A room-temperature superconductor? New developments
science.org
science.org
- Lossless transport of energy - Batteries that don't take any time to recharge - Faster CPUs. Much faster with no heat to burn your lap.
Can I have my flying car now?
Huh? Is this actually a thing that this enables? I don't initially see how
Another way to say it is that, with a superconducting wire, you can make the wire as thin as you want and still pass the same amount of current through it, without melting the wire. Picture using a USB-C cable to charge your car.
† (There'd still be a current limit due to the heat generated by the chemical reaction that rebuilds the battery's voltage potential... if said reaction is exothermic. Some battery chemistries are endothermic when charging!)
But a big bank of batteries, like are in an EV? Very hard to give them enough current to heat them up. Most of the "heat problem" is from the bottlenecked current path into the car; once you fan out across all the individual cells, each individual cell isn't receiving much current.
And a bank of supercapacitors? You could charge it effectively instantly.
I keep hearing battery tech is getting good, and the research I've seen suggests that more storage on the grid would improve efficiency by a lot, so I don't know if it would even pose a particular challenge if that sort of demand arose.. but overall utilization isn't really the limiting reagent.
If my math is correct, then for a basic 500mA USB device, that would mean a cable a bit over 3 cm^2 in cross-sectional area, or about 2 cm across (for each of the power and ground leads, at least).
Alternately, a cable of just over 1/2cm in diameter (for power and ground, each) could charge a rechargable Ni-MH AA battery in about 12 hours and 40 minutes.
Tl;DR this is absolutely revolutionary science, if true, but we're definitely Not There Yet.
In fact, the tight tolerances of this seem to indicate the opposite.
I have no knowledge in this area though.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_superconductivity#/...
Usually this is an optimization frontier, where something that has tetchy critical current/field at high temperature is going to have very good critical current/field at the same temperature as a lower-Tc superconductor.
If it superconducts at all at room temp, cooling it down even to 200K (about dry ice temp - quite cheap to do) could get you something very usable.
No, superconductors have a specific current above which they stop superconducting so you will want to stay away from that limit. This particular superconductor has been presented with a very low Ic (150 mA in the original paper0 which would not make it particularly useful in such applications but future iterations (assuming it is all true) may improve on that (they should otherwise we have the equivalent of a superconducting straw).
On another note: a superconductor that can only do 150 mA / cm^2 seems intuitively strange, as though that figure is somehow off, it's a gigantic cross section for such a small current. It is very well possible that this is somehow an error in the reporting or an actual measurement on a thin sample with small cross section. So there are many explanations possible and only one of those is a true limit of the material.
So it could be the whole sample, or it could one micron-sized link of grains of whatever the "real" material is running through the sample.
That has been the hypothesis from day #1.
Thick cable, high voltage (900V typically) and everything is fairly manageable. Assuming we could consistently charge at that 350kW we could fully (0->100%) charge an 80kWh ev battery in 13 minutes. That's not slow.
The limiting factor is the battery chemistry, not the wire chemistry.
There are limits how much you can pump into it, it isn’t magic… but it almost is actually.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_ene...
We won't see lossless transmission in a very long time, and no place where an aluminum cable is too expensive today will become viable because something a million times more expensive is 9% more efficient.
Batteries won't see a revolution because of this, there's simply no reason for them to (but they are currently in a revolution, and there are more to come). AC storage in the superconductor will probably be the most expensive storage mechanism you can buy, and flywheels will keep having atrocious energy density, they won't even get twice as good. But it will completely revolutionize some niches in storage.
This won't replace metal layers in CPU for a really long time. Superconductors are hard enough to make, CPUs are absurdly hard to make, and the wins on power savings aren't very large. If people make superconducting chips, it will be ones where the superconductors do active switching, what is much farther away and can enable much faster CPUs too.
I really wish people would stop repeating those. If you are going out of your way for an outlandish claim, I'm much more interested on discussing if this can replace rockets for near Earth space travel than those absurd costly low gain things.
The idea that reducing power consumption is also not large enough to matter is...yeah, detached from reality. Thermal density has been an enormous problem with increasing CPU feature densities. CPUs already run hotter then a kitchen hot-plate, which is why so much effort has been put into dynamic throttling and other tricks - you straight up can't run CPU circuit elements full-power for very long without the risk of frying them, or requiring a cooling system which is impractical for widespread deployment.
I would've thought the main wins would've been reduced heat generation. Like you said, power savings would be negligible. But at the data center scale I'd imagine that reduced heat would result in reduced air conditioning power costs. And potentially with thermal constraints removed, it would allow for more compact packaging per server as well.
Like you said though, I doubt it would happen any time soon.
Most of the heat in a data center is coming from power burned in the devices themselves not the power transmission to those devices.
Sort of like how a space heater is hot at the heater portion, not the power cable going into the heater.
You aren't losing more than a W or so to transmission for every kW of power delivered. (in fact, you are generating more heat from the AC->DC transformation)
Typically, power cords and wiring is 15 AWG, which has a 10 milli-ohm/meter resistance and runs as 120V AC (maximum of 15->20A). So, 1000m of power cord running at full load would result in 150->200W of heat from the power cable. Meanwhile the server is generating 1.6->2.2kW of heat. (Assuming a single very long 1kM route is servicing the server).
Cut the cabling distance to a couple of meters and you can see why nobody worries at power consumption at that point.
The reason they don't is because yeild is the one most important variable on the entire process. And silver adds enough complexity to decrease it. (A few chips do have silver layers. People manage to use them when the process is mature enough and the added complexity gets tamed. Including something like YBCO into a high-performance chips manufacturing process is a half-a-century project; LK-99 can't even be reliably done yet.)
Lanarkite and copper phosphide aren't expensive, other than the government controls on red phosphorous (because it can be used to make meth).
It is exciting stuff but there is a very long way to go if true.
Computation inherently creates heat, that's not something that superconductors will change.
So it isn't determined whether or not it will be changed but it could be.
Resistance in non-super- conductors wastes electricity as heat.
From "Thermodynamics of Computation Wiki" (2018) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18146854 :
> "Quantum knowledge cools computers: New understanding of entropy" (2011) https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110601134300.h...
>> The new study revisits Landauer's principle for cases when the values of the bits to be deleted may be known. (with QC)
The heat can be reduced by factor of a billion or so.
[1]: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-future-of-computing-depends-on...
(But I'm not getting my hopes up)
corollary: anyone trying to say we need fancy new technologies like fusion/superconductores/supercapacitors isn't actually very interested in stopping climate change.
Lack of will which fossil fuel shitbirds spend billions enfestering, with tobacco company style tactics. They knew exactly what the fuck they were doing for the last fifty+ years.
We probably agree on that, I'd just like to focus the blame where it properly belongs. Plenty of people care a lot about climate change, just as we care about plastic pollution and inequality, and I'm pretty fucking tired of being gaslit about it all.
Decent superconductors might enable, less lossy power transmission across distance, Maglev at scale, or perhaps initially, lower power consuming, small devices - every little helps.
I do agree with you though - that lot ain't any good right now. Don't allow yet more licenses in the North Sea etc ...
I believe they call this thing “harnessing the power of the sun”. I’m mildly sceptical about the safety of it’s failure modes.
Not to say I don’t still want it, but…
I ditto the sentiment. But we don't want literal flying cars. Well, self driven flying cars. Humans have enough problems when they're driving on the ground on ground made for driving.
However the failure cases at those heights and velocities are far worse. There's several orders of magnitude difference between an airplane license and driving license.
Let's not forget the flying skateboard of the film "Back to the future". I loved it in the film and it's a dream that I still have today - I'm now almost 50 years old so I would probably crash and get killed by using it, but I would still give it a try :)
I mean, theoretically, if you loosen the definition of "hoverboard" enough, it might be possible to create something that hovers with you on it, but I don't think you'd accept it as a substitute for the movie hoverboard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOH15_pqWZ4&ab_channel=SETHS...
(Said in jest by someone who recently turned 41 and hurt his back playing video games last year)
>hurt his back playing video games last year
Some extreme force-feedback device? :)
Turns out metals (in particular copper) are already incredibly good conductors.
Yes, but superconductors don't have that limitation, do they? You just dump current into them.
Currently they're only feasible as high quality power sources for fabs and other industrial uses because of the operating costs of cooling the superconductors.
https://www.eaton.com/gb/en-gb/catalog/electronic-components...
I have 4 at home and blows people's minds when you melt a wire with it. Incredible rapid current delivery.
You also get losses from practical usage - i.e. no one can build a 3V supercapacitor that has decent endurance (you can totally build one which will work, but you're rating it knowing that every cycle is damaging it).
Heat?
... you cannot just dump unlimited current through a superconductor. Once you exceed the critical current density, your superconductor becomes a regular conductor.
