"All the reactions are carried out under 10^-2 Pa"
OK, I know they mean 10^-2 of vacuum. But why not say that? "10^-2 Pa" isn't enough. Was this a full vacuum oven? Done in sealed quartz vials? Was there a purge, like argon, or just air?
If you look at the oven temperature profiles, you can see the ramp up time (0-2hr, 0-2hr, and 0-4hrs respectively), and the hold time, but the ramp down time isn't specified! There is no cooling rate, it just shows... a line drop off, with no end time. No label. This can be very critical. Were these just pulled straight out and air quenched? And were they kept under vacuum until at room temp or not?
Like, adding extra experimental setup details would take no time whatsoever to include in a paper and yet these researchers just don't do it. It's either pure fucking laziness or some sorta holier-than-thou gatekeeping that comes from theoreticians, or a combination, and it is the reason that replication is so hard in science right now. I would hope that no journal would accept this shit.
I know mercury gauges use to have a 0 to 30 scale sometimes (not 0 to -30), and that was confusing!
https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01723
>In fact, I find that Cu on this Pb(2) is 1.08 eV more energetically favorable than Cu on the Pb(1) site, suggesting possible difficulties in robustly obtaining Cu substituted on the Pb(1) site.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16892
The paper from Dr. Griffin at LBNL suggests copper atoms have to be placed in a specific (but less likely) position in the molecule to result in the desired flat band characteristic. Also, the original authors and the labs who were able to replicate LK-99 are reporting they had to make multiple batches to even find a tiny piece that shows levitation. This suggests that you just have to be very lucky to produce a sample with high enough concentration of LK-99 to observe levitation.
If we can somehow confirm that LK-99 is truly a room temperature superconductor, billions of dollars of R&D fund will pour in to improve the fabrication process. When the first transistor was invented, people probably weren't imagining that we'll be mass producing them in nanometer scale in the future. Or maybe LK-99 will be stuck in a lab like graphene. Who knows?
I think the more likely explanation is that the particles do touch each other but the interface is not superconductive. In other words, it is a polycrystalline material, and most of it is LK-99, but the grain boundaries are not a very good conductor. In conventional superconductors grain boundaries don't disrupt superconductivity because they are 3D superconductors, but in this allegedly 1D superconductor the superconducting channels in most cases don't meet at the grain boundaries, so the current has to overcome the resistance of some material that is almost an insulator.
If that is the case it will be difficult to produce a material that is macroscopically superconducting. But I hope researchers will be able to make single crystals that are large enough for resistance measurements so that finally it can be determined if this material is a superconductor or not. For practical uses the best result that can be achieved with this material may be a metal-LK-99 composite where the LK-99 particles lower the resistivity of the metal by 50-90%.
The Korean team appears to have been stuck for several years by the lack of reproducibility of this synthesis method. While it was a great discovery that has shown that this material must have some very interesting properties, perhaps even superconductivity at ambient temperature and pressure, in order to be able to measure its properties and be able to evaluate the possible practical applications, a much more precise method for enforcing the desired crystal structure is required, than mixing powders and baking them into a ceramic.
Perhaps such a method for producing samples with deterministic properties would be to develop first a method to grow monocrystals of the special kind of lead phosphate that forms the base crystal structure, maybe by drawing the crystals from melt.
Once monocrystals of this kind of lead phosphate are available, they could be doped with copper, e.g. by ion implantation. By controlling and varying the parameters of the process, e.g. the angle of incidence and the velocity of the ions and the thermal profile used for annealing, it is likely that reproducible samples can be produced, where the copper ions substitute lead in the useful places and not in the others.
By this method it would be possible to produce only thin layers of LK-99, but that should be enough to enable the characterization of the material.
Moreover, because LK-99 is very fragile, it is unlikely that it could be used to make cables or coils. Practical uses where LK-99 would be deposited as thin films are much more likely.
As an alternative to ion implantation, which might be able to produce thicker layers, perhaps once monocrystals of the base lead phosphate are available it may be possible to develop some method of chemical vapor deposition, to grow epitaxially a layer of LK-99 over the base crystal, but with such a method it is less obvious if there is any way to control which lead atoms are substituted, though this may depend on the orientation of the base crystal.
Showing diamagnetism is one of the least error-prone ways to demonstrate the superconductor effect.
That’s my understanding anyway.
The first LK-99 paper used this method to claim zero resistivity, but people complained that if the inner probes lost contact, that would also be consistent with their data. This criticism doesn't totally make sense to me, since the apparent superconductivity came and went in the expected way as they changed an external magnetic field. I don't understand how a loose terminal could mimic that figure (I think it was in figure 1).
No, a badly attached probe would usually show a larger resistance, not a smaller one. That's actually the easiest error to make, making improper contact with the sample. The resistance is measured indirectly using a reference current. So you'd measure a higher resistance or a break rather than zero if a probe were not attached correctly (unless the two voltage probes are touching but that would normally speaking be spotted).
The diamagnetism is simply easier to verify using an impure or small sample.
However, if they perfect 1d production, they can layer in a bunch of them to create a quasi 2d or 3d superconductor.
Back then, many asked if this was superconduction or merely diamagnetism. Does the new paper shine any light on this question?
