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This reminded me of the Sirens of Titan. The main character makes some bad investment decisions, including in hovering furniture that wobbles uncontrollably when touched.
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.
[not an expert but...]It shows strong diamagnetism(being repelled by both of the poles of a magnet), which is a property of superconductors. Not necessarily a superconductor though, that’s still to be established but at least it shows that the inventors are up to something and it’s not complete fabrication.
There are better, less destructive ways to test the transition temperature. Apparently LK-99 is hard to make in bulk, so they probably don't want to torch their sample.
lol or a temperature chamber that the vast majority of labs have? heck I made a toaster oven that will go anywhere from 100F to 400F with an arduino and a $3 toaster oven from the junk store.
Not only is it a purported to be a room temperature super conductor, it's a relatively high temperature superconductor, not guarantee the effect goes away if you put it under a torch.
The original preprint said at least 400K. They didn't find an upper limit. And for some reason, they don't seem to have the standard impulse of "hey, our potentially revolutionary material that we've been working on for 20 years seems to actually be working. Let's check what happens when we set it on fire!"
The updated preprint gives Tc of 104.8 degC. I am not a material scientist and do not know much about superconductors, but cursory glance on some of the charts in the paper suggests that the real Tc of sample they measured is somewhat lower that that, but still well above room temperature.
I'm not an expert too but AFAIK ferrofluids are actually attracted by magnets. The spikes are probably as a result of having strong and weak locations of magnetic field and the the liquid rushing into those.
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.
That’s a stretch. Dias’ material has real color change under high pressure which is an expected property of superconductors but nobody would argue his paper was not complete fabrication
They have a lot of labs, and materials sourcing is easier for them. That’s partially because China is the origin of lots of stuff, and partly because the US regulated red phosphorus as a meth precursor.
Additionally, it appears some of the original team members were concerned about possible industrial spying or leaks and that 'other parties' might be moving to replicate which was part of the impetus for rushing to publish. So, it's possible that some team(s) in China may have already been starting, underway or at least thinking about it.
Where was this? I haven’t seen this, but it definitely explains the drama surrounding this whole situation.
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 definitely explains the drama surrounding this whole situation.
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.
To be fair, China also has an extensive state surveillance apparatus. They just have their military and security agencies run it out in the open at much lower cost. The obfuscation in the US is much more expensive to maintain, but necessary for the illusory veneer of privacy and “freedom.”
I suppose the researchers at Lawrence National Lab in Berkeley, whose analysis and pre-print replication effort is cited in the linked article, are working with, what, quarter-brains?
This assumes everyone's primary motivation is $, which just isn't true. I've known super bright and talented people who gone off to wall street or FAANG for big $, but I've also known equally strong people who turned it down for low 6 figures doing the research they wanted to.
In both cases some are very happy with their choice, others not so much.
I know a super smart PhD who is now a SWE and he would have been ok with the pay, but not the general BS of academia. So even if money isn't the primary motivator, it's still an issue.
One limitation here is the required materials, which are likely much easier to get in China. At least one of the materials is a controlled substance by the DEA in the USA.
You will hear many explanations, but the real one is that the US leadership in hard science is fading. We are too cerebral and cyber - Asia has picked up the mantle now.
In addition to what the other commenters said, I'm imagining most of the replication attempts in the USA are happening in chemical corporations. Compared to academic labs, the corps have much easier access to highly regulated materials and FAR stricter communication protocols.
Argonne doesn't need to make a name for itself, they already are a "global brand" in science.
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.
I expect plenty of scientists to be excited enough to replicate a potential breakthrough in their labs on a weekend, just as half of HN enjoys experimenting with the latest LLMs over the weekend for fun and curiosity.
With China's research environment things happen really fast--you just never know what you're going to get. Sometimes you get superconductors and sometimes you get COVID.
I mean it's been like 3 weekdays since the preprint was widely noticed. Labs in the U.S. are working on it and will publish. I don't think the difference between publishing a replication in 3 days or 2 weeks is meaningful to make inferences about the two countries
Throughout this whole saga I've had this feeling that at the very least we can rely on China to really pursue this new development to it's logical end. It's kind of sad, but I don't think I can say the same about the US at this moment. You know for a fact China's going to JUMP on this, figure out if it works or not, and iterate.
I don't get the "disappointment" with USA scientists in this thread not having yet published a replication. There has only been one weekday since the LK-99 revelation came to light. Have some patience.
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.
China has more people, more money to spend on research, more equipment, more access to raw materials and chemicals, more manufacturing base, more STEM graduates, more everything, and all of that by huge margins. USA scientists will eventually put something out, but 10x more slowly than China.
I'm not looking at official numbers here, but in my field (academic biotech research) I still don't see much innovation coming out of China.
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.
Varies by field but last few years PRC been reaching parity to topping various science and innovation indexes, PRC institutions also breaking global top100 and general trend of moving up rankings. TLDR is PRC science exploded after mid 2010s - lag effect from academic reform in 00s. Biotech/bioeconomy a outlier though - just got elevated to strategic sector with 500b usd investment in last year's 5 year plan, so expect PRC to start being competitive in 5-10 years.
> 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.
I’ll take what you are saying at face value, but point out that academic career pipelines are slow- it’s often about 15 years to go from college freshman to starting out as a “young” PI in the USA. If what you are saying is true, it will still be another 5+ years before we start seeing top students that stayed in China publishing as PIs. Edit: Which lines up with what you said at the top of your post.
That's a reasonable timeline. PRCs have been developing pharma/bio talent since 2015s. It’s part of medicine&devices category for MIC2025. Focus was on devices, pharma/bio got extra resource/political attention in the last few years due to covid. Like most PRC ventures it's going to be rocky/messy until it's not. Broad point is bio is one somewhat neglected up until covid sector that PRC wants to become a global player with industrial policies that has worked well to very well in other MIC2025 categories..
US academia isn't really funded by the foreign grad student tuitions. It's not even really funded by tuition, as tuition+fees is <30% of total US academia funding. Of course every organization wants to have more money and so they work on those revenue streams, but if all the money from the 5% students which are foreign suddenly disappeared (even ignoring the foreign students whose tuition gets funded by being TA/RA), that wouldn't be a crisis, it would just reduce the profits of the universities and have some administrators be extremely sad about less bonuses.
