[HN Gopher] Room-temperature superconductor discovery meets with...
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Room-temperature superconductor discovery meets with resistance
Author : theafh
Score : 82 points
Date : 2023-03-08 16:01 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quantamagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quantamagazine.org)
| boredemployee wrote:
| I wonder what is the status of AI in this field.
| texaslonghorn5 wrote:
| Science journalism or materials science?
| boredemployee wrote:
| I meant in superconductivity
| staunton wrote:
| It's "Overhyped"
| hinkley wrote:
| I do seem to recall seeing a story about using computers to
| look at the space of all chemical formulas for conductors and
| filter/deprioritize the implausible ones. Basically AI driving
| task queues for humans, hoping to make the queue more
| effective.
| boredemployee wrote:
| I had a teacher that in the 80s or something made an
| experiment where he would drop lots of elements/composites
| that were "good candidates" in a melting pot and hope that
| some superconductor material would come out from it.
|
| He made some important discoveries there but no "room
| temperature" superconductor came from there. I wonder how AI
| could be used in the "same way" with data and much less
| effort.
| hinkley wrote:
| It's a bit of a mystery to me too.
|
| Are we really sure we understand how superconductivity
| happens? At one point there were theories, materials that
| didn't match the theories, and new theories to try to
| explain the anomalies. But I don't know how that all played
| out in the end.
|
| If we actually understand the process then you could
| simulate the materials, the way we do fluid dynamics or
| protein folding. But without that understanding we could
| end up flagging the eventual winners as unlikely and reduce
| progress instead of increasing it.
|
| And if we can do that, why haven't we used the same thing
| for battery chemistries? Give me all of the low-dendrite
| battery formulas sorted by simulated capacity, weight,
| longevity and engineering difficulty, please.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| This is the same group that already had their publication
| retracted by Nature the last time they made such a claim. Maybe
| Nature's reviewers got better and this time it is legit, but I
| wouldn't count on that. So there's nothing to see here until this
| gets independently replicated. They totally deserve all the
| scrutiny and resistance they seem to be getting.
| donnowhy wrote:
| > _until this gets independently replicated._
|
| hmm, very interesting. I don't think it works like that
| anymore. The next step has got to be commercial availability.
| else investors to would loose money or worse, some Chinese
| company could "steal" the future profits from this valuable
| novel technology painstakingly developed by the publishing
| group.
| perihelions wrote:
| Thread:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32993556 ( _" Retraction
| of Room-temperature superconductivity in a carbonaceous sulfur
| hydride (nature.com)"_, 46 comments)
| slackdog wrote:
| Nature has a well known bias for papers with sensational
| titles.
| dekhn wrote:
| I think this is working as intended. We often joke that if
| something is publishing in Nature it's almost certainly
| wrong.
|
| But realistically, at any time in any field there are only a
| small number of people who are truly pushing the state of the
| art (I'm referring to discovery science, not reference
| science- IE, a focus on adding 1% additional knowledge to our
| already copious understandings. Any I think tthose people
| shouldn't have to follow the normal rules about scientific
| publishing: I want them to push the limits as much as
| possible. That means occasionally publishing something that
| contains a mistake (not a falsification), and then being
| willing to have it retracted (without consequence to future
| publication).
|
| These sorts of fields tend to self-correct because somethign
| that's wrong isn't reproducible, and all these scientists are
| working to reproduce each other's results (note: both the
| people who thing Dias faked his results were going to take
| the new protocol home and attempt to repro it in their hands
| ASAP).
|
| In a sense, it's being willing to accept a higher false
| positive/false negative rate so you don't filter out some
| true positives.
| [deleted]
| m-watson wrote:
| This write up of it [0] tries to address that a little but I
| agree that all the scrutiny is deserved and should continue.
|
| "The previous paper has been resubmitted to Nature with new
| data that validates the earlier work, Dias says. The new data
| was collected outside the lab, at the Argonne and Brookhaven
| National Laboratories in front of an audience of scientists who
| saw the superconducting transition live. A similar approach has
| been taken with the new paper. "
|
| [0] https://phys.org/news/2023-03-viable-superconducting-
| materia...
| scythe wrote:
| The good news is that 1 GPa (10 kbar) is a lot easier to
| achieve than hundreds of GPa, which means that replication
| will be much easier. The previous "room temperature" claim
| involved around 2 Mbar or 200 GPa. For comparison, the
| detonation pressure of a high explosive is around 50 GPa. So,
| hopefully, this time, we won't have to wait as long.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| I don't understand, and if you could illuminate it would be
| very helpful, how are such pressures achieved and
| maintained even for the shortest time without destroying
| the apparatus that holds it?