ETA: also, in the presence of a magnetic field, that transition temperature decreases. That's pretty huge. Unless this paper is fraudulent, I take this as the biggest positive evidence so far that something besides simple diamagnetism is going on. And, cards on table, with the assumption that the paper is not fraudulent, this pushes my odds above 50% for the first time.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09258...
Time for you to make some money then? :D
https://polymarket.com/event/is-the-room-temp-superconductor...
First it shows a temperature graph vs moment, as they heat it it loses the diamagnetism around the temperature LK99 is said to be superconducting.
Second only a superconductor will have net-zero field, which means "stable" levitation. In the video they approach the sample with the magnet and flip it while the piece is mostly "in place". A regular diamagnet generates a external field that "follows" the field applied so it would likely move sideways, that is why to "levitate in place" a diamagnet people normally use a Halbach array.
EDIT: A Halback array is made alternating the poles N-S of the magnet, so that forces of repulsion created by the diamagnet cancel. This is why you will see people using multiple magnets when levitating pyrolytic graphite.
https://twitter.com/andrewmccalip/status/1687405505604734978
Also, turning the magnet upside down seems useful. And then, heating up to show that it drops at a certain temperature. I wonder what would be needed in this case; I guess less than 100° C.
In any case, the "show" part is important. Good video quality is important.
This Wikipedia article has a good summary of the replication attempts to date (including this paper).
The potential changes this can introduce is equivalent to when Faraday, Volte, and all the other 17th/18th century scientists started figuring out how electricity works. They had no idea how much it would change every aspect of life in the century to come after them.
I used to be a particle physicist, and some of the more complex systems were just those used to cool the superconducting magnets down to cold enough that they become superconducting. If you can do that at ambient temp, you don't have to bother with that entire system.
Also: fusion reactors rely on superconducting magnets (or if you are JET live with the fact that you can only run your magnets for a few seconds before the overheat), so can have a large impact on future fusion reactors.
With this you could get an MRI at your annual checkup. You could diagnose all number of diseases like that, not to mention 95% of cancers. Each year your scan is automatically compared to the previous year, and any sudden changes in morphology can be biopsied. The learning would be revolutionary for medical science as well- right now we have so little data on what kinds of benign growths people have that our best method for figuring out if a mass is a problem is asking if there are any other symptoms. Not to mention entirely new kinds of medical devices would be possible, eg using SQUIDs.
Ground-imaging MRI would also be revolutionized. Archeology, paleontology, geology, mapping resources and finding minerals would experience a quantum leap. You would be able to drive a car through the desert and spot fossils or faults or mineral signatures.
Space travel would become essentially free with the use of launch loops. Which would also make long-distance travel incredibly cheap and practically pollution-free. You would need electricity alone to reach low earth orbit, or to accelerate planes to multiples of the speed of sound.
Grid-level storage, peaker plants and load-following would become nearly obsolete. Superconducting catenaries would connect every nation on earth. Normally plants have to turn off when everyone goes to sleep; now factories in China can be powered by US fission. Canadian homes could be kept warm by Australian solar. HVDC interlinks would be obsolete. We might eventually transition away from AC power entirely.
CPUs could be anywhere from 10% to 50% more efficient. GPUs even more so. Fires, particularly house fires would become less common as wires simply stop conducting when they are overloaded.
- higher efficiency turbines and solar panels - more clean energy for the same investment
- fusion?
- low-energy computing at higher performance, as we learned recently LLMs so far can't take advantage of hitherto zero marginal cost of software anymore
- democratization of advanced quantum computing?
It's all very exciting and in a truly replicable and industrially-feasible scenario I'm starting to feel this could be another 1960s kind of rate of change. One can dream, no? Maybe we can finally get rid of all the doom & gloom stories we tell ourselves and actually do something with these unexpected presents of our times? Think smartness instead of ignorance, (old) Star Trek instead of the latest Fallout fantasy on the horizon? Why not?
These and many more consequential innovations might develop just in time, as climate change is coming at us much faster than we are willing to admit (don't look up).
That said, even with all of that (including fusion) we will still need to cut our co2 emissions; drastically change our lifestyles / minimize consumption and deal with already locked in impacts hitting us sooner than later.
Enthusiastic midnight edit:
Also what's up with graphene based ICs and optical computing advancements? Competition of new old ideas finally come to be realized? What's next? I want a new breed of superconductor enabled Lisp Machines by 2030! Why not home brew "3D print" the whole thing? That should be the ultimate target here! The handling of "open source" lead would probably suck though %D.
I guess Alan Kay wouldn't be enthused by such a Lisp Machine renaissance in principle yet still stand with his "the best way to predict the future is to invent it" credo.
Let's predict a future for a planet that shifts back into balance!
All i want is a maglev hot wheels track using flux pinning.
Just imagine all the cool toys a room temp semiconductor would enable.
And all of the high voltage transmission lines we want to build but can’t because of permitting reasons would have zero energy loss if we actually built them, which we won’t.
* devices that currently use superconductors don't have to use cooling anymore, and so become much cheaper to build and operate (MRI machines, certain sensors, high-power magnets for things like fusion research, big generators, big motors). This is a pretty solid bet.
