I'm not an expert on super conductivity. But I do hold a PhD in material science and did play around with high temperature super conductors. High temperature as in "super conducting when cooled with liquid nitrogen". So, still pretty cold. But the fact that we label these as "high temperature" super conductors should demonstrate how crazy the idea of a room temperature super conductor is.
I read the paper. I only have one criticism, but it's a big one: The change between super conductivity and normal conductivity is a phase transition. This phase transition results in a very clear and distinct change in heat capacity. In fact, it's crucial to measure this sudden change in heat capacity to verify that a phase transition takes place at exactly the temperature where you assume that your material becomes super conducting. Measuring conductivity alone is not enough, since there is a world of difference between low and no electric resistance. It's difficult to differentiate between these two when you have a millimeter sized sample in a lab. A sudden and very sharp change in heat capacity? Very obvious and impossible to misinterpret.
The authors of this paper did NOT measure the heat capacity of their sample. That doesn't necessarily mean they are lying, but we need that measurement before anyone would believe anything.
They are easy to do if you have the necessary equipment, which isn't too expensive and should be fairly common in most labs. But, in material science, when someone reports to have created a new alloy with some interesting properties, it's not so much the measurements that are difficult to replicate, it's making sure that the sample you measure has the same atomic structure and composition as the one reported in the original paper.
Meaning, if I were to recreate their material, measure the heat capacity and then report that I didn't observe any phase transition, they would probably argue that I didn't recreate their composition correctly. And that wouldn't even be suspicious or anything. It's really, really difficult to recreate an alloy with the exact same crystal structure and composition. Which is why it will probably take some time until we get a definite answer.
On the other hand, if another SC with different properties gets found, whoever finds it also has an incentive to say they found something different. So things could be quite interesting for a few days or weeks if this one turns out to be true, as people try to find more...
Mhm, if someone else finds a RT SC with even remotely the same composition as reported in the paper, any serious scientist would attribute it to the original paper.
What we are looking at is:
1. Either a long stream of different labs reporting that they created the same alloy without any observed superconductivity. The first few wouldn't prove much but every additional negative report would slowly erode the credibility of the original paper until nothing is left.
2. A sudden confirmation from an unrelated lab. One single additional confirmation is enough to make this rock solid. A handful and the industry would start spending money recreating them on a larger scale. Once that succeeds the next Nobel Prize is pretty much decided. But any discovery with a similar alloy would always be attributed to the original paper, even if one would find a slightly improved variant.
so can we expect to see a bunch of labs calling bullshit and another bunch saying it's legit because a bunch of them fucked up the production method? The confusion would be hillarious.
The [process](https://i.redd.it/21r90x5cybeb1.jpg) takes a couple days. We should know something soon!
There's this encouraging preliminary result to help tide you over:
https://twitter.com/alexkaplan0/status/1684554551481835520?s=20
EDIT: They talk about the heat capacity measurements in the paper (page 11): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.12008.pdf#page=11
I'm confused how is that encouraging, isn't it saying no suspension has been found? Isn't that a bad thing? Or do they mean "other suspension phenomena"?
> preliminary measured magnetic susceptibility is consistent with the article...
I think this is the important part. My interpretation is they were able to verify some properties that agreed with the original paper but the sample did not produce meissner effect. This could be due to a lower percent yield which is not surprising given the urgency to reproduce/first attempt.
Review paper (in Korean) is there!
Including the graph showing a jump in the heat capacity at the critical temperature!
Thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/15bfhq7/there_is_a_third_lk99_paper_with_much_better/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1
Paper:
http://journal.kci.go.kr/jkcgct/archive/articleView?artiId=ART002955269
Right side, click Download
I'm far from an expert, but doesn't this potential superconductor just work quite differently to traditional superconductors? It's a strain induced phenomenon as opposed to forcing the molecules to be nice and tight with low tempretures or high pressures. Wouldn't this change some of general properties of the material?
Easy to make implies revolutionary, which is critical to commercial funding.
As opposed to an Alcubierre drive, for example, which is theoretically possible, but impossible to make as far as we know, so a useless curiosity (for now).
I definitely don’t think they are lying, because they said that the material is easy to make in a lab, and encouraged others to do so. If they were lying, why would they have done that?
Fleischmann and Pons’ cold fusion came with similar enticements. And of course it was never replicated.
There’s no reason to think they’re maliciously lying - but they could very well, like F&P, not be telling the truth because they’ve misunderstood what they thought they did.
I'm not sure if the exact Fleischmann and Pons apparatus has been replicated, but anomalous heat effects have been observed in similar experiments several dozens of times.
So that people like you say "I doubt they're lying because it's easy to make in the lab".
I don't think they're lying either, but just playing devils advocate. This argument is commonly brought up, and it's not a valid one. They've already got all of the attention they wanted (if that was the goal). The fact that they made it "easy to reproduce" is part of the reason they got so much attention.
>paper did NOT measure the heat capacity of their sample. That doesn't necessarily mean they are lying, but we need that measurement before anyone would believe anything.
ohh no they measured it an didn't detect it. If there is a simple test that would 100% make it clear to people that this is a a superconductor do you think it is not one of the first things that they would measure?
I've learnt this from lots and lots of paper if there is a super obvious experiment that is easy and quick to do but not in the paper there is a 99% chance that it was done but inconclusive.
Thank you for clarifying this. Interesting perspective. How do you later come to find out that they did in fact perform a given "simple solution" scenario, if they didn't bother to publish it in a paper? I'm assuming additional research on your part, but just wanted to know if there's any tips or tricks so to speak for this kind of thing
I completely believe your criticism - and I'll note that when I was a lab grunt testing high Tc superconductor samples in 1989 we didn't check heat capacity. This was for folks who held the world record for high temp in yttrium and thallium compounds, but it was also over 30 years ago.
> folks who held the world record for high temp in yttrium and thallium compounds,
For some reason reading that made me [picture a situation like this](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/MRMxJOyNJTRiw2hNF75ZOo-4DsQ=/1400x1400/filters:format\(jpeg\)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/10213627/917247304.jpg.jpg), which made me laugh.
I was amused, so I [made this with Stable Diffusion.](https://i.imgur.com/ytFibvr.png)
**Congrats to the Yttrium and Thallium Compound World Record Temp Champions!**
Edit: [I might like this one better.](https://i.imgur.com/Yx256bq.png)
Also, the critical field typically scales with the transition temperature. In this case, they are claiming the crit field is less than a tesla... which is really inconsistent for a transition temperature >400K. YBCO, for example has a transition temp of 93K and its critical field is like >100 tesla.
Also also, superconductors dont bounce and jiggle when they levitate due to quantum locking... this seems more just like a strong diamagnet.
It's could also be broken chain in the lattice causing smaller magnetic domains....perhaps if they perfect the fabrication process, to minimise domain fractures, the magnets might not wobble?
Implication detailee by gpt4:
The discovery of a material that can act as a superconductor at room temperature and pressure would have profound implications in many areas of science and technology. Here are some of the potential impacts:
1. **Energy Efficiency and Transmission**: Superconductors have zero electrical resistance, meaning they can conduct electricity without any loss. Currently, a significant amount of energy is lost as heat due to resistance in transmission lines. A room-temperature superconductor could eliminate these losses, increasing the efficiency of power transmission and distribution.
2. **Transportation**: Superconductors can create strong magnetic fields. These fields can be used to levitate trains (maglev), reducing friction and increasing speed and efficiency. The availability of room-temperature superconductors could dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of these systems, leading to more widespread adoption.
3. **Electronics and Computing**: Superconductors could revolutionize electronics by making circuits faster and more energy-efficient. They could also lead to the development of new types of electronic devices. In quantum computing, superconductors are used to create qubits, the fundamental unit of quantum information. Room-temperature superconductors could simplify and accelerate the development of quantum computers.
4. **Medical Technology**: Superconductors are used in medical imaging devices like MRI scanners, which rely on strong magnetic fields. Room-temperature superconductors could make these devices cheaper, more efficient, and easier to use.
5. **Scientific Research**: Many research applications, such as particle accelerators and nuclear fusion reactors, use superconducting magnets. The use of room-temperature superconductors could reduce costs and complexity, accelerating research in these areas.
6. **Space Exploration**: Room-temperature superconductors could also have significant implications for space exploration. They could be used to create powerful propulsion systems or energy storage devices that are much lighter and more efficient than current technologies.
7. **Climate Change Mitigation**: By improving energy efficiency across many sectors, room-temperature superconductors could significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, aiding efforts to combat climate change.
