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Room-temperature superconductor discovery meets with resistance
- bandyaboot 4y agoI'm pretty amped about that headline.
- NotYourLawyer 4y agoPlease don’t turn HN into reddit.
- jedberg 4y agoYes let's not ever have any fun here ever when a journalist comes up with a very clever headline. I agree that if every thread had a joke it would ruin things, but the occasional joke when warranted is just fine.
- anoonmoose 4y agoi was willing to ignore the pun i was even willing to pass the thread of puns without commenting, just doling out up and down votes as necessary but "very clever" is a bridge too far, i don't think this even crosses into "a little clever" territory
- deepspace 4y ago> a bridge too far A Wheatstone bridge?
- drewbeck 4y agoI agree. The joke-per-thread count needs to be less than one or HN will devolve into chaos.
- NotYourLawyer 4y agoReddit is legit garbage though.
- deepspace 4y ago> Reddit is legit garbage though That is a pretty broad statement, and a low-quality comment for HN. Ir would be more suited as a comment in a Reddit default sub. As for the quality of Reddit, yes, the default experience sucks, since the demographic for r/popular is mostly high-school kids. Once you unsubscribe from the defaults and subscribe to well-moderated special interest subs, your experience will be completely different.
- imoverclocked 4y ago+1 from my experience on r/flying and r/gliding. I ignore almost everything else.
- tpush 4y agoThe consequences of allowing that is seen in the other responses to the GP: lots of useless fluff comments. So yes, please leave that stuff on reddit.
- jedberg 4y agoSo collapse the one thread it's in?
- imoverclocked 4y agoI don’t think a little light-hearted pun thread turns HN into Reddit, especially when the title of the article itself is a pun. Not justification, simply observation: I would hope that anyone reading the title would get the reference but I’ve been surprised before. This thread is an additional clue to the uninitiated that they may have missed something.
- p_j_w 4y agoI mean, look at the replies underneath GP. They are others just piling on with the puns and adding zero value to the conversation.
- imoverclocked 4y agoThere are many different kinds of value. Humor, even puns, has value to some, even if you don’t value it.
- antibasilisk 4y ago[flagged]
- CamperBob2 4y agoNo need to get all reactive.
- bandyaboot 4y agoNot to worry, if this were Reddit, I would be replying with a Breakfast Club fist pump gif. Not possible here.
- manv1 4y agoHeadline was a bit shocking
- VikingCoder 4y agoOhman, me, too!
- imoverclocked 4y agoI’m reluctant to read into it too much.
- geocrasher 4y agoI came here just to see the reactance to that headline
- hinkley 4y agoIf this is real they could get inducted into the Nobel Prize winner's circle. But the shenanigans this group has previously been involved in will impede their efforts to reach their potential.
- edejong 4y agoIt seems the whole research community is in flux.
- dontwearitout 4y agoRoom temperature, but 1GPa pressure (or 145037 psi). An exciting step forward if it's reproducible, but not useful commercially. I'd rather see breakthroughs in theoretical understanding; superconductivity in these regimes is still very poorly understood to my knowledge.
- loopdoend 4y agoYeah, why is 1GPa being referred to as "near-room pressure"?
- dontwearitout 4y agoAfter a bit of googling, the yield strength of some common materials is within striking distance of 1GPa (many steels are 0.25 GPa, silicon carbide is 3.4 GPa [1]). So perhaps it could be possible to embed this superconductor in a highly stressed supporting structure to provide the pressure. Not useful for cabling, but this could conceivably be used for room temperature SQUIDs [2], paving the way to cheap MRIs. [1] https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/young-modulus-d_417.html https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/young-modulus-d_417.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQUID https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQUID
- jetrink 4y agoWolfram Alpha tells me that to bring 10 sq. cm of the material to 1GPa would require 18x the bite force of a T-Rex. I don't consider the inside of a dinosaur's mouth "room pressure" either, but I could imagine a reasonably-sized housing capable of producing that force. Another comparison for scale: It is 1/6th the pressure at which artificial diamonds are manufactured.