Similar speeds for charging are impractical because of the power spikes required even if the battery could take it.
You cannot have instant charging, that's not pedantic, that's the discussion, and in any case there is a practical limit to how fast it can happen for similar reasons.
All the work being done on smart home EV chargers that automatically schedule the right time (controlled by grid) to charge overnight are because even at current speeds this wreaks havoc on the electrical subsystems and grid if everyone plug their EVs in at the same time in the evening...
What we need is sufficient infrastructure for ev charging.
Can't superconductor help here?
It's hyper-specialized tech, so it'd probably take over a decade from now to be seen in useful, everyday technologies.
But yet there's still so much that could be accelerated even with current hardware, but isn't.
So maybe just just t normal conductors like copper, silver, graphene (assuming the latter can be commercially made to surpass silver in RF surface resistance).
It could definitely open up the road to long distance high capacity power lines, but somewhere along the line reality is going to make things difficult. It's not magic after all, just sufficiently advanced technology.
Doesn't sound too spectacular but it took them over a year to fix all the damage.
External researchers have not even begun to purify and test the limits of this material.
This is not true anymore. At leading edge process nodes (i.e., smaller conductor pitch), the bulk resistivity of copper changes dramatically because it is increasingly dominated by ballistic electron scattering on the interfaces and grain boundaries: surface area has decreased as a fraction of volume and the average grain size has shrunk to fit inside the interconnect lines.
Alternative metals like Cobalt and Ruthenium have been proposed and to some extent used in production as an alternative to Cu for the low interconnect layers, but they just arrest the trend -- the fact is that the interconnect resistance is much higher than it used to be.
It's also why a lot of the big players like TSMC and Intel are investing heavily in backside power delivery.
Here is an accessible article on the topic:
https://www.fabricatedknowledge.com/p/backside-power-deliver...
(Also: high-voltage DC power is commonly used for long-range transmission and does not have coupling issues)
Resistance in the metal wires is not so much a problem for power as it is for signal propagation delay. That is the biggest problem with R skyrocketing in M0/1.
And backside power delivery is to relieve congestion in the interconnects. That's typically one of the limiting factors in complex logic designs now, transistor densities of under 70% aren't uncommon.
That's what "Removing the power signal and signal line to just a signal line would free up space for more transistors." line is about in the link. Power delivery losses aren't nothing, but they aren't a big fraction of energy in today's CPUs.
Eliminating most wire delay would be a huge benefit though, and could be a pretty big revolution. Not just within the core or on the die. You're still going to have to switch those transistors and burn current on leakage though, so no cold CPUs just yet.
Technically true but not applicable... Super conducting CPUs already exist (at below room temp), and they don't use semiconductors. They don't have an exact transistor equivalent but use digital logic circuits such as Quantum Flux Parametron (QFP) and rapid single flux quantum (RSFQ), which are comprised of Josephson Junctions [0] which are made from the same super conducting material. Relying on quantum effects of a gap between two conductors rather than specific material properties.
So while it is true that CMOS are limited by the resistance of both the conductor interconnects AND the semiconductors. Super conducting circuits only appear to need a conductor... There are other drawbacks, such as larger feature sizes due to the nature of super conducting materials, and QFP and RSFQ might be more complex? but this is potentially offset by huge advantages: zero resistance buys not only power efficiency and minimum heat generation (as required by landauer limit), but also allows circuits to be driven at a higher clock, so far demonstrated to 770GHz for one CPU [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephson_effect
[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/superconductor-logic-goes-lowpower
That's not a CPU, it's a simple circuit. From the article, "Simple superconducting logic circuits have been shown to operate at speeds of up to 770 gigahertz."
Exotic semiconductor transistors can switch that fast, record being over 800GHz I think. Regular transistors of the type in your phone can probably do around 200-300GHz. Not to say there could not be revolutionary designs opened up with superconducting wires or switches, just the switching speed itself doesn't necessarily tell us one way or the other.
Actually it's probably more like 200 than 300, I haven't seen 3nm models but transistors are still getting faster.
I'd be interested to know from any experts whether there is potential for fundamentally higher switching speed in super conducting circuits. As you suggest, they are not necessarily directly indicative of the clock speed of a specific real world circuit or CPU, especially considering super conductors don't even use transistors and need to use different building blocks for equivalent logic... but as a rough indication based on order of magnitude of switching speed would be interesting.
And to this point, HVDC has been slowly rising as a viable alternative beyond just undersea transmission.
A mistaken belief is that AC is more efficient than DC. What AC is is more easy to transform from one voltage to another (until somewhat recently). That makes it easier to run AC at 1 MV and then step it down to 240V for residential applications.
The cost is as AC voltage goes up, capacitive resistance increases. This is part of the reason why high voltage lines have such huge towers with the lines far apart.
An HVDC line, however, can be put underground (or water) without suffering power losses. It's voltage can go well above that of AC voltages with the only limit being how much insulation we need for the line.
Super conductors are nice, but only in the "now we can run 1 billion amps at 100V" sense to avoid the capactive resistance. Without any sort of special materials you get most of the benefits of super conductors by using HVDC. The only real downside is high voltage DC is still super dangerous. Cut the insulation and you've got something that can arc meters whereas a superconductor at lower voltages would be about the same danger as any other conductor at lower voltages.
That’s a pretty high current density compared to what’s feasible with copper — don’t get me wrong — but a billion amps would still require a pretty huge cable even with a superconductor.
So unless someone comes up with super conducting welding I guess that would mean no junctions.
DC is also used because a conductor can carry more current per kg than AC due to not having any skin loss. You can use smaller wires, less metal, less dollars.
As often in engineering, the sweet spot is where multiple factors have ~equal contributions, so even a 50% win in one of the factors can't give you that much benefit.
For high voltage AC power lines it's Ohmic losses, corona discharge losses, and inductive losses.
So what do we stand to gain?
At least a slight improvement in efficiency of transmission. And a huge improvement due to simpler heat dissipation needs.
So this might mean way faster battery charging - like 500 miles worth of charge in 5 mins. We’re mainly limited by how hot the batteries get during charging.
(1) https://www.tue.nl/en/news-and-events/news-overview/13-07-20...
Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36954783
Or store in coils, as "magnetic energy"(forgot the name for it)
Finally someone is speaking English in these room-temperature superconductor threads that I can actually understand and get excited about!
> None of the things you listed are limited by the conductors in them.
Never mind. :(
No joshing, I just got done posting this on facebook: "If this is practical it will change the world like the transistor; maybe more."
Liquid Nitrogen superconductors shocked the world in 1987 but have hardly changed it. They have some applications but we don't have transoceanic power cables, superconducting supercomputers, MAGLEV trains everywhere, etc.
You could have made the case that the cost of liquid helium cooling put traditional superconductors out of reach for most applications, but liquid nitrogen cooling is not difficult at all. Unlike helium, nitrogen is a renewable resource. Cuprate superconductors have been held back by issues that have had nothing to do with cooling and even if the new room temperature superconductors are for real, it's possible they'll turn out quite like the cuprates.
One strange thing about cuprate superconductors is that the theory is not understood despite being a "holy grail" for more than 35 years. It fits the schema of problems like dark matter, neutrino masses, the matter-antimatter and how energy gets coupled from a quasar accretion disk into a jet... Cases where a devilishly hard problem can go unsolved for the working lifetime of a physicist.
To which a student replied "You buy beer by the gallon?"
Since the base material is lead apatite, I had a random thought that maybe medieval alchemists trying to turn lead into gold just had it backward, as doping gold into lead might be a breakthrough. :-)
Just like how Mesoamerican civilizations invented the wheel, but only used it on children toys and not for transportation. There were no draft animals in the region, but they didn't even make wheelbarrows.
https://www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/home/the-concept-of-the-...
The problem is that you have to go backwards to go forwards, and you can't always predict (or convince the powers-that-be) that the end result will be better.
For example, let's say that 50% of cars on the road are EVs. Now gas stations have a problem. You can't survive with half your customers gone, so maybe half the gas stations go out of business. But that means your nearest gas station is much further away, so now the incentive for EV goes up.
In California (and the Bay Area, particularly), I bet we'll see this relatively soon.
It’s just that, the Chinese also had standardized crossbows capable of punching through armor, and allowed for long range sniping, centuries before gunpowder. The Manchus who founded the Qing dynasty valued archery, and were slower to adopt firearms. The mid and late Qing period saw firearm military units, with bows and arrows evolved for powerful short range attacks, ceding long range to firearms.
Even so, it looks like Chinese generals were interested in fielding firearms, and found them effective.
Wikipedia has a list of theories on why gun development stagnated, and the leading theory is that Chinese fortification were more resistant to cannon fire. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder_weapons_in_the_Min...