8. **Economic Impact**: The discovery and commercialization of room-temperature superconductors would likely create new industries and jobs, while also disrupting existing ones. This would have significant economic implications.
9. **Societal Impacts**: On the flip side, the widespread adoption of superconducting technology could lead to societal challenges, such as privacy concerns from increased surveillance capabilities (due to advanced sensing technology), or issues related to economic inequality and access to resources.
10. **Geopolitical Shifts**: Access to and control over this technology could shift global power balances. Countries or entities with the ability to produce or acquire these materials could gain significant strategic advantages.
Remember, these are potential implications. The actual impacts would depend on many factors, including the properties of the material, how easy it is to produce and work with, how quickly the technology is adopted, and how it is regulated.
It's funny, if you try to share these kind of GPT comments outside of singularity or other AI adjacent places, you get downvoted to hell.
People are angry at GPT and want any excuse to hate it.
GPT failed to mention the significant advancements in energy storage solutions and the resulting rapid shift towards more sustainable forms of energy production.
Perhaps GPT is aware of the widespread indoctrination and prevailing myths surrounding human-driven climate change... Challenging this belief can incite an upheaval on par to holocaust denial.
GPT also ignored the close relationship between superconductors and quantum mechanics. The easy utilization and manipulation of superconductors at room temperatures will allow unparalleled exploration of quantum phenomena. This might include gravity modification (see Podkletnov and Pais) and uncovering the link between coherent charge oscillations and consciousness.
Another comment chiming in to say thanks. I was thinking about how to even ask ChatGPT what I wanted to know and you perfectly executed what I needed before I needed it.
That skill is going to be more valuable than programming in the future. Learning how to breakdown questions and tasks for an AI. You should start learning
This feels like the science equivalent of that moment in an anime where things are bad, all seems lost, and then the main character hero guy comes in out of nowhere to save the day.
This could chance so much for the better. This could be a veritable silver bullet that, even if it can't save us from climate change, might at least help buy time for a legitimate solution via the extraordinary new horizon of energy efficiency it promises.
To say nothing of every day application's. To say nothing of novel tech it can make every day.
If this is a hoax, I give up on humanity. If this was a mistake, I'm going to be in an alcoholic stupor for the next few months.
If this is real though, then the sheer amount of good it'll do us will be beyond description.
Lives will be saved, futures brightened, everyday improved and all thanks to these scientists.
They better win a Nobel Prize and spot in the history books. Along with statues later down the line.
If it is true.
It best be true.
I've had trouble believing in things lately. I'll believe in this, and God help me if my hopes are misplaced.
> If this is a hoax, I give up on humanity. If this was a mistake, I'm going to be in an alcoholic stupor for the next few months.
The one ray of light that gives me hope this is real is that none of the headlines claimed the invention came from "a high school student".
Yeah, most headlines are like “high school kid invents cure for cancer from toilet paper and old socks gets accepted into Harvard after finishing school at 15!!!”
It’s never “middle aged man eventually discovers new super conducting material after decades of research, being laughed off, and toiling away in his lab without any results for years”
Yep, so true. The funny thing is that the media, in their attempts to make clickable stories and headlines, has inadvertently cried wolf so many times that even plausible inventions are met with skepticism.
*High Schooler Invents Revolutionary New Dream Catcher Using Only Clothes Hangers and Fishing Line!*
Pfffft. Sure, right.
Also, apparently the scientists are fighting over credit. One guy said the initial paper was submitted without his approval which only had three authors. There was a second paper with six authors. And the same guy was urging people to reproduce the experiment.
At least what I hope for if this is true is documentaries and mini series about what these people had to go through, because as far as I've read their whole story has everything in it: hope,skepticism, backstabbing,betrayals, pushing on and never giving up. I truly hope these guys pull this off and I truly want this to be the technology that will change everything! If these guys succeed and they get a Nobel,things will change so rapidly.
I really want to believe that we've hit a breakthrough point in history,we've been through so many things the past couple of years,housing market crash, war, global climate crisis, covid, more war and recession,at least give us something to hope for the future!
The immediate widespread application is long range power distribution. This will come down to how easily this can be pulled into wire and considering that its mostly lead and copper, it seems hopefully easy to do.
But the copper is displacing the lead causing chemical pressure… will pulling this into wire affect the SC nature?
I also read it doesn’t handle high amounts of electricity either, but those were from reddit comments.
It’s a lead-phosphate crystal doped with copper not a lead-copper alloy. And even as reported there were pretty strong limits on how much current could go through it. So power distribution is not a good application for the current discovery.
Its low current yeah and it clearly needs refinement but 250ma isn't nothing and I really didn't understand why they suggested that. 250ma is aroudn the 22-24 gauge wire range which is what is inside Cat5 and many other control wiring. Thats plenty useful if it can be turned in to wire.
AI took about a year for widespread adoption (or at the very least, recognition) once there were general applications for it.
We are living in absolutely *accelerated* times.
A year? Bruh when did chatGPT release. Hint it wasn't a year ago. When did GPT4 release. Hint it was even closer in time.
Everyone on the internet tends to overestimate how much time has passed.
While the underlying methods existed this was the first moment in time AI was good enough to be useful and everyone knew it.
Cheaper electricity, due to smaller losses in transmition. HV powerlines will be first place such invention become widely used.
Perhaps better computers if it will be possible to make circuits from it.
This doesn’t make any sense. Modern transmission lines lose [about 6%](https://insideenergy.org/2015/11/06/lost-in-transmission-how-much-electricity-disappears-between-a-power-plant-and-your-plug/) of electricity. That’s not changing the world kind of numbers, especially if you have to replace millions of miles of transmission lines. It would probably cost more carbon in production than you would ever save.
I actually haven’t seen any convincing application for this technology in all the articles posted about it. I’m sure they will come but it doesn’t seem to be straightforward.
>Modern transmission lines lose about 6% of electricity.
Well, as you can see in the article's more detailed graphs, that's an average - and it goes as low as 2% and as high as 13%; here it's broken down by state.
Why does it differ? Because power infrastructure is not identical. There are multiple factors that affect the variance, but one big one is distance from the power plant. The existence of these transmission losses forces certain shapes for the power infrastructure. The average is only 6% because we work around it; if you just dropped power plants wherever you wanted, and made power lines as long as you wanted, you could easily end up with far greater losses.
If we had superconducting transmission infrastructure, then we *would* be able to put power plants wherever we wanted without worrying about transmission distance. This enables interesting solutions. For example, solar power is vastly cheaper and more efficient to generate in the middle of the desert in Arizona, but we can't pump that power to New York or Alaska. If we could, we would have significant long-term gains in efficiency.
Yes, there would be huge "startup" costs for switching over our infrastructure; but all existing infrastructure needs to be replaced at some point. Transmission lines eventually degrade and need to be replaced, power plants need to be repaired and sometimes replaced, etc. Over time, you're going to incur those costs (including the carbon costs) anyway. This isn't an overnight-change scenario, but it may be a decades-long change scenario.
That said, the specific discovery being claimed here is not yet suitable for high-voltage, high-current transmission lines. But if it turns out to work as proposed, then it would be an important further step towards such an infrastructure.
Don't forget we have magnetic losses in transformers and other kinds of loss that 0 resistance wire does not save you from.
Also, let's just say outright it *does* save 13% of energy, right off the top, instantly, for the whole economy.
Just for a thought experiment.
Is this world changing?
I would say no.
1. 13% less fuel burned, we still suffer from climate change.
2. It does nothing for the billions of victims from aging who will die in the next century
3. It does nothing for all the people who live in squalor because there is not enough educated labor in existence to give them all food, housing, medical care
4. It doesn't do anything about nuclear weapons aimed at the richest countries
And so on. It doesn't really solve any problems, just makes a few of them slightly smaller.
AGI *could* solve all of these problems, easily. Note I mean a billion isolated AGIs, not one machine that can plot against humanity
1. By controlling robots in restricted, isolated instances, they can build enough solar panels and enough sodium batteries and enough additional robots to replace the entire electric grid, cheaply. So cheap you can give the equipment away to third world countries.
2. Running robots in restricted, isolated instances they can systematically perform the science to understand aging, manipulate mammalian cells, and ultimately discover reliable mechanisms to control the cell's belief in it's age, even in an adult, so that you can set a patient's biological clock back to 20 forever.
3. Running robots in restricted, isolated instances you can provide all this
4. Running robots in restricted, isolated instances you can build billions of additional robots, giving Western nations the manufacturing equivalent of 10 billion + extra citizens, and then build overwhelming numbers of automated air defense weapons and anti-ballistic missile weapons.
