Some background: there were two Chinese teams publicly pursuing LK-99-derived room temperature superconductor, which I arbitrarily named "north China team" and "south China team". North China team was headed by Hongyang Wang (who lives in Beijing) and south China team was headed by Yao Yao (who lives in Guangzhou). They used different synthesis and different analysis, i.e. north China team used hydrothermal synthesis and used SQUID measurement, while south China team used solid state synthesis and used EPR measurement.
This is a joint paper of both teams. They reproduced results of each other (this is unclear in the paper, but stated in their behind-the-scene posts) and measured a clear sign of superconductivity. It is "near room temperature", because they are sure about 250 K (hence "near"), but not sure about 300 K. As for "possible", the behind-the-scene post makes it clear it is false modesty.
If you are interested, you definitely want to read behind-the-scene posts. Read them here: https://www.zhihu.com/question/637763289 (they are in Chinese). Hongyang Wang is 真可爱呆 and Yao Yao is 洗芝溪.
> As for "possible", the behind-the-scene post makes it clear it is false modesty.
It's not false modesty to withhold a conclusion that is unwarranted without more evidence. The last time this happened there was also "possible Meissner effect" that turned out to be diamagnetism.
There are no downsides to being conservative until more evidence is acquired.
> There are no downsides to being conservative until more evidence is acquired.
There are, but I'd agree that there aren't downsides we should be concerned with. The downside is that if you're trying to publish the work that it can make it easier for the work to be rejected. I'd agree this is dumb, but it is a thing I've seen happen, and be not too uncommon. Just comes down to metrics: academics are judged by citations and number of papers published, thus papers are written to reviewers as opposed to peers (not necessarily the same thing, but assumed they are), also incentivizes flashy results to generate more publicity, or overselling the novelty of work (sometimes even by mistake). But otherwise I agree, and I think it should be encouraged to take a more tempered approach (I think it'll also really help build back social trust in sciences (again, small part of a larger pie)).
For this particular example, sure. I mean for this particular subject you'd have to hand in a really bad paper to get rejected, like past unintelligible, because the breakthrough is big. But I thought we were talking in general. There's also very clear downsides to this particular example by not being exceptionally cautious, because even a hint of hype can make them look like incompetent fools if they aren't correct. Though that wouldn't be good either because they clearly aren't. It's easy to make mistakes in science and even as I frequently told my friends last time, there was something different here and it'll probably end in failure (which it did) but that we'll learn something important (which looks likely to be true given this paper).
I was reading the paper and thought "Okay, these folks took the LK-99 lesson to heart about being overly enthusiastic in your experimental observations." :-)
Given that the LK-99 theoretical underpinnings were pretty solid (if not the implementation) I've been watching papers in this space. (on google scholar you can just track papers that cite the LK-99 paper as new follow-ups)
>There are no downsides to being conservative until more evidence is acquired.
That's true, but one upside here is that this is not from the guy at Rochester who already got burned twice for publishing false superconductor discoveries. This is at least a report that can't be dismissed immediately.
I don't know who you're referring to "from Rochester", but the excitement from last summer around LK-99 came from two South Korean researchers. Which, mind you, all turned out to be faulty interpretation of their data.
To be clear, I don't mean to cast unnecessary shade on these current results, I'm just saying the sane and prudent thing to do, especially given LK-99's recent history, is to hold off on any champagne popping, and that appropriate restraint shouldn't be characterized as "false modesty".
> Which, mind you, all turned out to be faulty interpretation of their data.
Which we should be critical of, but understandable, since that's one of the main reasons to publish (and why I think it is weird we say arxiv papers aren't peer reviewed. That was probably one of the most peer reviewed works in the last decade) and since we're all human. Science is full of mistakes, and is unsurprising when a lot of it is literally trying to do things that humans have never done before (much more to science than this too).
What I thought was really cool about LK-99 is that it isn't too often that people get a first hand look at what goes on inside the science communities. An abnormal amount of attention and openness, but illustrative. Just not sure this is the takeaway people got. But I saw science working in action, and it was really cool.
> So why do they publish if they're not 100% confident ? Why not wait to be certain ?
There are very good reasons to publish before one is "100% certain". It can get lots of other scientists to evaluate your information where they can try to reproduce it or poke holes in your theories. It just makes sense to do that with a tone of "We got some interesting results..." as opposed to what happened in the summer which was more like "We've made one of the biggest discoveries of mankind!!!"
Yeah, there’s a very good argument I’ve read from researchers that instead of papers we should be publishing continuously what our results are to encourage this early and often community interaction/feedback (ie more like code reviews). The reason it doesn’t happen is publish/perish + needing to be first to publish (ie someone taking your work and beating you to the punch and getting all the credit).
Getting other people to inspect your work sounds great for you but it costs those people a time and money.
So, the incentives for misuse are really high and the net result is that shortcutting the process is a net drag on progress. People remember the bigs stuff like FTL neutrinos, cold fusion, NK-99, etc but arguably this also shows up as part of the ‘reproducibility crisis’ in many fields.