* devices where superconductors would be an improvement, but currently don't make economic or practical sense. These are almost certain to crop up, but which ones will pan out is IMHO very speculative.
In the latter category, things like computing chips, more sensors, certain art works (sculptures with permanently levitating parts, how awesome!), smaller motors and generators seem plausible.
But there is likely whole categories of things we haven't thought of that could benefit from either zero resistance or rejecting magnetic fields.
So MRIs will get much cheaper, and they could end up being as cheap as taking an x-ray today.
I do think it's too early to say one way or the other what all of this ends up looking like, so we might find that purer/larger samples have better properties than what was measured so far, or the discovery puts us on the trail of other RTAPS in the same class that might be better for these purposes.
An Earth-sized MRI machine could image all of the remaining mineral deposits, and it coils could make for a hell of an autobahn.
In a thousand years people are gonna look back at us idiots filling balloons with helium and letting them disperse into the upper atmosphere and shake their heads at how stupid we were.
My thinking is that zero resistance through the projectile itself and through the rails would help, but you still need to make an electrical connection between the projectile and the rails. Either this is done with a plasma arc or physical contact, but either of these causes erosion of the rails even if there is no electrical resistance through the rails or projectiles. Am I missing something?
They had been working on this for quite a long time themselves, rightfully so. But now the whole world is working on it and exploring other methods and combinations of materials I would assume (to improve upon the original design and avoid any patents).
How long would they have kept this thing to themselves without the rogue employee bringing this thing to light?
Perhaps that was part of the rogue former employee's motivation in "going rogue": that this thing needs to see the light of day so it can start to benefit humanity.
It seems to me they were just in the process of constructing a convincing paper, which included convincing tests and could have been acompanied by sending out samples to independent labs. Then they were essentially forced to put out what they had, which made their claims even more unconvincing.
[...]
> Danijel Djurek, a physicist at A. Volta Applied Ceramics in Zagreb, Croatia, claims that he discovered his superconducting ceramic mixture in the late 1980s. But he was unable to pin down the structure and formula of the material, and his research was interrupted by years of war, following Croatia's split from Yugoslavia.
excerpts from http://www.rexresearch.com/djurek/djurek.htm
And this suggests that they were conflicted for some reason about publishing, likely commercially so (as evidenced about the patent). Maybe they were trying to create a product with it that they could sell before others could replicate the material.
So the rogue employee does absolutely deserve credit for bringing this thing into the world and humanity should not stigmatize them for doing so; perhaps we should do exactly the opposite.
edit:
KR20210062550A - Mehtod of manufacturing ceramic composite with low resistance including superconductors and the composite thereof -
Accept it happened and make amends and make those things very public and move forward to making an official announcement together with the so called 'rogue' author (in my opinion he did the world a favour).
Everyone's assuming it's about the Nobel, but it is much more likely it's about far more lucrative goals.
But the rogue scientist wanted to share it with the entire world.
It would make for a nice movie.
Fiat lux!
.. by way of Back to the Future hoverboards.
Two from HUST: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV14p4y1V7kS/ https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV13k4y1G7i1/
One by USTC https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Ex4y1X7ix/ this tiny sample can stand on its pointy side.
One by Qufu Normal University https://www.zhihu.com/zvideo/1669820225079070720
One with THU background but claims a personal project https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV14z4y1s7Vo
Why are't more labs outside China making LK-99 and publish videos?
Young researchers in China often face intense competition and pressure. While they are generally well-funded in the short-term, even more so than their counterparts in the US or Europe, the lack of long-term career security can be challenging. They must continuously chase after every potential scientific breakthrough, like LK-99, not just out of passion or curiosity, but as a necessary step for survival in their career.
Furthermore, the system in China offers many awards, grants, and titles that are tied to age. These are not just for prestige but are critical for progressing in their career. This situation adds another layer of urgency and competition among young researchers.
I don’t know, my fellow PhD students in EU have the same fears.
some possibilities:
- they have not been able to conclusively replicate anything and don't want to publish a negative result for fear of someone else publishing a conclusive positive result later.
- they are more careful to publish something that they are not (yet?) 100% sure about
- they don't care so much about the whole 'science in the spotlight' thing and prefer to go the traditional route of publishing after peer review of one or more papers rather than to make YT videos and having to fend off a barrage of interaction
- fear of getting it wrong.
- There are way more STEM graduates in China by a wide margin
- 18/20 of top universities in the world for chemistry research is in China according to Nature, including one of the attempts by USTC (#2 ranking): https://www.nature.com/nature-index/institution-outputs/gene...
- Supply chain is faster in China for chemicals and materials
- China has more money/equipment for this sort of stuff
- China is on average, more pro-science than the rest of the world
This happens in machine learning all the time. Low quality papers rush in after every major release and announcement in order to be first. But in the long term they're meaningless because it takes time to do a good job.
Good labs don't want to announce half done maybe results. They want to announce conclusive comprehensive high quality results they can stand behind. That's what moves science forward.
Plenty of labs are working on lk-99, but they won't publish this sort of half assed analysis.