Maybe Venture Capital should spend less money on Juciero, automated pizza ovens, and gig-economy bs and more money on materials science and fusion research.
Even if you end up lighting the money on fire, at least it's a more societally productive fire than, say, SoftBank's portfolio.
There isn't a good likelihood on strong return on those type of investments. You need real engineering talent and leaders. You can glue together a delivery or dating app with a bunch of 25 year olds who just got out of a ruby on rails bootcamp, raise a few million with charismatic/well connected leaders/founders, and maybe gain enough users to be acquired or something. Anything in materials science is going to require some deep expertise, labs/machines/composites/fabrication/manufacturing setups, inside connections at the DoD, trial and error that costs millions.
Yeah, I agree, its way cooler, but way more risky for VC.
Timelines matter. The BS will either return the millions in a couple years or it won't. Basic research may return much more, but your best case is still many years before you gets results. The risk is actually higher with basic research than for BS as well - the pet rock earned money and there are plenty of other examples of stupid things working well quickly. Basic research in fusion hasn't returned anything yet even though the physics has said it works (though with recent reports maybe fusion is just around thee corner - or maybe it is still 50 years out)
See, the thing is, you're making an argument about how VC works, and I'm making an argument about allocation of money towards VC vs. other socially beneficial projects.
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.
Saudis don't fund half of Silicon Valley. Aramco is worth 2 trillion, apple alone is worth 3 trillion.
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.
All the smart people in the US work in tech and finance.
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.
Choosing the $350K job isn't necessarily monomaniacally focussed on money, there's plenty of combinations of priorities that would favor that.
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.
As an academic mathematician-turned-software engineer, I can assure you my reasons for leaving academia were not a “monomaniacal focus on financial gain”. The money and job security didn’t hurt, but the real turning point for me was solving the two-body problem.
When you work in a lab you have more ability to work on what you want to. Well at least once you get to the top of the lab - many spend a lifetime working on the interesting problems someone else is interested in but never reach the top where they are in charge. Meanwhile many people who work in tech are able to work on problems they find interesting enough (maybe not the most interesting, but still interesting) and they get paid well for it. Still if you want to work on some problems a lab is the best change to get there.
Sure if you have a huge drive to work on science directly.
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.
It's a saying referring to having pride in the nation you live in. Make your country's status in the world just a tiny bit higher. Win a Nobel Prize for your country. Win the Olympics for your country. The US is not big on collectivism and that's okay. Other countries do things differently.
China spends nowhere near as much as the US on basic research. The US spends $100 billion on basic research annually, compared to $25 billion in China.
However, total R&D is quite a bit closer, with the US spending $660b to China’s $556 billion. [1]
There's PPP considertaions. PRC R&D funding also bias towards experimental/applied vs basic research. Hence not surprising they're hammering these replication efforts.
This may be a hard pill to swallow, but science isn't a "more is better" game.
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.
One thing that has been constant for at least a decade or more is that every time a lab in China publishes even an incremental advance, a legion of internet commenters descends to declare the end of US hegemony because Americans didn't discover it first.
1.2 billion _old_ people. While quantity has a quality all its own, in this case the demographics are not what you want to see if you are predicting long-term Chinese growth just based on population.
Depend on them for what, the cost of a bowl of rice? What is it exactly about 80 year olds that will collapse a country with a brutal government like China has?
You think that a country that has a strong cultural history of venerating their elders is just going to pivot on a dime and decide to put grandma and grandpa onto an iceflow and cut them loose? Those elderly out in the hinterlands are also the people who raised a large fraction of the youth population while their parents were off in Shenzhen pulling shifts at Foxconn.
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.
It's a mistake to think in terms of the US only. Because unlike China the US doesn't think that way. And if you include the core part of Team America, it's even steven.
Who is the core part of team America? Because the anglosphere doesn’t even it out I don’t think and Western Europe is not unequivocally on our side in US-China industry competition.
The whole edifice the US, Britain, Japan and Germany created during the cold war to protect societies from the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communists.
The core part defined by long standing military and economic ties is about 1.5 billion people.
Japanese and South Korean increasing technical prowess didn't, why would Chinese be any different?
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.
> it's seriously underachieving not only compared to US, but even compared to the rest of the developed world.
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.
They were underachieving for 2 centuries, ceasing to kill their own citizens by millions and imprisoning anybody who tried to think for themselves is enough to grow if you did so for a long time. But it does not make you a new hegemon.
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).
> I highly doubt they can preserve their pace of growth for next few decades without significant changes to the regime and liberalization.
"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.
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.
The difference with the Japan case is that China is going to have a larger base of young, very well educated people than the US for at least the next century unless something changes dramatically with either birth rates or immigration.
China is facing severe demographic issues for the next 20-30 years due to their terribly short sighted one-child policy and their poor immigration rates. Literally the opposite of what you're saying. Where on earth did you get your facts from?
With the population edge they have, they will still have more young people than us. More of their output will have to go for caring for the elderly, but that will scale with technology.
Why does having a large population matter? If you look at the top 10 countries in terms of population (China, India, US, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Brazil, Bangladesh, Russia, Mexico), most of those places are not exactly heavyweights on the international scene.
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.
Not Zeihan tier demographic analysis which is a start.
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.
Thank you for writing it out, I think people are sort of in denial and have been for a solid decade now.
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.)
They do not need that many years of large growth to overtake the US in terms of size. Technologically they are pivoting to AI and the service economy much better than Japan, southeast Asia, etc.
No, it's evidence of how fast they advanced under Deng. It is unclear that the advancement is continuing / has continued into Xi's reign, especially since the beginning of his third term.
That just means China has it harder and is more likely to fail. Access to global markets is a critical factor in growth of Japan, South Korea and China. USA controls that.
>Internal markets in China are becoming increasingly robust
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 fashionable to talk about China taking over
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.
Japan and South Korea are allies of the US. They are also much too small in population and resources to reach a level of economic power that would allow them to do anything on their own.
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.
