Superconductor Breakthrough Replicated, Twice, in Preliminary Testing

Yep. This is one of those world changing tech advances.

Replication is a huge step.

But I temper the excitement with the memory that I read my first The Coming Room Temp Superconductor revolution 30 or so years ago. IIRC it was a cover story in Scientific American in the early 90s.

That said, fuck I hope they have cracked a scalable RTS.

actually agree, I copied the summary but it's more sensational than it should be.. I'm excited but I've just gone from 1% believing it to 5%, it's far from confirmed.

considering what it would mean I'm still super excited however.. but I'll edit the summary

the Lawrence Livermore researcher seeming to post a simulation that supports it pushes me toward the "it's real" camp, but yeah someone needs to recreate this thing, if it can't be replicated from the paper then it's worthless, even if the original sample really is a rtsc

There's moderate consensus that there's a theoretical basis that this material should be an interesting candidate for a high temperature superconductor but is not a favourable output of the recipe used to make it.

Additionally there are now 4 independent reports (including the original and a highly prestigious chinese university) of it exhibiting diamagnetic properties (with no theoretical basis for non-superconducting diamagnetism).

This is more than enough evidence to say that the most reasonable interpretation is a room temperature superconducting material that sucks and is hard to make.

Upgrading that to a high confidence claim that the original research is reproduced will take a few weeks at least, so no super excitent yet, but the claim is fairly solid.

Agreed. This is massive.

Cool edit, i came to read some comments in between reading the article cause I got bored, finished the article and saw your edit. Agreed.

Thank you so much! Comments like these is why I love Lemmy. A hidden gem in the sea of news spam.

If I can ask, how did you even find that place?

Wow, great link. Thanks for that. Looking like bullshit.

Richard Feynman had a really good bit about how bad human intuition is about quantum physics. About how we evolved to throw a rock at an animal out on a grass plane, and not to make good guesses about the nature of particles so small we can't even fathom them.

Seems appropriate here.

The simple chemistry is pretty specific and doesn't work very well (it usually makes a semiconductor instead, and even when it does work, it's a few tiny impure specks most of the time).

Why is it unbelievable?

Why not? Lots of technologies are literally just about mixing chemicals together, and we could have done that at any point in time prior, we just didn't.

Lithium ion battery technology is literally just mixing materials together. We've had access to lithium for centuries but we didn't turn that technology into batteries until about 30 years ago.

Why not? The search space is massive, and it's not the first time humanity stumbled upon some simple revolutionary discovery.

Just because we failed to figure out the conceptually simple thing until now, doesn't mean it can't be the case. Anything else is just some form of human exceptionalism.

Well you know about all those fancy battery technologies you’ve seen in the news? Some of those are already 30 years old by now and they are still stuck in the lab whereas Li-ion actually became a product. There has got to be a good reason why that happened. Maybe the technology was too expensive, too fragile, or maybe there was another drawback the article never mentioned. Same kinds of challenges face superconductors, graphene and fusion. That’s why we have these headlines periodically.

No one ever really believe the EmDrive worked. It was just the media getting super over excited about it, but no one with any actual credibility ever gave it much credence.

This however is actually getting attention a real scientists so it is a little different.