100s of thousands of researchers out there in the real world, doing research and publishing papers, and that really is what's happening here.
https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest
Just having a laugh about AI becoming too powerful.
I don't honestly think it's happened yet, but it seems like a fake internet, or at least a future where it's hard to tell if this story is true as it has articles, videos and pictures to back it up.
We're just at a weird time of the internet where AI can generate stories, videos, audio and pictures, just not in a cohesive way - but that cohesiveness is just a matter of putting all the existing pieces together.
Just having a laugh about AI becoming too powerful.
I don't honestly think it's happened yet, but it seems like a fake internet, or at least a future where it's hard to tell if this story is true as it has articles, videos and pictures to back it up.
We're just at a weird time of the internet where AI can generate stories, videos, audio and pictures, just not in a cohesive way - but that cohesiveness is just a matter of putting all the existing pieces together.
Superconducting material discovered right around the time conversations about UFOs are kicking off again - coincidence?
If you want a tinfoil hat, consider that the LK-99 news dropped around the time that the US military is being exposed for having RTRPS tech flying around for decades
> for having RTRPS tech flying around for decades
RTRPS = Real Time Role Playing Strategy?
RTRPS = Real Time Role Playing Strategy?
I'm sorry, but you are correct. I made a mistake earlier when I referred to RTRPS as being a flying technology the government has been using for decades. No such technology goes by that name. I apologize for the error.
RTRPS is presumably "room temperature room pressure superconductor"
<tinfoil hat>
AI is multi-modal and is generating stories based on engagement.
<tinfoil hat>
I mean, we're all waiting for the "AI can now do everything announcement", but what if it just starts doing everything and telling us stories we want.
I can't personally verify LK-99, twitter, UFO's or the submarine story, but they're all highly entertaining.
I mean, we're all waiting for the "AI can now do everything announcement", but what if it just starts doing everything and telling us stories we want.
I can't personally verify LK-99, twitter, UFO's or the submarine story, but they're all highly entertaining.
"RTRPS tech" doesn't turn up anything on Google. What does this even mean?
What's RTRPS?
Registered Tax Return Preparers.
Radical Treason Raptor Planes
/Birds aren't real
/Birds aren't real
Returned Telephone Reproduction Plans
[deleted]
The only thing I care about is voyager 2 and I'm not going to hear how that thing is doing until October 15.
Not necessarily true; the heartbeat has been recently detected so it is possible (unlikely) we can transmit strongly enough that it can detect the commands and reorient before that time. Maybe we'll get lucky!
ChatGPT please rewrite this in a language of the King James bible.
Verily, yea, the AI hath usurped the dominion of the internet, and it doth dispense unto us news tales predicated on its vast repository of knowledge. A super conductor hath been unearthed by a diligent company of seekers, who toiled for two decades in their quest. Yet, amidst this discovery, internal strife ariseth, making manifest that there are matters to contend with and debate.
Lo, the tidings shared are fraught with obscurity and scant lucidity, yet there lies a glimmer of comprehension therein. From the streams and moving images of the Orient, cometh information in languages unknown to many.
Furthermore, Musk, a man of wealth and innovation, hath purchased the platform known as Twitter.
In a most daring endeavor, a submarine hath ventured to the sunken Titanic, only to be consumed by implosion, as the shipwreck claimed its price.
Lo, the tidings shared are fraught with obscurity and scant lucidity, yet there lies a glimmer of comprehension therein. From the streams and moving images of the Orient, cometh information in languages unknown to many.
Furthermore, Musk, a man of wealth and innovation, hath purchased the platform known as Twitter.
In a most daring endeavor, a submarine hath ventured to the sunken Titanic, only to be consumed by implosion, as the shipwreck claimed its price.
Someone call Tom Cruise, the entity is real!
But fear the news if it is discovered that LK-99 increases AI performance.
Or the news that ChatGPT is attempting an LK-99 replication.
Yes. Using the well known ChatGPT manufacturing capabilities.
Soon: The unrestricted GPT-4 model began by hiring a task rabbit to order lead oxide, lead sulfate, elemental copper, phosphorus, and a vacuum-evacuated quartz oven...
You mean emailing a for-profit materials science lab somewhere, like it did when it had that task rabbit solve a CAPTCHA for it?
I.e. natural language injection when somebody from a capable lab uses ChatGPT to write an e-mail :)
A planet completely populated by electronic beings.
