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Embattled physicist files patent for unprecedented ambient superconductor
- colechristensen 3y agoYawn. Demonstrate it? Get someone to reproduce it?
- DannyBee 3y agoThey did https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/23/science/room-temperature-superconductor.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/23/science/room-temperature-... Preprint is on arxiv
- raziel2701 3y agoJesus christ these headlines. Ambient is supposed to mean room temperature and pressure. This alleged superconductor is a high pressure one. External groups have not been able to reproduce his results.
- detaro 3y ago> In a little-noticed patent filing, Dias claims to have made a material that superconducts not only at room temperature, but also ambient pressure.
- ecks4ndr0s 3y ago"External groups have not been able to reproduce his results." The reproducibility crisis is going well. /s
- chrisweekly 3y agoIf the patent relates to a novel material, it'd be unreproducible by definition, right?
- mhandley 3y agoAt least in principle, for a patent to be valid it must be enabling. If other words, someone "of ordinary skill in the field" should be able to read the patent and implement it. If there's not enough information in the patent to be enabling, then a patent court should find it is invalid. Of course the patent system is pretty broken, especially when patent cases are tried by jury, but that's how it is supposed to work.
- sigmoid10 3y agoPatents protect commercial interests of intellectual property. But this is fundamental physics that hasn't made it out of the lab yet, so any lack of reproducible research is an enormous red flag. In many jurisdictions it shouldn't even have been granted in the first place, but patent offices are notoriously bad throughout heavily lobbied western nations.
- atmavatar 3y agoWhen theories most experts in the field put a lot of stock in cannot be reproduced, it's a crisis. When theories most experts in the field are skeptical about or downright disbelieve cannot be reproduced, it's a Tuesday.
- DannyBee 3y agoThe last is no longer true https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/23/science/room-temperature-superconductor.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/23/science/room-temperature-... The preprint is on arxiv but I’m too lazy to find a link
- xqcgrek2 3y agoThis is different from what I expected. It's for an ambient pressure room temperature superconductor, rather than high pressure. Big if true.
- EA-3167 3y agoClaims a world-changing breakthrough. Doesn't publish. Isn't reviewed. Files patent and starts company to get money. That's the classic pattern of a fraud, same as the cold fusion, "free energy" hacks and frauds. This is science, don't believe anything until it's peer reviewed and independently reproduced.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- auggierose 3y agoOn the other hand, just because it isn't peer reviewed yet, doesn't mean it is wrong. Peer reviews are laughable these days (well, at least I prefer laughing over crying). If it is truly new and ground breaking, there is a chance that you will get rejected into oblivion, and have to stand your ground and build your case for quite a while. Nothing wrong with trying to make money in the meantime.
- raziel2701 3y agoOther experimental groups have failed to reproduce his results. There's good reason to be skeptical of this until we get multiple groups confirming it's real.
- mitthrowaway2 3y agoIf you publish your idea before filing a patent, you will not be able to patent it, because your own publication will be held as prior art.
- hedora 3y agoTangentially related: Can people recommend any scientific publications that target the general public, but that aren’t resorting to clickbait headlines and suffering from repeated embarrassing retractions? (So, not Nature or Science)
- xqcgrek2 3y agoDoesn't exist. Maybe PNAS or the Royal Society if one is generous.
- meltyness 3y agoAPS Physics often promotes interesting papers which aren't clickbait.
- bananapub 3y agoNature and Science obviously aren't targeting the general public, so sniping at them about retractions is a bit silly. Quanta, I guess.
- xqcgrek2 3y agoQuanta is horrible. https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13209 https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13209
- cbolton 3y agoThat's a rather uncharitable judgement based on just one article... Also in case others struggled to understand what the linked article is talking about, I found this one very helpful: https://4gravitons.com/2022/12/09/simulated-wormholes-for-my-real-friends-real-wormholes-for-my-simulated-friends/ https://4gravitons.com/2022/12/09/simulated-wormholes-for-my...
