6 ms·
250 K at ambient pressure is still revolutionary, as it can be reached by dry ice. The highest critical temperature at ambient pressure had been something like
by sanxiyn 3y ago
250 K at ambient pressure is still revolutionary, as it can be reached by dry ice. The highest critical temperature at ambient pressure had been something like 150 K: still above boiling point of liquid nitrogen, and won Nobel Prize in Physics in 1987.
- VikingCoder 3y agoI grew up in Minnesota, and I have to laugh that 250 K is -9.67 F, and yeah, we had a lot of days like that. It's amazing to think that future childhood toys could be superconducting outside on those cold Minnesota days.
- rsaxvc 3y agoAsk your hometown to build an antigravity skating rink with magnet shoes.
- MobileVet 3y ago“Those boards don’t work on water!”
- 14 3y agoI laugh but also sad I’m betting a lot of the younger HN crowd doesn’t get the reference.
- sixothree 3y agoMovies of the 80s and 90s feel a lot more modern compared to the “old movies” we had living in the 80s. Black and white movies with cardboard acting sure felt quaint for the tv generation. Today though I’m constantly surprised by the number of young people who recognize things from 80s movies and especially music. I’d say that number is higher compared to our generation.
- Sanzig 3y agoThe 80s and 90s produced a lot of movies that became pop culture classics (Back to the Future among them). Millenials and Gen Z grew up in an era with much easier access to older media than previous generations. First was the video store - while Gen X had this too, it really took off in the 90s. I remember when I was a kid in the late 90s and early 2000s, it was $5 to rent a new release or 3 for $5 for old releases. This meant that we were basically encouraged by our parents to watch older stuff, and of course the fact that they lived through the 80s themselves meant they tended to recommend movies to us from that era. Of course, after the video store came VOD services like Netflix. Old movies are a great way to pad out a VOD catalogue, so that increased the access to 80s/90s movies even more. It also doesn't hurt that, as you've pointed out, many of these films still hold up pretty well today.
- radicalbyte 3y agoWe started to get a lot of the classic movies in the 70s (Taxi Driver, Godfather, Star Wars, Halloween, Blazing Saddles, Rocky, Alien, Clockwork Orange, Exorcist, Jaws, Apocalypse Now just to name a few) and the 80s went absolutely wild and - particularly - far more broad. The kids films from the 80s didn't really exist before then (outside of Disney). In the 50s/60s there were less (but still some of per personal faves) and the dominant genres (Westerns particularly) have been out of fashion for at least 40 years now.
- tempestn 3y agoRecently shared the bttf series with my 11yo. The third doesn't hold up too well, but the first two are great. The funny part was that she saw the 80s and the 50s as basically the same.
- phkahler 3y ago>> The funny part was that she saw the 80s and the 50s as basically the same. Is that because neither of them have any electronic devices? They both have payphones and cars that don't look like today?
- stavros 3y agoI think it's an issue of the fact that they're both "before my time". I treat the 20s and 50s as the same, I wouldn't be able to tell you any difference, even though they must be massively different.
- tempestn 3y agoYeah, they both just looked "old fashioned" to her. Obviously she could pick out some differences, but when they first went back to 1955, she didn't really notice that the cars, outfits, signage, etc. were particularly more dated than they had been in the 80s version.
- MobileVet 3y agoFascinating. I had never considered that. Will definitely be looking more closely when I watch with the family
- trafficante 3y agoSame thing with my nephew, though he did pick up on the cars. He also was very confused by the “Ronald Reagan? The ACTOR??” joke but immediately thought that BTTF2 Mogul-Biff was supposed to be Trump.
- MobileVet 3y agoFrankly I am shocked I got 27 up votes. To your point I expected a net negative score for the comment because - it was a joke (not typically acceptable on HN) - it is a dated reference I decided it was worth it…
- gfosco 3y agoIt's always worth it... Sometimes, even the downvotes are enjoyable.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bcrosby95 3y agoIn my experience jokes usually do well on HN. Memes and catchphrases don't. That's the main difference. Once something becomes a meme it's not actually funny anymore, but you'll still get upvoted for it on a place like Reddit because you're signalling that you're part of the "in" group.
- highwaylights 3y agoLet's hope this paper doesn't just join the list of broken promises we were made in the 80's
- sbierwagen 3y agoIt's easy enough to build a hoverboard with spinning magnets over copper plate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSheVhmcYLA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSheVhmcYLA As you can see, it's not actually that fun to ride. It hovers in every direction, like standing on an ice cube. The reason ice skates and roller blades work is they have low friction only along one dimension, so you can still apply force to the ground along the normal vector.
- thebradbain 3y agoLexus appears to have done something like that using superconductors – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhCcC2smGMI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhCcC2smGMI https://discoverlexus.com/stories/journeys-beyond-the-road/ https://discoverlexus.com/stories/journeys-beyond-the-road/
- zachmu 3y agoI forgot all about the hendo hoverboard scam. Thinking of the 11 rubes who paid $10k each for their own uncontrollable hoverboards that only work over conductive surfaces. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/142464853/hendo-hoverboards-worlds-first-real-hoverboard/rewards https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/142464853/hendo-hoverbo...
