This stuff is so 2023
I am also quite relaxed about this preprint. As far as I am concerned the issues pointed out in this post on an actual physics forums with regards to the famous LK-99 preprint still stand with regards to this new paper:
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/room-temperature-super...
To get that kind of commitment you the strong backing of senators from a dozen different states. It rarely happens in non military projects, and when it does it's a boondoggle. Look to the SLS project, $12 billion spent to recycle space shuttle engines from the 70s and 80s.
The latter, under any government type, don't have a great track record of massive government investment accelerating progress.
Proof of concept level grants, sure! But it doesn't seem to scale past that. IMHO, a free market is a better GTM-stage+ capital allocator.
Government can often be a failure-prone capital allocator, but it can also result in improved alignment when an entire industry with wide socioeconomic implications is about to be born.
The Chinese did much of the same with their tech sector especially Huawei if I remember correctly with gigantic tax breaks and cheap financing.
In this case, subsidies (and incentives) are 'governments throwing money at engineering problems'. The US does the same for SpaceX, EV manufacturers, and the entire military industrial complex – with the latter making tech controlled by the government
But I'd still hazard the exception rather than the rule, globally.
Those only have a limited dependence on dozens of senators; the NIH typically gets most of what it asks for every year. The US has funded science at spectacular levels in a bipartisan way for some time (that may change in the future). Of course there is still a lot of political bargaining, I'm not going to deny that.
What's interesting is that we could clearly spend even more if we felt it was a priority. There's so much that could be taken from military spending without having a direct impact on our defense. But I don't think we want to do that; during my grad school career, the NIH budget almost doubled, which led to a huge bolus of grad students minted as PhDs, who then had no jobs beccause the size of faculty positions didn't change nearly as quickly.
I admire China's efforts and I see a lot of similarities in China to the US around 1900: the time when the balance of industry and technology shifted from EU to US, but growing your industry super-fast runs the risk of overheating and meltdown.
China recently allocated $41 Billion just to improve chip production. The US hasn't spent like that since the Apollo program.
But my real points are: "allocation" is not actual spend. And if they do spend that much, they will grow the industry so fast it runs the risk of collapsing or at least not being sustainable, with the inevitable crashes following.
"Resting on your laurels" always ends badly.
> It has all the systemic advantages
Then let's take full advantage of them. We must remain extremely hungry for science/tech progress/breakthroughs or we will eventually get run over.
And history is littered with examples of technological disruption ending empires
Germany made some amazing developments that were superior to allied tech, and they didn’t win.
One place where they were significantly ahead was in large scale rocketry. By the same token, they were significantly and consistently behind the United Kingdom and United States in cryptography, computing, radar, electronics, atomics, and manufacturing—all of which had much more significant strategic impacts.
I like your fervent almost religious belief in the US. Is it reality? What boundaries: software, environmental.
Shenzhen felt like the most capitalist place I have ever been. It didn't seem to have big boy VC capital. However every single person seemed to be running a small capitalist business.
Want to see a swarm of businesses? Let one small business in Shenzhen be seen to make a profit, and watch how many competitors and supply chain businesses pop up and how quickly. I don't know if it is a no/low beaurocracy zone but I am guessing they don't have to worry too much about IP roadblocks. I imagine the biggest problem is too much competition?
I suspect young adults grok capitalism better there because as children they were embedded in the culture of endeavour, unlike westernized countries.
I wasn't there for long enough, but would love to hear what others think of business startup in Shenzhen.
Absent free trade, their advantages dwindle.
So the current "just shy of declared adversarial relationships" is optimum for them. Pushed further, say by retaining exclusive access to a game changing technology, and they start losing trade relationships (arguably, already have as manufacturing reallocated to SE Asia).
That said, in spite of tarrifs from the west, China still has plenty of skin in the game, and the hypothetical suggests that trade would still be open enough for China to profit
That's very arguable when it was the US who led the world in opening up to China in the 90s/early 2000s, opening its markets to China, bringing China into the WTO, etc. (all at great cost to middle class Americans). China was an economic basket case and incapable of developing on its own. No country in history has been more generous to another.
And what did the US get in return? Currency manipulation, large scale economic espionage and mercantilist behavior, protectionism of Chinese markets and industries, fentanyl, militarization of South China Sea and bullying the countries there, largest and fastest military buildup since 1930s Germany, supporting Russia vs Ukraine, threatening war over Taiwan, etc. "Unrestricted warfare".