| scythe wrote:
| Wikipedia provides a nice overview:
|
| http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_anvil_cell
|
| Contra the diagram, I don't believe the diamonds in a
| real anvil are faceted.
| crangos wrote:
| According to the wikipedia article you link, they are
| usually faceted with 16 faces (under "Force Generating
| Device")
| jjk166 wrote:
| These are generally done with diamond anvils which
| concentrate force on an extremely small area.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| I understand that but it sort of dodges the issue that
| such enormous pressures must exceed the strength of any
| material, however small that pressure is contained in.
| jjk166 wrote:
| The compressive strength of typical diamond is about 470
| GPa, so no this is very well within the strength of the
| material. The current record for highest compression
| achieved in a lab is 770 GPa using a special form of
| diamond.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| Note to silent downvoters, _this_ is what an answer looks
| like.
|
| (Thanks jjk166)
| mannerheim wrote:
| Only if one can get ahold of the material.
|
| > However, outside access may fall short of the community's
| hopes. Dias and Salamat have founded a startup, Unearthly
| Materials, which, Dias said, has already raised over $20
| million in funding from investors including the CEOs of
| Spotify and OpenAI. They've also recently applied for a
| patent on the lutetium hydride material, which would deter
| them from mailing out samples. "We have clear, detailed
| instructions on how to make our samples," Dias said. "We
| are not going to distribute this material, considering the
| proprietary nature of our processes and the intellectual
| property rights that exist." He suggested that "certain
| methodologies and processes" are also off the table.
| kloch wrote:
| This is exactly the kind of thing the patent system was
| intended to prevent. You have to share enough details of
| your secret sauce so others can replicate it, even if you
| intend to not license it or charge outrageous licensing
| fees. That way the knowledge is out there today, can be
| expanded on by other researchers/inventors, and at a
| specific date in the future anyone can use it.
|
| It also helps reduce fraudulent claims of new
| discoveries.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| Oh, I want to believe. But I will do so only when those other
| groups publish their own results.
| feoren wrote:
| > a handful of experts spotted unusual patterns in the data
|
| > a year later ... they detailed an unusual and complicated
| method [for processing the data]
|
| regarding which a team claims:
|
| > [We] proved basically mathematically that the raw data are
| not measured in the laboratory; they are fabricated
|
| So multiple different peers have pointed out multiple different
| times that this team is publishing "exactly the results you'd
| want to see to confirm superconductivity", and then a _year
| later_ publishing fake-looking raw data or overly-complex
| "data processing" that magically gives them the exact result
| they needed to get published. These guys don't even seem
| particularly good at their fraud:
|
| "We just made the most important discovery in the history of
| superconductivity!"
|
| [Immediately]: _Okay but what about all this bullshit here?_
|
| "Oh _that_? (nervous laughter) ha ha, well, see, the thing
| about that is ... [a year later] ... there, see, here 's the
| raw data; we were just processing the data in a way we never
| mentioned before. We didn't tell you about it because, um,
| well, um, we ... forgot?"
|
| [Immediately]: _Okay but this raw data is obviously fake_ "Oh,
| well, um, _psych_! We were just kidding about that result! Ha
| ha ha, take-backsies. Um yeah, we take it back. "
|
| [A year later]
|
| "Hey we did the result again! This time it's for real serious
| realsies. We have the result here. We did the result thing
| again. It's the exact same result but better this time. Guys?"
|
| Why is _anyone_ taking them seriously?
|
| Lying in a professional context is basically _never_ OK. If
| someone is shown to be lying, they should never work in that
| field again, nor any field that bestows upon them any sort of
| trust. Lying is a _big_ deal; it should absolutely be career-
| killing. It 's not something people just do once and then get
| over. A few weeks ago people on Hacker News were talking about
| how to help their children cheat at school, like it's just a
| normal thing. It absolutely blows my mind that this would be
| seen as OK.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Sounds a lot like what Jan Hendrik Schon did
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfDoml-Db64
| lisper wrote:
| > A few weeks ago people on Hacker News were talking about
| how to help their children cheat at school, like it's just a
| normal thing.
|
| Link?