People argue about whether putting stuff on arxiv constitutes "publication". I like the loose definition of publish (it's available for a wide audience to read, with at most, pay barriers) but other folks do not. There is still a huge cachet in being able to point at a peer-reviewed paper in a prestigious journal, no doubt, and many people will consider arxiv a preprint server, not a publication.
(in the old days, after your article was accepted, but before it was published, they'd send you a few copies labelled "preprint" that you could distribute informally)
"The first law of superconductivity: stay away from theoretical physicists." What should I say, the rules are all used to be broken?
I haven't been drunk for many years. Last Friday, I always stayed there to test and kept sending me photos and live broadcast the real-time measurement results. Every time I sent one, I couldn't help drinking a drink. I was directly broken. I was carried back by the students. It's embarrassing~~
This is LK-99 derived? Now I'm even less interested. Because if you believe this one, you need to believe that despite LK-99 being bogus, that somehow, trying to make a new LK-99 variant was lucky enough to find the one compound out of countless attempts that winds up working - as opposed to coming out of a completely different, still viable, line of research. Stranger things have happened in the history of science & technology... but not that many.
The hard part is that people have already tried really hard to make and measure a superconductor in the LK-99 system, and these researchers have once again gotten close, but not succeeded. There is some precedent for this: one of the highest-temperature superconductors is two-dimensional iron selenide supported on strontium titanate, which superconducts at 100 K, while the bulk iron selenide superconductivity is a measly 8 K at normal pressure (38 K under pressure). At this point, the most plausible way that superconductivity could be occurring in the LK-99 system is if it's in a metastable or nanostructured (possibly two-dimensional) phase that doesn't like to or can't exist as a uniform bulk material.
That scenario, if true, would surpass any other in the history of science. It's akin to the Monty Hall problem, but with a trillion doors, where you don't change your choice after all but two are shown not to have the superconductor.
So obviously if true there's a better explanation of why those early experiments failed.
Yes this is LK-99 derived. (See the paper's reference 4 and 5.) Eh, of course it is unlikely LK-99 is bogus and this one is not, but then the correct conclusion to draw is that LK-99 is not bogus?
Perhaps LK-99 is bogus, and they were triying to reproduce the result, they failed succesfully and they got another similar compound that is not bogus.
That’s possible but far less likely than the alternative explanation that either this is bunk too or LK-99 contained signal that people dismissed due to a hole in our methodology.
Wait how are all the flaws in the paper and all the failed reproductions of LK-99 and all the signs that LK-99 is just diamagnetism compatible with LK-99 being a proper superconductor?
The thing is.... all the failed reproductions of LK-99 were based on the leaked version of the paper, which according to the authors is missing some information/steps for production. They said they would publish the complete/final version of the paper in 2024, waiting to see that.
Jokes like that are going to get a lot of resistance. Oh well, time to amp it up.
Best chart I could find. Looks like there's another at 250 K from 2019. But what I don't have here is the Temperature / Pressure / Timeline, though...? What is the Pressure in the article? Is it STP?
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.
I 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.
Recently 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.
I 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.
Yeah, 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.
Movies 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.
The 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.
We 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.
In 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.
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.
One 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?
This 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.
Supercomputers (the classical kind) typically don't want to run codes that try lots of combinations; they were designed for, excel at, and cost a lot because of, the need to speed up single runs at a time. This is partly due to history, and partly due to definitions of supercomputers, but every time I proposed runs like this (proteins/drugs) to the supercomputer centers, they told me to bug off because my codes "only scaled to 64 processors" (that's 64 servers, mind you; before SMP was common).
We did what you described using idle cycles at Google (search for "Exacycle") and we got great results doing large scale parameter explorations (either randomly sampled, or sampled based on where the previous sims suggested looking next)- although, nobody actually did material simulations like this, we did proteins.
Realistically, almost nobody does this because it's just not cost effective (the search space is too large, the loss functions aren't accurate enough, and it uses TONS of energy), and more importantly, somebody else is just going to find a way to generate 75% of the results with 25% of the energy, and that person will get published faster.
You far overestimate the state of the art, and even our basic understanding of what superconducting is mechanistically. Simulating a single atom, alone in the universe is still a struggle not quite achieved.
Isn'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.
There'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
I 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.
My 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.
To be clear, you mean a freezer meant to contain food. Laboratory freezers can easily go lower without being remotely exotic (in design or construction).
> 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.
Compared with the working temperature of NMR magnets (4K)[1], it _is_ room temperature! It's not STP (standard temperature and pressure, 0C/1atm), yet, but maybe soon!
What's important is what you can use to cool it. Using helium to cool traditional superconductors is expensive and bulky. If we can cool superconductors with small Peltier coolers or your traditional fridge setup, that's a huge advantage.
If this was the issue, aren't Peletier coolers already able to reach -80 deg C already? I remember our research camera sensors being cooled to that temperature withoutbfuss and being there for months on end.. surely some other superconductors work at this range!
