4 ms·
Most people I talk to don't recognize the importance of room temperature superconductivity. A floating grain is cool, but not something that jumps out at peopl
by brucethemoose2 3y ago
Most people I talk to don't recognize the importance of room temperature superconductivity.
A floating grain is cool, but not something that jumps out at people like a rocket or a big fusion reactor.
The application is similarly unintuitive. Many here on HN ask why such a thing would be important, and they are probably the 99th (or 99.9th?) percentile in materials science and EE literacy.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y agoEven if it is true, we are a long ways off from Star Trek utopia. No idea if macroscopic quantities can be robustly produced, what their limitations will be, cost per gram, etc. If the material is confirmed, there will be oodles of money pumped into the space, but it could still be years before commercial applications begin to appear.
- boppo1 3y ago>Most people I talk to don't recognize the importance of room temperature superconductivity. I don't. I read someone saying it would be the biggest breakthrough since fire. Is that true or hyperbole?
- brucethemoose2 3y agoThats kinda hyperbolic. Its more like the transistor.
- xereeto 3y agoThe transistor was unequivocally the biggest technological breakthrough since fire
- kragen 3y agobreakthroughs since fire more important than the transistor probably include cooking, agriculture, the wheel, metallurgy, glass, ceramics, the heat engine, mechanisms in general (with things like pulleys, hydraulics, screws, and gears), construction cement (originally lime), math, writing, optics, electricity, chemistry (including things like distillation, the atomic theory, and recrystallization), plumbing, carpentry, weaving, sewing, automatic digital computation, and possibly language, depending on when that happened it seems like maybe you haven't thought much about the history of technology
- dharmab 3y agoDon't forget: Soap/handwashing, antibiotics, the smallpox vaccine, the Haber-Bosch process, blood transfusion, anesthetic and PCR!
- kragen 3y agosoap is a good one for sure; the others might turn out to be less important than the transistor time will tell
- dharmab 3y agoHaber-Bosch is the reason there are over 7 billion humans on Earth instead of closer to 2 billion. It's very difficult for any digital technology to compete with that.
- kragen 3y agoagriculture is the reason there were 2 billion instead of 20 million, which is a much bigger difference it seems likely that digital technology will be crucial in enabling there to be far more humans off earth than on earth; o'neill cylinders could enable many orders of magnitude more physical humans even within this solar system to say nothing of the possibility of backing up your mind with a brain scan and thus becoming immortal, and possibly forking into more copies of your mind than there are humans alive today (nitpick, transistors aren't digital)