From what I have heard, it’s not supposed to be that expensive or even difficult to make. They should have sent actual samples of the material to a dozen different universities from a batch they share their own data measurements about. Save everyone a lot of time about doubts that it’s manufactured correctly.
From that article:
“The general public seems oddly pumped about how ‘easy’ the 4-day, multistep, small batch, solid state synthesis is,”
The process is a 3-stage heating-holding-cooling process which they haven’t published the precise temperature profile for. The papers also claim only 4 samples were ever made in total, 2 of them got (destructively) analyzed by gas spectroscopy and crystallography, while of the other 2, one got further temperature annealed, and both got electrically characterized.
Chances are, they themselves don’t know exactly how they got what they got, and may or may not be capable of producing more samples.
I imagine they only have a few grams of the stuff. And they’re not highly motivated to be debunked immediately
but if it were real, they were claiming it could be manufactured easily, so making some samples to send out to research labs would not be too difficult
For anyone interested, there is a forum thread which is the closest thing we have to a live blog, along with the thread author’s opinions on how veritable the claims of each party currently known to try and replicate the study are.
Would a mega thread here help?
Though, lemmy.world is still defederated right? sh.itjust.works too? Maybe it’d be nicer to have one they could access too?
Ok, what is the importance of a room temperature semiconductor.
Room temperature superconductor. Not semiconductor, that’s something different.
With it we can build all sorts of otherwise impossible technologies.
Batterys with massive charge capacities that last weeks.
Stupidly high speed hover trains.
Electrical wires that don’t heat up with use, don’t waste energy, and can never electric you.
Body armour that actually repels bullets.
Probably some kind of horrific bomb.
These are some of the dumbest proposed applications I’ve ever seen for this. You have no idea what you’re talking about.
While I appreciate that you’re trying to point out factual errors in the comment you are replying to, please keep in mind Beehaw’s primary principle (and only* rule) when interacting with folks in the comments: Be(e) Nice. You can correct factual errors, or just point out that a comment is wrong, without insulting the person making the comment. Please try to engage more kindly in the future. Thanks!
That’s not a nice thing to say. I bet they —and everyone— could learn from getting some of the myths dispelled, instead of just getting insulted.
Wires that wouldn’t electrocute us?
Is it because we would have resistance and it wouldn’t so it’d ignore us?
Yes basically.
You get electrocuted when you touch a bare copper wire because the human body is less resistant to electricity than copper (your nervous system is optimized to not be resistant to electricity). Electricity would prefer to go through you than the cable.
But your nervous system still has some resistance, and you can’t get less resistance than zero resistance, so regardless of what you’re doing, the electricity would prefer to stay in the superconducting cable.
For the same reason you could also submerge the cable in water and nothing would happen.
The reason all this is very useful is that currently in order to prevent everybody getting electric shocks you have to insulate the cable in rubber. If you could safely make bare cables you could save an awful lot of rubber.
Probably some kind of horrific bomb.
It looks like the big technological leap in relation to ‘How can we use superconductors to hurt things’ is to use them in making advanced EMP devices. It doesn’t seem like anyone has figured out any other obvious use cases for them that massively change or improve upon the other horrific devices that we’ve already come up with.
In regards to potential for use in war crimes, it could be a lot worse.
Those are currently viable with conventional technologies. Explosively pumped magnetic coils with some big-ass capacitors. You could probably do something similar with a spark gap instead of a coil.
Room temperature superconductors would make them easier to build. Probably smaller.
One thing I could think of would be miniaturized railguns. A large part of the bulk in rail guns at the moment is the cooling system for the electro magnets and capacitors to deal with inefficient power delivery.
A room temperature superconductor would fit both problems.
I think it will be a while before we know what’s really happened.
Something I find striking is the question of where their original material is and where’s the video evidence of them testing it?
If I allow myself to be somewhat conspiratorial, I’d imagine that they know the material they made may have been somewhat accidental and that any further progress may depend on analyzing the material itself to determine what makes it work, which means they may want to keep its location somewhat secret.
Otherwise, I’m inclined to think that there’s something funky going on within the dynamics of the research group and that not one of them is entirely on top of everything that happened with the material and so the evidence got mixed up and foggy.
It is notoriously hard to replicate things in labs, especially with material science.
This was attempt to do it within 2 days of the paper being published.
To add to that, the original researchers apparently had 10% successes rate in their lab, they wanted to perfect it before publishing their paper.
Bad luck was that it leaked, so to make sure somebody else doesn’t get credit for their work they published what they had within hours.
It likely will take months before this will be verified.
10% success rate suggests there’s some hidden factor they haven’t discovered themselves yet, might influence the success rates of other labs. (assuming of course the claim is not fabricated)
So is this confirmation they were making shit up?
No. This is just one failure to replicate. There would need to be many more attempts, an investigation, and actual proof of how they made shit up, to confirm they were making shit up.
Yup, you never know what the cause of the discrepancy could be. It seems even the original team could only get it to work 10% of the time anyway, and they were familiar with the process. Even with detailed instructions, another unfamiliar team may not be able to recreate it even that often.
Until they determine what factor is leading to the occasional creation of the product, it’s effectively random whether they will create it or not. It could theoretically take 1000 tries to get it to work once. Or 1,000,000 times. But, it will probably take around 10.
That is, of course, if the product they claim to have made is real. If it isn’t real, then they’ll never get it. And, if they can figure out what exactly is making it or not, then they should be able to adapt the process to near perfect odds.
Reminds me of race conditions in programming.
1 in 15 times the bug happens and you can’t figure it out, but if 2 asynchronous events happen to happen within 10ms of each other it breaks.
Could be some super specific timing on one of the steps where a discrepancy of a short time doesn’t seem meaningful but is