As far as Mesoamericans and wheels, I’m not sure the hilly terrain and dense jungle would make wheeled transports that easy. They seemed to be able to create step pyramids with stone just fine.
Without the wheel, humans are actually relatively comparable to other pack animals in carrying efficiency. It is the wheel that makes moving larger loads more efficient which makes it advantageous to domesticate pack animals that can exert greater force.
As for wooden wheels being too fragile, you can build a perfectly good wheel without metal bands. It's simply going to be heavy and annoying if you're trying to run a wagon to Oregon.
Again, no idea if there is any validity to this or just something completely made up.
https://acoup.blog/2021/12/17/collections-fortification-part... Goes into this in more detail for a couple paragraphs.
My guess is there’s probably a whole bunch of neat things we could build with existing manufacturing tools, that we don’t yet know are even possible, and which the future will have similar discussions about.
https://deremilitari.org/2014/05/the-mongol-siege-of-xiangya...
I like the idea of pausing a seige in China to send a message to some experts in Mosul, wait for them to ride back, then build their novel device, and win.
After several millennia of killing people for gold, we can finally put all that gold to good use—using it to create superconductors that can power energy weapons we can use to kill each other.
♫ It's the circle of life ♫
ETA: I was off by an order of magnitude (originally I said sub-1%) because the doping is extensive, and the mass of the lead/gold is a dominant fraction of the total. The formula given in the paper is (subscripts in brackets):
Pb[10−x]Cu[x](PO4)[6]O with 0.9 < x < 1.1.
Similarly for Au we would have Pb[10−x]Au[x](PO4)[6]O. Taking the centerpoint x=1, this becomes Pb[9]Au[1](PO4)[6]O. In other words, there would be one gold atom for every 9 lead atoms.
The "unit cell weight" is 2647.59 g/mol, and the molar mass of gold is 196.97 g/mol, so in fact the hypothetical gold weight content is about 7.44%, not sub-1%.
That said -- presumably superconducting transmission wires would be thinner than the ones we are used to (a function of critical current rather than resistance). So I'm not sure that we'd have a theft problem worse than we already have with copper.
YBCO tape has a critical current in the 1-10 MA/cm2 range, so if the properties of this RT stuff is anywhere close, the actual superconducting element of the wire could potentially be very thin.
Perhaps assume an aluminum cladding for strength? Depending on how strong of a superconductor it is perhaps it's only 1% superconductor and 99% aluminum on top of the 10% content. So 0.1%?
I dunno, all these metals will be valuable in the future. Just saying, there's another large factor in estimating the gold content (conductivity saturation) that we don't know what it might be.
For example, paper recycling is profitable when centralized (barely), but even that's with most the pipeline subsidized, and it's not profitable to the degree that people are stealing paper to turn in because it's worth the effort.
here in argentina there are tens of thousands of people who make a living by recycling, sorting through whatever trash they can get access to in order to find materials with enough resale value to scrape by. they haul plastic sacks or two-wheeled carts all over the metropolitan area, stacking them high with recyclables: aluminum, copper, car batteries, brass, whatever they can find. a crt tv left out on the curb will have its yoke broken off within an hour or three in order to harvest the copper. neighborhoods sometimes lose phone and internet service for months at a time because someone has recycled the cables. commemorative bronze plaques go missing from cemeteries
but the recyclers are not called aluminieros or bronceros or cobreros, taking the name of their profession from aluminum, brass, or copper; they are instead referred to by the most abundant material they recycle
they are the cartoneros, because what their carts are usually piled high with is cardboard, cartón
(needless to say this activity is not subsidized)
> they are the cartoneros, because what their carts are usually piled high with is cardboard, cartón
Paper, or coardboard? It's unclear whether you're referring to cardboard as paper, because after your assertion the only thing possibly linked to it in the rest of the comment is your references to cardboard.
Cardboard is not paper. They share base components, but referring to cardboard as paper is akin to referring to a chair as a board. A chair is made of wood, and may be made of multiple boards, but if we're talking about the qualities and price of boards and you start trying to refute that with the price of chairs, people are going to call you out as losing the thread, rightly so.
For what it's worth, the subsidies I was referring to were the governmental ones in the U.S. where recycling centers and trash services can get funds, tax breaks, or special rates on lending when dealing with recycling which means all recycling done through those trash services are in some part subsidized by the state. At best that usually means you might get your recycling picked up for free or with reduced additional charges, but for the average person in the U.S. paper recycing is not worthwhile at an individual scale. Apparently it pays something around $50-$75 a ton, which isn't nothing, and might be worth doing in some locales, but I have to imagine the logistics of moving material of that weight on a regular basis to where it can be accepted means there are much more lucrative materials to harvest (either it's a long haul for most people, or I imagine middle men accepting it locally and transferring it are going to take a large cut).
there are different kinds of paper, which require different recycling streams; cartoneros will accept some others but not all
your talk about 'losing the thread' makes me think you are playing some kind of game where the objective is not to find out what the truth is but to sound convincing even if what you are saying is false
i am not playing that game. as far as i'm concerned, it's up to you to find out the truth, or not, not up to me to shove it down your throat, though i'm happy to provide relevant information
i am aware that in the usa recycling, even fake recycling, is heavily subsidized. that's why i was providing information about what happens in places where subsidies for recycling are scarce to nonexistent. almost nobody recycles plastic here (except for small programs that are subsidized and do things like recycle polypropylene bottlecaps), and only big operators recycle steel. but paper — specifically the kind of paper that corrugated fiberboard is made of — is abundantly recycled; it's not nearly as remunerative as brass, copper, aluminum, or lead, but it's the bread and butter of the cartoneros because people discard it in much higher volumes
i don't think it pays anywhere close to US$75 per tonne though, maybe a tenth of that
Isn't that exactly the point I just made? I'm confused as to why you're restating it. In English nobody is going to mistake someone that makes a statement about "paper" as talking about "cardboard", whether they're referring to corrugated fiberboard or plain fiberboard (which are both often referred to as cardboard depending on whether the context is arts, crafts or something else).
> your talk about 'losing the thread' makes me think you are playing some kind of game where the objective is not to find out what the truth is but to sound convincing even if what you are saying is false
If you look at my original comment, what I said about paper is purely an example to illustrate that commonly recycled doesn't necessarily mean worth supporting harvesting for base materials. Many other things go into that assessment (such as whether the base material can be easily separated from other materials and how its cost to transport affect any possible profit that might motivate people to do so.
That you refuted that example by using an entirely different material seems to either be a non-sequitur or misguided. While presented as a counterpoint, it doesn't really seem to affect the claim I was making at all.
That is what I meant by it lost the thread. It didn't really add to the conversation at hand usefully in the way it was presented. If it was presented as an interesting factoid about recycling and cardboard, which is related to paper, that would be one thing, and I would fully support it. But as to whether it means something that can be/is recycled will be scavenged for profit in all cases, I don't think it really says anything one way or the other, and that was what I was trying to convey.
If you're trying to say that paper itself as what any native English speaker would assume we're talking about if they read it, and not just cardboard, is also profitable to recycle and people collect and turn that in for profit then please clarify that point. Otherwise, while an interesting fact, and I'm happy to now know it, I'm not sure it actually affects what I was trying to communicate originally in any way.
certainly it is not the case that something that is commonly recycled will be scavenged for profit in all cases. even gold sometimes escapes recycling
Did you actually bother to read what I wrote in my various comments? Much of it was devoted to explaining the difference in what it meant and when people say paper compared to what they mean when people say cardboard. Why do you think I talked about boards and chairs?
> at this point i'm starting to question whether you've actually seen a piece of cardboard at some point or whether you're a large language model
I could say the same for you, given your inability to follow what has been said across even a handful of replies.
> certainly it is not the case that something that is commonly recycled will be scavenged for profit in all cases. even gold sometimes escapes recycling
Which also wasn't my point. My point, again and put bluntly, is that some materials may exist in a space where it's not profitable enough to harvest for an individual but they are still recycled either because of subsidies or because efficiencies of scale can be brought to bear by a larger organization, or the combination of the two (subsidies for larger regional trash pickup companies that can also bring economies of scale to bear) which mean a material is recycled, even if not profitable for the common person. Another example would be items that are unlawful to discard of in the trash. There are various chemicals and materials that it's unlawful to dispose of in the trash in the U.S. (motor oil), meaning those items are taken to a recycling and/or disposal center even if there's no payment for doing so.
It's not about it escaping recycling because people miss it, it's about how both economies of scale and subsidies and laws that all go into whether something is recycled which affect that calculus beyond just whether it's profitable, and thus something being commonly recycled is not necessarily an indicator that it's lucrative enough to do so that the material will be harvested by people for profit.
People don't seem to realize how radically society will change if this superconductor thing is legit.
the answer to that question is the answer to your question.
