The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor has been found

[ImorallySourcedElectrons]

7 minutes ago, GarlicDeliverySystem said:

I don't have first-hand experience with Korean Universities, but I do remember the stem cell research claims several years back. It would fit the pattern, plus there seems to be some infighting about potential credit and results in the group(s) who published it.

It's very common in electronics for Korean universities to publish atrocious garbage, there are a few topics I can think of:

• The entire biological stretchable electronics thing at various Korean universities, which is associated with the Bell Labs Rogers/Bao/Schön triumvirate from back in the day. 
• The microscopic on-die vacuum tubes they claimed were going to completely displace all other technologies, which were actually parasitic JFETs they were measuring "accidentally". This one died quite slowly.
• Various memristor schemes (though memristors in general are a crappy forced mathematical concept that doesn't make much sense to be honest) 
• The "DNA bio sensors" that smelled a lot like Theranos-style things.
• Amplifier topologies that were in reality injection-locked oscillators and didn't work for actual signals.

They also have a very active domestic conference scene going, which also has a lot of oddities to it. A lot of it doesn't make sense if you go outside of Korea.

[GarlicDeliverySystem]

3 minutes ago, ImorallySourcedElectrons said:

They also have a very active domestic conference scene going, which also has a lot of oddities to it. A lot of it doesn't make sense if you go outside of Korea.

Fascinating, never realized this. Coming from western/european academics I always wondered how different things were going in different parts of asia. All the weird conference spam, invitations to review stuff for journals barely related to my field, etc. coming in made me wonder how much is just malicious spam/phishing versus some weird but somewhat legit academia stuff I never understood.

 

Though even here I saw various groups, connections etc. pushing some concepts with others having a harder time to fit in unless they followed. But at least the science was usually good, so there is that.

[ImorallySourcedElectrons]

1 hour ago, GarlicDeliverySystem said:

Fascinating, never realized this. Coming from western/european academics I always wondered how different things were going in different parts of asia. All the weird conference spam, invitations to review stuff for journals barely related to my field, etc. coming in made me wonder how much is just malicious spam/phishing versus some weird but somewhat legit academia stuff I never understood.

 

Though even here I saw various groups, connections etc. pushing some concepts with others having a harder time to fit in unless they followed. But at least the science was usually good, so there is that.

It was also a bit of a culture shock for me, I think a large part of it is the language barrier, but it's also caused by the differences in the academic system over there. Being a master and Ph.D. student in South Korea is nothing like you'd find in the US or Europe, which does kind of explain how that local conference and workshop scene can exist. But we'd never consider such events valuable over here, the scientific value and networking opportunities are very limited, it feels more like they're trying to check something off on a to-do list. I kind of wonder how it'll evolve as Korea opens up.

[CarlBar]

@ImorallySourcedElectrons Oh like i said very sceptical, i just think the infight, (as western scientists have noted as well), suggest genuine error over malfance for points on the part of the majority of the team. Which is very different to the typical scenario your describing.

 

Also the infighting seems to have prompted the rest of the team to publish early, which may explain why someone like Nature didn't get it. They just weren't really ready to publish when someone jumped the gun and forced them to rush something out. Again doesn't mean they're right but sounds very different to the typical points scoring deliberate fakery you mention encountering.

 

 

I also agree with you on Thunderf00t. I never get the impression he's deliberately screwing up or that he's not very smart. But understanding theory, and understanding how that theory is applied is a very different beast, and i was absolutely guilty of it at times in internet discussions in my youth too. So i get how it can happen, which makes it extra frustrating.

 

 

@GarlicDeliverySystem The super confident delivery is definitely my biggest gripe. Everything i've seen suggests several of these people involved in such videos are really knowledgeable and intelligent, but they seem completely oblivious to their own limits. As i noted above i was prone to the same in my younger days to a large degree, (i'd like to think i didn't come off as quite so certain of myself, but memory can be self serving so not 100% sure), so i get it, but it's still frustrating to see. You can be annoyed at someone's errors whilst being understanding of why they're making them.

 

I think for myself a big factor is i've allways been interested not just in the theory, but in how that theory is applied IRL.