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1cY4y1y7ZM
Translation of the title: If room temperature superconductivity is really repeated, I will eat shit
Then this topic became hot in bilibili. Currently the first LK-99 replication video reaches nearly 10 million views.
Good rigorous science takes time to produce. It can take anywhere between several months to a year or more, and the career implications for rushing something out that is later found lacking is not great.
On a tangent, this idea of reputation keeps on coming up in this whole discussion and I am burdened by it in a way I don't fully understand. The way people have talked, if this LK-99 doesn't work out, then it is almost as if those who published this did something _morally_ wrong. Well, morally wrong is not quite true, but the way people talk about it tanking their reputation it feels like such a strong statement. Is there some way we can focus on the science and not get bogged down in the very human reputational part of this whole thing? It's almost as if a good chunk of the scientific community don't care about the benefits the science brings but the reputational benefits.
Implying that Chinese science is bad?
Chinese universities absolutely dominate in chemistry: https://www.nature.com/nature-index/institution-outputs/gene...
By my count, 18/20 top universities for chemistry research is in China. The first US university in chemistry is MIT at 23.
One of the attempts is by USTC, the second best university in the world for chemistry research according to the Nature link.
China's lead in chemistry research is also translating directly to real world applications. For example, CATL and BYD combined own more than 50% of the car battery market. Six of the top 10 car battery makers are Chinese companies. [0]
It's not surprising that most of the first replication attempts are from China.
[0] https://cnevpost.com/2023/01/04/global-ev-battery-market-sha...
I did a post-doc in China, so that's my sample size N=1 piece of cheap opinion
* https://twitter.com/andrewmccalip/status/1687288889717989376
* https://twitter.com/CondMatfyz/status/1687051547337781248
I imagine over the next few weeks there'll be an explosion of efforts to replicate if it's truly that straightforward to produce for reasonably-equipped labs.
USTC is the second best university in the world in chemistry research according to Nature. [0]
[0] https://www.nature.com/nature-index/institution-outputs/gene...
Red phosphorus, one of the ingredients in the synthesis, is a controlled substance in the US. Might be delaying everyone while they fill out the paperwork with whoever their supplier is.
I don't fault them for failing to synthesize room-temperature superconductors while they were relaxing in some resort in Turkey or Thailand.
1: Superconductivity becomes widely confirmed
2: Reproducibility remains microscopic
Imagine a game of rolling a collection of n dice (normal 6 sided), where the player wins if all N dice are 4 or higher (probability 1/2 for a single dice).
Then the probability of a lucky roll is P = (½)ⁿ
So the smaller the collection of dice the more likely a lucky roll becomes.
Consider a hypothetical continuous production method of LK-99, where the fraction of wire in superconducting arrangement is a function of its thickness, more likely if thinner.
Could one simply re-anneal (and possibly re-quench) a short non-superconducting section until we get lucky, then proceed to the next non-superconducting section?
"Lucky annealing" fortune cookies?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._V._Boys
Especially: "On the Production, Properties, and some suggested Uses of the Finest Threads." 1887
https://zenodo.org/record/1431517/files/article.pdf
This is a very entertaining read, and highly recommended.
He produced extremely fine threads of glass, quartz, etc. finer than the visible light diffraction limit. (Which he would use to construct sensitive torsion balances)
He was inspired by Peles Hair. (Volcanoes grow hair too...). He first describes electro-spinning and its limitations (uncontrolled growth of hair which mattes together).
How did he do it? He used a miniature crossbow, modified so he could trigger it by foot pedal, leaving his hands free to work.
He would first produce a small thin section by more conventional means, glue one end to a fine dart or arrow (a piece of straw really).
In the next sentence "blowpipe" is not a launching device, but a device to heat a small sample to a high temperature.
Then he would use a blowpipe and melt the piece of say quartz until a bead forms, at which point he would trigger the cross bow.
As the arrow of straw shot away it draws the bead of melt to a long fine thread.
Perhaps this can be modernized to vacuum or inert atmosphere, melt the quasi LK-99 sample until it beads, then shoot away. Rewind the resulting thread and re-anneal any non-superconductive segments.
Aaaand we’re back!
I’m really trying to remain (reasonably, not ideologically) skeptical but if this is legit this is a huge step towards confirmation.
In other words: even the downside here is great, and the upside is...
The reputable sources only ever show videos of the sample touching the magnet.
From what I'm reading, several different types of materials can angle themselves like this from a magnet, but only Type II superconductors will float above a single monolithic magnet.
Until we see a confirmed video from a reputable source of a visible gap between the sample and the magnet, it's not confirmed that LK-99 is superconducting.
So yeah, I hope there's a better way to evaluate this substance than "it floats!"
Can someone ELI5 why this matters? What does it enable technologically?
Flying cars? Fusion reactors? Magic fix for global warming?
Advanced tech like MRI machines, maglev trains, and quantum computers all use superconductivity now, but are enormously bulky and expensive because they require extreme cooling using liquid helium (which is in short supply). Room temperature super conductors can dispense with all that, so instead of a quantum computer being the size and power draw of a refrigerator (because it is in fact mostly refrigerator) it could go in your wristwatch.