Yeah, it's always possible this may not pan out but I'm really enjoying the visceral reminder that new fundamental science always has the potential to be suddenly transformative across a spectrum fields.
--
I know we hate jokes - but apropos
Wouldn't that just make gold even more valuable (and thus more killing will ensue, even ignoring the high energy weapons).
♫ Through despair and hope ♫
SpaceX becomes an evil megacorp mining gold from the asteroid belt with LLM AI controlled robot slaves so that we can make hover cars using superconductors?
...also, Elon would totally pull a Duarte....
Can someone please take layers of graphene and pure gold leaf and tell me what that may result in, aside from beautiful "damascus"?
The material in question will have these effects at room temperature and pressure.
But yes, Maybe I'm interpreting the video wrongly. Yet, to me it looks like the bulky part of the sample is being repelled by both poles of the magnet as it stands upright with the pointy end at the bottom each time. IMHO if this was due to attraction, the pointy end would be at the top.
It couldn’t have come at a worse time for drama either, as the right wing is currently on possibly their most massive anti-science tirade world wide that they’ve ever pushed.
It was in a Twitter thread linked on an HN thread a couple days ago wherein someone had done some digging online into resumes, publication histories, etc and recapped a bunch of the apparent history of LK99 and the related scientists and institutions. Sorry, I didn't bookmark it. But it contained quite a bit more drama including possible team conflict over potential Nobel credit and a deathbed promise to the team's mentor, one of the initial LK99 discoverers.
No matter how this turns out, there's probably a helluva good book or movie in the backstory as it appears to be a team of unlikely underdogs stubbornly pursuing a long-shot while scraping together minimal funding over many years, being passed over for tenure, taking on unrelated side work and having their initial paper rejected by Nature, etc. It makes me extra hopeful that LK99 is at least an interesting novel material, even if not a superconductor.
but the same person admitted they're writing fiction (I would call it speculative fiction drawn from known facts) https://twitter.com/8teAPi/status/1686217806298423299
In both cases some are very happy with their choice, others not so much.
US labs dont find replication work exciting enough. If the effect is genuine, good, if not, life goes on.
Chinese labs are looking to build credibility, so they will benefit by publicly resolving this.
They won't jump to publish a video on social media of the first replication of diamagnetism that they get. They'll be putting together a definitive and defensible paper on the production and properties of the material. That will take longer.
And if they can't replicate it, then it'll drag on longer without hearing anything from them, since they'll have to try multiple different methods and reach out to the authors, and iterate until they've exhausted enough possibilities that they feel confident enough publishing a failure to replicate.
Do you expect American and European scientists to work during weekends?
The analysis from this article is a publication from Berkeley National Lab that has already come out, and Argonne National Lab has announced they have synthesized the material as of yesterday and will release results from their replication attempt in the next few days.
All of what you say is true, yet in academic research China is still far behind the USA in nearly every field. They haven't yet been able to build institutions with the staff, structure, and culture needed. That will likely change in time, but at present the best Chinese scientists are still coming to the USA to work, and staying here. Despite the USA having a lot more research output, a substantial fraction of the top scientists in the USA are from China.
My Chinese colleagues tell me that the bureaucracy and authoritarianism in Chinese institutions puts a lot of hurdles in place when trying to do research. Simply buying equipment, hiring staff, etc. is a nightmare, and results in "evaporative cooling" where the top researchers with the option to work anywhere don't tolerate this and leave.
Edit: I will also add that in some sense US academia is supported by overcharging Chinese students for tuition. If and when Chinese institutions get to the point where the best students want to stay there, there will be a huge crisis in US universities, possibly being unable to support tenured staff.
> at present the best Chinese scientists are still coming to the USA to work
IMO not true anymore. This isn't pre 00s where PRC send best abroad as part of state strategy and best have some english fluency because it's needed for science. More and more PRC best aren't English fluent since there's sufficiently large and growing chinese science ecosystem and best also have good access to resources in tier1 labs. Hence US cracking down on 1000 talents program where PRC entice scientists to work in PRC due to unparallel resources. Or acadmeic exchanges with PRC in general. Also see stats of record amount of scientists returning to PRC this yearm
>best students want to stay there,
Best PRC students go to PRC C9 (Ivy equivalent) now. Top US institutions captures the occasional talent with english proficiency and desire / resources to go abroad. But PRC best have been largely staying in PRC last decade. TBH most Chinese students in west now are those who couldnt hack PRC gaokao/teritary selection system but have rich enough parents to send them abroad. They're B tier talent. Still adequate to work in western labs but you simply don't hear much about PRC students in west who tested top of their districts anymore like in 00s. They're no sending their best and haven't been for while. But generally their ok is good enough. Medium term expect even less PRC students, partly due to geopoltics but also PRC likely phasing out mandetory English as core subject which will make brain draining next gen more difficult. There's always India who seem systemically incapable of preventing brain drain.
Given this poster's history, I would not do that
It was China's STEM graduates and not just the stereotypical "cheap labor" who built up the Chinese manufacturing base.
Would you accept “chooses to spend more on research”?
The US certainly could spend more but, imho sadly, we do not.
Even if you end up lighting the money on fire, at least it's a more societally productive fire than, say, SoftBank's portfolio.
(Edited to clarify “ideally” parenthetical, in response to a reply that really didn’t deserve to be dead.)
Yeah, I agree, its way cooler, but way more risky for VC.
I understand how VC works. I'm annoyed that - let's even take the Saudis as an example, since they fund half of Silicon Valley anyway - would rather flush their money down the drain on stupid shit than do long-term projects that may help secure their existence post-oil. Even with every motivation to focus on the long-term, still it gets blown on short-term complete garbage.
The rampant short-termism is the real issue
Saudis have built entire top-equipment universities out of nothing (KAUST), and hired top foreign professors, and offered generous scholarships to foreign students to fill it up.
You rant about short termism, but don't seem to like doing research yourself.
If you have a big ole' brain, why would you take $80k to work in some crumby lab when you can get paid $350k to maintain a login screen from the comfort of your mountain side home.
But when you don't assume all smart developers are monomaniacally focussed on money, there’s also plenty of combinations of priorities that might favor an $80K lab job over the $350K login screen job.
But the fact of that matter is that many people would rather work on something they find interesting enough, while also being able to comfortably afford a good life for themselves and their family.
Betterment of human existence, preservation of habitable environment, etc, those are bigger than the self.
However, total R&D is quite a bit closer, with the US spending $660b to China’s $556 billion. [1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...
It ultimately requires being embedded in a culture that, to quote Popper, "seeks truths that are difficult and interesting". From that view, the problem for US scientific efforts is entirely home made, but it's also a problem that's much more pronounced in China.
Japan is a technical powerhouse but that doesn't inevitably lead to ending hegemony. It requires a lot of other work too.
Median age USA, 2022: 38.9
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
China has triple the young people we do, but quadruple the old people that depend on the young people.
The other thing to look at in those population distributions, besides the upside-down age distribution, is the absolutely pathological gender imbalance. The number of surplus males under 30 should be keeping Xi Jinping up at night because if there is anything that is going to trigger another revolution it is tens of millions of disaffected young males migrating across the country who eventually get fed up with what they perceive as a dead-end future.
The core part defined by long standing military and economic ties is about 1.5 billion people.
China has serious fundamental problems and if you account for its gigantic population - it's seriously underachieving not only compared to US, but even compared to the rest of the developed world.
It's fashionable to talk about China taking over, but it's far from guaranteed. China is pretty much confirmed to be falsifying its economic stats for example [1] [2] but people just take them at face value anyway. I don't understand why.
[1] https://www.voanews.com/a/satellites-shed-light-on-dictators... [2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-forensic-examination-of...
This statement would have been viewed as absolutely obvious and ridiculous 2 decades ago. The fact that it even needs to be said now is indicating how fast they are advancing.
I highly doubt they can preserve their pace of growth for next few decades without significant changes to the regime and liberalization.
Once they return to the mean - they will very likely slow down. Arguably they already did (3% official growth last year + people accusing them of falsifying data for 1-2 percentage points of growth each year would make them already grow slower than some western countries, including the US).
"Demographics is destiny" also comes to mind.
Note how the era of "Japan Inc." during the 1980s was also the time when the post-war baby boom population were in their 30s-40s (i.e. peak productive worker population). As this cohort has aged and are now in retirement, Japan's economic performance has tailed off.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#/media/F...
If you look at the Chinese population pyramid, we could already be at the point of maximum Chinese economic growth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#/media/F...
From the geopolitical standpoint, this may also explain why China and Russia have become more belligerent - they will lack sufficient numbers of young fighting aged men in the next few decades.