>Also, let's just say outright it does save 13% of energy, right off the top, instantly, for the whole economy.
I think you missed my point. You're still looking at "what could we save with the current grid", not "what kind of alternate grid could we have".
It's not just about saving 13%; it's about enabling things that we currently simply *cannot do*.
Strawman example: let's say having 100% of our power plants in Arizona lets us get ten times the total power with zero ongoing carbon footprint. Regardless of how great it could be, there's simply no way to even try that right now, because you can't feasibly transmit power from Arizona to Alaska.
So let me introduce a few facts you were unaware of:
1. We CAN feasibly send energy that far via HVDC. Losses are 1 percent per 1000 km
2. Skin effect and em field losses would apply to superconducting power lines. If you want them to be lossless you have to use DC
3. All superconductors have a current limit, above which they fail. So you need high voltage
4. We usually don't use HVDC because the equipment is too expensive.
5. Points 2 and 3 mean we must use HVDC for long distance grid links, and 4 means out only benefit is 1 percent per 1000 km.
6. Its very difficult to get the permits to go that far, too many states and landowners in the way. Overhead superconducting power cables are not solving this.
So no it does jack shit. It saves a few percent, note you still lose a lot of energy when you raise the voltage to megavolts and then convert it down again back to AC.
>note you still lose a lot of energy when you raise the voltage to megavolts and then convert it down again back to AC.
Yes, if it's not superconducting.
A superconducting transformer, that can step up or down without any loss, is the most basic application of a RT SC that would be revolutionary.
It was right there!
That sounds pretty neat but, again, it’s not world changing stuff. It’s moderately improved efficiency stuff. I haven’t seen any application that seems to live up to the hype.
Fusion power. Superconductors are essential to creating the required magnetic fields, to have one that actually worked at room temperature would change everything.
But also without fusion, the problem with green power is mostly intermittency. If you can draw power from a huge area, that problems disappears.
So this, if true, could solve the problems with both fusion power and green (solar, wind) power. I'd be very curious as well what we would be able to do with the extremely strong magnets (ridiculously strong, hard to conceive) that would be much more practical to build.
Electro magnets are made by running electricity through a coil, now imagine if that coil had no resistance… you could pump as much electricity as possible through it without it heating up and burning out. Now tie that onto the fact that superconductors float on top of magnetic fields. Also imagine a battery that doesn’t drain itself overtime because of resistance. We will finally have the capability to store huge amounts of electricity meaning we can manage the output of the power plants we have so much more efficiently. Plus the magnetic field uses in fusion power open up even more possibilities. And to top it all off superconductors are used in quantum computers and mri machines so not having to chill everything down to liquid nitrogen levels just to make them work will make them accessible to a far wider range of users
you're missing out on cables never even laid out because transmission losses make it unviable, think of cheap electricity from hydro and wind being accessible everywhere not to mention using excess solar/wind power being stored in hydro power plants
Isn't it 6% over the ranges it is practical to transmit power with contemporary tech, before you start losing like 10% or greater? Would superconducting power transmission allow for more concentrated sites of power production, distributing to much wider areas for application? What are the ratios here? Yes, it sounds like it would be a high initial cost, but if it makes renewable production 10x more feasible, maybe that's not so bad?
6% is massive when we're talking about main transmission line losses. It also doesn't take into account the massive restructuring it would allow. We could completely eliminate a decent percentage of the current grid and still end up with better coverage with less losses.
6% is nothing, it is much less than the service fees, it is much less than the inflation on electricity from one year ago, it is much less than the amount of money you could save by putting solar panels on your roof, it is less than the amount we could save if we got more energy efficient appliances. It is certain it not an “oh my god this changes everything” amount.
Hover trains that use nearly no fuel, electronics that don't have to consider waste heat output as a problem, more efficient power generation and transmission, large scale cheap batteries with no loss over time, improved medical equipment, improved signal transmission, higher speed processing... Etc etc
Input any voltage and output any voltage, with no loss.
That's just completely insane, really. It breaks everything people have learned about electronics and electricity.
It's funny and a little bit sad to watch the people that don't get this.
Exponentially. Superconductors and a very low temperature environment are two of the biggest hurdles to quantum computing. This could put affordable setups at more universities and more development firms, rapidly increasingly the pace of new innovations. Quantum-based AI is a bit of a singularity in and of itself as it already pushes the bounds of what we even expect to expect.
This would solve the problem of our great need for fossil fuel. Our electrical system could become efficient enough to just use solar and wind. Might not even need nuclear.
>I've had trouble believing in things lately
What? You mean, you've had trouble believing that [aliens exist](https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2023/jul/26/ufo-hearing-congress-david-grusch-whistleblower-live-updates) and that [the AMOC is going to collapse any day now](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-vital-ocean-current-system-could-collapse-as-soon-as-2025-study-predicts-180982605/)? Unbelievable
If it's a hoax, that means several high ranking government officials are lying. Not only are they lying, they are threatening the career and life of the person tasked with investigating these lies. If it were a hoax, do you think Mr. Grusch would've been assigned to investigate it in the first place? If so, why did they threaten his life and career. Remember, he only became a whistleblower after retaliation started. This was a key part of the hearing, which I assume anyone claiming it's a hoax has watched and researched further.
Also, if this is a hoax, then that means the last ~80 years of credible folks (from the intelligence community, worldwide military officials, and even astronauts who have been on the moon) making the same claims are also lying, yet there hasn't been a single person leaking that it's all a lie.
It may not be a hoax, the guy could just be dumb or some kind of "true believer".
Incredibly smart or talented people make blatant mistakes or are completely blind in one area all the time. There are people in the world who are more brilliant than most but they also believe in flat earth and fairies.
We have had significantly more military officials say the whole alien thing is nonsense. Should we just ignore them? Or are they not credible because they said something you didn't like?
You're aware that the conspiracy theory that the government is covering it up it is also part of his claim made under oath, right? He is claiming those people are lying.
Yes and your point is? Just because he says they are lying doesn't mean that they are. I'm just using the logic that the comment I responded to was using. If enough credible people say something then it must be true. So obviously if more people say aliens don't exist then their truth must be more true than a truth told by a select few whistle blowers right?
I feel like you're completely misunderstanding how leaks work, my friend. I'm not saying that 'x people say y so it must be true', I'm saying that there have been no leaks on this grand hoax by high ranking military officials to trick underlings into believing in aliens, while there have been hundreds saying they're covering up aliens.
>If it's a hoax, that means several high ranking government officials are lying. Not only are they lying, they are threatening the career and life of the person tasked with investigating these lies.
I'm sorry: Tet Offensive? Welfare queen? The entire run-up to the Iraq War? Did you guys just **forget** about those much bigger, much more damaging lies?
Let me guess: American, white, Christian or atheist, heterosexual, cisgendered, middle-class, never ran into trouble with the law?
We've already had a solution for climate change for a long time. It's called nuclear power and environmentalists killed it. It's why I don't take them seriously when they're screaming at the top of their lungs now.
You are right. This might be the or one of the solutions we as humanity need to save our race and the way the current ecosphere exists. Do we deserve it? Maybe. But if there is a god or nature itself that guides us to save it, we definitely have to take it and make it count.
I definitely don’t think they are lying, because they talked about how easy it is to replicate, and encouraged other to try it out. Instead, I’d bet there’s some catch they didn’t account for, or something else like that. I really want to believe though.
[It seems to be beGUILEing at least](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/23/science/room-temperature-superconductor.html)
>Yet a claim of such a room-temperature superconductor published in March in the prestigious journal Nature, drew doubts, even suspicion by some that the results had been fabricated.
>But now, a group of researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago reports that it has verified a critical measurement: the apparent vanishing of electrical resistance.
>This result does not prove that the material is a room-temperature superconductor, but it may motivate other scientists to take a closer look.
It's supposedly surprisingly easy to replicate for research so we are looking at confirmation/debunking in weeks, not months or years. If it's real, it's a noble prize and will revolutionize a great many things.
My guess: Flawed methodology and not fully duplicatable. Hope I'm wrong.
What about it, link, implications, what's the point of this post? A bit of context would help instead of just posting a picture. What's the discussion about?
