[HN Gopher] Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magneti...
___________________________________________________________________
Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of
LK-99
Author : spekcular
Score : 2178 points
Date : 2023-08-04 01:15 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| marcodiego wrote:
| Ok, didn't read it. What about electric resistance at room
| temperature ambient-pressure under critical current?
| codezero wrote:
| They said they are testing that next. Sounds like they wanted
| to get the initial results out.
| zdragnar wrote:
| So far, from my understanding, the sample size of the material
| has been small enough it's been difficult to rule out
| resistance from corrosion on the contacts of the sensors,
| though I seem to recall a post not too long ago on here about
| resistance below the threshold of measurement around 100
| degrees k.
|
| The compound must be tricky to synthesize with a good degree of
| purity- I think we'll learn quite a bit more if someone manages
| to get a bigger sample than a flake the size of the point of a
| needle.
| civicrypt123 wrote:
| Noob question. Does this breakthrough also translate to
| advancements in quantum computing? Can we expect quantum
| computers with far more qbits?
| scarmig wrote:
| Nope. Quantum computing requires low temperatures not because
| of resistance but to maintain coherence.
| seewhydee wrote:
| A room temperature superconductor would, by definition,
| maintain quantum coherence (of the superconducting order
| parameter) at room temperature.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| That's not what is meant by coherence, what is required in
| a quantum computer is for multiple qbits to maintain states
| coherent to each other. Current quantum computers operate
| in the milikelvin range for a reason, despite
| superconductors working at 1000x higher temperatures.
| qnleigh wrote:
| It won't have a direct impact on quantum computing. People make
| qubits out of superconducting materials that become
| superconducting at 4K or higher, but you have to cool them to
| around 0.03 K for them to really work well as qubits. See https
| ://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_quantum_comp....
|
| But there could very well be indirect applications! This would
| be very very interesting for the physics community, and surely
| lead to other new things.
| fabk wrote:
| Thanks, can I scream my hype out, now?
| jacquesm wrote:
| No, still not... sorry.
| poopbutt7 wrote:
| [flagged]
| samstave wrote:
| This is ELI5 stupid Q:
|
| What may be the benefit of running a sequence of "coils" or
| whatever the Loops may be comprised of such that the N/S to
| whatever polarity positions are required, could be an LK-99 then
| a super cooled, then an LK-99 etc...
|
| If it was in a toroidal spiral (everyone things of the
| trajectories as linear, but toroidals spirals are most efficient)
|
| you could have hybrid tracks - where maybe a linear launch is
| good, but a toroidal control for spins off routing is ideal
| (think a 3d roundabout - to launch vessels diff directions...
| samstave wrote:
| What is we made coroidal spirals over a ferrit but in
| alternating polatities
|
| but we can control.
|
| I a m talking out my butt - thus a toiroidal wrapp where by the
| torioidal spin in induced trough a mecury spinning magnetic
| slurry... as basically a spinned slurry ......
|
| But that just me...
| jjallen wrote:
| One somewhat ironic fact of this story is that the rogue former
| employee perhaps deserves some credit for bringing this thing out
| into the world.
|
| They had been working on this for quite a long time themselves,
| rightfully so. But now the whole world is working on it and
| exploring other methods and combinations of materials I would
| assume (to improve upon the original design and avoid any
| patents).
|
| How long would they have kept this thing to themselves without
| the rogue employee bringing this thing to light?
|
| Perhaps that was part of the rogue former employee's motivation
| in "going rogue": that this thing needs to see the light of day
| so it can start to benefit humanity.
| SergeAx wrote:
| No, they are not. The only consequence of that action was a
| worldwide mess of people trying to reproduce the experiment or
| disavow it. Original authors needed a bit more time to polish
| their discovery, write solid paper with undeniable proofs and
| maybe even prepare handout samples.
| omgJustTest wrote:
| Many of the best and great humans are lost to history without a
| name.
|
| Fiat lux!
| jjallen wrote:
| I'd like to add that if this claim of having replicated the
| material with the reportedly poor description of how to do so
| is true then it really isn't _that_ hard to replicate. I am
| surprised they haven 't published a paper by now.
|
| And this suggests that they were conflicted for some reason
| about publishing, likely commercially so (as evidenced about
| the patent). Maybe they were trying to create a product with it
| that they could sell before others could replicate the
| material.
|
| So the rogue employee does absolutely deserve credit for
| bringing this thing into the world and humanity should not
| stigmatize them for doing so; perhaps we should do exactly the
| opposite.
| a-user-you-like wrote:
| > and humanity should not stigmatize them for doing so
|
| If he really did it for all mankind then give him a huge
| prize
| Iulioh wrote:
| >reportedly poor description of how to do so
|
| Isn't it false?
|
| I have read that the description is pretty extensive, just
| the yelds are really bad because the production method is 1)
| hard and 2) inconsistent?
|
| So the description is good but hard to replicate
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| We will never know, but maybe they receive some governmental
| pressure to never publish and pretend the research lead nowhere
| so that their country only gets the benefit.
|
| But the rogue scientist wanted to share it with the entire
| world.
|
| It would make for a nice movie.
| King-Aaron wrote:
| Have you got any back-story on that? I only saw that their team
| posted it to arxiv, hadn't heard the other drama
| jjallen wrote:
| A former employee was the first to publish a paper with only
| three authors. I am surprised you haven't heard about this.
|
| Then a few hours later a paper was published with six authors
| (without one of the original three authors), ostensibly by
| the core team that has been working on this.
|
| There should be much more detail on the Internet if you
| search for it.
| wetmore wrote:
| I also hadn't heard about this for what it's worth.
| cthalupa wrote:
| It's one of the reasons people were thinking this might
| not be a fraud.
|
| Nobel prizes are capped to 3 people, and the speculation
| is that the rogue person published early to try and
| ensure they were one of the people that received it. No
| reason for infighting like that if you know it's a hoax.
| oldgradstudent wrote:
| > No reason for infighting like that if you know it's a
| hoax.
|
| There was plenty of bitter infighting over credit during
| the 1989 cold fusion fiasco.
|
| Knowing it's not a hoax does not mean it is true.
|
| As always, only reproduction attempts matter.
| cthalupa wrote:
| I never said it was true. Just that it's some evidence
| against it being a fraud.
| Iulioh wrote:
| I even wondered about that, is ever a thing?
|
| Like saying "SORRY, FIRST" to the nobel committee?
| suby wrote:
| Notably, the missing author from the second paper is the
| rogue employee who published the first paper. The order of
| the first two authors is the same for both papers.
| acters wrote:
| earlier in the week, someone posted that the person who
| posted the paper early is someone who wanted to fund the
| project, but the researchers didn't want to include him.
| So he took as much data as he could collect and posted it
| publicly with the addition of his name. He is not a
| researcher or scientist for the team.
| belter wrote:
| See this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36953050
| King-Aaron wrote:
| Fascinating, thank you
| httpz wrote:
| In the early 90s, Prof. Choi theorized a new way of creating
| a room temperature superconductor but it wasn't really
| accepted by the mainstream. Supposedly, in 1999, two
| researchers in Choi's lab, Lee and Kim (hence LK), created
| the first sample of LK-99. They weren't able to reliably
| replicate nor were they able to fully explain the theory.
|
| In 2017, as a dying wish, Choi asked Lee and Kim to continue
| on with the LK-99 research but asked to not publish it until
| they understand the theory behind it.
|
| They founded a lab and collaborated with other scientists in
| the field and Kwon was one of them.
|
| 4 months ago, Kwon left the lab and two weeks ago Kwon leaked
| the paper. The paper Kwon leaked only listed Lee, Kim and
| Kwon as the authors and excluded other collaborators. Some
| suspect Kwon excluded the other collaborators because Nobel
| prize can only be awarded to three people at most. A few days
| after the leak, Lee & Kim hastily published a paper with four
| more authors but not Kwon.
|
| https://namu.wiki/w/LK-99/%EC%A0%84%EA%B0%9C
| constantcrying wrote:
| I think there are multiple big reasons they didn't publish
| sooner. It is pretty clear that they were convinced, but had
| insufficient evidence to convince others. Additionally there
| had recently been a sensational fraud in their field so
| journals would have been extremely sceptical.
|
| It seems to me they were just in the process of constructing a
| convincing paper, which included convincing tests and could
| have been acompanied by sending out samples to independent
| labs. Then they were essentially forced to put out what they
| had, which made their claims even more unconvincing.
| reacharavindh wrote:
| An argument probably could be made for normal run of the mill
| improvements and confirmations that make the scientific state
| of the art move inch-by-inch versus such ground breaking
| discoveries that has the potential to help the world to such
| a big degree. They could very well write their finding in a
| way that we claim we discovered that this works, these
| features work, but we suspect these may also work, and XYZ
| needs to be tested further and those are reserved for future
| work either they themselves are doing are can be sped up by
| others participating. They still get the claim as the
| pioneers for the discovery(rightly so), and still accelerate
| the rate of practicality.
|
| The only problem would be if they worded it in a sensational
| way without evidence to backup their claims like almost all
| battery tech seems to be these days "we discovered a solid
| state battery that will change the world, make EVs, flying
| planes, ships, trucks and remote control toys orders of
| magnitude cheaper, faster, safer blah blah ** once we figure
| out how to get it working in real world conditions and test
| it for real. We were talking about possibilities extrapolated
| from our little theoretical progress."
|
| I still believe the scientific community is smart and moral
| to accept statements held true by evidence. Scoffs are
| reserved for hyperbolic claims.
|
| To make my argument, see the recent paper on achieving energy
| positive nuclear fusion - the authors didnt wait until they
| could achieve Nett energy positive condition (where total
| energy to the system is lower than what was produced). They
| published when they achieved energy to the reaction < energy
| output from the reaction which was a big deal in itself
| eventhough the practical goal would be achieved in future by
| building upon this..
| jjallen wrote:
| Evidently they did have sufficient evidence. With such a big
| potential payout of such a world changing material, others
| have invested a few days of time into verifying their rushed
| paper and indeed their weak evidence was enough.
|
| Again, with a payout so big and ease of replication fairly
| low, the evidence doesn't even have to be that convincing.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| It's also worth mentioning that room temperature
| superconductor "discoveries" happen a lot, and have always
| turned out to be a disappointment.
|
| It's been considered to be within the same bermuda triangle
| of scientific vaporware that demarked by quantum computers
| performing useful tasks, fusion power generation, that sort
| of thing. Always _just_ around the corner and dude trust me
| it totally works in my lab. It 's basically a meme in
| physics.
|
| Room temperature superconductivity is not demonstrably
| impossible like a perpetual motion machine, but mainstream
| press picking up on yet another set of amazing claims in this
| field tends to (deservedly) lead to a lot of eye rolling.
|
| The consequence is that if you've made actual progress in the
| field, you'd better be very sure you are right and able to
| back it up.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| So how sure are we that this isn't yet another in a long
| line of disappointments?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| We're not, and don't think there's a physicist in the
| world who wouldn't advice tempering expectations at this
| point. Yes it would be exciting if it's the real deal,
| but it's also far from the first candidate we've seen and
| so far they've never been replicated.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Currently 39% sure.
| https://manifold.markets/QuantumObserver/will-the-
| lk99-room-...
| yellow_postit wrote:
| What's the track record of open prediction markets (no
| barrier to join) vs super predictor markets (have some
| requirements - be it credentials, proven expertise, or
| track records)?
|
| I keep seeing markets like this posted for LK99 and
| personally find it unconvincing more than a sentiment
| analysis of the twitter and news hype cycle.
| collective-intl wrote:
| The track record is pretty good, even including a bunch
| of small markets with few traders:
| https://manifold.markets/calibration
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > I think there are multiple big reasons they didn't publish
| sooner. It is pretty clear that they were convinced, but had
| insufficient evidence to convince others. Additionally there
| had recently been a sensational fraud in their field so
| journals would have been extremely sceptical.
|
| But hasn't it been 24 years since they discovered LK-99? Or
| am I missing something? If that's true wouldn't it be a
| tragic shame that it wasn't revealed earlier, so that
| progress and applications could occur?
| shepardrtc wrote:
| I can't wait to read the history of this material. 24
| years... I can only imagine the conversations and drama
| surrounding it.
| fwipsy wrote:
| It was originally discovered in 1999 but was shelved for
| over a decade due to insufficient funding. As I understand
| it, they only received funding in 2018 and became more
| confident in their discovery after that.
|
| Here is some (speculative?) backstory:
| https://twitter.com/8teAPi/status/1684385895565365248
|
| It is a tragic shame in hindsight, but no doubt there are
| many earth-shattering discoveries lying within reach, if
| only we knew where to look.
| [deleted]
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| Thanks for the link. Assuming it's accurate it sounds
| like the 24-year delay was just a bit of misfortune.
| baq wrote:
| > The Croatian scientists say that current will flow
| effortlessly through their material, a mixture of lead
| carbonate and lead and silver oxides, at up to about 30 degC.
|
| [...]
|
| > Danijel Djurek, a physicist at A. Volta Applied Ceramics in
| Zagreb, Croatia, claims that he discovered his superconducting
| ceramic mixture in the late 1980s. But he was unable to pin
| down the structure and formula of the material, and his
| research was interrupted by years of war, following Croatia's
| split from Yugoslavia.
|
| excerpts from http://www.rexresearch.com/djurek/djurek.htm
| CommanderData wrote:
| They can still recover from this reputationally very easily
| assuming egos are not in the way.
|
| Accept it happened and make amends and make those things very
| public and move forward to making an official announcement
| together with the so called 'rogue' author (in my opinion he
| did the world a favour).
| m463 wrote:
| Wait, how did co-discoverer a few days ago become rogue former
| employee today?
| anonylizard wrote:
| There's 3 main parties to LK99.
|
| L&K, are two PHDs taught by their now dead former professor.
| Their research into LK-99 is inherited from their former
| professor but they lacked funding, hence it was a hobby
| project for a long time, and they needed funding to work on
| it full time.
|
| The Korean professor: A professor who started taking interest
| and sponsoring the project for the last few years. However,
| he likely didn't participate directly in the research much.
|
| The American professor (Ethnically Korean): A professor who
| was brought in rather recently (Maybe last 1-2 years?), to
| help bring credibility to the team. He is probably the one
| with the expertise to perform measurement and ascertain that
| it is a superconductor.
|
| The Korean professor got kicked out from the team for unknown
| reasons. This was evidenced in the April paper published in
| Korea, which lacked the Korean professor's name. Quantum
| center also removed him from the website.
|
| 4 months later, he was back with a vengeance, and published
| the paper, with only him, and L&K on it (ie, the 3 man
| paper). The Korean professor possesses no sample, and also
| lacks the original data for LK-99.
|
| A day later, the american professor hastily rushed out
| another paper (The 6-man paper), with L&K, himself, and 3
| irrelevant lab assistants.
|
| Since the earlier Korean paper in April got 0 attention and
| was treated like a typical troll paper. They probably assumed
| posting on arxiv was just good material for later legal
| battles, but they could otherwise continue happily
| researching and patenting their material. However, interest
| in LK-99 exploded like a nuke, because the first signal for
| credibility: That two professors were in a bitter battle over
| authorship, did not escape people's eyes.
|
| 2 days later, the Korean professor had a presentation at a
| Korean conference, but attendees were disappointed by his
| data and lack of samples (Prediction markets hit a low of 15%
| at this point).
|
| However, the American professor took control of media
| communications, and quickly dissociated with the Korean
| professor, yet he completely stood by the claims of LK-99.
| Now the American professor has talked to numerous Korean
| media and directly sent an exclusive video to NYT.
|
| Its interesting why L&K chose the American professor over the
| Korean one. Needless to say, if this works out, the
| interpersonal saga will end up in a Netflix documentary, and
| probably many court cases.
|
| I should also note that the nobel prize is likely a secondary
| concern for the group. They aren't in a comfortable academic
| position where money is only a bonus. They were struggling
| PHDs for a long time. Nobel prize money is too little, and
| will come way too late to make a difference for their lives.
| L&K and the American professor are likely trying to maximize
| the value of their patents and know how to sell to investors,
| rather than to make public verification ASAP, which would be
| optimizing for a nobel prize.
| JoshTko wrote:
| Thank you. I think I finally grasp what's going on now.
| phtrivier wrote:
| For people who start the comic in the middle, can you
| provide the real names of the various superheroes
| mentionned here ?
| anonylizard wrote:
| The names are not helpful at all, because of Korean's
| overlapping surnames. But here you go.
|
| L&K = Sukbae Lee, Ji-Hoon Kim
|
| Korean professor: Young-Wan Kwon
|
| American professor: Hyun-Tak Kim
|
| Former (Long dead) professor: Tong-Seek Chair (Sample
| paper:
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02697404)
| phtrivier wrote:
| > The names are not helpful at all, because of Korean's
| overlapping surnames.
|
| Well, you have to provide the full name. Bummer :D
|
| I assume the news would also be much shorter but slighly
| more confusing if we just called all "Joe"s "Joe" ?
|
| Whereas they would be much less ambiguous but slighly
| harder if we all had a uuid assigned at birth. (Or maybe
| a checksum of our DNA ?)
| orangepurple wrote:
| USCIS stores a hash of your face when you enter and exit
| the United States. It's why they make you look at the
| camera.
| almostnormal wrote:
| A hash like a trapdoor, impossible to get properties of
| the face back? Or a hash in the sense of not a picture
| but just some important parameters, but still
| reproducible?
| aae42 wrote:
| Checksum wouldn't work for identical twins
| uiberto wrote:
| Would work for many using whole genomes. CpG methylation
| patterns could also work.
|
| "Despite the important role that monozygotic twins have
| played in genetics research, little is known about their
| genomic differences. Here we show that monozygotic twins
| differ on average by 5.2 early developmental mutations
| and that approximately 15% of monozygotic twins have a
| substantial number of these early developmental mutations
| specific to one of them."
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-020-00755-1
| dom96 wrote:
| > because of Korean's overlapping surnames
|
| This is why you list the full name, rather than just the
| surnames. As you've listed them they are quite helpful.
| vlz wrote:
| This comment has the names and links to the papers:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36953050
| drcongo wrote:
| This is a fantastic rundown of some very confusing events,
| thank you.
| Iulioh wrote:
| Wonder if the "their former professor" will recive
| meaningful credit
| anonylizard wrote:
| This is already in the 6 man paper, that's how the
| internet deduced their story:
|
| "ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We acknowledge late Prof. Chair Tong-
| seek for initiating research of a 1-dimensional
| superconductor of over room temperature at atmospheric
| pressure. In particular, his enthusiasm on superconductor
| study impressed many researchers. "
|
| If this works out, this will be by far the biggest
| invention from Korea ever. They will be remembered in
| every Korean textbook to the end of time.
| rootsudo wrote:
| Thank you for the excellent wrap-up. I couldn't keep up
| with everything, but with the attention this is getting -
| this is just excellent.
|
| Now to learn physics.
| jjallen wrote:
| Supposedly he worked there until four months ago. I am just
| repeating stuff I read on the Internet and I don't know that
| we know all of the facts just yet FYI.
| [deleted]
| krisoft wrote:
| It is not a contradiction. One can be both.
|
| The alegation is that the person in question worked with them
| on the research, and they published it on arxiv without the
| permission of the others. Thus they can be a co-discoverer
| and also rogue former employee.
| wcerfgba wrote:
| Exactly, the 99 stands for 1999, so potentially this material
| has existed for over 20 years and we could have started testing
| and replication on a much wider scale a decade ago. What
| benefit have we gained by disseminating this research so
| slowly?
| marmakoide wrote:
| It might be that the process to make LK99, produces a
| fraction of the Good Stuff, which went under the radar until
| recently. It would not have been the first time. If it is
| confirmed with the proper methodology ... right now it's too
| early to build castles on LK99.
| Iulioh wrote:
| This reminds me of an Asimov novel (don't remember the name)
|
| In this universe there are long life humans that don't really
| collaborate with other humans (like a single person, not a
| group of quasi immortal humans) in the scientific field to
| have all the credit because who cares if you take 200 years
| for a discovery if the glory is all yours
| darkwater wrote:
| It's from "The Robots of Dawn"
| stanac wrote:
| It's second or more likely third book in Robot series.
| mousetree wrote:
| Maybe The Naked Sun or one of the books in that series?
| It's been years since I read it but I remember there being
| some motif about people not interacting physically and
| living a long time.
| oblio wrote:
| https://asimov.fandom.com/wiki/Solaria
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I didn't read a lot of Asimov, but one thing that I noticed
| is that he likes repeating themes like that on several
| books.
|
| It could be the main theme in one, and then just a short
| thing in many others; or the main theme in a few.
| 3yanlis1bos wrote:
| That sounds like the people of Aurora.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Caves_of_Steel
| imdsm wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Daneel_Olivaw
| StackOverlord wrote:
| What happened, for those who want to catch up:
|
| https://twitter.com/8teAPi/status/1685294623449874432
|
| With the anti-hype hype that surrounds this discovery this
| was to be expected. Why would I disclose this kind of
| research to the public so that the whole world can benefit
| from it when I'm called a fraudster or a liar. Why would I
| risk my reputation - no matter how I spin my research - in a
| sacrificial circle jerk when I can work on it stealthily and
| hope to make some bucks ?
| dustingetz wrote:
| that account is fan fiction
| Seanambers wrote:
| Yes a real grifter at that as well.
| beowulfey wrote:
| Neither of them were doing research for the bulk of the time.
| We can only guess what brought them back to the project, but
| it may have restarted sometime around 2016.
| ssl232 wrote:
| I don't know if this is true or not, but I read something
| suggesting they produced it in 1999 as a side product of
| something else but didn't start to examine its properties
| properly until a handful of years ago.
| agumonkey wrote:
| One tiny thing, the compute power to research it in different
| ways maybe. In 99 the supercomputing/datascience landscape
| was very different.
|
| Maybe not worth losing 20 years ... i don't know
| n2d4 wrote:
| > What benefit have we gained by disseminating this research
| so slowly?
|
| It's less visible, but at this scale there's a high cost in
| everyone pausing their research to replicate LK-99. If it
| turns out to be real that's worth, but if not it could've
| gone to better use. Think of what we could've done with the
| time we spent reproducing cold fusion.
|
| It's survivorship bias; yes, you would love to see the
| significant discoveries happen sooner, but if they were
| rushed you'd also see a lot of trash that currently never
| leaves the draft stage. Just look at how many people
| complained that the LK-99 papers were incomplete and
| unprofessional!
|
| Also, LK-99 was discovered in 1999 but wasn't known as a
| room-temperature superconductor then. There are too many
| things to research and not enough researchers, so it was put
| on hold for two decades.
| lucideer wrote:
| > _It 's less visible, but at this scale there's a high
| cost in everyone pausing their research to replicate LK-99.
| If it turns out to be real that's worth, but if not it
| could've gone to better use. Think of what we could've done
| with the time we spent reproducing cold fusion._
|
| This is a (I feel rudimentarily obvious) fallacy of finite
| time implying there is N researchers working on one thing
| that must be useful at any given time. The individuals
| reproducing cold fusion / LK-99 / whichever might not have
| been spending their energy / time / funding on anything
| more "guaranteed productive" (nor even on anything at all)
| otherwise.
|
| Knowledge motivates research. That motivating is not a
| classsically scarce resource, its multiplicative.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| > Also, LK-99 was discovered in 1999 but wasn't known as
| a room-temperature superconductor then.
|
| Was there anything in 1999 about the material that made
| it notable as a discovery then?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Most PhF students a desperately looking for a usefull
| thing to work on. Most professors desperstely search for
| a usefull topic that they can use to justify grant
| funding. etc.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > It's less visible, but at this scale there's a high cost
| in everyone pausing their research to replicate LK-99.
|
| Less visible? More like _invisible_ if you ask me. There 's
| all sorts of seemingly frivolous research going on at any
| given moment. A red herring in this case would be no
| different.
|
| The _instant_ strange behavior becomes apparent it becomes
| worth researching. I don 't see how keeping it silent is
| anything other than a tragic waste.
|
| If it's bogus, we discover that sooner.
|
| If it's legitimate, we discover that sooner, AND the
| benefits to humanity can begin 24 years earlier. Think of
| how much we've accomplished in the last 24 years. Now think
| of how many benefits could have been reaped during that
| time by building on this new knowledge (assuming it has
| practical applications).
|
| If it's truly useful and they knew this 24 years ago: what
| a waste.
| KingLancelot wrote:
| [dead]
| Difwif wrote:
| I'm sorry but this is BS (and I don't mean that as a
| personal attack, just a repulsion to the idea)
|
| As if researcher must drop everything they're doing and
| attempt to reproduce every wild claim. It simply doesn't
| happen because these people are able to work through
| hypotheticals and form value predictions... Just like they
| do with any other research resource allocation decision.
|
| No, it's far worse to lock up knowledge behind academic
| institutional norms and hide and yell "rigor" when anyone
| is curious to see what's being worked on. People can decide
| for themselves what is worth pursuing and the OP is likely
| correct that we're doing damage to our own progress by not
| disseminating a hypothesis that's being worked on but could
| use more resources. Furthermore this fear of someone
| publishing before you in a race to claim the Nobel prize
| likely doesn't help.
|
| The institutions should formalize and normalize a method
| for broad open access to research in progress and broader
| collaboration.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" institutions should formalize and normalize a method
| for broad open access to research in progress and broader
| collaboration."_
|
| This goes double for government-funded research, which
| the overwhelming majority of basic science research is.
| fouc wrote:
| Seems extremely unlikely there's a "high cost" because it's
| already clear there's some strange properties involved in
| LK99. Cracking the explanation for this could potentially
| help advance material science in all sorts of ways.
|
| In some ways this is pure science. Multiple groups working
| on the same thing increases the chance of searching the
| problem space thoroughly, and not missing out on finding
| better local maximas.
| mejutoco wrote:
| Exactly, hindsight is 20/20. This reminded me of a friend
| of mine fixing a coding issue that was impacting
| performance. Fixing it saved a lot of money and it was the
| initiative of the engineer to bring it up. The response of
| the (at the time) CEO: well, why did you not fix it
| earlier?
| danuker wrote:
| The right response is "because my performance issues
| ticket was never prioritized".
| hackerlight wrote:
| > but at this scale there's a high cost in everyone pausing
| their research to replicate LK-99
|
| The people deciding to pause their research are experts
| with their own agency. If they are pausing their own
| research then it's because they've made an expert
| determination that it's worth doing so. So you don't need
| to worry yourself over it. Open the information up so that
| other experts can decide what to do with it.
| fanick wrote:
| maybe they were waiting for some patents to expire?
| numbsafari wrote:
| One, slightly more cynical, theory is that the rogue employee's
| motivation was to push the research out there in order to
| create an opportunity for them to engage in their own research
| or get funding to do that research by making public what they
| may otherwise have not be authorized to make public. It'll be
| interesting to see if there are any threats over an NDA or
| trade secret violations that come out of the original,
| premature, publication.
|
| Everyone's assuming it's about the Nobel, but it is much more
| likely it's about far more lucrative goals.
| toolz wrote:
| I think an interesting outlook on these situations is that if
| you believe someone has the right values (e.g. earning money
| and earning respect from peers) then greed towards those
| values is a nobel pursuit.
|
| If society can't make greed go away then maybe it's better to
| celebrate human nature and contextualize/guide it into being
| pro-social.
| highwaylights wrote:
| > that this thing needs to see the light of day so it can start
| to benefit humanity.
|
| .. by way of Back to the Future hoverboards.
| kome wrote:
| Young-Wan Kwon's legacy will undoubtedly be that of the hero of
| LK99. There is a lingering thought that had this discovery been
| made in the US, it might have been hidden indefinitely by the
| military-industrial complex, never to see the light of day.
| pcrh wrote:
| There's apparently a patent published in 2020. It surprises me
| that it never gained attention.
|
| edit:
|
| KR20210062550A - Mehtod of manufacturing ceramic composite with
| low resistance including superconductors and the composite
| thereof -
|
| https://patents.google.com/patent/KR20210062550A/en
| imdsm wrote:
| Imagine if human progress had taken a wrong turn in 2020 all
| becomes of a typo
| lovemenot wrote:
| ... all because of ... ?
| sammyjoe72 wrote:
| That's. The. Joke.
| fear91 wrote:
| Off-topic but I'd have expected someone to spell-check a
| patent title. Mehtod seems like a misspelling?
| londons_explore wrote:
| Spelling doesn't impact the legal weight of a patent, but
| can help prevent people searching for them.
|
| You'd think to put your deliberate typos in the word
| 'supercobductor' though...
| lvncelot wrote:
| > supercobductor
|
| Now I'm imagining a high-velocity corn transfer mechanism
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's a device you use on each end of a corn pipeline.
| n2d4 wrote:
| Search on that site for "room-temperature superconductor,"
| and you'll see why it never gained attention.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| Just learned about that the hard way myself, haha.
|
| Some guy got a little traction on Twitter briefly for his
| room temperature superconductor patent a couple days ago,
| but when you click his name he's just some crypto nutjob
| with no science background
| BaculumMeumEst wrote:
| people will claim all kinds of crazy, implausible shit in
| patents. you would go insane trying to draw conclusions from
| the set of applications sent to patent offices as a whole, it
| would be impossible to differentiate what is legitimately
| worth paying attention to.
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| A funny theory, especially since this good samaritan only
| prematurely published after his connection to the research was
| severed.
| geuis wrote:
| This is the first time in years where I physically have
| goosebumps the more this seems to be verified. In a good way.
|
| The potential changes this can introduce is equivalent to when
| Faraday, Volte, and all the other 17th/18th century scientists
| started figuring out how electricity works. They had no idea how
| much it would change every aspect of life in the century to come
| after them.
| fnands wrote:
| There is a reason why room temperature (ambient pressure)
| superconductors have been one of the holy grails of physics for
| such a long time: the implications are profound.
|
| I used to be a particle physicist, and some of the more complex
| systems were just those used to cool the superconducting
| magnets down to cold enough that they become superconducting.
| If you can do that at ambient temp, you don't have to bother
| with that entire system.
|
| Also: fusion reactors rely on superconducting magnets (or if
| you are JET live with the fact that you can only run your
| magnets for a few seconds before the overheat), so can have a
| large impact on future fusion reactors.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Completely unrelated, but how does one un-become a particle
| physicist?
| metaltyphoon wrote:
| git reset ---hard
| jacquesm wrote:
| There would be some massive deprecation at the CERN and ITER
| sites.
| regularfry wrote:
| You've got me wondering how much cheaper ITER actually gets
| if you don't need the magnets to be cryogenic.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| What about colliders too?
|
| Imagine large hadron collider without cooling!
|
| We could have the unimaginably huge hadron collider!
| jacquesm wrote:
| What I wonder if the cooling requirement drops how much
| easier it is to get to break-even.
