Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

Classical off by one when you wrap through zero (not sure if this one has a specific name).

Yep, had that on my calc, and then skipped the zero when typing the post. Good catch. Even closer to a pure vacuum!

This is a quite biased view.

As a non-Chinese scientist, I can attest that there is intense pressure to publish as many papers as possible pretty much everywhere, and this leads to a problem of bad research across the world.

China may be among the worst offenders in this respect, but the particular thing the OP is asking about doesn't strike me as a Chinese-specific thing at all. I see non-Chinese scientists rushing half-baked results to arXiv all the time.

There's a long standing joke (but also true) that many things are named after the last person to find them.

See, for instance, Stigler's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy (for the concept an example itself)

>> What personal benefit does this gain someone to publish it so quickly? Is it just social media attention?

> There are no prizes for being second in science.

The reply (second quote above) fits in context, but there is more to it.

1. Publishing early at the expense of quality has a way of catching up to one's reputation. (Hopefully.)

2. History has many examples of scientists who were "too early" or not "in the right place at the right time" to get recognition.

3. A result may get little attention in one field but a lot in another. One example that comes to mind are string-matching algorithms. Sometimes they seem a dime-a-dozen in CS. But the "right" ones have transformed DNA sequencing.

Except, most likely, in exactly this story with the second paper from the original Korean authors (if things can be proven to be true).

8teAPi admitted they were essentially writing fiction generated from some of the known facts

The formula and atomic structure should not be patentable (like gene sequence), but a novel and non-obvious industrial process to fabricate such material could be patented. There may be many different such patents.

Why do you think so?

Another example that might be of interest is the use of neural networks in Monte Carlo Tree Search. In 2017 there were two papers published showing how effective the combination of NN’s and MCTS are for planning in board games.

One is an algorithm called ExIT published by Anthony et al, it showed excellent performance on a somewhat obscure board game called Hex. The authors using a typical academic lab setup to achieve this. It has a very impressive 300ish citations.

The other paper is AlphaGo, which has about 10k citations and a Netflix documentary. There are some algorithmic differences that probably make AlphaGo strictly better than ExIT but the big difference seems to mostly be that one group had like a thousand GPUs for a month.

It's even more stark when you come to realize how big the pyramid is just under a new scientific breakthrough. But there are also examples of people that stayed the course against common wisdom (and sometimes while being derided) who eventually succeeded in what they were doing. This is to me the kind of science that is most deserving of prizes, to encourage others to keep looking even when the answers are far from obvious.

Two independent research groups, one from Japan and one from the US, simultaneously published their discovery of the NdFeB magnet in the same issue of the same journal.

A community of giants. Winner takes all is not fair, but it is very motivating to the vanity of human nature. i.e. untrue, but effective

Quite similar is Darwin and Wallace presenting their evolutionary theories together. Darwin had been working on his for much longer, but spurred by the possibility of losing priority, he presented Origin of Species as a book rather than waiting for formal review + journal publication.

By the way, that's one important problem with patents.

The twitter thread linked below says that it was an independent discovery and the Korean professor was not aware of the prior knowledge until after the discovery, so it's not inspired as much as parallel development.

very interesting, is there a an article about it?

The clue is in the name.

From a purely scientific angle, so presumably less amenable to mass production, why doesn't anyone use FT-ICR mass spectrometers to assemble say a unit cell?

There is a good classic primer on FT-ICR, mostly focused on analysis (mass spectrometry) but also mentioning activation energies for reactions and measurement of kinetics etc.

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/chemistry/research/oconnor/oco...

If you dunk a bunch of chemicals (for simplicity think wet chemistry) in a vial, all reactions and side reactions are simultaneously occuring, so one has little control over what happens on an atomic scale.

FT-ICR can be used to observe the state AND to manipulate the state. Its like having a compact particle collider, but instead of the high (TeV) energy in CERN etc. its just chemical energy levels.

It happens in high vacuum, so low densities of species, hence not amenable to mass production.

But the instrument is both eyes and hands: one can identify the frequencies corresponding to each ionized molecule, and selectively energize or de-energize specific species to encourage or prevent main and competing reactions, by pumping or damping specific frequencies.

One may build up a molecule in elementary steps and eject finished molecules. Those steps can occur at the same time in the same vessel. Its like having a miniature digitally controlled chemical plant, without having to redo all the pipework if you decide to use a different pathway here or there.

The good news is that we should know within a few weeks if rock surgery is effective. If that works they can increase the purity and sample size without needing to find a new creation process

Drawing from melt to achieve a consistent crystal orientation was my first thought as well.