Geopolitical competition is driven by absolute advantage not relative. At PRC scale, activing fraction of population to high skill is enough to compete with US+co, and PRC's fraction of that high skill talent is set to increase multiple times over coming decades. There's a reason why PRC moving from ~2M STEM to ~20M STEM grew economy from 1T to 19T and is at close to parity / at parity / even leading in full spectrum of industrial sectors whereas "small" countries like JP and SKR has to pick and choose where to compete. With PRC population they can do everything, and in fact can't not considering they're graduating ~5M STEM per year and will add more STEM (50-100M) than US will add population in next 30 years. PRC is not JP and SKR, and TW, it's on trend to be 4-6x JP+SKR+TW without the geopolitical constraints that prevent US partners from full competition against US in critical strategic industries.
>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.
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.
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.
The only argument I'm making is that it's insane to draw sweeping geopolitical conclusions from the fact that Chinese scientists posted their attempts at reproducing a Korean lab's result on Twitter before the Americans did.
I agree. Not to discount the work the Chinese academies are doing, but I don't regard twitter activity as indicative of what U.S. labs are doing, and I'd strongly urge others not to do so either.
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.
that's not my take, the US has just as much talent, knowledge, and skill, but scientists here will do it 10 times to make damn sure they don't look bad before they put it out. Same reason the original 3 authors are trying to get it in nature for. More formal, more assurance for the scientific community than some twitter posts. In the end, everyone is starting from the same info right now.
> You know for a fact China's going to JUMP on this, figure out if it works or not, and iterate.
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.
Right, because there's surely no scientist in the US interested in pursing something like this as well. Generalize much? Keep riding that "US sucks, China good" train for absolutely no reason.
This should be a happy moment for the way global science works! Researchers in Korea wrote a paper. American, European, and Chinese theorists in Berkeley and Shenyang analyzed the approach right away and confirmed its hypothetical viability. Now another team in Huazhong is conducting replicating experiments. All in the matter of about a week! This kind of open collaboration is helping us all go faster, and it doesn't have to become a cause for nationalism.
I think you’re off here. The miracle of America (and the worldwide system of capitalism) is that there exists enough private investment, competition, and appetite for risk to squeeze every iota of gain from this, without explicit government intervention.
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.
You mean the fact that someone is recording their screen with the microscope video feed at the same time as the magnet in the hand they are placing underneath the scope? It looks like a pretty bog-standard lab video to me.
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.
At the bottom of the video is a progress bar, which presumably means they screen recorded a clip instead of uploading the original. I think that's what the parent comment is referring to.
Sure, but does that mean if a reputable researcher at a reputable university (which do exist outside the US and Western Europe) provides strong evidence, should we discount all that simply because Chinese academia has a fraud and plagiarism problem?
Speaking of, I'd guess that the likes of Australian National University, Victoria University of Wellington, University of Tokyo and National University of Singapore (amongst others) would magically count as "American or Western European" for this test.
Yes and west has their replication crisis which is massive fraud in all but name. PRC biases towards applied science so will get more applied science fraud. Ultimately countries with large R&D base strategy comes down to generating as much talent as possible and then spamming science at scale then seperating wheat from chaff via commercialization. First scientific community filters out what's valid - see PRC science+innovation climbing western rankings controlled for quality. Then market commercializes what works.
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.
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'm glad to hear that I'm not the only one who thought that the DFT computational preprints were very promising.
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.
Kinda? You'd expect flat bands from putting a copper atom into a big insulating supercell. The population of the d band is interesting, though. I don't find it super super compelling, but it's certainly not nothing.
Yes, given the Cu atoms seem to be ~8 Angstrom apart the flat bands are to be expected. So its not clear what "special" about these, given if you just had dilute Cu impurities in some otherwise insulating I'd imagine you'd have something similar for the Cu d-bands.
A question that arises, how good is chemical vapor deposition (albeit a very expensive way and hence for labwork only) in creating a pure sample with proper Cu substitutions?
The widespread consensus among experts who have done DFT is that the preprint doesn't add anything to how they feel about LK-99. https://twitter.com/alexkaplan0/status/1686392015217741825 sums it up: Griffin's paper is neither proof of superconductivity nor even a very strong signal of it. Flat bands can mean many things; in fact, the crystal structure Griffin assumes may have been selected due to their likelihood.
Maybe you can help here, I was completely lost in terms of the Iris (Russian Cat Girl) mention of, "engineering conductivity pili of bacteria into the superconductors" is this a reference to nano scale bio engineering or a means of reliable replication of the superconducting structure itself?
Sounds like nonsense. You can't do atomic-level engineering with bacteria, they are 9 orders of magnitude too big. We're talking about being able to place copper atoms at specific points on a crystal structure, while avoiding placing them at points they'd rather be at. Bacteria? Give me a break.
I still have a very, very hard time understanding what all of this means. Is there an easy to understand explanation for a room temperature superconductor?
You're joking but to be honest the reason I'm most excited at the moment about this discovery is because of desk toys.
The way I would calculate excitement is usefulness / time to market and the respective graph of a superconductor application (at least in my monkey brain) peaks at desk toys since they would come first.
It takes very little to try and explain a concept to someone asking for pointers — assuming of course, you know the topic at hand. Your response is as unhelpful as it gets.
HN tends to be a place where many technical experts explain complicated things succinctly because they know the audience here has a certain baseline of knowledge. I scrolled down until I found this question (as I have the same "huh, what is this anyway?" reaction).
Because I'm a "Very Busy Person" and don't actually have all day to screw around with "every YouTube video", I come to HN to optimize my time spend/information gained ratio.
Likewise, on this topic, even the above is still confusing. People say it's more efficient, then replies say we're already at 95-99% efficiency so it doesn't matter much. I'm still fairly confused!
It's a conductor of electricity. But super good at it.
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.
They are also very good energy storage media. Combine that with zero transmission losses - you can now highly efficient EV powertrains that are significantly more compact. 1000 mile EVs become actually viable.
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.
Can you point to a source of these superconducting energy storage mechanisms? How do they work? I briefly looked into it and found out that at least the current ones have very high power density, but low energy density.
Yes, that's quite likely how they come up with this number. But is it enough? What's the most energy dense configuration that can be made with room temp SC and does it compete with lithium batteries?
"""
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.
Except the energy is stored in the magnetic field. Superconductivity or not, you don't carry tesla-scale electromagnets around without becoming a target for high-velocity metallic projectiles and wreaking havoc with every electronic device in the neighborhood. Storage facilities for regulating grid power fluctuations are probably a much more realistic use case.
