Room-temperature superconductor discovery meets with resistance
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
"The previous paper has been resubmitted to Nature with new data that validates the earlier work, Dias says. The new data was collected outside the lab, at the Argonne and Brookhaven National Laboratories in front of an audience of scientists who saw the superconducting transition live. A similar approach has been taken with the new paper. "
[0] https://phys.org/news/2023-03-viable-superconducting-materia...
> However, outside access may fall short of the community’s hopes. Dias and Salamat have founded a startup, Unearthly Materials, which, Dias said, has already raised over $20 million in funding from investors including the CEOs of Spotify and OpenAI. They’ve also recently applied for a patent on the lutetium hydride material, which would deter them from mailing out samples. “We have clear, detailed instructions on how to make our samples,” Dias said. “We are not going to distribute this material, considering the proprietary nature of our processes and the intellectual property rights that exist.” He suggested that “certain methodologies and processes” are also off the table.
It also helps reduce fraudulent claims of new discoveries.
(Thanks jjk166)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_anvil_cell
Contra the diagram, I don't believe the diamonds in a real anvil are faceted.
But realistically, at any time in any field there are only a small number of people who are truly pushing the state of the art (I'm referring to discovery science, not reference science- IE, a focus on adding 1% additional knowledge to our already copious understandings. Any I think tthose people shouldn't have to follow the normal rules about scientific publishing: I want them to push the limits as much as possible. That means occasionally publishing something that contains a mistake (not a falsification), and then being willing to have it retracted (without consequence to future publication).
These sorts of fields tend to self-correct because somethign that's wrong isn't reproducible, and all these scientists are working to reproduce each other's results (note: both the people who thing Dias faked his results were going to take the new protocol home and attempt to repro it in their hands ASAP).
In a sense, it's being willing to accept a higher false positive/false negative rate so you don't filter out some true positives.
> a year later ... they detailed an unusual and complicated method [for processing the data]
regarding which a team claims:
> [We] proved basically mathematically that the raw data are not measured in the laboratory; they are fabricated
So multiple different peers have pointed out multiple different times that this team is publishing "exactly the results you'd want to see to confirm superconductivity", and then a year later publishing fake-looking raw data or overly-complex "data processing" that magically gives them the exact result they needed to get published. These guys don't even seem particularly good at their fraud:
"We just made the most important discovery in the history of superconductivity!"
[Immediately]: Okay but what about all this bullshit here?
"Oh that? (nervous laughter) ha ha, well, see, the thing about that is ... [a year later] ... there, see, here's the raw data; we were just processing the data in a way we never mentioned before. We didn't tell you about it because, um, well, um, we ... forgot?"
[Immediately]: Okay but this raw data is obviously fake "Oh, well, um, psych! We were just kidding about that result! Ha ha ha, take-backsies. Um yeah, we take it back."
[A year later]
"Hey we did the result again! This time it's for real serious realsies. We have the result here. We did the result thing again. It's the exact same result but better this time. Guys?"
Why is anyone taking them seriously?
Lying in a professional context is basically never OK. If someone is shown to be lying, they should never work in that field again, nor any field that bestows upon them any sort of trust. Lying is a big deal; it should absolutely be career-killing. It's not something people just do once and then get over. A few weeks ago people on Hacker News were talking about how to help their children cheat at school, like it's just a normal thing. It absolutely blows my mind that this would be seen as OK.
Link?
;-)
(sarcasm, of course).
> I was helping my son with his homework. He had to write an essay about why the gender of the protagonist might be female (although this is never mentioned in the short story). Fortunately for him, ChatGPT knew the story and was happy to write an essay with arguments.
It goes on like that. The parent helps their son use ChatGPT to cheat at school, and the responses are all positive, like:
> I am delighted to hear that children are already adopting the new tech
And:
> This gives your son a competitive advantage over the kids who will simply turn up what the AI wrote (and get a 0) or spend too long writing their own essays.
They're celebrating it and talking about how learning to cheat well will give them a "competitive advantage" (zero-sum bullshit) over the kids who cheat badly, and then making a mockery of the children who actually "spend too long" doing the work themselves.
It's insane. It's bizzaro world. It's infuriating. They're teaching their children to grow up to be liars and cheaters. They're knowingly punishing the children who choose not to cheat. They sound like toxic psychopaths, which I got downvoted (obviously) for calling them.
Sorry, but I don't agree. The form of this argument is indistinguishable to me from those who argued back in the 20th century that using calculators to do arithmetic was cheating.
Writing essays is on the same road as doing arithmetic by hand, calligraphy, blacksmithing, and buggy-whip manufacturing. All of these used to be useful skills but technology has displaced them. That's the reality, and no amount of railing at the wind will change that.
If it doesn't repro probably this guy's career is over.
You're right, of course. I would not be jumping to conclusions if I had actual authority over the consideration of their work; I would be much more measured. But here in my armchair, I'm free to express my strong gut feeling that these guys are obvious liars -- but that's just, like, my opinion, man. This is one of those cases where I'd be very happy to be proven wrong.
I'm curious about the methods used to determine that the data was fabricated though. Would someone mathier than me help answer this: Was the fabrication of data determined through a mathmatical analysis of the actual data numbers ala Benford's Law? Or was this determined more through a scientific analysis of the experiment that determined that the numbers weren't possible?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32993556 ("Retraction of Room-temperature superconductivity in a carbonaceous sulfur hydride (nature.com)", 46 comments)
hmm, very interesting. I don't think it works like that anymore. The next step has got to be commercial availability. else investors to would loose money or worse, some Chinese company could "steal" the future profits from this valuable novel technology painstakingly developed by the publishing group.