 

As an aside, In The Pipeline has had a number of articles over the years on chemistry papers not proving replicable or being downright bad in other ways, China, India, Korea, and Iran are the 4 most prolific source of such bad papers, (with China leading the pack by a mile).

[GarlicDeliverySystem]

1 hour ago, CarlBar said:

As an aside, In The Pipeline has had a number of articles over the years on chemistry papers not proving replicable or being downright bad in other ways, China, India, Korea, and Iran are the 4 most prolific source of such bad papers, (with China leading the pack by a mile).

That sounds interesting, I need to look that up.

Chemistry papers always had this issue with being technically correct in fully describing all the relevant steps in a synthesis, but providing a description that ensures reproducibility is hard and often not even desired. After all, it might cut into a labs competitive advantage when it comes to funding.

I experienced this first hand when trying to reproduce some synthesis for a polymer, where it became obvious that a lot of tacit knowledge went into the whole process. And that is before you factor in outside pressure or even malevolence.

[leadeater]

This video is really good, worth a watch

 

 

Even if true it's not "that good" compared to other superconductors, but still super revolutionary and opens more research in this new area of superconductors.

[ImorallySourcedElectrons]

3 hours ago, CarlBar said:

@ImorallySourcedElectrons Oh like i said very sceptical, i just think the infight, (as western scientists have noted as well), suggest genuine error over malfance for points on the part of the majority of the team. Which is very different to the typical scenario your describing.

 

Also the infighting seems to have prompted the rest of the team to publish early, which may explain why someone like Nature didn't get it. They just weren't really ready to publish when someone jumped the gun and forced them to rush something out. Again doesn't mean they're right but sounds very different to the typical points scoring deliberate fakery you mention encountering.

 

I also agree with you on Thunderf00t. I never get the impression he's deliberately screwing up or that he's not very smart. But understanding theory, and understanding how that theory is applied is a very different beast, and i was absolutely guilty of it at times in internet discussions in my youth too. So i get how it can happen, which makes it extra frustrating.

I think only time well tell, my money is honestly on measurement error. Measuring resistance is something a lot of people have a lot of problems with because they don't really understand what the measurement equipment is actually doing to measure said resistance, I skimmed over it and the paper doesn't seem to contain any clear indication of how their setup was put together and only a list of equipment used. I can think of a few ways they could have screwed up, especially when using a Keithley 182 in combination with a Keithley 228A, it's the correct combination of instruments for measuring very low resistances (to give you an idea, we used the more modern versions for solder joint resistance measurements). but getting those two to work together to measure very small resistances is no trivial matter.

 

You got to consider the thermal EMFs, triboelectric effects, piezeoelectric effects, the dielectric absorption, the humidity in the room versus when the instrument and cables were calibrated, etc. The end result is that you should be using very expensive triaxial cables with a hybrid PTFE/PE and a carbon-paste like material lining the conductors. You also need to apply guarding strategies to eliminate leakage currents and then preferably put everything on PTFE or ceramic stand-offs, keep everything ultra clean etc. And only then you are ready to do repeatable nanovolt, nanoampere, or microohm measurements - assuming you get the cable layout right, keep the lab climate controlled, have a good calibration standard, etc. Skip any of those things and you're out of the absolute measurement game. And don't get me wrong, you can measure nanovolts with something like a regular Keithley 2001/2002, I've frequently done so, but you must understand that what you're doing at that point is only an indicatory or relative measurement over a short time period. Anyhow, I doubt any of them have an actual electronics background, so the odds of them making these sort of mistakes are quite large. I've also made this mistake many times in the past, and back when I worked in academia I even got into a massive fight over this type of measurement with my PhD supervisor. I managed to prove that an effect he was measuring didn't actually exist, and that what he was actually measuring was the increasing oxidation of the copper on his circuit board.

 

And about thunderf00t, part of this is also really what defines the difference between engineering and other scientific fields. A lot of theories don't survive an encounter with reality, and then it usually takes quite a bit of creativity to find work arounds. (e.g., think of all the crazy lithography tricks we're using to manufacture semiconductors at wavelengths less than the light source we use to expose the photoresist) So when physicists say things are impossible I have a really hard time believing them.