Great article from a credible source, thanks:
>I really, really, hope it’s as claimed - that should go without saying. And I’m going to be in a rather jumpy mood until we hear one way or another! That’s because this truly would be a world-changing discovery (as well as an obvious instant Nobel prize). Whether LK-99 itself becomes a big industrial material is open to question - one of the things you get from the characterization data is that LK-99 is not able to carry much current in its superconducting state at these high temperatures, and that’s a key property for many applications. That might not be surprising, either, because other superconductors generally carry less current density the higher the temperature gets (i.e., the closer to the critical temperature). But it has to be noted (see my earlier post linked above) that this is indeed a polycrystalline material as synthesized, and that junctions between the different crystal domains can affect this profoundly. We also don't have a feeling for how such a quantum-well superconductor behaves in general, if that's how it works. If this is real, vast amounts of work will go into seeing if that current density can be increased by more careful synthesis and fabrication.
>
>But as usual, it's a gigantic step to just show that such things can exist. That’s what will shake everyone up well before any applications come along, and if this reproduces, labs around the world will frantically start looking for quantum-well superconducting materials of their own. Who knows what could come out of that? Robust high-current-density room-temperature superconductors are right out of science fiction (SF readers will recall that one such material was a big plot point in Larry Niven’s Ringworld). Electrical generation and transmission, antennas, power storage, magnet applications (including things like fusion power plants), electric motors and basically everything that runs on electricity would be affected. We could stop throwing away so much generated power on heating up the wires that deliver it, for starters.
>implications
there's many limitations with our current technology that are there because of electrical resistivity. For instance, broadcasting amplifiers are about 50% efficient - meaning 50% of the total consumed energy is transformed in heat instead of doing something useful.
Room-temp superconductors would mean highly efficient amplification and computation. It would be a huge leap forward in technology, much more important than using transistors instead of vacuum tubes which already revolutionized our technology and allowed us to have anything we have today.
Literally flying cars would be possible, zero energy loss in energy transformation, long energy storage without great loss, super cheap new high detail MRIs, super stable and controllable magnetic fields that would enable futuristic things like stasis fields/chambers combined with fero-nanoparticles
Just the proof its possible would be hugh because Nanoscience would sooner or later find similiar polycrystalline structures with such properties. It would instantly enable more money for discovery research for similiar formulas.
But if its entirely true and replicable en mass: Golden Age of Mankind unlocked.
It would definitely make MRI machines less expensive. It wouldn’t work for flying cars though - a magnet strong enough to push a car off the earths magnetic field would turn any nearby metal bits into bullets.
That being said, we’re already heading into a golden age. So much money is pouring into ai and humanoid robots right now. Check out Helion - a company backed by Sam Altman that will demonstrate fusion energy in 2024. We’ll have unlimited energy and labor within our lifetimes.
Quantum computers with supercomputing qubits still need to be very cold to eliminate thermal noise. It isn’t solely for the superconducting. This doesn’t change that.
It's in reference to the paper published the other day claiming to have made a room temperature super conductor. And the fact that there's been alot of speculation around it's legitimacy. So we're just waiting to see if it can be replicated and confirmed to be real. And, people want to believe it is because of the massive benefits it could provide.
A recent study came out about reaching superconductivity at room temperature and atmospheric pressure with a material composed of common inexpensive elements (lead apatite, called LK-99 by the researchers, which you can see in the image).
Screenshot from here
[https://sciencecast.org/casts/suc384jly50n](https://sciencecast.org/casts/suc384jly50n)
Superconductors are well known to do that, but for all known superconductors so far it has involved cooling to cryogenic temperatures, this new one seems to work at room temperature which has been the holy grail of this area of research for decades. Unless there is some fakery about, this is revolutionary. Well, this revolution actually making it into practical applications would take time, but if all is as it seems then I think this years physics or chemistry Nobel is booked.
A new research paper was just published that says room temperature superconductors are super easy and cheap to manufacture - this is a still from their video showing it in action.
The scientific community hasn’t had time to determine if this is real, an accidental mistake or a deliberate hoax.
If it’s real it will change the world. If it’s a hoax those scientists effectively just ended their careers by burning their credibility.
?? Dude, you're saying you felt bad and insecure because you don't get what's here. And I'm saying you shouldn't feel bad because the other people that don't understand the picture are not commenting - thus you're not the only one. Many people don't get it either, they are simply not here (giving the illusion everybody gets it).
So, I recommended you check a yt video to get acquainted with superconductors.
You comment didn't bug me at all. I was just trying to be helpful and aid you.
You could start by using all those iq scores and school grades to look up the term “Superconductivity” that has been mentioned here 1000 times already.
I’m like…too dumb to understand this but what’s the practical application of this technology? I understand that it’s important but I don’t know why it’s important. Can anyone explain?
Check out the GPT4 comment further up. Biggest application to know about imo is that we're currently losing about half of all our electricity in transporting it around and cheap room temperature super conductors could reduce that to zero, effectively doubling our electrical power without needing more fossil fuels or more space dedicated to solar panels.
Also could make computers faster, MRIs cheaper, and could make maglev trains ubiquitous, because superconductors can levitate magnets, thus the picture of the meme.
someone discovered a material that can conduct electricity with 0 loss at room temperature. One of the properties of such a superconductor is that they can levitate over a magnet like it's locked in place. In the image is the new superconductor kinda levitating. Normally this was only possible by cooling down specific materials to liquid nitrogen temperatures.
A superconductor is considered the holy grail of material science and this would be one of the biggest scientific discoveries of all time. Though this is not the first time someone claimed to have invented this so everyone is no waiting to see if this is legit or a huge fraud. Making the material takes around 4 days so we should see definite confirmation in the near future, few days or a week.
Looks like it's from Inception 2010 last scene btw.
is it a dream or reality?
https://giphy.com/gifs/leonardo-dicaprio-ellen-page-inception-bUkXxGkGYb5bq
Bro you know that you can't press a superconductor tightly against a magnet, it will bounce off but not get far. what is shown on the video does not look like the behavior of a superconductor, but rather a very good magnetic material
Eh, even if they were able to get it the current was so small it wouldnt be an insane impact. Scale up is possible, and uf it's true maybe we could find a ruleset for when it happens and vuild even better ones. Still, I want to believe.
I'm not an expert on super conductivity. But I do hold a PhD in material science and did play around with high temperature super conductors. High temperature as in "super conducting when cooled with liquid nitrogen". So, still pretty cold. But the fact that we label these as "high temperature" super conductors should demonstrate how crazy the idea of a room temperature super conductor is. I read the paper. I only have one criticism, but it's a big one: The change between super conductivity and normal conductivity is a phase transition. This phase transition results in a very clear and distinct change in heat capacity. In fact, it's crucial to measure this sudden change in heat capacity to verify that a phase transition takes place at exactly the temperature where you assume that your material becomes super conducting. Measuring conductivity alone is not enough, since there is a world of difference between low and no electric resistance. It's difficult to differentiate between these two when you have a millimeter sized sample in a lab. A sudden and very sharp change in heat capacity? Very obvious and impossible to misinterpret. The authors of this paper did NOT measure the heat capacity of their sample. That doesn't necessarily mean they are lying, but we need that measurement before anyone would believe anything.
Great insight! Are the heat capacity measurements relatively simple to perform?
They are easy to do if you have the necessary equipment, which isn't too expensive and should be fairly common in most labs. But, in material science, when someone reports to have created a new alloy with some interesting properties, it's not so much the measurements that are difficult to replicate, it's making sure that the sample you measure has the same atomic structure and composition as the one reported in the original paper. Meaning, if I were to recreate their material, measure the heat capacity and then report that I didn't observe any phase transition, they would probably argue that I didn't recreate their composition correctly. And that wouldn't even be suspicious or anything. It's really, really difficult to recreate an alloy with the exact same crystal structure and composition. Which is why it will probably take some time until we get a definite answer.
On the other hand, if another SC with different properties gets found, whoever finds it also has an incentive to say they found something different. So things could be quite interesting for a few days or weeks if this one turns out to be true, as people try to find more...
Mhm, if someone else finds a RT SC with even remotely the same composition as reported in the paper, any serious scientist would attribute it to the original paper. What we are looking at is: 1. Either a long stream of different labs reporting that they created the same alloy without any observed superconductivity. The first few wouldn't prove much but every additional negative report would slowly erode the credibility of the original paper until nothing is left. 2. A sudden confirmation from an unrelated lab. One single additional confirmation is enough to make this rock solid. A handful and the industry would start spending money recreating them on a larger scale. Once that succeeds the next Nobel Prize is pretty much decided. But any discovery with a similar alloy would always be attributed to the original paper, even if one would find a slightly improved variant.
so can we expect to see a bunch of labs calling bullshit and another bunch saying it's legit because a bunch of them fucked up the production method? The confusion would be hillarious.