There are so many factors that contribute more to economic and political success than sheer population. I would even say that a large population is a bad thing in many cases. India would be better off with fewer people. Their infrastructure can't handle their density, they don't have enough jobs for their educated workers, there's a lot of sectarianism conflict between various religions and casts, etc.
High population + low GDP per capita is probably the worst situation a country can be in IMO. So it's not enough for China to have a billion people—those people have to be doing something productive for the economy.
PRC currently generating ~5m STEM per year, aka OECD combined, multiple times more than US has ability to train or brain drain. And relatively proven ability to coordinate talent. Project that out next 20-30s from previous 20-30 years of birth rate and PRC on trend to add 50M-100M STEM to workforce, just STEM, not including other skilled workers, which is the greatest high skill demographic divident in recorded history. Literally no country in the world, at any time in the past or projected future has better demographics for actual global competition than PRC in the next 30 years. Including India who will have more people, but have all the issues you noted that will likely prevent them from actually coordinating human capita enmass successfully in the time it takes their youth demographic divident to expire.
Contrary to naive PRC demographic pyramid bomb arguments that doesn't address what you correctly note below - quality of human capita. By 2050, PRC is going to add more STEM talent than US is projected to increase population. All the news of PRC climbing up value chains, leading in science and innovation indexes from last few years? Or moving from 1T to 18T economy. Done by growing STEM from ~2M to ~17M STEM exploited via industrial policy that west is now copying. PRC is moving from workforce with 25% skilled talent to 60/70/80 of modern economies with 60% and increasing tertiary education rate that biases towards science will look weak on per capita stats due to huge existing cohort of old / undereducated, but it absolute terms it's a demographic advantage no country currently has conditions to remotely rival. Then note how net population decline will reduce resource dependency and you basically have the most optimal mix of demographic trend for PRC with respect to geopolitical competition.
Are those demographic issues difficult to govern/manage? Yes, but they're also close to ideal conditions for improving comprehensive national power within PRC's constraints. PRC's big population = with big demographic curse but also big demographic divident post 2050s. But they don't cancel each other out. Likelt follow JP/SKR trend where TFR collapsed in the 80s/90s but GDP increased 500% because workforce was net gaining skilled/productive people, while losing unskilled. JP (and later SKR) are/will only entering process of real stagnation when TFR cannot replace level of skilled labour at parity. Which for PRC is a post 2050 problem and even then countries will be competing with a PRC roughly 3-5x larger than now.
On the actual demographic curse of aging, the blessings of huge segment of PRC old getting old before they get rich is there simply isn't going to be high expectations for advanced economy levels of welfare and social support. There's a reason PRC has 90% (96% in rural where poor concentrates) home ownership and very high household savings rate. Old expects to weather most of retirement without substantial state support and increasingly family support since they don't want to burden future gens. If you look at JP, old are basically rotting/dying alone, unceremoniously. In JP it's called Kodokushi, in SKR, it's godoksa, it's happening in HK as well. In households that pressure young for support, you know what the east-asian human response to that is? Being miserable whiel working even harder. Half the reason JP/SKR/TW lead in high end industries they currently dominate is because those societies have resigned to working 100% harder for 10% competitve advantage.
Arguments about China’s inevitable collapse are more about comfort than about the an reality, because as you have mentioned if you think at all seriously about the demographics argument it just does not make sense.
I think the biggest risk for China demographically is if their aging population translates to an extremely conservative, risk-averse government/society that harms their technological progress, as has happened with Japan (ie. top multinationals stuck in the 80s with fax machines, paper, etc.)
Because while Japan and South Korea are the 51st and 52nd US states, China is a superpower vying to usurp the US as the preeminent world superpower.
So no, they do not control access to the oceans.
I think this fact is being severely understated, perhaps even denied by almost everyone in the west.
The way the US-China cold war has been playing out, the US and friends keeps closing doors only for China to go "Go right ahead, I don't have to play ball." and just succeed even harder on their own. Adding insult to injury is they then take that success and just wholesale buy the doors the US keeps closing.
A surefire way to lose Pax Americana is to become delusional that Pax Americana is winning when by all accounts it's losing and losing hard. I think this ship can still have its course corrected, because Pax Americana is better for us than Pax China, but not if we just keep up this kabuki theatre.
It's not so much fashionable as it is literally state propaganda used to try and shoulder its way into the South China Sea and the Pacific by claiming it is so prosperous and populous that it is entitled to increasingly large sphere of influence and direct control.
China doesn’t believe in western democracy and has as a stated goal ending American hegemony.
It’s not even slightly confusing or subtle, not sure why American elitist types like to just handwave it away.
Actually I am sure. Everyone is making too much money. Until they aren’t.
The Chinese Communist party has the resources, people and determination to follow a different course. It might underperform relative to its size, and the one-child policy is going to cause a disastrous demographic situation, but even if you consider just coastal, urban China, that's getting pretty close to US in terms of people and economic power. The communist party is developing its military capabilities at a fast clip, and fusing its military and civilian economies to accelerate its technical development. Where almost every other government has been unable to wrestle control of Internet information, the Chinese Communist party has successfully turned its version of the Internet into an effective tool of govt propaganda and social control.
In other words, there are lots and lots of very concrete reasons to believe that the post-development trajectory of China can be very different from Japan's or South Korea's.
>comfirmed falsifying
Here's a more rigours NBER light study on PRC GDP being underestimated by much more accomplished economists aka not retarded like Martinez study.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w23323
Here's a more comprehensive GDP resconstruction by Rhodium, leading economic search group that focus on PRC that also reports underestimation, ~10% by 2014. Including work by David Dollar, one of the more competent PRC economic analyst at Brookings that also led discussion of your second link, noting it had 2 models of over estimation and went with the much higher overestimation model vs the lower (basically marginal amount) one that was probably more correct.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/broken-abacus
No one takes PRC GDP reporting at face value, but anyone with half a brain can see PRC climbing western science and innovation indexes (controlled for quality), moving up global value chain, displacing other advanced economies in increasing amount of intermediate and final goods and doing all that rapidly in last 10 years that US basically needs to go full spectrum containment beyond what they did for USSR while acknowledge PRC is greater challenge then USSR ever was. Anyone with half a brain can also napkin math future skilled workforce between US @35M STEM + ~600K per year, vs PRC @20M STEM ~5M (M as in million) per year and understand PRC will have more STEM workforce than US in a few years, and possibly 2-3x more STEM by 2050 even factoring in PRC demographics. Cut that in half and PRC's future potential is still outrageous.
E: over post limit
E2: removed reply to deleted comment
As you noted, there's labs working on this, they've said they're working on this, and I take the lack of minute-by-minute social media updates to indicate that it's serious and they want to get it right.
The original paper drop was July 22nd.
Doesn't China also have a huge incentive problem in research? I've seen plenty of stories about low impact journals feeding the system with the publications it demands, regardless of quality of results.
China’s growth currently appears magical simply because of scale and a shittier starting point, also a lack of whatever it is that ails India.
In addition to being the fastest way that doesn’t require any video editing, I can’t really think of a way to do it that would be more likely to be real.
https://vdn3.vzuu.com/HD/7d42236a-3065-11ee-a787-7e9db7aa394...
That it interacts strongly with a magnetic field shows that a big change in the material, consistent with superconductivity, has occurred.
Quantum level effects are newly appearing in the macroscopic world, and that's always interesting.
Most materials are diamagnetic, but only very weakly so.
I think that a new room-temperature material that was so strongly diamagnetic that it could lift the weight of its own volume in lead probably would bring some interesting new applications.
Getting "stuck" in a magnetic field is called "Flux pinning", which is what we're seeing here, from what I understand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_pinning
Magnetic material can't do this. They're attracted. As some of the videos have shown, with large magnets placed next to the samples, they are not attracted.
I didn’t know science could be such a thrilling spectator sport.
No need to squint into a microscope, parse a screen full of numbers, or try to make sense of false-color renderings. Either you have video proof of a levitating object, or you don't. The demonstration is as intuitive as it gets, despite the fact that the theory is crazy difficult to wrap one's head around.
None of the videos have yet shown complete 'levitation', they all have a corner on the surface. But still, not behavior that anyone has ever seen from lead before.
https://pubs.aip.org/aip/apm/article/9/10/101107/1061600/Pho...
One even did that on the cover of Nature, iirc.
Just like they demonstrated all the stuff you know from school over a hundred years ago, before you needed fancy equipment to do anything.
Basically, something which is very unexpected, with potentially large consequences, and which can be done in many labs using discretionary funding.
But I'd also appreciate other links
It's interesting they marked one of the claims as "likely fraudulent" but the guy at the spacebattles one hasn't. The video doesn't seem to be related at all to the 4 samples one, so I'm not sure why they think it's likely fraudulent.
