The Quest for Room-Temperature Superconductors
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
It is always humbling to read about what it takes to do cutting edge research. This article was good at conveying the efforts required.
I do wonder if studying these simple hydrogen-based compounds is a dead end though. I believe the same mechanism (phonon-electron coupling) is at work here, than in conventional superconductors, so the physics is well-understood. It's been established that this mechanism can only support superconductivity up to 30-40 K at normal pressures [1]. Unconventional superconductors, on the other hand, don't have this hard limit, so there is probably more knowledge to be gained from studying those, which could be used to propose new, better superconductors.
Take notes, psychology.
> The teams synthesized only about a dust-speck worth of [lanthanum hydride] from expensive ingredients crushed to unfathomable pressures between hand-cranked diamond halves
While the temperatures are amazing (when I was young, superconductivity above 0 Celsius was the stuff of science fiction), the material might not have commercial applications in the near future.
Instead, why not use active cooling and powerful insulation? Like this: https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/world-first-as-wind-turb...
I've never forgotten that, and it sounds like the challenge still stands.
Probably be a really useful piece of industrial equipment, not just a really strange weapon.
Besides, "probably impossible" seems to be a large overrating of our knowledge of superconductivity.
Transporters would be more useful in a day to day setting, but that doesn't mean FTL is academic.
- Practical nuclear fusion (that outputs more power that it takes to run)
- Superconductivity at room temperature
- Artificial general intelligence
- Practical high-density energy storage"Elon Musk: How to Build the Future"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnBQmEqBCY0
(of course "down-to-earth" is very relative)
Also, if you were to flood the market with any material you mined, prices would go down.
There were a few reports in the ‘90s of this, all involving superconductors.
The biggest clue it didn't pan out is that if it were real we would be using it now.
- cure for cancer
Humans are GI, but it takes more than one human-level GI to make an AGI or it probably would’ve already happened. Simulation of a human mind has various estimates of computational cost (we don’t know what’s missing from out models, and won’t until we’ve got a working AGI), so taking an arbitrary estimate, all the iPhones in the world might be able to do tens of thousands of real-time human minds [1]. This is comparable to the entire population of the AI research community [2]. It is also expensive not only to put together that much computer power, but also to power it. It is very plausible we will run out of room for Moore’s Law (0.1 nm features) without having figured out how to go from narrow AI to general AI, even despite the fact that transistors already outpace synapses the way wolves outpace hills [3].
[1] https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/10/01/pocket-brai...
[2] https://jfgagne.ai/talent/
[3] https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2017/11/26/you-wont-be...
Humans can already create humans that can outsmart them, and only every so often do they solve an interesting problem here or there.
And your second point is also flawed, the fact that Moore's Law stops working doesn't prevent one from having ever more computing power, by simply buying more chips. Google doesn't run on one massive computer, but on millions of small ones.
It really isn’t. Sure, the Von Neumann architecture doesn’t match our brains, but right now silicon is so much faster than biology that our fundamental problem is elsewhere — our best understanding of what it means to learn from experience doesn’t allow us to make machines which learn as effectively as we do from as little data as we do.
And that is the point — we can only (usefully) invent a new architecture like we did TPUs when we have a better idea. Sure, we probably will, but to what schedule? Biology is not obligated to make sense to us. Despite my general optimism about AI, I have to accept the possibility that perhaps the rules governing our own intelligence could (in principle) be as incomprehensible to us as they are to any other primate.
> And your second point is also flawed, the fact that Moore's Law stops working doesn't prevent one from having ever more computing power, by simply buying more chips. Google doesn't run on one massive computer, but on millions of small ones.
You seem to have missed my point here, too. I explicitly suggested what you used as a counter-argument — millions of small computers working together. To be precise, I suggested using 217.52 million A12 SoC units, running at 5e12 op/s, and a (guesstimated) 5 W TDP. This gave me an estimated 35,465 real-time human brains at a power cost of 36.8 kW per brain, which consumed roughly 32,200 US dollars of electricity per year, even when making the over-optimistic assumption the chips were the only power requirement (i.e. no network, no cooling).
This also gave me a hardware supply cost of about $2,500,000 per brain (assuming the cost of the cheapest iPad using an A12, because I lack any better idea for how to estimate the cost of all other components needed to keep the chip working).
If you hit the atomic limit, you get a x900 improvement (I think) on those costs. Which is great [1] if we know enough about how our minds work to replicate them… and my point is that we don’t.
[1] except for the social and economic implications when minds powered by sunlight are cheaper than literal slaves given nothing more than the minimum food to keep them alive, which I also hope we’ll deal with but is a totally independent question.
Despite the visions in our heads of super sonic maglev trains spanning NYC to Shanghai, the real boon is probably in something like plasma containment for fusion generators ;)
If you could build a room temperature superconductor, you could shrink these machines and reduce their cost and complexity by a large amount. Additionally, you would open up new applications for superconducting magnets, such as maglev trains.
As others have said, reducing electrical transmission losses is another huge benefit. It's only the beginning of the potential applications of room temperature superconductors though.
https://blog.schneider-electric.com/energy-management-energy...
As stands at the moment, some older MRIs use liquid nitrogen to help insulate liquid helium. Newer machines use liquid helium alone.
There seems to be ongoing research into producing suitable magnets with cuprates, but I don't know if the problem has been solved yet. In any case, there are no commercially available MRI machines that use cuprate superconductors.
Most importantly it would require an unlocking of fundamental properties in electromagnetism, chemistry, and quantum physics that as of today is still very much unknown.