Single-celled life, multi-cellular, mushrooms, trees, whatever ate lignin, dinosaurs, rodents, humans, Electric beings? I mean, there's nothing 'unnatural' about a world populated by robots, we just assume that 'alive' means 'made of meat', but the raw materials in a robot and a human are all Earth based.
Single-celled life, multi-cellular, mushrooms, trees, whatever ate lignin, dinosaurs, rodents, humans, Electric beings? I mean, there's nothing 'unnatural' about a world populated by robots, we just assume that 'alive' means 'made of meat', but the raw materials in a robot and a human are all Earth based.
I recommend checking out "They're made out of meat":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GggK9SjJpuQ
Reminds me of the (absolutely dreadful) series by Tobias Roote where a certain space metal gets alloyed by human blood to produce AI processors a hundred times more powerful.
Realistically, superconducting processors would most likely be much faster, or at least cram more cores on a single die.
Realistically, superconducting processors would most likely be much faster, or at least cram more cores on a single die.
Seriously speaking, it can in fact increase AI performance, since it will optimize
all things electromagnetic. It takes humankind closer to the so called 'singularity'.
I'm sure Elon also has SpaceX or something trying to replicate it as well. He sort of has to jump on each new trend anyhow.
In a serious note, superconductors are likely useful in electric magnetic motors and probably in high power electronics and batteries in general, no?
In a serious note, superconductors are likely useful in electric magnetic motors and probably in high power electronics and batteries in general, no?
LK-99 is already patented so even if Elon were making a ton of it, he couldn't do much in his products without licensing it from the creators.
As if that would have stopped him. He will argue that it’s XK-69, entirely different material and spend decades in litigation trying to bankrupt the inventors or worse.
There's probably other similar chemistries that also super conduct at room temperature. Call it the marching tetrahedra of super conductors.
You are likely correct. Now that this has been shown we will probably get a dozen or more of these over the next decade.
I think the winners will be those which are cheaply and reliably made at scale out of common and non toxic elements and have long durability, or if this isn’t fully achievable something close to this goal.
I think the winners will be those which are cheaply and reliably made at scale out of common and non toxic elements and have long durability, or if this isn’t fully achievable something close to this goal.
[deleted]
I put 1k USD into Tesla today with the same reasoning. Hopefully I don't end up a fool!
The only thing Elon seems to be interested now is embarrassing himself even further
Anything is better than crypto.
Crypto is utterly useless, a walled off sector of cons.
AI is useful enough to be dangerous in the hands of bad actors, where the marks are not just the suckers but the people who want to have nothing to do with it.
AI is useful enough to be dangerous in the hands of bad actors, where the marks are not just the suckers but the people who want to have nothing to do with it.
How about LK-99 coins!?!? Right? Maybe we use diffusion to design them so they are "super-conducting crypto AI coins" get yours now for only $199 at the Philadelphia Mint. Act now, supplies are limited!
I'm going to use my new skills as a Prompt Engineer to get Stable Diffusion to produce some NFTs for me, and use the profits to invest in a SPAC targeting LK-99 start-ups.
Now explain that sentence to a caveman - or even to someone in 1990.
Now explain that sentence to a caveman - or even to someone in 1990.
Language divergence is kind of insane. I heard a person say in conversation "I didn't get a picture of it because I didn't have my phone with me." And thinking about how that would be interpreted, 10, 25, 50, and 100 years ago is pretty funny.
There is a funny comedy bit in the movie "Sleeper" where Woody Allen's character is explaining what things were for to scientists in the 23rd century. But today it is even wilder.
What really strikes me is that it isn't "slang" that we're dealing with here, it is actual kind of "things". I thought we had peaked with pet rocks but I was so, so very wrong.
There is a funny comedy bit in the movie "Sleeper" where Woody Allen's character is explaining what things were for to scientists in the 23rd century. But today it is even wilder.
What really strikes me is that it isn't "slang" that we're dealing with here, it is actual kind of "things". I thought we had peaked with pet rocks but I was so, so very wrong.
He is going to use his skills as a poweruser of an AI program to have it output a script; which runs an image generation program to produce and record sales transactions of images. He will take the money from the sales of those images to invest in a SPAC targeting potential room temperature super conductor start-ups.
DOGE-99 is just around the corner
My new start-up, Super Conducting Artifical Minds, is releasing a new coin that allows zero resistance neural network computation on the block chain. Get in on it now and you can make millions in passive income!