Looking at the Griffin paper, the Pb(2) site is described as being 1.08eV 'more energetically favorable'. I am having trouble understanding what this means.

Years back I did MOCVD semiconductor fabrication research, I never reached a mastery of it but I am still trying to leverage that understanding here.

During growth, adatoms that incorporate into proper crystal lattice locations enter a lower energy state compared to those in imperfect locations. The energy state is lower in the sense that it requires more energy to remove them from that location. Hence careful control of temperature allows you to selectively favor incorporation into these low energy locations e.g. choose a temperature high enough to remove adatoms from 'imperfect' locations but low enough to not remove them from 'perfect' (low energy) locations.

So when the author says 'energetically favorable' am I to understand this means the Pb(2) location represents a lower energy state (i.e. more difficult to remove Cu from this location) or the opposite? Or something else entirely?

Even thin films would enable highly efficient antenna-on-chip designs.

The conductors of your ohmmeter are not that important, though. You can work around that by using four-terminal sensing, and you can of course also calibrate your probes by directly touching them together. Even if your ohmmeter conductors have a resistance of several ohm, you could still get an accurate measurement if your tool has a high enough resolution.

A bigger issue is going to be sample size. A 1mm-diameter 1mm-long rod of silver has a resistance of about 20 μΩ (or 2e-5) at room temperature. That's already getting tricky to measure with lab-grade equipment without pushing insane currents through it, let alone anything even smaller. If you want to measure a 1m-diameter 1m-long silver rod (which would be 0.02μΩ or 2e-8) you could just push a few thousand amps through it and reliably measure that using a household multimeter in the mV range - but do that with a small sample and it'll evaporate.

> superconductivity is (by convention) less than 10^-11,

Ah, so you're saying that superconductivity is not actual zero resistance, but something close to it, and in fact only a factor of 1000x less resistive than the best conductor?

If that is so, this is something that I had previously thought would make a lot more sense to me.

But in that case it's not intuitive to me how SMES is possible with a 0% discharge rate. Shouldn't a significant fraction of the electrons looping around the coils be lost after many loops? (I know very little about electricity, as you can probably tell, never mind superconductors).

They were. E.g. see here for a major, good paper announcing a novel class of superconductors:

https://sci-hub.ru/https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007...

The difference now is that we're seeing a premature preprint being replicated in real time.

Even in that paper, the authors note: "The way the samples have been prepared seems to be of crucial importance: Michel et al. [21] obtained a single-phase perovskite by mixing the oxides of La and Cu and BaCOa in an appropriate ratio and subsequent annealing at 1,000 ~ in air. We also applied this annealing condition to one of our samples, obtained by the decomposition of the corresponding oxalates, and found no superconductivity." And you can see that in their resistivity/temperature graph of samples prepared using different protocols.

I'm not sure how you're getting that from my comment.

They were, but they had more time to resolve the difficulties

One case in which you can see something similar to SC transition is percolation, where the sample is mix of regular metal and insulator, and you (accidentally) connect current contacts to metal but voltage probes to insulator [1]

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.05871

It also doesn’t make sense to me because you would expect they didn’t just say “omg super conductivity!” on their first measurement and presumably measured more than once, verified connections, and generally assumed scrutiny would be high on any claim and (from what I’ve read of the history so far) the reason it’s from 1999 and published now is they didn’t believe it was real to begin with but believed it was a measurement mistake. This doesn’t mean others should be credulous and replication is crucial. But it seems to beggar reality to assume they made such an amateur mistake. I would assume outright fraud first.

Don’t you also measure the current of the “inner probes” (the ones “driving a current”), to verify that you do have contact?!

Magnetic fields can move the probes.

It's apparently hard to measure zero vs extremely low resistance with the two probe setup you are imagining (I guess because the probes and wires aren't superconducting, so most of the resistance in the circuit is not in the sample). The graphs I have seen are all made with a four probe setup [1], where a constant current is run through the outer probe pair and the voltage across the inner pair is measured. If the inner probes have contact issues, the voltage (and inferred resistance) drops, potentially to zero.

[1] https://www.ni.com/docs/en-US/bundle/ni-daqmx/page/measfunds...

>No, a badly attached probe would usually show a larger resistance, not a smaller one.

if the area is small, couldn't it be "badly attached" directly to the other probe?

Glad to be corrected, thank you.

If you can't answer the question then you won't ever understand how to measure zero resistance.

But I did eat breakfast this morning?

Isn't that exactly what I said?