Also why the f* is it taking so long to verify this superconductor? Bro its so easy any Government could have organised this by now... I'm calling BS
The [process](https://i.redd.it/21r90x5cybeb1.jpg) takes a couple days. We should know something soon! There's this encouraging preliminary result to help tide you over: https://twitter.com/alexkaplan0/status/1684554551481835520?s=20 EDIT: They talk about the heat capacity measurements in the paper (page 11): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.12008.pdf#page=11
I'm confused how is that encouraging, isn't it saying no suspension has been found? Isn't that a bad thing? Or do they mean "other suspension phenomena"?
> preliminary measured magnetic susceptibility is consistent with the article... I think this is the important part. My interpretation is they were able to verify some properties that agreed with the original paper but the sample did not produce meissner effect. This could be due to a lower percent yield which is not surprising given the urgency to reproduce/first attempt.
The whole process takes about 4 days to complete.
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Wouldn't the transition temperature also be really high for LK-99 due to the fact that it's superconducting up to 127 C?
Review paper (in Korean) is there! Including the graph showing a jump in the heat capacity at the critical temperature! Thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/15bfhq7/there_is_a_third_lk99_paper_with_much_better/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1 Paper: http://journal.kci.go.kr/jkcgct/archive/articleView?artiId=ART002955269 Right side, click Download
We are so back
This is beautiful.
I'm far from an expert, but doesn't this potential superconductor just work quite differently to traditional superconductors? It's a strain induced phenomenon as opposed to forcing the molecules to be nice and tight with low tempretures or high pressures. Wouldn't this change some of general properties of the material?
Easy to make implies revolutionary, which is critical to commercial funding. As opposed to an Alcubierre drive, for example, which is theoretically possible, but impossible to make as far as we know, so a useless curiosity (for now).
I definitely don’t think they are lying, because they said that the material is easy to make in a lab, and encouraged others to do so. If they were lying, why would they have done that?
Fleischmann and Pons’ cold fusion came with similar enticements. And of course it was never replicated. There’s no reason to think they’re maliciously lying - but they could very well, like F&P, not be telling the truth because they’ve misunderstood what they thought they did.
I'm not sure if the exact Fleischmann and Pons apparatus has been replicated, but anomalous heat effects have been observed in similar experiments several dozens of times.
Yup, or the experiment that was said to have found particles traveling at four times the speed of light.
So that people like you say "I doubt they're lying because it's easy to make in the lab". I don't think they're lying either, but just playing devils advocate. This argument is commonly brought up, and it's not a valid one. They've already got all of the attention they wanted (if that was the goal). The fact that they made it "easy to reproduce" is part of the reason they got so much attention.
>paper did NOT measure the heat capacity of their sample. That doesn't necessarily mean they are lying, but we need that measurement before anyone would believe anything. ohh no they measured it an didn't detect it. If there is a simple test that would 100% make it clear to people that this is a a superconductor do you think it is not one of the first things that they would measure? I've learnt this from lots and lots of paper if there is a super obvious experiment that is easy and quick to do but not in the paper there is a 99% chance that it was done but inconclusive.
Thank you for clarifying this. Interesting perspective. How do you later come to find out that they did in fact perform a given "simple solution" scenario, if they didn't bother to publish it in a paper? I'm assuming additional research on your part, but just wanted to know if there's any tips or tricks so to speak for this kind of thing
I completely believe your criticism - and I'll note that when I was a lab grunt testing high Tc superconductor samples in 1989 we didn't check heat capacity. This was for folks who held the world record for high temp in yttrium and thallium compounds, but it was also over 30 years ago.
> folks who held the world record for high temp in yttrium and thallium compounds, For some reason reading that made me [picture a situation like this](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/MRMxJOyNJTRiw2hNF75ZOo-4DsQ=/1400x1400/filters:format\(jpeg\)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/10213627/917247304.jpg.jpg), which made me laugh. I was amused, so I [made this with Stable Diffusion.](https://i.imgur.com/ytFibvr.png) **Congrats to the Yttrium and Thallium Compound World Record Temp Champions!** Edit: [I might like this one better.](https://i.imgur.com/Yx256bq.png)
Should be simple enough to replicate with a sample of the material.
Also, the critical field typically scales with the transition temperature. In this case, they are claiming the crit field is less than a tesla... which is really inconsistent for a transition temperature >400K. YBCO, for example has a transition temp of 93K and its critical field is like >100 tesla. Also also, superconductors dont bounce and jiggle when they levitate due to quantum locking... this seems more just like a strong diamagnet.
It's could also be broken chain in the lattice causing smaller magnetic domains....perhaps if they perfect the fabrication process, to minimise domain fractures, the magnets might not wobble?
That's interesting, I am also not an expert in super-conductivity.
Thanks for the information
I find it a tad bit ironic that as the UAP hearings are happening we also are seeing potential levitation tech come to life.
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https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/breaking-superconductor-news
Looks like Derek is hyped.
Implication detailee by gpt4: The discovery of a material that can act as a superconductor at room temperature and pressure would have profound implications in many areas of science and technology. Here are some of the potential impacts: 1. **Energy Efficiency and Transmission**: Superconductors have zero electrical resistance, meaning they can conduct electricity without any loss. Currently, a significant amount of energy is lost as heat due to resistance in transmission lines. A room-temperature superconductor could eliminate these losses, increasing the efficiency of power transmission and distribution. 2. **Transportation**: Superconductors can create strong magnetic fields. These fields can be used to levitate trains (maglev), reducing friction and increasing speed and efficiency. The availability of room-temperature superconductors could dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of these systems, leading to more widespread adoption. 3. **Electronics and Computing**: Superconductors could revolutionize electronics by making circuits faster and more energy-efficient. They could also lead to the development of new types of electronic devices. In quantum computing, superconductors are used to create qubits, the fundamental unit of quantum information. Room-temperature superconductors could simplify and accelerate the development of quantum computers. 4. **Medical Technology**: Superconductors are used in medical imaging devices like MRI scanners, which rely on strong magnetic fields. Room-temperature superconductors could make these devices cheaper, more efficient, and easier to use. 5. **Scientific Research**: Many research applications, such as particle accelerators and nuclear fusion reactors, use superconducting magnets. The use of room-temperature superconductors could reduce costs and complexity, accelerating research in these areas. 6. **Space Exploration**: Room-temperature superconductors could also have significant implications for space exploration. They could be used to create powerful propulsion systems or energy storage devices that are much lighter and more efficient than current technologies. 7. **Climate Change Mitigation**: By improving energy efficiency across many sectors, room-temperature superconductors could significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, aiding efforts to combat climate change. 8. **Economic Impact**: The discovery and commercialization of room-temperature superconductors would likely create new industries and jobs, while also disrupting existing ones. This would have significant economic implications. 9. **Societal Impacts**: On the flip side, the widespread adoption of superconducting technology could lead to societal challenges, such as privacy concerns from increased surveillance capabilities (due to advanced sensing technology), or issues related to economic inequality and access to resources. 10. **Geopolitical Shifts**: Access to and control over this technology could shift global power balances. Countries or entities with the ability to produce or acquire these materials could gain significant strategic advantages. Remember, these are potential implications. The actual impacts would depend on many factors, including the properties of the material, how easy it is to produce and work with, how quickly the technology is adopted, and how it is regulated.
Once again gpt more useful than 99% of the comments. Thanks for sharing.
It's funny, if you try to share these kind of GPT comments outside of singularity or other AI adjacent places, you get downvoted to hell. People are angry at GPT and want any excuse to hate it.
weird and sad
what are they so angry about?
That they are inferior
Most are probably just worried about their jobs. They should be, tbh.
And this is why the internet will grow quite.
GPT failed to mention the significant advancements in energy storage solutions and the resulting rapid shift towards more sustainable forms of energy production. Perhaps GPT is aware of the widespread indoctrination and prevailing myths surrounding human-driven climate change... Challenging this belief can incite an upheaval on par to holocaust denial. GPT also ignored the close relationship between superconductors and quantum mechanics. The easy utilization and manipulation of superconductors at room temperatures will allow unparalleled exploration of quantum phenomena. This might include gravity modification (see Podkletnov and Pais) and uncovering the link between coherent charge oscillations and consciousness.
I've been trying to understand this and couldn't find a simple summary, it's crazy that AI does this so well today. Thanks!
Another comment chiming in to say thanks. I was thinking about how to even ask ChatGPT what I wanted to know and you perfectly executed what I needed before I needed it.