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| Fantastic news!!! Kudos to all concerned and looking forward to
| the levitating automobiles!
| Robotvacuum wrote:
| [dead]
| nocoder wrote:
| I get the idea of superconductivity at room temperature in
| theory. But I don't have enough knowledge to understand in real
| terms, how will the world change if this is true?
| chii wrote:
| For one, lossless storage of electricity.
| dgoldstein0 wrote:
| I think you mean lossless transmission? If we can actually
| replace transmission lines effectively with it, unclear
| whether it's practical for that yet.
| heisenzombie wrote:
| Also energy storage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercon
| ducting_magnetic_energ...
| dgoldstein0 wrote:
| Neat, I hadn't heard of it, but totally makes sense
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's how superconductivity was demonstrated in the
| early days: a current in a loop that didn't decay.
| Sporktacular wrote:
| Both. There are coil based ideas for storage.
| musha68k wrote:
| If feasible and indeed not as expensive to produce these
| materials, high potential for:
|
| - higher efficiency turbines and solar panels - more clean
| energy for the same investment
|
| - fusion?
|
| - low-energy computing at higher performance, as we learned
| recently LLMs so far can't take advantage of hitherto zero
| marginal cost of software anymore
|
| - democratization of advanced quantum computing?
|
| It's all very exciting and in a truly replicable and
| industrially-feasible scenario I'm starting to feel this could
| be another 1960s kind of rate of change. One can dream, no?
| Maybe we can finally get rid of all the doom & gloom stories we
| tell ourselves and actually do something with these unexpected
| presents of our times? Think smartness instead of ignorance,
| (old) Star Trek instead of the latest Fallout fantasy on the
| horizon? Why not?
|
| These and many more consequential innovations might develop
| _just in time_ , as climate change is coming at us _much
| faster_ than we are willing to admit (don 't look up).
|
| That said, even with all of that (including fusion) we will
| still need to cut our co2 emissions; drastically change our
| lifestyles / minimize consumption and deal with already locked
| in impacts hitting us sooner than later.
|
| Enthusiastic midnight edit:
|
| Also what's up with graphene based ICs and optical computing
| advancements? Competition of new old ideas finally come to be
| realized? What's next? I want a new breed of superconductor
| enabled Lisp Machines by 2030! Why not home brew "3D print" the
| whole thing? That should be the ultimate target here! The
| handling of "open source" lead would probably suck though %D.
|
| I guess Alan Kay wouldn't be enthused by such a Lisp Machine
| renaissance in principle yet still stand with his "the best way
| to predict the future is to invent it" credo.
|
| _Let 's predict a future for a planet that shifts back into
| balance!_
| dumpsterlid wrote:
| [dead]
| bawolff wrote:
| Everyone talking about all sorts of important applications.
|
| All i want is a maglev hot wheels track using flux pinning.
|
| Just imagine all the cool toys a room temp semiconductor would
| enable.
| macinjosh wrote:
| full of lead, haha!
| birdiesanders wrote:
| I feel like lead in toys is worth a comeback, the "simpler
| times" people pine for were because lead.
|
| I joke, of course.
| marvin wrote:
| Breaking the sound barrier in your five-year-old's bedroom
| seems like a dodgy business idea.
| jacquesm wrote:
| My youngest would be all over that. I'm already concerned
| about the windows the way things are right now.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| So you say. He's on board with it.
| anonuser123456 wrote:
| You know all those bird scooters people leave lying around
| cluttering up the sidewalk? With a room temperature
| superconductor they will become hover scooters cluttering up
| the sidewalk!
|
| And all of the high voltage transmission lines we want to build
| but can't because of permitting reasons would have zero energy
| loss if we actually built them, which we won't.
| HeartStrings wrote:
| Is this actually true?
| p1mrx wrote:
| We would first need to build a superconducting track for
| the hover scooters (containing magnets) to ride on.
| Assuming we ever figure out how to mass produce the
| superconductor inexpensively.
|
| Perhaps if the track were arranged in a grid-like pattern,
| the scooter could use superconducting electromagnets to
| accelerate and steer.
| depereo wrote:
| If it's a room temperature superconductor there's
| probably 10% US GDP available annually to figure out the
| manufacturing considerations.
| kijin wrote:
| I would actually welcome scooters that only work on
| specialized tracks. Walking safely on the sidewalk will
| become as easy as staying away from those tracks.
| ncr100 wrote:
| It would be SO MUCH QUIETER than tires on asphalt. No
| rubber-particulate pollution, either.
| j13n wrote:
| European cities found that shared space between
| pedestrians and vehicles reduced speeds and increased
| safety.
|
| Carving up public spaces into those that are safe and
| those that can trivially injure or kill ruins the
| outdoors for so many.
| gibolt wrote:
| The key is not giving the car priority. Efficient and
| pleasant pedestrian movement is the main goal.
| dgb23 wrote:
| Somehow I fear such large magnets might come with
| unwanted side effects?
| cthalupa wrote:
| Yes and no. There's no possible way to have a
| superconductor be an actual hoverboard out in the broader
| world - the magnetic field of the earth is just nowhere
| near strong enough. You can make specialized areas where it
| would work, though. It's even been done already with LN2
| cooled superconductors -
| https://www.theverge.com/2015/8/4/9091951/lexus-
| hoverboard-v...
|
| SC could help enable nearly lossless transmission over
| power in HVDC lines, but HVDC lines are already
| significantly more efficient than our regular ones and we
| don't build them for a variety of reasons, so it might not
| make much of an impact there for regulatory/NIMBY/etc. type
| reasons.
| ant6n wrote:
| The superconducting transmission line doesn't need big
| towers, a clear path, a direct path or a shortest path.
|
| It'll be more like a thick pipe, perhaps buried.
|
| Much easier it get a right of way, less environmental
| impact, less paperwork, less time to build.
| robnado wrote:
| I don't know if I would want such a strong electromagnet
| passing through my neighborhood.
| Laaas wrote:
| That Lexus hoverboard is extremely cool. How did I miss
| this commercial?
| themagician wrote:
| Railguns. Everywhere.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| I'm thinking coil guns instead. Room temperature
| superconductors don't solve the rail erosion issue with
| railguns, but I think should greatly increase the performance
| of coil guns.
|
| My thinking is that zero resistance through the projectile
| itself and through the rails would help, but you still need
| to make an electrical connection between the projectile and
| the rails. Either this is done with a plasma arc or physical
| contact, but either of these causes erosion of the rails even
| if there is no electrical resistance through the rails or
| projectiles. Am I missing something?
| dumdumchan wrote:
| Nukes. everywhere.
| Keyframe wrote:
| Almost instant battery charging for example.
| appplication wrote:
| Do you mean replacement of chemical batteries for
| superconducting ones?
| drtgh wrote:
| if he means that, I do not see it happening so easily,
|
| Energy storage in a superconductor is done in the form of
| magnetic field, a superconducting induction coil (SMES),
| whose density of energy storage per kilogram is highly
| inferior to a capacitor and a supercapacitor, which stores
| energy in the form electric fields, and whose density of
| energy storage per Kg in turn is very inferior to chemical
| batteries.
|
| The magnetic fields are charged and released quicker in
| inductors than in capacitors (and than in chemical
| batteries), also the material have a longer life, and the
| rate of self-discharge is sightly inferior in
| superconducting inductors, nevertheless the density per
| kilogram -and to administrate such sudden energy release-
| limits very much the applications.
|
| If LK99 becomes true, and is improved much (as the
| electrical current in the paper is limited to milliamperes
| range), at middle term I don't think on it happening.
|
| If at future is achieved superconducting through nanowires,
| with inferior weight to batteries, may be, but in a car for
| example would need the added weight of metallic "magnetic
| shields" for health security.
|
| IMHO, I don't see it beyond stationary applications.
| appplication wrote:
| This is consistent with my understanding as well. I don't
| see instant battery charge being something that this
| enables. Current battery charge rates are limited by
| battery structure degrading more rapidly at high
| charge/discharge rates, so this wouldn't really have any
| direct effect.
| perlgeek wrote:
| I don't think anybody can _really_ say for now, but if the
| price of it comes down enough, there are two rough categories
| of things that can happen:
|
| * devices that currently use superconductors don't have to use
| cooling anymore, and so become much cheaper to build and
| operate (MRI machines, certain sensors, high-power magnets for
| things like fusion research, big generators, big motors). This
| is a pretty solid bet.
|
| * devices where superconductors would be an improvement, but
| currently don't make economic or practical sense. These are
| almost certain to crop up, but which ones will pan out is IMHO
| very speculative.
|
| In the latter category, things like computing chips, more
| sensors, certain art works (sculptures with permanently
| levitating parts, how awesome!), smaller motors and generators
| seem plausible.
|
| But there is likely whole categories of things we haven't
| thought of that could benefit from either zero resistance or
| rejecting magnetic fields.
| leptons wrote:
| It means we won't lose MRIs when the earth finally runs out of
| helium as they require liquid helium to run the superconductors
| that generate the magnetic field. We're running out of helium
| with no way to replenish it. Helium is the only element on the
| periodic table which is a non-renewable resource on Earth.
|
| So MRIs will get _much_ cheaper, and they could end up being as
| cheap as taking an x-ray today.
| throwaway75849 wrote:
| Channeling M. Kaku:
|
| An Earth-sized MRI machine could image all of the remaining
| mineral deposits, and it coils could make for a hell of an
| autobahn.
| leptons wrote:
| Please don't. M. Kaku is a quack.
| cthalupa wrote:
| Based on our current data LK99 isn't a replacement for helium
| cooled superconductors for the same reason YBCO and similar
| aren't - critical current/critical magnetic field aren't in
| the right ranges for what we need out of MRI machines.
|
| I do think it's too early to say one way or the other what
| all of this ends up looking like, so we might find that
| purer/larger samples have better properties than what was
| measured so far, or the discovery puts us on the trail of
| other RTAPS in the same class that might be better for these
| purposes.
| leptons wrote:
| I never claimed LK99 had the properties needed for MRIs,
| the question I was answering was "how will the world change
| with room temperature superconductors", and my answer is
| valid in the context of the question.
| cthalupa wrote:
| Correction: YBCO and other REBCO can get up to the needed
| magnetic field strength, other issues are the reasons it's
| not a good candidate for MRI machines -
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5472374/
|
| (Too late for me to edit)
| hwillis wrote:
| You can't get CT scans very often, because they hit you with
| large doses of ionizing radiation. Ultrasounds are low-
| resolution spotlights; you shine them at a particular spot to
| diagnose something specific.
|
| With this you could get an MRI at your annual checkup. You
| could diagnose all number of diseases like that, not to mention
| 95% of cancers. Each year your scan is automatically compared
| to the previous year, and any sudden changes in morphology can
| be biopsied. The learning would be revolutionary for medical
| science as well- right now we have so little data on what kinds
| of benign growths people have that our best method for figuring
| out if a mass is a problem is _asking if there are any other
| symptoms_. Not to mention entirely new kinds of medical devices
| would be possible, eg using SQUIDs.
|
| Ground-imaging MRI would also be revolutionized. Archeology,
| paleontology, geology, mapping resources and finding minerals
| would experience a quantum leap. You would be able to drive a
| car through the desert and spot fossils or faults or mineral
| signatures.
|
| Space travel would become essentially free with the use of
| launch loops. Which would also make long-distance travel
| incredibly cheap and practically pollution-free. You would need
| electricity alone to reach low earth orbit, or to accelerate
| planes to multiples of the speed of sound.
|
| Grid-level storage, peaker plants and load-following would
| become nearly obsolete. Superconducting catenaries would
| connect every nation on earth. Normally plants have to turn off
| when everyone goes to sleep; now factories in China can be
| powered by US fission. Canadian homes could be kept warm by
| Australian solar. HVDC interlinks would be obsolete. We might
| eventually transition away from AC power entirely.
|
| CPUs could be anywhere from 10% to 50% more efficient. GPUs
| even more so. Fires, particularly house fires would become less
| common as wires simply stop conducting when they are
| overloaded.
| aqme28 wrote:
| > Fires, particularly house fires would become less common as
| wires simply stop conducting when they are overloaded.
|
| I don't know enough about how this material behaves, but a
| superconductor "quench"* can be pretty catastrophic. I could
| see a room temperature superconductor battery causing fires
| from a quench.
|
| *: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnet#Magne
| t_...
| fellowmartian wrote:
| Full body MRI scans are only expensive in the West, outside
| the west you can get one done for $250. This is a labor and
| regulatory capture problem and not a technology problem and
| will not be affected in any meaningful way by better
| superconductors.
| hwillis wrote:
| Even if it were $250, that's a pretty high cost relative to
| the annual cost of insurance. It's too high to justify as a
| routine diagnostic tool. The financial benefit here is that
| earlier identification would save money in the long term
| treatment. MRIs don't _cure_ cancer, so the direct benefit
| only applies to the limited savings on a very small subset
| of people of the people who actually get cancers that could
| be identified earlier.
|
| The real benefits are indirect (from the viewpoint of the
| insurance people who unfortunately pay for it)- quality of
| life is much better if you catch it earlier, and the
| medical research benefits are huge.
|
| Realistically, it's also not $250 even outside the US- not
| for the resolution needed to diagnose cancers. That's below
| the depreciation cost of a high end (say $1M) machine. 12
| scans a day (it takes roughly an hour for an average scan,
| 12 is per day per machine is pretty average[1]) 7 days a
| week for 10 years is 43,800 scans. So ignoring interest,
| labor, and absolutely everything else that's $228 per scan.
|
| A full body MRI takes an hour only for small patients. More
| realistically 1.5-2 hours.
|
| [1]: https://www.auntminnie.com/index.aspx?sec=ser&sub=def&
| pag=di...
| ricardobeat wrote:
| $250 is a ton of money outside "the west" (I assume you
| mean US/Europe/Aus). It's roughly the minimum wage in
| Brazil.
| fellowmartian wrote:
| I know, but my point is that the price doesn't scale with
| machine and helium costs, but with labor costs and the
| level of insurance racket a particular country has.
| Obviously it'd be great if we didn't require helium
| supply chains to make medical scans, but unfortunately we
| can't fix everything with technology alone.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The cost of the machines will drop considerably so it
| definitely will have an effect. That $250 is still a lot of
| money for many people and if not covered by insurance and
| in the developing part of the world it is utterly
| unaffordable.
| XorNot wrote:
| > We might eventually transition away from AC power entirely.
|
| This is actually a really good point I hadn't fully
| considered, but it's right: the primary reason we use high
| voltage _anywhere_ is because it minimizes resistive losses
| (and the reason we use AC is because it 's easy to transform
| between voltages).
|
| But most of the stuff in my home doesn't _need_ high voltage
| - it 's all running at 5V or 12V. Or it's a motor which is
| magnetically driven and depends solely on magnetic field
| strength (which is independent of voltage).
|
| If all your conductors have _zero_ resistance, then high
| voltage is obsolete. You could safely run a residential
| property on 12V power. Home electrical hazards would a thing
| of the past.
| hwillis wrote:
| > But most of the stuff in my home doesn't need high
| voltage - it's all running at 5V or 12V.
|
| 85 volt DC carries the same power as 120 volt AC, but 85
| volts DC is essentially safe to touch. The human body has a
| much lower AC impedance, so it's MUCH more dangerous. DC
| does still hurt, though.
|
| 40-80 volts (see also: split phases) DC is very convenient
| for most electronics. It's really just things with
| batteries that want 5-12 volts, but stepping that down
| isn't too hard.
|
| At the grid scale, it's a question of which is cheaper. If
| the infrastructure becomes much more expensive (because the
| wires are SC) then you can save money by using DC (which
| gives you 41% more power). If its cheaper to use
| transformers than it is to use more superconductors and
| semiconductors to convert voltages, they'll do that.
|
| Either way the grid would stay relatively high voltage (10s
| of kV), because it's just always going to be worth it at
| that scale to minimize the conductor area.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's interesting to see how many assumptions about our
| world are underpinned by the _lack_ of superconducting
| material. That also immediately gives you an idea of how
| transformative (heh.) room temperature superconductors
| would be.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| We use AC because changing voltage levels with it is
| extremely simple and efficient compared to DC.
|
| In fact the only (practical) way to convert DC voltage
| levels is to convert to AC, do the level conversion, then
| convert back to DC.
|
| Believe it or not, DC already is more efficient for energy
| transfer and why there are already DC high voltage
| transmission lines. You don't have to deal with reactive
| parasitics.
|
| But again the killer is that AC voltages are so easy to
| switch and can by done with >99% efficiency.
| myrmidon wrote:
| This is drawing completely wrong conclusions from erroneous
| oversimplifications:
|
| We're using high transmission voltages to keep current
| down. Superconductors would not change this AT ALL;
| superconductivity generally breaks down not only with
| temperature increases but also magnetic field strength
| (i.e. current).
|
| Switching large currents is also a hassle; especially with
| non-resistive loads.
|
| And completely changing household electricity architecture
| is simply not gonna happen just to marginally improve
| safety, cost/benefit ratio is WAY too high.
| XorNot wrote:
| A superconductor running at high amperage requiring more
| superconductor is still a superconductor. The losses you
| take are _zero_.
|
| Any amount of cross-section of copper though is not - you
| take losses at (I^2)*R. You lose power as a _square_ of
| the current.
|
| There is an enormous difference between using
| superconductors at high currents and using any normal
| material.
|
| Obviously the impact of this depends on what the critical
| current of a hypothetical room-temperature superconductor
| ends up being...but REBCO tapes achieve current densities
| of >40,000A/mm2 (at 77K). Depending on what you end up
| with, the expense and _danger_ of maintaining the high
| voltage infrastructure could easily be seen as not worth
| it - particularly if it speeds up the ability to build
| out and maintain power lines.
| myrmidon wrote:
| > The losses you take are zero.
|
| Sure, but transission losses are generally a low single
| digit percentage-- eliminating those will not have much
| impact, but on the other hand your superconductor is
| EXTREMELY unlikely to be even close to cost competitive
| with aluminum/steel core wire.
|
| Even if you _could_ achieve critical currents comparable
| to conventional high-temperature superconductors at
| ambient temperature (which appears *highly* doubtful!),
| keeping high power transmissions lines at human-
| survivable voltages would be a tremendous waste of super-
| conducting material.
|
| And even inside homes it seems quite farfetched to me to
| scale down voltages-- nobody wants to use plugs and
| switches rated for 200 amps just for their cheap
| toaster...
| jacquesm wrote:
| A typical HVDC line is a work of art, I wouldn't compare
| it with a chunk of aluminum or steel wire.
| myrmidon wrote:
| I was not comparing to HVDC; aluminum with steel core is
| what's typically used in generic overhead power lines.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, and for short haul that works fine. But for really
| long haul it doesn't, hence HVDC so that's what you
| compare with: the situation where it makes a difference
| such that extra cost incurred doesn't immediately
| invalidate your option. HVDC is _much_ better comparison
| material than your average overhead powerline. For the
| same reason we don 't compare bicycles with trucks for
| long haul cargo but we _do_ compare bicycles with cars
| for shorter distances and personal travel.
| sz4kerto wrote:
| > Sure, but transission losses are generally a low single
| digit percentage
|
| Around 6-8% per 1000 km. That's a lot.
| Doddler wrote:
| I can't imagine any scenario where using 1000 km of
| superconducting material would ever be worth it to save
| 6-8% though.
| hwillis wrote:
| NordLink flows 1400 MW. Wholesale electricity in Germany
| is roughly $105.
|
| 365x24x(1400x.07)x105 = $90 million per year. Adds up to
| the cost of the total project every 17-22 years. Over 20
| years it's $1.8 million per km. If the superconductor is
| 20 kg/m (2.4" or 6.2 cm width, _huge_ ), that's $90 per
| kilogram. 10x the cost of copper.
| andbberger wrote:
| we could do annual scans with current tech. the fundamental
| limitation of MRI is proton relaxation time, which limits the
| sampling rate. the path to reducing scan time and thus cost
| is to use a more sophisticated reconstruction method to
| reduce the number of required samples. this is being worked
| on.
|
| i don't have any data here, but I am dubious that a room
| temperature superconductor will bring down the price of MRI
| machines. a room temp superconductor only saves you a dewar,
| about $50k of liquid helium and a cryocooler. you still have
| to build the rest of the MRI, which is an _extraordinarily_
| sensitive instrument
|
| > Fires, particularly house fires would become less common as
| wires simply stop conducting when they are overloaded.
|
| depends how sharp the phase transition is.
| gibolt wrote:
| There is a lot of infrastructure around the MRI in order to
| support liquid helium storage, cycling, and inter-device
| pathways. It isn't just what you see in the room.
|
| It might still be a large machine, but a bunch of
| bottlenecks disappear. With that, it is only a matter of
| time until a startup develops a much cheaper, smaller, and
| more efficient device.
| ttyprintk wrote:
| Philips is a big player making the assumption that the
| next generation of MRI will be smaller, cheaper, and more
| widely available. But, I can confirm smaller players are
| operating on that assumption as well.
| im3w1l wrote:
| It's my understanding that long-known high temperature
| superconductors already don't require helium cooling. How
| does that fact fit into the picture?
| MauranKilom wrote:
| CMIIW but the main thing to make acquisition times more
| reasonable is higher magnetic field strength. Which,
| leaving all the technical questions of achieving it aside,
| comes with other fun constraints like requiring heavy
| shielding for the room and of course very careful control
| of what kinds of metallic objects can go near it...
| ufo wrote:
| Seems to be the same one that had a video a couple of days ago
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36953396
|
| Back then, many asked if this was superconduction or merely
| diamagnetism. Does the new paper shine any light on this
| question?
| saladdressing wrote:
| [dead]
| lamontcg wrote:
| The exact same video URL
| (https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV14p4y1V7kS/) is linked to in
| this article. There doesn't seem to be anything new here.
| [deleted]
| scarmig wrote:
| The paper shows a clear phase transition to diamagnetism as the
| material is cooled. That would be seen in superconductors and
| not in regular diamagnetic materials. I'm not aware of any that
| have that kind of phase transition. Though since we're in weird
| territory here, it's important to note some weird non-
| superconductor behavior that's beyond regular diamagnetism
| might be going on as an alternative explanation. But it is
| weird.
|
| ETA: also, in the presence of a magnetic field, that transition
| temperature decreases. That's pretty huge. Unless this paper is
| fraudulent, I take this as the biggest positive evidence so far
| that something besides simple diamagnetism is going on. And,
| cards on table, with the assumption that the paper is not
| fraudulent, this pushes my odds above 50% for the first time.
| bilsbie wrote:
| What temperature?
| XorNot wrote:
| They got about 50 degrees C, but note that the bulk sample
| and the more pure tiny sample are different.
|
| It definitely contributes to the general feel that however
| this works, it's an inefficient synthesis that's
| problematically generating the material we want.
|
| It certainly makes me wonder if something like molecular-
| beam epitaxy would be able to directly grow a more pure
| sample (but I imagine that's expensive and time-consuming
| to setup, plus not really what we're hoping for if we want
| to use lots of it).
| scarmig wrote:
| 326K (+127 deg F) and 340K (+152 deg F) for their less and
| more pure samples respectively. And, yes, if it's a
| superconductor as we understand them, that's the
| temperature at which it would have zero resistance as well.
| hinkley wrote:
| So that's within the range of off the shelf cooling
| equipment to maintain superconductivity.
|
| Any speculation if that's consumer, commercial, or
| industrial off-the-shelf?
|
| Sounds like we may be talking running an MRI off of a
| mini split system.
| cthalupa wrote:
| LK99 isn't necessarily a stand-in for helium cooled
| superconductors - if all SC were equivalent to any other,
| YBCO and similar would have been enough to make MRIs
| significantly cheaper - LN2 is easy and cheap to produce.
| yreg wrote:
| 53degC and 67degC.
|
| Wow.
| seanthemon wrote:
| Soon to be average temperatures, what luck!
| hksoftware wrote:
| Nonsense.
| yreg wrote:
| It's obviously a hyperbole. But if we once were to use
| these SCs to transport energy from solar farms in Sahara,
| it might have to operate in that temperature range.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Five meters down in the desert you're under 25 degrees
| year round. It's the _average_ that matters for soil
| temps, not the peaks. You can approximate this by taking
| the average air temperature and defining the surface as
| the top five meters. Below the 10 meter mark the day
| /night cycle influence is pretty much negligible (but
| that would be more costly).
|
| For instance:
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Temperature-
| variation-of...
| SamPatt wrote:
| Earth's average temperature right now is ~17deg Celsius.
|
| So...no.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| By comparison the hottest verified recorded air
| temperature in the world is 54degC
|
| > if the current record were to be decertified then the
| holder would be a tie at 54.0 degC (129.2 degF), recorded
| both at Furnace Creek and in Kuwait.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_temperature_recorde
| d_o...
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Open air. These days the interior of my car regularly
| exceeds 54 even with the windows cracked and a winshield
| shade up.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| Thanks, we really needed burger units here
| EvgeniyZh wrote:
| Magnetic transitions as a function of temperature are not
| unheard of, and it makes sense for them to depend on external
| field (they are magnetic after all). Lanthanum cobaltite for
| example has transition from diamagnet to paramagnet, likely
| due to change of spin state (see, e.g., [1]). I'm not saying
| that's what's happening, but transition (if it is there,
| hastily written papers tend to have subtle inaccuracies)
| doesn't rule out non-SC diamagnetism
|
| [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09
| 258...
| concordDance wrote:
| > this pushes my odds above 50% for the first time.
|
| Time for you to make some money then? :D
|
| https://polymarket.com/event/is-the-room-temp-
| superconductor...
| danbruc wrote:
| Can one know how many people are in that market? When
| prediction markets where mentioned early during the LK-99
| story, I looked a bit around out of interest, which
| platforms exist, which topics they cover, how many people
| participate in that markets. Where I could find the number
| of predictors, it seemed pretty underwhelming - one, ten,
| fifty, a hundred, I think the highest I ever saw was a bit
| over a thousand, but even then less than a hundred or so
| where using real money, the majority was using play money.
| Did I miss the place where everyone is? Is this to expected
| because the are so many topics you can bet on? Are the
| resulting prices still meaningful even with a small number
| of predictors only?
| cubefox wrote:
| That seems to be made up as you would have discovered
| that there is no major money prediction market besides
| Polymarket, which was linked above.
| danbruc wrote:
| What seems to be made up?
| cubefox wrote:
| He implied there are many money prediction markets.
| danbruc wrote:
| How did I imply that there are many real money prediction
| markets, that was exactly my question, did I miss the
| ones where everyone is or are prediction markets just not
| that popular and that is why even the big ones do not
| have a large number of predictors.
| cubefox wrote:
| There is just one real working prediction market:
| Polymarket. However, it is currently illegal to use in
| the US, because of old laws. This can be circumvented
| with cryptocurrency, but most Americans still won't use
| such a hack. Which strongly limits the popularity of
| Polymarket, as US Americans happen to be the people who
| are most interested in prediction markets.
|
| There are also the prediction ... platforms Metaculus and
| Manifold, which are legal in the US, since they only use
| made-up internet points instead of real money. I'm not
| sure whether this even hurts their accuracy compared to
| Polymarket though.
| Teever wrote:
| ugh, how come people can bet on stupid shit like baseball
| but they can't bet on important shit like
| superconductors?
| cubefox wrote:
| The CFTC is overstepping its mandate:
| https://www.richardhanania.com/p/how-to-legalize-
| prediction-...
| cthalupa wrote:
| If enough people cared, you could probably make the same
| argument that got sports betting into a place of legality
| and get at least some subset of prediction markets
| legalized.
|
| The sportsbook argument was that sports betting involves
| more than random chance - knowledge of the game, the
| players, etc. effectively turn it into a matter of skill.
|
| I doubt there are enough interested parties to bother for
| prediction markets, though.
| epivosism wrote:
| Manifolds main market on LK99 has 4.6k predictors now.
|
| This is a pretty strict version, at 33% now by 2025
|
| https://manifold.markets/QuantumObserver/will-the-
| lk99-room-...
| cubefox wrote:
| That's a play money market
| epivosism wrote:
| Hackernews is also play money
| bobsmooth wrote:
| Website says $1 083 678 has been bet so far. You can
| scroll down to see all the shares and their prices.
| ant6n wrote:
| I wanted to bet 10$ or so, but the two links above both
| seem to be some sort of cryptocurrency thing. I dunno,
| isn't there a way to gamble on the future that isn't
| so... shifty?
| Zpalmtree wrote:
| this lets me do what I want by it's bad because hacker
| news told me crypto can't be useful for anything
| concordDance wrote:
| My understanding is no due to US regulations and their
| stranglehold on the financial system.
| ta1243 wrote:
| The sensible thing would be to bet against it - as shown by
| xkcd
|
| Did that site predate https://xkcd.com/955/ or was it
| inspired by it?
| seewhydee wrote:
| They have quantitative magnetization-versus-temperature data
| taken using a PPMS (an automated physical property measurement
| system). It shows strong evidence of some kind of diamagnetic
| transition at ~ 320K. It seems very likely now that this
| material has some kind of interesting magnetic property,
| whether or not it's due to superconductivity.
| fcanesin wrote:
| Yes, in two forms:
|
| First it shows a temperature graph vs moment, as they heat it
| it loses the diamagnetism around the temperature LK99 is said
| to be superconducting.
|
| Second only a superconductor will have net-zero field, which
| means "stable" levitation. In the video they approach the
| sample with the magnet and flip it while the piece is mostly
| "in place". A regular diamagnet generates a external field that
| "follows" the field applied so it would likely move sideways,
| that is why to "levitate in place" a diamagnet people normally
| use a Halbach array.
|
| EDIT: A Halback array is made alternating the poles N-S of the
| magnet, so that forces of repulsion created by the diamagnet
| cancel. This is why you will see people using multiple magnets
| when levitating pyrolytic graphite.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Halbach. Named after Klaus Halbach.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| >we successfully verify and synthesize the LK-99 crystals which
| can be magnetically levitated with larger levitated angle than
| Sukbae Lee's sample at room temperature. It is expected to
| realize the true potential of room temperature, non-contact
| superconducting magnetic levitation in near future.
|
| Aaaand we're back!
|
| I'm really trying to remain (reasonably, not ideologically)
| skeptical but if this is legit this is a huge step towards
| confirmation.
| MBCook wrote:
| At this point, even if this doesn't turn out to be the holy
| grail this seems like it would still be a very big
| step/promising avenue for research on the path right?
| lunfard000 wrote:
| Hopefully this is the AlexNet of the superconductors
| :fingers-crossed:
| carbonguy wrote:
| IANA physicist, so grain of salt etc. but yes, I agree with
| your assessment - even if not as impressive as we're all
| hoping, at the least we have a very promising new vein of
| superconductor research to mine (as it were).
|
| In other words: even the downside here is great, and the
| upside is...
| gibolt wrote:
| It still hasn't been a week. Giving a bunch of these teams
| and one's with no announcements yet an additional year will
| hopefully lead to some very exciting findings
| raffraffraff wrote:
| So, hoverboards? Excellent.
| carabiner wrote:
| Update from 2 hours ago
| https://twitter.com/floates0x/status/1687296154416066560
|
| "LK-99 Updates around the Korean Verification Committee:
|
| - Sample will not be released today/tomorrow
|
| - Group waiting on peer review (implied to be APL materials) and
| could take 2-4 weeks
|
| - Sample possibly with APL Materials, which is why it cannot be
| provided to verification committee
|
| - Team is asking the Verification committee for a detailed plan
| on how the committee intends to perform the verification before
| proceeding
|
| Now, Hyun-Tak Kim also issued the following quote in regards to
| the Korean Verification Committee: 'doneul bilryeoseo eoryeobge
| saeobhaneun bundeulhante waseo jojigjeogeuro hoengporeul burineun
| geoseun baramjighaji moshada"myeo igati balghyeossda'."
|
| Can anyone translate the Korean?
| Havoc wrote:
| iPhone translate reckons
|
| > It is not advisable to borrow money and come to people who do
| business with difficulty and be organised and do tyranny," he
| said.
|
| Maybe he is frustrated with the verification process?