 

1 hour ago, GarlicDeliverySystem said:

That sounds interesting, I need to look that up.

Chemistry papers always had this issue with being technically correct in fully describing all the relevant steps in a synthesis, but providing a description that ensures reproducibility is hard and often not even desired. After all, it might cut into a labs competitive advantage when it comes to funding.

I experienced this first hand when trying to reproduce some synthesis for a polymer, where it became obvious that a lot of tacit knowledge went into the whole process. And that is before you factor in outside pressure or even malevolence.

 

You have a similar issue in electronics manufacturing, and whenever you try to add the practical considerations you often even get reviewers telling you to remove them. It's quite ridiculous how academic publishing intentionally makes replication more difficult.

[CarlBar]

7 hours ago, ImorallySourcedElectrons said:

And about thunderf00t, part of this is also really what defines the difference between engineering and other scientific fields. A lot of theories don't survive an encounter with reality, and then it usually takes quite a bit of creativity to find work arounds. (e.g., think of all the crazy lithography tricks we're using to manufacture semiconductors at wavelengths less than the light source we use to expose the photoresist) So when physicists say things are impossible I have a really hard time believing them.

 

The old saw about “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” probably applies here.

 

And yeah now you've explained some of the details behind how to do measurements i can really see how it could screw up, even if i only understood bits and pieces, (thank you though this is the kind of stuff i love to read about even if i only partially understand it). I figured that was the most likely explanation anyway. 

 

9 hours ago, GarlicDeliverySystem said:

That sounds interesting, I need to look that up.

Chemistry papers always had this issue with being technically correct in fully describing all the relevant steps in a synthesis, but providing a description that ensures reproducibility is hard and often not even desired. After all, it might cut into a labs competitive advantage when it comes to funding.

I experienced this first hand when trying to reproduce some synthesis for a polymer, where it became obvious that a lot of tacit knowledge went into the whole process. And that is before you factor in outside pressure or even malevolence.

 

Whilst this is about data irregularities here's an article from the last week or so:

 

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/too-many-bad-clinical-trials

 

Finding more is awkward now they've moved to a new system at science a couple of years back or so, completely wrecked organising and categorising of articles. But he links to a few past articles on the issue in that one.

[CarlBar]

Minor update as i'm keeping an eye on this as it's either going to be huge good or huge bad news. (Also i'm just bored and looking around is somthing to do).

 

Chinese lab has produced a sample of the material and are measuring weird stuff with it, they think it might be superconducting but that their sample is very impure, (i.e. most of it is non-superconducting):

 

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2023/07/reports-of-a-chinese-lk-99-superconductor-replication-effort.html

 

It's not remotely confirmation yet, (especially given the measuring issues @ImorallySourcedElectrons outlined previously), but the fact that an attempt to replicate didn't immidietlly throw it out is worth noting. 

 

On the other hand if it gets confirmed it looks like getting high purity is more difficult than first thought.

[PocketNerd]

I may me misunderstanding something here. But last I checked 127C != ambient room temperature.

[GarlicDeliverySystem]

6 minutes ago, PocketNerd said:

I may me misunderstanding something here. But last I checked 127C != ambient room temperature.

That is the supposed critical temperature above which superconductivity stops working in this material, so at RT it supposedly still works.

[ImorallySourcedElectrons]

5 hours ago, CarlBar said:

And yeah now you've explained some of the details behind how to do measurements i can really see how it could screw up, even if i only understood bits and pieces, (thank you though this is the kind of stuff i love to read about even if i only partially understand it). I figured that was the most likely explanation anyway. 

If you're really interested in the topic: https://www.tek.com/en/documents/product-article/keithley-low-level-measurements-handbook---7th-edition  Keithley back in the day was a precision measurement powerhouse (before Fortive/Tektronix bought them and started ruining the brand), and they wrote lots of documentation on how to actually do those measurements properly. Sadly, they haven't really released any new instruments or manuals ever since they got bought.

 

5 hours ago, CarlBar said:

Whilst this is about data irregularities here's an article from the last week or so:

 

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/too-many-bad-clinical-trials

 

Finding more is awkward now they've moved to a new system at science a couple of years back or so, completely wrecked organising and categorising of articles. But he links to a few past articles on the issue in that one.