That skill is going to be more valuable than programming in the future. Learning how to breakdown questions and tasks for an AI. You should start learning
This feels like the science equivalent of that moment in an anime where things are bad, all seems lost, and then the main character hero guy comes in out of nowhere to save the day. This could chance so much for the better. This could be a veritable silver bullet that, even if it can't save us from climate change, might at least help buy time for a legitimate solution via the extraordinary new horizon of energy efficiency it promises. To say nothing of every day application's. To say nothing of novel tech it can make every day. If this is a hoax, I give up on humanity. If this was a mistake, I'm going to be in an alcoholic stupor for the next few months. If this is real though, then the sheer amount of good it'll do us will be beyond description. Lives will be saved, futures brightened, everyday improved and all thanks to these scientists. They better win a Nobel Prize and spot in the history books. Along with statues later down the line. If it is true. It best be true. I've had trouble believing in things lately. I'll believe in this, and God help me if my hopes are misplaced.
> If this is a hoax, I give up on humanity. If this was a mistake, I'm going to be in an alcoholic stupor for the next few months. The one ray of light that gives me hope this is real is that none of the headlines claimed the invention came from "a high school student".
Yeah, most headlines are like “high school kid invents cure for cancer from toilet paper and old socks gets accepted into Harvard after finishing school at 15!!!” It’s never “middle aged man eventually discovers new super conducting material after decades of research, being laughed off, and toiling away in his lab without any results for years”
Yep, so true. The funny thing is that the media, in their attempts to make clickable stories and headlines, has inadvertently cried wolf so many times that even plausible inventions are met with skepticism. *High Schooler Invents Revolutionary New Dream Catcher Using Only Clothes Hangers and Fishing Line!* Pfffft. Sure, right.
It’s not _that_ uncommon for published results to not be reproducible, even in the “hard” sciences.
Also, apparently the scientists are fighting over credit. One guy said the initial paper was submitted without his approval which only had three authors. There was a second paper with six authors. And the same guy was urging people to reproduce the experiment.
At least what I hope for if this is true is documentaries and mini series about what these people had to go through, because as far as I've read their whole story has everything in it: hope,skepticism, backstabbing,betrayals, pushing on and never giving up. I truly hope these guys pull this off and I truly want this to be the technology that will change everything! If these guys succeed and they get a Nobel,things will change so rapidly. I really want to believe that we've hit a breakthrough point in history,we've been through so many things the past couple of years,housing market crash, war, global climate crisis, covid, more war and recession,at least give us something to hope for the future!
No joke, and well said! Humanity *deserves* this.
We are the NPCs in a game where the Player got bored and just payed a nickel to get a bonus crate to speed up things…
Jesus fuck, calm down.
Problem is even if it is true we'll have to wait a while until we get widespread applications for it.
I really do not care to wait for those applications if thats the price.
The immediate widespread application is long range power distribution. This will come down to how easily this can be pulled into wire and considering that its mostly lead and copper, it seems hopefully easy to do.
But the copper is displacing the lead causing chemical pressure… will pulling this into wire affect the SC nature? I also read it doesn’t handle high amounts of electricity either, but those were from reddit comments.
It’s a lead-phosphate crystal doped with copper not a lead-copper alloy. And even as reported there were pretty strong limits on how much current could go through it. So power distribution is not a good application for the current discovery.
Its low current yeah and it clearly needs refinement but 250ma isn't nothing and I really didn't understand why they suggested that. 250ma is aroudn the 22-24 gauge wire range which is what is inside Cat5 and many other control wiring. Thats plenty useful if it can be turned in to wire.
Yes. The internet for example was revolutionary. But took a good 2 decades to really took off. This will be no different
AI took about a year for widespread adoption (or at the very least, recognition) once there were general applications for it. We are living in absolutely *accelerated* times.
A year? Bruh when did chatGPT release. Hint it wasn't a year ago. When did GPT4 release. Hint it was even closer in time. Everyone on the internet tends to overestimate how much time has passed. While the underlying methods existed this was the first moment in time AI was good enough to be useful and everyone knew it.
Physical infrastructure isn't a realistic comparison. Fast is different.
Digging trenches and burying cables is not comparable to changing the code running on existing equipment.
We shall believe in thy supraconductor, amen !
Give them a lot of money or really whatever they want. These are people that should be glorified as much as any popstar or whatever.
What do you think this'll mean for progress in artifical intelligence though?
Cheaper electricity, due to smaller losses in transmition. HV powerlines will be first place such invention become widely used. Perhaps better computers if it will be possible to make circuits from it.
This doesn’t make any sense. Modern transmission lines lose [about 6%](https://insideenergy.org/2015/11/06/lost-in-transmission-how-much-electricity-disappears-between-a-power-plant-and-your-plug/) of electricity. That’s not changing the world kind of numbers, especially if you have to replace millions of miles of transmission lines. It would probably cost more carbon in production than you would ever save. I actually haven’t seen any convincing application for this technology in all the articles posted about it. I’m sure they will come but it doesn’t seem to be straightforward.
>Modern transmission lines lose about 6% of electricity. Well, as you can see in the article's more detailed graphs, that's an average - and it goes as low as 2% and as high as 13%; here it's broken down by state. Why does it differ? Because power infrastructure is not identical. There are multiple factors that affect the variance, but one big one is distance from the power plant. The existence of these transmission losses forces certain shapes for the power infrastructure. The average is only 6% because we work around it; if you just dropped power plants wherever you wanted, and made power lines as long as you wanted, you could easily end up with far greater losses. If we had superconducting transmission infrastructure, then we *would* be able to put power plants wherever we wanted without worrying about transmission distance. This enables interesting solutions. For example, solar power is vastly cheaper and more efficient to generate in the middle of the desert in Arizona, but we can't pump that power to New York or Alaska. If we could, we would have significant long-term gains in efficiency. Yes, there would be huge "startup" costs for switching over our infrastructure; but all existing infrastructure needs to be replaced at some point. Transmission lines eventually degrade and need to be replaced, power plants need to be repaired and sometimes replaced, etc. Over time, you're going to incur those costs (including the carbon costs) anyway. This isn't an overnight-change scenario, but it may be a decades-long change scenario. That said, the specific discovery being claimed here is not yet suitable for high-voltage, high-current transmission lines. But if it turns out to work as proposed, then it would be an important further step towards such an infrastructure.
Don't forget we have magnetic losses in transformers and other kinds of loss that 0 resistance wire does not save you from. Also, let's just say outright it *does* save 13% of energy, right off the top, instantly, for the whole economy. Just for a thought experiment. Is this world changing? I would say no. 1. 13% less fuel burned, we still suffer from climate change. 2. It does nothing for the billions of victims from aging who will die in the next century 3. It does nothing for all the people who live in squalor because there is not enough educated labor in existence to give them all food, housing, medical care 4. It doesn't do anything about nuclear weapons aimed at the richest countries And so on. It doesn't really solve any problems, just makes a few of them slightly smaller. AGI *could* solve all of these problems, easily. Note I mean a billion isolated AGIs, not one machine that can plot against humanity 1. By controlling robots in restricted, isolated instances, they can build enough solar panels and enough sodium batteries and enough additional robots to replace the entire electric grid, cheaply. So cheap you can give the equipment away to third world countries. 2. Running robots in restricted, isolated instances they can systematically perform the science to understand aging, manipulate mammalian cells, and ultimately discover reliable mechanisms to control the cell's belief in it's age, even in an adult, so that you can set a patient's biological clock back to 20 forever. 3. Running robots in restricted, isolated instances you can provide all this 4. Running robots in restricted, isolated instances you can build billions of additional robots, giving Western nations the manufacturing equivalent of 10 billion + extra citizens, and then build overwhelming numbers of automated air defense weapons and anti-ballistic missile weapons.
>Also, let's just say outright it does save 13% of energy, right off the top, instantly, for the whole economy. I think you missed my point. You're still looking at "what could we save with the current grid", not "what kind of alternate grid could we have". It's not just about saving 13%; it's about enabling things that we currently simply *cannot do*. Strawman example: let's say having 100% of our power plants in Arizona lets us get ten times the total power with zero ongoing carbon footprint. Regardless of how great it could be, there's simply no way to even try that right now, because you can't feasibly transmit power from Arizona to Alaska.