Can one know how many people are in that market? When prediction markets where mentioned early during the LK-99 story, I looked a bit around out of interest, which platforms exist, which topics they cover, how many people participate in that markets. Where I could find the number of predictors, it seemed pretty underwhelming - one, ten, fifty, a hundred, I think the highest I ever saw was a bit over a thousand, but even then less than a hundred or so where using real money, the majority was using play money. Did I miss the place where everyone is? Is this to expected because the are so many topics you can bet on? Are the resulting prices still meaningful even with a small number of predictors only?

The sensible thing would be to bet against it - as shown by xkcd

Did that site predate https://xkcd.com/955/ or was it inspired by it?

They got about 50 degrees C, but note that the bulk sample and the more pure tiny sample are different.

It definitely contributes to the general feel that however this works, it's an inefficient synthesis that's problematically generating the material we want.

It certainly makes me wonder if something like molecular-beam epitaxy would be able to directly grow a more pure sample (but I imagine that's expensive and time-consuming to setup, plus not really what we're hoping for if we want to use lots of it).

326K (+127 deg F) and 340K (+152 deg F) for their less and more pure samples respectively. And, yes, if it's a superconductor as we understand them, that's the temperature at which it would have zero resistance as well.

  > Magnetic force scales as 1/r^3, not 1/r^2 like gravity

> That's why your standard issue fridge magnet measurably attracts stuff only from a very close distance, but when it does, it easily counters the gravitational attraction of the entire planet

You can still get that effect if both forces are r^2. You can even get it with the same force—consider standing on the moon looking up at the earth. It will just be a more marked change with r^3.

Thank you.

This is not just telling someone there's a winning move. It's telling them that X is a winning move and they just have to verify that X is indeed one. Many, many problems are such that it's difficult to find a solution but easy to verify one.

You've got me wondering how much cheaper ITER actually gets if you don't need the magnets to be cryogenic.

git reset —-hard

Well, I don't do particle physics as my day-job anymore, so basically that.

You switch fields or leave physics entirely.

This is drawing completely wrong conclusions from erroneous oversimplifications:

We're using high transmission voltages to keep current down. Superconductors would not change this AT ALL; superconductivity generally breaks down not only with temperature increases but also magnetic field strength (i.e. current).

Switching large currents is also a hassle; especially with non-resistive loads.

And completely changing household electricity architecture is simply not gonna happen just to marginally improve safety, cost/benefit ratio is WAY too high.

It's interesting to see how many assumptions about our world are underpinned by the lack of superconducting material. That also immediately gives you an idea of how transformative (heh.) room temperature superconductors would be.

> But most of the stuff in my home doesn't need high voltage - it's all running at 5V or 12V.

85 volt DC carries the same power as 120 volt AC, but 85 volts DC is essentially safe to touch. The human body has a much lower AC impedance, so it's MUCH more dangerous. DC does still hurt, though.

40-80 volts (see also: split phases) DC is very convenient for most electronics. It's really just things with batteries that want 5-12 volts, but stepping that down isn't too hard.

At the grid scale, it's a question of which is cheaper. If the infrastructure becomes much more expensive (because the wires are SC) then you can save money by using DC (which gives you 41% more power). If its cheaper to use transformers than it is to use more superconductors and semiconductors to convert voltages, they'll do that.

Either way the grid would stay relatively high voltage (10s of kV), because it's just always going to be worth it at that scale to minimize the conductor area.

We use AC because changing voltage levels with it is extremely simple and efficient compared to DC.

In fact the only (practical) way to convert DC voltage levels is to convert to AC, do the level conversion, then convert back to DC.

Believe it or not, DC already is more efficient for energy transfer and why there are already DC high voltage transmission lines. You don't have to deal with reactive parasitics.

But again the killer is that AC voltages are so easy to switch and can by done with >99% efficiency.

Even if it were $250, that's a pretty high cost relative to the annual cost of insurance. It's too high to justify as a routine diagnostic tool. The financial benefit here is that earlier identification would save money in the long term treatment. MRIs don't cure cancer, so the direct benefit only applies to the limited savings on a very small subset of people of the people who actually get cancers that could be identified earlier.

The real benefits are indirect (from the viewpoint of the insurance people who unfortunately pay for it)- quality of life is much better if you catch it earlier, and the medical research benefits are huge.

Realistically, it's also not $250 even outside the US- not for the resolution needed to diagnose cancers. That's below the depreciation cost of a high end (say $1M) machine. 12 scans a day (it takes roughly an hour for an average scan, 12 is per day per machine is pretty average[1]) 7 days a week for 10 years is 43,800 scans. So ignoring interest, labor, and absolutely everything else that's $228 per scan.