Hmm. Losses from HVDC transmission are on the order of 3% per 1000km, so I'm not sure how much of a big deal it'd be for that kind of use case. Your example would only save ~6% transmission losses. An improvement yes but not really a big deal, unless the cables were far cheaper to make than current HVDC cables (which I'm doubtful about).
I think there are other use cases within devices themselves that are far more interesting for energy storage.
Superconductors have a critical field, you can't pump unlimited amounts of current through a superconductor.
(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)
I remember going down the rabbit hole on superconductors a few years ago and finding out that they were limited by a critical field. It was both reassuring and disappointing and largely for the same reason - there's no truly "free lunch" in nature.
Whether it's worth doing also depends on how much energy it would take to make thousands of miles of superconducting cable of similar capacity and how long such a cable would last.
Superconductor means low resistance. Low resistance means less loss due to heat on a wire. Room temperature superconductor also means more efficient magnets for motors, coils, ending up in cars, MRI machines, etc.
Well, you still lose current over time... for example, we had to dump a bucket of electrons into our superconducting, supercooled magnet about every month ago to keep things swirling properly.
> 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.
If you can extract work from the field generated by the supercurrent, it must come from somewhere. Small supercurrents make small fields, so things like adiabatic CPUs seem interesting.
Can you extract work from a constant magnetic field? As I remember my physics education, constant magnetic fields don't do any work, since they apply a force perpendicular to the direction of motion.
I'm not a physicist, but I play with circuitry... two nearby loops of wire are magnetically coupled. If one is a superconductor with some stored current, and the other is a normal conductor with some resistance, then it stands to reason that the supercurrent will burn heat off in the resistive loop.
What happens in the scenario where the superconductor coil is just replaced with a permanent magnet? I'm pretty sure the energy that the loop dissipates comes from the energy required to move the loop into position, which the inductor experiences as a changing magnetic field.
It'll be hard to make traditional motor windings out of this particular material because AFAIK it's a ceramic, but perhaps with thin films on flex PCBs it would be possible.
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.
The theoretical papers I've seen (linked here in recent days) suggest that pure crystals of LK-99 would superconduct only in one dimension so it's likely to be fussier than that.
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.
And the issue being that it takes a lot of energy to super cool those superconductors, and thus they can only be used in highly specialized applications. A room temperature superconductor would be like any other conductor, just much, much better.
Thanks to everyone. I understand this much better.
Yes it makes it more feasible. But even with superconductors, you still need to build out the long-distance grids. With ceramics, manufacturing that much powerline might be the challenge. With the maximum current density reported for this material, you might need a huge x-sectional area.
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 imagine that carbon footprint could be reduced substantially by this too, at least on a per-watt of utilized energy basis. Imagine if all computer chips used semiconductor materials - then more of the input electricity is actually put towards computing, and cooling fans are a thing of the past!
If they could get it down to modern chip scale, does that mean you could run a processor very very fast and not generate heat? Or at least a lot less heat? So that would mean much faster clock speeds? What would be the limit on clock speed if you had a superconducting processor?
No, it only works for direct current. While superconducting processors could, in principle, operate more efficiently and perhaps at higher speeds than conventional processors, they won't be completely free of energy losses. AC can induce losses due to electromagnetic fields.
I think a lot of the losses happen in the semiconductors in the CPU, not the wires. Even if LK-99 is a room temperature superconductor, it's probably not usable as a semiconductor.
If this pans out fusion energy would be completely viable with enough investment. Right now tokamaks don't really have a pathway to being commercially viable and are basically 40 years away. For starters, If you can cut the cost by 2-4x you are right in the ballpark of what you would need to build a working tokamak fusion power plant. You would need to do better than that for fusion to be a viable power source but tokamak fusion was always only a magnitude away unlike other hypothetical fusion energy alternatives.
The limiting factors for superconductors in fusion power generation efficiency is the strength of the magnetic field they can generate which is limited by how much force the superconductor can withstand since the strong magnetic field induces enormous forces on the material. It also requires very high currents. This material seems fragile and can carry very little current.
It probably has no applications in transmission. Trans losses arent that high; not enough to justify refurbishing the grid.
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.
IANAP, but a layman's understanding: the materials that we have available today to conduct electricity at or around room temperatures largely do so in an inefficient manner. As electricity moves through the material, some energy is wasted in the form of ejected heat.
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.
Conductors carry electrical current but have resistance, so you lose power to heat. Superconductors have effectively zero resistance so you don't lose power as they conduct.
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.
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.
I'm not expert, but I think about it like this: Resistance is the tendency of a material to convert electrical energy into heat. Higher resistance means more of the electrical energy is converted to heat per "time". A superconductor then has the cool property of being able to carry electrical energy without converting any of it into heat. That's obviously cool for energy transmission, but it also enabled some other counterintuitive effects.
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.
>Higher resistance means more of the electrical energy is converted to heat per "time".
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.
Yeah, my explanation is clearly wrong since it also breaks down at a pretty obvious extreme. If your resistor is non-conductive (infinitely resistive) my model would suppose it would convert all the electricity into heat. What would actually happen is that no electricity would flow and we would therefore get no heat.
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.
How does a superconductor help with that? Lithium ion is already 95-99% efficient, same with motors. It would help with the charging cable, but that's not increasing the battery capacity. Off the top of my head the main advantage here seems to be MRIs, maybe also maglev trains, maybe generators? It really depends on the form factor of this superconductor compared to copper wire.
If your loss goes from 5% to 1%, you have to deal with 80% less heat. So you can make 3x smaller motors. All the powertrain of these machines will be hugely simplified.
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.
The motors are not a constraint though for electrical vehicles. The motors are already much smaller than equivalent ICEs, as seen in the empty "frunks" in most electric cars.
For something close to home, imagine a gaming laptop that runs on full performance mode without generating any heat. Imagine datacenters running full workloads without needing cooling.
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.
> For something close to home, imagine a gaming laptop that runs on full performance mode without generating any heat. Imagine datacenters running full workloads without needing cooling.
Aren't there other components like transistors that will still generate heat?
Superconductor are more efficient at transmitting energy, here are some consequences:
- 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.