Isn’t the introduction of the 4004 in 1971 a better comparison? while that was still 24 years since the Bell labs discovery, we have much better scientific, manufacturing, logistical and mining ecosystems within industry and research today.
If there’s a compelling reason to do so, governments will find ways to accelerate the development of those ecosystems from decades to years (probably more like a decade).
This is a tautological statement if I ever saw one!
One wit on a different social media site opined that "all technological advances such as plumbing and petrol result in lead poisoning, so perhaps this is real".
again, in experimental condensed matter physics it's acceptable to do a fine experiment and then throw in a half-baked "theoretical underpinning" to appease reviewers, so I wouldn't be surprised if the superconductivity turns out to be totally unrelated to the mechanism proposed in the paper. i would really like to see some more robust characterization work(biased because this is my background), hopefully some of the labs doing the replication studies can take a look at the juicy stuff
(*) it was, like, two decades ago, but I've got a first-author PRB paper so I wouldn't trust me compared to an active researcher but I'm not _entirely_ clueless
The "just a function of" is a non-trivial problem. Given a single set of elements you want to "try out" results in a huge global optimization problem to find the set of stable structures (low energy). When aided by experimental data it becomes a tractable problem.
Unfortunately, they also indicate that the desired substitution will be very hard to achieve — crucially, the "crush and separate the composite" suggestion a few commenters have made is unlikely to work, since the heterogeneity exists within the same crystal, depending on whether Cu substitutes into Pb {1} (good) or Pb {2} (bad) crystal sites. This may be why the very oblique synthetic approach favored by the authors — reacting copper phosphide with lanarkite, giving lots of copper sulfide byproduct — was needed to give interesting properties. Now that we have an idea of what to look for, though, it may be possible to derive other synthetic approaches with a clear idea of what particular sort of copper substitution should be achieved, and a way to determine if it was achieved.
Of course, there remains a possibility that all of this is a big mistake, but now it would have to be several correlated mistakes. It may be a long time until the necessary selective substitution is achieved in a high-quality bulk sample, so, going on this hypothesis, I do not expect a sudden rush of new technologies in the near-term.
CMTC says the Griffin paper doesn't really shift anything and they still believe replication is unlikely: https://twitter.com/condensed_the/status/1686373904044949504...
Or is this just nonsense? https://twitter.com/iris_IGB/status/1685322871306928128
They may want to cover it and just have a hard time explaining it to their editor, but I think "we can afford to wait until a peer reviewed paper comes out" is more likely.
I keep seeing people saying "CPU's that don't generate heat". How exactly would that work? When a transistor turns off/ switches to 0, where does it dump the electrons? Hint: into heat
As the Veritasium video explains [0], current flow is not a literal flow of electrons, but a state of the electromagnetic field (or something to that effect... it's been many years since my electromagnetism university courses).
you probably should trust your electromagnetism textbook more than a youtube video
I could still see this being something "new" but not a true superconductor. If you read the link, there seems to be some kind of discovery brewing, but the original discovers may not have understood what they found.
It doesn't even matter if it works or not as for whether it's newsworthy; the mystery, human backstory, and Argonne/China/independent scientists jumping to replicate alone is a whole swathe of viable and fascinating topics ready to be published.
The crazy thing is NYT just bothered to publish a story about the Dias superconductor paper retraction; a paper that had never even crossed my radar in the first place because TBH I don't care about superconductors unless they're going to be a huge step change in practical applications, which the Dias "finding" wasn't.
What are they doing?!
Trying to make ad money with views, which is their profit incentive.
Mouse models are nearly always spun as applicable to humans, which an average, aging, viewer would be interested, usually relating to "Cure <ailment>", "regrow limbs", "stop aging", etc.
The average viewer isn't interested in superconductors, and the 10 seconds the news orgs have for each bit of news isn't enough to explain them.
wp says
In 2020, a room-temperature superconductor (critical temperature 288 K) made from hydrogen, carbon and sulfur under pressures of around 270 gigapascals was described in a paper in Nature.[71][72] However in 2022 the article was retracted by the editors because the validity of background subtraction procedures had been called into question. All nine authors maintain that the raw data strongly support the main claims of the paper.[73]
It's very hard to become a science journalist where you can pursue your own stories, because the market for this is practically zero in comparison to other parts of the media.
I always try to pay for media that publishes stories from the likes of, say, Ed Yong, and leave messages that I'm doing it for the science journalism. But I doubt it has much substantial effect on how much real science journalism happens.
I appreciate reputable news organizations as a reliable filter against noise out there on the internet. If I want early rumors I have sites like this. If I want something filtered, curated and focused, I go to them.
Nah, this just doesn’t sell or is not a paid article.
A floating grain is cool, but not something that jumps out at people like a rocket or a big fusion reactor.
The application is similarly unintuitive. Many here on HN ask why such a thing would be important, and they are probably the 99th (or 99.9th?) percentile in materials science and EE literacy.
I don't. I read someone saying it would be the biggest breakthrough since fire. Is that true or hyperbole?
Its more like the transistor.
it seems like maybe you haven't thought much about the history of technology
time will tell
it seems likely that digital technology will be crucial in enabling there to be far more humans off earth than on earth; o'neill cylinders could enable many orders of magnitude more physical humans even within this solar system
to say nothing of the possibility of backing up your mind with a brain scan and thus becoming immortal, and possibly forking into more copies of your mind than there are humans alive today
(nitpick, transistors aren't digital)
i mean all five of those were probably prerequisites for it?
maybe if the humans build torchships or nuclear-powered starships, or convert the electric grid to mostly nuclear, i'd agree, but those all seem far in the future
sewing without spinning or weaving still gives you tents and jackets (of hide or felt, at least). i think weaving without sewing only gives you floor mats. spinning without sewing gives you rope, which makes longer fibers than natural sinews, and thus lassos and lashing, but i think these are less transformative technologies than tents and jackets
i think the humans probably could have developed the fission chain reaction without spinning but probably not without sewing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewing_needle#Prehistoric_sewi... sewing: 50–61 kya or possibly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_clothing_and_textil... 170 kya
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_spinning#History spinning: 41–52 kya
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weaving#Archaeology weaving: 27 kya (cloth doesn't survive but its clay impressions do)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%A5lebinding#History nålbinding: 8 kya
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_knitting knitting: .9 kya
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crochet#Origins crochet: .2 kya
The original articles are a pair of papers posted to arxiv in a field which I believe isn't well-known for arxiv publications, and most science journalism tends to wait for a peer-reviewed paper to come out in a notable journal before reporting on it. Although it has been reported by some specialized outlets already (a category which I'd include Derek Lowe's In The Pipeline).
[1] See, e.g., https://nitter.net/i/status/1686373516286005248, which goes into why even the recent theoretical-confirmation papers are unpersuasive to them.
My feeling watching all this has been that it's weird people are getting so excited about the replication when the actually interesting question (is it truly a superconductor) hasn't even been answered yet. Glad to see that isn't just my ignorance.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/26/science/ranga-dias-retrac...
People use this fact to try to bash things like cancer research, but it is unfortunately just a fundamental problem of science. Scientific publications are not kernels of distilled truth, they are work-in-progress commits. If we waited to publish until every last detail is known, science discovery would slow to a snails pace and we would miss a ton of discoveries.
They tested a different substance.
Now imagine one where you don't have to chill it with liquid nitrogen.
It will be fun to see trains levitating over the ground without any friction loss from the wheels at high speed.
i.e. - It has zero resistance to electricity.
Currently, the best superconducting materials we can create have to be chilled to near absolute zero, which means designing them to work in liquid helium baths. This is expensive, and difficult. If a material can superconduct at room temperature, now we're talking usage in general purpose consumer goods.
As for why we want a superconductor? Real cool stuff happens when there's zero resistance to electrical current. I'm sure other people can add on to this, but for an immediate benefit - electricity transmission wouldn't have any losses. Imagine offshore wind turbines that could transmit power to Kansas from the Atlantic. It'd be a big deal.
Secondly, superconductors are one of the most promising platforms for qubits. Big boost for quantum computing - and these are just two applications off the top off my head.
""" Although the attainable magnetic flux density limits the energy per unit volume given by Equation (1) ( B2 /2μ o), the real limit of the energy stored in a SMES is mechanical. [...] The relation defines the minimum mass of the mechanical structure in pure tension to support the radial electromagnetic forces. Force-balanced coils [5] minimize the working stress and thus the mass of the structure. """
So it looks like they 1) don't look at cryo and 2) the limiting factor is the stress due to EM fields.
[0] https://snf.ieeecsc.org/sites/ieeecsc.org/files/CR5_Final3_0...
I think there are other use cases within devices themselves that are far more interesting for energy storage.
The same cable diameter can now power an entire state.
(I think there were some comments going around that this material has quite a low critical field, so there would have to be some substantial improvements on this even if it is superconducting)
The benefit might lie less in the wires and more in the equipment.