This is exactly how an arbitrary group of scientists should react to extraordinary claims like this. Not 100% dismissal because of the history or provenance of the researchers, not 100% acceptance without independent replication.
The fact that they are going to making independent verification impossible makes me highly highly suspicious. Most scientists I know in their position would be sharing the material widely (even ahead of publication) to have replication from other parties, to bolster this claim. Until there is replication, I trust NOTHING from this group which has outright fabricated data previously.
Extraordinary claims, from those who have previously faked data, require independent third-party verification.
Considering the academic (?) origin and allegedly shady history of the research this drawing of a commercial veil might encourage scepticism as to how revolutionary and successful it really is.
I didn't realise it was possible to publish a paper with the premise that details required to reproduce it are omitted in some sort of weird guessing game... It makes sense that the allegations focus on analysing data manipulation. Maybe it's real, maybe it's fake, but the extreme scepticism seems deserved if they aren't going to be completely open and have a history of doing the same thing over and over.
An exciting step forward if it's reproducible, but not useful commercially. I'd rather see breakthroughs in theoretical understanding; superconductivity in these regimes is still very poorly understood to my knowledge.
Not useful for cabling, but this could conceivably be used for room temperature SQUIDs [2], paving the way to cheap MRIs.
[1] https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/young-modulus-d_417.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQUID
Another comparison for scale: It is 1/6th the pressure at which artificial diamonds are manufactured.
This would put it into the realm of engineering problems at least for some applications if this claim turns out to be true.
Because it's _very_ close to room pressure compared to other results. For example this team's last result (that's ... very questionable, but ignoring that), needed around 250 GPa.
If 1GPa is all that is needed, then yes this is a big breakthrough that can lead to wider research and more understanding.
For example if superconductivity is desired from a 1 square inch (6.5e-4 m^2) footprint of this material, a weight of 6.5e5 N must fully rest on that footprint. Near the surface of earth that translates to a mass of approximately 146,000 lbs. Something like the mass of 3 tanks.
You'll have to ask a smart guy what deposition, subtraction, injection, or teleportation process he's going to use to make a permanent diamond container that leverages the high compressive strength because I'm stupid.
I’m not sure what interesting things can be done with this superconductor in 1mm^2, but squeezing the anvil isn’t outrageous.
For perspective, TSMC will put 150 million transistors in that area. I kind of suspect that integrated circuits might flow at this pressure, so that might not be the application, but a superconducting ground plane and power plane would be interesting.
Edit: Wait, maybe that’s just a giant capacitive load on all the signals. Do something smarter.
I have enough faith that this would work out that I'd put it in a sci-fi story, and not enough that I would invest in a startup.
Or maybe more importantly, how much of my desk would be left after it went off?
With their past retraction, why wouldn't Nature demand independent verification of the results?
Question for any experts - what’s the relative difficulty of keeping something under sustained high pressure in a piece of hardware vs keeping it very cold?
Our ultra cold usages work decently well. Would it be any easier to keep a hardware component under pressure like what this new material requires?
Big high voltage transmission lines lose ~200 watts per meter in resistive losses when under full load.
The electrical energy to keep something 1 meter long at liquid nitrogen temperatures is also ~200 watts, assuming 8 inches of insulation.
The resistive losses go down with the square of the power transmitted - so they fall to zero rapidly when not under full load. Cooling losses stay approximately constant.
Therefore, I suspect a liquid nitrogen cooled superconducting cable wouldn't work out financially.
Math only correct to an order of magnitude...
For example, if you wanted to keep an underground superconducting wire cold, then you would send coolant pipes along it, and wrap it in an insulator. You need to put energy into chilling the coolant, inversely proportional to the thickness of the insulation.
However, typically for most things humans want to do, the cooling cost works out higher than the energy lost to resistance in a non-superconductor, so, apart from a few specialist use cases (MRI machines, particle accelerators), superconductors have seen no use.
Might be naive of me but I would have thought this would be a simple case of some other team duplicating it and commenting on their findings.
I could make diamonds from coal at room temperature with that kind of pressure.
He made some important discoveries there but no "room temperature" superconductor came from there. I wonder how AI could be used in the "same way" with data and much less effort.
Are we really sure we understand how superconductivity happens? At one point there were theories, materials that didn't match the theories, and new theories to try to explain the anomalies. But I don't know how that all played out in the end.
If we actually understand the process then you could simulate the materials, the way we do fluid dynamics or protein folding. But without that understanding we could end up flagging the eventual winners as unlikely and reduce progress instead of increasing it.
And if we can do that, why haven't we used the same thing for battery chemistries? Give me all of the low-dendrite battery formulas sorted by simulated capacity, weight, longevity and engineering difficulty, please.
But the shenanigans this group has previously been involved in will impede their efforts to reach their potential.
I agree that if every thread had a joke it would ruin things, but the occasional joke when warranted is just fine.
i was even willing to pass the thread of puns without commenting, just doling out up and down votes as necessary
but "very clever" is a bridge too far, i don't think this even crosses into "a little clever" territory
A Wheatstone bridge?
That is a pretty broad statement, and a low-quality comment for HN. Ir would be more suited as a comment in a Reddit default sub.
As for the quality of Reddit, yes, the default experience sucks, since the demographic for r/popular is mostly high-school kids.
Once you unsubscribe from the defaults and subscribe to well-moderated special interest subs, your experience will be completely different.
So yes, please leave that stuff on reddit.
Not justification, simply observation: I would hope that anyone reading the title would get the reference but I’ve been surprised before. This thread is an additional clue to the uninitiated that they may have missed something.