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After skimming the paper, it reads like a legitimate paper even though I have zero expertise in the area. That it is in Word instead of LaTeX makes it feel a bi
by danbruc 3y ago
After skimming the paper, it reads like a legitimate paper even though I have zero expertise in the area. That it is in Word instead of LaTeX makes it feel a bit less legitimate to me and they could of course always have some error in there setup.
The most notable thing to me was that this was done in a thin film where structural defects are supposedly responsible for strain in the material which in turn enables the superconductivity. Probably because it is only a thin film, the material could only support about 250 mA at 25°C before losing superconductivity. So even if the paper is correct, it might turn out to be challenging to get to higher currents. Or maybe not and one could just roll up a wide thin film and have as much amps as one likes.
EDIT: I misread the thin film thing, they also produced a thin film but primarily they describe the material testes as follows without any dimensions I could immediatly spot.
After the reaction, a dark gray ingot was obtained reproducibly and then made into the shape of
thin cuboids for electrical measurements [...]
- postmortembees 3y agoYeah, it seems like (to me, a naive layperson) to be similar to how a prince rupert's drop exerts strong forces thanks to the mechanism of its cooling/shape. The copper somehow forcing other structures to form in an atypical way which enables the superconductivity. And even at 250mA, there'd be tons of different usecases for a superconductor.
- barelyauser 3y agoIt is not limited to 250mA overall. A physically larger specimen would be capable of more current.
- danbruc 3y agoI got this wrong, they also produced a thin film in addition to bulk material. And my worry was that one could maybe not easily scale this up in case the effect relied on it being a thin film in which case you can only make ever so wide before it becomes impractical or you have to layer or fold the thin film which might also be problematic. But as I said, I just read this wrong.
- generalizations 3y agoHow much is latex used for papers outside of computer science? Medical researchers I know generally used word for their papers.
- Sharlin 3y agoLaTeX is of course big in math and physics because its math typesetting is unparalleled. And generally it’s just much more convenient to write a lot of math in LaTeX than a wysiwyg editor once you’re proficient. Outside hard sciences it’s probably not common.
- beanjuice 3y agoChemists and material scientists that I have met largely use word documents and not LaTeX.
- ccppurcell 3y agoIt's a red flag for a physics paper. It's a coffin for a mathematics paper.
- doctorwho42 3y agoAs a physicist, it's not a red flag... It's a red klaxon blaring out an alarm. I have only met a few physicists who don't write papers in latex. They are all 65+ and generally work with younger scientists/grad students who prepare the paper in latex for final drafts and submissions.
- fijiaarone 3y agoTeX was written in the 1970s for typesetting when there were no word processors by a computer programmer who couldn’t afford professional typesetting and couldn’t be bothered to learn assembly language so he wrote his own fictional one for his book — the same book he wrote TeX to publish.
- Forgotthepass8 3y ago
- klodolph 3y agoWord is one of the most common tools for writing papers. There was a study a while back that looked at the quality of Word or Latex papers. The study found that researchers using Word were more effective, and the working theory that explained it was that people who focused on the research did better research, and people focusing on the typesetting do better typesetting.
- mat_epice 3y agoI can believe that this is true today. As recently as 15 or 20 years ago, Word was awful enough that seeing through significant technical documents was a terrible experience. Horror stories of large corrupted documents and mysterious formatting behaviors were very common. Today, Word is much more capable as a scientist's tool.
- fellowniusmonk 3y agoLatex is a waste of human potential. I've done professional typesetting and cataloging with QuarkXPress and InDesign both and it was extremely fast, that's for professional high quality publishing. .doc and .md is fine for information first publishing. Latex is not simple and is in my opinion just a big nerd snipe, its the intrusive thought of layout software, for humanities sake we'd be better off with simpler tools like markdown + math notation and if latex had been never invented.
- carabiner 3y agoReminds of "command line is faster than GUI" folks who get timed doing every task slower. "But it feels faster!"
- mavhc 3y agoNow repeat what you did
- iopq 3y agoEvery task? If I want to rename all of the .pdf files in the folder to .avi I would just do it in the command line Or would you rather have me google a GUI that lets me "quickly rename" and download a few programs that have this capability? Or do a few hundred files by hand?
- sfink 3y agoSo you're saying it could be a great sensor, similar to a Josephson junction? :-) Update: "yes", from the paper: "The Josephson-like phenomenon for the under-damped junction of superconductor-normal metal-superconductor(21, 22) or Inter-grain coupled superconductors(23) and the thermoelectric effect(24-26) of the inter- or intra-grain network were also observed."
- CamperBob2 3y agoIt'd be nifty enough if we just got a new room-temperature voltage reference standard out of this.
- klyrs 3y ago(note: using language that accepts the claims of the paper for simplicity -- I remain skeptical) For what it's worth, superconductors have a shared budget[1] of (magnetic field, temperature, current). At 25°C, the material is near its critical temperature, so its current-carrying capacity is necessarily diminished. At a lower temperature, the film should be able to carry more current. That said, 250mA is plenty of current if you're interested in making a superconducting CPU. [1] http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Solids/scbc2.html http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Solids/scbc2.html edit after reading the paper: they claim an extraordinarily high critical temperature of ~126°C. You can see the temperature dependence in Figure 1e; they're much further from the critical temperature than I expected, and at room temperature, a little cooling appears to go a long way. I'm eager to see an attempt to reproduce this result. That said, the material is essentially a 2d molecule -- we've been hyped on graphene for decades, and have yet to see it integrated into a scalable process.
- nine_k 3y agoThin layers can be stacked. What's more interesting is flexibility. Current ceramic liquid-nitrogen-cooled superconductors are not flexible at all; they are brittle. This can be fine for a transmission line, but makes things hard for various coils.
- jychang 3y agoMeh. Wake me up when Graphene is commercially sold.
- oceanplexian 3y agoGraphene is being used in high performance batteries for RC use (https://hobbyking.com/en_us/turnigy-graphene-lipo-batteries.html https://hobbyking.com/en_us/turnigy-graphene-lipo-batteries....). They can put out a good bit more current than a regular lipo, I don't know the science behind it though.
- shantara 3y agoPlenty of examples online, it's a matter of purity and number of defects: https://www.acsmaterial.com/materials/graphene-series.html https://www.acsmaterial.com/materials/graphene-series.html
- carabiner 3y ago> After skimming the paper, it reads like a legitimate paper even though I have zero expertise in the area. Ummm am I the only one who finds this line hilarious?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nephyrin 3y agoThis whole thread is full of Dunning–Kruger victims misexplaining magnets to each other, this is pretty tame.
- jacquesm 3y agoOr even wires.
- mahathu 3y ago> > After skimming the paper, it reads like a legitimate paper even though I have zero expertise in the area. most humble hackernews commenter
- danbruc 3y agoIf you read some real papers and some crackpot papers, you can learn to identify bad papers without having to have much knowledge on the topic. Bad papers will, for example, often lay out trivial things at length, i.e. have very low information density. Or they will say things that are incoherent even if you do not understand all the details. Or there will be no references to legitimate other literature. This paper is dense and coherent and does not contain obvious nonsense even to an non-expert. More I did not want to imply, just that it does not look like a a crackpot paper. For a more detailed judgment, for example whether the experiments they performed or the numbers they got are reasonable or something like that, I am indeed unqualified.