Tough to say with a trans Atlantic cable though. Those kinds of distances have never been tried to my knowledge.
(The EE I worked with later didn't believe me. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnet#Persist... and note that the loss was due to details of magnetic superconductors, not superconductors in general)
> Experiments have demonstrated that currents in superconducting coils can persist for years without any measurable degradation. Experimental evidence points to a lifetime of at least 100,000 years. Theoretical estimates for the lifetime of a persistent current can exceed the estimated lifetime of the universe, depending on the wire geometry and the temperature. In practice, currents injected in superconducting coils have persisted for more than 27 years (as of August 2022) in superconducting gravimeters.
I'm imagining a future where a superconducting layer on a PCB is just another checkbox you can choose when ordering small runs of boards.
[ ] 1 oz copper
[ ] 2 oz copper (+$2)
[X] 10 micron LK-99 (+$10)
Another thought - I think the first place we'll see this widely rolled out is in IC's (waiting for the Asianometry video on it). IC's are already planar, they're small so exotic materials aren't a big contributor to costs, and they're very power dense. Replacing a metal layer with a superconducting one could enable greater gate density and potentially significant improvements in efficiency. I don't know by how much because switching losses are probably where most energy is dissipated, but it's an incremental change that seems compatible with the process.
Perhaps it will be like a "tape" laid down with the proper orientation for each conductor. Perhaps you'll need separate north-south and east-west and maybe diagonal layers with special attention to inter-layer connections.
Thanks to everyone. I understand this much better.
You still have to worry about batteries. Unless if you place equal numbers of panels separated by 120° meridians for example.
And then there is coordination between governments. This is probably where such an initiative might fail.
I keep hearing mixed things about superconductors being useful for energy storage.
The electrical resistance per se is actually not that interesting. Certainly not for energy loss. Electronics would benefit, especially CPUs if transistor switching doesn't heat the interconnects above the transition T (the actual cpu is much hotter than the package where the thermocouple is).
High quality (as in high Q) passives would be cool. Think very good capacitors and inductors for filtering. Super cond. caps wouldn't be great for energy dumping since high B fields kill the superconducting effect.
The magnetic properties are more interesting. MRIs w/out crygenic cooling, mag levitation without stabilization.
Apparently there are quantum applications too, but Im not too sure about those but my physicist friend is super excited (in a bad way) for quantum computers now.
If this pans out we're looking at an unexpected revolution.
To circumvent this, physicists discovered superconductivity: a state in which a material is a perfectly efficient conductor of electricity. Thus far, to create a superconductive material requires keeping that material at extreme conditions of temperature and pressure.
A room-temperature superconductor is a game-changer because we could get nearly-perfect energy efficient electric conduction without the additional energy overhead it takes to keep the material at such a dense pressure or extreme temperature. Such a material would have wide applications across a variety of disciplines.
Here's a useful article as well: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0953-2048/26/11/1...
We lose it to HEAT and that has a lot of limitations like the stuff melting and exploding.
We can make superconductors, but they only work at extremely cold temperatures, if they get too hot they turn back into bad conductors. This new material might be able to superconduct at room temperature, which means zero loss conductors without expensive bulky and complicated cooling systems. There are many cool things that can be done with zero loss conductors.
There are also some really cool levitation effects, demonstrated here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPqEEZa2Gis
As to why this one works at room temp? It really needs quantum physics to explain.
Weekly Science news by Sabine Hossenfelder
Today we’ll talk about the new superconductor claim, bad news for new physics, a quantum radar, how to print origami, space-based solar power for a moon station, a dire prediction for the collapse of an ocean circulation, Europe’s first hyperloop test, why NASA shoots lasers at the rain forest, and of course, the telephone will ring.
Magnetic fields moving through conductors induce electrical energy in the conductors. Normally this is quickly dissipated as heat, but in a superconductor this energy can't go anywhere, and the conductor therefore can't move through the magnetic field.
We've already done a lot of experiments with superconductors, since we've found some that work at extreme cold, but room temperature superconductors would allow us to productive some of those cool ideas by making them economically viable.
This isn't really accurate because increasing the resistance of a resistor in a given circuit will actually decrease the amount of heat dissipated.
W = IV where I = V/R plug that in we get W = (V/R)V = V^2/R
So Watts = Volts^2/Resistance. Increase resistance, decrease watts.
Its better to just say that resistance converts voltage to heat, and leave it at that. Also is why in the orginal paper (and other superconductor work) they measure voltage drop across the conductor. No voltage drop(loss) = no resistance.
I presented it as an intuitive "feel" based idea of what a resistor does. It's very much not a numerically useful or physically accurate one.
Maybe if mag-lev cars are possible, you could get that kind of gain from the reduced friction.
That's no small deal, but in the grand scheme of things that a hot superconductor can give us.. I mean, this can (possibly, with decades of research) give us fusion, quantum computing, etc.
Agreed Fusion would be the biggest win possible.
Electromagnets are built with coils of copper magnet wire - an efficient conductor but generates waste heat - what if we could build those electromagnets with zero resistance? Electric motors become very exciting. The electrical <-> mechanical relationship gets transformed.
We use electricity for everything, so it's hard to communicate the extent of the revolution. People keep bringing up MRI machines because they're on the ragged edge of electromagnet usage constrained by cooling.
Aren't there other components like transistors that will still generate heat?
- Cheaper electricity transportation
- New kind of batteries
- Consumer devices that don't heat up as you use them
- Simplifies the design of fusion reactors, which means we could have fusion sooner and cheaper
- Probably lots of things we can't even think of
If this is true, then you still have a lot of time before you can do industrial replication but given the stakes I imagine we will see immense inflows of capital into this.
And now I’m imagining a superconducting toaster. Such frustration!
Huazhong University demonstrates LK-99 diamagnetism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36953819 - Aug 1, 2023 (265 comments)
LK-99 crystal verified to be magnetically levitated (with video) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36953396 - Aug 1, 2023 (10 comments)
Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor LK-99 preprint revision 2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36952894 - Aug 1, 2023 (272 comments)
Origin of correlated isolated flat bands in LK99 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36951815 - Aug 1, 2023 (196 comments)
Semiconducting Transport in LK99 reproduction attempt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36951140 - Aug 1, 2023 (245 comments)
LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36940323 - July 31, 2023 (619 comments)
Ask HN: Room temperature superconductor: what to expect? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36930707 - July 30, 2023 (61 comments)
“We are not cheating” (YH Kwon superconductor comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36929386 - July 30, 2023 (61 comments)
Korea Superconductor Papers Published ‘Without Consent’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36927216 - July 30, 2023 (47 comments)
Argonne National Lab is attempting to replicate LK-99 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36916254 - July 29, 2023 (201 comments)
LK-99 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36897300 - July 27, 2023 (58 comments)
Superconductor news: What’s claimed, and how strong the evidence seems to be - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36881808 - July 26, 2023 (471 comments)
The first room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36864624 - July 25, 2023 (875 comments)
Edit: thanks to mystery user for emailing hn@ycombinator.com to suggest we include the days, not just month/year, for fast-moving stories like this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36953396 (10 comments)
Why did Derek Lowe link to HN? Who knows - maybe he noticed all the traffic this place has sent him, or how loved his articles are here!
It's a blog post. Not a Science article.
Plausible enough for science fiction at least.
I need to clarify and explain: the sample is standing above the magnet, and it will immediately return to standing when pressed with tweezers in front of the video, similar to the anti-magnetism of Koreans. In the back of the video, because the sample is too small, I dare not push it with tweezers, and it is easy to break the sample, so I moved the paper a little sideways, and it can be seen that the sample is still diamagnetic, and it is not that the moving magnet is moving with the magnet. Whether it is related to flux pinning or superconductivity remains to be further verified. Please treat it rationally!
Original: 我需要澄清和解释一下：样品在磁铁上方是站立着，视频前面用镊子去压它马上又恢复站立状态，类似韩国人的抗磁性。视频后面因为样品太小，没敢用镊子去推，容易把样品搞碎，所以稍微横移了一下纸张，可以看到样品还是呈抗磁性，并不是移动磁铁跟着磁铁在移动。是否属于磁通钉扎或者超导相关还有待进一步的验证。请理性看待！
After that replication of production of LK-99 would of course be critical, but just proving it exists should alone be enough for grand celebration.
I know we're all eager for news, but there's no urgent need to verify the claims. That's not how science works. Give it a couple weeks.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography
PBS had a documentary about the possibilities way back in the 1980s and I still remember it
It won't change things overnight or even this year but the benefits to humankind will be huge eventually.
(and we'll need more power transmission more cheaply for all that extra air-conditioning we'll need unfortunately)
Also, what are the chances this is like another graphene, where it can do everything except get out of the lab?
