2y ago

Superconductor Breakthrough Replicated, Twice, in Preliminary Testing

www.tomshardware.com

A tentative but less nebulous step toward superconductor-fueled electronics.

32 comments

The entire story surrounding this discovery is a scientific rollercoaster ride, with rogue scientists, updated papers, plus cloudy definitions and process descriptions within the paper that make replication efforts more difficult, and even a Russian soil scientist (and anime catgirl) deconstructing the original Korean paper to unveil the trademark levitation of the Meissner effect over her own kitchen counter.
I can't believe they just dropped all this without any explanation. XD
- You can't just put anime catgirl in parenthesis and move on like nothing happened!
  
  They can, and they will!
- My working knowledge of this entire situation stems from this Substack post, which gives slightly more info than what you quoted and kind of explains the anime catgirl
I wonder if in 5 years from now we'll look back at this invention as one of the biggest breakthroughs in decades.
- I hope so. Room temperature superconductivity would make so many things economically viable overnight...
  
  can I get an ELI5 on why?
  
  Sort of problematic it's made of lead though.
  
  3mA per conductor though? You'd need a lot of strands to make a power line.
- Everyone will have their own lemmy instance hosted on their smartwatch.
- Oh man! The movie is going to be awesome.
  
  I hope that get Cillian Murphy to do The Stare™.
Reading the article does not make me any more confident that this claim is real and accurate. Especially when other replication efforts have failed.
It really does feel like this is a data and testing anomaly and not a real breakthrough.
Overview of ongoing tests: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/claims-of-room-temperature-and-ambient-pressure-superconductor.1106083
Two teams in India and China could not reproduce:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16402
https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16802
Source: Heise
If this is confirmed then it's definitely interesting, but I'm skeptical that it's going to be scalable even if it's real.
- Even if LK-99 isnt scalable or viable but simply works sometimes under certain circumstances as a room temperature superconductor, it would be a big jump. Not only would it prove that room temperature superconductors are viable, it could be the first step in developing better alternatives to LK-99.
I've heard that fusion reactors become slightly more viable with room temperature superconductors, is that true or no?
- I think most everything is better with superconductors, because there's less worry about stray electricity or heat causing unnecessary failures.

32 comments