Superconductors also expel magnetic fields, which in practical terms means they repel magnets. And they only repel, without being attracted to magnets at all, like iron or the poles of other magnets. So you can use them for levitation. And because superconductors have zero resistance, if you put energy into a superconducting coil it stays there forever, just circling round and round the coil.
This LK-99 material people are talking about is an alloy of lead and copper, and it's not that difficult or expensive to make. The raw materials are fairly cheap, and the production involves heating it to hundreds of degrees centigrade for 24-48 hours, which is very easy to do in a lab and probably easy to do at industrial scale. Scientists don't understand the material very well yet, but if these discoveries are validated (as appears to be happening right now), then refining the manufacturing process is going to happen quite quickly because the payoffs and economic demand will be enormous.
People are comparing this to the invention of the transistor; I think a better comparison is the electrical lightbulb. It's going to change things massively, because any country will be able to manufacture this. You could manufacture this stuff at home, the equipment you need fits on a desk and costs only a few thousand $.
Robots and exoskeletons come to mind.
One of the more bonkers applications would be to wrap Mars around the equator with it, creating an artificial magnetosphere.
Temperatures on Mars are pretty low, but during the Martian summer they get to a nice 20°C there, so currently available superconductors are not up to the task.
The deluge of news about non-replicable results, fabricated data, overhyped press releases from both academia and industry had become really depressing. For once after a long time it’s the real deal.
Even if this is not a RT superconductor, it’s now evident that the original authors didn’t cheat and are not crackpots as initially suspected by most.
But that sort of science seems to be quite rare. Most science people are exposed in their daily lives is of the Francesca Gino variety, and that's not merely "a lot of noise with unknown variables", that's "nobody will care if we don't do real science so let's not bother".
It turned out that LK folks were not talking about some stupid shit. Specifically they were one of the last believers of long-forgotten Russian theory of superconductivity, pioneered by Nikolay Bogolyubov. The accepted theory is entirely based on Cooper pairs, but this theory suggests that a sufficient constraint on electrons may allow superconductivity without actual Cooper pairs. This requires carefully positioned point defects in the crystalline structure, which contemporary scientists consider unlikely and such mode of SC was never formally categorized unlike type-I and type-II SC. Professor Tong-seek Chair (최동식) represented a regret about this status quo (in 90s, but still applies today) that this theory was largely forgotten without the proper assessment after the fall of USSR. It was also a very interesting twist that Iris Alexandria, "that Russian catgirl chemist", had an advisor who was a physicist-cum-biochemist studied this theory and as a result were so familiar with the theory that they were able to tell if replications follow the theoretical prediction.
Fast forward to today, students of the late Chair continued the research and produced a possible superconducting substance---LK-99---based on the Russian theory. A lot can be said about papers themselves, but it should be first noted that this substance is not a strict superconductor in the current theory. Prof. Chair once suggested that we need to trade off some (less desirable) properties of superconductors for room-temperature superconductivity, and that property seems to be isotropy. This particularly weakens the Meissner effect criterion due to the much reduced Eddy current, so there is a possibility that LK-99, even when it's real, might not be accepted as a superconductor in the traditional sense. LK folks on the other hand think they should be also considered a superconductor, but they are probably already aware of this possibility.
If we allow anisotropy in this discussion, we do have lots of such things already, most importantly carbon nanotubes. Scientists even thought about the possibility that they may function as typical superconductors [2], without any success though. So it might be appropriate to say that LK-99 is a substance that mimics them in one direction, but much more malleable. And that is an actually significant result (if true, of course) because for most uses a strict type-I superconductor is far more than sufficient, while implications of superconductivity are more achievable. We so far looked for strict superconductors only because we didn't know the effective way to trigger superconductivity otherwise; LK-99 might change that situation.
This whole discourse should make you more careful to conclude whether LK-99 is a superconductor or not, because we may well end up with a revised definition of SC as a result. If LK-99 makes superconductivity much easier to trigger it should be considered a superconductor in the macroscopic sense, authors would argue. Only the time will tell if they indeed made such a substance and it would be malleable enough to be substitutes for other superconductors, but they have a long history and arguably received unfair treatments. And they are about to fight back.
[1] https://hackmd.io/@sanxiyn/S1hejVXo3 (Semi-automatically translated: https://hackmd.io/DMjYGOJFRheZw5XZU8kqKg)
[2] For example, https://twitter.com/MichaelSFuhrer/status/168696072754495897...
----
This post is now also available as a standalone version: https://hackmd.io/@lifthrasiir/lk-99-prehistory & https://twitter.com/senokay/status/1687360854315151360
This happens to lots of famous scientists/engineers (Sergey Korolev, Vladimir Vernadsky, ...). We can do a bit better.
"LK-99 Updates around the Korean Verification Committee:
- Sample will not be released today/tomorrow
- Group waiting on peer review (implied to be APL materials) and could take 2-4 weeks
- Sample possibly with APL Materials, which is why it cannot be provided to verification committee
- Team is asking the Verification committee for a detailed plan on how the committee intends to perform the verification before proceeding
Now, Hyun-Tak Kim also issued the following quote in regards to the Korean Verification Committee: '돈을 빌려서 어렵게 사업하는 분들한테 와서 조직적으로 횡포를 부리는 것은 바람직하지 못하다"며 이같이 밝혔다'."