The US didn't cause China to do any of that, that was all the CCP's decision. Responses like economic derisking/decoupling (aka trade war) are completely legitimate and unsurprising.
This is hilarious revisionism. We didn't do any of that out of generosity, we did it for profit. We saw a huge pool of cheap labor and decided we wanted to let our companies exploit that. We rubbed our hands together and grinned while selling them the proverbial rope.
But if by "we" you mean the large portion of the US middle class whose financial security and upward mobility was obliterated, then no "we" did not do it for profit and were extremely generous, sacrificial even, in lifting hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty when the CCP was unable to do that on their own.
It's not like this is any surprise, Ross Perot was even explicitly warning about it back in 1992: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3LvZAZ-HV4
If the US had a sensible culture (and hence democratically driven government policy) behind education, a skilled labor pool could have emerged to develop high-tech manufacturing that leveraged China's low-skill labor pool. Instead, China has 'hid its strength, and bided its time', establishing its own high-skill labor pool and advanced manufacturing capability, giving it substantial leverage over the entire world, without so much as starting a proxy war, usurping foreign lands, assassinating foreign political leaders, etc.
US hegemony is absolutely its own to lose, but it all depends on the culture driving it.
Regardless of the motivations and machinations on either government's part.
I'm intrigued by the metrics you're using to conclude that the US has been more generous towards China than it has been towards, say, Israel or even Mexico, as a matter of state policy. Especially considering that US placed China under trade embargo and singlehandedly denied it UN representation for 20+ years.
The actions you are describing as representing a historically unprecedented level of generosity seems essentially to boil done to US agreeing to maintain normal trade relations with China, similar to those it has with nearly every other country. Worth noting that the US extends Most Favored Nation (MFN) status to all its trading partners — it's not some exclusive or rare privilege as its name might suggest but a standard practice in international trade.
Partly due to what it cost the US public. Free trade with smaller countries hurts less than one-sided free trade with a protectionist mercantilist country 4x your population. (one-sided due to required joint ventures, unilateral bans on US social media, currency manipulation, among others)
> and singlehandedly denied it UN representation for 20+ years.
To be pedantic, the US didn't deny China representation for 20+ years, just the CCP. The ROC was a founding member of the UN and permanent Security Council member. US just opposed the CCP replacing it until 1971. Given the instability of CCP regime during that time - famine, Cultural Revolution - that wasn't an unreasonable position.
> similar to those it has with nearly every other country.
Except the Communist bloc countries, USSR, Cuba, etc. Extending MFN to China while they were still Communist was unprecedented.
The fentanyl histrionic in your earlier comment is especially good paired with this endorsement of the 50s/60s KMT, who were busy fighting an insurgency to establish and maintain a heroin cartel.
Afaik, their domestic middle class market isn't nearby big enough to singlehandedly fuel their economy.
And they'll economically-politically run up against the "middle class wants things like political power and freedom" if they try to balloon that class too quickly.
Losing Taiwanese, Korean, Australian, and EU specialty and raw material imports would hurt. A lot.
Goodbye substantial amounts of integrated circuits, oil, and iron and copper ore.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_... https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/CHN/Yea...
Can't exactly have room temperature superconducting monorails all over the nation without someone questioning exactly how you have room temp superconductors and nobody else does...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainstorm_(1983_film)
a researcher builds a device that can record and play back experiences which takes up most of a room, in a meeting with his boss, he receives some secret microchips made of a room temperature superconductor that he uses to make headsets.
My understanding is that a major hurdle is just how tiny everything is on modern chiplets. If I remember right....someone managed to reverse engineer the Intel 8086 or the 8080....but my understanding is that our lithography is so complex at this point you can't accurately reverse engineer the physical chip layout. If one could reverse engineer the physical layout and chemical layers...you could probably use that information to reverse engineer the photolithography mask and chemical etching step.
TLDR: we can't reverse those modern server CPU's ....we can only learn via what the fan or the chiplet owner be it Intel or and or apple decides to release regarding architecture or chip layout.
You'd need to use gamma spectrography to map out more modern chips. I'm sure someone's got the equipment somewhere; the chip manufacturers themselves must verify they got a good etch somehow.
It’s only viable if it’s exclusively used in military tech.
Agree with your overall point, though.