-80c is 193K. Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_superconductors there are 3 superconductors that work at that temperature or higher. But they all need very high pressures (150 GPa or higher). Which is close to the pressure in the centre of the earth (380 GPa).
A more reasonable superconductor that's widely used is YBCO, which at 95K (-178c) is cooled using liquid nitrogen. And I believe that's at normal pressures.
While it's a lot for the planet as a whole, 2 or so degrees is trivial in these contexts. This discovery would raise the available temperature range of high temperature superconductors by 157 degrees K.
Hardly. Just because you can make a chunk of it doesn’t mean it’s automatically useful. Is it ductile enough to make wires or sheets? Does it corrode quickly? Is it stable in the long term? Does it amalgamate with other metals too easily?
Materials have a whole list of properties that are important in both manufacturing and usage contexts. Alternative processing methods can fix some issues but not all.
That being said, finding one should be like kicking down the door to a whole room of related possibilities.
> finding one should be like kicking down the door to a whole room of related possibilities
You actually agree with the GP, you are just being more specific about what “one working” means, and providing more criteria for what getting “closer every year” would entail.
*Two. Not one. It's not science until it's been independently reproduced. Until then, it's "cute, but we can't trust what you're saying until someone else shows you're not making things up". And that counter resets every single time someone does something slightly different and then claims that it works.
It isn't "one and done." Room temperature superconductivity will be an amazing breakthrough, but there will be many more barriers to overcome before it becomes a practical product.
There were many similar LK-99 pictures that were later identified as caused by other magnetic / optical effects.
One popular theory explaining the LK-99 "levitation" pictures is that the material is diamagnetic (repels magnets), but has iron impurities (attracts magnets). So a small fragment might have a tiny fleck of iron in a corner, which is stuck to the magnet, but the bulk is repelled. This makes the sample "half float", with one corner always touching. After a while you start noticing the consistent look of the samples almost-but-not-quite floating askew.
Another effect is that if a picture is taken in a dark room with a camera that has the iris wide open, optical effects can blur the point at which the sample touches the magnet. A macro shot of a tiny sample especially is susceptible to this effect, and it can make the sample look like it is truly floating, with a visible "gap". Better focus (or focus-stacking) would reveal the small point still in contact with the magnet.
Simple answer: no. Ferromagnetic hysteresis increases with temperature, and the hysteresis here is stronger at lower temperatures. The amount of hysteresis they see at low temperatures is also too much to explain with undetected contamination. Plus, the scientists posted a picture of them fully floating a sample upside-down, which is pretty hard to explain away.
Complex answer: Maybe. Copper sulfide does a lot of weird things, and it's very easy to screw with ferromagnetism in unexpected ways. It's totally possible there's a lot of iron in this sample, and the huge incentive for room temperature superconductors is a powerful temptation to slant your data... or fabricate it entirely: https://www.science.org/content/article/plagiarism-allegatio...
Examples from that page put through Google Translate:
"Submitted by: Guided by the big assembly, with really cute stupid, wash the teacher,Sekiyama Pass, Fire Machine Immortal, Frog, Teacher Chen, etc"
"The rivers and lakes are far away, and I still remember that the cute and stupid sent the statement of "don't do it, whoever likes to do it" several times, and began to return to the old business in a few days. Don't say it, I really believed it at the time. Only the scumbag told me, impossible, absolutely impossible, he burned dozens of furnaces, much more fierce than us."
He really has become my source to go for most science papers lol, then after that its PBS guy and sometimes Sabine although I don't usually go to her stuff for 100% accuracy or them trying to at least
Same here. wow. <3 Anton though, I know when I sit down to watch his vids, it's 8 minutes or pure information, no nonsense, consistent delivery. The man is a national treasure.
Having followed the LK99 saga a bit it seems the visual appearance of the proper Meissner effect floating above the magnet and holding in a different position if you prod it (https://youtu.be/F9ukYM4cSOk?t=11) looks very different to the diamagnetic stuff LK99 did - one end touching the magnet and wobbling a bit.
Until they show a video looking like the above count my skepical.
Not a physicist but my understanding is superconductors have max amount of current you can put through it, so its not clear it can be used for free energy distribution at scale even if it is a super conductor.
Even if it allowed infinite current, the only thing that would become "free" is what we currently lose to inefficiencies in the conductors. There's still the cost of generating electricity, maintaining the distribution infrastructure (which would likely be far more expensive than what we have), etc.
Cheaper and smaller than what? All the existing fusion power plants?
We have to make it work before we can optimize it. Fusion still poses many engineering challenges that have nothing to do with the quality of our superconductors. How to not melt the reactor walls and what to do with all those angry neutrons, for starters.
Cheaper and smaller than all the existing experimental fusion reactors such as Wendelstein 7X or the under construction reactor ITER.
The vast majority of their size, weight, and cost is related to maintaining extremely low temperatures for the superconductors right next to the angry neutrons.
If you could use a regular coolant loop with heat pumps and only needed to maintain, say, -20°C, it'd be much easier to keep the superconductors cool and transport away the neutrons' heat.