Can anyone translate the Korean?
> It is not advisable to borrow money and come to people who do business with difficulty and be organised and do tyranny," he said.
Maybe he is frustrated with the verification process?
For example, if someone could replicate the effect with lead + gold, would that be considered a novel material which would not be subject to licensing? Is it the material itself or the method of production?
If I recall correctly, their patent for method covered a wide range of constituent elements, but left off gold. I would feel pretty bad for them if they genuinely discovered an RTP superconductor but that omission prevents them from becoming billionaires.
But more likely the issue is that their current method has lots of room for improvement and someone else finds one that is substantially better.
ETA: apparently wrong, can patent composition of very novel materials.
You can write stuff down generally enough that it's hard to make small changes and get around it. I did a lot of "1-10%" stuff in the claims.
I'm no patent lawyer, but there is literally a US patent-office category covering "material" for exactly this kind of invention. Section 505 - "Superconductor Technology: Apparatus, Material, Process".
> This is the generic class for subject matter involving (a) superconductor technology above 30 K and (b) Art collections involving superconductor technology. Apparatus, devices, materials, and processes involving such technology are included herein.
https://www.uspto.gov/web/patents/classification/uspc505/def...
Even so - if this works out, their prizes and paid speaking gigs will cover a very comfortable life if that's what they want. I'm not sure why they should be entitled to more than that.
Is it possible that the inventors do not receive a dime of royalties?
Better yet would be to offer partial payouts for failed efforts if research is made public.
This is probably more relevant for pharmaceuticals though.
If it's literally a room-temperature superconductor, the present state of the law is irrelevant. China won't play by the rules. If Korea tries to corner it in the West, the rules will be replaced. (This would have been true had the inventor been French or American, too.)
I'd rest my hopes on them not being dicks about it, not on them not getting benefit from it.
No MRI, No Fusion, ect.
I yearn for a Star Trek utopia as the next, but we do live in a capitalistic world where I hope that someone can enjoy outsized rewards for upending some previously insurmountable physical barriers.
Superconduction at room temp would all for less current consumption due to resistance inside the metal layer for chips, letting them run cooler and faster.
MRIs use massive, supercooled magnets. If you can do the same at room temp, you could potentially have a portable or much smaller and more efficient MRI.
If you can levitate an object, you can use a lot less power running electromagnets to run things like maglev trains.
If you have power lines that have zero resistance, you can reduce wasted energy. Power lines will actually sag under heavy load due to heat and cause outages or forest fires, this could be avoided.
Also there are superconductor based batteries that are very efficient, would would become a thing, likely revolutionising batteries.
Let's say we got a massive wave of independent replication of superconductivity tomorrow - at least enough to convince Big Money to move in, and it all ends up being For Real.
The next steps are figuring out the other properties of the material, with a big one being 'how ductile is it', how to produce it in large enough quantities to be useful, if the underlying mechanisms here can be applied to other compositions that allow us to make RTAPS with better properties, etc.
Depending on those results determines the range of applications it is suitable for out of the box, how much we can make at what cost, etc. We've got minimal details to go on there. It's a ceramic, so it's probably not super ductile, but we have some experience in making those be useful via making them into a tape, a la YBCO. Can we do the same thing here? Who knows!
There's a timeline where all of these questions end up favorable and 10 years from now we see RTAPS in all sorts of day to day applications - we might find out that with one small trick we end up with big pure samples of LK99 with easy production methods. There's a world where all these answers aren't favorable, and it takes 10 years for it to show up in specialized applications (which are still huge for science and humanity!), and trickles bit by bit to more use cases over another few decades.
I would guess that a decade-ish is really the earliest window for significant impact to humanity - we're probably going to spend the next year at minimum figuring out what all the deal is with LK99, and then it'll take a few years to even really start making cool experimental stuff in labs, and then you have to actually productize things using it, etc.
Also, are there other blocking points for inertial confinement fusion ? Would it also make solar power and wind farm pointless ?
Supplementary video 1：Meissner effect for sample 2.
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV14p4y1V7kS/?spm_id_from=333... c8fec748481fb4b933932e80c
Supplementary video 2：Exclude ferromagnetism of sample 2.
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV13k4y1G7i1/?buvid=XY81B1F84... A291&is_story_h5=false&mid=jLEqsyica5eHkvtMXQ2K1A%3D%3D&plat_id=193&share_from=ug c&share_medium=android&share_plat=android&share_source=QQ&share_tag=s_i×tamp= 1690894807&unique_k=B6gawMH&up_id=7590247
Typically you measure resistance that small like this:
+<-------sample------>-
---------p p--------
https://polymarket.com/event/is-the-room-temp-superconductor...
As long as the blue line doesn't cross the red one, I won't believe in it. Money talks, bullshit walks.
Wait, I missed that one. Was it yesterday?
What may be the benefit of running a sequence of "coils" or whatever the Loops may be comprised of such that the N/S to whatever polarity positions are required, could be an LK-99 then a super cooled, then an LK-99 etc...