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Yeah - like does it work? Is it costly ? do I need to sneak
| an iphone in ? What if the kids rat on me !
|
| ;-)
|
| (sarcasm, of course).
| dekhn wrote:
| there isn't enough evidence to say they are _lying_ compared
| to making a mistake. It is remarkably hard for many
| scientists to ensure that the presented "raw datA" isn't
| actually the output of a synthetic analysis. also, if the new
| work repros and is valid, it means that the original work may
| well have been right.
|
| If it doesn't repro probably this guy's career is over.
| kloch wrote:
| > Reactions by 10 independent experts contacted by Quanta
| ranged from unbridled excitement to outright dismissal, with
| many of the experts expressing some version of cautious
| optimism.
|
| This is exactly how an arbitrary group of scientists _should_
| react to extraordinary claims like this. Not 100% dismissal
| because of the history or provenance of the researchers, not
| 100% acceptance without independent replication.
| antibasilisk wrote:
| That's a very good title.
| mellosouls wrote:
| The article ends with a warning that full reproducibility may be
| difficult due to IP issues.
|
| Considering the academic (?) origin and allegedly shady history
| of the research this drawing of a commercial veil might encourage
| scepticism as to how revolutionary and successful it really is.
| femto113 wrote:
| Definitely sets off my BS detector. They're under no obligation
| to publicize this so if they want it to be a secret they could
| keep it a secret. This means they do want publicity, probably
| so they can raise money. But there's an official way to protect
| your IP and get publicity: file a patent that details your
| process.
| tomxor wrote:
| Yeah, this sounds like they are using Nature as an
| advertising platform to hype up their work.
|
| I didn't realise it was possible to publish a paper with the
| premise that details required to reproduce it are omitted in
| some sort of weird guessing game... It makes sense that the
| allegations focus on analysing data manipulation. Maybe it's
| real, maybe it's fake, but the extreme scepticism seems
| deserved if they aren't going to be completely open and have
| a history of doing the same thing over and over.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| Serious question -
|
| With their past retraction, why wouldn't Nature demand
| independent verification of the results?
| [deleted]
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| Peer review exists to make sure that the scientific methodology
| is sound. It doesn't protect from systematic incompetence or
| malice. So if you can make something _sound_ reasonable, there
| 's no reason they wouldn't publish you, especially for
| something so spectacular. On the other hand, your downfall will
| be even harder if the inevitable replication confirms that you
| screwed up. I can't imagine why this group would risk their
| entire career, because they already screwed this up once. If
| they did so again, they're done.
| staunton wrote:
| Looking at existing precedent, people who get caught in even
| the most blatant fraud (e.g. J. H. Schon) end up doing
| alright. One scapegoat will lose their position and
| credentials and go on to work in industry for about the same
| wage they would have expected prior to the "revolutionary
| work" that was exposed as fraud. Everyone else will not feel
| any repercussions at all and find positions (e.g. tenure)
| about as easily as they would have given the prestige of the
| group prior to being found out.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| If you look at Pons & Fleischmann, their fraud was so bad
| that it essentially killed the entire field. You can't
| publish anything in that area anymore without getting
| dismissed immediately.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Was the previous paper retracted due to honest experimental
| errors or the inability to produce results? Or was it
| something more concerning? Experimental errors happen to
| everyone, no need to crush careers over them.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| J. H. Schon actively defrauded the materials science
| community for like a year. It was no mistake.
| Ekaros wrote:
| They would not be first to release it? They also have to pick
| the most marketable stories...
| [deleted]
| ubermonkey wrote:
| IJWTS I'm very happy with the headline here.
| strangeloops85 wrote:
| "We are not going to distribute this material, considering the
| proprietary nature of our processes and the intellectual property
| rights that exist."
|
| The fact that they are going to making independent verification
| impossible makes me highly highly suspicious. Most scientists I
| know in their position would be sharing the material widely (even
| ahead of publication) to have replication from other parties, to
| bolster this claim. Until there is replication, I trust NOTHING
| from this group which has outright fabricated data previously.
|
| Extraordinary claims, from those who have previously faked data,
| require independent third-party verification.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| Wow on point with the bad puns today
| bandyaboot wrote:
| I'm pretty amped about that headline.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Please don't turn HN into reddit.
| bandyaboot wrote:
| Not to worry, if this were Reddit, I would be replying with a
| Breakfast Club fist pump gif. Not possible here.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| I don't think a little light-hearted pun thread turns HN into
| Reddit, especially when the title of the article itself is a
| pun.
|
| Not justification, simply observation: I would hope that
| anyone reading the title would get the reference but I've
| been surprised before. This thread is an additional clue to
| the uninitiated that they may have missed something.
| p_j_w wrote:
| I mean, look at the replies underneath GP. They are others
| just piling on with the puns and adding zero value to the
| conversation.
| antibasilisk wrote:
| [flagged]
| jedberg wrote:
| Yes let's not ever have any fun here ever when a journalist
| comes up with a very clever headline.
|
| I agree that if every thread had a joke it would ruin things,
| but the occasional joke when warranted is just fine.
| anoonmoose wrote:
| i was willing to ignore the pun
|
| i was even willing to pass the thread of puns without
| commenting, just doling out up and down votes as necessary
|
| but "very clever" is a bridge too far, i don't think this
| even crosses into "a little clever" territory
| deepspace wrote:
| > a bridge too far
|
| A Wheatstone bridge?
