Jump to content
Objectivism Online Forum

The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor?

Rate this topic


Recommended Posts

https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12008

Looks like three researchers in South Korea have discovered the holy grail of superconductivity.

I saw this on Hacker News. People in the Hacker News comments seem to think it should be relatively simple to confirm or not, and might take a week or so. If it is independently confirmed, it will be big.

If it is not confirmed, it will be the next Cold Fusion.

I think it's exciting, but these days I worry that, if it works, it will fall into the wrong hands, like Project X (the one in Atlas Shrugged, not the Elon Musk one).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

meh.  Sounds too good to be true.   But if it is a fraud it is too dumb to believe because synthesizing the material is relatively easy and the experiment will be performed by others very soon.   So something is there but perhaps it is just a large diamagnetic effect.   

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Quote

 

Several details in the South Korean team’s preprint papers have raised concern. James Hamlin, a physicist at the University of Florida, points out oddities in a measurement of LK-99’s magnetic properties that gave him pause. “It doesn't really look much like my experience of measuring” these properties, he says.

Doug Natelson, a physicist at Rice University, spontaneously spotted something even stranger while going over the preprints during an interview for this story. Both papers include a data plot detailing LK-99’s magnetic properties. Both plots were sourced from the same dataset and should thus be identical—but the plot in one paper has a y-axis with a scale that is about 7,000 times larger than the other. This kind of inconsistency does not prove anything, but at minimum, it suggests a worrisome shortfall in proofreading. Scientific American reached out to the South Korean team for comment but did not receive a response by the time of this story’s publication.

Getting definitive answers about what’s really happening in LK-99 demands patience, as eager independent teams attempt to replicate the South Korean team’s work. Because the recipe for LK-99’s synthesis is straightforward, results could come in the next few days or weeks.

 

27 July 2023

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've read reports that the paper was published to Arxiv without permission, which may explain why it has errors.

I've also read that Argonne National Laboratories is among those trying to reproduce the results.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

There's another way to do this but I won't go into the details here but it was discussed in an article in the 19fortyfive online magazine involving technology that is being "secretly" held by the Navy.

Edited by EC
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, EC said:

There's another way to do this but I won't go into the details here but it was discussed in an article in the 19fortyfive online magazine involving technology that is being "secretly" held by the Navy.

I point this out specifically because I had previously reached the same idea for the process for room temperature conductivity that was outlined in the Navy documents but had never spoke of it then read that a few years years back and learned they had a patent for both that and another technology I had independently already thought of in the same paper.

Edited by EC
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

So far it looks like it has not panned out. Lots of people made the material, some observed diamagnetism, none observed superconductivity (as far as I have heard).

When the liquid-nitrogen superconductors were discovered, they were much easier to replicate.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...