If it was in a toroidal spiral (everyone things of the trajectories as linear, but toroidals spirals are most efficient)
you could have hybrid tracks - where maybe a linear launch is good, but a toroidal control for spins off routing is ideal (think a 3d roundabout - to launch vessels diff directions...
but we can control.
I a m talking out my butt - thus a toiroidal wrapp where by the torioidal spin in induced trough a mecury spinning magnetic slurry... as basically a spinned slurry ......
But that just me...
I'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
I'm sure this is a promising discovery and everything, but saying "levitation" at this stage is very forward-looking, and for me - a bit cynicism-inducing.
A fully pure sample would probably fully levitate. Given the rush to recreate and lack of purity, if a portion levitates (causing standing on one end) you could assume a pure sample would fully levitate.
When there's clearly big and important differences between everyone's outputs using the "method similar to that reported by Sukbae Lee et al." then it's important to know every detail!
But there could very well be indirect applications! This would be very very interesting for the physics community, and surely lead to other new things.
However, take a look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99#Replication_attempts
0 from both the EU and the US
Getting downvoted over this speaks volume ;)
I hope he isn't connected to Stanford's Nolan.
LK-99 is weirdly connected to UFO lore, so I'd want to be cautious.
The compound must be tricky to synthesize with a good degree of purity- I think we'll learn quite a bit more if someone manages to get a bigger sample than a flake the size of the point of a needle.
Go to their science section.
Now it isn't top news, but when it is confirmed, it'll be front page news on every western newspaper.
For a while I've kept a list of the things that could be "good" swan events, but to be fair I didn't have "room temperature superconductor on that list" :-)
Other things that could happen:
1) Fully decoding the cellular mechanism of cells allowing for the curing of any disease, repairing any genetic disorder.
2) Commercially viable fusion energy. Will change a lot of things.
3) An AI subsystem with some reasoning ability (yeah, could go either way)
Etc.
Although I'm pretty sure there are plenty that many people can think of, so it doesn't really detract much from your point.
Shoutout to 50 things that made the modern economy, a great podcast/book.
When I was a kid in the 90's I already enjoyed electricity and electronics and I would play with those low power incandescent lightbulbs powered by 9V batteries. They would generate a lot of heat and very little light, to the point that it wasn't easy to tell if it was on when the sun was bright.
With a modern LED and the same setup you could generate enough light to blind yourself.
There hasn’t been a full scale war between major powers since.
Electric cars mainstream
City of Hope scientists develop targeted chemotherapy able to kill all solid tumors in preclinical research
Apparently. I'm not an expect, but it's what I have encountered elsewhere.
Still great news! But not quite as revolutionary as the headline implies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00016-009-0006-9
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.ns.39....
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph241/yoon1/
https://www.chemeurope.com/en/encyclopedia/Muon-catalyzed_fu...
> Even if muons were absolutely stable, each muon could catalyze, on average, only about 100 d-t fusions before sticking to an alpha particle, which is only about one-fifth the number of muon catalyzed d–t fusions needed for break-even, where as much thermal energy is generated as electrical energy is consumed to produce the muons in the first place, according to Jackson's rough estimate
Some of the “good” black swans at the top of my mind…
5) programmable matter / nanobots - the applications of a swarm of nanobots or even microbots are pretty much endless.
Considering that we already have a fusion reactor in the skies, I think that the room temp room pressure superconductor is the next best thing. Fusion is good but at this stage, the natural one will just do. Think global network of solar cells interconnected with LK-99.
The creation of a global electricity network perhaps also has some effect on global cooperation.
Now we just need reduce the use of fossil fuels (cars, aviation, heating, industry).
Honestly that doesn’t seem likely to be a black swan event. Not because it is never going to happen, more because it won’t be an event but a slow progression.
It is more likely that as we understand more and more we will be able to cure more and more. It is not like there is some silver bullet piece of research where sudenly we have “fully decoded the celular mechanism”. Plus even if we somehow suddenly and all at once atained all that knowledge (perhaps a flying saucer takes pitty on us and beams down a whole library documenting our cells) it would take a long time while we turn that knowledge into helpfull interventions. And even that progress would be multiple generations long.
It is how becoming a black-belt martial artist is not an “event”. You don’t go from zero to that in one night. It is more of a progression where every day you are about as proficient as you were the previous one, but maybe a tiny bit better. Just applied on a whole species level.
3) has already happened. The AI chat bots aren't very smart, but they're clearly capable of some degree of basic reasoning.
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...
>Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?
>We show that the [neuroscience experimental] approaches reveal interesting structure in the data but do not meaningfully describe the hierarchy of information processing in the microprocessor. This suggests current analytic approaches in neuroscience may fall short of producing meaningful understanding of neural systems, regardless of the amount of data.
I feel our generation (I am in my mid-forties) lived through enormous technological advancements but not as many scientific breakthroughs as the previous generation. So maybe it is not surprising that we are suddenly more likely to have breakthroughs in basic science.
I hope there is a phase transition to science mode now, so we that have a chance to solve the hard pressing issues.
If free-form gene editing were developed today, you would see the elites using it to make themselves immortal, while denying the same to everyone else. If fusion power suddenly became viable, you would see the richest people using it to make themselves even richer, while cementing their stranglehold on vital infrastructure. And it should be obvious to anyone who has been paying attention during the past 3 years that artificial intelligence is above all else an instrument of control, and even in its infancy, access to it is unevenly distributed along the same strata of power that already existed before.