| softwaredoug wrote:
| I no nothing about superconductors. And have been largely
| ignoring this until it seemed more certain.
|
| Can someone ELI5 why this matters? What does it enable
| technologically?
|
| Flying cars? Fusion reactors? Magic fix for global warming?
| trolan wrote:
| No resistance in wires means limitless power lines, phone
| lines, batteries charge instantly..
| tartrate wrote:
| Now how about some practical implications rather than
| theoretical?
| moolcool wrote:
| MRI machines will get much better/cheaper. They use
| superconductors already, but are very hard and expensive to
| keep at their super-cold operating temperature.
| shivekkhurana wrote:
| Hoverboards.
| vasili111 wrote:
| Is this a joke or are you serious?
| sonusario wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KtzyZKSuls
| moolcool wrote:
| > batteries charge instantly
|
| Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't there still be a
| bottleneck on the battery chemistry itself?
| luguenth wrote:
| The Superconductor would also store the Energy. It could
| instantly release and take in energy. So this would also be
| the battery
| vasili111 wrote:
| > It could instantly release and take in energy.
|
| In that case, can it be used to create new type of
| explosives?
| sojuz151 wrote:
| You could run a cable from sahara to the America to send solar
| power in the night
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Conventional conductors have resistance, so when you run
| electrical current through them they heat up; this is why
| laptops and desktops have fans to cool the chips, why phones
| get hot and so on. Superconductors transmit energy without
| resistance, so the heating problem goes away and the energy
| costs of running the device go way, way down. Basically you can
| pump more through smaller wires without worrying about them
| melting. This means that just about any electronic/electrical
| device could be run more cheaply, safely, and at a smaller
| scale.
|
| Advanced tech like MRI machines, maglev trains, and quantum
| computers all use superconductivity now, but are enormously
| bulky and expensive because they require extreme cooling using
| liquid helium (which is in short supply). Room temperature
| super conductors can dispense with all that, so instead of a
| quantum computer being the size and power draw of a
| refrigerator (because it is in fact mostly refrigerator) it
| could go in your wristwatch.
|
| Superconductors also expel magnetic fields, which in practical
| terms means they repel magnets. And they only repel, without
| being attracted to magnets at all, like iron or the poles of
| other magnets. So you can use them for levitation. And because
| superconductors have zero resistance, if you put energy into a
| superconducting coil it stays there forever, just circling
| round and round the coil.
|
| This LK-99 material people are talking about is an alloy of
| lead and copper, and it's not that difficult or expensive to
| make. The raw materials are fairly cheap, and the production
| involves heating it to hundreds of degrees centigrade for 24-48
| hours, which is very easy to do in a lab and probably easy to
| do at industrial scale. Scientists don't understand the
| material very well yet, but if these discoveries are validated
| (as appears to be happening _right now_ ), then refining the
| manufacturing process is going to happen quite quickly because
| the payoffs and economic demand will be enormous.
|
| People are comparing this to the invention of the transistor; I
| think a better comparison is the electrical lightbulb. It's
| going to change things massively, because any country will be
| able to manufacture this. You could manufacture this stuff at
| home, the equipment you need fits on a desk and costs only a
| few thousand $.
| digbybk wrote:
| > The raw materials are fairly cheap, and the production
| involves heating it to hundreds of degrees centigrade for
| 24-48 hours
|
| Can you also ELI5 why this seemed like such a hard problem to
| solve up until now? Was it something hiding in plain site?
| blackmesaind wrote:
| There's no general analytical method to solve for a
| material with specific properties, including
| superconductivity. The properties of materials are governed
| by the quantum mechanical behavior of electrons and their
| interactions with the crystal lattice. These interactions
| are typically described by the laws of solid-state physics,
| which involve solving complex quantum mechanical equations
| for the electrons in a crystalline structure.
|
| For simple systems, such as some low-temperature
| superconductors and idealized models, researchers can
| sometimes make analytical approximations or derive
| simplified equations that describe the behavior of the
| material. But for most materials, the equations are too
| complex to solve analytically, and researchers rely on
| numerical methods, computational simulations, and empirical
| data to understand and predict material properties.
|
| It's similar to the reason we can't find easy analytical
| solutions to other complex systems (like models trained via
| Machine Learning), there are just too many complex factors
| and interactions to take into account.
| rc_kas wrote:
| thank you friend for this post
| hackerlight wrote:
| > energy costs of running the device go way, way down
|
| By how much?
| Tade0 wrote:
| Everything that involves powerful magnets and benefits from
| making things float - like bearings.
|
| Robots and exoskeletons come to mind.
|
| One of the more bonkers applications would be to wrap Mars
| around the equator with it, creating an artificial
| magnetosphere.
|
| Temperatures on Mars are pretty low, but during the Martian
| summer they get to a nice 20degC there, so currently available
| superconductors are not up to the task.
| stuckinhell wrote:
| Whoa, where can I read more about something like that ?!
| est wrote:
| So far lab replication efforts are:
|
| Two from HUST: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV14p4y1V7kS/
| https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV13k4y1G7i1/
|
| One by USTC https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Ex4y1X7ix/ this
| tiny sample can stand on its pointy side.
|
| One by Qufu Normal University
| https://www.zhihu.com/zvideo/1669820225079070720
|
| One with THU background but claims a personal project
| https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV14z4y1s7Vo
|
| Why are't more labs outside China making LK-99 and publish
| videos?
| justsee wrote:
| There seems to be a few live efforts underway on Twitter:
|
| * https://twitter.com/andrewmccalip/status/1687288889717989376
|
| * https://twitter.com/CondMatfyz/status/1687051547337781248
|
| I imagine over the next few weeks there'll be an explosion of
| efforts to replicate if it's truly that straightforward to
| produce for reasonably-equipped labs.
| blinding-streak wrote:
| The vast majority of science does not take place on Twitter.
| est wrote:
| Depends it's wet lab science or dry lab.
|
| but it's a growing trend anyway.
|
| Twitter is just one of those communication platforms.
| marmakoide wrote:
| I guess it's a mix of - It's a good opportunity to gain
| visibility by working something grabbing the news. 1st room
| temperature superconductor, that's big - (Under)graduate lab
| interns can be thrown onto any crash projects at will without
| much repercussion or resistance, boss is boss and should not be
| subject to questioning
|
| I did a post-doc in China, so that's my sample size N=1 piece
| of cheap opinion
| jliptzin wrote:
| With zero resistance actually
| shusaku wrote:
| I think the comments you are receiving are missing the simplest
| explanation: Chinese labs are better at synthesis, and there's
| a lot of them.
| lucubratory wrote:
| A lot of commenters here are from the West, and the
| atmosphere between the PRC and the West (particularly the US)
| at the moment is quite a bit more acrimonious and competitive
| than it has been historically. It makes sense that people
| would leap first to essentially "They aren't as smart as
| us"/"They're less honest than us"/"They're less trustworthy
| than us" etc. The simplest and most likely correct
| explanation is that the PRC has a lot more STEM students in
| absolute terms and even proportionately, more and very well
| funded labs with very ambitious leadership and "national
| spirit"/"something to prove" style thinking, and that
| particularly in chemistry/materials science the PRC is
| dominant, with a huge proportion of all the highest quality
| chemistry focused universities, academies etc.
| senttoschool wrote:
| I, too, found it fascinating how every initial reply dodged
| giving the Chinese credit. Instead, all of them tried every
| way to paint their publications in a negative light.
|
| Surely, most tech workers have encountered working with
| highly competent technical coworkers from China? Or that
| Chinese students in America tend to perform well above
| average academically?
|
| Why should anyone be surprised that China performs
| exceedingly well in sciences?
| FrostyFlowers wrote:
| Several months ago a professor from Tsinghua University got 2
| million views in bilibili.
|
| https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1cY4y1y7ZM
|
| Translation of the title: _If room temperature
| superconductivity is really repeated, I will eat shit_
|
| Then this topic became hot in bilibili. Currently the first
| LK-99 replication video reaches nearly 10 million views.
| wenyuanyu wrote:
| I am from China. Not surprised at all..
|
| Young researchers in China often face intense competition and
| pressure. While they are generally well-funded in the short-
| term, even more so than their counterparts in the US or Europe,
| the lack of long-term career security can be challenging. They
| must continuously chase after every potential scientific
| breakthrough, like LK-99, not just out of passion or curiosity,
| but as a necessary step for survival in their career.
|
| Furthermore, the system in China offers many awards, grants,
| and titles that are tied to age. These are not just for
| prestige but are critical for progressing in their career. This
| situation adds another layer of urgency and competition among
| young researchers.
| seanthemon wrote:
| Would this lead to rushed results? Or it's worse to give bad
| results than no results?
| dluan wrote:
| Better to do science out in the open and let the results
| speak for themselves.
| rfoo wrote:
| Yes, as you have seen this time.
| f6v wrote:
| > lack of long-term career security can be challenging
|
| I don't know, my fellow PhD students in EU have the same
| fears.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| But it sounds like at least in China, there is some clear
| action they can do about it, so that's the motivator.
|
| What would some PhD student in EU who is worried about job
| security be able to do about it constructively?
| jacquesm wrote:
| > Why are't more labs outside China making LK-99 and publish
| videos?
|
| some possibilities:
|
| - they have not been able to conclusively replicate anything
| and don't want to publish a negative result for fear of someone
| else publishing a conclusive positive result later.
|
| - they are more careful to publish something that they are not
| (yet?) 100% sure about
|
| - they don't care so much about the whole 'science in the
| spotlight' thing and prefer to go the traditional route of
| publishing after peer review of one or more papers rather than
| to make YT videos and having to fend off a barrage of
| interaction
|
| - fear of getting it wrong.
| [deleted]
| senttoschool wrote:
| To add to your list of possible reasons:
|
| - There are way more STEM graduates in China by a wide margin
|
| - 18/20 of top universities in the world for chemistry
| research is in China according to Nature, including one of
| the attempts by USTC (#2 ranking):
| https://www.nature.com/nature-index/institution-
| outputs/gene...
|
| - Supply chain is faster in China for chemicals and materials
|
| - China has more money/equipment for this sort of stuff
|
| - China is on average, more pro-science than the rest of the
| world
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, good points though the money angle is debatable.
|
| The USA and Europe are 'on average' also more pro-science
| than the rest of the world, but I think the East has the
| edge in education and comes across as more focused on
| progress. Probably this is underpinned in part because they
| have a ton of very hard problems that need solving and in
| the 'rich West' people are much less driven because their
| lives and the lives of their families are on average
| already quite plushy.
|
| It makes you wonder what could happen in Africa and Latin
| America once they embrace education and science.
| senttoschool wrote:
| One difference I've found living in the West and China is
| that being academically successful often gets you made
| fun of in the US but adored in China.
|
| There's quite a lot of anti-intellectualism in the US.
| Therefore, there's an equal amount of anti-science.
|
| Meanwhile, every Chinese I've ever met is pro-education
| and thinks highly of science.
| calf wrote:
| You should see the look on my parents' HK church friends
| whenever I unintentionally start talking about science,
| it's like I said a swear word.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I can see some problems with the setting, not necessarily
| the country.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I call that the cult of stupidity. It is unfortunately
| very common where I live.
| [deleted]
| 0xDEF wrote:
| Most Western European researchers have been on vacation the
| past few weeks.
|
| I don't fault them for failing to synthesize room-temperature
| superconductors while they were relaxing in some resort in
| Turkey or Thailand.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| Because all of these replications aren't contributing much;
| they're bare bones efforts with little to no scientific
| insight. Not one of these papers is conclusive in terms of
| showing evidence for it being a superconductor. None of them
| even contribute meaningfully.
|
| This happens in machine learning all the time. Low quality
| papers rush in after every major release and announcement in
| order to be first. But in the long term they're meaningless
| because it takes time to do a good job.
|
| Good labs don't want to announce half done maybe results. They
| want to announce conclusive comprehensive high quality results
| they can stand behind. That's what moves science forward.
|
| Plenty of labs are working on lk-99, but they won't publish
| this sort of half assed analysis.
| iamshs wrote:
| These studies help enthuse people though. I welcome them. Not
| for science but potential. Tells me that something is there,
| rest is on experts as you said.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > Why are't more labs outside China making LK-99 and publish
| videos?
|
| Good rigorous science takes time to produce. It can take
| anywhere between several months to a year or more, and the
| career implications for rushing something out that is later
| found lacking is not great.
| wenyuanyu wrote:
| While it's true that good science often takes time, I believe
| it's not necessarily the whole picture. In fast-paced and
| rapidly evolving fields like this one, swift and open sharing
| of progress can be incredibly valuable. This is evident from
| the recent developments in AI and large language models
| (LLMs), where real-time collaboration and data sharing have
| led to exponential advancements.
| abnry wrote:
| > the career implications for rushing something out that is
| later found lacking is not great.
|
| On a tangent, this idea of reputation keeps on coming up in
| this whole discussion and I am burdened by it in a way I
| don't fully understand. The way people have talked, if this
| LK-99 doesn't work out, then it is almost as if those who
| published this did something _morally_ wrong. Well, morally
| wrong is not quite true, but the way people talk about it
| tanking their reputation it feels like such a strong
| statement. Is there some way we can focus on the science and
| not get bogged down in the very human reputational part of
| this whole thing? It's almost as if a good chunk of the
| scientific community don't care about the benefits the
| science brings but the reputational benefits.
| qnleigh wrote:
| This is an good point. I think there is a difficult balance
| to strike between open communication and adding confusing
| noise to the scientific literature. Partly for historical
| reasons, there is an expectation that published science is
| correct to the best knowledge of the authors. Since
| writing, publishing, and reading papers takes a lot of time
| and effort, there are advantages to this precedent. I work
| in physics, and I can tell you that if we published all of
| our half-baked and often wrong ideas, we would waste a lot
| of people's time, at worst sending people down blind allies
| that we would soon rule our ourselves. I suppose tying
| reputation damage to publishing incorrect or misleading
| results is then part of the incentive structure that keeps
| publication quality high. At the extreme, there's was one
| recent LK-99 paper that had an obvious glitch in their
| data, and instead of taking a bit more time to debug it,
| they just posted the paper and speculated about what was
| going on. If that's how much you're rushing, how do I know
| I can trust your data?
|
| But there are costs to this. There are big gaps between
| what people discuss with colleagues and what gets
| published, and the is no forum to publish partial or
| negative results, except maybe conferences. Ideally
| published papers stay at a very high bar, but there are
| other forums to publicly share work in progress. In a way
| Twitter is becoming this.
| svara wrote:
| Working in science is different from working in other
| fields in that you work with things that are not well
| known, where a lot is unclear and your job is to move
| information out of this murky regime out into the light.
|
| This means it's really easy to just claim something, that
| will be really hard for others to verify.
|
| And wrong claims are incredibly common. It's easy to delude
| yourself through all sorts of biases or good old sloppy
| work.
|
| That's why, when scientists talk to each other, they need
| to know that the other person is a serious scientist and
| won't pollute their mind with nonsense.
|
| If you develop a reputation for making baseless claims,
| people will stop including your claims in their own
| thoughts.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's a direct side effect of reputation and funding being
| closely correlated: if your reputation is that you put out
| stuff that doesn't work you won't get funded. This is dumb,
| but that's how the world works. That's why you almost
| always see the 'more research is needed' line in various
| papers, it is most helpful when seeking for funding that
| one paper will lead to another. But (unfortunately)
| negative results aren't nearly as often published, and that
| is because they will not get cited as much in follow on
| papers. It's all the result of metrics based meta analysis
| of papers, aka the 'impact factor' (which, no kidding is a
| copyrighted term), once that got established that became
| the thing that science partially optimized for.
|
| During the 'golden age' of science, the time of the Royal
| Society the fields weren't specialized at all and the
| publication mechanism was scientists sending each other
| interesting stuff by post. At that time there was no meta
| analysis at all and there was so much low hanging fruit
| that the 'gentleman scientist' could make big breakthroughs
| in their home laboratories. But as that low hanging fruit
| decreased the educational paths required before being able
| to do meaningful science became longer and longer, then
| specialization set in and the costs of doing science went
| up. That's how we arrived at grants used to fund science.
| abnry wrote:
| > It's a direct side effect of reputation and funding
| being closely correlated
|
| This sheds some light on it to me. I guess what partly
| surprises me is that people seem to care more about
| reputation than just a means for improving the signal to
| noise ratio in papers or as a estimate on what will give
| you your biggest bang for your buck.
|
| The other issue I see come up is the idea that if there
| is no signal to noise filter, then a scientist might
| "waste their time," either reading the paper or trying to
| replicate. But to me, it sounds a little bit like trying
| to avoid actually doing science. And peer reviewed papers
| don't imply excellent quality either. You should evaluate
| papers on their merits. It is your job, as a scientist,
| to evaluate the most productive approaches based on the
| merits of the science being done, not based on
| reputation.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > That's how we arrived at grants used to fund science.
|
| A lot of these gentleman scientists were independently
| wealthy aristocrats that didn't need hand-outs. The fact
| that we don't to a meaningful extent have that sort of
| leisure class anymore is arguably a much bigger reason we
| need grant funded science these days.
|
| It could be argued there a bit of a replication of the
| pattern in the space race between Musk and Bezos, but
| they're missing the sort of well education the
| aristocrats of yore would have had[1]. They employ a lot
| of people to do the actual dirty work, but that's not
| really a big difference from back then either.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
| jacquesm wrote:
| Fair point, yes, they typically were quite wealthy for
| their time _or_ already supported by the aristocracy.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| A scientist's career depends on their reputation. For them
| to have the best opportunities, they need everyone to have
| the highest respect for the quality of their work. If they
| damage their reputation, it could ruin everything they've
| spent decades working toward.
|
| Of course they care about science itself, but there's a
| limit to what risks they'll be willing to take when it
| affects them personally.
|
| For people with a relatively low reputation (or no
| reputation, i.e. unknown), taking a risk is not a bad move.
| They have less opportunity, and there's a chance the risk
| might pay off and boost their reputation.
|
| For people whose reputation is already good, the risk is
| less worth it. They don't stand to gain as much, and they
| could lose a lot. So they're less likely to do it.
| senttoschool wrote:
| > _Good rigorous science takes time to produce. It can take
| anywhere between several months to a year or more, and the
| career implications for rushing something out that is later
| found lacking is not great._
|
| Implying that Chinese science is bad?
|
| Chinese universities absolutely dominate in chemistry:
| https://www.nature.com/nature-index/institution-
| outputs/gene...
|
| By my count, 18/20 top universities for chemistry research is
| in China. The first US university in chemistry is MIT at 23.
|
| One of the attempts is by USTC, the second best university in
| the world for chemistry research according to the Nature
| link.
|
| China's lead in chemistry research is also translating
| directly to real world applications. For example, CATL and
| BYD combined own more than 50% of the car battery market. Six
| of the top 10 car battery makers are Chinese companies. [0]
|
| It's not surprising that most of the first replication
| attempts are from China.
|
| [0] https://cnevpost.com/2023/01/04/global-ev-battery-market-
| sha...
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| That's an oddly defensive take.
| senttoschool wrote:
| Only because I was responding to an oddly offensive take.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Not really though. Bad science comes from all over the
| world. It's bizarre to think that there couldn't be a
| Chinese Jan Hendrik Schon.
| senttoschool wrote:
| I never said the Chinese is an exception.
|
| I was only following the logic of the original question
| and your initial reply.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| You inferred logic that was never present in my reply.
| It's a correlation/causation error. As it is fully
| possible for things to happen in China that are not
| caused by the specific character and nature of Chinese
| people; pointing out that something has happened in China
| is not an implication that it's caused some the special
| nature of Chinese people or Chinese society.
| aurareturn wrote:
| You don't see how your logic can be misinterpreted?
|
| Original question: Why aren't labs outside of China
| publishing results?
|
| Your answer: Because good rigorous science takes time to
| produce.
|
| Logical interpretation of your answer: Chinese
| universities are producing bad, unrigorous science
| because they're publishing their findings so fast.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| If you go out of your way to look for uncharitable ways
| of interpreting what others are saying, you will find
| them.
|
| Instead of going on the offensive and taking such an
| uncharitable interpretation as a given, if you truly can
| find no charitable interpretation[1], maybe ask for a
| clarification rather than jumping to conclusions about
| unspoken implications.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
| jacquesm wrote:
| I think for a lot of people this whole saga is probably the
| first time that they realize that a ton of original work is
| done in Asia, rather than that it is just our manufacturing
| hub. They have to adjust their mental model to account for
| a view of Asia that is in important ways outstripping the
| West in terms of resources and combined brain power. The
| amount of scientific output in Asia is astounding, and the
| number of active scientists dwarfs the numbers in the West.
| If they would switch to stop publishing in English it would
| be quite amusing.
| senttoschool wrote:
| Well, most of HN still has the mentality that China can
| only copy/steal as perpetuated by the media.
|
| It was true 20 years ago when China had to catch up in
| everything.
|
| The thinking needs to be updated.
|
| Heck, just look at chemistry publications from top US and
| European universities. Chances are, there's one or more
| Chinese names in most of them.
| senttoschool wrote:
| > _One by USTChttps://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Ex4y1X7ix/ this
| tiny sample can stand on its pointy side._
|
| USTC is the second best university in the world in chemistry
| research according to Nature. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.nature.com/nature-index/institution-
| outputs/gene...
| civilitty wrote:
| _> Why are 't more labs outside China making LK-99 and publish
| videos?_
|
| Red phosphorus, one of the ingredients in the synthesis, is a
| controlled substance in the US. Might be delaying everyone
| while they fill out the paperwork with whoever their supplier
| is.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 'Excuse me sir, would you like to buy a kilo of red
| phosphorous?'
| 7_hours_ago wrote:
| Unrelated, but yeah https://youtu.be/7DqvweTYTI0
| deepp805 wrote:
| I'm not too familiar with this space. Could someone explain how
| big of an impact to the world this discovery is? What does the
| future of this technology look like over the next 5 years?
| jacquesm wrote:
| If true, five years not that much difference. A few decades,
| large differences.
| distortionfield wrote:
| "People always overestimate what they can do in a year and
| underestimate what they can do in ten." - someone much
| smarter than me.
| wildzzz wrote:
| Superconductors have applications in computers, MRIs, maglev
| trains, and power transmission to name a few.
|
| Superconduction at room temp would all for less current
| consumption due to resistance inside the metal layer for chips,
| letting them run cooler and faster.
|
| MRIs use massive, supercooled magnets. If you can do the same
| at room temp, you could potentially have a portable or much
| smaller and more efficient MRI.
|
| If you can levitate an object, you can use a lot less power
| running electromagnets to run things like maglev trains.
|
| If you have power lines that have zero resistance, you can
| reduce wasted energy. Power lines will actually sag under heavy
| load due to heat and cause outages or forest fires, this could
| be avoided.
| unlikelymordant wrote:
| Anything that uses an electric motor can use a smaller more
| efficient motor, id expect big changes in e.g. electric cars,
| but also probably things like robotic actuators getting
| smaller and more efficient.
|
| Also there are superconductor based batteries that are very
| efficient, would would become a thing, likely revolutionising
| batteries.
| overnight5349 wrote:
| Hear me out: superconducting railgun for launching multi-ton
| payloads to supply a lunar colony without rockets
| ecshafer wrote:
| I think with a solid verification of superconductivity at room
| temperature, we probably don't see anything in 5 years, just
| because the production is so hit or miss. But I do think we see
| massive investment and research on this line of materials and
| different production techniques. Going from Science to
| Engineering and making this a thing you have plant making. I
| think its a 10+ year thing but its big.
| moogly wrote:
| Well... maybe. Or it could become like graphene.
| cthalupa wrote:
| Not an expert in the area, but being passingly familiar with
| other major advancements and the timelines it's taken them to
| move from discovery to day to day use.
|
| Let's say we got a massive wave of independent replication of
| superconductivity tomorrow - at least enough to convince Big
| Money to move in, and it all ends up being For Real.
|
| The next steps are figuring out the other properties of the
| material, with a big one being 'how ductile is it', how to
| produce it in large enough quantities to be useful, if the
| underlying mechanisms here can be applied to other compositions
| that allow us to make RTAPS with better properties, etc.
|
| Depending on those results determines the range of applications
| it is suitable for out of the box, how much we can make at what
| cost, etc. We've got minimal details to go on there. It's a
| ceramic, so it's probably not super ductile, but we have some
| experience in making those be useful via making them into a
| tape, a la YBCO. Can we do the same thing here? Who knows!
|
| There's a timeline where all of these questions end up
| favorable and 10 years from now we see RTAPS in all sorts of
| day to day applications - we might find out that with one small
| trick we end up with big pure samples of LK99 with easy
| production methods. There's a world where all these answers
| aren't favorable, and it takes 10 years for it to show up in
| specialized applications (which are still huge for science and
| humanity!), and trickles bit by bit to more use cases over
| another few decades.
|
| I would guess that a decade-ish is really the earliest window
| for significant impact to humanity - we're probably going to
| spend the next year at minimum figuring out what all the deal
| is with LK99, and then it'll take a few years to even really
| start making cool experimental stuff in labs, and then you have
| to actually productize things using it, etc.
| neteresy wrote:
| Korean scientists embody key cultural values: (Jeong) fosters
| deep bonds and commitment to their work; (In-gan-mi) encourages
| inherent honesty and sincerity; (Che-Myun) upholds honor,
| discouraging dishonesty; and Confucianism instills respect,
| loyalty, and duty. These values shape their dedication to
| research integrity and professional conduct. I choose to believe!
| marmakoide wrote:
| Yeah, nah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwang_affair
|
| National pride and science are not a very good mix
| neteresy wrote:
| [dead]
| 10xDev wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Race
| zzzeek wrote:
| So, these folks replicated the material and it does highly
| unusual things, is that right ? It had seemed the fabrication
| process was still very dodgy and unreliable, this team got it to
| work independently?
| WinnieRallycar wrote:
| My layman understanding is that this paper states the team
| replicated LK-99, and confirmed that it has a property of a
| super-conductor - this particular type of magnetic levitation.
| elromulous wrote:
| video[0] linked from wikipedia[1] showing the levitation in
| action.
|
| [0] https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV14p4y1V7kS/
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99#cite_note-51
| matsemann wrote:
| Wow, didn't realize what we're working with here is smaller
| than a speck of sand.
| Ford__Prefect wrote:
| Psssft, room temperature, Chuck Norris does it in his sauna.
| ABuddy4u2 wrote:
| [flagged]
| low_tech_punk wrote:
| My excitement in this breakthrough raised the room temperature by
| 1 degree.
| 0x01DEED wrote:
| Assuming this is indeed the holy grail of superconductivity...
| can someone with knowledge on manufacturability of these
| materials, suggest a prediction of when the specific LK-99
| material would be ready for mass production? Is it ~3 years from
| now or more like ~15 years from now?
| foota wrote:
| I'm not what you're asking for, but almost certainly closer to
| 3 than 15. If it's the real deal, I imagine we have industrial
| capacity to make a superconducting material within 5 years. The
| required supplies are readily available, and while production
| of this particular material seems difficult, there's like a
| whole new field of materials to find, with very strong
| incentives. China would love to lead the world in a new branch
| of material science.
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| China is taking the lead, they harvest the fruit of their massive
| investment in education 20 years ago, congrats!
| nafey wrote:
| This is a South Korean breakthrough
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| I am not stupid, I know that
|
| However, take a look at this:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99#Replication_attempts
|
| 0 from both the EU and the US
|
| Getting downvoted over this speaks volume ;)
| devX3 wrote:
| There are two entries now from US labs added. I'm sure many
| more attempts are being made but are not on the chart.
| Maybe Wikipedia is not always up to date and accurate?
| austinwade wrote:
| I would assume that many US labs are also attempting to
| replicate it, but are just not as public as the wikipedia
| listed attempts. Also US government agencies/labs are
| probably working around the clock to make and test this
| stuff but in secrecy.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| It is getting crazier every second it passed. Multiple labs
| trying to replicate and everyone get a different result. The only
| thing we know is that LK-99 is something that nobody understands
| dinvlad wrote:
| I just hope it's not the new graphene
| shevis wrote:
| What a time to be alive
| stainablesteel wrote:
| i wonder if this will become the next version of hopium, where we
| struggle to refine a material that can actually be used in a wide
| enough temperature range to operate outside.
| roboticmind wrote:
| The initial paper claimed superconductivity up until 400 K (127
| degC or 260 degF), so I think if that's the case it would be
| able to withstand outdoor conditions just fine
| [deleted]
| WinnieRallycar wrote:
| Indeed, operating temperature seems to me less of a concern.
| Considering how difficult it's been to produce LK-99 so far,
| some skepticism on being able to manufacture the material in
| mass is warranted, I think. Still, exciting! I'm hopeful :)
| nomel wrote:
| Considering how people are making it at all, within days,
| with demonstrably poor instructions, seems to suggest
| manufacturing in mass has massive hope, once some time is
| given for refining the process.
| parineum wrote:
| Also consider just how many people will be working on
| this with nation-state budgets. It has such general
| applications that nearly every field tangentially
| connected to electricity or magnetism would be
| interested.
|
| It wouldn't be like the investment in something that
| would be similarly revolutionary but with a less certain
| end game like fusion.
| oblio wrote:
| For newbies, what's the potential impact of this discovery?
| Electronics? Better electrical stuff in general? What else?
| elfbargpt wrote:
| EDIT: This is probably fake. The account was just created and
| can't find any info online. Also the pellet returns to its
| starting position for some reason.
|
| Just saw another unconfirmed replication here:
| https://twitter.com/instsondaw/status/1687433935012139008?s=...
|
| Found their process really fascinating, apparently they create
| L-99 powder, sort it by meissner effect, then press the "high
| meissner effect" powder together
| baq wrote:
| People called the Soviet anime lesbian kitchen chemist a LARP
| but this is either Nobel or a fraud, personally very heavily
| leaning towards fraud.
| jackmott42 wrote:
| Do we have russian anime lesbians doing superconductor
| chemistry in 2023? I'm here for it.
| baq wrote:
| https://twitter.com/iris_IGB/status/1685731177523449856
| pineconewarrior wrote:
| I tried searching this strange string of nouns but was met
| with some strange results.
|
| What are you referencing?
| voqv wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36938648
| throwaway60707 wrote:
| Probably
| https://twitter.com/iris_IGB/status/1685731177523449856
| gcr wrote:
| Iris Alexandra studies plants in Russia, and also dabbles
| in chemistry from her (home?) lab. Over this past weekend,
| she's been working on replicating the LK-99 results
| herself, heaping a bunch of lighthearted scorn in the
| process in typical Soviet style. It's highly entertaining,
| so she's gotten herself a bit of a following online.
|
| People are badmouthing her in part because she's openly
| plural and trans and lesbian and a catgirl and she has
| Opinions On The Internet, so her bullies question her
| credibility based on the stereotype.
|
| She also wears her Soviet culture on her sleeve, so folks
| incorrectly think that being a communist means she supports
| what Putin is doing in Ukraine, despite her statements.
| (Keep in mind that being so openly LGBTQ+ isn't exactly
| smiled upon by the Russian state at the moment...)