- hedora 3y agoThey clearly are, take this article, for example. Literally zero scientists outside this researcher’s circle of 10 related labs care about the political intrigue and name calling around this. Outline if I wrote the article: What are the implications of the claims? What has this lab reported before, what were the technical mistakes they made? Survey of state of the art in peer reviewed publications. Technical critique of patent from world experts (“they probably incorrectly hooked up the volt ohm meter again” is in the article, but that belongs in the prior work section, not in the analysis of the patent)
- mikewarot 3y agoThere's a simple way to find out the truth of these claims, wait a decade, and see if a product comes from it, or if it is replicated. All else is sound and fury, signifying nothing. From the patent application[1], the method used is First, obtaining a material at a first higher pressure that superconducts at that first higher pressure and at a desirable practical operating temperature (e.g., room temperature). Next, while maintaining the material at the first higher pressure, cooling it to a very low temperature. Next, releasing the pressure to a second, lower pressure (e.g., room pressure) and then slowly raising the temperature (e.g., at about 1 K per minute) to a higher temperature such as the desirable practical operating temperature (e.g., room temperature). Does it work? I don't know, none of us does. It's plausible. Let's just wait and see. [1] https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO2023064019 https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO20...
- wslh 3y agoYour comment reminds me of the chapter 6 of the book "Only the Paranoid Survive" about Signal or Noise. One story is about the X-ray technology from Japan to produce better chips. IBM decided to invest in that technology while Intel didn't. The rest is business history.
- refulgentis 3y agoAfter 13 years here, that's one of the biggest issues with the HN-expertee-comment-ism that is so widely remarked upon. One person asserts a brutalist simplification about technology far outside their education and expertise. Another, given the brutalist simplification, ties it to something within our common field. Then, we have 1000s of people reading who are conditioned to spew optimism about "take room temperature superconductor[1] and cool it and lower the pressure and raise the temperature, tada!" and a false analogy like "doubting this would be like IBM failing to adopt [a commonplace technique] in semiconductor manufacturing" [1] from where?
- wslh 3y agoIt seems you need to reread my comment and the well known book I referred to. Based on your answer It seems you don't have idea about what I am talking about.
- xqcgrek2 3y agoFor those stating their previous claims have not been confirmed or replicated, that was true until about 3 weeks ago https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/23/science/room-temperature-superconductor.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/23/science/room-temperature-...
- bananapub 3y agophysicists/proper engineers: how useful would the electrical properties of a room temperature superconductor be, say usable as wires and only 10x the cost of aluminium or copper or whatever high tension wires are made out of? the web suggests resistive losses are O(10%), which doesn't seem hugely important in the scheme of things. or would it be more useful for conductors in some other space? generators/turbines?
- raziel2701 3y agoUseful? It would be a veritable revolution if we had access to room temperature, ambient pressure superconductors. Applications would be everywhere, even new ones would arise from people tinkering with it.
- inhumantsar 3y agoNot a physicist or engineer but I can speak to it as a layman. Superconductors enable some deep magnetic magic which is used in all kinds of things from fusion reactors to MRI machines. Current superconductors require cryogenic temperatures to operate though, which limits their applications, makes them extremely expensive to operate, and too complicated for large scale manufacturing. An ambient temperature superconductor, even if the material itself was hideously expensive, would make these extraordinarily powerful technologies much easier to develop and deploy.
- bananapub 3y ago> how useful would the *electrical* properties
- mitthrowaway2 3y agoExtremely useful! For one, it would allow current-based forms of memory storage. Right now, non-volatile memory is always stored as a voltage*, because static charges can be held without decay. Superconductors allow that for current. This also is great for sensors. For example whereas a copper ring will have a brief current when exposed to a changing magnetic field, a superconductor will have a current that perfectly tracks and cancels any magnetic flux it is exposed to. It can bring AC effects down to DC. And due to zero losses (and zero Nyquist noise), it could be used to, for example, make more sensitive antennas. Secondly, even if you don't care about the losses in terms of power consumption, you almost always care about losses in terms of heat. Superconductive motor windings, for example, would allow motors to not only be more efficient, they could also be much more power-dense because of less heat generation. And then there are the really fun applications, like levitation. * (Or eg. a ferromagnet)
- Tade0 3y agoWhat ever happened to that demonstration he announced a while ago? Did it go according to plan?
- jokoon 3y agoWell it's always profitable to attract the attention of rich tech-bros like Elon Musk, so I wish this scientist a lot of money.
- AlbertCory 3y ago> It’s customary for scientists working on the edge of discovery to patent their findings and further their work as more evidence emerges. Yes, it IS customary, unfortunately. You can keep amending the claims, as long as they're "supported" by the spec, so as to avoid Allowance or Rejection. Slimy, but sometimes it works. Even if it's Allowed, you can file a new one and claim Priority to the original date. Legal gamesmanship.