- billiam 3y agoI envision a future where maglev trains whisk you to ice fishing.
- Tade0 3y agoIce cream freezers reach 248K, so if it's really the case, then sufficient devices are already mass produced.
- peteradio 3y agoYou'd have to clean out all the ice cream though.
- babypuncher 3y agoSounds like a delicious problem to solve.
- tanseydavid 3y agoHappy to help with clearing out the Ice Cream...
- rspoerri 3y agoLevitating ice cream
- hypercube33 3y agoOne would think with all of our crazy AI and supercomputers and quantum computers that a team would give it evolutionary goals of just trying simulations of molecular combinations to reach superconductivity. Sure, it'd be one thing to make it in a computer, and making the materials in the real world is quite another but I'm kind of shocked no one has come forward with something yet. I saw simulations of whole viruses running on a cluster of computers where they test drugs out and how they interact with the virus and simulated human cells so one would think its something with enough effort would be possible?
- j_maffe 3y agoThere's plenty of researchers working on material simulation on a molecular level. It's not easy to just search millions of possible combinations and accurately predict their behavior
- londons_explore 3y agoI believe that the fundamental physical particle interactions are not yet well enough understood to make a precise simulation, even if you had a supercomputer. Ie. currently it can't be formulated as a search problem entirely on a computer.
- radarsat1 3y agoIsn't the whole point that it's something we might not predict from what we understand about the materials so far? Why would it be likely that a simulation would do better than theory at predicting unknown experimental results? You might hit on some interesting interactions between known properties that haven't been investigated but I would assume the real interesting results are from things we just don't know to model, or how to model.
- frostix 3y agoThis is done across many disciplines to try and aide in new discovery paths. Typically you’re limited in exactly what you can simulate and often times solution candidates may be found that are impractical, currently impossible, or perhaps actually impossible to produce. Sometimes you can add search constraints to tie simulations together to narrow down such false positive solutions found but not always. Heck in some cases it’s literally cheaper and more accurate to do the bench science no matter how alluring virtualized renditions may be. Most fields are still left with piles and piles of potential solutions to sort through. They often select candidates that are the cheapest and most practical to approach or they have high suspicion of success and pursue those. At the end of the day though we don’t have full universe simulators at every scale we’d want, we have very specific area simulators within very specific bounds. You have to go out an empirically test these things. But this is and has already been going on for decades across most disciplines I’ve interacted with, they just weren’t using DNN or LLMs at the time but domains are adopting these as well to leverage where feasible in the search process. I work with a variety of people interested in leveraging simulation and everyone wants to take the successes they see in LLMs or say RL from AlphaStar or AlphaGo and apply them in their domain. It’s alluring, I get it, the issue is that we often lack enough real understanding in domains and the science isn’t as airtight and people think it is, its too general or narrow, or on some cases we have good suspicion of how to build better more accurate simulations but there’s not enough compute power or energy in the world to make them currently practical, so we need to take some tradeoffs and live with less accurate and detailed simulation which leads to inaccurate representations of reality and ultimately inaccurate solution suggestion candidates.
- sheepscreek 3y agoThe lowest temperature a freezer can achieve is typically around -23 degrees Celsius (-9 degrees Fahrenheit).
- billyjmc 3y agoTo be clear, you mean a freezer meant to contain food. Laboratory freezers can easily go lower without being remotely exotic (in design or construction).
- ahahahahah 3y agoSo a normal freezer is already sufficient? 250K is about -23 degrees celsius.
- westurner 3y agoThat's without laser cooling, near-field thermophotopoltaics (TPV)), or thermoelectric solid-state refrigeration. Infrared photons are thermal energy. Thermophotovoltaics and thermoelectrics convert work due to the thermal gradient into electricity. Laser cooling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_cooling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_cooling Cooling with LEDs in reverse: https://issuu.com/designinglighting/docs/dec_2022/s/17923182 https://issuu.com/designinglighting/docs/dec_2022/s/17923182 : "Near-field photonic cooling through control of the chemical potential of photons" (2019) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-0918-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-0918-8 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=8589611114160282602&as_sdt=5,47&sciodt=0,47&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=8589611114160282602... : > This demonstration of active nanophotonic cooling—without the use of coherent laser radiation—lays the experimental foundation for systematic exploration of nanoscale photonics and optoelectronics for solid-state refrigeration and on-chip device cooling.
- _ph_ 3y agoMy basic kitchen freezer can do -25. And that is a very basic and cheap freezer, so I think it would be relative easy to push it a few more degrees down.
- raverbashing 3y agoThe joke used to go "Scientists in Alaska discover the first room-temperature superconductor" but that works as well
- mort96 3y agoNot only is 250 K achievable by dry ice; it's achievable with a normal home freezer!
- alkonaut 3y agoRoughly half of Sweden is 250K or colder this very moment. Some parts close to 230K. No dry ice needed!