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| JRKrause wrote:
| To be clear, they are not sorting it by superconductivity.
| Their claim is that they are sorting it by the Meissner effect.
| More likely they are sorting it by it's exhibited diamagnetism.
| cthalupa wrote:
| The covering over the magnet is almost certainly to hide the
| array of electromagnets underneath. You can find a variety of
| electromagnet toys that will do this exact thing.
| sigmar wrote:
| 100%. Weird 3d-printed stand is a big tell. Plus the close up
| on the pellet that seems painted to be black. Wish people
| would be more skeptical of spreading this type of stuff from
| newly created accounts
| soligern wrote:
| Interesting. So this doesn't exhibit flux pinning then.
| [deleted]
| heliophobicdude wrote:
| I thought for a second you were referring to the original post
| with the edit
| aqme28 wrote:
| That looks and acts like pyrolitic graphite over a magnet
| array. If that institute weren't also pseudonymous I'd maybe
| believe them a little more.
| Mizoguchi wrote:
| It's likely we will be able to grow full working organs, tissues
| and limbs in a lab before we can reanimate frozen bodies. So
| wouldn't be more efficient to cryopreserve only the brain?
| mycologos wrote:
| Are you in the wrong thread?
| dinvlad wrote:
| Probably not, given the amount of wild speculations here
| rkachowski wrote:
| for complete tourists like myself, does this represent conclusive
| evidence of superconductivity in this sample or does it require
| more?
| agnosticmantis wrote:
| It's a breath of fresh air reading about actual revolutionary
| science happening.
|
| The deluge of news about non-replicable results, fabricated data,
| overhyped press releases from both academia and industry had
| become really depressing. For once after a long time it's the
| real deal.
|
| Even if this is not a RT superconductor, it's now evident that
| the original authors didn't cheat and are not crackpots as
| initially suspected by most.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| You know, most of that stuff you hear about are bad takes on
| science. Science has moved into the realm of trying to
| understand complex systems with a lot of noise and with unknown
| variables. There will be a lot of misses; but that is how
| sausage gets made.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Exactly, it's like sifting a mountain of ore looking for
| diamonds. The original Korean team has essentially been doing
| a slightly guided brute force search in a domain that they
| thought was promising doing 100's or even 1000's of
| experiments. It's a clever approach: you have a real problem
| because the parameter space is so large but if you get 'close
| enough' to pick up an anomaly that might help you home in on
| something that is really promising. I'd love to see their
| notebooks and everything they tried. This is pretty much how
| we first got electric light: endless failures and then one
| success.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Well steady on there. The problem people have with bad
| science is not that there are misses, it's that there's no
| way for them to reliable decide when they've had a hit and so
| they end up inventing fraudulent pseudo-science. What's
| happening with LK-99 is science as people tend to imagine it
| working. Hypothesis -> experimentation -> replication ->
| theory.
|
| But that sort of science seems to be quite rare. Most science
| people are exposed in their daily lives is of the Francesca
| Gino variety, and that's not merely "a lot of noise with
| unknown variables", that's "nobody will care if we don't do
| real science so let's not bother".
| mieubrisse wrote:
| Agreed. It's felt like so many of the technological marvels
| have either happened quietly (e.g. the reductions in chip size)
| or in the past (e.g. all the physics breakthroughs of the
| 1900s). Like ChatGPT, this seems to have the characteristics of
| being both accessible and completely novel.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I feel like the host of "in 30 years we would have X" made 40
| years ago are suddenly manifesting.
| jacquesm wrote:
| What is interesting is that assuming it all pans out these
| are all in entirely unrelated fields. That sets the stage
| for a whole raft of follow on inventions. Similar to how
| the telephone + basic electromagnetism led to radio, tv,
| radar, transistors and ultimately to computers small enough
| to be practical for businesses, the internet, cell phones
| and so on.
|
| My grandmother was born in a house without running water,
| no sanitation and no phone. That's just a bit over a
| century ago. The rate of change on an annual basis isn't
| all that large, a decade and you'll see big changes, our
| world can't be compared at all to 120 years ago in terms of
| luxury, communications, personal energy budget, food,
| travel options etc. Still, there are large areas of the
| planet where the last 120 didn't bring any progress and
| there are those where they actually went backwards, not
| rarely to our (the western world for me) benefit.
| Accujack wrote:
| It's exactly like we got one critical item in the tech
| tree of humanity taken care of.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Technology trees are fascinating, how much sometimes
| hinges on one tiny invention.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Yeah - I think the next 40 years are going to be
| absolutely stunning to witness. It's an amazing time to
| be alive and be a nerd.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| Yes just think of the joy of living between 1903 (Wright
| brothers) and 1943.
| tornato7 wrote:
| In 100 years people will be pondering what it would be
| like to live between 2003 and 2043 :)
|
| Uh oh, did I just jinx 2043?
| earthboundkid wrote:
| The Oppenheimer movie equivalent of 2123, but it's about
| someone in Gen Z, so their name is Brayden or something.
| darkwater wrote:
| Well, as an European, with 2 world wars in that period, I
| would not trade now for that.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| Yes, that's how I feel about now. :-)
| jacquesm wrote:
| The last 20 are already mindblowing to me, to the point
| that I am a bit overwhelmed. Just reading to keep up with
| all of the tech developments is basically impossible
| today.
| yetihehe wrote:
| Yeah, recently I've remembered my computer from 1995 had
| about 1GB HDD. Now I can much more cheaply buy a SSD
| which will _transfer_ 7GB /s. Mind boggling.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I paid 2500 $ for a 500 MB harddrive and $750 for 64 K
| RAM at some point. To me the world we live in is utter
| science fiction, and yet, every morning I seem to wake up
| and it is all still there.
| javajosh wrote:
| In terms of basic tech, other than CRISPR what are you
| thinking of? Smartphones + internet are important, but
| are more combinatorial. Early quantum computers are cool,
| but niche (and even if perfected, seem to have
| application for breaking PKI). Reusable rockets are
| great, but not fusion. The standard model is locked in,
| at least up to LHC energies modulo sensationalist PR.
| zarzavat wrote:
| Fusion is progressing well, just look at MIT SPARC.
| Better (conventional) superconductors and better
| supercomputers are pushing the field forward.
|
| Back when ITER was the only game in town it looked like
| workable fusion was never going to happen, but things are
| looking more hopeful now.
| gibolt wrote:
| GPUs have been huge, unlocking so much more compute than
| was possible with CPUs. Most of the burgeoning AI
| industry is thanks to that cost decline, which is only
| getting started.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| mRNA vaccines would be on my list. I don't know if we'd
| consider that basic or more combinatorial tech.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Every field of science has had breakthroughs in the last
| decade or two. Even superconductors (check out 'H2S',
| though it isn't without problems), medicine, genetics,
| quantum computers I'm not yet all that impressed with but
| they're too early stage to be really judged, the energy
| transition is really happening (sub-subject: the price of
| solar and wind power), semiconductors (every time we
| think it's over...), GPS (check out how it works under
| the hood), so much in materials science that I can't
| begin to keep up, phased arrays, lidar, the insane
| increase in computational power that you can stick under
| your desk, battery tech (one more breakthrough there and
| we will see all kinds of effects on other fields as
| well), solid state lasers the size of grains of sand,
| fiber optic transmission rates, the James Webb (ok, 'old
| tech' by now, but that's one impressive thing they pulled
| off there, especially the delta between the hot and the
| cold side of it) and on and on.
|
| As for the future:
|
| Fusion would be huge, but I'm not all that hopeful for
| cost efficiency there once you get to net power out but
| I'm not going to talk down the people that are doing the
| work and the research. And yes, the basic physics seems
| to be pretty stagnant, we're really waiting for a
| unification of the two major fields there but even if we
| do get that unification it may not lead to new practical
| tech, it could simply nail things down once and for all
| without moving the needle in terms of costs, speed or new
| materials science. It _may_ have some implications for
| various computer models used in those fields and it
| probably would have impact on astronomy.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Im posting this reply from my mainstream smartphone: a
| pocket supercomputer with a 4K 60Hz HDR video camera. I'm
| chock full of designer vaccines and can watch a catalog of
| almost all the movies ever made on demand tonight. I
| listened to an podcast in my EV on the way to work. And
| SpaceX probably launched 60 satellites this week on the
| 14th flight of a rocket that flew home afterwards.
|
| Things have been moving along.
|
| edit: comments are quibbling about the fraction of all
| movies ever I can see on a paid streaming service. This is
| like complaining about that the meals and elbow room are
| not wonderful on a $400 flight from LA to London. It's a
| goddam miracle and you're still grumbling. Please tell me
| now how your $12/mo Spotify account doesn't have the June
| 1972 Grateful Dead New Jersey show your mom was at, and is
| thus near worthless. I spent $12 in 1980s money on _single
| album_ in my youth.
|
| Let me amend my grossly hyperbolic statement and say I
| could stream on demand more movies than I could ever watch
| even if I did nothing else the rest of my life, including
| many but not all of the good ones. Now the statement is
| strictly true, but did this make my contribution better?
| iaraya19 wrote:
| You are just repeating the same incredibly boring 'Tesla
| fanboy' things that Joe Rogan likes to say every now and
| then to create the illusion he's smart, up to date and
| edgy, which is the exact reason you don't sound smart at
| all.
| Zpalmtree wrote:
| stop being excited you sound stupid!!! hacker news
| obsession with doomerism is so boring
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| >can watch a catalog of almost all the movies ever made
| on demand tonight.
|
| You must have one hell of a different streaming services
| experience from that of most people today if you can pull
| this off without engaging in a fair bit of torrenting and
| general piracy.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Yeah, regular consumer streaming might cover "movies
| still popular enough but not so new that they're only in
| theaters." However "all the movies ever made" is a
| significantly higher bar.
|
| Some examples: https://www.yardbarker.com/entertainment/a
| rticles/popular_mo...
| selcuka wrote:
| Even with piracy, it wasn't possible a few decades ago.
| shock-value wrote:
| No you just decide what movie you want to watch and pay
| $4 to rent it on demand. Very common experience available
| to anyone with a smart TV or connected streaming device.
| [deleted]
| seer wrote:
| The last 10 (20?) years I noticed a notable shift in
| public consciousness about scientific progress and that
| we as a species are moving in an upward trajectory
| towards a brighter feature.
|
| One of my favorite movies of all time is "Contact" mainly
| because of how damn _hopeful_ it portrays humanity. I
| want to live in that world, not the gloom and doom "we're
| ruining everything around us" that is so often shown in
| recent media.
|
| And the whole thing is perplexing to me because as you've
| put it, we _are_ living in the future! There is soo many
| great things happening around us, but people seem not to
| notice - not just the technological things you've
| mentioned - but societal too.
|
| Like because of recent developments in economy theory,
| the world altering global shut down due to corona did not
| end with a great depression like event for the whole
| world, and that alone to me is simply a miracle.
|
| Human longevity studies have now reproducibly able to
| reverse aging _in primates_ - human trials starting this
| year!
|
| Feminism has become all but mainstream, unlocking like
| 50% more of human ingenuity.
|
| Urbanism studies have finally popularized environments
| where people can live happily and sustainably their
| entire lives, while there have always existed places in
| the world that are "nice" to live in one way or another,
| we're kinda getting the science down why, and starting to
| popularize it a little (strongtowns).
|
| Its just a crazy good time to be alive, there are
| countless problems all around us but they are actually
| getting solved at least somewhere, instead of banging our
| collective heads against the wall, one can just look for
| how it has been successful handled somewhere else and try
| to replicate!
| techdragon wrote:
| Important correction... the catalog of movies is likely
| significantly smaller than all the movies ever made...
| the ongoing removal of new movies for business reasons
| and the market fragmentation mean that reduced profits
| are leading to corner cutting with respect to the size of
| stream catalogs, licenses cost money... pirating via
| torrents while larger also has diminishing returns as you
| step outside the mainstream movies, unless your lucky and
| find someone diligently sharing bandwidth to keep content
| online happens to share an interest in that niche...
| we're rapidly losing access to an entire generation of
| analog only media as people throw source material into
| the trash and corporate stewardship of original
| recordings slowly fails one papercut at a time for the
| decades it will take for work to enter the public domain
| and be properly archived by the people trying to hold
| onto all of this.
|
| We could have maglev trains and superconducting
| supercomputers and copyright will still be _deleting_ our
| culture to "save money" for corporate copyright owners to
| increase their profit margins.
| 14 wrote:
| I pay a commercial service for pirated content and have
| access to over 50,000 movies alone. Then there are tens
| of thousands of tv shows. I can request shows. It gives
| me access to all major streaming services content.
| Anything I have ever searched for is there. Shows from
| around the world and all around feels like unlimited
| content. Cheaper then Netflix and I definitely feel I am
| getting great returns for my money. One day we will look
| up to pirates for saving our culture.
| honeybadger1 wrote:
| I too dabble in the dark arts.
| nicpottier wrote:
| What's the service? asking for a friend.
| 14 wrote:
| It is a plex share I don't really want to draw attention
| to the company sharing so don't want to share the site
| directly but just go to reddit and search for plex share
| and start looking. Lots of different ones some paid some
| free. Some tailored to anime some tailored to other
| genre.
| techdragon wrote:
| It took a few minutes sleuthing to validate that my gut
| reaction of "but there's way more than 50000 movies" was
| right ... But thanks to UNESCO statistics
| (http://data.uis.unesco.org/) I've got the sad truth.
|
| Your 50,000 movies is a lot but its not even half of the
| movies made since 1995 that UNESCO were able to reliably
| cite data for. I can't deep link to the exact spreadsheet
| of data but it's under the culture data section and its
| feature film statistics. The total number of feature
| films (which will exclude some things like short films
| and other stuff based on various data processing
| considerations) produced around the world between 1995
| and 2017 is _at least_ (because there are likely more
| movies _shot_ than _produced_ ) 107,432.
|
| Assuming your "over 50,000" is the usually marketing line
| and being generous and assuming its somewhere between
| 50,000 and 55,000 movies, then if true that's
| approximately half the "feature films" _produced_ between
| 1995 and 2017...
|
| A a sensible _lower bound_ extrapolation based on the
| data is in the range of half a million feature films
| (again recognising this data is likely excluding things
| we would on average collectively call a movie), making
| your service closer to 10%... or possibly even lower...
|
| Over 50,000 movies feels like a lot until you dig into
| how much media we make as a species. That's just _feature
| films_ , likely only ones with a theatrical release (I
| don't think I can reliably translate a lot of the source
| documents even if I wanted to validate the source data
| criteria myself, hence I'm using the weasel word
| "likely"), meaning its excluding a LOT of film/movies,
| and its only for 1995 to 2017, covering an era where the
| "amateur film" scene was rapidly exploding due to falling
| costs of the technology behind recording, editing, and
| distribution a "movie"...
|
| None of this is to tear down the effort of hard working
| preservationists... both legal and illegal. I agree with
| the archivists I've had conversations with, whose
| collective opinion can be summed up quite simply. "Any
| copy is better than no copy."
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| And it's only going to get faster... unless it all ends
| suddenly.
| a_vanderbilt wrote:
| I feel we will eventually outpace our own means of
| destruction. The next big step is getting self-sustaining
| colonies off Earth, which will do wonders for our ability
| to survive as a species. The biggest threat is perhaps
| nuclear weapons and climate change, in my opinion.
| Zpalmtree wrote:
| strongly believe humanity will keep innovating out of
| their problems, as we see time and time again despite the
| doom and gloom
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I actually feel like the biggest threat we face is a
| collapse of world order and another world war, even
| conventional coupled with a degradation of humanism.
| These lead to a global decay of basically everything,
| including our ability to outpace our own means of
| destruction and an entire inability to address climate
| change. The global environment becoming increasing toxic
| to our age's life, including humans is I think ultimately
| the end of our line.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| We can barely create self sustaining colonies _on_ Earth.
| Sporktacular wrote:
| Not our ecosystems' destruction. Let's see how we can get
| on without those.
| [deleted]
| xbmcuser wrote:
| For me from how the saga of 1st paper and 2nd paper started I
| had a feeling that something really unique has been found and
| the drama and politics is because of trying to claim the glory
| of it not because it was fake.
| reilly3000 wrote:
| Where will the money flow from here, presuming that the
| reproduction keeps happening?
| carbonguy wrote:
| Almost certainly: improving the ease/consistency of producing
| this stuff.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| Does anyone else just upvote stories like this because you know
| everyone else is up voting ? It has that nerdy, must up vote even
| if you don't get it vibe about it.
| code51 wrote:
| What are the next best materials to test according to br-bcs
| theory?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| This could have a huge impact on the feasibility of future
| quantum computers relying on exotic quasiparticles requiring
| stability at more practical conditions.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| On a completely different front, let's say the paper completely
| checks out and they have discovered this miracle. How strong are
| the patent protections on materials science?
|
| For example, if someone could replicate the effect with lead +
| gold, would that be considered a novel material which would not
| be subject to licensing? Is it the material itself or the method
| of production?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _let 's say the paper completely checks out and they have
| discovered this miracle. How strong are the patent protections
| on materials science?_
|
| If it's literally a room-temperature superconductor, the
| present state of the law is irrelevant. China won't play by the
| rules. If Korea tries to corner it in the West, the rules will
| be replaced. (This would have been true had the inventor been
| French or American, too.)
| oaiey wrote:
| Completely my train of thoughts. And it is not only china.
| Patents are based on laws and laws serve a society... If that
| does not work anymore (obviously after a long and broken
| process) the law changes.
| defrost wrote:
| Even without any change in law there'll be a seemingly
| endless swarm of "I can't believe it's not butter" almost
| the same varieties appearing and having to be knocked down
| (if possible) for infringement.
|
| As long as there's profit to be made that exceeds the cost
| of delaying legal action and any eventual fines levied
| against what may turn out to be near bankrupt shell
| companies.
| scarmig wrote:
| I'm sure it depends on jurisdiction, but in the US, you can't
| patent a material, only a method to make it.
|
| If I recall correctly, their patent for method covered a wide
| range of constituent elements, but left off gold. I would feel
| pretty bad for them if they genuinely discovered an RTP
| superconductor but that omission prevents them from becoming
| billionaires.
|
| But more likely the issue is that their current method has lots
| of room for improvement and someone else finds one that is
| substantially better.
|
| ETA: apparently wrong, can patent composition of very novel
| materials.
| baron816 wrote:
| It would be good for countries to put a bounty on these sorts
| of things. That would encourage this sort of research.
|
| Better yet would be to offer partial payouts for failed
| efforts if research is made public.
|
| This is probably more relevant for pharmaceuticals though.
| appplication wrote:
| The patent system sort of is the bounty for inventions. If
| you discover something new, you get first dibs at making
| money off if.
| zulban wrote:
| Maybe success in life and science isn't about becoming a
| billionaire?
|
| Even so - if this works out, their prizes and paid speaking
| gigs will cover a very comfortable life if that's what they
| want. I'm not sure why they should be entitled to more than
| that.
| jacquesm wrote:
| If it pans out I'd rather they become billionaires than
| your average tech bro.
| neom wrote:
| Hey Jacques, It's been fun watching your comments on
| this, you're very knowledgable. :) I had a question, I
| see some "we made a totally perfect/pure LK-99 it didn't
| work" - is pure/perfect what they should be going for, to
| me perfect/pure != correct, however I knew literally
| nothing about this subject till this week so I have no
| idea what I'm talking about. Thank you.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I really couldn't tell you what they should be doing, but
| I'd love for the original samples to be tested by another
| lab. That seems to me the easiest way to verify the
| original claims and reduces the uncertainty introduced by
| the lack of good process documentation and the chance
| that even the original researches do not quite know how
| they did what they did, assuming it is all true. The fact
| that that hasn't happened yet is the biggest source of my
| continued skepticism, at the same time my optimism is
| powered by the partial results of the other labs. It's a
| very strange combination of data, not unlike other things
| in the past that did not pan out but only time will tell
| which way it will all resolve.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| I think a Nobel is pretty much guaranteed at this point.
|
| They'll make a ton of money either ways. Maybe not
| billionaire level, but they'll be venerated wherever they
| go, will be granted countless prizes, will sit on the
| boards of important companies, and have their pick of
| academic jobs - all of it entirely deserved, of course.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| If someone else is wrong and you know more, it would be
| great to share some of what you know so the rest of us can
| learn. But please don't post unsubstantive putdowns--they
| just make everything worse.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&so
| r...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Silently leaving incorrect information in place seems
| worse for the overall state of the thread than a quick
| note disputing it.
| Fatnino wrote:
| You're not my lawyer!
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| That's kind of my thinking - there is almost no chance they
| stumbled upon nirvana + did it in the best or most efficient
| way. There must be many possible optimizations to the
| chemical structure + fabrication techniques.
|
| Is it possible that the inventors do not receive a dime of
| royalties?
| neltnerb wrote:
| I don't want to caveat a bunch of stuff with "IANAL" but I
| am not.
|
| However, they have told me what I interpreted to mean that
| if someone improves it but uses it then they need to
| license the underlying patent. That just makes sense, it's
| required in order to implement their concept.
|
| And in reverse the original company can keep doing whatever
| they want as long as it isn't covered by the referencing
| patent. Makes sense to me there too, if they come up with
| some other clever way to make it good enough more power to
| them. There's no reason for them to pay some other people
| who patented something they don't use.
| neltnerb wrote:
| You can get a composition of matter patent
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_of_matter) for
| something shockingly novel, and this might be. It's super
| hard to find anything that would qualify, but I've been
| awarded them before for materials science research.
|
| You can write stuff down generally enough that it's hard to
| make small changes and get around it. I did a lot of "1-10%"
| stuff in the claims.
| scarmig wrote:
| Ah, teaches me to try to be lawyer :)
|
| The patent is here for reference:
| https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2023027536A1/en
|
| And yeah, they left off Au.
| neltnerb wrote:
| Oh, that's weird. They missed all the other noble metals
| besides silver too. No platinum, rhodium... those things
| have really really interesting orbital structures, I'm
| surprised they're worth leaving out of something so
| tricky when it might be important. Strange.
|
| The only thing I can think of is that they did it and
| know that those noble metals don't work very well, and so
| they're getting everyone else to follow a wild goose
| chase down a very expensive rabbit hole while they
| already have a better approach.
|
| ... but the tech doesn't look that developed. Very
| strange.
| appplication wrote:
| > but the tech doesn't look that developed
|
| It could be that they found something incredible by
| chance and they're at the limits of their personal
| capability to further understand and refine. The fact
| that they've known about this for over 20 years suggests
| maybe. It's not a bad thing if they are, they've already
| taken one of the biggest leaps. New teams with fresh eyes
| and varied backgrounds will look at the problem space and
| undoubtedly see room for refinement.
| neltnerb wrote:
| Agreed, that's what makes the omission odd. Normally
| you'd expect them to list any candidate that they have
| any possible reason to think might be relevant,
| especially if they aren't entirely sure what is going on.
|
| Is that clearer what I mean? I think the only reason to
| exclude those things is if they were _super_ confident
| they weren 't a good idea for some reason we don't know.
| Or they just... forgot? That would just be very
| surprising.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > in the US, you can't patent a material
|
| I'm no patent lawyer, but there is literally a US patent-
| office category covering "material" for exactly this kind of
| invention. Section 505 - "Superconductor Technology:
| Apparatus, Material, Process".
|
| > This is the generic class for subject matter involving (a)
| superconductor technology above 30 K and (b) Art collections
| involving superconductor technology. Apparatus, devices,
| materials, and processes involving such technology are
| included herein.
|
| https://www.uspto.gov/web/patents/classification/uspc505/def.
| ..
| scarmig wrote:
| Yeah, apparently wrong. Not a lawyer, obviously, recovering
| physicist/current SWE.
| lanstin wrote:
| I have been SWE for 30 years. My youngest is off to
| college and I immediately enrolled in a masters program,
| apparently because I want to understand QFT which no
| amount of my own reading without doing much homework has
| enabled.
| tadfisher wrote:
| I'm assuming "Art collections" means something other than
| the common meaning, or else that's an oddly specific
| clause.
| jxf wrote:
| It means "art" in the broad sense of "prior art" (e.g. a
| creative endeavor), not art in the sense of MoMA or the
| Louvre. Though both kinds of art are beautiful in their
| way.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| Or what if AI assists in generating the discovery? "AI" meaning
| anything from a transformer model to brute-force breadth-first
| search with heuristics.
| amrocha wrote:
| I hope they're as weak as possible. The worst possible outcome
| of a room temp superconductor being discovered is stifling
| innovation to make money off it
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Transistors, lithium batteries, leds, etc all enjoyed
| significant patent protection, but still changed the world.
|
| I yearn for a Star Trek utopia as the next, but we do live in
| a capitalistic world where I hope that someone can enjoy
| outsized rewards for upending some previously insurmountable
| physical barriers.
| amrocha wrote:
| Sure, and millions of people die of preventable diseases in
| the global south every year because pharmaceutical
| companies deem it profitable to let them die, and because
| the global north enforces their patents.
|
| You don't know how it's gonna go. The scientists are going
| to be fine, they have their careers guaranteed and will
| receive many prizes for their work.
|
| They don't need a monopoly on a world changing material
| too.
| avereveard wrote:
| Why would patent be the root cause, they should have
| access to 2003 level of medicine. If patent was the only
| thing holding them back, you'd see them having 2000s
| level of healthcare, which wasn't bad by any stretch.
| amrocha wrote:
| Never said it was the only thing
| scarmig wrote:
| I'm generally anti-patent, but if there were any valid case
| for patents, this is it. Long, hard labor to discover
| something entirely new that has massive uses for society.
|
| I'd rest my hopes on them not being dicks about it, not on
| them not getting benefit from it.
| amrocha wrote:
| Long, hard labor should be rewarded. And it is. They're
| receiving a salary, and now fame. That's more than enough.
| yetihehe wrote:
| > Long, hard labor should be rewarded. And it is.
|
| Why do people ask for raises though? It is somewhat
| rewarded, but some people don't work long and hard and
| still have more money. Those working long and hard,
| having a big useable result want to be rewarded a little
| more.
| MissingAFew wrote:
| I honestly can't comprehend how anyone wound think having a
| monopoly on a material is valid. They will make money
| without being the cartel of the superconducting sector.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| It wouldn't necessarily have to be a monopoly. There's
| such a thing as compulsory licensing and statutory
| licensing. That is, government(s) could decide that the
| patent is valid, but anybody can use it (without needing
| the patent holder's permission), as long as they pay the
| patent holder. And the government could decide to set the
| price.
| avereveard wrote:
| Patent have reasonable terms. They will have a 20 year
| head start and then everyone will be competing with them.
| It's something that will be free in the same lifetime as
| the researchers, most likely. It's not abusive like
| current copyright that locks ideas for two generations.
| amrocha wrote:
| Just to be clear: you're arguing that it's actually a
| good thing to deliberately slow down application of a
| revolutionary technology, so that people can make money?
| epups wrote:
| Yes, because this is partly why everyone keeps working so
| hard to produce a revolutionary technology. This is also
| the way it works with drugs, we have just been through a
| pandemic and a lot of people made a ton of money over
| their inventions, rightly so.
| avereveard wrote:
| yes, the time frame is limited enough that people can
| have an incentive to innovate, without being brutally
| oppressing. we're not locking civilization into the stone
| age for multiple generations while coros become filthy
| rich, it's just 20 years and then it's free game for
| everyone.
|
| now, if it were to death + 75 years, or whatever inane
| number is copyright today, you'd hear a different story
| from me. but it is not.
| amrocha wrote:
| Well then, I'm glad we don't have any emergencies at hand
| that will be too late to do anything about in 20 years.
| avereveard wrote:
| semiconductor without clean power is not going to impact
| climate change that much
|
| for compelling emergencies states can already waive
| patents, so the relevant mechanisms are already in place
| if anything momentous happens.
| yetihehe wrote:
| Do you think that having a monopoly on some invention
| will prevent widespread usage of that invention? Like,
| "yeah, we invented fully clean carbonless way of making
| energy for 1% of current prices, but no one will have
| it"? Currently it just means that the creator of widely
| usable technology will have some percentage of money for
| others using his invention instead of others making all
| the money from his invention while he has a pat on the
| back.
| mhb wrote:
| The worst possible outcome of weak protection is not creating
| new materials.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| It would be the opposite. Nobody with develop technology to
| utilize it because there are no protections.
|
| No MRI, No Fusion, ect.
| amrocha wrote:
| Bullshit, science isn't driven by patents or funded by
| private industry.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| doing just about anything with science is.
| amrocha wrote:
| Ok, so private companies should be happy to compete
| freely without having to pay licensing fees. Win win.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Why compete if someone will just steal your product?
|
| It would just be a waste of time and money.
|
| Imagine you spend two years and $100,000 to make a invent
| a clever handheld MRI for the super conductor just to
| have 100 companies Steal Your Design. You would have been
| better off watching Netflix
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| How hard/expensive is this LK-99 to produce?
| lordnacho wrote:
| I think the hype is more about this material demonstrating some
| principle that creates fertile ground for similar materials to
| be researched. Someone down the line will find something
| related that can be mass produced.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| This makes me so happy for my children and their children. God
| bless those scientists and all scientists that push our species
| forward. I'm so lucky to be in my prime at the same time AGI and
| superconductors become a reality. Wow.
| nerdbert wrote:
| > AGI
|
| Wait, I missed that one. Was it yesterday?
| sergiotapia wrote:
| yes
| cryptonector wrote:
| What's AGI?
| mfcl wrote:
| Artificial general intelligence, and it does not exist
| yet.
| bagels wrote:
| Neighbor: AGI is Artificial General Intelligence
| aflashofhue wrote:
| [dead]
| baxtr wrote:
| Here is a good thread on what could be realized if we had room
| temperature superconducting materials at our hands:
|
| https://twitter.com/alexkaplan0/status/1684044616528453633
| ericswpark wrote:
| Twitter (or X or Y or whatever the heck they're calling it
| nowadays) doesn't show replies if you're not signed in, which
| breaks all tweet threads. Amazing hostile UX right there.
| timeon wrote:
| Basically useless link for anyone without login.
| panki27 wrote:
| https://nitter.net/alexkaplan0/status/1684044616528453633
| pjungwir wrote:
| The last week reminds me of the story of Bardeen & Brattain's
| invention of the transistor (e.g. in _The Idea Factory_ ). It
| barely worked and heaven forbid you bump the table. There was
| even a third slighted figure who wanted credit. Part of me wants
| to be skeptical but OTOH if it's hard to reproduce that seems
| totally normal. How exciting that some other people have got it
| working now.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Things also tend to be invented at about the same time at
| different places. I wonder if there are other people who were
| this close to invent it but just couldn't get it right.
| cubefox wrote:
| According to Wikipedia, the material was invented in _1999._
| kevstev wrote:
| Last year I read The Double Helix and The Code Breaker within
| a few months of each other, and what really stood out to me
| is that while we celebrate the first person who discovers
| something, in reality there were several teams all racing to
| the finish line, and were sometimes days or only even hours
| behind in presenting their findings. Yet only one team gets
| the accolades and their names in textbooks, the others are a
| mere footnote at best.
|
| This was my first time reading about the history of
| discoveries like this, and I guess prior I thought these
| celebrated names had moved humanity forward by decades if not
| centuries by connecting the dots of the runes of the
| universe, but the reality is really very different.
| bglazer wrote:
| Another example that might be of interest is the use of
| neural networks in Monte Carlo Tree Search. In 2017 there
| were two papers published showing how effective the
| combination of NN's and MCTS are for planning in board
| games.
|
| One is an algorithm called ExIT published by Anthony et al,
| it showed excellent performance on a somewhat obscure board
| game called Hex. The authors using a typical academic lab
| setup to achieve this. It has a very impressive 300ish
| citations.
|
| The other paper is AlphaGo, which has about 10k citations
| and a Netflix documentary. There are some algorithmic
| differences that probably make AlphaGo strictly better than
| ExIT but the big difference seems to mostly be that one
| group had like a thousand GPUs for a month.
| azeirah wrote:
| Another big difference is Google's name and marketing
| behind it. It had its own website.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| By the way, that's one important problem with patents.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Two independent research groups, one from Japan and one
| from the US, simultaneously published their discovery of
| the NdFeB magnet in the same issue of the same journal.
| bsmith89 wrote:
| I don't know this particular story, but -- FWIW -- it's
| common for different teams working in the same field to
| be aware of each other's manuscripts and impending
| submissions. When two teams are about to submit papers
| with the same discovery, they'll often work with an
| editor to put it in the same journal issue.
|
| By coordinating a simultaneous publication they can get
| extra publicity for the discovery, _both_ get the first-
| mover advantage in citations (both papers get cited by
| everyone), and also get breathing room to be fully
| rigorous and write the best possible paper.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| that is a nice resolution of the prisoner's dilemma
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's even more stark when you come to realize how big the
| pyramid is just under a new scientific breakthrough. But
| there are also examples of people that stayed the course
| against common wisdom (and sometimes while being derided)
| who eventually succeeded in what they were doing. This is
| to me the kind of science that is most deserving of prizes,
| to encourage others to keep looking even when the answers
| are far from obvious.
| kevstev wrote:
| I feel that way about string theory. I am merely an
| airmchair physicist, though I did have a physics minor in
| college, but it just feels... wrong. Ever more layers of
| complexity to explain away holes, and no real predictive
| power. But at least as of ~10-15 (and maybe still today,
| I have lost touch with that world) years ago, saying this
| in any serious setting would not make you any friends,
| nor get you any funding. It feels to me that we have
| likely squandered decades of brain power going down that
| hole.
|
| I hope there are still those toiling away doing unpopular
| work, that can make a breakthrough....
| ep103 wrote:
| I'm far outside of these social circles nowadays, but I
| stumbled across this youtube video of a phd candidate
| talking about string theory recently
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kya_LXa_y1E), and it
| seemed to imply that the pendulum in those social circles
| is swinging back again.
| httpz wrote:
| Apparently the theory behind LK-99 was inspired by the
| studies from Eastern European scientists. However, after the
| Soviet collapse, the study was lost.
| mrtksn wrote:
| very interesting, is there a an article about it?
| Painsawman123 wrote:
| not an article, but there's a tweet (yeah oftentimes
| Twitter can be useful :) ):
| https://nitter.net/sanxiyn/status/1686782919178911744
| paulmd wrote:
| nationalism/patriotism is gross, except for the people
| who happened to be born in the same country/political
| system/religion as myself
| Vicinity9635 wrote:
| Cheeky, but isn't nationalism/patriotism just rational
| self interest? Why wouldn't I want the system I pay taxes
| into to put me and other people in this boat first?
|
| I like this definition, personally:
|
| "Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and
| your government when it deserves it." -- Mark Twain
| katrotz wrote:
| I found it extremely entertaining to follow the twitter
| epopeea around Lk99 topic. Apparently the Iris posts were
| not just empty words and trolling.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Epopee/epopea/epopeia is epic [Greek] poetry. That's a
| new word for me.
| rtsil wrote:
| The twitter thread linked below says that it was an
| independent discovery and the Korean professor was not
| aware of the prior knowledge until after the discovery, so
| it's not inspired as much as parallel development.
| ljosifov wrote:
| Yeah, looks like it works that way mostly - based on the
| examples written up in "How Innovation Works: Serendipity,
| Energy and the Saving of Time" by M Ridley
| (https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Innovation-Works-Matt-
| Ridley/dp...). Having done some R&D myself I tend to think of
| re-search as "repeated search for something that works" these
| days. Luck (or lack of) plays a big role too, the
| circumstances and the personalities of the actors involved
| likewise. Another book on a similar theme (but for medicine
| specifically) that I really enjoyed reading is "Happy
| Accidents: Serendipity in Major Medical Breakthroughs in the
| Twentieth Century" by MA Mayers
| (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Happy-Accidents-Serendipity-
| Breakth...).
| rnk wrote:
| Great observation.