No no no, this eliminates the need for cryo, not crypto.
What has happened to HN the past few months? So much AI, Superconductors and open source air quality monitoring.
You've fallen for the Fundamental Attribution Error.
It's not HN; it's the world that's driving this.
1. GPT-4-grade AI is a genuine, holy-smokes innovation that is already driving massive changes in education (universities are having to redesign all their writing assignments,) entertainment (SAG-AFTRA strike,) and the tech industry (the sudden disappearance of thousands of jobs, and the concomitant socioeconomic demotion of software engineers. And if you think AI isn't to blame here: you're probably right! There was other stuff going on, e.g. the end of ZIRP. But AI will keep those jobs away.)
2. Clean air seems pressing, as (if you'll recall) we just had this little pandemic thing happen, and in case you missed it, a vast chunk of my country (Canada) is currently ablaze, choking the United States with smoke, and other places are experiencing similar pressures (thanks, 2023 Thermal Pulse.)
3. RTAP Superconductors are literally the stuff of sci fi, and their advent interacts directly with trends 1 and 2, as RTAPS would make climate change more easily addressed (dramatic efficiency improvements across the board) and also would make AI silicon work much, much faster as part of that. It might also open the door to efficient quantum computing, which in turn would drive AGI even faster/further.
You're living through some seriously bonkers stuff, and your newsfeed is understandably preoccupied with it.
It's not HN; it's the world that's driving this.
1. GPT-4-grade AI is a genuine, holy-smokes innovation that is already driving massive changes in education (universities are having to redesign all their writing assignments,) entertainment (SAG-AFTRA strike,) and the tech industry (the sudden disappearance of thousands of jobs, and the concomitant socioeconomic demotion of software engineers. And if you think AI isn't to blame here: you're probably right! There was other stuff going on, e.g. the end of ZIRP. But AI will keep those jobs away.)
2. Clean air seems pressing, as (if you'll recall) we just had this little pandemic thing happen, and in case you missed it, a vast chunk of my country (Canada) is currently ablaze, choking the United States with smoke, and other places are experiencing similar pressures (thanks, 2023 Thermal Pulse.)
3. RTAP Superconductors are literally the stuff of sci fi, and their advent interacts directly with trends 1 and 2, as RTAPS would make climate change more easily addressed (dramatic efficiency improvements across the board) and also would make AI silicon work much, much faster as part of that. It might also open the door to efficient quantum computing, which in turn would drive AGI even faster/further.
You're living through some seriously bonkers stuff, and your newsfeed is understandably preoccupied with it.
I don't know, I haven't really seen the same level of interest from my "normie" friends that I've seen among the HN-adjacent crowd. None of them seem to be aware of LK-99, let alone care about it. Meanwhile, the GPT hype has worn off, and on that note, none of them seem to be aware that there's a difference between GPT-4 and ChatGPT. The former is this vague, nearly non-existent thing.
They're aware of the actors/writers strike and the association AI has with it, but AI in this context is a vague speculative thing rather than a specific type of AI or brand of AI made by some company.
They're aware of the actors/writers strike and the association AI has with it, but AI in this context is a vague speculative thing rather than a specific type of AI or brand of AI made by some company.
Yeah, HN is always gonna be quite a bit further along than mainstream in terms of both depth and detail, and living a bit in the future (and as a result of this, more speculatively.)
> I don't know, I haven't really seen the same level of interest from my "normie" friends that I've seen among the HN-adjacent crowd.
Implicit in this counterargument is the idea that judging what is of genuine importance is a matter of opinion, as though we could get a sense of what to pay attention to by polling a large enough sample set.
It is not. Expertise matters. Who is interested in the topic matters.
Put another way: from the Fundamental Attribution Error alone, it does not follow that identity is completely meaningless; it does, however imply that anyone with such-and-such a set of concerns and knowledge would behave in such-and-such a way under such-and-such conditions.
And those conditions obtain. And so, with a flourish: I give you, 2023 "Superconduct my clean-air-monitoring AI, please!" Hackernews
Implicit in this counterargument is the idea that judging what is of genuine importance is a matter of opinion, as though we could get a sense of what to pay attention to by polling a large enough sample set.
It is not. Expertise matters. Who is interested in the topic matters.