A full body MRI takes an hour only for small patients. More realistically 1.5-2 hours.

[1]: https://www.auntminnie.com/index.aspx?sec=ser&sub=def&pag=di...

$250 is a ton of money outside ”the west” (I assume you mean US/Europe/Aus). It’s roughly the minimum wage in Brazil.

The cost of the machines will drop considerably so it definitely will have an effect. That $250 is still a lot of money for many people and if not covered by insurance and in the developing part of the world it is utterly unaffordable.

There is a lot of infrastructure around the MRI in order to support liquid helium storage, cycling, and inter-device pathways. It isn't just what you see in the room.

It might still be a large machine, but a bunch of bottlenecks disappear. With that, it is only a matter of time until a startup develops a much cheaper, smaller, and more efficient device.

CMIIW but the main thing to make acquisition times more reasonable is higher magnetic field strength. Which, leaving all the technical questions of achieving it aside, comes with other fun constraints like requiring heavy shielding for the room and of course very careful control of what kinds of metallic objects can go near it...

It's my understanding that long-known high temperature superconductors already don't require helium cooling. How does that fact fit into the picture?

My youngest would be all over that. I'm already concerned about the windows the way things are right now.

So you say. He's on board with it.

I feel like lead in toys is worth a comeback, the "simpler times" people pine for were because lead.

I joke, of course.

Yes and no. There's no possible way to have a superconductor be an actual hoverboard out in the broader world - the magnetic field of the earth is just nowhere near strong enough. You can make specialized areas where it would work, though. It's even been done already with LN2 cooled superconductors - https://www.theverge.com/2015/8/4/9091951/lexus-hoverboard-v...

SC could help enable nearly lossless transmission over power in HVDC lines, but HVDC lines are already significantly more efficient than our regular ones and we don't build them for a variety of reasons, so it might not make much of an impact there for regulatory/NIMBY/etc. type reasons.

We would first need to build a superconducting track for the hover scooters (containing magnets) to ride on. Assuming we ever figure out how to mass produce the superconductor inexpensively.

Perhaps if the track were arranged in a grid-like pattern, the scooter could use superconducting electromagnets to accelerate and steer.

Correction: YBCO and other REBCO can get up to the needed magnetic field strength, other issues are the reasons it's not a good candidate for MRI machines - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5472374/

(Too late for me to edit)

I never claimed LK99 had the properties needed for MRIs, the question I was answering was "how will the world change with room temperature superconductors", and my answer is valid in the context of the question.

Please don't. M. Kaku is a quack.

Also energy storage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_energ...

Both. There are coil based ideas for storage.

Coil guns seem like they'd last longer, wonder what the performance figures for coil vs rail are.

For future rail guns, they'd just have replacement rails available as they do barrels for tanks/artillery guns (that wear out after about 1000 shots afaik).

if he means that, I do not see it happening so easily,

Energy storage in a superconductor is done in the form of magnetic field, a superconducting induction coil (SMES), whose density of energy storage per kilogram is highly inferior to a capacitor and a supercapacitor, which stores energy in the form electric fields, and whose density of energy storage per Kg in turn is very inferior to chemical batteries.

The magnetic fields are charged and released quicker in inductors than in capacitors (and than in chemical batteries), also the material have a longer life, and the rate of self-discharge is sightly inferior in superconducting inductors, nevertheless the density per kilogram -and to administrate such sudden energy release- limits very much the applications.

If LK99 becomes true, and is improved much (as the electrical current in the paper is limited to milliamperes range), at middle term I don't think on it happening.

If at future is achieved superconducting through nanowires, with inferior weight to batteries, may be, but in a car for example would need the added weight of metallic "magnetic shields" for health security.

IMHO, I don't see it beyond stationary applications.

Talking about fusion, isn’t the major part of the Tokamak plant in Cadarache in France, dedicated to cooling down the superconductors to zero temperatures?

If we make a leap in room-temperature superconductors, do we also make a leap in fusion?

So how sure are we that this isn't yet another in a long line of disappointments?

It was originally discovered in 1999 but was shelved for over a decade due to insufficient funding. As I understand it, they only received funding in 2018 and became more confident in their discovery after that.

Here is some (speculative?) backstory: https://twitter.com/8teAPi/status/1684385895565365248

It is a tragic shame in hindsight, but no doubt there are many earth-shattering discoveries lying within reach, if only we knew where to look.