The neutrons are an issue because they slowly destroy the reactor materials [1].
Point is, even with better superconductors we'd still be a long way from practical fusion power. They'd be a step forward, but they're not the key that's going to unlock a world of cheap clean energy.
There have been scientific breakthroughs throughout human history and none of them "liberated" humanity in regards to sickness, poverty, energy, travel, entertainment. Why should this one now be different? There will always be sickness and poverty in a capitalist system that is built on the exploitation of others to sustain itself. During capitalism, medical ånd technological advances such breakthroughs might bring will always disproportionately benefit the rich. Sickness, poverty at least could already be "solved problems", as some people I think say, if not for class injustice in a system that depends on inequality to function.
If you agree that we'll always be mortal then there will always be sickness, etc., even without capitalism, and in fact this breakthrough (if it is one) didn't originate in a capitalist system.
With that in mind, liberation is a means, not an end. When I think of it that way I see great progress. Here are 2 examples:
- Sickness: Fluoridation reduces enamel caries in adults by 20%-40%. "Tooth loss is no longer considered inevitable".[1]
- Poverty: The number of humans living in extreme poverty has never been lower[2]
I could keep going but I think you get the point. I agree that we have serious problems in the world, and many of them are getting worse, but in terms of health and wealth, humans as a whole have never had it better. Some of that might actually be _due_ to capitalism, or at least Democracy, which has a hard time existing without it.
Really? "none of them liberated"? Have you checked life expectancy in the last hundreds of years? Doubling life span is not a liberation?
And we are on a tech website, do you see open source being a part of the capitalist system?! Due to open source movement a huge amount of benefits were to anybody with knowledge, irrespective of their fortune. And don't get me started on medical advances. There are so many things that are shared for research and everybody can benefit from the information.
Yes, any system can be improved, but throwing rocks without practical suggestions is useless.
You write as if there is any alternative to capitalism that isn't far, far worse. It is truly the height of luxury to throw stones at the system that enabled the current wealth of the world.
Though the original, supposedly superconducting LK-99 sample, was produced in a way that caused it to be contaminated with sulfur. So this might be why their sample acted the way it did.
Christ. 2024 really coming in hot, we get a 7.6 magnitude earthquake on day 1, bombings killing over 100 people on day 2, and this shit again on day 3.
I'd go so far as to say all apparently exponential curves are actually sigmoid, but the asymptote of the sigmoid often increases itself (in another, longer-term sigmoid). But I don't think we're anywhere near the carrying capacity of weird shit happening; we're still firmly in the exponential-ish zone of human development.
>> In what sense? Public interest? LK-99 wasn't an incremental step toward room temp superconductivity, was it?
It was an incremental step toward this material. It also had some interesting properties at higher temperatures even if superconductivity wasn't one of them. It seemed really strange to me that LK99 was tossed aside so quickly. It got discredited faster than cold fusion, which is still lingering today under different names BTW.
> It seemed really strange to me that LK99 was tossed aside so quickly.
My understanding is that room-temperature superconductor claims come out on average every six months or so. So the impressive thing is that LK99 was tossed aside so quickly, but that it was treated as seriously as it was for as long as it was.
If this material exhibits the properties that the authors claim, then it most definitely is a massive step in the right direction. If so, the material can be applied in a significantly large number of settings at much lower upkeep costs. It can also lead us to another set of materials that might exhibit these properties at 20c/1atm.
Sorry, how is last year any different from the previous many decades of repeated claims of room temperature super conductivity that ended up not being room temperature superconductivity?
LK99 was not "a step in the right direction", it was verifiably incorrect, and as a publication, it was bad science.
Bars are a good guess, but the 3rd dimension should not matter. We could manufacture thin tile as the conductor, and PCB design would be done with superconducting Lego bricks.
Among other things, critical current in bulk ceramic superconductors depends on cross-sectional area, so while it seems reasonable to make a ribbon-like structure, the 3rd dimension does matter. You can't make it effectively 2D.
So they've possibly discovered a material wlthat may have a property that could be indicative of superconductivity at room temperature? It's a shame I don't have any popcorn handy.
I do however appreciate their dedication to not putting the word superconductor in the title.
Looks like they have observed what they can only explain as apparent superconductivity, but consistent with the Sagan principle are being rather cautious with how they report it.
You know what, one of the authors wrote pretty much the same elsewhere.
可以这样理解: 人类还没有仪器能测到理论严格意义上的迈斯纳, 所以加possible是出于对自然复杂性的敬畏. (Translation: It can be understood this way: humans do not yet have instruments that can measure Meissner in the strict sense of the theory, so adding possible is out of awe of the complexity of nature.)
I know it looks silly but what was wrong with being optimistic about what would be the biggest physical discovery since the transistor? Acting like an expert when you’re not is something that I’d say happens on HN just as often as on Twitter. Learn to let it go
There's difference between raising hope and raising hype. Those Twitter gurus ride on any wave convincing of people of whatever they can just to get more traffic. It's mostly harmless until you find people obsessing over updates and start betting on it.