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Reddit is legit garbage though.
| deepspace wrote:
| > Reddit is legit garbage though
|
| That is a pretty broad statement, and a low-quality
| comment for HN. Ir would be more suited as a comment in a
| Reddit default sub.
|
| As for the quality of Reddit, yes, the default experience
| sucks, since the demographic for r/popular is mostly
| high-school kids.
|
| Once you unsubscribe from the defaults and subscribe to
| well-moderated special interest subs, your experience
| will be completely different.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| +1 from my experience on r/flying and r/gliding. I ignore
| almost everything else.
| tpush wrote:
| The consequences of allowing that is seen in the other
| responses to the GP: lots of useless fluff comments.
|
| So yes, please leave that stuff on reddit.
| jedberg wrote:
| So collapse the one thread it's in?
| drewbeck wrote:
| I agree. The joke-per-thread count needs to be less than
| one or HN will devolve into chaos.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| No need to get all reactive.
| manv1 wrote:
| Headline was a bit shocking
| VikingCoder wrote:
| Ohman, me, too!
| imoverclocked wrote:
| I'm reluctant to read into it too much.
| geocrasher wrote:
| I came here just to see the reactance to that headline
| hinkley wrote:
| If this is real they could get inducted into the Nobel Prize
| winner's circle.
|
| But the shenanigans this group has previously been involved in
| will impede their efforts to reach their potential.
| edejong wrote:
| It seems the whole research community is in flux.
| dontwearitout wrote:
| Room temperature, but 1GPa pressure (or 145037 psi).
|
| An exciting step forward if it's reproducible, but not useful
| commercially. I'd rather see breakthroughs in theoretical
| understanding; superconductivity in these regimes is still very
| poorly understood to my knowledge.
| loopdoend wrote:
| Yeah, why is 1GPa being referred to as "near-room pressure"?
| dontwearitout wrote:
| After a bit of googling, the yield strength of some common
| materials is within striking distance of 1GPa (many steels
| are 0.25 GPa, silicon carbide is 3.4 GPa [1]). So perhaps it
| could be possible to embed this superconductor in a highly
| stressed supporting structure to provide the pressure.
|
| Not useful for cabling, but this could conceivably be used
| for room temperature SQUIDs [2], paving the way to cheap
| MRIs.
|
| [1] https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/young-modulus-
| d_417.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQUID
| jetrink wrote:
| Wolfram Alpha tells me that to bring 10 sq. cm of the
| material to 1GPa would require 18x the bite force of a T-Rex.
| I don't consider the inside of a dinosaur's mouth "room
| pressure" either, but I could imagine a reasonably-sized
| housing capable of producing that force.
|
| Another comparison for scale: It is 1/6th the pressure at
| which artificial diamonds are manufactured.
| hinkley wrote:
| T-Rex bite strength sounds like something Abe Simpson would
| say. 16% of diamond pressure is a lot.
| bhaak wrote:
| But diamond pressure is something that we are already
| capable of on a regular basis.
|
| This would put it into the realm of engineering problems
| at least for some applications if this claim turns out to
| be true.
| galaxytachyon wrote:
| First you have to make it easier to conduct experiment on
| before you can get more understanding.
|
| If 1GPa is all that is needed, then yes this is a big
| breakthrough that can lead to wider research and more
| understanding.
| meltyness wrote:
| This is about 10,000x standard pressure. CRTs operate at
| 0.0000001x standard pressure, for reference -- they implode.
|
| For example if superconductivity is desired from a 1 square
| inch (6.5e-4 m^2) footprint of this material, a weight of 6.5e5
| N must fully rest on that footprint. Near the surface of earth
| that translates to a mass of approximately 146,000 lbs.
| Something like the mass of 3 tanks.
| jws wrote:
| A woodworking clamp with a handle in line with the screw will
| generate about 400lbs of force. That's a reasonable model for
| how much axial force you will be able to exert with a
| screwdriver handle and beefy threaded screws. To get 150000 psi
| you have to squeeze something .0027 square inches, or 1.7mm^2,
| leave some room for edges and let's work with 1mm^2.