I can't wait to read the history of this material. 24 years... I can only imagine the conversations and drama surrounding it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Daneel_Olivaw

That sounds like the people of Aurora.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Caves_of_Steel

Maybe The Naked Sun or one of the books in that series? It’s been years since I read it but I remember there being some motif about people not interacting physically and living a long time.

It's from "The Robots of Dawn"

I didn't read a lot of Asimov, but one thing that I noticed is that he likes repeating themes like that on several books.

It could be the main theme in one, and then just a short thing in many others; or the main theme in a few.

It's second or more likely third book in Robot series.

> It's less visible, but at this scale there's a high cost in everyone pausing their research to replicate LK-99. If it turns out to be real that's worth, but if not it could've gone to better use. Think of what we could've done with the time we spent reproducing cold fusion.

This is a (I feel rudimentarily obvious) fallacy of finite time implying there is N researchers working on one thing that must be useful at any given time. The individuals reproducing cold fusion / LK-99 / whichever might not have been spending their energy / time / funding on anything more "guaranteed productive" (nor even on anything at all) otherwise.

Knowledge motivates research. That motivating is not a classsically scarce resource, its multiplicative.

I'm sorry but this is BS (and I don't mean that as a personal attack, just a repulsion to the idea)

As if researcher must drop everything they're doing and attempt to reproduce every wild claim. It simply doesn't happen because these people are able to work through hypotheticals and form value predictions... Just like they do with any other research resource allocation decision.

No, it's far worse to lock up knowledge behind academic institutional norms and hide and yell "rigor" when anyone is curious to see what's being worked on. People can decide for themselves what is worth pursuing and the OP is likely correct that we're doing damage to our own progress by not disseminating a hypothesis that's being worked on but could use more resources. Furthermore this fear of someone publishing before you in a race to claim the Nobel prize likely doesn't help.

The institutions should formalize and normalize a method for broad open access to research in progress and broader collaboration.

Seems extremely unlikely there's a "high cost" because it's already clear there's some strange properties involved in LK99. Cracking the explanation for this could potentially help advance material science in all sorts of ways.

In some ways this is pure science. Multiple groups working on the same thing increases the chance of searching the problem space thoroughly, and not missing out on finding better local maximas.

Exactly, hindsight is 20/20. This reminded me of a friend of mine fixing a coding issue that was impacting performance. Fixing it saved a lot of money and it was the initiative of the engineer to bring it up. The response of the (at the time) CEO: well, why did you not fix it earlier?

> It's less visible, but at this scale there's a high cost in everyone pausing their research to replicate LK-99.

Less visible? More like invisible if you ask me. There's all sorts of seemingly frivolous research going on at any given moment. A red herring in this case would be no different.

The instant strange behavior becomes apparent it becomes worth researching. I don't see how keeping it silent is anything other than a tragic waste.

If it's bogus, we discover that sooner.

If it's legitimate, we discover that sooner, AND the benefits to humanity can begin 24 years earlier. Think of how much we've accomplished in the last 24 years. Now think of how many benefits could have been reaped during that time by building on this new knowledge (assuming it has practical applications).

If it's truly useful and they knew this 24 years ago: what a waste.

> but at this scale there's a high cost in everyone pausing their research to replicate LK-99

The people deciding to pause their research are experts with their own agency. If they are pausing their own research then it's because they've made an expert determination that it's worth doing so. So you don't need to worry yourself over it. Open the information up so that other experts can decide what to do with it.

that account is fan fiction

I hate that the patent system went from engineers patenting a working, proven idea to business a-holes patenting an "idea" then sitting on their butts waiting for an engineer somewhere to prove the idea so that they can raise their hand and say "I have the patent on that".

The modern patent system is despicable.

Just learned about that the hard way myself, haha.

Some guy got a little traction on Twitter briefly for his room temperature superconductor patent a couple days ago, but when you click his name he's just some crypto nutjob with no science background

... all because of ... ?

Spelling doesn't impact the legal weight of a patent, but can help prevent people searching for them.

You'd think to put your deliberate typos in the word 'supercobductor' though...

For people who start the comic in the middle, can you provide the real names of the various superheroes mentionned here ?

Thank you for the excellent wrap-up. I couldn't keep up with everything, but with the attention this is getting - this is just excellent.

Now to learn physics.

This is a fantastic rundown of some very confusing events, thank you.

Wonder if the "their former professor" will recive meaningful credit

Thank you. I think I finally grasp what's going on now.

Notably, the missing author from the second paper is the rogue employee who published the first paper. The order of the first two authors is the same for both papers.

I also hadn't heard about this for what it's worth.

Fascinating, thank you

But it sounds like at least in China, there is some clear action they can do about it, so that’s the motivator.

