Superconductivity Near 20 Celsius | Hacker News Reader

Superconductivity Near 20 Celsius

superconductors.org

92 pointsph0rque35 comments

I'll believe it when I see it in a peer reviewed journal--published by more than one group. Until then, it's a USO (unidentified superconducting object). If it were real, then reports would be all over the March Meeting of the American Physical Society which is celebrating 100 years of superconductivity this year.

I don't know about physics, but in robotics and computer vision and CS, there is no correlation between credible research and journal publication. I suppose physics attracts more quacks, though, and it's not quite as easy to verify because you need expensive equipment generally owned only by people who publish in journals all the time anyway.

If you look into the history of high temperature superconductors (or any realm of physics where 'world changing' is in play... like fusion), it's full of quacks, frauds, overeager scientists publishing before checking properly, unrepeatable experiments, or just plain honest errors.

If someone claims to have code that can distinguish between apples and oranges it's much easier to check the claim than to reproduce the experiments the physicists did.

There is a correlation (most good CS researchers publish in journals), but it is not as strong as in physics. Also, the lead times are much longer. In CS conferences typically play the role that journals play in most other fields.

The fact that CS mostly uses refereed conferences as the publishing medium is an ongoing issue when comparing with other fields. One favorite anecdote I heard was the CS guy who was told off at a faculty review by a physicist for getting a "Best paper" award at a conference, he shouldn't spend so much time on frivolous presentations :)

Unpublished claims of superconductivity and cold-fusion should be regarded as suspiciously as unpublished claims of proving P!=NP.

... Until then, it's a USO (unidentified superconducting object). If it were real, ...

Funny, USO (say like uh-so) means false or lie in Japanese.

oo-so

As a condensed matter researcher, agreed. I don't believe that somebody with that level of laboratory equipment (4 probe system, furnace, pellet press etc) can't afford a $150 journal submission fee.

Don't get me wrong - I love DIY science and I don't think a physics journal is the only path to being accepted, but it IS the fastest way to overcome skepticism.

This has been posted before, and there was much interesting discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2041675

That article claims 3 deg C. The article just posted claims to have furthered that research to 20 deg C.

Amazing how 3 months of research produced such a significant jump.

Until further replication I think it is more probable that three months of waiting resulted in somebody using a text editor.

Haha very true.

They have both posted on their news, however, under the root. However I'd like to see the claim backed up.

Too bad you can't reply to those old posts. ck2 asked if it was an "all or nothing" phenomenon and no one even mentioned the Shubnikov phase in type 2 superconductors.

If this is for real, the implications are huge. Seems odd that news like this would be broken on a weird page like this, and not on arxiv, for example.

Not holding my breath.

What would some of the implications be?

Big magnets, for MRI, and for trains. Maybe flying cars :)

Run a big, refrigerated line (or just dig underground where it's cooler), and you can transmit unlimited power coast-to-coast, or even around the world. You could put some big nuclear power plants in the middle of a desert (or several deserts, to reduce the risk of a failure taking out the world's power supply), and a wind/solar grid around the world, and send that power anywhere. They are already building this kind of thing (Tres Amigas SuperStation), but it's expensive and small-scale.

Wouldn't you still hit a wall due to the maximum field in the superconductor? I'd expect the wires needed to transport gigawatts of power to be pretty large and require exotic metals to build, so much that it may not make economic sense compared to a regular, slightly lossy wire.

Perhaps more of interest to HN, 100Ghz processors using RSFQ logic.

I don't see that website linking to any kind of a scientific or academic publication about this. If this was real, I don't think it would be only on the web.

Wow - I liked this part:

"This discovery is being released into the public domain without patent protection in order to encourage additional research."

Let's hope this works!

I'm not even sure what it means. Not patenting the invention makes sense, but exactly what is being released into the public domain? I don't see any benefit to not retaining the copyright on your writeup. (Provided you make it publicly accessible - but that's clearly the case here.)

You can patent the process for creating superconducting materials:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=superconducting+patents&...

Presumably, that's what is being release into the public domain.

Just half year ago I thought that it can't happen any time soon. Now I think some day we will have a new kind of transport and many other technologies based on superconductivity.

Don't hold your breath.

It's not the temperature that makes HTSC a problem, it would still be fantastic if they were usable at liquid nitrogen temperatures. The difficulty is that most of these materials have a very low maximum field, in anything approaching the sort of fields you need for an MRI or even a motor the material stops superconducting. They are also difficult to form into wires.

That's the temperature of a nice day in San Jose.

That's a typical summer day here in eastern Canada. Seriously.

But the question is, how many summer days do you get in a year?

I'm not really certain about eastern Canada, but in Calgary the seasons are something like:

  Spring: Mid-March til Mid-May.  Snow goes away.  Then it
          comes back.  Then it goes away.  Then it comes
          back.  Then it goes away.
  Summer: Mid-May til early September (with luck) or late-
          August (without it).  Mostly warm, usually dry.
          Punctuated by hailstorms.  Once every few years
          punctuated with a smallish snow storm.
  Fall: Early September til late October.  Stuff cools down.
        Frost is common.  Occasional hail or freezing rain.
  Winter: Late October til mid-March.  October-til-Christmas
          swings back and forth between (very) cold streaks
          and stereotypically fall-ish weather.  January to
          March is mostly just cold and snowy and icy.

Bear in mind that the climate really only gets worse the further east you go, culminating in the maritimes - where winters of five-foot snow alternate with summers of hurricanes. :P

No, the one between `Spring' and `Fall' is called `Construction'.

I'm from Montreal and currently that's now year long.

It's pothole season here.. That's how we know it's spring!

We call it "Spring plowing" in Iowa. Or "Fall Plowing", whatever works.

Edmonton's like Calgary, but with all the cold periods extended :D.

http://www.whitemagicsoftware.com/software/climate/master.sh... ;-)

Can someone explain this?

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