|
| I'm not sure what interesting things can be done with this
| superconductor in 1mm^2, but squeezing the anvil isn't
| outrageous.
|
| For perspective, TSMC will put 150 million transistors in that
| area. I kind of suspect that integrated circuits might flow at
| this pressure, so that might not be the application, but a
| superconducting ground plane and power plane would be
| interesting.
|
| Edit: Wait, maybe that's just a giant capacitive load on all
| the signals. Do something smarter.
| thfuran wrote:
| Never mind the silicon, that's about at the compressive
| strength of tool steel and significantly more than that of
| stainless.
| jws wrote:
| I'm beyond my expertise, but silicon crystal's compressive
| strength is 3GPa, so maybe? Plus I assume one would
| surround everything with a "fluid" (or at least flows at
| that pressure) to distribute the forces. Silicon chip fluid
| suspended inside carbide anvil with a steel clamping
| structure and tightening bolts should work. Interconnects
| are left as an exercise for the reader.
|
| I have enough faith that this would work out that I'd put
| it in a sci-fi story, and not enough that I would invest in
| a startup.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Maybe a problem keeping it in a pressure vessel, but it might
| be possible to produce such high pressures at very small scales
| in solid state devices without use of a pressure vessel. In
| that case it would be more about changing the shape or bond
| angle of some nearby material to distort the electric field and
| induce the desired pressure.
| slackdog wrote:
| AFAIK they don't use pressure vessels for pressures this
| high; they use diamond anvils.
| FredPret wrote:
| I wonder if it's possible to come up with a crystal or other
| material that has that much internal pressure - and isn't prone
| to unscheduled pressure release
| UseofWeapons1 wrote:
| Fascinating. This material alone would be revolutionary if
| legitimate, although I'm sure there'd be further improvements.
|
| Question for any experts - what's the relative difficulty of
| keeping something under sustained high pressure in a piece of
| hardware vs keeping it very cold?
|
| Our ultra cold usages work decently well. Would it be any easier
| to keep a hardware component under pressure like what this new
| material requires?
| londons_explore wrote:
| Keeping things cold is effectively an energy vs space tradeoff.
|
| For example, if you wanted to keep an underground
| superconducting wire cold, then you would send coolant pipes
| along it, and wrap it in an insulator. You need to put energy
| into chilling the coolant, inversely proportional to the
| thickness of the insulation.
|
| However, typically for most things humans want to do, the
| cooling cost works out higher than the energy lost to
| resistance in a non-superconductor, so, apart from a few
| specialist use cases (MRI machines, particle accelerators),
| superconductors have seen no use.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| The second to holy grail is temperature above liquid nitrogen
| at around normal pressure with cheap and easy to obtain
| coolant. It will enable big things like really high voltage
| intercontinental transmission lines etc.
| moring wrote:
| Is there some napkin math available on the net for a
| transmission line with a nitrogen-cooled high-temp
| superconductor (Tc > 90K) and thick thermal insulation? I
| mean for the energy required per km too keep it cooled below
| Tc.
| 13of40 wrote:
| ...and how that compares to the energy loss you'd have from
| resistance in a regular cable.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| The energy could be very low - after all we are really good
| at insulation.
| londons_explore wrote:
| They are of the same order of magnitude...
|
| Big high voltage transmission lines lose ~200 watts per
| meter in resistive losses when under full load.
|
| The electrical energy to keep something 1 meter long at
| liquid nitrogen temperatures is also ~200 watts, assuming
| 8 inches of insulation.
|
| The resistive losses go down with the _square_ of the
| power transmitted - so they fall to zero rapidly when not
| under full load. Cooling losses stay approximately
| constant.
|
| Therefore, I suspect a liquid nitrogen cooled
| superconducting cable wouldn't work out financially.
|
| Math only correct to an order of magnitude...
| zardo wrote:
| The actual trade-off would have to be far better
| insulation e.g. double wall vacuum insulated stainless
| pipe. With much higher upfront costs.
| pfdietz wrote:
| We've had that for decades.
| zardo wrote:
| We've already got there with YbCO. But just barely, which
| means useful amounts of current and magnetic field density
| bring it out of the critical region.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| Lmao it requires 1,000,000 atmospheres of pressure for it to
| function. That's not exactly what I'd consider a room temperature
| superconductor.
|
| I could make diamonds from coal at room temperature with that
| kind of pressure.
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