What would some PhD student in EU who is worried about job security be able to do about it constructively?

Yes, as you have seen this time.

Better to do science out in the open and let the results speak for themselves.

Yes, good points though the money angle is debatable.

The USA and Europe are 'on average' also more pro-science than the rest of the world, but I think the East has the edge in education and comes across as more focused on progress. Probably this is underpinned in part because they have a ton of very hard problems that need solving and in the 'rich West' people are much less driven because their lives and the lives of their families are on average already quite plushy.

It makes you wonder what could happen in Africa and Latin America once they embrace education and science.

I, too, found it fascinating how every initial reply dodged giving the Chinese credit. Instead, all of them tried every way to paint their publications in a negative light.

Surely, most tech workers have encountered working with highly competent technical coworkers from China? Or that Chinese students in America tend to perform well above average academically?

Why should anyone be surprised that China performs exceedingly well in sciences?

A scientist's career depends on their reputation. For them to have the best opportunities, they need everyone to have the highest respect for the quality of their work. If they damage their reputation, it could ruin everything they've spent decades working toward.

Of course they care about science itself, but there's a limit to what risks they'll be willing to take when it affects them personally.

For people with a relatively low reputation (or no reputation, i.e. unknown), taking a risk is not a bad move. They have less opportunity, and there's a chance the risk might pay off and boost their reputation.

For people whose reputation is already good, the risk is less worth it. They don't stand to gain as much, and they could lose a lot. So they're less likely to do it.

It's a direct side effect of reputation and funding being closely correlated: if your reputation is that you put out stuff that doesn't work you won't get funded. This is dumb, but that's how the world works. That's why you almost always see the 'more research is needed' line in various papers, it is most helpful when seeking for funding that one paper will lead to another. But (unfortunately) negative results aren't nearly as often published, and that is because they will not get cited as much in follow on papers. It's all the result of metrics based meta analysis of papers, aka the 'impact factor' (which, no kidding is a copyrighted term), once that got established that became the thing that science partially optimized for.

During the 'golden age' of science, the time of the Royal Society the fields weren't specialized at all and the publication mechanism was scientists sending each other interesting stuff by post. At that time there was no meta analysis at all and there was so much low hanging fruit that the 'gentleman scientist' could make big breakthroughs in their home laboratories. But as that low hanging fruit decreased the educational paths required before being able to do meaningful science became longer and longer, then specialization set in and the costs of doing science went up. That's how we arrived at grants used to fund science.

Working in science is different from working in other fields in that you work with things that are not well known, where a lot is unclear and your job is to move information out of this murky regime out into the light.

This means it's really easy to just claim something, that will be really hard for others to verify.

And wrong claims are incredibly common. It's easy to delude yourself through all sorts of biases or good old sloppy work.

That's why, when scientists talk to each other, they need to know that the other person is a serious scientist and won't pollute their mind with nonsense.

If you develop a reputation for making baseless claims, people will stop including your claims in their own thoughts.

This is an good point. I think there is a difficult balance to strike between open communication and adding confusing noise to the scientific literature. Partly for historical reasons, there is an expectation that published science is correct to the best knowledge of the authors. Since writing, publishing, and reading papers takes a lot of time and effort, there are advantages to this precedent. I work in physics, and I can tell you that if we published all of our half-baked and often wrong ideas, we would waste a lot of people's time, at worst sending people down blind allies that we would soon rule our ourselves. I suppose tying reputation damage to publishing incorrect or misleading results is then part of the incentive structure that keeps publication quality high. At the extreme, there's was one recent LK-99 paper that had an obvious glitch in their data, and instead of taking a bit more time to debug it, they just posted the paper and speculated about what was going on. If that's how much you're rushing, how do I know I can trust your data?

But there are costs to this. There are big gaps between what people discuss with colleagues and what gets published, and the is no forum to publish partial or negative results, except maybe conferences. Ideally published papers stay at a very high bar, but there are other forums to publicly share work in progress. In a way Twitter is becoming this.

I think for a lot of people this whole saga is probably the first time that they realize that a ton of original work is done in Asia, rather than that it is just our manufacturing hub. They have to adjust their mental model to account for a view of Asia that is in important ways outstripping the West in terms of resources and combined brain power. The amount of scientific output in Asia is astounding, and the number of active scientists dwarfs the numbers in the West. If they would switch to stop publishing in English it would be quite amusing.

That's an oddly defensive take.

It still hasn't been a week. Giving a bunch of these teams and one's with no announcements yet an additional year will hopefully lead to some very exciting findings

1D just means it conducts in one direction. Like it's got tiny wires in it.