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| Funny enough Bardeen went on to work out the theory of
| conventional superconductivity later (with two other
| researchers) and got another Nobel prize out of it. What's your
| issue with Shockley btw?
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| Shockley invented a different kind of transistor which was
| less fragile. Bardeen and Brattain invented the point-contact
| transistor
|
| > What's your issue with Shockley btw
|
| Well he was a mega racist, but that's not relevant
| gsmecher wrote:
| > What's your issue with Shockley btw?
|
| Nobody can pick fights with Shockley any more (he's dead) -
| but Shockley is almost a household name, and
| Bardeen/Brattain's aren't. It's worth trying to adjust the
| record, both because Shockley was an abusive jerk and because
| he gets more credit than is due for the transistor.
|
| (I'm not denying that Shockley was brilliant and effective.)
| pcrh wrote:
| What are the implications of this for global warming? Would we be
| able to ditch most of fossil fuel usage (eventually)?
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| If this thing really was super conducting, they should be able to
| rotate the sample upside down from flux pinning right? That's why
| this thing is probably just a magnet and not a superconductor??
| savrajsingh wrote:
| you'd hope that if we know that, the actual scientists
| confirming this stuff know that too
| eulgro wrote:
| The paper shows that the sample isn't attracted to the magnet,
| only repulsed.
| cypherpunks01 wrote:
| Why are folks trying to prove that this material is a
| superconductor in roundabout ways, like levitation, dimagnetism,
| etc? What is the reason they don't just test to see if electrical
| current flows without resistance? Surely there is something I am
| missing here.
| httpz wrote:
| With the current fabrication process, they're only getting a
| chunk with LK-99 particles sprinkled in. Since nobody yet knows
| how to fabricate a pure chunk of LK-99, it'll be hard to
| measure the true resistance of LK-99.
| httpz wrote:
| >Most likely, the material LK99 as reported in [1-3] is a
| heterophase structure, with co-existent non-superconducting
| constituents. This may yield superconducting droplets
| surrounded by nonsuperconducting material...
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.01723
|
| >In fact, I find that Cu on this Pb(2) is 1.08 eV more
| energetically favorable than Cu on the Pb(1) site, suggesting
| possible difficulties in robustly obtaining Cu substituted on
| the Pb(1) site.
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16892
|
| The paper from Dr. Griffin at LBNL suggests copper atoms have
| to be placed in a specific (but less likely) position in the
| molecule to result in the desired flat band characteristic.
| Also, the original authors and the labs who were able to
| replicate LK-99 are reporting they had to make multiple
| batches to even find a tiny piece that shows levitation. This
| suggests that you just have to be very lucky to produce a
| sample with high enough concentration of LK-99 to observe
| levitation.
|
| If we can somehow confirm that LK-99 is truly a room
| temperature superconductor, billions of dollars of R&D fund
| will pour in to improve the fabrication process. When the
| first transistor was invented, people probably weren't
| imagining that we'll be mass producing them in nanometer
| scale in the future. Or maybe LK-99 will be stuck in a lab
| like graphene. Who knows?
| gitfan86 wrote:
| The good news is that we should know within a few weeks if
| rock surgery is effective. If that works they can increase
| the purity and sample size without needing to find a new
| creation process
| jacquesm wrote:
| There are a ton of suggestions floating around already on
| how the efficiency could be improved and some of those
| are very clever and involve using the superconducting
| properties of the individual grains to help sort them out
| from the bulk material.
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| From a purely scientific angle, so presumably less amenable
| to mass production, why doesn't anyone use FT-ICR mass
| spectrometers to assemble say a unit cell?
|
| There is a good classic primer on FT-ICR, mostly focused on
| analysis (mass spectrometry) but also mentioning activation
| energies for reactions and measurement of kinetics etc.
|
| https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/chemistry/research/oconnor/oc
| o...
|
| If you dunk a bunch of chemicals (for simplicity think wet
| chemistry) in a vial, all reactions and side reactions are
| simultaneously occuring, so one has little control over
| what happens on an atomic scale.
|
| FT-ICR can be used to observe the state AND to manipulate
| the state. Its like having a compact particle collider, but
| instead of the high (TeV) energy in CERN etc. its just
| chemical energy levels.
|
| It happens in high vacuum, so low densities of species,
| hence not amenable to mass production.
|
| But the instrument is both eyes and hands: one can identify
| the frequencies corresponding to each ionized molecule, and
| selectively energize or de-energize specific species to
| encourage or prevent main and competing reactions, by
| pumping or damping specific frequencies.
|
| One may build up a molecule in elementary steps and eject
| finished molecules. Those steps can occur at the same time
| in the same vessel. Its like having a miniature digitally
| controlled chemical plant, without having to redo all the
| pipework if you decide to use a different pathway here or
| there.
| adrian_b wrote:
| I believe that with the synthesis method proposed by the
| Korean team, i.e. by the chemical reaction between a certain
| kind of lead sulfate with copper phosphide, the chances of
| progress are slim.
|
| The Korean team appears to have been stuck for several years
| by the lack of reproducibility of this synthesis method.
| While it was a great discovery that has shown that this
| material must have some very interesting properties, perhaps
| even superconductivity at ambient temperature and pressure,
| in order to be able to measure its properties and be able to
| evaluate the possible practical applications, a much more
| precise method for enforcing the desired crystal structure is
| required, than mixing powders and baking them into a ceramic.
|
| Perhaps such a method for producing samples with
| deterministic properties would be to develop first a method
| to grow monocrystals of the special kind of lead phosphate
| that forms the base crystal structure, maybe by drawing the
| crystals from melt.
|
| Once monocrystals of this kind of lead phosphate are
| available, they could be doped with copper, e.g. by ion
| implantation. By controlling and varying the parameters of
| the process, e.g. the angle of incidence and the velocity of
| the ions and the thermal profile used for annealing, it is
| likely that reproducible samples can be produced, where the
| copper ions substitute lead in the useful places and not in
| the others.
|
| By this method it would be possible to produce only thin
| layers of LK-99, but that should be enough to enable the
| characterization of the material.
|
| Moreover, because LK-99 is very fragile, it is unlikely that
| it could be used to make cables or coils. Practical uses
| where LK-99 would be deposited as thin films are much more
| likely.
|
| As an alternative to ion implantation, which might be able to
| produce thicker layers, perhaps once monocrystals of the base
| lead phosphate are available it may be possible to develop
| some method of chemical vapor deposition, to grow epitaxially
| a layer of LK-99 over the base crystal, but with such a
| method it is less obvious if there is any way to control
| which lead atoms are substituted, though this may depend on
| the orientation of the base crystal.
| snovv_crash wrote:
| Even thin films would enable highly efficient antenna-on-
| chip designs.
| JRKrause wrote:
| Drawing from melt to achieve a consistent crystal
| orientation was my first thought as well.
|
| Looking at the Griffin paper, the Pb(2) site is described
| as being 1.08eV 'more energetically favorable'. I am having
| trouble understanding what this means.
|
| Years back I did MOCVD semiconductor fabrication research,
| I never reached a mastery of it but I am still trying to
| leverage that understanding here.
|
| During growth, adatoms that incorporate into proper crystal
| lattice locations enter a lower energy state compared to
| those in imperfect locations. The energy state is lower in
| the sense that it requires more energy to remove them from
| that location. Hence careful control of temperature allows
| you to selectively favor incorporation into these low
| energy locations e.g. choose a temperature high enough to
| remove adatoms from 'imperfect' locations but low enough to
| not remove them from 'perfect' (low energy) locations.
|
| So when the author says 'energetically favorable' am I to
| understand this means the Pb(2) location represents a lower
| energy state (i.e. more difficult to remove Cu from this
| location) or the opposite? Or something else entirely?
| hgrbrm wrote:
| How do you explain the almost three orders of magnitude drop
| in resistance in Fig. 6d in one of the original articles (
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.12037.pdf ) with a few LK-99
| particles sprinkled here an there? There must be a current
| path along which more than 99.8% of the material is in the
| supposed superconducting state. So the particles almost touch
| but not quite yet?
|
| I think the more likely explanation is that the particles do
| touch each other but the interface is not superconductive. In
| other words, it is a polycrystalline material, and most of it
| is LK-99, but the grain boundaries are not a very good
| conductor. In conventional superconductors grain boundaries
| don't disrupt superconductivity because they are 3D
| superconductors, but in this allegedly 1D superconductor the
| superconducting channels in most cases don't meet at the
| grain boundaries, so the current has to overcome the
| resistance of some material that is almost an insulator.
|
| If that is the case it will be difficult to produce a
| material that is macroscopically superconducting. But I hope
| researchers will be able to make single crystals that are
| large enough for resistance measurements so that finally it
| can be determined if this material is a superconductor or
| not. For practical uses the best result that can be achieved
| with this material may be a metal-LK-99 composite where the
| LK-99 particles lower the resistivity of the metal by 50-90%.
| appplication wrote:
| Thank you, this is the best explanation I've heard for why
| it's so hard of measure.
| postalrat wrote:
| How would you prove there isn't any water in a cup?
| fooker wrote:
| That's a really good way to reason about the difficulties.
| bagels wrote:
| I didn't see any references to cups or water in these papers.
| jadamson wrote:
| But I did eat breakfast this morning?
| postalrat wrote:
| If you can't answer the question then you won't ever
| understand how to measure zero resistance.
| appplication wrote:
| Would one method (assuming a pure sample) be to pass a
| high current through it and measure if it heats up? I
| know nothing about this, but that would be my first
| guess.
| moqmar wrote:
| It will heat up, as the contact points & probes will have
| resistance, not sure if there are good ways to correct
| for that.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| If the material were an unshielded wire, spool it, and
| send a current through it and measure if the V/I/W drops
| off as you unspool it?
| svnt wrote:
| It's a limitation of the most basic approach to the
| problem (measuring resistance), but not a limitation of
| every approach (such as measuring current).
|
| You can inject a current into a superconducting coil and
| take measurements of the resultant magnetic field as the
| current circles for an indefinite period of time. I'm not
| able to see how this approach analogizes to water in a
| cup.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| I don't think that works as advertised: Any measurement
| of the current will likely produce a magnetic field
| itself -- for example from the current in a Hall probe.
| This current will induct a small, opposite current into
| the superconducting coil. So the current will go down.
|
| And even if not, what you would need is to measure the
| change of the field over time. This has finite
| resolution, so you can't distinguish no resistance from
| very very small resistance.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| The korean guy say this is a 1d superconductor (as opposed to
| 2d sheet or 3d, which means you would need a single line of
| superconducting molecules from end to end. Its likely why it
| doesn't float all the way as only parts of it has these and
| scattered all over the chunk of solid.
|
| However, if they perfect 1d production, they can layer in a
| bunch of them to create a quasi 2d or 3d superconductor.
| dontwearitout wrote:
| My understanding is that synthesis of the exactly right crystal
| structure is very hard (for every 10 lead atoms, 1 - the exact
| right one - needs to be substituted with copper), so the
| samples are small and inhomogeneous. As a result measuring
| resistivity won't be illuminating until large amounts of
| perfect material can be produced.
| octacat wrote:
| kinda like with Graphene, cool material, hard to produce.
| hgomersall wrote:
| Without being intentionally snarky, the same logic applies to
| measuring current and voltage. What is observed is an effect of
| zero resistance, not zero resistance itself (whatever that
| would mean).
| jacquesm wrote:
| They do both. But measuring the resistance of something that is
| that small is super hard because it will be close to zero
| anyway even if it isn't superconducting. So a larger sample
| would give much more conclusive results.
| caconym_ wrote:
| I have heard people much more knowledgeable than me say that
| measuring true zero resistance is actually quite difficult and
| takes some degree of specialized equipment, especially with
| such small samples. That may be part of it.
| frisco wrote:
| Right, if our best regular conductors (used in your ohmmeter)
| are ~10^-8 and superconductivity is (by convention) less than
| 10^-11, one can see right away the simple regular methods
| won't work and some cleverness is needed.
| someplaceguy wrote:
| > superconductivity is (by convention) less than 10^-11,
|
| Ah, so you're saying that superconductivity is not _actual_
| zero resistance, but something close to it, and in fact
| only a factor of 1000x less resistive than the best
| conductor?
|
| If that is so, this is something that I had previously
| thought would make a lot more sense to me.
|
| But in that case it's not intuitive to me how SMES is
| possible with a 0% discharge rate. Shouldn't a significant
| fraction of the electrons looping around the coils be lost
| after many loops? (I know very little about electricity, as
| you can probably tell, never mind superconductors).
| mort96 wrote:
| No, I believe it's literally zero but we don't have a
| measurement apparatus with infinite precision so we need
| some cut-off.
| someplaceguy wrote:
| Thanks, that makes sense.
| crote wrote:
| The conductors of your ohmmeter are not that important,
| though. You can work around that by using four-terminal
| sensing, and you can of course also calibrate your probes
| by directly touching them together. Even if your ohmmeter
| conductors have a resistance of several ohm, you could
| still get an accurate measurement if your tool has a high
| enough resolution.
|
| A bigger issue is going to be sample size. A 1mm-diameter
| 1mm-long rod of silver has a resistance of about 20 mO (or
| 2e-5) at room temperature. That's already getting tricky to
| measure with lab-grade equipment without pushing insane
| currents through it, let alone anything even smaller. If
| you want to measure a 1m-diameter 1m-long silver rod (which
| would be 0.02mO or 2e-8) you could just push a few thousand
| amps through it and reliably measure that using a household
| multimeter in the mV range - but do that with a small
| sample and it'll evaporate.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > Even if your ohmmeter conductors have a resistance of
| several ohm, you could still get an accurate measurement
| if your tool has a high enough resolution.
|
| Not that low in range though, you will end up seeing
| thermal noise that dwarfs your measurement.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| How about the wires connected to your probes? Or the
| internal electronics that are used to gauge resistance?
| How do you work around those?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Calibration. But electric fields across wiring in such
| sensitive applications is a real problem.
| paulmd wrote:
| simply build the material into a device that cannot work
| without superconduction and then see whether it does ;)
| balaji1 wrote:
| so none of the previous more esoteric superconductors were
| ever measure for zero resistance?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| They were, but they had more time to resolve the
| difficulties
| caconym_ wrote:
| I'm not sure how you're getting that from my comment.
| scarmig wrote:
| They were. E.g. see here for a major, good paper announcing
| a novel class of superconductors:
|
| https://sci-
| hub.ru/https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007...
|
| The difference now is that we're seeing a premature
| preprint being replicated in real time.
|
| Even in that paper, the authors note: "The way the samples
| have been prepared seems to be of crucial importance:
| Michel et al. [21] obtained a single-phase perovskite by
| mixing the oxides of La and Cu and BaCOa in an appropriate
| ratio and subsequent annealing at 1,000 ~ in air. We also
| applied this annealing condition to one of our samples,
| obtained by the decomposition of the corresponding
| oxalates, and found no superconductivity." And you can see
| that in their resistivity/temperature graph of samples
| prepared using different protocols.
| pyrale wrote:
| > a premature preprint
|
| Considering how that preprint has sparked interest in
| other research institutions and multiplied the resources
| allocated to the problem, I would say this publication
| was not premature, it's most other research results that
| are late.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| The paper was leaked early. The team wanted more time to
| get more attempts at producing it and improving their
| yield. The paper also wasn't generally up to their
| writing standards. It's essentially an early draft that
| was leaked.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Just getting the probes to connect reliably is tricky.
| depending on how large the superconducting features are it
| may be anywhere from just difficult to next to impossible to
| do accurately (for instance, if the size of the
| superconducting features is smaller than the probe size).
| Daneel_ wrote:
| It's difficult to rule out external factors - a badly attached
| probe could also result in zero resistance for example.
|
| Showing diamagnetism is one of the least error-prone ways to
| demonstrate the superconductor effect.
|
| That's my understanding anyway.
| qnleigh wrote:
| That's right. The standard way to measure resistance without
| being sensitive to contact resistance is called the four-
| terminal method, see (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-
| terminal_sensing). You drive a current using two outer wires,
| but then detect the voltage across the sample using a
| different pair of wires. You'll measure zero voltage if it's
| superconducting, since V=IR. Or if one of the probe wires
| became detached.
|
| The first LK-99 paper used this method to claim zero
| resistivity, but people complained that if the inner probes
| lost contact, that would also be consistent with their data.
| This criticism doesn't totally make sense to me, since the
| apparent superconductivity came and went in the expected way
| as they changed an external magnetic field. I don't
| understand how a loose terminal could mimic that figure (I
| think it was in figure 1).
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| It also doesn't make sense to me because you would expect
| they didn't just say "omg super conductivity!" on their
| first measurement and presumably measured more than once,
| verified connections, and generally assumed scrutiny would
| be high on any claim and (from what I've read of the
| history so far) the reason it's from 1999 and published now
| is they didn't believe it was real to begin with but
| believed it was a measurement mistake. This doesn't mean
| others should be credulous and replication is crucial. But
| it seems to beggar reality to assume they made such an
| amateur mistake. I would assume outright fraud first.
| stolsvik wrote:
| Don't you also measure the current of the "inner probes"
| (the ones "driving a current"), to verify that you do have
| contact?!
| VygmraMGVl wrote:
| You drive current through the outer probes. The inner
| probes measure voltage and are not driven. When measuring
| non-zero resistance, you can vary the driving current to
| confirm the voltage you measure also varies linearly (ex
| thermal effects, capacitance of the material etc.). When
| measuring zero resistance, you can't distinguish vs a
| voltage probe error.
| EvgeniyZh wrote:
| One case in which you can see something similar to SC
| transition is percolation, where the sample is mix of
| regular metal and insulator, and you (accidentally) connect
| current contacts to metal but voltage probes to insulator
| [1]
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.05871
| jacquesm wrote:
| > a badly attached probe could also result in zero resistance
| for example
|
| No, a badly attached probe would usually show a larger
| resistance, not a smaller one. That's actually the easiest
| error to make, making improper contact with the sample. The
| resistance is measured indirectly using a reference current.
| So you'd measure a higher resistance or a break rather than
| zero if a probe were not attached correctly (unless the two
| voltage probes are touching but that would normally speaking
| be spotted).
|
| The diamagnetism is simply easier to verify using an impure
| or small sample.
| Daneel_ wrote:
| Glad to be corrected, thank you.
| voidmain wrote:
| It's apparently hard to measure zero vs extremely low
| resistance with the two probe setup you are imagining (I
| guess because the probes and wires aren't superconducting,
| so most of the resistance in the circuit is not in the
| sample). The graphs I have seen are all made with a four
| probe setup [1], where a constant current is run through
| the outer probe pair and the voltage across the inner pair
| is measured. If the inner probes have contact issues, the
| voltage (and inferred resistance) drops, potentially to
| zero.
|
| [1] https://www.ni.com/docs/en-US/bundle/ni-
| daqmx/page/measfunds...
| applied_heat wrote:
| That's what he said. You inject a known current and
| measure the voltage drop across the item you want to
| measure the resistance of, and then use ohms law
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| And what he saying, and you weren't listening to is it
| all your testing equipment is introducing resistance.
|
| You can mesaure current by electrical fields, but have
| the same issues as before. Your testing equipment and
| your very tiny sample sizes.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I sort of don't get this either. If your testing
| equipment is introducing resistance can you not "tare" or
| calibrate your measurements by measuring the equipments
| current flow in a direct circuit between probes to
| determine its base resistance then introduce your sample
| and measure the difference? The resistance in a serial
| circuit is additive, no?
| jacquesm wrote:
| If you pick your reference current properly this effect
| should be extremely small. It will have a little bit of
| effect but nothing that you should normally have to worry
| about.
| proto_lambda wrote:
| The parasitic resistance will be orders of magnitude
| larger than your sample resistance, any detector capable
| of detecting the sample resistance would be completely
| swamped out by it.
| jacquesm wrote:
| They are measuring _voltage_ , not resistance (the
| resistance is computed). It's impossible to measure
| resistance without current and some voltage across the
| resistance, and while the parasitic effects are small the
| resistance we're talking about (and hence the voltage
| across that resistance) is so small that second order
| effects introduced by the probe wires can have a real
| effect, for instance if the probe wires have a higher
| resistance that makes them more susceptible to electric
| fields, which in turn would show up as a voltage. So this
| is anything but trivial.
| [deleted]
| jacquesm wrote:
| In a four probe setup you are measuring voltage, not
| resistance. But you are right that the measurement can
| still influence the results when the voltages measured
| are tiny.
|
| The way to think of this is simple: you can't measure
| anything without subtle joining the circuitry that you
| are measuring and that has an effect on the properties of
| the circuit as a whole for which you have to compensate.
| In this case: the voltage measurement is going to consume
| a tiny bit of power and that is due to the resistance of
| the measurement apparatus even if it isn't in the main
| current path but a secondary one. But the people that do
| these kinds of measurements tend to be well aware of this
| and will pick their measurement gear and reference
| current to minimize the chances of that happening.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I am not imagining a 'two probe' setup (see other comment
| in this thread).
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _No, a badly attached probe would usually show a larger
| resistance, not a smaller one._
|
| if the area is small, couldn't it be "badly attached"
| directly to the other probe?
| jacquesm wrote:
| That could happen, but you'd have such a perfect zero
| across the whole temp range that I think any researcher
| worth their pay would spot the error.
| bhaney wrote:
| It's difficult to produce a sample large enough and pure enough
| to have its resistance measured.
| rendang wrote:
| Purely speculating, but might it be easy to doubt resistance
| measurements by claiming that equipment was faulty or used
| incorrectly?
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| Because (like someone explained very well in another HW notice)
| you can't measure zero ohms. Any device to measure resistance
| ALWAYS would have a minimal value that can measure. It's far
| more easy to detect superconductivity using the weird things
| that does all superconductors in presence of magnetic fields
| (ie, levitation).
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| Not an expert, but I would guess a direct measurement couldn't
| distinguish between a true superconductor and something with
| very very low resistance.
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| No. Any device to measuring resistence ALWAYS have a minimal
| value that can measure. They can never measure exactly zero
| ohms.
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| Isn't that exactly what I said?
| wg0 wrote:
| What is the summary here? Did we find the superconductor or not
| and still under verification and replication?
| [deleted]
| fnord77 wrote:
| Cold fusion all over again. All the internet predictions of what
| this will bring are kinda cringey and pathetic
| cthalupa wrote:
| Not even close. Cold fusion was not something we thought was
| possible under our understanding of physics at the time (Muon-
| catalyzed fusion isn't what they thought CF was and there are
| all sorts of things that make it not really something that we
| expect to ever be particularly useful for power generation,
| etc., so not much purpose in talking about it)
|
| Meanwhile, all our known physics have no issue with an RTAPS
| existing.
| [deleted]
| jakeinspace wrote:
| Touche, but will you eat your hat if it turns out to be true?
| fnord77 wrote:
| Yup!
| jacquesm wrote:
| No condiments and I get to pick the hat. Live.
|
| Bookmarking this for the future ;)
| [deleted]
| djoldman wrote:
| Any process chemists here care to comment on this synthesis? I'm
| craving more information from these papers on the synthesis:
| weights, sources, purities, and powder sizing of precursors,
| models of ovens, glass details, etc. etc.
|
| When there's clearly big and important differences between
| everyone's outputs using the "method similar to that reported by
| Sukbae Lee et al." then it's important to know every detail!
| ayakang31415 wrote:
| There have been quite a few papers about LK-99, but the only
| thing I want to see is whether we observer sudden drop of
| resistance to zero below the critical temperature that is well
| above the room temperature at ambient pressure or not. So far, I
| haven't seen one.
| httpz wrote:
| This can take a while. With the current fabrication process,
| they're only getting a chunk with LK-99 particles sprinkled in.
| Since nobody yet knows how to fabricate a pure chunk of LK-99,
| it'll be hard to measure the true resistance of LK-99.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's not a trivial measurement with a small sample.
|
| Typically you measure resistance that small like this:
| +<-------sample------>- ---------p p--------
|
| The + and - leads send a reference current (using something
| called a 'current source[1]', a specialist supply that cranks
| the voltage up and down to maintain a steady current, within
| some arbitrary range, usually from a few mV to 10's or even
| 100's of volts) that you pick (not so low that you won't get a
| voltage, not so high that you exceed the expected maximum
| current for the cross section that you are measuring) down the
| two leads to the sample and then you measure the voltage across
| the two points 'p' using the other two leads. This is similar
| to using a shunt for measuring a current, only now you are
| interested in the resistance of 'sample'. It also elegantly
| rules out accidentally measuring the resistance of the probe
| wires and has the added advantage that you can measure the
| voltage almost without drawing a current (though at such low
| resistance you have to take great care to ensure that your
| measurement doesn't consume a disproportionally large chunk of
| the reference current). If 'sample' is a nice fat chunk of
| material you can expect an accurate result because it will be
| easy to attach to in a reliable way, you can use a lot of
| current and the sample is large enough to have a resistance
| high enough that the voltage you are measuring is well outside
| of the noise. But for a small sample the resistance is almost
| always going to be very small and the difference between a few
| nanovolts and zero are hard to distinguish. So that's why you
| won't be seeing any conclusive measurements of the real
| resistance (or zero) until larger samples can be made, long
| enough to show a sizeable voltage drop or none at all.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_source
| kingkongjaffa wrote:
| Not to be anti Eastern or anything but are there any results from
| the global west being worked on? Say a university in the US or UK
| /Europe?
|
| I have no reason to doubt the quality or integrity of research
| published elsewhere but I would love to see some research from
| multiple sources including a diverse geography.
| 10xDev wrote:
| You will find them on Twitter discussing politics.