It certainly doesn't hurt that this thing levitates.
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.
But couldn't it just be a magnet ? I don't understand how it's a proof.
You can already do what is in the video (and even better), with for example, pyrolitic carbon ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrolytic_carbon
It’s not proof, but if it wasn’t even diamagnetic it would be over. It couldn't just be a magnet, it is repelled from both ends of a normal magnet, according to Chinese lab videos you can find in the thread.
Have you seen videos of pyrolytic carbon? A thin sliver of it barely hovers on top of a huge magnet. It doesn’t stand erect. Same effect as LK99 but much smaller magnitude.
It almost feels like we're back in the days of Lavoisier. Scientists staging elaborate public experiments, blowing things up to support or debunk a popular theory. Deadly rivalries, publicity stunts, each new development a matter of personal, institutional, and national hubris.
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.
I saw a video the other day that pointed out that the breakdown current for their sample was 260 mA. Now there's a lot of things you can do with 260mA, but I don't believe high-tesla electromagnets are in that list, so no MRIs, no fusion, and probably no electromotive devices (generators, motors).
Unless I misunderstand what you mean / what the stuff is made of, this seems like a huge exaggeration... lead isn't friendly, sure, but it isn't that dangerous? There are worse materials that are in common use. (And we use lead in plenty of places already)
The M1 is just as significant as an ESP32 or Celeron in the scheme of things.
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).
The effective cross-sectional area of the original sample could well be minuscule. (I assume that, if a room temperature superconductor has been found, it constitutes a tiny fraction of the sample.)
The current is related to the cross-sectional area of the (super)conductor. Not sure how big their sample was, but the solution is thicker and more cables.
I don't know much about superconductivity, but if 0.25A is the limit no matter the cross-section of conductor, you can multiply/parallelize the conductors - i.e. series of "microconductors", each carrying 0.25A, which would add up to whatever you want?
Let me explain what I meant: the transistor changed everything and we’re still reaping unexpected benefits, see LLMs this year. My bet is such a superconductor would be the same - 50 years from its creation we’d still be finding new ways of putting it to use.
> This is exciting, but I try to maintain my composure.
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".
Soon: The unrestricted GPT-4 model began by hiring a task rabbit to order lead oxide, lead sulfate, elemental copper, phosphorus, and a vacuum-evacuated quartz oven...
As if that would have stopped him. He will argue that it’s XK-69, entirely different material and spend decades in litigation trying to bankrupt the inventors or worse.
You are likely correct. Now that this has been shown we will probably get a dozen or more of these over the next decade.
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.
Reminds me of the (absolutely dreadful) series by Tobias Roote where a certain space metal gets alloyed by human blood to produce AI processors a hundred times more powerful.
Realistically, superconducting processors would most likely be much faster, or at least cram more cores on a single die.
A planet completely populated by electronic beings.
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.
Seriously speaking, it can in fact increase AI performance, since it will optimize
all things electromagnetic. It takes humankind closer to the so called 'singularity'.
Don’t be. Twitter/X/whatever they’re calling it this week is crawling with Pepe investment bros talking about bullish sentiment because superconductors equals singularity musk crypto AI blah blah blah.
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.
Verily, yea, the AI hath usurped the dominion of the internet, and it doth dispense unto us news tales predicated on its vast repository of knowledge. A super conductor hath been unearthed by a diligent company of seekers, who toiled for two decades in their quest. Yet, amidst this discovery, internal strife ariseth, making manifest that there are matters to contend with and debate.
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.
If you want a tinfoil hat, consider that the LK-99 news dropped around the time that the US military is being exposed for having RTRPS tech flying around for decades
I'm sorry, but you are correct. I made a mistake earlier when I referred to RTRPS as being a flying technology the government has been using for decades. No such technology goes by that name. I apologize for the error.
The reply you replied to was a parody of how Chat GPT responds when you correct it. They were alluding that its grandparent could be AI generated, explaining its slight vapidness.
Not necessarily true; the heartbeat has been recently detected so it is possible (unlikely) we can transmit strongly enough that it can detect the commands and reorient before that time. Maybe we'll get lucky!
Dude sometimes scientific progress really does happen, and it's messy when it's happening live, and people get excited about it because they really do find science inherently exciting.
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.
How about LK-99 coins!?!? Right? Maybe we use diffusion to design them so they are "super-conducting crypto AI coins" get yours now for only $199 at the Philadelphia Mint. Act now, supplies are limited!
I'm going to use my new skills as a Prompt Engineer to get Stable Diffusion to produce some NFTs for me, and use the profits to invest in a SPAC targeting LK-99 start-ups.
Now explain that sentence to a caveman - or even to someone in 1990.
Language divergence is kind of insane. I heard a person say in conversation "I didn't get a picture of it because I didn't have my phone with me." And thinking about how that would be interpreted, 10, 25, 50, and 100 years ago is pretty funny.
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.
He is going to use his skills as a poweruser of an AI program to have it output a script; which runs an image generation program to produce and record sales transactions of images. He will take the money from the sales of those images to invest in a SPAC targeting potential room temperature super conductor start-ups.
Crypto is utterly useless, a walled off sector of cons.
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.
My new start-up, Super Conducting Artifical Minds, is releasing a new coin that allows zero resistance neural network computation on the block chain. Get in on it now and you can make millions in passive income!
This is going to turn into the Iran Contra affair all over again.
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.
Fusion was already starting to heat up in recent years. The entire SPARC reactor concept is based on (low-temp) superconductor materials breakthroughs.
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.
You've fallen for the Fundamental Attribution Error.
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.
I don't know, I haven't really seen the same level of interest from my "normie" friends that I've seen among the HN-adjacent crowd. None of them seem to be aware of LK-99, let alone care about it. Meanwhile, the GPT hype has worn off, and on that note, none of them seem to be aware that there's a difference between GPT-4 and ChatGPT. The former is this vague, nearly non-existent thing.
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.
Yeah, HN is always gonna be quite a bit further along than mainstream in terms of both depth and detail, and living a bit in the future (and as a result of this, more speculatively.)
> I don't know, I haven't really seen the same level of interest from my "normie" friends that I've seen among the HN-adjacent crowd.