Those "twitter gurus" were actively trying to recreate the paper, and a lot of those "twitter gurus" are actual founders doing actual hardtech startups with relevant degrees and labs.
This - these aren't hopeful people with a layman's understanding cheering on the scientific method, they're hype bros looking to gather gullible followers and shill cryptocurrencies to them based on yet another thing they're utterly clueless about and don't care to inform themselves on.
I don’t think this is true. When I heard of LK-99, I remember talking of my friends about it and we sort of daydreamed about what it could mean for society if true. None of us are on social media anymore (except HN if you count that).
Sometimes you just get excited, or want to be excited. Otherwise it’s back to wake up, work, eat dinner, sleep. When cool stuff seems to be happening, why wouldn’t we talk about it? Even if it ends up being a dud, it’s still something to talk about out.
I love "They-ing" because if it's even lightly questioned someone will jump in to explain they know They, and add even more qualifiers. Ex. if we weren't on HN "tech bros" and "AI hype" would start being invoked.
You know you can block and mute people on Twitter, right? The actual true grifters of the kind you are talking about are pretty rare in terms of a per user basis (though get get lots of distribution), and most of them are very bad at concealing themselves.
HN was absolutely choked with the same sort of would-be experts, reading the Wikipedia page for Superconductors and trying to post their way into a position of authoritative knowledge. Certainly there are more on Twitter as a consequence of the larger use base, but those two weeks involved some of the most unhinged hype-posting I've seen in the decade I've been following HN.
'Nerds get excited and furiously try to catch up'? Everyone is acting like reading up on superconductivity and discussing it is this social ill - did I miss something? Did it turn into a ponzi scam?
More like people with relatively low familiarity with a field posting with the confidence of ChatGPT and, like LLM spam, recycling and reposting so much material that adds nothing to the conversation that any actually useful content is buried.
That's way better than people dunking on lk-99 in the name of "science", quick to judge themselves while criticizing early results as too quick to judge
I'm not holding my breath for room temperature semiconductors anymore. I've gotten excited too many times. If they come, great. If they don't, no emotional investment here.
What interested me with this line of research is that it seems like even if they are completely wrong about it being superconductive, it looked like they might be on to some novel electromagnetic effects, which while not as exciting as hover trains or long haul EVs, might mean punctuated improvements in more mundane items.
To a non chemist it may look like it’s going in circles. When you’re not solving a bug and writing debug statements and throwing paint at the wall it looks like you’re going in circles. Everything is going in circles until it isn’t. Be optimistic!
That's what functioning science looks like. Giving up the first time round is a sure-fire way to guarantee that RTP superconductors are never found. How many non-functioning light bulbs did Edison invent before he made the one that worked?
I wish there was a journal that only published experiments that have been replicated. That would save so much time for many of us who want to know what is, and not what's being tried.
The skepticism is laudable. The pessimism is laughable. The hindsight is predictable.
In the skies, they streak, these UAPs, so sleek,
A dance of lights, TR-3B secrets they keep.
At the edge of science, a silent peak,
Superconductivity at psyop strength, not for the meek.
Whispers of tech, beyond our grasp, a sign,
In the shadow of stars, conspiracies align.
Truth obscured, in a skeptic's design,
But in hindsight's glow, the patterns entwine.
Counterpoint: Imagine this line of inquiry that the west has given up on lands China the breakthrough of the century? Given the way the US and EU are conspiring to withhold key chip fab tech, it would be absolutely hilarious if China covertly discovered room temperature superconductivity and the government withholds it as a domestic advantage; blowing away AWS and Microsoft's compute offering with something orders of magnitudes faster and reverse the tech playing field.
I am really relaxed about the US primacy in tech. It has all the systemic advantages and no fluke discovery would change that.
I am also quite relaxed about this preprint. As far as I am concerned the issues pointed out in this post on an actual physics forums with regards to the famous LK-99 preprint still stand with regards to this new paper:
China has one big advance over the US. A government willing to throw unlimited funds and specific science or engineering problems.
To get that kind of commitment you the strong backing of senators from a dozen different states. It rarely happens in non military projects, and when it does it's a boondoggle. Look to the SLS project, $12 billion spent to recycle space shuttle engines from the 70s and 80s.
It's worth noting that, at least on the electronics manufacturing side (which is indeed what we're talking about here) the undeniable success story of TSMC was very much a government-led capital structure from the beginning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSMC#History
Government can often be a failure-prone capital allocator, but it can also result in improved alignment when an entire industry with wide socioeconomic implications is about to be born.
In this case, subsidies (and incentives) are 'governments throwing money at engineering problems'. The US does the same for SpaceX, EV manufacturers, and the entire military industrial complex – with the latter making tech controlled by the government
The annual NIH budget is >$50B and they earmark large portions of that for specific problems. This has paid off well for the US which became the world's leader in biotechnology and has maintained it for some time. NSF is another $11B, DOE another $50B (part of which is military, I admit).