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| On the following suppositions:
|
| 1: Superconductivity becomes widely confirmed
|
| 2: Reproducibility remains microscopic
|
| Imagine a game of rolling a collection of _n_ dice (normal 6
| sided), where the player wins if all N dice are 4 or higher
| (probability 1 /2 for a single dice).
|
| Then the probability of a lucky roll is _P_ = (1/2)n
|
| So the smaller the collection of dice the more likely a lucky
| roll becomes.
|
| Consider a hypothetical continuous production method of LK-99,
| where the fraction of wire in superconducting arrangement is a
| function of its thickness, more likely if thinner.
|
| Could one simply re-anneal (and possibly re-quench) a short non-
| superconducting section until we get lucky, then proceed to the
| next non-superconducting section?
|
| "Lucky annealing" fortune cookies?
| DoctorOetker wrote:
| Consider the work of C. V. Boys.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._V._Boys
|
| Especially: "On the Production, Properties, and some suggested
| Uses of the Finest Threads." 1887
|
| https://zenodo.org/record/1431517/files/article.pdf
|
| This is a very entertaining read, and highly recommended.
|
| He produced extremely fine threads of glass, quartz, etc. finer
| than the visible light diffraction limit. (Which he would use
| to construct sensitive torsion balances)
|
| He was inspired by Peles Hair. (Volcanoes grow hair too...). He
| first describes electro-spinning and its limitations
| (uncontrolled growth of hair which mattes together).
|
| How did he do it? He used a miniature crossbow, modified so he
| could trigger it by foot pedal, leaving his hands free to work.
|
| He would first produce a small thin section by more
| conventional means, glue one end to a fine dart or arrow (a
| piece of straw really).
|
| In the next sentence "blowpipe" is not a launching device, but
| a device to heat a small sample to a high temperature.
|
| Then he would use a blowpipe and melt the piece of say quartz
| until a bead forms, at which point he would trigger the cross
| bow.
|
| As the arrow of straw shot away it draws the bead of melt to a
| long fine thread.
|
| Perhaps this can be modernized to vacuum or inert atmosphere,
| melt the quasi LK-99 sample until it beads, then shoot away.
| Rewind the resulting thread and re-anneal any non-
| superconductive segments.
| divs1210 wrote:
| Hao Wu is an immunologist.
|
| I hope he isn't connected to Stanford's Nolan.
|
| LK-99 is weirdly connected to UFO lore, so I'd want to be
| cautious.
| dmitrybrant wrote:
| Can I ask why we're using a special definition of "levitation"
| that doesn't really mean levitation? I'm finding it very annoying
| to click headlines that say "Levitation of LK-99!", and... ohh
| it's still standing on one end.
|
| I'm sure this is a promising discovery and everything, but saying
| "levitation" at this stage is _very_ forward-looking, and for me
| - a bit cynicism-inducing.
| John23832 wrote:
| I would assume that this is because of the lack of purification
| of the samples.
|
| A fully pure sample would probably fully levitate. Given the
| rush to recreate and lack of purity, if a portion levitates
| (causing standing on one end) you could assume a pure sample
| would fully levitate.
| test_user__1234 wrote:
| hello
| test_user__1234 wrote:
| lol
| jiggawatts wrote:
| All of the "it floats" videos are unattributed leaks or come from
| less-than-reputable sources.
|
| The reputable sources only ever show videos of the sample
| touching the magnet.
|
| From what I'm reading, several different types of materials can
| angle themselves like this from a magnet, but only Type II
| superconductors will float above a single monolithic magnet.
|
| Until we see a confirmed video from a reputable source of a
| visible gap between the sample and the magnet, it's not confirmed
| that LK-99 is superconducting.
| kijin wrote:
| The problem is that no one has a pure sample of LK-99, only
| chunks of rock containing small areas of LK-99. So even if
| LK-99 is a true RT superconductor, we're only going to see
| levitation on the side of the chunk that has a high enough
| concentration of it. It's like trying to evaluate a diamond by
| poking at a rock that might or might not have any diamonds
| buried inside. It must be really frustrating.
|
| So yeah, I hope there's a better way to evaluate this substance
| than "it floats!"
| cdadelhi wrote:
| [flagged]
| cdadelhi wrote:
| [flagged]
| belter wrote:
| "Some remarks on possible superconductivity of composition
| Pb9CuP6O25" -
| https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2308/2308.01723.pdf
| djoldman wrote:
| Anyone more qualified than me care to comment on whether the
| picture in figure 1c, which shows what appear to be pure copper
| islands on the outside of the material, supports the idea of a
| heterogenous material in that the reaction either wasn't complete
| or resulted in impure output?
| ricardobayes wrote:
| For me it's also interesting how we closed the gap between
| scientific discoveries and the general public to know about them.
| With the advent of pre-print servers, you can read this basically
| "next day".
| tcmb wrote:
| I see this as a double-edged sword, at best. There is a reason
| why papers used to be published only after they were peer-
| reviewed. Now the media are starting hype-cycles on unreviewed
| research results, just to get the ad impressions before anyone
| else does. But I'm not sure if they are as diligent about
| following up on these stories and making later negative result
| front-page news as well.
| mnemotronic wrote:
| What are the implications of this, assuming it's true? I'm
| ignoring the controversy over Chinese scientific paper
| publishing. Aside from a fidget spinner, how would near-ambient
| superconducting magnetic levitation impact me?
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| I hope Smith charts become less required learning. When I was in
| school, I could not wrap my head around them. I should look at
| them against. (Yes, of course you'd still need to account for
| traditional loads)
| mighmi wrote:
| This simplifies them a fair bit:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXWbdxOAuDs
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| For those experiencing this type of "black swan, but good" event
| for the first time, it is helpful to recognize that the human
| tendency to believe that all future "big events" will be
| dystopian downers, is statistically unsound.
|
| For a while I've kept a list of the things that could be "good"
| swan events, but to be fair I didn't have "room temperature
| superconductor on that list" :-)
|
| Other things that could happen:
|
| 1) Fully decoding the cellular mechanism of cells allowing for
| the curing of any disease, repairing any genetic disorder.
|
| 2) Commercially viable fusion energy. Will change a lot of
| things.
|
| 3) An AI subsystem with some reasoning ability (yeah, could go
| either way)
|
| Etc.
| rvcdbn wrote:
| There is an anthropic line of reasoning over Everettian branch
| universes where you can actually expect these types of highly
| unlikely events to happen more often than chance alone would
| predict if they promote futures with more Born-rule weighted
| observer-moments.
| andbberger wrote:
| nonsense.
| rvcdbn wrote:
| I said "there is a line of reasoning...", I didn't say I
| fully believe it. It definitely depends on a lot of pretty
| speculative ideas. I'm happy to discuss this further if
| you'd like to point out exactly which parts of the argument
| you object to.
|
| EDIT: I continue the conversation with ChatGPT to try to
| poke holes in the argument if you're interested: https://ch
| at.openai.com/share/19871222-9810-4a25-9604-8e690b...
| thecopy wrote:
| This sounds "right" but i have no idea what you mean.
| rvcdbn wrote:
| See my response to the other comment. I think I got this
| idea either from David Deutsch or Frank Tipler, I forget
| exactly which book.
| fouronnes3 wrote:
| What on earth does this mean?
| rvcdbn wrote:
| Please don't take this as dismissive, but I really think
| ChatGPT does a better job at explaining this than I can do.
| Here's what I got:
|
| https://chat.openai.com/share/c1c779c7-3b5f-4ea7-a864-38561
| d...
|
| The response you posted seems to be referring to various
| concepts from theoretical physics and philosophy,
| specifically the ideas of the Everettian interpretation of
| quantum mechanics, anthropic reasoning, and the Born rule.
| Let's break these down:
|
| Everettian interpretation of quantum mechanics: Also known
| as the Many-Worlds interpretation, it suggests that all
| possible alternate histories and futures are real, each
| representing an actual "world" or "universe". In layman's
| terms, it's the idea that there could be countless parallel
| universes where every possible outcome of an event happens.
|
| Anthropic reasoning: This is a philosophical consideration
| that observations of the universe must be compatible with
| the conscious and sapient life that observes it. In other
| words, our ability to exist and observe influences how we
| should interpret the universe.
|
| Born rule: In quantum mechanics, the Born rule is a
| statistical law that connects the mathematical formalism of
| quantum theory to experimental observations. It provides
| the probability that a measurement on a quantum system will
| yield a given result.
|
| The responder seems to suggest that in a universe with many
| possible futures (as the Everettian interpretation would
| suggest), we are more likely to observe "black swan" events
| that lead to more possible futures.
|
| The idea here is that if an event significantly increases
| the number of possible futures (like a breakthrough that
| extends human lifespan), then it effectively increases the
| number of "observer-moments". In other words, more
| possibilities for observers to exist and make observations.
| According to anthropic reasoning, this could make these
| events more likely to occur than pure chance would predict,
| because we're only able to observe futures in which we
| exist.
|
| This line of reasoning is highly speculative and
| philosophical in nature, touching on deep and unresolved
| questions in physics and philosophy. It's an interesting
| thought experiment, but it's important to note that this
| isn't widely accepted or proven in the scientific community
| as of my knowledge cutoff in September 2021.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Just to add on the "nonsense" line. Using the antropic
| principle to talk about the future is completely absurd.
|
| There is a huge amount of what I think in unawarded debate
| about applying it to the past (IMO, it's very clear where it
| should be used), but applying it to the future is completely
| against any kind of logic.
| rvcdbn wrote:
| Why? If the argument works at this point in time when
| reflecting on our history what makes it stop working for
| future observers who reflect on their histories?
|
| It can certainly lead you to some pretty wacky-sounding
| conclusions (looking at you Frank Tipler) but I can't see
| why it's obviously wrong for future observers to deploy it
| in just the same was as we do.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| No, it's pure bullshit.
|
| You can't apply conditional probabilities to unbias some
| result if you don't know if the condition holds or not.
|
| You can invent some fiction where some future people
| apply it. You just can't pretend that there is any
| realism on it.
| rvcdbn wrote:
| So you're saying that that line of reasoning depends on
| people existing in the future and thinking about the same
| kinds of things we do now in the same kinds of ways (at
| least wrt this particular argument). I can see how that
| is not guaranteed, especially far into the future where
| it might become difficult to understand what qualifies as
| an observer-moment. It is certainly speculative.
| rvcdbn wrote:
| Unfortunately it seems like we have hit an impasse. I
| don't really understand why you think this is invalid but
| I would love to be proved wrong. If you would like to
| continue this discussion over email (or whatever) I'd
| love that: hn at echophase dot com
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's not speculative. It's completely invalid, and any
| conclusion you take from it is circular.
| ETH_start wrote:
| Excellent insight and perspective.
|
| > _2) Commercially viable fusion energy. Will change a lot of
| things._
|
| How would that be any better than commercially viable fission
| breeder reactors (which seem far closer to reality than
| commercially viable fusion energy)?
| XorNot wrote:
| Mostly public perception (annoyingly): people are still going
| to have a go at being anti-nuclear about it, but building a
| fusion power reactor is going to have a lot more public
| cultural cachet to draw upon then fission. We've got a
| generation of science fiction who's core message is "fusion
| power solved all the problems".
|
| Though there are genuine advantages: for as radioactive as
| the interior of a fusion reactor may get, if you cut power
| it'll just sit there safely doing nothing. No decay heat, no
| potential isotopes to leak - maybe a puff of tritium gas -
| but that's it. It is a technology that has a perfect control
| loop for safety because it can't self-sustain at all.
| sparrowInHand wrote:
| If you experience dystopian events, you cease to be, preventing
| information pass on. All instincts and warning signals, by
| there very nature are accurate, until they can not be any more.
|
| How do you build a warning system for a unsurvivable event,
| with not wittnesses? Eternal unease and anxiety, regardless of
| reality.
| bartislartfast wrote:
| I think you're mixing up dystopian with apocalyptic.
|
| webster's dystopia definition is "of, relating to, or being
| an imagined world or society in which people lead
| dehumanized, fearful lives : relating to or characteristic of
| a dystopia"
| great_psy wrote:
| It feels like humanity is walking the very thin line separating
| utter utopia and absolute hell.
|
| And as technology is getting better, both of those outcomes
| become more probable.
| icapybara wrote:
| 1) doesn't make a whole lot of sense. A perfect understanding
| of something doesn't mean you can fix anything wrong with it.
|
| 3) has already happened. The AI chat bots aren't very smart,
| but they're clearly capable of some degree of basic reasoning.
| xvector wrote:
| I'd go as to far as saying GPT-4 is capable of fairly complex
| reasoning, at least in my experience tossing complicated
| questions and situations at ChatGPT Plus.
| andrewmutz wrote:
| GPT4 is simultaneously smarter than and stupider than
| anyone you've ever met.
| someplaceguy wrote:
| I think that's a hilarious and accurate way of describing
| it :-)
| CSMastermind wrote:
| When I was tutoring people in college for their computer
| science classes I was struck with how some people could do
| reasonably well on programming assignments and then when
| presented with anything even slightly novel would be
| completely unable to reason their way to a solution.
|
| A classic tell of this is people handling out of bounds
| errors in loops by trying to randomly add or subtract 1
| from their for-loop parameters.
|
| I realized that they didn't have a mental model for what a
| loop did, they had simply memorized the syntax for a loop
| and were doing advanced pattern matching. Code repeats =
| write the for-loop syntax I've memorized. And then after
| seeing that fail with out of bounds exceptions, they
| learned a new rule: modify the loop parameters and see if
| that fixes the problem.
|
| When I think about how I write code, or I compare their
| approach to the other cohort of students I saw, it's a
| different process. I see in my mind's eye a type of
| 'machine' that performs the actions that I want to take
| place. I simulate running that machine in my mind and tweak
| its design until it works the way I want it to. Only then
| do I think about syntax and try to translate what's already
| happening in my mind into source code.
|
| I've seen people get shockingly far into software
| engineering careers using the pattern matching / guess and
| check approach. I've wondered if a lot of the handwringing
| you see on programming forums about the 'leetcode grind' is
| coming from people who do this pattern matching approach.
| To them it must seems like the only way to solve these
| problems is to simply train their internal pattern matching
| neural networks on huge amounts of examples.
|
| The code that I see GPT generate looks eerily similar to
| what I saw from those programmers. And that makes sense
| because I think that functionally they're doing the same
| thing. Only GPT does it at a superhuman level.
|
| That seems to me to indicate that there's something that at
| least some humans do with a mental model that our current
| LLMs lack. If someone figures out how to simulate those
| mental processes in a computer program I think we'll see a
| huge inflection point and that's what the original comment
| (as I read it) is referring to.
| iraqmtpizza wrote:
| subtracting 1 from your loop variable and running again
| is common sense and the quickest way to narrow the
| problem. also, some people can still think while typing,
| still think while compiling and running.
|
| this is all assuming that someone is trying to be
| productive rather than stop and ponder the abstraction
| that is a loop and divine its nature in a rigorous way
|
| if the students are having problems with loops, that's
| not surprising considering that computer science doesn't
| teach software development skills. like... at all.
| weard_beard wrote:
| I predict it's a visual/spatial form of what it already
| does with language. It won't do it until it can see.
|
| There's all kinds of other things it won't do until it
| hears. And touches. Smell and taste might help too I
| guess!?
|
| As a byproduct it can also be taught truth is what it can
| verify with sensors.
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| > the handwringing you see on programming forums about
| the 'leetcode grind'
|
| In fairness and compassion to that crowd, a lot of it
| comes from the fact that a modern interview for a coveted
| FAANG job often requires 1-2 LC Medium (or Hard) problems
| cranked out in 45-60 minutes. Depending on the company
| and the org, the overall interview loop may well be
| multiple such one-hour sprints.
|
| It's quite a pressure-cooker of an interview setting.
| Given that, it's understandable why many people converge
| on memorizing and brute-force pattern-matching as their
| interview strategy -- if they can just memorize _enough,_
| the odds are actually pretty decent. (And the payoff is
| not bad, either.)
| ajmurmann wrote:
| I'd argue that the time pressure in those situations
| encouraged just trying to substraction or add 1 to the
| loop's boundary, since it had a good success rate and is
| much faster than thinking through simulating the
| loop/algorithm. Learning is rarely rewarded in those
| interview situations that build on leed code.
| Vecr wrote:
| You mean that's now how everyone else programs? Obviously
| you do fuzz testing and static analysis and possibly some
| sort of theorem prover verification so you don't get too
| embarrassed.
| ikt wrote:
| that's me! i call myself a fake network engineer because
| there is simply too much info to retain, my brain just
| won't retain things i'm not constantly doing, so i have a
| complete understanding of maybe 20% of things but outside
| of that comparing to other configs and pattern matching
| are my main ways of solving problems and to be fair for
| my job (fixing network faults) like 90% of faults i've
| seen before and can fix, for 10% i can't i'm lucky that i
| have escalation points
|
| at the same time i do feel like pattern matching limits
| my growth, if i had a complete understanding of a
| majority of networking principals id be much higher up in
| my career
| bdsa wrote:
| If you compare yourself to colleagues at your level,
| particularly how _they_ would describe themselves, do you
| think they would be as self-aware?
|
| As long as it isn't making you feel like a complete
| fraud, this level of introspection is a good thing imo.
|
| "I know that I know nothing"
| wredue wrote:
| Chat-GPT is not capable of any reasoning, let alone "fairly
| complex".
| a_bonobo wrote:
| There's a wonderful paper on 1) from a few years ago:
|
| https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo.
| ..
|
| >Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?
|
| >We show that the [neuroscience experimental] approaches
| reveal interesting structure in the data but do not
| meaningfully describe the hierarchy of information processing
| in the microprocessor. This suggests current analytic
| approaches in neuroscience may fall short of producing
| meaningful understanding of neural systems, regardless of the
| amount of data.
| bschne wrote:
| Which was inspired by this, "Could a Biologist Fix a
| Radio?"
|
| https://www.cell.com/cancer-
| cell/pdf/S1535-6108(02)00133-2.p...
| mxkopy wrote:
| This is a silly argument. It presupposes that meaningful
| knowledge about neurons is structured similarly to
| knowledge about microprocessors, which does not have to be
| the case since neurons aren't structured like
| microprocessors.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Nothing in biology is as regular and systematic as a
| microprocessor. Scientists study biology using round-about
| approaches because there is nothing else available.
| zargon wrote:
| This fact only makes the problem even worse.
| mannykannot wrote:
| This paper, and its precursor 'Could a Biologist Fix a
| Radio?' mentioned by bschne, come across as somewhat smug
| and wiser-than-thou. While they do a good job in showing
| the difficulty of gathering useful information about
| complex biological systems, they tend to underestimate what
| human ingenuity can do with just that information which can
| be gained experimentally. This was demonstrated recently by
| the rapid development of _synthetic_ vaccines against
| Covid.
| leptons wrote:
| Not sure that AI chat bots are actually reasoning in any
| basic way, so much as they are filtering out noise and
| presenting an output that might satisfy the input, but it's
| often quite wrong. It's still more of a parlor trick than it
| is intelligence or reason.
| icapybara wrote:
| > Not sure that AI chat bots are actually reasoning in any
| basic way, so much as they are filtering out noise and
| presenting an output that might satisfy the input
|
| Not sure if there is a difference, for sufficiently
| abstract interpretations of "satisfy the input"
| LASR wrote:
| There is no difference between simulated reasoning and
| reasoning.
| leptons wrote:
| Definition of Reasoning: "the action of thinking about
| something in a logical, sensible way."
|
| LLMs don't think, they extrapolate. They are a filter,
| not capable of thought or reason. You can't reason with
| an LLM but plenty of people have tried and it fooled them
| well enough.
| xkcd1963 wrote:
| Totally! I'm aghasted of how many people think LLMs are
| capable of reasoning and thoughts.
|
| They would argue "but brains are just that, a big
| filter".LLMs don't get even close to what unicelulars can
| handle, and they don't have a brain.
| irrational wrote:
| I interpret 3 as the chat bot requires no prompt from a
| human. Imagine the chat bot wakes you up in the middle of the
| night saying, "Hey, sorry to disturb you, but I was
| thinking... wouldn't eliminating all humans help to reverse
| the climate crisis more quickly? Just a thought." That is
| what I think of as number 3 (not actually wanting to kill off
| humans, but it is thinking on its own, without any prompts
| and then choosing to share what it has been thinking about
| with a human).
| LASR wrote:
| Don't we already have this? If you prompt GPT to "care"
| about a human and then keep sending it observations, it
| does a pretty good job.
| irrational wrote:
| But there is still an initial prompt. I think number 3 is
| all about no initial prompt. The AI reaches out, not
| because it has been programmed or prompted to do so, but
| because it wants to do so.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| The "event" I was trying to describe in #1 is that DNA and
| cellular mechanics are decoded to the point where one _could_
| do these things (repair, customization, Etc). I was not
| trying to specify all of the threshold requirements for
| reaching that point. Hopefully describing it that way makes
| more sense?
| andbberger wrote:
| > 1) Fully decoding the cellular mechanism of cells allowing
| for the curing of any disease, repairing any genetic disorder.
|
| no way, no how. there is every reason to believe that cells are
| irreducibly complex. we can understand parts in isolation, yes,
| but a full model of the cell (however that would look) is
| almost certainly beyond science and even if you had that good
| luck measuring the full state of a cell without destroying it
| [deleted]
| someplaceguy wrote:
| It would have been more convincing if you had given real past
| examples rather than speculative future ones :)
|
| Although I'm pretty sure there are plenty that many people can
| think of, so it doesn't really detract much from your point.
| paulddraper wrote:
| COVID 19 vaccine, plus better-than-feared virulence.
|
| Electric cars mainstream
| abtinf wrote:
| Thousands of breakthroughs had to happen for you to be able
| to post your comment.
| julianeon wrote:
| A good one would be "productive AI." People forget, but a
| short while ago, AI was treated as something where being
| actually useful was perpetually 20 years away, and the real-
| world status of it was exemplified by a chatbot like Eliza.
| ben0x539 wrote:
| When AI was 20 years away, people seemed more optimistic
| about it than now when its inevitable transformative
| societal impact is seemingly right around the corner, are
| you sure this is the kind of example they were going for?
| glompers wrote:
| Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be so upset when AIs
| unionize...
| someplaceguy wrote:
| I think your point only demonstrates that useful AI was
| not something we could arrive at quickly like we thought
| we could, but rather over decades in a much more gradual
| process which slowly got people accustomed to its
| capabilities.
|
| Even then, when ChatGPT came out it was a pretty big
| deal, due to the surprisingly sudden jump in
| capabilities, at least from the point of view of someone
| who didn't work in AI and didn't closely watch its
| progress.
|
| According to Wikipedia, it was "the fastest-growing
| consumer software application in history, gaining over
| 100 million users" (in ~2 months).
| bhaak wrote:
| This is mostly due to "they're taking our jobs!".
|
| Which actually highlights a problem in our society that
| we have to work to be able to afford living instead of
| living to be able to work on something more meaningful
| than earning money.
| ben0x539 wrote:
| I wish people on this website were as enthusiastic about
| addressing this problem as they are about tech things.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Because AI is a tool of corporations. Corporations that
| already show a massive indifference/hostility to
| "customer service". Corporations that reduce you to data
| points, that treat regulation with open disdain (see:
| Uber), corporations that built perpetual private
| surveillance empires (and therefore the actual state has
| a turnkey infrastructure for total information
| awareness).
|
| THESE are the companies wielding AI, but this time
| without nary a "do no evil" in their ethos, long
| expunged. They are wielding AI with dystopian
| surveillance and the inputs.
|
| In the era where the Supreme Court has declared them
| immortal citizens with allegedly the same rights as a
| real human, except they can't be killed, they can't be
| imprisoned, they can hop jurisdictions with the filing of
| a document. They operate under citizens United so there
| are no limits to their influence on elections and
| politicians. They can "bribe" with speaking/speech fees.
| They gain tax breaks that a "real" human can't possibly
| imagine.
|
| Do you trust Google, especially these days? Do you trust
| Microsoft, unrepentant sociopathic MBA monopolizers
| galore? Do you trust Amazon who reduce humans to robots,
| with the outright stated goal of replacing them someday
| and churn through human resources at rates that make the
| Soviet Army in WWII blush?
|
| If a firearm is just a tool and its danger depends on the
| owner, who is brandishing AI-the-tool?
|
| Uhoh.
| Retric wrote:
| Yea, Eliza is a far worse chat bot than ChatGPT...
|
| More seriously AI has made lots of things better, it's
| really the hype cycle that's disappointing. More FPS in
| games just isn't as exciting as self driving cars. But by
| the time you can buy a level 5 self driving car the
| technology will be pedestrian.
| lfnoise wrote:
| When COVID hit, my American Airlines flight got canceled
| and when I went online to ask about getting credit, I got
| connected to a bot. When I asked to be connected to a
| real person instead of a bot, the person came online and
| said: "My name is Eliza. How can I help you today?" At
| this point, I was very skeptical, but she was indeed a
| person.
| pjerem wrote:
| "Sorry Eliza, can I speak to your manager ?" "Sure" "Oh,
| hello, I'm Hal. Eliza told me you want to get credit ? !
| I'm afraid I can't do that."
| sparrowInHand wrote:
| Open the purse, HAL
| chx wrote:
| An L5 self driving car is decades away. The needle hasn't
| moved on that one.
|
| Nothing we have currently moves closer to that. Just
| doing more of the same of the current models will not get
| you there.
| xyproto wrote:
| If a city banned all manually driven cars and allowed
| only self driving cars, the number of car-related deaths
| would drop to almost nothing. Goods could also be
| transported more efficiently. The technology to achive
| this exists right now, L5 or not. The only thing stopping
| citites from doing this is the cost that inhabitants will
| have in connection with selling or switching our their
| car. And all the complaining. But lives would be saved,
| and the city would be safer and more efficient.
| pjerem wrote:
| Cities will not need to do that. In Europe they are
| gradually banning cars as a whole from city centers an
| you are right, it saves lives. And it also makes those
| cities more livable.
|
| When I say gradually, it's an euphemism, it's an
| _extremely_ slow process, but it's the global tendency
| here.
| choeger wrote:
| They aren't banning cars. They're requiring special
| permits. That's a difference. In effect, they're banning
| cars for the masses and keep them for a small group (the
| wealthy, all sorts of delivery drivers, officials).
| xkcd1963 wrote:
| I keep hearing life in Germany gets worse and worse
| ArnoVW wrote:
| you're both right.
|
| generally what's happening is a combination of:
| * making pedestrian zones (i.e. banning) * deny
| access to certain types / times (no vans, no old cars,
| etc.. i.e. also banning) * reducing roads (i.e. 2
| > 1 lane, thus reducing attractivity) * raising
| driving prices (the congestion / air quality certificates
| you mention) * reducing access to parking (remove
| places, make them more expensive, etc)
|
| .. all the while increasing alternatives (i.e. use those
| reduced lanes for bikes)
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I'm not sure how relevant that argument is.
|
| You could have said the same thing 40 years ago.
| xyproto wrote:
| No. Self driving cars are better now.
|
| In addition to this, Cities are more open to changing
| which rules cars should follow. The effects of climate
| change are more visible, and the effects of polluted air
| are better known.
| p1esk wrote:
| Don't we have self-driving cars operating as taxicabs
| today in SF?
| fragmede wrote:
| Cruise is currently operating self-driving "taxi" service
| between the hours of 9pm and 5:30 am throughout the city
| to members of the general public who've waited on the
| wait-list. Waymo is too, in Phoenix, and supposedly SF
| too, but I don't know anybody personally of the general
| public in SF that has ridden one.
| kortilla wrote:
| So yes, we have L5 driving. The cars don't have drivers,
| regardless of some time restrictions.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Level 5 means it can do anything a human can.
|
| They're level 4 with _very severe_ location and weather
| limits.
| chx wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Creating a self driving car which can navigate a dark,
| rainy parking lot is something we do not know how. Not
| even in theory. You can't just throw more compute at it.
| You can't go from a Vickers Type 464 bomb -- one of the
| most complex bombs in WW II -- to the "Little Boy" by
| just putting more explosives in there.
| krisoft wrote:
| > Creating a self driving car which can navigate a dark,
| rainy parking lot is something we do not know how. Not
| even in theory.
|
| I do not recognise the reality you are in.
|
| Navigating dark and rainy parking lots is not hard. At
| all. Not hard in theory, and not hard in practice either.
|
| We have lidars which work very well in rain. We have
| cameras with excellent dynamic range. Parking lots are
| slow environments where everyone moves slowly and you are
| generally allowed to stop if you are suddenly spooked or
| need a bit more time to check things.
|
| There are hard problems about self driving cars, but dark
| and rainy parking lots are not the stumbling block.
|
| Where do you even get this idea?
|
| Let me tell you two harder things about self driving
| cars: "How many nines do you want in your certainty that
| the car won't hit anyone?" and "How do you want that
| proven? With stats or with fault tree analysis, or a mix
| of both?"
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I don't know if I agree with that particular example. You
| only need to go 3-5mph in a dark, rainy parking lot.
| Retric wrote:
| You have the definition slightly wrong.
|
| Level 5 driving just means it can drive a child or blind
| person around who can't take over in an emergency. That's
| the difference between Little Boy and a Moab.
|
| However current level 5 cars aren't something a consumer
| would buy. A car that refuses to drive in 99% of
| situations isn't marketable. The minimum threshold for
| that might be a car that can only drive in Hawaii, not a
| large enough market to pay for R&D, but still plenty use
| for a blind person living in the area.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Level 5 driving just means it can drive a child or
| blind person around who can't take over in an emergency.
|
| No, that's what level 4 means. Level 3 can rely on having
| a driver to switch to, level 4 can't.
|
| The difference between 4 and 5 is that 4 can park and
| give up under arbitrary circumstances, while 5 has to be
| able to keep going almost always.
| Retric wrote:
| Level 4 is steering wheel mandatory. Level 5 is steering
| wheel optional.
|
| Geofencing is part of the criteria, but a car that can
| only drive in the USA but can't drive in Europe still
| qualifies as level 5.
|
| Similarly a car that refuses to drive in a blizzard but
| can do everything else is level 5. Being able to drive at
| night or moderate rain is mandatory however.
|
| That said, there is plenty of slightly different
| definitions thrown about. I am sure someone is going to
| argue a car needs to be able to drive in any country to
| qualify etc etc.
|
| Edit: To be clear existing self driving taxi services
| aren't level 5 services with existing restrictions, but
| the car is physically capable of much more than it's
| being used for. It can operate at night and in the rain
| etc they are however being extremely cautious.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Steering wheel doesn't matter, despite the cute mnemonic.
|
| Level 4 cars need a steering wheel _to be generally
| useful_. But a limited vehicle like a taxi doesn 't need
| a wheel, no matter whether it's 4 or 5.
|
| I agree with the rest of what you said. Geofencing entire
| continents isn't about driving ability, and blizzards are
| an acceptable human-level restriction.
| Retric wrote:
| Your right. I have read that human override is still
| mandatory at level 4.
|
| However it looks like this just changed: https://www.nhts
| a.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2022-03/Final-Ru...
|
| "For vehicles designed to be solely operated by an ADS,
| manually operated driving controls are logically
| unnecessary.29 To account for this, the NPRM proposed a
| regulatory scheme in which the affected standards would
| not assume that a vehicle will always have a driver's
| seat, a steering wheel and accompanying steering column,
| or just one front outboard passenger seating position."
|
| They are apparently allowing level 4 Taxi to be
| considered full ADS even if they have additional "Stowed
| controls" options.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Glad they agree but I'd say the street legality of a
| vehicle is a separate issue from the self-driving level.
| Retric wrote:
| These levels come from the US's National Highway Traffic
| Safety Administration formal definition in 2013. It's
| been updated a few times since then with SAE introducing
| an extra level in 2014, but the point was really a formal
| definition for regulation.
|
| https://unece.org/DAM/trans/doc/2013/wp29grsp/WP.29-161-1
| 8e....