It's a massive issue, and until reproducibility guidelines are implemented everywhere and the publish or perish culture remains the same, we'll keep seeing crappy science.

 

2 hours ago, CarlBar said:

Minor update as i'm keeping an eye on this as it's either going to be huge good or huge bad news. (Also i'm just bored and looking around is somthing to do).

 

Chinese lab has produced a sample of the material and are measuring weird stuff with it, they think it might be superconducting but that their sample is very impure, (i.e. most of it is non-superconducting):

 

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2023/07/reports-of-a-chinese-lk-99-superconductor-replication-effort.html

 

It's not remotely confirmation yet, (especially given the measuring issues @ImorallySourcedElectrons outlined previously), but the fact that an attempt to replicate didn't immidietlly throw it out is worth noting. 

 

On the other hand if it gets confirmed it looks like getting high purity is more difficult than first thought.

And there's also the question of the critical current density, even if you have a high temperature superconductor, it'd be quite worthless for practical uses if J_C is kind of crap. And there's a few other possible ways in which it can be problematic, and I'm not talking about the ceramic thing, because that's fixable by making thin strands and making a cable. Cross-fingers that it is real, because an easy to manufacture superconductor made out of a material we don't really have much use for (lead) could dramatically impact the world in so many ways. 

 

1 hour ago, HenrySalayne said:

If it's still a superconductor at 400 K, it is also a superconductor at 300 K. It The previous "high temperature" superconductors had to be around 100 K to be superconducting (the term "high temperature superconductor" already tells you how this was thought to be out of the ordinary).

Yeah, anything that flew with liquid nitrogen was considered high temperature, which is kind of hilarious if you think about it.   Especially funny if you read up on the life/history of Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, he and his team were doing absolutely crazy experiments in the late 19th/early 20th century when trying to establish absolute zero and how to measure it. Just that mental image of someone sitting there trying to make a wire out of mercury and measuring its electric resistance while it's at 2-3 K and going "mhhh, that's funny", meanwhile outside they're still putting up the wires to electrify the city. It's kind of funny if you think about it.

[Kisai]

On 7/29/2023 at 1:40 AM, CarlBar said:

 

That claim comes from Thunderf00t, i've seen him make a whole bunch of confidently wrong assumptions in the past, (notably about the physics side of the Hyperloop concept). He's clearly relatively knowledgeable in some areas,

Nah, that guy is a total fool. Pretty much everyone that got canceled in 2014, is still making the same drama bait content.

 

When actual professionals, doctors, lawyers, and scientists put the content on youtube, they explain, and they do that at the risk of being wrong, and potentially even losing their license to practice if they make grossly inaccurate statements. When a hack on youtube decides to make a video for the clicks, but have nothing actually to say, it's pretty obvious. There is no risk for them to be wrong or right. 

 

Editorialized video content is for entertainment and for you to be offended at, not to be taken at face value.

[PocketNerd]

8 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

If it's still a superconductor at 400 K, it is also a superconductor at 300 K. It The previous "high temperature" superconductors had to be around 100 K to be superconducting (the term "high temperature superconductor" already tells you how this was thought to be out of the ordinary).

Ah, so what’s being said is that it stops being a superconductor at 127C?

[Forbidden Wafer]

32 minutes ago, PocketNerd said:

Ah, so what’s being said is that it stops being a superconductor at 127C?

Yes. Which means that if it really works, its awesome.

[bcredeur97]

alright guys lets start a business mass producing this stuff before the scientists even finish /s 

[CarlBar]

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

Nah, that guy is a total fool. Pretty much everyone that got canceled in 2014, is still making the same drama bait content.

 

When actual professionals, doctors, lawyers, and scientists put the content on youtube, they explain, and they do that at the risk of being wrong, and potentially even losing their license to practice if they make grossly inaccurate statements. When a hack on youtube decides to make a video for the clicks, but have nothing actually to say, it's pretty obvious. There is no risk for them to be wrong or right. 

 

Editorialized video content is for entertainment and for you to be offended at, not to be taken at face value.