It's not particularly unusual; anisotropic conductive adhesive is used in your cellphone to glue the screen on. They tape over the electrical pads, then line up the corresponding LCD pads. The tape allows current to flow vertically between the pads, but for adjacent pads it's insulating.

Neodymium magnets are another example. They're made up of a little honeycomb, and inside the cells of the comb are very long, needles of neodymium a single atom thick. They create a magnetic field in a single direction.

There's no general analytical method to solve for a material with specific properties, including superconductivity. The properties of materials are governed by the quantum mechanical behavior of electrons and their interactions with the crystal lattice. These interactions are typically described by the laws of solid-state physics, which involve solving complex quantum mechanical equations for the electrons in a crystalline structure.

For simple systems, such as some low-temperature superconductors and idealized models, researchers can sometimes make analytical approximations or derive simplified equations that describe the behavior of the material. But for most materials, the equations are too complex to solve analytically, and researchers rely on numerical methods, computational simulations, and empirical data to understand and predict material properties.

It's similar to the reason we can't find easy analytical solutions to other complex systems (like models trained via Machine Learning), there are just too many complex factors and interactions to take into account.

Same reason a photograph of a delicious meal (the theorized characteristics of the material you want) doesn't give much idea of how to make it, even if you have a stove and live next to a supermarket with all the ingredients.

The cost of the cooling subsystem and whatever workarounds you need to do to deal with heat buildup, plus about 10-20% in resistivity iirc. Not a pro engineer, but have some experience with building electronics and embedded systems.

The Superconductor would also store the Energy. It could instantly release and take in energy. So this would also be the battery

MRI machines will get much better/cheaper. They use superconductors already, but are very hard and expensive to keep at their super-cold operating temperature.

Hoverboards.

What is interesting is that assuming it all pans out these are all in entirely unrelated fields. That sets the stage for a whole raft of follow on inventions. Similar to how the telephone + basic electromagnetism led to radio, tv, radar, transistors and ultimately to computers small enough to be practical for businesses, the internet, cell phones and so on.

My grandmother was born in a house without running water, no sanitation and no phone. That's just a bit over a century ago. The rate of change on an annual basis isn't all that large, a decade and you'll see big changes, our world can't be compared at all to 120 years ago in terms of luxury, communications, personal energy budget, food, travel options etc. Still, there are large areas of the planet where the last 120 didn't bring any progress and there are those where they actually went backwards, not rarely to our (the western world for me) benefit.

Im posting this reply from my mainstream smartphone: a pocket supercomputer with a 4K 60Hz HDR video camera. I’m chock full of designer vaccines and can watch a catalog of almost all the movies ever made on demand tonight. I listened to an podcast in my EV on the way to work. And SpaceX probably launched 60 satellites this week on the 14th flight of a rocket that flew home afterwards.

Things have been moving along.

edit: comments are quibbling about the fraction of all movies ever I can see on a paid streaming service. This is like complaining about that the meals and elbow room are not wonderful on a $400 flight from LA to London. It's a goddam miracle and you're still grumbling. Please tell me now how your $12/mo Spotify account doesn't have the June 1972 Grateful Dead New Jersey show your mom was at, and is thus near worthless. I spent $12 in 1980s money on single album in my youth.

Let me amend my grossly hyperbolic statement and say I could stream on demand more movies than I could ever watch even if I did nothing else the rest of my life, including many but not all of the good ones. Now the statement is strictly true, but did this make my contribution better?

It make sence to not map all soviet people to russians after Russia started invasion and killed 150.000 civilians in Mariupol only and people in Russia support that. Many of them have Ukrainian family names and nationalities. Also many people in Ukraine resist invasion with Russian family names and nationalities. If Bogolyubov was alive then he could decide what side to support. So calling him soviet is correct way to go.

What practical use case could be for that new material? Can we make a battery with it or something practical?

"Ethnic Ukrainian"? What is that? Someone from the village near Polish border?

Ah, teaches me to try to be lawyer :)

The patent is here for reference: https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2023027536A1/en

And yeah, they left off Au.

I'm assuming "Art collections" means something other than the common meaning, or else that's an oddly specific clause.

Yeah, apparently wrong. Not a lawyer, obviously, recovering physicist/current SWE.

If it pans out I'd rather they become billionaires than your average tech bro.

I think a Nobel is pretty much guaranteed at this point.

They'll make a ton of money either ways. Maybe not billionaire level, but they'll be venerated wherever they go, will be granted countless prizes, will sit on the boards of important companies, and have their pick of academic jobs - all of it entirely deserved, of course.