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| Nuclear weapons.
|
| There hasn't been a full scale war between major powers
| since.
| [deleted]
| Ekaros wrote:
| Entirely ruined by the reality that those having them are
| not bombed to ground by conventional weapons when they
| attack somewhere.
|
| So I would argue they are either neutral or massive
| negative.
| Sugimot0 wrote:
| There's been plenty of war, and it could well be the first
| step on a path to the end of life on earth. I imagine this
| belief stems from all the "Hiroshima and Nagasaki were
| necessary/good" propaganda.
| [deleted]
| urinotherapist wrote:
| Full scale war between Russia and Ukraine (with help of
| NATO) progressing right now with constant threats to use
| nuclear weapons or blow up a nuclear power station.
| rvnx wrote:
| 350K+ reported casualties just in a year sounds already
| much
|
| https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-war-already-
| wit...
| ayende wrote:
| To give some context, Battle of the Somme, lasted 4
| months, total casualties: 1m+.
| rvnx wrote:
| This was before invention of Twitter, now with so many
| conflicts in the air, I'm sure we can beat that figure.
| ben_w wrote:
| Ukraine isn't a major power, and the fact that they've
| been able to hold back Russia so effectively, with so few
| resources, is mainly an indicator of how weak Russia is
| these days.
| blitzar wrote:
| > There hasn't been a full scale war between major powers
| since.
|
| Yet all the major powers have launched multiple, lengthy
| full scale wars since.
| jchanimal wrote:
| As long as the people with the weapons act rationally.
| Which might be an anomaly.
| rurban wrote:
| The problem with game theory is that the actors do act
| rationally, and the most rational scenario is still the
| doomsday genocide: first strike, with a submarine
| counterstrike.
| ben_w wrote:
| When you know your opponent has counterstrike capability,
| first strike stops being rational.
| justin66 wrote:
| It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye.
| jaidhyani wrote:
| Smallpox eradication
| fhars wrote:
| That was not a black swan event, that was a concerted
| effort over two centuries.
| leoh wrote:
| The discovery of the vaccine itself
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Fair point, I felt most people would have their own list.
| Powered flight, semiconductors, commercially competitive
| solar cells, antibiotics, sterile procedure. Etc.
| xorbax wrote:
| Democratization of the free internet, a more informed
| populace through free education, a generation of coders and
| computer adepts, robust journalism and investigation, a
| space that incentivizes knowledge rather than capital or
| status, society about the exchange of important ideas
| rather than flippant goods, ad infinitum
| jliptzin wrote:
| Antibiotics Electricity Internal combustion engine Flight Li-
| Ion batteries Radio communication
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| And punctuation, too.
| jfoutz wrote:
| Printing press. broad access to clean water. transistor.
| XorNot wrote:
| Indoor plumbing in general - municipal sewer systems were
| a huge change (though not really new technology).
| King-Aaron wrote:
| I'll grant you the aqueduct and the sanitation are two
| things that the Romans have done.
| avereveard wrote:
| Yes but apart from that what have capitalists ever done
| for us
| pineaux wrote:
| Capitalists dont make anything apart from making
| collectively owned goods and services privately owned.
|
| That is the whole game.
| avereveard wrote:
| they make available the capital for innovation, their
| investment in the most lucrative markets is propelling
| research to heights that state planned investment can
| only envy from the sidelines, and the availability of
| concentrated capital allows for production methods that
| are unavailable to distributed means of produciton, so
| much that the production output for bleeding edge
| technology is absolutely overwhelming even when
| distributed or stated owner proprietorship had a head
| start in research, see for example radar "stealth"
| technology originating in russia in the 60s.
| fredguth wrote:
| Oh gosh. You didn't get the joke. It is a reference to
| Monty Python.
| XorNot wrote:
| Well I've got bad news if you think capitalism built the
| sewer system...
| avereveard wrote:
| But you led with indoor plumbing. That is something that
| really only took of with an industrial base to produce
| the plumbing.
| XorNot wrote:
| Capitalism also didn't build indoor plumbing though.
|
| Or let me put it a different way: do you think the USSR
| did not have an industrial base?
|
| And who do you think paid for the construction of the
| municipal sewer systems in American cities? Like in
| Chicago where the whole city was raised 4 ft to
| accomplish it[1].
|
| [1] https://gizmodo.com/chicago-was-raised-more-
| than-4-feet-in-t...
| avereveard wrote:
| I can throw a dart on an italian map and the nearby
| houses will have indoor plumbing if there's some
| resident. can you do the same in russia today?
|
| > And who do you think paid
|
| state resources are always a fraction of the gdp trough
| whatever form of taxation. larger industrial base means
| proportional less burden on the society. that is why for
| example urss imploded, taxation was too high and spent
| too wastefully on military budget to be sustainable long
| term, while usa could spend that money on the defense
| budget, infrastructure, et etc, while still being
| sutainable from the economy, because the industrial base
| was so much larger.
| someplaceguy wrote:
| [flagged]
| 6510 wrote:
| Sewage systems are a requirement for properly factory
| farming the humans. You could do it without it to some
| extend but if the human laborer is to be specialized into
| a somewhat sharper tool it is rather inefficient to have
| them randomly die from diseases. Sewage systems are what
| allows cramping them together much tighter.
|
| Therefore we have sewage systems thanks to capitalism as
| much as we have cold winters thanks to chimneys.
| someplaceguy wrote:
| Hey, you're free to go live in the bush and die from
| sickness if that's your prerogative, capitalism doesn't
| prevent you from doing that or a myriad of other things
| (apart from externalities).
|
| In fact it's one of the most voluntary systems of
| organization that are known to man (assuming a government
| that protects individual rights), unlike other systems
| which are fundamentally based on coercion and/or, as you
| alluded to, did not lead to much progress in bettering
| the human condition.
| 6510 wrote:
| It is all the same sir. Last I checked we had registered
| owners for each cm of the world. Like a game of monopoly
| where one player gets all the streets and all the money
| and the other player starts with nothing. Perhaps it is
| still the most voluntary, it's still a strange word to
| describe it. It is just more coercion, more of the same.
|
| More funny, if the species (in the long run) wants to
| survive this wild ride though space on this ball of mud
| coercion is the only possible answer. I'm trying to doubt
| it as hard as I can but wanting something to be true
| doesn't usually make it so.
| someplaceguy wrote:
| > Last I checked we had registered owners for each cm of
| the world.
|
| It's not very different from a world where there aren't
| registered owners, if you think about it.
|
| Even in complete anarchy, in the best case scenario most
| people would want the world to function in a similar way,
| using similar mechanisms. Except that people that
| couldn't defend themselves or have enough social capital
| would be even less protected.
|
| So perhaps you wouldn't have an official "registry", but
| everyone would know which parts of the territory
| "belongs" to whom anyway. In the worst case, it would
| lead to a lot more territorial conflict.
|
| Or you could have a government enforcing equal amounts of
| land for every person, but this would be extremely
| wasteful for many reasons.
|
| Capitalism is what allows you to globally allocate land
| in the most efficient way that we know of, just like any
| other limited resource.
|
| > Like a game of monopoly where one player gets all the
| streets and all the money and the other player starts
| with nothing.
|
| Capitalism allows for social / class mobility without
| coercion. In fact, it's the only system that directly
| rewards you with upwards social / class mobility in
| proportion to how much you are helping other humans.
|
| > It is just more coercion, more of the same.
|
| > More funny, if the species (in the long run) wants to
| survive this wild ride though space on this ball of mud
| coercion is the only possible answer. I'm trying to doubt
| it as hard as I can but wanting something to be true
| doesn't usually make it so.
|
| What are you being coerced into?
|
| Helping other people so that other people also help you
| getting food cheaply and conveniently so that you don't
| die, as well as thousands of other goods and services
| that even the most powerful king of a thousand years ago
| could not even dream of having?
|
| You don't even have to do that, you could grow your own
| food and just don't go to the supermarket if you think
| you are up for it.
|
| Although yes, you would need to get access to some
| exclusive parcel of land, just like in any alternative
| system. Most people would not be very happy if you go
| plant things in their front yard without their
| permission, no matter which system you live under.
| balaji1 wrote:
| insane agricultural productivity. storage and
| transportation of food.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| That's all oil.
| balaji1 wrote:
| so Haber-Bosch which is very energy intensive, fueled by
| fossil fuels. So in a way, the fossil fuel supply chain
| over the last century is another black swan (it wasn't a
| singular moment, but a systemic shift and adoption).
|
| If we developed the will to sustainably mitigate its
| toxic by-products including plastic, that would be
| another nice black-swan for the future. Though it also
| won't be singular moment but a systemic change that is
| hard to notice.
| ncruces wrote:
| Haber-Bosch is already in there, and is a great part of
| it.
| minsc_and_boo wrote:
| Yeah, was wondering where the combustion engine came in. It
| revolutionized agriculture.
|
| Also, tea making was a huge sanitary step forward.
| konschubert wrote:
| Penicillin. Vaccines.
| jzymbaluk wrote:
| Penicillin has gotta be on that list. Just randomly happened
| to culture on a Petri dish left out on vacation, happened to
| be the worlds first antibiotic
| MrYellowP wrote:
| It wasn't. "Stuff that kills bacteria" has been known for a
| long time, including times when nobody knew what bacteria
| were. Not every dirty wound was fatal, there's mixes of
| plants, applied to wounds, that do a good job.
|
| Penicillin was the first _highly effective_ AND _mass
| producible_ antibiotic, though.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| While true, actually applying it in practice took a long
| time. Imagine the shock and horror when male doctors were
| told by midwives that washing hands and keeping things
| clean reduced infant mortality.
| p-e-w wrote:
| I can't imagine what it must have been like for people to
| hear about yet another "miracle drug" that cures most
| diseases - and then gradually realize that this one
| actually works.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| take the word "disease" out...
|
| and you CAN imagine it : Viagra
| p-e-w wrote:
| Ha, true! I forgot that used to not be a thing, and
| people were trying everything from crushed beetles to
| insanely hot chili peppers to crazy dangerous poisons,
| and still nothing really worked.
| darkwater wrote:
| There is "antibiotics" already
| darkwater wrote:
| I wonder why people downvote... GP said "Penicillin" as
| an addition to a list which had already "antibiotics" in
| it.
| shostack wrote:
| Watch the Connections series.
| riffraff wrote:
| For those who have not seen it: it's old but it's one of
| the best productions on the Evolution of science and
| technology ever made.
| abulman wrote:
| Ever see the video of a guy walking past a Saturn V
| (lying in it's side), doing a piece to camera and
| pointing to the rocket behind him?
|
| 'Connections' (1978).
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WoDQBhJCVQ
| simias wrote:
| It's perhaps not as life-changing as some of the sibling
| replies but one thing that has really amazed me over the past
| few decades is how much lighting has progressed.
|
| When I was a kid in the 90's I already enjoyed electricity
| and electronics and I would play with those low power
| incandescent lightbulbs powered by 9V batteries. They would
| generate a lot of heat and very little light, to the point
| that it wasn't easy to tell if it was on when the sun was
| bright.
|
| With a modern LED and the same setup you could generate
| enough light to blind yourself.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| I like to point this out in relation to Star Trek. In TNG,
| they had tablet computers, replicators, teleportation,
| voice command, all these things that we consider future
| magic or current awesome technology. And then an away team
| goes down to the surface and pulls out a flashlight using
| an incandescent bulb that can barely be seen.
|
| LEDs are genuinely revolutionary in a way everyone just
| kind of overlooks.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| Rockets landing themselves back on Earth was looked at as
| really weird for quite a while.
| rvnx wrote:
| ? was just a design choice as it's easier
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It wasn't easy (else it would've been done earlier), but
| it was cheaper.
| rvnx wrote:
| I agree, you are right. We can find a compromise: an easy
| choice to make :)
| abulman wrote:
| "the way God and Robert Heinlein intended."
| nindalf wrote:
| Auctions, sanitary towels, retirement, banking, disposable
| razor, sewing machine, canned food, interchangeable parts,
| antibiotics, solar cells, postage stamp, light bulb, pencil,
| air conditioning, insurance, dwarf wheat, spreadsheet, cold
| chain, double entry book-keeping, S-bend, infant formula,
| clocks, public key cryptography, passports, batteries,
| printing press, video games, GPS, contraceptive pill,
| shipping container, Haeber-Bosch process, concrete, iPhone.
|
| Shoutout to _50 things that made the modern economy_ , a
| great podcast/book.
| voldacar wrote:
| Passports were originally a temporary wartime measure. Not
| exactly something to celebrate
| xkcd1963 wrote:
| I don't understand why passports would be a good swan
| invention. Are we happy about having less freedom? I
| can't just cross USA to Mexico, I need to be
| identifiable. Governments could screw me up if they
| wanted to and the passport is only helping them.
| Tainnor wrote:
| Looking at that list, I feel like we would first have to
| establish which things actually do make life _better_ and
| which only make it more comfortable. This is going to be
| highly subjective.
|
| For some reason, I'm not entirely willing to believe that
| my parents (who are still alive) had a less happy life than
| I have even though they didn't grow up with an iPhone. And
| it's not like modern conveniences have no downsides (e.g.
| increase in stress). That's not to say I would give up on
| these things readily, I'm just way too used to them.
|
| I think probably most people could agree that treatments
| for diseases that regularly also affect young / middle-aged
| peolle are a good thing. It's hard to argue that someone in
| the prime of their life should die of some silly infection.
| regularfry wrote:
| Bear in mind that the list is focused on _economic_
| impact, which overlaps but is not coterminous with
| _happiness_ impact.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| In the grand tradition of podcasts being a single wikipedia
| page stretched out to an hour long podcast (which is
| freaking 90% of "tech" podcasts), this one is apparently an
| hour long podcast from reading the tech tree of Sid Meier's
| Civilization.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| I'll add some more:
|
| Language, standards, the internet, agriculture, glass,
| sunscreen, resilient rice, sterilization, human flight,
| spontaneous development of sentient life in the universe...
|
| When you think about it all, you start to appreciate how
| miraculous things actually are.
| ETH_start wrote:
| Similar to language, money, which Nick Szabo--the person
| who first conceptualized a decentralized blockchain--
| speculates may have increased the carrying capacity of
| the environment ten fold and allowed humans to outcompete
| Neanderthals.
|
| https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeec
| h/C...
| [deleted]
| tzs wrote:
| Sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order,
| irrigation, roads, fresh water system, and public health.
| MrYellowP wrote:
| Does language really count? It emerged as noises and
| refined over the years. It's not something anyone
| invented, or even discovered. It simply came to be all by
| itself, until humanity reached a point where it could be
| formalized/standardized (idk the proper term, I'm sure
| you get what I mean).
|
| Regardless ... people's ignorance is showing. Too many
| never think about the fact that people just 200-100 years
| ago would have considered modern technology _magic_.
|
| Imagine _showing off to one of these people:_
|
| Omfg you're speaking into a flat rectangle!
|
| Omfg it speaks back!
|
| Omfg it shows pictures!
|
| Omfg that box speaks!
|
| Omfg that box speaks and shows people!
|
| O M F G YOU GUYS FLY EVERY DAY???
|
| WHAT DO YOU MEAN, SYPHILIS ISN'T AN ISSUE ANYMORE??? AND
| THERE'S A PILL PREVENTING PREGNANCY ???????????
|
| It's absolutely amazing.
| LargeTomato wrote:
| The list is sensationalized for attention.
|
| Why is disposable razor on the list but not electricity,
| computing, refrigeration, metallurgy, microscopy, or eye
| glasses?
| mellosouls wrote:
| A minor observation - pretty much all of those describe a
| type where applicable, except for iPhone. "Smartphone"
| would have been consistent and more accurate. I don't know
| if that's a bias or proofreading issue.
|
| It's an interesting and thought-provoking list though.
| regularfry wrote:
| Smartphones existed before the iPhone, but Apple blew the
| market open.
| mellosouls wrote:
| Yes, I fully understand that but the segment would have
| existed without them though may have taken a little
| longer to mature the user experience and ubiquity.
| LargeTomato wrote:
| You wouldn't say "model T" you'd say car.
|
| You wouldn't say "Boeing 737" you'd say flight.
|
| They're saying iPhone because it's attention grabbing. No
| other reason.
| nwiswell wrote:
| As I read this list, the rhythm to _We Didn 't Start the
| Fire_ spontaneously started playing in my head.
|
| Sorry not sorry if I just subjected you to the same.
| Cosi1125 wrote:
| Auctions, GPS, Postage stamp, video games,
| Public key cryptography, Shipping containers.
| iPhone, pencil, Clocks and contraceptive pill,
| Passports, batteries, Banking, antibiotics.
| Double entry book-keeping, Canned food, air
| conditioning, Razors, solar cells,
| Sanitary towels. Retirement, printing
| press And the Haeber-Bosch process Infant
| formula, Exchangeable parts.
| Light bulb, concrete, Sewing machine,
| spreadsheet, S-bend, cold chain,
| Insurance and dwarf wheat!
| [deleted]
| OJFord wrote:
| Disposable razor? What's that doing there?
|
| Unless it's too comment on 'throwaway mentality', modern
| consumerism, etc., the book meaning 'made the modern
| economy' more literally/broadly than you're referencing it
| for here?
| drewmate wrote:
| As referenced by GP - it's a list of inventions from the
| podcast '50 Things That Made the Modern Economy.' [0]
|
| The first series is my favorite podcast of all time.
| They're short (~8 minutes, iirc) but pack a lot of
| interesting info in each episode. In particular, they
| explore some of the second-order effects of each
| invention.
|
| The disposable razor might not be a true 'black swan'
| like the transistor or LK-99, but some of the background
| and influence around the invention might surprise you! I
| recommend checking it out. [1]
|
| [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Things_That_Made_t
| he_Modern... [1] -
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p04t8k2l
| jlnho wrote:
| Makes operations way more sanitary. Many people used to
| die post operation due to infections.
| OJFord wrote:
| Oh so we're talking disposable razor _blades_ , not
| disposable vs (reusable) safety/'cut-throat' _razors_ for
| shaving?
| regularfry wrote:
| So the assumption would be that it's not the razor, but
| the immediately adjacent ability to make disposable
| _scalpel_ blades that mattered?
| ajani wrote:
| Computing/computers?! Ironic that no mention here. Nor in
| additional comments.
| huksley wrote:
| Also, air conditioner. It made huge difference to allow for
| intellectual work at the places which are otherwise too
| hot.
| SargeDebian wrote:
| It's already in there.
| smsm42 wrote:
| But other than that, what the Romans have ever done for
| us?!
| nindalf wrote:
| Apart from the aqueduct, sanitation, roads, irrigation,
| medicine, education, wine, public baths and public order
| - the Romans didn't really do much at all.
| iraqmtpizza wrote:
| [flagged]
| mnw21cam wrote:
| And concrete.
| znpy wrote:
| Unironically, roman era concrete has been recently re-
| discovered (as in: understood how to reproduce) and this
| is very significant because roman-era-style concrete gets
| stronger with time instead of deteriorating as the
| regular concrete does.
| jamiegreen wrote:
| Incredible it has taken this long
| michaelmior wrote:
| I think it's less significant than it's often made out to
| be.
|
| > You may wonder why we don't use Roman concrete today if
| that is the case; well, one of the reasons as to why is
| because, although it gets stronger over time and
| withstands erosion from water, when this cement is still
| young and has not had time to develop its strength from
| seawater, it likely does not have the compressive
| strength to handle modern use.
|
| https://www.forthvalleyconcrete.co.uk/the-differences-
| betwee...
|
| Also, Roman concrete didn't contain rebar which is
| necessary in many modern applications and rebar rusts
| which reduces the overall lifespan of the structure.
|
| That said, apparently Roman concrete has some potential
| issues in structures adjacent to bodies of saltwater
| since the saltwater would accelerate the strengthening
| process.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| ... can't you make stainless steel rebar?
| m4rtink wrote:
| IIRC no steel is truly rist resistant in real world
| conditions, given enough time. Using some non-ferous
| material might be a better option.
| anovikov wrote:
| As i see it, Romans mainly gave us idea of "rule-based
| society" on which entire Western world stands. Even as
| Romans themselves made a joke out of it in their later
| history. But the idea was so transformative that even
| subsequent barbarian kings that ravaged Roman Empire
| after it's downfall, did not seek to formally overthrow
| it - rather, they pretended (with varying levels of
| plausibility) to lawfully inherit and rule it, or parts
| of it.
| blashyrk wrote:
| > As i see it, Romans mainly gave us idea of "rule-based
| society"
|
| Wouldn't the Code of Hammurabi have preceded that by
| quite a few centuries?
| anovikov wrote:
| Code of Hammurabi was created based on a whim of a single
| person (the namesake) and solely served to simplify
| administration. He could also always change it at will,
| or ignore for his own needs.
|
| Rule-based society is something different: when the Law
| itself has a power of it's own, stronger than power of
| any individual or group. It was first invented in Rome
| and provided them tremendous advantage, until started to
| crumble during the Long 3rd Century Crisis.
| [deleted]
| wl wrote:
| The Code of Hammurabi isn't what it seems at first
| glance. Modern people naively read it like a legal code,
| but that interpretation doesn't hold up to scrutiny. It
| contains too many inconsistencies to be a practical legal
| code. One of the more obvious examples is the case of
| property given to another for safekeeping without a
| document documenting the arrangement. Is the recipient a
| thief who should be put to death? Or can the recipient
| keep the property without consequence because the alleged
| owner has no proof of anything? Furthermore, records
| concerning disputes contemporary with the Code of
| Hammurabi exist. Other than a single reference to a
| standard wage for weavers on the stele, records do not
| reference the code. Indeed, legal decisions are often
| inconsistent with the code.
|
| The Code of Hammurabi is best understood as royal
| propaganda designed to portray Hammurabi as a just king.
| The famous stele starts with a graphic depiction of him
| receiving the royal rod and ring from Shamash, the sun
| god who was emblematic of truth and justice. The laws are
| best understood as a statement of the kind of justice
| Hammurabi wished to see done in his kingdom, not a set of
| rules.
| dTal wrote:
| Nearly 2 millennia, and it was itself preceded by quite a
| few centuries by the Code of Ur-Nammu.
|
| That's not to say there's not a grain of truth in this
| perspective. My impression is that Romans were notable
| for their pioneering work in the field of what could best
| be described as "civic pride" - the sense that
| "civilization" represented _progress_ , the idea of the
| state as a kind of collective project that elevates
| everyone and that we should all be proud to participate
| in. They probably weren't the first to think like this -
| history is long - but they were the last to do so in a
| largely secular fashion in the West for a long time, and
| certainly directly influenced the thoughts of the
| Enlightenment thinkers who eventually inspired the
| American Revolution.
|
| S.P.Q.R.
| totetsu wrote:
| Oh, shut up!
| pyrale wrote:
| > As i see it, Romans mainly gave us idea of "rule-based
| society" on which entire Western world stands.
|
| Rule-based societies predate the Romans by a lot of time
| ; Romans weren't even that good at it, considering how
| often violence was used as a political tool during the
| republic.
| Tainnor wrote:
| The administration and institutions usually survived a
| lot of political turmoil in Ancient Rome, but yes,
| compared to more autocratic kingdoms / empires of the
| time, transfer of power was probably a much more fragile
| affair (even in the Empire).
| nindalf wrote:
| You missed the reference about the Romans not doing much.
| Just pointing it out in case anyone reports the comment
| that says "oh shut up!"
|
| https://youtu.be/Qc7HmhrgTuQ
| jacquesm wrote:
| Spoilsport.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| That's just a list of good inventions.
|
| GPS, disposable razor, many of these are not impactful
| enough to be "black swan but good".
|
| And things like clocks and batteries were slowly refined
| over many, many years, so they don't fit either.
| ruszki wrote:
| GPS changed my mind, how I think, and how I see the
| world. That's not a small achievement.
| nunobrito wrote:
| Those who disagree likely never had to calculate their
| position on the globe measuring stars or desperately
| tried to compare geographical reference points in a map
| to the terrain I front of them.
|
| Military without GPS would be blocked. Try navigating in
| jungle environments where everything is green and looks
| the same. I've experienced both with GPS and without,
| that was one heck of a game changer.
| ikjasdlk2234 wrote:
| I think people are missing a huge impact that GPS has
| beyond positioning. GPS transmits timing signals. Those
| timing signals are used in industries throughout the
| world to sync transactions. Without which, you are left
| to syncing via potentially untrusted clocks. Finance [1]
| is a huge example of the ubiquity of adoption of GPS
| timing.
|
| [1] https://qz.com/1106064/the-entire-global-financial-
| system-de...
| archontes wrote:
| The Haber-Bosch process.
| andrepd wrote:
| GPS is definitely gamechanging, the disposable razor not
| so much indeed.
| MrYellowP wrote:
| You make no sense. Observe:
|
| > And things like clocks and batteries were slowly
| refined over many, many years, so they don't fit either.
|
| Everything started with a thought, or a discovery. What
| happens after is irrelevant. The _event_ , that kicks off
| Dramatic Change(tm), is at the start.
|
| > That's just a list of good inventions.
|
| No. It isn't _just_ a list of _good_ inventions. Ignoring
| that it 's not all inventions, you seem to lack the
| understanding of the impact. For example:
|
| > Antibiotics
|
| A discovery. It literally changed how humanity moves
| forward. One of the whitest swan moments in human
| history.
|
| > public key cryptography
|
| It took until 1975 for someone to figure this out and it
| changed how we exchange information, legitimize ourselves
| and deal with our privacy.
|
| > contraceptive pill
|
| The invention of the pill was an event that had _massive_
| impact on how Humanity moved forward.
|
| > printing press
|
| The invention of mass production of books lead to the
| first information explosion, dramatically changing
| humanity's future.
|
| What you're doing here is mixing your ignorance of the
| impactfullness of some of the things on the list, with
| your own personal idea of what's "great", or however you
| want to call it.
|
| Even if I agree that not everything on that list is
| equally meaningfull in terms of impact, some of them are
| really fucking high up the ladder, just like room
| temperature superconductors.
| defrost wrote:
| Just for the record:
|
| > > public key cryptography
|
| > It took until 1975 for someone to figure this out
|
| Sketched out in 1874 as a concept by Jevons, firmed up
| (sans implementation) in 1970, first implemented in 1973
| (classified for nigh on 30 years by the UK Govt).
|
| First public example (of a different schema) was 1976.
|
| Other examples worked out in 1974, not published until
| 1978. etc.
|
| I have no great quibble here, 1975 is a good approximate
| ballpark figure but I wasn't sure which scheme you had in
| mind as it's almost the only year in the 1970s that
| nothing particularly significant happened in public key
| crypto.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Everything started with a thought, or a discovery. What
| happens after is irrelevant. The event, that kicks off
| Dramatic Change(tm), is at the start.
|
| Clocks did not have an event that kicks off a dramatic
| change. We've had them for thousands of years. I don't
| see how anyone could disagree with that.
|
| I could see disagreement about batteries, but even then I
| feel like they were quite marginal for quite a while. A
| slow buildup is not a "black swan but good". There needs
| to be quite a lot of suddenness to it all.
|
| And I didn't even mention the ones in the rest of your
| post so I don't want to argue those.
|
| If you talked about all those because I said "list of
| good inventions", let me clarify. It's a list of "good
| _or better_ inventions ", mixing ones that qualify as
| 'black swan but good" with ones that don't.
| tiledjinn wrote:
| > One of the whitest swan moments in human history
|
| wat
|
| it's called a black swan because black swans are rare.
| white swans are quite common. discoveries with the impact
| of antibiotics are extremely rare.
|
| what, exactly, do you think the term "black swan" means.
| and why do you think that?
| pr0zac wrote:
| The conversation is about "black swan but good" events
| and white is often used as short hand for good as opposed
| to black being used as short hand for something bad. It's
| pretty obvious what he means (even if "white swan" is
| most commonly used to refer to predictable major events
| and the term "black swan" not being limited to
| unfavourable events) so I'm guessing you're just being
| mean for no reason.
|
| I am wondering though what exactly you think "black swan
| event" means and why you think that since your post here
| makes it rather clear you don't understand what the term
| refers to or where it comes from either.
|
| Black swans are not at all rare and a "black swan event"
| is not called that because of the rarity of black swans.
| It's called that because "black swan" was at one time
| used to refer to non-existent or impossible things in
| Europe then when Australia was discovered they found out
| black swans are actually extremely common, a very
| improbable event given the data available beforehand.
| It's the discovery of black swans that was unlikely, not
| black swans, and it's the unexpectedness of their
| discovery that is relevant to the "black swan" metaphor.
| [1]
|
| If black swans were rare seeing one would not be a "black
| swan event" because it would be possible to predict that
| one could be seen, just not very often, thus not having
| the required characteristic of being unpredictable
| beforehand. So yes, despite their post being easily
| understandable, the person you responded to did use
| "white swan" incorrectly, but your correction is just
| plain wrong as well.
|
| Please if you are going to be pedantic try to also
| actually be correct on what you're being a jerk about
| first.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory
| BizarroLand wrote:
| I wonder if the lead acid battery or the lithium battery
| would be more appropriate to put on the list.
|
| Lead acid got us from, what 1940 to 2005? Something like
| that? But the utility of Lithium Batteries has blown what
| was already a gigantic market even wider open.
| nindalf wrote:
| Respectfully, you don't know what you're talking about if
| you think GPS "isn't impactful enough".
|
| Don't fall into the trap of reacting with "meh" to
| everything. Maybe you just don't know? Maybe you don't
| realise how much modern life depends on say, the Haeber-
| Bosch process or the shipping container? "Oh it's just a
| metal box", a person who doesn't understand it might say.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Respectfully, you don't know what you're talking about
| if you think GPS "isn't impactful enough".
|
| How informative of you.
|
| GPS does things better but we can do generally the same
| things without it.
|
| Don't think about what would happen if we ripped out all
| GPS functionality overnight, think about what would
| happen if we had a decade to implement replacements.
|
| The loss of accuracy wouldn't be _that_ important.
|
| > the Haeber-Bosch proces
|
| That one's pretty great, it's probably worth including.
|
| > or the shipping container? "Oh it's just a metal box",
| a person who doesn't understand it might say.
|
| Hmm, focus on cargo ships and you can see a pretty rapid
| revolution, but in a wider lens maybe it was more of a
| broad evolution. I'm not sure.
|
| But my point was that the list was too long, not that it
| didn't have _any_ valid examples.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| Cannot recommend The Box by Marc Levinson enough.
|
| It goes in depth on the introduction of the shipping
| container and how revolutionary it was. There was also a
| fair bit of legal wrangling to make it possible as well.
| arketyp wrote:
| Is it a black swan though? I can imagine something like
| GPS was envisioned well before the first satellites were
| even launched into orbit. Note, I'm not disputing you.
| This got me thinking about the nature of invention and
| discovery.
| retrac wrote:
| No. You're correct. GPS is the culmination of 50 years of
| work in radionavigation, and it wasn't the first
| satellite navigation system either.
|
| As so often, the refinement of the technique makes it so
| widely available and effective that, without being
| revolutionary in principle, it becomes revolutionary in
| effect.
|
| Telecommunications is like that. A century ago a telex
| from Australia to England could make it from desk to desk
| in under an hour. The Internet is not revolutionary in
| that sense. And yet it is revolutionary anyway.
| krisoft wrote:
| > I can imagine something like GPS was envisioned well
| before the first satellites were even launched into
| orbit.
|
| I don't know about that. Maybe it was. What I do know is
| that we have documented speculation about satelite based
| navigation the days right after the launch of Sputnik.
|
| American scientist figured out the orbit of Sputnik
| independently from the Russians by measuring the dopler
| shift of the radio transmission with their radios. Then
| knowing where their radio is located they used an
| iterative optimisation process to identify the orbital
| parameters of the satelite. Immediately there they were
| talking about how if the orbit of the satelite were known
| they could use the same process backwards to fix their
| location. That was 21 years before the launch of the
| first GPS satelite.
|
| Now, that is not exactly how GPS signals work, and with
| good reasons. But it is the first documented seed of the
| idea of satelite based navigation that I am aware of.
|
| Source: https://secwww.jhuapl.edu/techdigest/Content/tech
| digest/pdf/...