Those only have a limited dependence on dozens of senators; the NIH typically gets most of what it asks for every year. The US has funded science at spectacular levels in a bipartisan way for some time (that may change in the future). Of course there is still a lot of political bargaining, I'm not going to deny that.
What's interesting is that we could clearly spend even more if we felt it was a priority. There's so much that could be taken from military spending without having a direct impact on our defense. But I don't think we want to do that; during my grad school career, the NIH budget almost doubled, which led to a huge bolus of grad students minted as PhDs, who then had no jobs beccause the size of faculty positions didn't change nearly as quickly.
I admire China's efforts and I see a lot of similarities in China to the US around 1900: the time when the balance of industry and technology shifted from EU to US, but growing your industry super-fast runs the risk of overheating and meltdown.
Yes, NIH funds many projects. Everything from individual investigators who discover new things to massive projects involving hundreds of sites. In fact, they funded so many projects that they found money to fund virus research in china (why????).
But my real points are: "allocation" is not actual spend. And if they do spend that much, they will grow the industry so fast it runs the risk of collapsing or at least not being sustainable, with the inevitable crashes following.
By the time the Ottomans took Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire had been in decline for centuries already. The crusaders and Venetians took Constantinople 200 years previously, and while the Byzantines eventually recaptured it, that was still an ultimately fatal blow. And even that blow was only possible because Venice had been allowed to drift out of the Byzantine sphere of influence.
I immediately regretted my claim soon after posting it, and this was the first example I had in mind, along with this counterargument. If I was to make a further (somewhat weak) counter-argument, it was engineering know-how that established the Roman Empire as a dominant military in the first place, consuming the territories of other empires. It's a safer claim that technological asymmetry permitted the conquest of the less equipped 'societies', rather than 'empires'.
This is almost entirely a myth. If you set aside all of the fantastical prototypes, there are a few plausible examples but none that are truly “amazing”. For example, Germany did develop some of the earliest jet engines, but then again, so did Britain. The Me 262 and Gloster Meteor were introduced within months of each other, and while the Messerschmidt had its advantages, it also required scarce materials and couldn’t be manufactured at scale. Manufacturing issues were also present with the later German tanks, which were also significantly less maintainable and less reliable than Allied tanks.
One place where they were significantly ahead was in large scale rocketry. By the same token, they were significantly and consistently behind the United Kingdom and United States in cryptography, computing, radar, electronics, atomics, and manufacturing—all of which had much more significant strategic impacts.
The Aztecs were toppled because they had alienated all of their neighbors and vassal states. The main thing the Spanish did was to organize everyone against the Aztecs. They had guns and horses, sure, but not nearly enough to singlehandedly make a difference on the battlefield.
I wasn't talking specifically about this paper. If there's some merit to this line of inquiry, and it yields something revolutionary, I think the Chinese government would be foolish not to turn it into leverage. Especially given the recent adversarial climate in trade relations and access to advanced equipment
Any technology will have a very long way from the initial discovery to widespread application. A swarm of tinkering US startups will beat any Chinese megaproject. You propose that it is developed covertly to such an extend that it becomes a game changer that disrupts the current power balance before the US realises. I strongly disbelieve that such things can happen outside of fiction. For example, Manhattan project was known to the Soviets very early.
Startups dont do massive infrastructure investment. The Manhattan project was not a startup, but one of the most expensive things the US government ever did.
> A swarm of tinkering US startups will beat any Chinese megaproject.
I like your fervent almost religious belief in the US.
Is it reality? What boundaries: software, environmental.
Shenzhen felt like the most capitalist place I have ever been. It didn't seem to have big boy VC capital. However every single person seemed to be running a small capitalist business.
Want to see a swarm of businesses? Let one small business in Shenzhen be seen to make a profit, and watch how many competitors and supply chain businesses pop up and how quickly. I don't know if it is a no/low beaurocracy zone but I am guessing they don't have to worry too much about IP roadblocks. I imagine the biggest problem is too much competition?
I suspect young adults grok capitalism better there because as children they were embedded in the culture of endeavour, unlike westernized countries.
I wasn't there for long enough, but would love to hear what others think of business startup in Shenzhen.
You could be right, but it's hard to know how history would play out if a 'new cold war' with China started today, and with such a unique technological asymmetry (as room temperature superconductivity), and with a country that has a great deal more technical capability, self-sufficiency, and scruples than the former USSR.
The thing that brings China all those boons is that they make and sell things to the rest of the world.
Absent free trade, their advantages dwindle.
So the current "just shy of declared adversarial relationships" is optimum for them. Pushed further, say by retaining exclusive access to a game changing technology, and they start losing trade relationships (arguably, already have as manufacturing reallocated to SE Asia).
The trade war between the US and China (and the precipitating outcones) were instigated by the US. The withholding of ASML lithography equipment is a case in point.