I don't want to caveat a bunch of stuff with "IANAL" but I am not.

However, they have told me what I interpreted to mean that if someone improves it but uses it then they need to license the underlying patent. That just makes sense, it's required in order to implement their concept.

And in reverse the original company can keep doing whatever they want as long as it isn't covered by the referencing patent. Makes sense to me there too, if they come up with some other clever way to make it good enough more power to them. There's no reason for them to pay some other people who patented something they don't use.

The patent system sort of is the bounty for inventions. If you discover something new, you get first dibs at making money off if.

Even without any change in law there'll be a seemingly endless swarm of "I can't believe it's not butter" almost the same varieties appearing and having to be knocked down (if possible) for infringement.

As long as there's profit to be made that exceeds the cost of delaying legal action and any eventual fines levied against what may turn out to be near bankrupt shell companies.

I honestly can't comprehend how anyone wound think having a monopoly on a material is valid. They will make money without being the cartel of the superconducting sector.

Long, hard labor should be rewarded. And it is. They're receiving a salary, and now fame. That's more than enough.

Bullshit, science isn't driven by patents or funded by private industry.

Sure, and millions of people die of preventable diseases in the global south every year because pharmaceutical companies deem it profitable to let them die, and because the global north enforces their patents.

You don't know how it's gonna go. The scientists are going to be fine, they have their careers guaranteed and will receive many prizes for their work.

They don't need a monopoly on a world changing material too.

The first confirmation of some aspects of the sample by outsiders.

Neighbor: AGI is Artificial General Intelligence

What's AGI?

Yes, there exist diamagnetism-paramagnetism phase transitions.

Pyrolitic graphite can evade Earnshaw's theorem only with either specific magnet array shapes or with rotation, they still can't stably levitate on a regular dipole without rotation.

True, but only trapped within alternating N/S permanent magnetic poles... so it's possible to fool other people, but you won't be fooled yourself. Just don't use that magnetic setup. Superconducting materials will levitate in the field of a single magnetic pole.

On an array of magnets, but not on a single magnet.

Not on a single magnet though, it has to be a shaped array.

That's not what is meant by coherence, what is required in a quantum computer is for multiple qbits to maintain states coherent to each other. Current quantum computers operate in the milikelvin range for a reason, despite superconductors working at 1000x higher temperatures.

I would assume that many US labs are also attempting to replicate it, but are just not as public as the wikipedia listed attempts. Also US government agencies/labs are probably working around the clock to make and test this stuff but in secrecy.

There are two entries now from US labs added. I'm sure many more attempts are being made but are not on the chart. Maybe Wikipedia is not always up to date and accurate?

Yeah sure, but you're singling out them as if it's not the case with every mainstream media outlet. We already know that this type of story isn't what drives revenue and that's why it's not on the front page.

But other than that, what the Romans have ever done for us?!

As I read this list, the rhythm to We Didn't Start the Fire spontaneously started playing in my head.

Sorry not sorry if I just subjected you to the same.

Passports are not a good invention. They are a dystopian evil we grew to take for granted and even see as something that exists for our own benefit. Before WWI there were no passports and no need for them. Those were Good Old Days that are not coming back. It's weird to see some people seeing some kind of benefit in them.

A minor observation - pretty much all of those describe a type where applicable, except for iPhone. "Smartphone" would have been consistent and more accurate. I don't know if that's a bias or proofreading issue.

It's an interesting and thought-provoking list though.

That's just a list of good inventions.

GPS, disposable razor, many of these are not impactful enough to be "black swan but good".

And things like clocks and batteries were slowly refined over many, many years, so they don't fit either.

Also, air conditioner. It made huge difference to allow for intellectual work at the places which are otherwise too hot.

Looking at that list, I feel like we would first have to establish which things actually do make life better and which only make it more comfortable. This is going to be highly subjective.

For some reason, I'm not entirely willing to believe that my parents (who are still alive) had a less happy life than I have even though they didn't grow up with an iPhone. And it's not like modern conveniences have no downsides (e.g. increase in stress). That's not to say I would give up on these things readily, I'm just way too used to them.

I think probably most people could agree that treatments for diseases that regularly also affect young / middle-aged peolle are a good thing. It's hard to argue that someone in the prime of their life should die of some silly infection.

I’ll add some more:

Language, standards, the internet, agriculture, glass, sunscreen, resilient rice, sterilization, human flight, spontaneous development of sentient life in the universe…

When you think about it all, you start to appreciate how miraculous things actually are.