 

As @ImorallySourcedElectrons has noted he's an actual scientist with peer reviews works. And i can think of more than a few others on the internet with clear qualifications who do a good or bad job respectively of handling things.

 

And as someone with a fair education, (and i'd like to think have absorbed a fair amount more besides that), i can recognise his clear knowledge of many concepts. As noted the real issue is he's seemingly much more of a pure theory person than an "actually apply it in the real world" person. Nice neat theory is good, but allways remember it's limits, and be aware of your own limits in that regard.

 

7 hours ago, ImorallySourcedElectrons said:

If you're really interested in the topic: https://www.tek.com/en/documents/product-article/keithley-low-level-measurements-handbook---7th-edition  Keithley back in the day was a precision measurement powerhouse (before Fortive/Tektronix bought them and started ruining the brand), and they wrote lots of documentation on how to actually do those measurements properly. Sadly, they haven't really released any new instruments or manuals ever since they got bought.

 

It's a massive issue, and until reproducibility guidelines are implemented everywhere and the publish or perish culture remains the same, we'll keep seeing crappy science.

 

And there's also the question of the critical current density, even if you have a high temperature superconductor, it'd be quite worthless for practical uses if J_C is kind of crap. And there's a few other possible ways in which it can be problematic, and I'm not talking about the ceramic thing, because that's fixable by making thin strands and making a cable. Cross-fingers that it is real, because an easy to manufacture superconductor made out of a material we don't really have much use for (lead) could dramatically impact the world in so many ways. 

 

Yeah, anything that flew with liquid nitrogen was considered high temperature, which is kind of hilarious if you think about it.   Especially funny if you read up on the life/history of Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, he and his team were doing absolutely crazy experiments in the late 19th/early 20th century when trying to establish absolute zero and how to measure it. Just that mental image of someone sitting there trying to make a wire out of mercury and measuring its electric resistance while it's at 2-3 K and going "mhhh, that's funny", meanwhile outside they're still putting up the wires to electrify the city. It's kind of funny if you think about it.

 

I suspect that manual would still go over my head but i'll probably take a nosey at some point.

 

Also absolutely on it maybe turning out to having issues if it is a superconductor, but it's mere existence would likely have major positive implications for further research to produce one that is usable.

 

And yeah the first people to discover superconductors must have been mighty puzzled for a while. 

[jagdtigger]

On 7/29/2023 at 7:34 AM, GarlicDeliverySystem said:

hey have:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_wire

https://www.fujikura.co.uk/products/fel2ghts_high-temperature-superconductors

https://www.bruker.com/zh/products-and-solutions/superconductors/superconductors/ybco-2g-hts-superconductor.html

https://www.bruker.com/en/products-and-solutions/superconductors/superconductors.html

https://spectrum.ieee.org/fusion-2662267312

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1359028607000344

They havent, each of them talks about some sort of metallic alloy. Ceramics are rigid and you cant do anything with that property.....

[GarlicDeliverySystem]

4 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

They havent, each of them talks about some sort of metallic alloy. Ceramics are rigid and you cant do anything with that property.....

Please read the quoted sources more carefully, because I think you might be mistaken.

 

My current understanding of the HTS situation is as follows:

 

The most commonly used HTS are cuprate based, like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bismuth_strontium_calcium_copper_oxide

Those are inorganic, crystalline copper oxides with added metal ions that form a rigid, crystalline solid. NOT a metallic alloy.

 

These materials are basically ceramics (inorganic crystalline materials), and the superconductivity is limited to certain directions in the crystalline lattice, requiring the materials to be highly organized and pure. They are also brittle and hard, like all ceramics.

 

However, they are made into superconducting tape, like these:

Quote

source: https://www.fujikura.co.uk/products/fel2ghts_high-temperature-superconductors under the "specifications"

 

They have metal substrates, like Hastelloy and various other metals for mechanical strength, plus insulation and buffer layers, before thin crystalline layers of superconductor are grown via techniques like ALD or PLD. From the outside these look like metallic tape, but the superconductor is a nm to micrometer thin layer of ceramic sandwiched between other inorganic and metallic layers.