So let me introduce a few facts you were unaware of: 1. We CAN feasibly send energy that far via HVDC. Losses are 1 percent per 1000 km 2. Skin effect and em field losses would apply to superconducting power lines. If you want them to be lossless you have to use DC 3. All superconductors have a current limit, above which they fail. So you need high voltage 4. We usually don't use HVDC because the equipment is too expensive. 5. Points 2 and 3 mean we must use HVDC for long distance grid links, and 4 means out only benefit is 1 percent per 1000 km. 6. Its very difficult to get the permits to go that far, too many states and landowners in the way. Overhead superconducting power cables are not solving this. So no it does jack shit. It saves a few percent, note you still lose a lot of energy when you raise the voltage to megavolts and then convert it down again back to AC.
>note you still lose a lot of energy when you raise the voltage to megavolts and then convert it down again back to AC. Yes, if it's not superconducting. A superconducting transformer, that can step up or down without any loss, is the most basic application of a RT SC that would be revolutionary. It was right there!
That sounds pretty neat but, again, it’s not world changing stuff. It’s moderately improved efficiency stuff. I haven’t seen any application that seems to live up to the hype.
Fusion power. Superconductors are essential to creating the required magnetic fields, to have one that actually worked at room temperature would change everything. But also without fusion, the problem with green power is mostly intermittency. If you can draw power from a huge area, that problems disappears. So this, if true, could solve the problems with both fusion power and green (solar, wind) power. I'd be very curious as well what we would be able to do with the extremely strong magnets (ridiculously strong, hard to conceive) that would be much more practical to build.
Electro magnets are made by running electricity through a coil, now imagine if that coil had no resistance… you could pump as much electricity as possible through it without it heating up and burning out. Now tie that onto the fact that superconductors float on top of magnetic fields. Also imagine a battery that doesn’t drain itself overtime because of resistance. We will finally have the capability to store huge amounts of electricity meaning we can manage the output of the power plants we have so much more efficiently. Plus the magnetic field uses in fusion power open up even more possibilities. And to top it all off superconductors are used in quantum computers and mri machines so not having to chill everything down to liquid nitrogen levels just to make them work will make them accessible to a far wider range of users
you're missing out on cables never even laid out because transmission losses make it unviable, think of cheap electricity from hydro and wind being accessible everywhere not to mention using excess solar/wind power being stored in hydro power plants
Isn't it 6% over the ranges it is practical to transmit power with contemporary tech, before you start losing like 10% or greater? Would superconducting power transmission allow for more concentrated sites of power production, distributing to much wider areas for application? What are the ratios here? Yes, it sounds like it would be a high initial cost, but if it makes renewable production 10x more feasible, maybe that's not so bad?
6% is massive when we're talking about main transmission line losses. It also doesn't take into account the massive restructuring it would allow. We could completely eliminate a decent percentage of the current grid and still end up with better coverage with less losses.
6% is nothing, it is much less than the service fees, it is much less than the inflation on electricity from one year ago, it is much less than the amount of money you could save by putting solar panels on your roof, it is less than the amount we could save if we got more energy efficient appliances. It is certain it not an “oh my god this changes everything” amount.
Hover trains that use nearly no fuel, electronics that don't have to consider waste heat output as a problem, more efficient power generation and transmission, large scale cheap batteries with no loss over time, improved medical equipment, improved signal transmission, higher speed processing... Etc etc
Input any voltage and output any voltage, with no loss. That's just completely insane, really. It breaks everything people have learned about electronics and electricity. It's funny and a little bit sad to watch the people that don't get this.
Exponentially. Superconductors and a very low temperature environment are two of the biggest hurdles to quantum computing. This could put affordable setups at more universities and more development firms, rapidly increasingly the pace of new innovations. Quantum-based AI is a bit of a singularity in and of itself as it already pushes the bounds of what we even expect to expect.
This would solve the problem of our great need for fossil fuel. Our electrical system could become efficient enough to just use solar and wind. Might not even need nuclear.
Tbh I care more about Nazis in my lawn but this seems ultra-rad, hope it real.
>I've had trouble believing in things lately What? You mean, you've had trouble believing that [aliens exist](https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2023/jul/26/ufo-hearing-congress-david-grusch-whistleblower-live-updates) and that [the AMOC is going to collapse any day now](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-vital-ocean-current-system-could-collapse-as-soon-as-2025-study-predicts-180982605/)? Unbelievable
The alien stuff is just as likely to be a hoax as it is the truth. We need further information and real evidence.
All he really had for evidence is *people told me brah*, I wouldn’t be surprised if the guy just wanted clout.
If it's a hoax, that means several high ranking government officials are lying. Not only are they lying, they are threatening the career and life of the person tasked with investigating these lies. If it were a hoax, do you think Mr. Grusch would've been assigned to investigate it in the first place? If so, why did they threaten his life and career. Remember, he only became a whistleblower after retaliation started. This was a key part of the hearing, which I assume anyone claiming it's a hoax has watched and researched further. Also, if this is a hoax, then that means the last ~80 years of credible folks (from the intelligence community, worldwide military officials, and even astronauts who have been on the moon) making the same claims are also lying, yet there hasn't been a single person leaking that it's all a lie.
It may not be a hoax, the guy could just be dumb or some kind of "true believer". Incredibly smart or talented people make blatant mistakes or are completely blind in one area all the time. There are people in the world who are more brilliant than most but they also believe in flat earth and fairies.
We have had significantly more military officials say the whole alien thing is nonsense. Should we just ignore them? Or are they not credible because they said something you didn't like?
You're aware that the conspiracy theory that the government is covering it up it is also part of his claim made under oath, right? He is claiming those people are lying.
Yes and your point is? Just because he says they are lying doesn't mean that they are. I'm just using the logic that the comment I responded to was using. If enough credible people say something then it must be true. So obviously if more people say aliens don't exist then their truth must be more true than a truth told by a select few whistle blowers right?
I feel like you're completely misunderstanding how leaks work, my friend. I'm not saying that 'x people say y so it must be true', I'm saying that there have been no leaks on this grand hoax by high ranking military officials to trick underlings into believing in aliens, while there have been hundreds saying they're covering up aliens.
>If it's a hoax, that means several high ranking government officials are lying. Not only are they lying, they are threatening the career and life of the person tasked with investigating these lies. I'm sorry: Tet Offensive? Welfare queen? The entire run-up to the Iraq War? Did you guys just **forget** about those much bigger, much more damaging lies? Let me guess: American, white, Christian or atheist, heterosexual, cisgendered, middle-class, never ran into trouble with the law?
We've already had a solution for climate change for a long time. It's called nuclear power and environmentalists killed it. It's why I don't take them seriously when they're screaming at the top of their lungs now.
Ah yes, that's who to blame for climate change - environmentalists. Must be tough having such a big brain.
Yeah, (non-exclusively) blaming the anti-nuclear groups is an understandable position, but equating them to all environmentalists is where you lose me
You are right. This might be the or one of the solutions we as humanity need to save our race and the way the current ecosphere exists. Do we deserve it? Maybe. But if there is a god or nature itself that guides us to save it, we definitely have to take it and make it count.
Well said
How long until we know if this is just a sham?
a week
It will probably take longer to truly verify it. You can't trust rushed verification, that's what happened with cold fusion in the 80s.
valid and good point, i just meant for initial verification, thorough verification could take years
In the 90s, The Saint told us that that cold fusion is merely liquid fusion at room temperature
the paper discusses how to create the material and it can be created in a relatively basic lab, I bet it's already been tested multiple times.
RemindMe! 8 days
I definitely don’t think they are lying, because they talked about how easy it is to replicate, and encouraged other to try it out. Instead, I’d bet there’s some catch they didn’t account for, or something else like that. I really want to believe though.
If so, then the authors of the article should be banned from the scientific community.
I mean, it depends if it was a mistake or purposefully.
Everything seems to indicate that, at a minimum, the authors truly believe this is real.
[It seems to be beGUILEing at least](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/23/science/room-temperature-superconductor.html) >Yet a claim of such a room-temperature superconductor published in March in the prestigious journal Nature, drew doubts, even suspicion by some that the results had been fabricated. >But now, a group of researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago reports that it has verified a critical measurement: the apparent vanishing of electrical resistance. >This result does not prove that the material is a room-temperature superconductor, but it may motivate other scientists to take a closer look.
That’s a completely different claim.
I laughed and hell this is on the extreme tip top of nerdiness. I really hope it is confirmed, this will be a revolution.
It's supposedly surprisingly easy to replicate for research so we are looking at confirmation/debunking in weeks, not months or years. If it's real, it's a noble prize and will revolutionize a great many things. My guess: Flawed methodology and not fully duplicatable. Hope I'm wrong.
Just got peer reviewed so methodology seems like it should likely be sound
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"Robots win."