- UseofWeapons1 4y agoFascinating. This material alone would be revolutionary if legitimate, although I’m sure there’d be further improvements. Question for any experts - what’s the relative difficulty of keeping something under sustained high pressure in a piece of hardware vs keeping it very cold? Our ultra cold usages work decently well. Would it be any easier to keep a hardware component under pressure like what this new material requires?
- ReptileMan 4y agoThe second to holy grail is temperature above liquid nitrogen at around normal pressure with cheap and easy to obtain coolant. It will enable big things like really high voltage intercontinental transmission lines etc.
- moring 4y agoIs there some napkin math available on the net for a transmission line with a nitrogen-cooled high-temp superconductor (Tc > 90K) and thick thermal insulation? I mean for the energy required per km too keep it cooled below Tc.
- 13of40 4y ago...and how that compares to the energy loss you'd have from resistance in a regular cable.
- pfdietz 4y agoThe energy loss (in the sense of where the heat ends up) is at the refrigeration plant. The cable itself extracts heat from the environment. So SC cables make sense for underground cables, where heat buildup is a problem.
- ReptileMan 4y agoThe energy could be very low - after all we are really good at insulation.
- sigmoid10 4y agoThis is the same group that already had their publication retracted by Nature the last time they made such a claim. Maybe Nature's reviewers got better and this time it is legit, but I wouldn't count on that. So there's nothing to see here until this gets independently replicated. They totally deserve all the scrutiny and resistance they seem to be getting.
- m-watson 4y agoThis write up of it [0] tries to address that a little but I agree that all the scrutiny is deserved and should continue. "The previous paper has been resubmitted to Nature with new data that validates the earlier work, Dias says. The new data was collected outside the lab, at the Argonne and Brookhaven National Laboratories in front of an audience of scientists who saw the superconducting transition live. A similar approach has been taken with the new paper. " [0] https://phys.org/news/2023-03-viable-superconducting-material-temperature-pressure.html https://phys.org/news/2023-03-viable-superconducting-materia...
- sigmoid10 4y agoOh, I want to believe. But I will do so only when those other groups publish their own results.
- scythe 4y agoThe good news is that 1 GPa (10 kbar) is a lot easier to achieve than hundreds of GPa, which means that replication will be much easier. The previous "room temperature" claim involved around 2 Mbar or 200 GPa. For comparison, the detonation pressure of a high explosive is around 50 GPa. So, hopefully, this time, we won't have to wait as long.
- mannerheim 4y agoOnly if one can get ahold of the material. > However, outside access may fall short of the community’s hopes. Dias and Salamat have founded a startup, Unearthly Materials, which, Dias said, has already raised over $20 million in funding from investors including the CEOs of Spotify and OpenAI. They’ve also recently applied for a patent on the lutetium hydride material, which would deter them from mailing out samples. “We have clear, detailed instructions on how to make our samples,” Dias said. “We are not going to distribute this material, considering the proprietary nature of our processes and the intellectual property rights that exist.” He suggested that “certain methodologies and processes” are also off the table.
- VikingCoder 4y agoSerious question - With their past retraction, why wouldn't Nature demand independent verification of the results?
- sigmoid10 4y agoPeer review exists to make sure that the scientific methodology is sound. It doesn't protect from systematic incompetence or malice. So if you can make something sound reasonable, there's no reason they wouldn't publish you, especially for something so spectacular. On the other hand, your downfall will be even harder if the inevitable replication confirms that you screwed up. I can't imagine why this group would risk their entire career, because they already screwed this up once. If they did so again, they're done.
- staunton 4y agoLooking at existing precedent, people who get caught in even the most blatant fraud (e.g. J. H. Schon) end up doing alright. One scapegoat will lose their position and credentials and go on to work in industry for about the same wage they would have expected prior to the "revolutionary work" that was exposed as fraud. Everyone else will not feel any repercussions at all and find positions (e.g. tenure) about as easily as they would have given the prestige of the group prior to being found out.