 

The main issues here are quality of the deposition process, as the grain boundaries between crystalline domains need to be as small as possible, and the crystalline domains/grains must be grown so that all the crystal lattices align in orientation. The other one is bonding two wires, as again the two tapes would need to be pressed together very precisely to line up the crystal lattices of their respective superconductor layers. Alternatively you can solder them with LTS materials, if you plan to operate the joint outside a magnetic field and at 4K.

 

These tapes with ceramic superconductors are now in the field apparently, at least in the form of new hybrid NMR magnets:

https://www.bruker.com/en/products-and-solutions/mr/nmr/ascend-ghz-class.html

https://www.mpg.de/15191397/0721-bich-056839-eines-der-drei-staerksten-hochaufloesenden-1-2-ghz-nmr-spektrometer-weltweit-steht-nun-in-goettingen

https://cen.acs.org/business/instrumentation/Bruker-installs-12-GHz-NMR/98/i19

https://chab.ethz.ch/news-und-veranstaltungen/d-chab-news/2020/06/8-tons-of-hope-worlds-strongest-nmr-magnet-at-eth.html

https://www.bnmrz.org/about-bnmrz/1-2-ghz-spectrometer

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/uk-reaches-the-gigahertz-nmr-level-behind-other-nations/4012642.article

 

Probably now also in particle accelerators and MRI machines.

 

Quote

Bruker HTS Coated Conductors

Magnet technology and electric engineering require increasing quantities of quality assured and commercially processable HTS wire. Bruker EST addresses this demand with an industrial scale production of second generation YBCO-based coated conductors for application at a temperature range between 4 Kelvin and 77 Kelvin.

Tape architecture: designed for high performance

HTS coated conductors by Bruker display a multilayer architecture: stainless steel tape material of 100µm thickness serves as a substrate, or carrier, for a 1.5 micrometer (µm) buffer layer of yttria-stabilized zirconia oxide (YSZ) and a 0.05 µm buffer layer of ceramic cerium (IV) oxide (CeO₂). The buffers provide both a chemical barrier and a textured surface for the deposition of a 1 µm superconducting layer of high-quality bi-epitaxial yttrium barium copper oxide (YBCO). A protecting and stabilizing 0.2 µm layer of gold or silver covers the superconducting film. The layer architecture as a whole is subsequently encased by a 20 µm copper plating serving as a shunt.

 

source: https://www.bruker.com/zh/products-and-solutions/superconductors/superconductors/ybco-2g-hts-superconductor.html

 

By contrast, metallic superconductors like LTS are alloys or intermetallic compounds like Nb3Sn and NbTi. These are also difficult to make into wires, due to poor mechanical properties. However, these can either be embedded into other materials like copper (those images you most often see) or created in-situ.

 

NbTi can actually be made by stacking rods of the material and embedding into a large copper billet, which is then drawn out into thinner and thinner wires. These can then be bundled and drawn out again, to create flexible wires with thousands of strands of superconductor in it. This is still used in a lot of magnets, but it has limits in terms of magnetic fields that can be generated, usually around 3-7 Tesla but up to 9.4 Tesla (400MHz NMR/MRI).

 

Nb3Sn is way too brittle for this, so usually the way these are made by putting Niobium wires into a special bronze matrix (often something like a tantalum layers/cores are added for mechanical strength). After winding the material, it is baked to react the Sn in the bronze with the Niobium in the wires to form Nb3Sn in the wire itself. After the bake the material can't be really moved anymore.

Quote

https://www.bruker.com/en/products-and-solutions/superconductors/superconductors/niobium-tin-superconductor.html

https://www.bruker.com/en/products-and-solutions/superconductors/superconductors/niobium-titanium-superconductor.html

 

For anyone wondering why I quote that one company so much, it is just the vendor for this stuff that I am most familiar with. There are a lot more companies out there, some of them with even more impressive materials and works but they don't really advertise this on the internet. So out of convenience I went with the one where I knew where to find the stuff.

[ImorallySourcedElectrons]

5 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

They havent, each of them talks about some sort of metallic alloy. Ceramics are rigid and you cant do anything with that property.....