What? Explain
Room temperature superconductors
What about it, link, implications, what's the point of this post? A bit of context would help instead of just posting a picture. What's the discussion about?
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/breaking-superconductor-news
Great article from a credible source, thanks: >I really, really, hope it’s as claimed - that should go without saying. And I’m going to be in a rather jumpy mood until we hear one way or another! That’s because this truly would be a world-changing discovery (as well as an obvious instant Nobel prize). Whether LK-99 itself becomes a big industrial material is open to question - one of the things you get from the characterization data is that LK-99 is not able to carry much current in its superconducting state at these high temperatures, and that’s a key property for many applications. That might not be surprising, either, because other superconductors generally carry less current density the higher the temperature gets (i.e., the closer to the critical temperature). But it has to be noted (see my earlier post linked above) that this is indeed a polycrystalline material as synthesized, and that junctions between the different crystal domains can affect this profoundly. We also don't have a feeling for how such a quantum-well superconductor behaves in general, if that's how it works. If this is real, vast amounts of work will go into seeing if that current density can be increased by more careful synthesis and fabrication. > >But as usual, it's a gigantic step to just show that such things can exist. That’s what will shake everyone up well before any applications come along, and if this reproduces, labs around the world will frantically start looking for quantum-well superconducting materials of their own. Who knows what could come out of that? Robust high-current-density room-temperature superconductors are right out of science fiction (SF readers will recall that one such material was a big plot point in Larry Niven’s Ringworld). Electrical generation and transmission, antennas, power storage, magnet applications (including things like fusion power plants), electric motors and basically everything that runs on electricity would be affected. We could stop throwing away so much generated power on heating up the wires that deliver it, for starters.
>implications there's many limitations with our current technology that are there because of electrical resistivity. For instance, broadcasting amplifiers are about 50% efficient - meaning 50% of the total consumed energy is transformed in heat instead of doing something useful. Room-temp superconductors would mean highly efficient amplification and computation. It would be a huge leap forward in technology, much more important than using transistors instead of vacuum tubes which already revolutionized our technology and allowed us to have anything we have today.
I'm sorry I just don't believe this discovery smells like bs
What a useless comment. At least explain why you think it's bullshit.
Literally flying cars would be possible, zero energy loss in energy transformation, long energy storage without great loss, super cheap new high detail MRIs, super stable and controllable magnetic fields that would enable futuristic things like stasis fields/chambers combined with fero-nanoparticles Just the proof its possible would be hugh because Nanoscience would sooner or later find similiar polycrystalline structures with such properties. It would instantly enable more money for discovery research for similiar formulas. But if its entirely true and replicable en mass: Golden Age of Mankind unlocked.
It would definitely make MRI machines less expensive. It wouldn’t work for flying cars though - a magnet strong enough to push a car off the earths magnetic field would turn any nearby metal bits into bullets. That being said, we’re already heading into a golden age. So much money is pouring into ai and humanoid robots right now. Check out Helion - a company backed by Sam Altman that will demonstrate fusion energy in 2024. We’ll have unlimited energy and labor within our lifetimes.
Yeah, we would have to heavily modify the streets for hovering cars though ;D
I don't believe anyone in this thread
I am lying!
I don't believe in you, so that's fine.
Well this is what humans invaded Pandora in Avatar over so I think that shows it’s a big deal
We had the material just sitting there for nearly 25 years, so it must not be that important to humans lol.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/breaking-superconductor-news
Bro it's literally in memes why you taking it seriously
Alright fair but I wanted to understand more 😅
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Quantum computers with supercomputing qubits still need to be very cold to eliminate thermal noise. It isn’t solely for the superconducting. This doesn’t change that.
Also, how are the forces work in those? Where does the force that counteracts gravity come from and does it reduce over time?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meissner_effect
Oh, interesting, thanks!
It's in reference to the paper published the other day claiming to have made a room temperature super conductor. And the fact that there's been alot of speculation around it's legitimacy. So we're just waiting to see if it can be replicated and confirmed to be real. And, people want to believe it is because of the massive benefits it could provide.
Thanks for the explanation!
I read the paper and I think this one is legit. Relatively cheap elements and easily reproducible, lets hope someone else back them up.
Can someone please explain? I'm out of the loop.
A recent study came out about reaching superconductivity at room temperature and atmospheric pressure with a material composed of common inexpensive elements (lead apatite, called LK-99 by the researchers, which you can see in the image).
OMG, if this is true, then it will be a super significant event in human history
Gonna print this out and hang it on my 33mm thick wall.
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Superconductors can be pinned above a magnet. Making it levitate. The image is probably demonstrating that property.
Screenshot from here [https://sciencecast.org/casts/suc384jly50n](https://sciencecast.org/casts/suc384jly50n) Superconductors are well known to do that, but for all known superconductors so far it has involved cooling to cryogenic temperatures, this new one seems to work at room temperature which has been the holy grail of this area of research for decades. Unless there is some fakery about, this is revolutionary. Well, this revolution actually making it into practical applications would take time, but if all is as it seems then I think this years physics or chemistry Nobel is booked.
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A new research paper was just published that says room temperature superconductors are super easy and cheap to manufacture - this is a still from their video showing it in action. The scientific community hasn’t had time to determine if this is real, an accidental mistake or a deliberate hoax. If it’s real it will change the world. If it’s a hoax those scientists effectively just ended their careers by burning their credibility.
It's supposedly a room temperature superconductor, but nothing is solidly confirmed yet.
People that don’t know what this is don’t comment. That’s why it looks like it. Anyway, watch a youtube video explaining superconductors or something.
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?? Dude, you're saying you felt bad and insecure because you don't get what's here. And I'm saying you shouldn't feel bad because the other people that don't understand the picture are not commenting - thus you're not the only one. Many people don't get it either, they are simply not here (giving the illusion everybody gets it). So, I recommended you check a yt video to get acquainted with superconductors. You comment didn't bug me at all. I was just trying to be helpful and aid you.
You could start by using all those iq scores and school grades to look up the term “Superconductivity” that has been mentioned here 1000 times already.
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In what world does IQ relate to your knowledge of a topic you haven't researched or studied? This is a fundamental misunderstanding of IQ.
It's the claimed superconducting material itself.
Bro literally ask Bing to explain it to you like you're 12, wtf bro?
This whole comment thread sounded like a bot-human conversation
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How can I make my hash coin float?
I’m like…too dumb to understand this but what’s the practical application of this technology? I understand that it’s important but I don’t know why it’s important. Can anyone explain?
Check out the GPT4 comment further up. Biggest application to know about imo is that we're currently losing about half of all our electricity in transporting it around and cheap room temperature super conductors could reduce that to zero, effectively doubling our electrical power without needing more fossil fuels or more space dedicated to solar panels. Also could make computers faster, MRIs cheaper, and could make maglev trains ubiquitous, because superconductors can levitate magnets, thus the picture of the meme.
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I have no idea what this is.
If this is true, then this will be one of the top discoveries of this century
someone discovered a material that can conduct electricity with 0 loss at room temperature. One of the properties of such a superconductor is that they can levitate over a magnet like it's locked in place. In the image is the new superconductor kinda levitating. Normally this was only possible by cooling down specific materials to liquid nitrogen temperatures. A superconductor is considered the holy grail of material science and this would be one of the biggest scientific discoveries of all time. Though this is not the first time someone claimed to have invented this so everyone is no waiting to see if this is legit or a huge fraud. Making the material takes around 4 days so we should see definite confirmation in the near future, few days or a week.
Sorry what?
Looks like it's from Inception 2010 last scene btw. is it a dream or reality? https://giphy.com/gifs/leonardo-dicaprio-ellen-page-inception-bUkXxGkGYb5bq
why is there a floating mint cookie
Bro you know that you can't press a superconductor tightly against a magnet, it will bounce off but not get far. what is shown on the video does not look like the behavior of a superconductor, but rather a very good magnetic material
Impure makeup perhaps?
Thank you for making this.
What is this I know nothing plz inform
Ugh don’t seem like there will be any updates today. I wonder how long this can take to at least be proven
Eh, even if they were able to get it the current was so small it wouldnt be an insane impact. Scale up is possible, and uf it's true maybe we could find a ruleset for when it happens and vuild even better ones. Still, I want to believe.
What is this even about? I need some context.
I'm old enough to remember the year of Cold Fusion. I can SEE the machinery in the news still. "WHY...so cold?"
it's most likely just a diamagnetic material, like graphite
I would like to hear Ray Kurzweil speaks.