I think this means production of usable superconducting masses will be tricky, if its even possible.
So... Probably on the longer side? Time will be needed to figure out how to make it macroscopically, or discover a similar compound thats easier to produce in bulk.
But once wire, coils, high purity samples and such start getting sold, I think the adoption would be very quick.
But I dont want to jump to conclusions. I dont think its a drop in replacement for, say, the copper substrate.
If this turns out to be a super conducting material you can be assured that overnight there will be many thousands of people all around the world, from academic, corporate, government, and private labs working with the new theory and materials and discoveries will occur as our understanding of the phenomenon get deeper and wider. There will be so much incentive to find new methods and materials that have the properties of this material.
Organic superlube!? Oh, it's great stuff! Great stuff.
I’m interested to know if anyone has any recommended resources on DFT or DDFT (the simulation method used here) for someone with good applied math knowledge but who is not a physicist. I have a decent working knowledge of stat mech from knowing about dynamical systems and information theory, but I am not a physicist. I’ve come across (classical) DFT before, but the tutorial papers I’ve come across get weighed down by a lot of physics jargon and notation that I don’t understand and they describe it in terms of certain physical systems that obfuscate whether I can adapt the method to problems I am interested (I think the answer is yes in my case but if I was confident I wouldn’t be asking). I could just rederive (classical) D or DDFT for my stochastic process, and that is likely the best way to learn it, but having a resource that is written more from the perspective of dynamical systems than a physicist would speed the process up quite a bit!
When people think of magnetism, they think of polar charges that either attract or repel other polar charges. Diamagnetism is neat in that regardless of the orientation and polarity of the external field, a diamagnetic material is always repelled.
Now why this matters. All superconductors exhibit diamagnetism, but not all diamagnetic materials are superconductors. So this lends credibility to lk-99 being a potential super conductor because they have been able to show it has one of properties of a superconductor.
But we're still far off from showing it is a superconductor. That will be harder because impurities and other factors can confound the results, so right now the focus is on synthesis and confirming some of the easier properties we expect to see
In comparison, levitating things like pyrolytic graphite seems to require truly massive magnets to achieve even millimeters of levitation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC3r9-OaWes
Right now the original claim is on shakey ground because one of the authors rushed the publication, so there's problems with the original paper that needed addressing (I havent looked at the new paper yet). So there's a bit of parallel construction going on, the authors are fixing the publication while other researchers are working to replicate the material/claims.
So basically, people are super excited because so far, the material has been replicated to some degree of success a few times, and exhibiting properties that support the original claim.
The claim of room temperature super conductors is exciting by itself, but that the science is replicating to any degree in such a short window is awesome
If it does, hoo boy!
They reference Dr Salvatore Cezar Pais in the patent. The spaceship guy. Surely they're trying to stir the pot with that.
You wouldn't had believed it if I had told you a month ago.
Would buying quantum computing stocks be a good idea now?
These stories need a time-stamp.
Who replicated or not since this morning.
(2014) Some Title
What is below the title is a time since posted, not the date of the article.
This was a joke. Since there are multiple submittals every hour today about this story.
So need something like
(8/1/2023 10AM) Yet Another Story, about another group, with claim about Replication of Superconductor
In a serious note, superconductors are likely useful in electric magnetic motors and probably in high power electronics and batteries in general, no?
I think the winners will be those which are cheaply and reliably made at scale out of common and non toxic elements and have long durability, or if this isn’t fully achievable something close to this goal.
Realistically, superconducting processors would most likely be much faster, or at least cram more cores on a single die.
Single-celled life, multi-cellular, mushrooms, trees, whatever ate lignin, dinosaurs, rodents, humans, Electric beings? I mean, there's nothing 'unnatural' about a world populated by robots, we just assume that 'alive' means 'made of meat', but the raw materials in a robot and a human are all Earth based.
It’s bad. It’s really, really bad.
Also hype tempering.
AI has already taken over the internet and is just feeding us news stories based on what it already knows.
Super conductor discovered by a team who's been searching for 20 years. Internal conflict 'proves' there's something to argue over. Low quality, confusing information that's hard to decipher, but kind of makes sense. Asian language information streams and videos.
Musk buys twitter.
A submarine visited the titanic and imploded.
</tinfoil hat>
Lo, the tidings shared are fraught with obscurity and scant lucidity, yet there lies a glimmer of comprehension therein. From the streams and moving images of the Orient, cometh information in languages unknown to many.
Furthermore, Musk, a man of wealth and innovation, hath purchased the platform known as Twitter.
In a most daring endeavor, a submarine hath ventured to the sunken Titanic, only to be consumed by implosion, as the shipwreck claimed its price.
RTRPS = Real Time Role Playing Strategy?
/Birds aren't real
I mean, we're all waiting for the "AI can now do everything announcement", but what if it just starts doing everything and telling us stories we want.
I can't personally verify LK-99, twitter, UFO's or the submarine story, but they're all highly entertaining.
I've got no clue what you're trying to imply. Most things aren't an internet conspiracy. Skepticism is warranted, and the claims about LK-99 are far from proven. But there's 100s of thousands of researchers out there in the real world, doing research and publishing papers, and that really is what's happening here.
Just having a laugh about AI becoming too powerful.
I don't honestly think it's happened yet, but it seems like a fake internet, or at least a future where it's hard to tell if this story is true as it has articles, videos and pictures to back it up.
We're just at a weird time of the internet where AI can generate stories, videos, audio and pictures, just not in a cohesive way - but that cohesiveness is just a matter of putting all the existing pieces together.
Now explain that sentence to a caveman - or even to someone in 1990.
There is a funny comedy bit in the movie "Sleeper" where Woody Allen's character is explaining what things were for to scientists in the 23rd century. But today it is even wilder.
What really strikes me is that it isn't "slang" that we're dealing with here, it is actual kind of "things". I thought we had peaked with pet rocks but I was so, so very wrong.
AI is useful enough to be dangerous in the hands of bad actors, where the marks are not just the suckers but the people who want to have nothing to do with it.
Get tired of one set of assholes? Funnel resources to another set of assholes (who also wish you harm).
If this turns out to be actually true then everyone will want to talk about fusion again. I don't know if I have the stomach for it. But as you say, at least it's not AI.
If these room-temp superconductors pan out, it will be dumping gasoline on the funding fire for new fusion attempts. Given less than a year from scientific verification, fusion will go red hot.
It's not HN; it's the world that's driving this.
1. GPT-4-grade AI is a genuine, holy-smokes innovation that is already driving massive changes in education (universities are having to redesign all their writing assignments,) entertainment (SAG-AFTRA strike,) and the tech industry (the sudden disappearance of thousands of jobs, and the concomitant socioeconomic demotion of software engineers. And if you think AI isn't to blame here: you're probably right! There was other stuff going on, e.g. the end of ZIRP. But AI will keep those jobs away.)
2. Clean air seems pressing, as (if you'll recall) we just had this little pandemic thing happen, and in case you missed it, a vast chunk of my country (Canada) is currently ablaze, choking the United States with smoke, and other places are experiencing similar pressures (thanks, 2023 Thermal Pulse.)
3. RTAP Superconductors are literally the stuff of sci fi, and their advent interacts directly with trends 1 and 2, as RTAPS would make climate change more easily addressed (dramatic efficiency improvements across the board) and also would make AI silicon work much, much faster as part of that. It might also open the door to efficient quantum computing, which in turn would drive AGI even faster/further.
You're living through some seriously bonkers stuff, and your newsfeed is understandably preoccupied with it.
They're aware of the actors/writers strike and the association AI has with it, but AI in this context is a vague speculative thing rather than a specific type of AI or brand of AI made by some company.
Implicit in this counterargument is the idea that judging what is of genuine importance is a matter of opinion, as though we could get a sense of what to pay attention to by polling a large enough sample set.
It is not. Expertise matters. Who is interested in the topic matters.
Put another way: from the Fundamental Attribution Error alone, it does not follow that identity is completely meaningless; it does, however imply that anyone with such-and-such a set of concerns and knowledge would behave in such-and-such a way under such-and-such conditions.
And those conditions obtain. And so, with a flourish: I give you, 2023 "Superconduct my clean-air-monitoring AI, please!" Hackernews
But I agree that it needs a healthy dose of skepticism until several reputable groups have replicated it.
The last dotcom I worked for was trying to get funding and had a freakout because someone took money from an unaccredited investor. Had to spend a bunch of their remaining cash to buy that person out and clear the balance sheets.
You have a lot more leeway to ~defraud~ work with accredited investors without all sorts of consumer-protectiony legal clauses kicking in. It's a liability for future rounds. Luckily there are a bunch of rich suckers out there.
Well, not with that attitude.
Instructions unclear: can't buy lunch.