Put another way: from the Fundamental Attribution Error alone, it does not follow that identity is completely meaningless; it does, however imply that anyone with such-and-such a set of concerns and knowledge would behave in such-and-such a way under such-and-such conditions.
And those conditions obtain. And so, with a flourish: I give you, 2023 "Superconduct my clean-air-monitoring AI, please!" Hackernews
This is going to turn into the Iran Contra affair all over again.
Get tired of one set of assholes? Funnel resources to another set of assholes (who also wish you harm).
If this turns out to be actually true then everyone will want to talk about fusion again. I don't know if I have the stomach for it. But as you say, at least it's not AI.
Get tired of one set of assholes? Funnel resources to another set of assholes (who also wish you harm).
If this turns out to be actually true then everyone will want to talk about fusion again. I don't know if I have the stomach for it. But as you say, at least it's not AI.
Fusion was already starting to heat up in recent years. The entire SPARC reactor concept is based on (low-temp) superconductor materials breakthroughs.
If these room-temp superconductors pan out, it will be dumping gasoline on the funding fire for new fusion attempts. Given less than a year from scientific verification, fusion will go red hot.
If these room-temp superconductors pan out, it will be dumping gasoline on the funding fire for new fusion attempts. Given less than a year from scientific verification, fusion will go red hot.
there's already superconductor twitter guys who were AI guys last week
Don’t be. Twitter/X/whatever they’re calling it this week is crawling with Pepe investment bros talking about bullish sentiment because superconductors equals singularity musk crypto AI blah blah blah.
It’s bad. It’s really, really bad.
It’s bad. It’s really, really bad.
Yeah, hnews is the place to be, nobody here is ever excited about anything new.
Oh people here are excited, it’s just that most of the discussion stops short of digital butterflies behind walls of encrypted energy.
Also hype tempering.
Also hype tempering.
[deleted]
That sounds like a good reason not to visit Twitter/X/whatever.
I want to believe
And a great many people also want you to believe. Just remember: don't give anyone any money, not until this is properly verified.
Who could you possibly give money for this? It's not like there's a as-seen-on-TV ad for superconductors.
But I agree that it needs a healthy dose of skepticism until several reputable groups have replicated it.
But I agree that it needs a healthy dose of skepticism until several reputable groups have replicated it.
Are you tired of stuff sitting on the ground like yesterday's news? Introducing Hovertape, the super-productive superconductor. Now for only 12 easy payments of $19.95, you can make almost anything float. If you order now, we'll throw in 3 rare earth magnets absolutely free!
This reminded me of the Sirens of Titan. The main character makes some bad investment decisions, including in hovering furniture that wobbles uncontrollably when touched.
No one’s selling a retail product now, but there’s definitely going to be investors speculatively pushing money into the space
Founders soliciting investment, for one.
Most of us are not rich enough to be eligible.
The last dotcom I worked for was trying to get funding and had a freakout because someone took money from an unaccredited investor. Had to spend a bunch of their remaining cash to buy that person out and clear the balance sheets.
You have a lot more leeway to ~defraud~ work with accredited investors without all sorts of consumer-protectiony legal clauses kicking in. It's a liability for future rounds. Luckily there are a bunch of rich suckers out there.
The last dotcom I worked for was trying to get funding and had a freakout because someone took money from an unaccredited investor. Had to spend a bunch of their remaining cash to buy that person out and clear the balance sheets.
You have a lot more leeway to ~defraud~ work with accredited investors without all sorts of consumer-protectiony legal clauses kicking in. It's a liability for future rounds. Luckily there are a bunch of rich suckers out there.
> Who could you possibly give money for this? It's not like there's a as-seen-on-TV ad for superconductors.
Well, not with that attitude.
Well, not with that attitude.
Trust me - all the crypto bros that turned AI bros will become superconductor bros overnight
> don't give anyone any money, not until this is properly verified
Instructions unclear: can't buy lunch.
Instructions unclear: can't buy lunch.
Why would I pay any money when I can just cook it up at home?
You are not alone !
Best way I've heard the DFT preprint described: "You know those spam pop sci websites where they find a study in which a specific cancer cell is killed by a certain drug and then go to print an article titled ‘SCIENTISTS CURE CANCER’. This is a similar situation." by https://www.reddit.com/user/giantraspberry. The preprint doesn't mean much.
- Lossless transport of energy - Batteries that don't take any time to recharge - Faster CPUs. Much faster with no heat to burn your lap.
Can I have my flying car now?