An interesting take on the matter. Plenty of ways to get around these issues, we also use things like glass or metal wire coated in ceramics woven into braids for high temperature electrical insulation. And, as far as I know, we're able to build quite large devices using said brittle ceramic superconductors. This is literally why I said earlier in this thread that when such concerns come up, physicists should leave the room and let the engineers have a go at it. We're quite used to this entire "it's impossible" shtick that gets thrown around a lot, just got to apply some creativity and figure out how you can keep the desirable properties while eliminating the undesirable ones, or (more commonly) how to exploit the undesirable properties to do something desirable.

 

A nice example is when physicists or chemists try to make double-sided bio-degradable PCB substrates in research papers, they always complain they can't get them flat when they try to put a metal on them. They then propose all sorts of crazy strategies to flatten them, meanwhile most electronics engineers don't consider this an issue at all: we just laminate copper to both sides and etch away the side we don't need. They seem to consider this an impossible step, failing to realise we can just recuperate the copper from the etching bath by bubbling air through it and then shipping off the sludge for metal recuperation. Another fun one is that they claim you can't handle anisotropic base material for display manufacturing, failing to realise that you can just get it to behave in a mostly isotropic manner if you simply let it relax for a while, so while they're off trying to do research on how to make it isotropic, we just throw it in a hot humid room for a couple of weeks and then dry it before use.

 

Which is to say, most of the time the solution to this type of problem is really simple, you just got to stop trying to take it head-on and side step the issue instead.

 

@GarlicDeliverySystem, rumours are starting to pop up of other folks being able to replicate the results with some success. Things might get very interesting in the coming years, especially if we manage to figure out how this one works and learn to make similar ones with better properties.  

[Kisai]

6 hours ago, CarlBar said:

 

As @ImorallySourcedElectrons has noted he's an actual scientist with peer reviews works. And i can think of more than a few others on the internet with clear qualifications who do a good or bad job respectively of handling things.

Doesn't change the fact that nearly the entirety of their produced content, on topics they know care nothing about just for rage clicks. A broken clock can be right twice a day.

 

6 hours ago, CarlBar said:

And as someone with a fair education, (and i'd like to think have absorbed a fair amount more besides that), i can recognise his clear knowledge of many concepts. As noted the real issue is he's seemingly much more of a pure theory person than an "actually apply it in the real world" person. Nice neat theory is good, but allways remember it's limits, and be aware of your own limits in that regard.

 

In theory, everyone is a nice person. Person in question is definitely not one of them. He has a degree in chemistry but spends his time rage farming creationists. Any fool with an internet-connected device, can be a critic about anything.  Dunking on creationist blowhards, is a pretty tiny hurdle that only produces negative feedback loops and gives those people exactly what they want. 

 

[GOTSpectrum]

America be like: 

 

Did someone say railguns? 

[ImorallySourcedElectrons]

4 hours ago, GOTSpectrum said:

America be like: 

 

Did someone say railguns? 

This wouldn't really help much, the main reason why we don't have railguns is that you're vaporising those rails with each shot, and there's also a fair chance of welding the projectile to the rails. And you have a couple of other fun issues in that category. The power electronics involved are also a concern, though it's doable to make something that'll do a couple of hundred shots with modern power semiconductors.

 

Now, coil guns become a whole lot more viable with super conductors, and you could remove a lot of the self heating in machines (e.g., generators) and get them to behave almost like their theoretical ideal (e.g., zero resistance voltage source). Though there are a few caveats to that as well.

[GarlicDeliverySystem]

9 hours ago, ImorallySourcedElectrons said:

@GarlicDeliverySystem, rumours are starting to pop up of other folks being able to replicate the results with some success. Things might get very interesting in the coming years, especially if we manage to figure out how this one works and learn to make similar ones with better properties.  

Oh boy, this will be interesting times indeed. I really don't think this is real, but man do I hope so.

[jagdtigger]

13 hours ago, GarlicDeliverySystem said:

However, they are made into superconducting tape, like these:

That thin material wont have much of a current carrying capacity even if it has very low resistance, my chemical knowledge is quite a bit tarnished but that thin alloy layer will get saturated with electrons at some point......