That said, in spite of tarrifs from the west, China still has plenty of skin in the game, and the hypothetical suggests that trade would still be open enough for China to profit
>The trade war between the US and China (and the precipitating outcones) were instigated by the US.
That's very arguable when it was the US who led the world in opening up to China in the 90s/early 2000s, opening its markets to China, bringing China into the WTO, etc. (all at great cost to middle class Americans). China was an economic basket case and incapable of developing on its own. No country in history has been more generous to another.
And what did the US get in return? Currency manipulation, large scale economic espionage and mercantilist behavior, protectionism of Chinese markets and industries, fentanyl, militarization of South China Sea and bullying the countries there, largest and fastest military buildup since 1930s Germany, supporting Russia vs Ukraine, threatening war over Taiwan, etc. "Unrestricted warfare".
The US didn't cause China to do any of that, that was all the CCP's decision. Responses like economic derisking/decoupling (aka trade war) are completely legitimate and unsurprising.
>it was the US who led the world in opening up to China in the 90s/early 2000s, opening its markets to China, bringing China into the WTO, etc. (all at great cost to middle class Americans). China was an economic basket case and incapable of developing on its own. No country in history has been more generous to another.
This is hilarious revisionism. We didn't do any of that out of generosity, we did it for profit. We saw a huge pool of cheap labor and decided we wanted to let our companies exploit that. We rubbed our hands together and grinned while selling them the proverbial rope.
If by "we" you mean the 1% of bankers and corporate executives who are the primary beneficiaries of drastically increased profit margins from outsourcing production to countries with no labor or environmental protections, then yes "we" did it for profit.
But if by "we" you mean the large portion of the US middle class whose financial security and upward mobility was obliterated, then no "we" did not do it for profit and were extremely generous, sacrificial even, in lifting hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty when the CCP was unable to do that on their own.
The second "we" was all too happy, and still is, to buy cheaper products, even when apprised of the economic consequences. The third beneficiaries are businesses, for whom components and manufacturing are now vastly cheaper, enabling further (taxable) wealth generation that could support the middle-class.
If the US had a sensible culture (and hence democratically driven government policy) behind education, a skilled labor pool could have emerged to develop high-tech manufacturing that leveraged China's low-skill labor pool. Instead, China has 'hid its strength, and bided its time', establishing its own high-skill labor pool and advanced manufacturing capability, giving it substantial leverage over the entire world, without so much as starting a proxy war, usurping foreign lands, assassinating foreign political leaders, etc.
US hegemony is absolutely its own to lose, but it all depends on the culture driving it.
> That's very arguable when it was the US who led the world in opening up to China in the 90s/early 2000s, opening its markets to China, bringing China into the WTO, etc. (all at great cost to middle class Americans). China was an economic basket case and incapable of developing on its own. No country in history has been more generous to another.
I'm intrigued by the metrics you're using to conclude that the US has been more generous towards China than it has been towards, say, Israel or even Mexico, as a matter of state policy. Especially considering that US placed China under trade embargo and singlehandedly denied it UN representation for 20+ years.
The actions you are describing as representing a historically unprecedented level of generosity seems essentially to boil done to US agreeing to maintain normal trade relations with China, similar to those it has with nearly every other country. Worth noting that the US extends Most Favored Nation (MFN) status to all its trading partners — it's not some exclusive or rare privilege as its name might suggest but a standard practice in international trade.
>than it has been towards, say, Israel or even Mexico,
Partly due to what it cost the US public. Free trade with smaller countries hurts less than one-sided free trade with a protectionist mercantilist country 4x your population. (one-sided due to required joint ventures, unilateral bans on US social media, currency manipulation, among others)
> and singlehandedly denied it UN representation for 20+ years.
To be pedantic, the US didn't deny China representation for 20+ years, just the CCP. The ROC was a founding member of the UN and permanent Security Council member. US just opposed the CCP replacing it until 1971. Given the instability of CCP regime during that time - famine,
Cultural Revolution - that wasn't an unreasonable position.
> similar to those it has with nearly every other country.
Except the Communist bloc countries, USSR, Cuba, etc. Extending MFN to China while they were still Communist was unprecedented.
> Given the instability of CCP regime during that time
The fentanyl histrionic in your earlier comment is especially good paired with this endorsement of the 50s/60s KMT, who were busy fighting an insurgency to establish and maintain a heroin cartel.
Afaik, their domestic middle class market isn't nearby big enough to singlehandedly fuel their economy.
And they'll economically-politically run up against the "middle class wants things like political power and freedom" if they try to balloon that class too quickly.
The number one most systemic difference going forward is population. China already has hundreds of millions living the equivalent of a middle-class US lifestyle. That is a massive prosperous population to draw scientists, etc. from.
If China discovers this, publishes papers on it, and patents it, you can be 100% sure that the west will just ignore any patents and fabricate it themselves.
Possible, but many of the economic benefits would be lost if you needed to do it covertly.
Can't exactly have room temperature superconducting monorails all over the nation without someone questioning exactly how you have room temp superconductors and nobody else does...