At this point, the only "black swan, but good" event that could happen is a cataclysmic reset of civilization that might somehow see a better phoenix rise from the ashes. Barring that, we're full steam ahead to a techno-totalitarian nightmare future.
A bit of history would do you wonders. Top-down control was the norm*. If it has changed, it’s less now.
* For 95% of the peasant/slave population
Also, pedantic point, you keep referring to good and bad black swan events. I thought the definition of black swan didn't make any assumption about whether the impact is positive or negative? Only that has a huge impact (I haven't read Taleb's book yet, correct me if I'm wrong)
How do you build a warning system for a unsurvivable event, with not wittnesses? Eternal unease and anxiety, regardless of reality.
Our civilisation is an energy-junkie who happened to stumble on a huge bag full of cash around 1860 and the discovery of oil distillation. Since then, we have been on a hallucinating trip, burning down our house in the process. Viable fusion is essentially another huge pile of cash being deposited right across the street, just 10 times larger than 2 centuries ago. There is no coming back after that.
And as technology is getting better, both of those outcomes become more probable.
no way, no how. there is every reason to believe that cells are irreducibly complex. we can understand parts in isolation, yes, but a full model of the cell (however that would look) is almost certainly beyond science and even if you had that good luck measuring the full state of a cell without destroying it
I would be curious if anyone with knowledge in the space could comment on whether or not LK-99 may get us closer to viable nuclear fusion?
My understanding is that magnetic field containment systems are at least part of the technical hurdles required to make fusion feasible.
2. Light year capable transport
3. Inertia dampers
4. Mass scale carbon capture technology
5. Robots to prepare space for habitation
6. World recognition to manage resources globally
one of these is not like the others. direct carbon capture works now with the slight caveat that we would have to build 10x our current power supply in fission plants to power them. coccolithophores are an appealing route in principle, but research into their lifecycle and use for sequestration would be a quotidian pursuit for thousands of labs around the world, given funding.
There is a huge amount of what I think in unawarded debate about applying it to the past (IMO, it's very clear where it should be used), but applying it to the future is completely against any kind of logic.
But yeah I suspect the people who are most excited about this news are fusion power engineers!
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-plasma-ph...
>2) Commercially viable fusion energy. Will change a lot of things.
How would that be any better than commercially viable fission breeder reactors (which seem far closer to reality than commercially viable fusion energy)?
Though there are genuine advantages: for as radioactive as the interior of a fusion reactor may get, if you cut power it'll just sit there safely doing nothing. No decay heat, no potential isotopes to leak - maybe a puff of tritium gas - but that's it. It is a technology that has a perfect control loop for safety because it can't self-sustain at all.
If it's proven to be the case that P != NP, it would hardly change much on the grand scale of things as generally, that's what most people believe anyway. In particular, the world continues to function mostly in the same way (since, even if it was the case that P = NP, we haven't found any polynomial reductions yet, so we're effectively living in a P != NP world). Of course, for mathematics and CS, this would be huge, because the techniques used in a proof would likely be very interesting and novel.
If it's proven to be the case that P = NP, then it remains to be seen whether this knowledge can be turned into actually efficient algorithms (polynomial algorithms are not all efficient in practice). If that is the case, I think it might have more downsides than upsides, since all of cryptography would collapse.
>> 1) Fully decoding the cellular mechanism of cells allowing for the curing of any disease, repairing any genetic disorder.
-- so you want to cure aging then- how many billions of people you think can a planet with a 6k km radius sustain ?
You think Claus Schwabs of the world wont buy it out to keep it to themselves ?
>> 2) Commercially viable fusion energy. Will change a lot of things.
-- That will eventually happen, and electricity will be just as "expensive" as it is now, simply because the price of a product has nothing to do with its cost and everything to do with the purchasing power of its intended audience.
>> 3) An AI subsystem with some reasoning ability (yeah, could go either way)
-- No, its cant go either way, the power insatiable psychopaths in power will use it to maximize their power. Period. Its psychopath nature- for them its natural and perfectly normal. Until psychopathy is recognized as a disease and sick people are disallowed from positions of power, the world will continue to be an abusive place.
0. LK99 is so obviously a fraud. They've been dicking around with this substance for 24 years.
1. some diseases will be possible to fix, like metabolic problems, but where structures are already formed in an adult organism this will be impossible. Like Autism. Go ahead, change every chromosome in every cell, the malformed brain structures will remain.
2. Sure there will be ignition, but the facilities will be wildly too expensive for commercial power.
3. will never happen with conventional computing hardware. Maybe if someone figures out how to grow actual neurons
Just saw another unconfirmed replication here: https://twitter.com/instsondaw/status/1687433935012139008?s=...
Found their process really fascinating, apparently they create L-99 powder, sort it by meissner effect, then press the "high meissner effect" powder together
Meanwhile, all our known physics have no issue with an RTAPS existing.
I have no reason to doubt the quality or integrity of research published elsewhere but I would love to see some research from multiple sources including a diverse geography.
National pride and science are not a very good mix