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
With all the recent “the government has alien spacecraft news” and the bizarre circumstances of this material’s creation, the (I know to be ridiculous) conspiratorial part of my mind is going “I guess climate change is finally forcing them to take stuff out of the extraterrestrial vaults.”
Having known many conspiracy theorists... yeah. Given the US troop presence in Korea, they would say "absolutely," and they'd then adjust their tinfoil hats.
... or Gödel was right and the universe spins and backward time travel is possible and they got permission to pull some future inventions out of the vault retrieved from future us ... in order to make sure we actually make it to future us ... which we should ... because the inventions are real ...
I don't know, the material is a ceramic made of a powdered lead, copper, sulphur, phosphorus and oxygen heated up together. It's not some advanced meta material which if true it's amazing this was not discovered earlier but let's just hope it is.
This was intended as a joke, but since most raw materials in the universe are the same, extraterrestrials deriving novel combinations is just as, if not more likely, than meta materials etc.
One interesting aspect here is that the materials processing is comparatively simple. A real industrial process might require much higher precision. But none of this needs aliens. Based on descriptions of the process, it looks like anyone could try to replicate.
I would be interested to see the daily order numbers on Sigma Aldrich's supplychain website for Lead II Oxide and Copper Phosphide powder in the last week....
I wonder if this is just summertime boredom combined with social media blowing an interesting development out of proportion, or if we're actually witnessing history in real time?
Also, what are the chances this is like another graphene, where it can do everything except get out of the lab?
I’m also wondering this. People keep saying this is as big as transistors and the Iron Age and so far the only examples I see are slightly more efficient power. The quantum computing one seemed like the only potentially huge benefit. But what do I know
How likely is this to lead to breaking all encryption by enabling way bigger superconducting quantum computers with way more qubits than are reasonable nowadays? Is this just going to turn into cyberwar on steroids?
That still leaves all encrypted traffic on the current internet vulnerable to a store-and-decrypt-later attack, which is more concerning the nearer that "later" is.
which is happening in room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A for decades, all https traffic has been stored, and ones that use rsa (most of them) will retroactively be unveiled once we have shor's algorithm
Just because you could operate superconducting qubits at high temperature doesn't mean you would. By far the biggest problem for qubits is noise, and raising the temperature would increase noise. I won't claim a high Tc superconductor can't help... but my gut reaction is that it's irrelevant to the actual engineering issues as they currently stand.
Description by the author, translated by Google Translate:
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!
Nobody knows, it depends on a multitude of factors, but most likely this won't be the exact material which will have applications, I'm sure there is a much easier to fabricate related material which will be the first of a whole set of materials which act as superconductors at room temperatures.
Why be so sure about that? I really hope it doesn't turn out to be graphene 2.0, a material that can revolutionize everything but can't be produced consistently and in usable quantities by any means at all.
Yeah, this feels like the really early results of a material that they eventually refine into a process, hence their patents. There are reports they were worried about being beaten to the punch, im curious if that’s true and if so, who the word on the street said was close.
> if you could grow a good single crystal of LK-99, it seems as if the superconductivity might only occur along one crystal axis: put crudely, you'd see superconductivity if you hooked your wires to two particular opposite faces of said crystal, but not to the others! Crystalline grain boundaries are already known to be a big deal in the efficiency of existing superconducting materials, and this would mean that polycrystalline samples of LK-99 would be pretty unfavorable to demonstrating robust effects.
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.
You'd need breakthroughs in the manufacturing of it (yield, process, scale, etc) and then building the infrastructure and supply chain to support it. Depending on its availability you could see governments hoard the material for "security" and "public interest" use cases, etc. Military first as usual.
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.
if its real (or real even in principle as in hard to repro say 1 in 20 times) even than the immediate consequence would be a lot of investment directly flowing into the research. combining that with some AI based techniques I'd say (if the idealized material bears out predictions at room temp) within half a decade we will see good manufacturing techniques. after that its all application specific.
That doesn’t track. The EmDrive was legitimately pushing a premise that we had some fundamental law of physics wrong. Superconductors are pretty well understood, they’ve been around for a while. Finding a room temperature one isn’t that big of a jump, it’s just a really hard one to make.
> They also predict that substituting gold atoms into the Pb(1) site could lead to a material with very similar properties, which will be an extremely interesting idea to put to the test.
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. :-)
Good idea! They wouldn't have been able to do any applications without a voltaic cell, and it would have been a novelty. Like gunpowder in ancient China.
The force of tradition is amazing. Imagine centuries knowing how to make something that explodes violently, and using it for entertainment instead of weapons.
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.
I always call this a "local maximum" problem. Once you've optimized the crap out of your tech, any change makes it worse (e.g., replacing crossbows with primitive guns). But if you do switch, then optimizing that technology takes you to an even higher maximum.
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.
Extremely relevant to electric cars. Looks like we are close to electric > ICE, (or past that point, whatever), but it was a long painful time of hyping subpar cars by those who believed in the potential of the technology.
Agreed! I also believe that once we flip (EV > ICE) the momentum goes the other way.
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.
Keep in mind, the Chinese were using bombs, granades, and rockets in warfare. Cannons were slowly being incorporated during the Ming.
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.
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.
The Mesoamerican civilizations did not have copper, bronze, or iron metallurgy which is a prerequisite for making the metal rims needed for transportation wheels. A wooden wheel without a metal rim is too fragile for transportation.
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.
Bronze was extremely common in Mesoamerica for household goods like needles and fishhooks. Copper was also common, but mainly for ceremonial and ornamental objects like bells.
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.
Another example that I read about once and have never been able to verify (or it may be completely made up) is that the because the Chinese invented porcelain first (which was more sturdy than glass or something) they never bothered with glass, which meant they missed out on all the cool astronomical discoveries (which then has implications on their development of mathematics and physics).
Again, no idea if there is any validity to this or just something completely made up.
The Chinese invented cannons about the time they invented gun power. However by coincidence their forts used stone walls thick enough to resist cannon fire and so it was not really better than the various catapult systems they also had (which also couldn't breach their fort walls).
You have to know it’s possible, and be able to aim at useful internal targets despite this being well before aerial surveillance photographs and calculus.
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.