- galangalalgol 4y agoWas the previous paper retracted due to honest experimental errors or the inability to produce results? Or was it something more concerning? Experimental errors happen to everyone, no need to crush careers over them.
- mrguyorama 4y agoJ. H. Schon actively defrauded the materials science community for like a year. It was no mistake.
- 4y ago
- boredemployee 4y agoI wonder what is the status of AI in this field.
- texaslonghorn5 4y agoScience journalism or materials science?
- boredemployee 4y agoI meant in superconductivity
- staunton 4y agoIt's "Overhyped"
- hinkley 4y agoI do seem to recall seeing a story about using computers to look at the space of all chemical formulas for conductors and filter/deprioritize the implausible ones. Basically AI driving task queues for humans, hoping to make the queue more effective.
- boredemployee 4y agoI had a teacher that in the 80s or something made an experiment where he would drop lots of elements/composites that were "good candidates" in a melting pot and hope that some superconductor material would come out from it. He made some important discoveries there but no "room temperature" superconductor came from there. I wonder how AI could be used in the "same way" with data and much less effort.
- hinkley 4y agoIt's a bit of a mystery to me too. Are we really sure we understand how superconductivity happens? At one point there were theories, materials that didn't match the theories, and new theories to try to explain the anomalies. But I don't know how that all played out in the end. If we actually understand the process then you could simulate the materials, the way we do fluid dynamics or protein folding. But without that understanding we could end up flagging the eventual winners as unlikely and reduce progress instead of increasing it. And if we can do that, why haven't we used the same thing for battery chemistries? Give me all of the low-dendrite battery formulas sorted by simulated capacity, weight, longevity and engineering difficulty, please.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mellosouls 4y agoThe article ends with a warning that full reproducibility may be difficult due to IP issues. Considering the academic (?) origin and allegedly shady history of the research this drawing of a commercial veil might encourage scepticism as to how revolutionary and successful it really is.
- femto113 4y agoDefinitely sets off my BS detector. They're under no obligation to publicize this so if they want it to be a secret they could keep it a secret. This means they do want publicity, probably so they can raise money. But there's an official way to protect your IP and get publicity: file a patent that details your process.
- tomxor 4y agoYeah, this sounds like they are using Nature as an advertising platform to hype up their work. I didn't realise it was possible to publish a paper with the premise that details required to reproduce it are omitted in some sort of weird guessing game... It makes sense that the allegations focus on analysing data manipulation. Maybe it's real, maybe it's fake, but the extreme scepticism seems deserved if they aren't going to be completely open and have a history of doing the same thing over and over.
- fallingfrog 4y agoWow on point with the bad puns today
- antibasilisk 4y agoThat's a very good title.
- ubermonkey 4y agoIJWTS I'm very happy with the headline here.
- strangeloops85 4y ago“We are not going to distribute this material, considering the proprietary nature of our processes and the intellectual property rights that exist.” The fact that they are going to making independent verification impossible makes me highly highly suspicious. Most scientists I know in their position would be sharing the material widely (even ahead of publication) to have replication from other parties, to bolster this claim. Until there is replication, I trust NOTHING from this group which has outright fabricated data previously. Extraordinary claims, from those who have previously faked data, require independent third-party verification.
- benjaminsky2 4y agoMy thoughts exactly, and you can understand their motivation when they’ve “already received 20m in funding from …”
- mannyv 4y agoApparently they're going to let the market validate their findings.
- MagicMoonlight 4y agoLmao it requires 1,000,000 atmospheres of pressure for it to function. That’s not exactly what I’d consider a room temperature superconductor. I could make diamonds from coal at room temperature with that kind of pressure.
- jeffrallen 4y agoUpvote for the word play in the title. Well played, editors.
- Havoc 4y agoAre these claims somehow hard to verify? Might be naive of me but I would have thought this would be a simple case of some other team duplicating it and commenting on their findings.
- rsynnott 4y agoToday in terrible puns.