I’m fancying that a centrally managed economy might be able to do this, where a democratic capitalist economy may not. But I agree it’s a bit of a leap
It's an interesting thought experiment. I can entertain the idea of a superconductor staying a secret in a military environment, but I can't imagine it getting widescale commercial use and staying a secret.
Sure I think the idea fanciful, and I agree that keeping the tech from leaking would be close to impossible, but if the stakes were high enough, maybe a centrally governed and authoritarian government like China could pull it off. It's at least fun to think about.
a researcher builds a device that can record and play back experiences which takes up most of a room, in a meeting with his boss, he receives some secret microchips made of a room temperature superconductor that he uses to make headsets.
Thank you for that. I had never encountered this film. I think parallels could also be drawn to the (highly underrated) Counterpart Series, where a researcher in Berlin accidentally creates a portal to a parallel earth and a cold war between the two world ensues.
My understanding is that while you can reverse engineer something like a new material via trial and effort plus some basic lab analysis of samples.....stuff like chips are a PITA to reverse engineer.
My understanding is that a major hurdle is just how tiny everything is on modern chiplets. If I remember right....someone managed to reverse engineer the Intel 8086 or the 8080....but my understanding is that our lithography is so complex at this point you can't accurately reverse engineer the physical chip layout. If one could reverse engineer the physical layout and chemical layers...you could probably use that information to reverse engineer the photolithography mask and chemical etching step.
TLDR: we can't reverse those modern server CPU's ....we can only learn via what the fan or the chiplet owner be it Intel or and or apple decides to release regarding architecture or chip layout.
Back when I worked at TI we had a neat machine that used X-Rays to map and reverse competitor chips (mostly to discover they were duping ours). It would work down to just short of a 10nm resolution.
You'd need to use gamma spectrography to map out more modern chips. I'm sure someone's got the equipment somewhere; the chip manufacturers themselves must verify they got a good etch somehow.
As someone whose every move is monitored by some of the most well-funded, best-equipped, and ethically questionable intelligence agencies his tax money can buy, I look forward to seeing how long they can keep this secret.
It doesn't need to be secret, just obscure. Don't believe the intelligence agencies are always intelligent or always there to help you or their host countries. Shin bet and their mishandling of Rabin and the recent October attacks prove this, as well as the CIA's pointless declassified wastes of money, often against American interests.
I was making subtle reference to ASML withholding lithography machines from China. One could ask why China is yet to replicate their technology if know-how is so permeable
Even if you had a room temp SC manufacturing chips out of it would be a whole different issue. In fact we already have a material that can be used to build chips that can be clocked a couple OOM higher than silicon. It's just graphite. But even with a well known material like that and decades to try, the manufacturing capability still isn't there.
This would actually be an amazing outcome because there's no way they could keep it secret (it would spur both espionage and intense research), and the US would end up being able to reproduce their formula. It would make things "exciting" again in a way we haven't really seen since the space race.
It's a hypothetical I haven't really ruminated on. But I suppose it would be a new cold war scenario with superconductivity supremacy swapped out for nuclear first-strike capability, and similar levels of espionage
It's actually really hard to keep discoveries like this secret or restricted. The real value worth protecting often is how to manufacture and mass produce.
The nuclear bomb is a perfect example: It's actually a very simple mechanism, and the steps needed to refine the materials and make the mechanism are extremely well documented. However, the capability to actually reliably and safely make it is quite difficult.
Thats not really true about nukes. Some of the simple first ones (namely the 'gun model') were simple enough that you can just do it if you had the uranium (because the gun model is literally just slap a bunch of uranium into itself), but the efficiently & yield is low.
If you want a real nuke today - the thermonuclear fusion bombs - you're going to be missing a lot of parts that aren't in the public documents.
For the simple bomb you mentioned, you need U-235, in high quality. That's actually very difficult and dangerous to refine and manufacture. It's time consuming, expensive, and requires bespoke process across multiple disciplines. Even today, some nation-states struggle with the process.
While i'm still extremely skeptical there's anything to this, especially with the total lack of professionalism in the initial "discovery", I'm not sure something this big is within their ability to control, at least if they're not right on the cusp of it.
This kind of science is almost inherently international, and I don't think they could possibly keep up "keeping quiet" all the potential successes.
That said, if there was one, I do think they'd at least try and fail.
If the CCP forbids such announcements, young ambitious Chinese scientists will decide that they should get out as soon as they have a chance, because otherwise they will never make international fame. Consider what that would do to Chinese tech in ten years.
This is a joint paper of both teams. They reproduced results of each other (this is unclear in the paper, but stated in their behind-the-scene posts) and measured a clear sign of superconductivity. It is "near room temperature", because they are sure about 250 K (hence "near"), but not sure about 300 K. As for "possible", the behind-the-scene post makes it clear it is false modesty.
If you are interested, you definitely want to read behind-the-scene posts. Read them here: https://www.zhihu.com/question/637763289 (they are in Chinese). Hongyang Wang is 真可爱呆 and Yao Yao is 洗芝溪.