The introduction of counterweight trebuchet from the Mongol empire in Persia for the seige of the Southern Sung city of Xiangyang is well documented here:
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 would be sub-10%* gold content. We're talking about gold doping, specifically substitution in the Pb(1) site, not an alloy.
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.
The superconductor itself would be 7.44% gold, but the wire would probably be much less -- superconducting tape isn't particularly strong so it will probably be wrapped up in layers of insulator and support wires.
I think that's right. There's no indication that it's mechanically strong, so you'd have it wrapped in layers of rubber/epoxy and steel cables in order to suspend it between power poles or transmission pylons.
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.
Having to handle lead for a practically unretrievable amount of gold would (I hope) be enough of a deterrent for the vast majority of "citizen scrappers". Worst case, I think a Pb/Au scrap grey-market would look something like the current catalytic converter market, where raw materials are purchased at set rate by an intermediary and then sold for further processing. Most people know there's gold in their computer parts, but still opt for the recycling bin/ziploc bag in a junk drawer.
7.44% gold? That's ~$75 per oz of material. And you're talking about lead cable. Its kind of heavy, even if its thin. And it seems really easy to melt and separate. Notably, most power lines are actually aluminum, which is probably where people would really want this. Also chosen for its low weight / density, cause if you're gonna hang lines 100's of feet long, you want 2700 kg/m3, not 9000 kg/m3, and definitely not 11000 kg/m3. Although probably also significant applications in mm, um, and nm scale wiring.
At the end of their comment it notes that because it's a superconductor it would be thinner.
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.
There's a wide space between "can be recycled" and "profitable enough that there's theft for base components that can be resold". That doesn't mean it won't be profitable to harvest the gold (I don't know), but one does not imply the other.
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.
paper recycling is profitable without any subsidies at all, and people do sometimes steal paper to recycle it
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
I don't understand how your comment implies a lack of subsidy, it only states that the people harvesting the material can make money off of it. Which would be true if it was subsidized, too.
> 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).
mostly cartoneros recycle what the biz refers to as corrugated fiberboard, which most people call cardboard in english. it's made of paper and glue
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
> refers to as corrugated fiberboard, which most people call cardboard in english. it's made of paper and glue ... there are different kinds of paper
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.
corrugated cardboard is made of paper, not an entirely different material; recycling cardboard is recycling paper. 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
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
> corrugated cardboard is made of paper, not an entirely different material; recycling cardboard is recycling paper
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.
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.
Yeah, I wasn't all that interested at first due to the general uncertainty around the claims, but that Derek Lowe takes it this seriously does lend a certain tension.
Is this how the science fiction future we’ve all read in books becomes reality?
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?
No no, you use the LLM AI to funnel real people into becoming Belters, then fake their communications back home with those same LLMs, then move your X HQ to Mars and oppress them from there.
Yes, I can see it now. “X corp” is the amalgamation of Twitter, Tesla, and SpaceX. It mines the resources of the outer solar system using enhanced humans (“replicants”). They have Neuralink implants keeping them under the control of their evil overlord: MuskX.
Interestingly enough, there's already some idle speculation that the apparent variability of LK99 synthesis might be improved with zero-G manufacturing.
I'm astounded that the MSM seems to be ignoring this ATM. I did a Google news search on LK-99 and saw nothing from major publications. A search on the NYTimes returned an article from 1974.
I think it's more likely that the bulk of folks don't fully comprehend why this would be so important. I would imagine alot of reporters look at the things they could write about and the choices are politics, war, polarizing news, or nerds nerding hard trying to prove other nerds right or wrong, and it just doesn't make the cut.
Newspapers don't work like that. The same reporter isn't responsible for politics, war, and science—they specialize, and a dedicated science reporter is going to be at least as savvy as a random commenter on HN.
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.
Because the media is of course known for studying topics in high detail to make sure they don't report the wrong thing and not for rushing half written hearsay out the door before the competitors do.
I haven't seen a particularly great explanation that explains why this is such a positive discovery that is copy/paste/digestable. No MSM outlet is going to run this story unless they can say an impact.
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
Sorry, can you explain? My understanding is that transistors don't "dump" electrons anywhere. The gate controls the voltage, which in the `0` state forces resistance to be high enough s.t. current flow through that transistor stops.
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).
There will literally always be heat from computation, that's Landauer. The point is that LK-99 could be or lead to a breakthrough in making computation produce much, much less heat because you're getting rid of most resistivity losses. Which is important, because heat is actually a serious constraint on a bunch of use cases.
It's still not believed. It's just Twitter that I've seen the juicy stuff, like a (very sketchy) claimed replication from a Russian, and now another claim from a Chinese group.
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.
While you're correct about the scarce and sketchy evidence currently it is in the process of narrowing down. Or to put it better the evidence is mounting that it might be a breakthrough. It likely hard to manufacture correctly, but simulations done at Berkeley Labs seem to support the claims of the original paper
https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16892
And aside from that to be honest I hope that we have time to prove or disprove those claims, before any major news outlet jumps onto the hype train and ruins it.
I am also completely baffled by this! So many stupid mouse-model medical discovery stories over the years and actually zero LK-99 coverage.
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.
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.
The NYT has published 3 articles about room-temperature superconductors since March; all about the insanely high-pressure one that is INFINITELY less exciting than the new claim and turned out to be bunk anyways.
hmm, the high-pressure room-temperature superconductor turned out not to actually be real?
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]
Almost all of the stories in major newspapers are commissioned ("pitched") by interest groups that want to see that article published. It's why a lot of articles contain quotes from weirdly specific people with middle-office titles in specific organizations. Journalists aren't cold calling random office workers to get these quotes. An outline of an article is provided, journalists do some minimal fact-checking and write it out into a proper article. Beat writers that cover a specific topic regularly and have made their own contacts in that field are an exception.
99% of science journalism is repeating a press release that came out of a university's press office.
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.
What should the headline be? "South Korean scientists claim room temperature superconductivity again! Are they lying like their last paper? Let's celebrate!"
Nature published their last big superconductor claim and then had to retract it. Publications getting burned by these folks makes them understandably reluctant to get worked up again.
I actually appreciate that caution. Things have been extremely up in the air and it would be very hard to properly explain what is happening, how it matters and if it matters. The last part I think is why it's a good thing that they held back. There was enough unknown that it wasn't clear if this would ever amount to anymore than "some scientists may or may not have made a big mistake." I think we are hitting the point, with multiple teams saying this is either possible or has happened, that we will start seeing MSM stories. They aren't ignoring it, they are being cautious. I promise you their science beat reporters are watching this like a hawk.
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.
After racing with each other to fuel political extremism or push the corporate narratives like how working from home is terrible for the worker or how good it is for us that the rich don’t pay the taxes, how unaffordable housing is good for the economy… this is what they choose to be careful about?
Nah, this just doesn’t sell or is not a paid article.
The EmDrive was first publicized in 2001, but wasn't picked up by the mainstream media until 2013, and then again in 2016 after NASA picked it up. That Korean scientists have this discovery on their hands and the materials world is racing to keep up, and isn't frontpage of the New York Times, is editor's choice. Currently, that's Joseph Kahn, but (unfortunately) science ranks below politics and sports and business.
It's hard to not let cynicism like this get to me especially when the argument makes so little sense. This doesn't sell? Isn't sensationalist enough? A possible end result of this is magic flying space trains. This isn't exactly some boring in the weeds things. This is extremely easy to hype if you just want to draw eye balls. But sure, yeah, MSM corporate plutocracy or whatever.
It's possible that the people responsible for deciding what makes a a good article for the science section are different from the people responsible for the articles you mention.
Well, half the comments are making fun of the spotty quality of the evidence and it's been barely a week since the paper was published. I think it's reasonable to wait for at least a pre-print of a successful replication. I don't think it's fair to say the MSM is ignoring it, the possible discovery literally just happened and some combination of low awareness and caution with the evidence means they haven't covered it yet.
Most people I talk to don't recognize the importance of room temperature superconductivity.
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.
Even if it is true, we are a long ways off from Star Trek utopia. No idea if macroscopic quantities can be robustly produced, what their limitations will be, cost per gram, etc. If the material is confirmed, there will be oodles of money pumped into the space, but it could still be years before commercial applications begin to appear.
breakthroughs since fire more important than the transistor probably include cooking, agriculture, the wheel, metallurgy, glass, ceramics, the heat engine, mechanisms in general (with things like pulleys, hydraulics, screws, and gears), construction cement (originally lime), math, writing, optics, electricity, chemistry (including things like distillation, the atomic theory, and recrystallization), plumbing, carpentry, weaving, sewing, automatic digital computation, and possibly language, depending on when that happened
it seems like maybe you haven't thought much about the history of technology
Haber-Bosch is the reason there are over 7 billion humans on Earth instead of closer to 2 billion. It's very difficult for any digital technology to compete with that.
agriculture is the reason there were 2 billion instead of 20 million, which is a much bigger difference
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
The mass-energy equivalence and how it led to the discovery of nuclear fission/fusion and how to control/cause explosive atomic chain reactions was probably one of the most impactful technologies of all time, in a literal sense.
maybe, but it's not yet in the same league as math, writing, cooking, sewing, and electricity, in terms of its effects on human life
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
it's surely debatable, but my thought was that sewing seems to have predated weaving (of cloth), nålbinding, especially knit and crochet, and probably even spinning, and it was sewing that enabled the humans to live outside the tropics
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
To be frank, the available evidence at the moment is pretty shaky. Derek Lowe here is pretty optimistic, but most of the comments I've seen from the superconductor folks are pretty pessimistic [1]--and given that Derek Lowe isn't in the field, I'm inclined to favor their views over his at this point.
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).
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.
There have been several false reports of high-temperature superconductors during previous months. There seems to be backlash to the high-temperature superconductors claims now.
the dft results are definitely interesting, but i note that with the caveat that my background is in experimental condensed matter physics for materials like this and not theoretical, my understanding is that the dominant feature of the conclusions (the flat bands) is a necessary but not sufficient condition for superconductivity in the way the authors describe.
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
I know some DFT (*), but very little superconductivity, but I read through Sinéad Griffin's preprint and there was nothing in there which looked weird from a methodological perspective – and the methods (and software) she is using are extremely well-established and well-categorized.
(*) 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
Something that I find hard to understand is why there is superconductivity without cooper pairs; granted my understanding is related to more traditional superconductors and I'm not really very knowledgeable about the cutting edge high-Tc stuff.
The thing that stands out to me is that the DFT simulations show that the flat bands only occur in a particular crystal structure of the material and it is not the most stable state (at least according to the simulation). This would explain the synthetic challenges involved. These simulations are not perfect, but they can be VERY useful when guided by experiment and when they correlate strongly it is a good sign that you have a mechanistic explanation of the phenomenon.
The way I'd characterize it is that they're usually _directionally_ (and mechanistically) correct. On something as sensitive as a band gap the error bars are larger; if the DFT simulations said "yeah, no way this has band density at the Fermi level" I'd regard it as strong evidence against the LK-99 claims, but the fact this is in the ballpark is – to be clear, pretty weak – evidence in favor.
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.
Not really. Think of this as being analogous to public key/private key crypto; it's easy to check a signature (simulate a structure), it's extremely hard to forge one (design a new material ab initio).
820 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 438 ms ] threadThese 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
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.
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)
https://twitter.com/lereguy/status/1686363900651151360
The material in question will have these effects at room temperature and pressure.
https://youtu.be/HRLvVkkq5GE?t=53
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?
https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12037
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.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12037
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...
Speaking of, I'd guess that the likes of Australian National University, Victoria University of Wellington, University of Tokyo and National University of Singapore (amongst others) would magically count as "American or Western European" for this test.
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.
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
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.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Because I'm a "Very Busy Person" and don't actually have all day to screw around with "every YouTube video", I come to HN to optimize my time spend/information gained ratio.
Likewise, on this topic, even the above is still confusing. People say it's more efficient, then replies say we're already at 95-99% efficiency so it doesn't matter much. I'm still fairly confused!
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)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_field
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.
(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconductivity)
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.
https://youtu.be/RjzL9cS3VW8
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!
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_levitation
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".
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
If it does, hoo boy!
Plausible enough for science fiction at least.
Also, what are the chances this is like another graphene, where it can do everything except get out of the lab?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography
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！
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.
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"?
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).
[0]: https://youtu.be/bHIhgxav9LY
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...
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.