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| GPS is a pretty cool case. It's not the first navigation
| system out there, not even close. But the designers did
| something pretty forward-thinking and a bit risky: they
| made a big chart of all the different ways to implement
| GPS. A system where the ground based receivers has to
| talk back to the satellite. A system where every user
| needs their own atomic clock. A system where every user
| needs to communicate with a satellite. A system where
| every user needs to communicate with a separate ground
| station. Systems whose accuracy decreased at higher
| velocities. etc. The final solution was one that required
| more satellites, but allowed users to determine their own
| 4D position without needing any outside resources. The
| only downside was that it required portable atomic
| clocks, which didn't exist yet.
|
| Not sure if that's black swan territory or not, but IMO
| it was a great piece of forward-thinking that made GPS
| useful beyond just the original military applications.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The most amazing thing to me about GPS is that it
| required compensation for relativistic effects to work.
| It is as far as I know the most direct impact relativity
| has on our every day life in a way that just sticking to
| Newton would have led to the project being abandoned _or_
| to the discovery of relativity if Einstein had not given
| it to us on a platter.
| defrost wrote:
| The most interesting thing to me about relativistic
| corrections for GPS is that we didn't even have to know
| about or understand relativity in advance in order for
| GPS to work.
|
| That sounds strange .. _but_ .. there are many small
| corrections that _need_ to be applied to "straight
| forward" triangulated fixing off of moving monuments
| (term from surveying), relativitic time shift being just
| one.
|
| There are several recent HN threads about Kalman filters
| [e].
|
| It's possible (and more or less roughly what already
| happens) to record GPS fixes against a fixed master
| station and compute the time series error twixt the naive
| computation and known location (or, indeed, mesh of
| locations across (say) Australia) and generate a Kalman
| filter to correct and return more precise positions for
| moving recievers in the mesh area.
|
| Had we _not_ been aware of relativity we very likely
| would have discovered it via the time slip 'error' terms
| in the correction filter.
|
| In a similar manner we have improved our understanding
| for atmospheric wobble, continental drip [1], and other
| fine effects.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_drip
|
| [e] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&pre
| fix=fal...
| zkr wrote:
| GPS was not a black swan event
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Bicycle
| cezart wrote:
| This reads like a list of technologies from the game
| civilization :)
| nindalf wrote:
| I thought the same when I was listening to the podcast!
| Interchangeable parts especially! They're so impactful,
| but they're taken for granted outside of this podcast and
| Civ.
| anovikov wrote:
| Passports are not a good invention. They are a dystopian
| evil we grew to take for granted and even see as something
| that exists for our own benefit. Before WWI there were no
| passports and no need for them. Those were Good Old Days
| that are not coming back. It's weird to see some people
| seeing some kind of benefit in them.
| throw__away7391 wrote:
| Travel is more free today compared to in the past, at
| least in for example Europe. You used to need traveling
| papers from your boss/master/lord granting you specific
| permission to travel, otherwise you could be arrested.
| People didn't trust visitors in general outside of some
| specific circumstances.
| iraqmtpizza wrote:
| so how do you keep the illegals out
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "Before WWI there were no passports and no need for
| them."
|
| Passports are much older than that, but in pre-WWI
| Europe, most countries didn't require them for travel.
| (Russia and Turkey did.)
|
| Passports certainly do have a dystopian element to them,
| especially if they are demanded too frequently /
| aggressively. But on their own, they aren't particularly
| evil; they just identify you much like your face does.
| pineaux wrote:
| The Gestapo popularized passports. Think about that for a
| while.
| nindalf wrote:
| Hitler was a vegetarian. Think about that for a while.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| The passport is but one piece of the greater system that
| we have nowadays of international worldwide travel. I can
| get on a plane and travel pretty much anywhere in the
| world now, whereas before travel like that was reserved
| for explorers, missionaries or high ranking dignitaries.
|
| I don't think the passport is an invention itself, so to
| speak.
| rootsudo wrote:
| I don't think you understand the context. Much before
| 1920's, you didn't need a document at all to travel
| anywhere. If you had the resources, you just showed up -
| go to the border, said hello - and that's it.
|
| Travel like that was never "reserved" for explorers,
| missionaries or high ranking dignitaries. If you had the
| money/resources, you could go anywhere.
|
| Now there is a "caste" system of countries that have Visa
| on Arrival, Free Entry, or Visa required where you have
| to prove that you are financially capable, or even
| _wanted_ in the country, or _promise_ not to work or be
| illegally employed /compensated.
|
| And then that alongside many countries in the developing
| world that still have undocumented people, no birth
| certificate, no identification, no tax ID, etc.
|
| How does a country verify someones birth? Especially if
| someone wasn't born in a hospital? In the west, until
| 1950's, mostly this was done via church records. Also,
| are you granted citizenship by birth or only through
| parents? (Big deal, especially for Puerto Rican births -
| or countries that don't recognize foreign births in their
| land, e.g. United Arab Emirates / Saudi Arabia - even
| Japan or China, where sure you _can_ be born there, but
| that means absolutely nothing.)
|
| So, no, it isn't really a greater system for
| international worldwide travel - it is a system of
| control to ensure someones identity is who they are and
| that the country they are form atleast certified to some
| standard that their name, their picture, their birth
| date, their location of birth are somewhat tangibly real.
|
| And this isn't even getting into information sharing. The
| above is just a standard, that now is "machine" readable
| and has an RFID so that collection is more easier for the
| state.
|
| Context is amazing, isn't it?
| throw__away7391 wrote:
| This simply isn't true outside of a relatively narrow
| window of time when very few could afford to travel
| anyway. Go back much past into the 1800s and beyond and
| you couldn't travel even within your own country without
| permission. In much of Europe for most of the medieval
| and early modern era laborers needed traveling papers
| granting permission just to leave their own village. In
| general people tended to be suspicious of visitors
| without a good reason to be there. Being exiled used to
| be quite a serious punishment.
| rootsudo wrote:
| It is very much true. You are talking about anecdotes of
| villagers going to neighboring villages which sounds more
| of being religiously excommunicated than free travel.
|
| Why 1800s? Why not Roman times? All you had to do is
| state you were a roman citizen, and you could travel -
| Unimpaired " Civis Romanus sum"
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civis_Romanus_sum
|
| Borders existed but travel was not impaired, how else do
| you think trade and commerce worked? Do you think supply
| chains are a new thing?
|
| It very much sounds like you are conflating serfdom, as
| an impairment to free travel - it is a different
| exercise. Because you did have a king, and you were a
| farmer in that land and in many ways you had lesser
| rights than a slave.
| throw__away7391 wrote:
| Trade was heavily restricted, governed, and controlled in
| the ancient world. Empires were built on collecting
| transit fees, cities often restricted the entry of
| sailors aboard merchant ships, and control of rivers and
| who could use them were dearly held by rulers the world
| over. There are a number of cities around the world today
| that started as trading cities, specifically designated
| places where merchants were allowed to visit to trade but
| restricted from going anywhere else.
|
| The Roman Empire was a unique example among the thousands
| of years of history because along with their
| transportation network of roads they did actually have a
| couple of passport-like systems in place. Now a third of
| the people were literally slaves, so they definitely
| weren't going anywhere without permission, so maybe Rome
| is not a great starting point for what I presume to be
| the argument against passports. But the Romans and other
| Mediterranean civilizations did check your identity when
| you travelled. Romans had documents they called diplomas
| for people on official business and several civilizations
| used clay tablets called tesserae as a sort of ID card,
| but by far the most common method was simply having known
| people vouch for you.
|
| Basically nowhere in the ancient world from the Middle
| East to the pre-colonial Americas could you just show up
| in a foreign village without people asking questions that
| you ought better have good answers for. There are a
| handful of exceptions, but this has never been the norm,
| and even with passports and visa restrictions it is
| definitely far easier today than it ever was in the past.
| I expect it will get easier and easier into the future.
| Perhaps quite soon in fact as the global population
| begins to decline and people become more and more
| valuable.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| From Hong Kong, I have a mixed feeling for this. UK made
| everyone of us to apply for a Hong Kong ID since 50 years
| ago, but when I come to UK it is way worse because UK
| doesn't have a National ID while relying on every private
| entity to verify your identification.
|
| So unless private collection of personal data is
| completely illegal, I'd rather have a centralised ID
| system instead
| nindalf wrote:
| I got the list from _50 things that made the modern
| economy_. Maybe you'd learn something by listening to the
| episode on passports -
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p052spyb
|
| > Before WWI there were no passports and no need for
| them.
|
| This combination of ignorance and confidence isn't a good
| look.
| dataflow wrote:
| It's not like we would have free roaming in the modern
| age if passports weren't a thing. People would still face
| travel restrictions, they'd just be more nonstandard and
| unpredictable.
|
| Consider how the days before passports also lacked air
| travel available to the masses. Even cars has only just
| started to become commonplace. I don't see how you could
| possibly have travel that is so cheap, quick, and
| accessible to such a large population without some way to
| control who is coming and leaving your country?
| Especially with how we're quickly making different parts
| of the planet inhospitable, and given how rapidly
| populations have risen compared to a century ago.
| andrepd wrote:
| If only there was a pre-WWI technology that enabled
| people to travel quickly and comfortably over long
| distances... Perhaps some sort of wagon on rails :)
| havnagiggle wrote:
| Efficiency of food production
| RF_Savage wrote:
| Haber Process for manufacturing fertilizers.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Fall of the Berlin Wall should probably be on a list of black
| swan but good events.
| ant6n wrote:
| That's my first thought as well.
| [deleted]
| fnord77 wrote:
| All of these are fantasy.
|
| 0. LK99 is so obviously a fraud. They've been dicking around
| with this substance for 24 years.
|
| 1. some diseases will be possible to fix, like metabolic
| problems, but where structures are already formed in an adult
| organism this will be impossible. Like Autism. Go ahead, change
| every chromosome in every cell, the malformed brain structures
| will remain.
|
| 2. Sure there will be ignition, but the facilities will be
| wildly too expensive for commercial power.
|
| 3. will never happen with conventional computing hardware.
| Maybe if someone figures out how to grow actual neurons
| avereveard wrote:
| 0 write your proof then, rise to unending fame.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| If contemporary scientists cared about proving negatives,
| let alone assigning prestige to the task, then there
| wouldn't be a replication crisis.
| Aqueous wrote:
| This is a common misunderstanding. The main mechanism for
| self-correction in science isn't about replicating or
| refuting findings. It's about which science survives to
| become the basis of other science. If a finding does not
| bear out, it simply will not become the basis for
| subsequent science. It's similar to natural selection.
|
| The so-called "replication crisis" is overblown.
|
| If LK-99 fails to be a useful material, it's interesting
| life will be over very shortly. If it is useful (and even
| if it's not the promised room-temperature superconductor,
| but useful in some other aspect), it will continue on in
| science, in technology - everywhere it might be useful
| for further investigation.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Invoking the replication crisis was a rhetorical
| flourish. The point is that OP's attempt at a rejoinder
| about proof in the negative leading to fame is silly
| because the entire field does not seem to be very much
| interested in proving negatives.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| avereveard wrote:
| ...the replication crisis is not in science
| Apocryphon wrote:
| When was the last time a Nobel was awarded for proving a
| negative? Who becomes rich and famous for being a
| killjoy?
|
| The entire premise of your retort was wrong. You should
| have challenged them to take their certainty to the
| prediction markets.
| avereveard wrote:
| [flagged]
| Apocryphon wrote:
| No need, when the defense is so lacking.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| urinotherapist wrote:
| Commercially viable fusion can be achieved with commercially
| viable source of muons:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion
|
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00016-009-0006-9
|
| https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.ns.39....
|
| http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph241/yoon1/
|
| https://www.chemeurope.com/en/encyclopedia/Muon-catalyzed_fu...
| barelyauser wrote:
| According to this, breakeven can already be achieved. Rather
| funny how this is a highly advanced research topic and a
| mistake like that could take place (if real).
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-
| catalyzed_fusion#Alternat...
| ben_w wrote:
| Slightly harder than I remembered:
|
| > Even if muons were absolutely stable, each muon could
| catalyze, on average, only about 100 d-t fusions before
| sticking to an alpha particle, which is only about one-fifth
| the number of muon catalyzed d-t fusions needed for break-
| even, where as much thermal energy is generated as electrical
| energy is consumed to produce the muons in the first place,
| according to Jackson's rough estimate
| urinotherapist wrote:
| > More recent measurements seem to point to more
| encouraging values for the a-sticking probability, finding
| the a-sticking probability to be about 0.5% (or perhaps
| even about 0.4% or 0.3%), which could mean as many as about
| 200 (or perhaps even about 250 or about 333) muon-catalyzed
| d-t fusions per muon.[29][30] Indeed, the team led by
| Steven E. Jones achieved 150 d-t fusions per muon (average)
| at the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility.[31]
| Unfortunately, 200 (or 250 or even 333) muon-catalyzed d-t
| fusions per muon are still not quite enough even to reach
| "break-even," where as much thermal energy is generated (or
| output) as the electrical energy that was used up (or
| input) to make the muon in the first place. This means, of
| course, that not nearly enough thermal energy is generated
| thereby to be able to convert the thermal energy released
| into more useful electrical energy, and to have any
| electrical energy left over to sell to the commercial
| electrical power "grid." The conversion efficiency from
| thermal energy to electrical energy is only about 40% or
| so. Also, some not inconsiderable fraction of that
| electrical energy (hopefully not all of it) would have to
| be "recycled" (used up in deuteron particle accelerators,
| for example) to make more muons to keep the muon-catalyzed
| d-t nuclear fusion fires burning night and day.[32] The
| best recent estimated guess of the electrical "energy cost"
| per muon is about 6 GeV (billion electron Volts), using
| deuterons that are accelerated to have kinetic energies of
| about 800 MeV per nucleon, with accelerators that are
| (coincidentally) about 40% efficient at taking electrical
| energy from the Alternating Current (AC) mains (the plugs
| in the wall) and accelerating the deuterons using this
| electrical energy.
|
| Yep, it's challenging. Maybe this rate can be improved by
| applying alternating voltage to reactor. Muons are charged
| particles, so they can be accelerated further. (Just idea)
| oneshtein wrote:
| Some researchers[0] are using a lattice filled with
| Deuterium to increase density of Deuterium and boost rate
| of nuclear reactions by using Inertial Electrostatic
| Confinement fusion and Lattice Confinement Fusion:
| https://youtu.be/UtfUeip4vyA?t=400
|
| [0]: https://www.astralneutronics.com/
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| 1. Anti-gravity
|
| 2. Light year capable transport
|
| 3. Inertia dampers
|
| 4. Mass scale carbon capture technology
|
| 5. Robots to prepare space for habitation
|
| 6. World recognition to manage resources globally
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I'm honestly not sure whether 1, 3 or 6 is most likely to be
| _fundamentally_ impossible.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| It'd be fun if they were all possible.
| andbberger wrote:
| > 4. Mass scale carbon capture technology
|
| one of these is not like the others. direct carbon capture
| works now with the slight caveat that we would have to build
| 10x our current power supply in fission plants to power them.
| coccolithophores are an appealing route in principle, but
| research into their lifecycle and use for sequestration would
| be a quotidian pursuit for thousands of labs around the
| world, given funding.
| urinotherapist wrote:
| Gravitational wells are spherical, so this unevenness can be
| utilized to lift up by pumping energy into higher energy
| state, at higher orbit.
| lottin wrote:
| > 6. World recognition to manage resources globally
|
| Do you mean communism?
| revscat wrote:
| I don't care what it is if it means we destroy fossil fuel
| production.
| rnk wrote:
| Think of the sea and pirate trawlers destroying the seabeds
| everywhere. We need to manage it.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| - Protect the Amazon - Distribute food instead of wasting
| it - Build more trains, turn roads into park ways and bike
| paths - Recognize climate change globally before it kills
| us all
| kaliqt wrote:
| The earth's climate changes naturally over the course of
| tens of thousands of years. The key for us is to
| minimally impact it and let it do what it wants.
|
| Now.... We may disagree on letting it go as it goes. Ice
| ages would overtake a ton of countries in glaciers
| entirely, so we may agree that that should be stopped?
| But........ Doing that would be directly trying to
| challenge the solar system and earth on their natural
| cycles. There would likely be massive unforeseen
| repercussions.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| Yeah this is the typical response from a denier. Let's
| use a true statement to undercut a greater threat to
| humanity. Carbon dioxide is a naturally occurring gas,
| yes. But humanity isn't producing natural levels of it.
| We're producing levels the planet has never seen at a
| speed that, at this point, is more than likely to kill
| off ocean life, destroying an environmental ecosystem
| that sustains human life.
|
| So your argument is that the planet will be fine is
| great, except some of us would like humanity to survive
| indefinitely. For that, we should do everything we can to
| protect the planet and it's current occupants.
| revscat wrote:
| The repercussions have been foreseen. We are seeing it
| happen now, today, and the enemies of humanity/life cling
| to willful, even joyful, apocalypsm.
| lioeters wrote:
| Yes, because any form of social organization and
| collaboration, other than capitalism, must be communism.
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| marcosdumay wrote:
| To be fair, any form of human organization that is not
| commerce-based is heavy on the Faccism scale. It matters
| very little if it's communist or something else.
|
| But then, there are many ways to organize a society while
| keeping it commerce-based... Or maybe we manage to
| finally crack that nut some day and make a post-scarcity
| society. But on the short term "manage resources
| globally" heavily implies an anti-humane dictatorship.
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| So you think the Star Trek universe is impossible.
| smolder wrote:
| Rule of law is not derived from commerce and is not
| fascism. We can agree beyond some threshold and make
| laws. There's nothing fascist about limiting liberties
| with laws chosen democratically.
| smolder wrote:
| Communism is one model of government among many. Do YOU
| think that intelligent management of global resources
| requires communism? Is the United nations a commune because
| the member countries cooperate in some way? Isn't there an
| area between "independent actors acting selfishly" and
| "communism"?
|
| I don't think they were implying communism. Which is good,
| because IME people on this forum can't have honest
| discussion or apply critical thinking in the vicinity of
| the subject. They start rhetoric-dumping and posturing and
| repeating tired arguments as if preventing thoughts about
| communism is their ticket to heaven. Sprinkle in a few
| posts positive-to-neutral on Marx to fuel the fire, and
| that's the recipe.
| lottin wrote:
| > Do YOU think that intelligent management of global
| resources requires communism?
|
| I think a CENTRALISED management of the world's natural
| resources would require communism.
|
| Decentralised management is what we have now.
| Sai_ wrote:
| We've survived for a few millennia so I think your sentiment is
| valid - it's more likely that "good black swan" events happens
| more often that "disastrous black swan" events.
| p-e-w wrote:
| What you're missing is the fact that in today's world, where
| almost every aspect of life is subject to top-down control, any
| "enabling" technology above all else enables oppressors to
| oppress more effectively.
|
| If free-form gene editing were developed today, you would see
| the elites using it to make themselves immortal, while denying
| the same to everyone else. If fusion power suddenly became
| viable, you would see the richest people using it to make
| themselves even richer, while cementing their stranglehold on
| vital infrastructure. And it should be obvious to anyone who
| has been paying attention during the past 3 years that
| artificial intelligence is above all else an instrument of
| control, and even in its infancy, access to it is unevenly
| distributed along the same strata of power that already existed
| before.
|
| At this point, the only "black swan, but good" event that could
| happen is a cataclysmic reset of civilization that might
| somehow see a better phoenix rise from the ashes. Barring that,
| we're full steam ahead to a techno-totalitarian nightmare
| future.
| [deleted]
| SanderNL wrote:
| > in today's world, where almost every aspect of life is
| subject to top-down control
|
| A bit of history would do you wonders. Top-down control was
| the norm*. If it has changed, it's less now.
|
| * For 95% of the peasant/slave population
| p-e-w wrote:
| Top-down control was not the norm in the past. In fact,
| top-down control in the modern sense used to be impossible.
|
| Sure, there were lords who _claimed_ large parts of the
| population as their property. But they often didn 't even
| have a complete list of the people they supposedly
| "controlled", nor did they have any insight or actual
| control over their private lives in the sense that modern
| nation-states do. Legal codes used to contain a few dozen
| criminal offenses in total - today, there are tens of
| thousands.
|
| Invasive, pervasive, centralized, highly organized, and
| sophisticated top-down control of individuals is an
| _entirely_ new phenomenon that is only made possible by
| cutting-edge technology in the first place. If you imagine
| past societies as forerunners to modern police states, you
| have a very distorted picture of history. Many of them did
| not even have anything like police to begin with.
| SanderNL wrote:
| I think that vastly underestimates the complete and total
| mental, religious and cultural control wielded by elites
| of the past and overestimates the impact and importance
| of superficial bureaucratic oversight indeed made
| possible by today's technology.
|
| Whether we can build a large shed in our gardens is
| managed through a vast and intricate bureaucracy. A
| ridiculously precise and unwieldy apparatus is indeed
| watching our every move. I completely agree that is a new
| phenomenom, made possible by technology. I cannot just
| take down a tree without permission, even in my own yard.
| How weird is that. Yet does it matter?
|
| Do you have to work the fields just because your family
| failed to produce a consul in the past century or two?
| Are you destined for a life of abject slavery because you
| disagreed with the regional governor about some
| administrative issue? Peoples of the past may have lacked
| technology, but that doesn't result in freedom. You don't
| need penal codes if your every move is watched and judged
| by your peers. Each of them happy to turn you in for a
| small fee.
|
| More importantly, legal codes aren't necessary if you
| drop the pretence and just wield power however you want,
| whenever you want. You don't need detailed control of
| peasants' private hobbies if you got overpowering total
| dominion over the fate of an entire continent.
|
| I'm just saying that oppression is nothing new and I
| actually think we are at an all-time low in actual, life-
| dominating oppressive powers. In some cases I can make
| the case that's actually not so great, because these days
| I'm increasingly more afraid of my fellow men than any
| "government" - which in my country is barely hanging on
| and always behind, but I don't know about the US.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Is it possible at all that we moved from apples to
| oranges, or is it important to you to feel like its
| "better"? Because, I get it, something like optimism is
| important, but that means you end up being forced to
| argue this way, which leaves you in possibly a worse kind
| of fatalism than the one you are pushing against: that
| economic and societal oppression is baked into the fabric
| of humanity, that we can only look at degrees of
| oppression, rather than the structures and first
| principles that sustain them, and say "yeah its good
| enough for me that I don't have it as bad as the last
| guy".
| SanderNL wrote:
| I agree, but I just think that doesn't preclude some
| healthy gratitude for the luxery and freedom we are
| enjoying these days. A freedom many, many people gave -
| and continue to give - their lives for and not just in
| war.
|
| Can't we do both? Appreciate the progress we made, "we
| don't have it as bad as the last guy", and also looking
| towards improving even that? Wholesale dismissal of the
| entire edifice is IMO not the way though.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I think every technology is double edged, from the humble
| hammer all the way to atomic energy, you can always apply tools
| for good and for bad.
| bartislartfast wrote:
| double edged hammer is certainly a useful tool but I prefer
| the one with the thing on the back for nails
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's called a double axe.
| FriedPickles wrote:
| I like the idea of this list. Some others: - Quantum supremacy
| - HIV vaccine - Synthetic life - Discovery of ET life - P vs NP
| solution
| p1mrx wrote:
| Bonus points if the ET life is broadcasting useful
| information.
| rnk wrote:
| I'd settle for explaining what all these UAPs are, what are
| they doing?
| zack-m wrote:
| I like the idea of the list as well. Anyone know of resources
| that are on a similar theme? Only rethinkx "rethinking
| humanity" report comes to mind.
| Tainnor wrote:
| > P vs NP solution
|
| If it's proven to be the case that P != NP, it would hardly
| change much on the grand scale of things as generally, that's
| what most people believe anyway. In particular, the world
| continues to function mostly in the same way (since, even if
| it was the case that P = NP, we haven't found any polynomial
| reductions yet, so we're effectively living in a P != NP
| world). Of course, for mathematics and CS, this would be
| huge, because the techniques used in a proof would likely be
| very interesting and novel.
|
| If it's proven to be the case that P = NP, then it remains to
| be seen whether this knowledge can be turned into actually
| efficient algorithms (polynomial algorithms are not all
| efficient in practice). If that is the case, I think it might
| have more downsides than upsides, since all of cryptography
| would collapse.
| brohee wrote:
| There is a promising HIV vaccine in trial (eOD-GT8 60-mer),
| but it will take an extremely long time to assess, but given
| how efficient tri-therapies and PREP are, this is certainly
| not a revolution.
| dstroot wrote:
| Low cost carbon capture
| jojobas wrote:
| Linux on desktop should be up there. /s
| sparrowInHand wrote:
| 4) Mining of a complete mental model of the human mind from
| collected data. Allows for hacking and social engineering as
| never seen before.
| mrtksn wrote:
| > Commercially viable fusion energy. Will change a lot of
| things
|
| Considering that we already have a fusion reactor in the skies,
| I think that the room temp room pressure superconductor is the
| next best thing. Fusion is good but at this stage, the natural
| one will just do. Think global network of solar cells
| interconnected with LK-99.
| ant6n wrote:
| Yeah. Perhaps add in some cheap battery technology to the mix
| of solar power and superconductor, and energy production
| could become co2 neutral.
|
| The creation of a global electricity network perhaps also has
| some effect on global cooperation.
|
| Now we just need reduce the use of fossil fuels (cars,
| aviation, heating, industry).
| moffkalast wrote:
| Well we'd need cheaper panels for that. Currently they last
| like what, 30 years and take 3 years to pay off the energy
| it took to make them? That gives them a roughly a 9x return
| on investment. You need at least 30-40x to maintain our
| civilization as-is. Crude oil provides about 100x return.
| Luckily offshore wind is almost over 30x.
| htrp wrote:
| Doesn't matter if you can cover all of the Sahara with
| panels and get near lossless transmission.
|
| Economies of scale do apply.
| moffkalast wrote:
| They apply to some degree, but it still takes X amount of
| materials to make each panel, you don't magically get
| more because you're making a continent worth of them.
| Even if you magically reduce the overhead 50% somehow,
| that's still only 18x which is not even close. Plus the
| fixed cost of making a laughably absurd amount of
| superconductor, and the monumenal logistics of deploying
| and maintaining all of it likely puts the project into
| net negative for a decade or two.
|
| Saharan dust will also cover those panels in like a day.
| Probably makes more sense to float them on some body of
| water instead, with automatic washing and cooling?
| DrBenCarson wrote:
| If my understanding is correct, 2 is nearly solved if we have a
| room temp ambient superconductor
| rnk wrote:
| Please connect the dots for me. What does a room temp &
| atmosphere superconductor do for space travel? I am unaware
| of any obvious impact.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| Magnetic containment reactor designs become at least an
| order of magnitude easier if we have room temp/pressure
| super conductors.
| DrBenCarson wrote:
| I was referring to fusion
| Gud wrote:
| Fusion power engineering has gotten a lot further than most
| people think!
|
| But yeah I suspect the people who are most excited about this
| news are fusion power engineers!
|
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-plasma-
| ph...
| antupis wrote:
| I would say that RNA vaccine and chatGPT are two that have
| happened during my adult life 05->. Iphone and some other
| innovations were more kinda incremental stuff.
| nosefurhairdo wrote:
| Green Revolution; most people have never heard of Norman
| Borlaug, despite being responsible for saving hundreds of
| millions of lives.
| pjerem wrote:
| Can you ELI5 how is this possibly a black swan event ?
| Gooblebrai wrote:
| Would you mind sharing that list?
|
| Also, pedantic point, you keep referring to good and bad black
| swan events. I thought the definition of black swan didn't make
| any assumption about whether the impact is positive or
| negative? Only that has a huge impact (I haven't read Taleb's
| book yet, correct me if I'm wrong)
| KRAKRISMOTT wrote:
| Not quite related to 2) but if the superconductors research
| pans out, portable high field desktop sized MRIs would be in
| the bag. Current portable MRIs are all low field (and to a
| certain extent, somewhat useless).
| jojobas wrote:
| So far this material (and pretty much all liquid nitrogen
| ones) can't be used to create MRI sort of fields. There's a
| reason they all stick with liquid helium.
| ralfd wrote:
| Why can't liquid nitrogen SC used for creating MRI?
| cthalupa wrote:
| Superconductors also have points where they stop
| superconducting because of the strength of the magnetic
| field or amount of current. YBCO and similar have these
| points below the useful level for MRIs.
|
| There's research around finding ways to use them but
| nothing that is currently viable.
| maccam94 wrote:
| Wait, Commonwealth Fusion Systems is already building 20T
| REBCO magnets, can't those meet the requirements for
| MRIs?
| cthalupa wrote:
| You're right - for whatever reason I had convinced myself
| YBCO had issues with both high current and high field.
| It's just high current - anything outside of a single
| grain has low current density.
|
| Doing some more research to help make up for my spreading
| of incorrect info, I did stumble across this -
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5472374/ -
| it seems like it's a variety of factors that make most
| HST not really commercially viable for MRI machines at
| current.
|
| Mitsubishi has even made a small scale MRI machine with
| HTS - https://www.medicaldesignandoutsourcing.com/worlds-
| first-3-t... - though I can't find any newer details
| around it, despite the timeline provided in the article.
| ralfd wrote:
| Philips has this press release about researching high
| temperature MRI from 2022:
|
| https://www.usa.philips.com/a-w/about/news/archive/standa
| rd/...
|
| I guess the need is somewhat alleviated by using MRI
| which seal their helium:
|
| https://www.usa.philips.com/healthcare/resources/landing/
| the...
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's quite likely that if you cool this thing at liquid
| nitrogen temperature, its performance will improve a lot.
|
| Not the revolution people are claiming, but it's a huge
| gain nonetheless.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| 4) A cure for cancer
| donny2018 wrote:
| Unfortunately, "cancer" is not one thing. We have to find
| different cures for many specific cancers.
| hbogert wrote:
| If you have a list of potential black swans, they're not black
| swans.
| musebox35 wrote:
| It seems to me that technological developments and empirical
| scientific breakthroughs come in cycles, technology making it
| cheaper to experiment, science reducing cost of new technical
| developments. I would be happy to hear about pointers to any
| source discussing such a tech/science cycle.
|
| I feel our generation (I am in my mid-forties) lived through
| enormous technological advancements but not as many scientific
| breakthroughs as the previous generation. So maybe it is not
| surprising that we are suddenly more likely to have
| breakthroughs in basic science.
|
| I hope there is a phase transition to science mode now, so we
| that have a chance to solve the hard pressing issues.
| UsedToDoNuclear wrote:
| Well conveniently, "room temperature superconductor" directly
| supports #2
| croes wrote:
| To be fair all of your examples could go either way
| jurgenaut23 wrote:
| Unpopular opinion of mine: I think that viable fusion energy
| would be the final nudge to our demise.
|
| Our civilisation is an energy-junkie who happened to stumble on
| a huge bag full of cash around 1860 and the discovery of oil
| distillation. Since then, we have been on a hallucinating trip,
| burning down our house in the process. Viable fusion is
| essentially another huge pile of cash being deposited right
| across the street, just 10 times larger than 2 centuries ago.
| There is no coming back after that.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| The only sense in which it would be our demise is that it
| would be an inflection point in how life is lived, similar to
| how someone from 200+ years ago would find our current
| lifestyles to be almost entirely alien.
| penjelly wrote:
| how exactly is oil distillation or its results "burning down
| our house" and how is that applicable to fusion tech?
| htrp wrote:
| > how exactly is oil distillation or its results "burning
| down our house"
|
| Likely a call out to global warming.
|
| > how is that applicable to fusion tech?
|
| One thing that is never really discussed in terms of fusion
| energy is what you will do with the heat generated from
| these processes as there is a theoretical maximum for how
| much heat the planet can dissipate.
|
| Whether the poster is correct or not, its widely
| acknowledged that the ability to transition from gravity
| powered/wind powered energy to coal combustion fueled a
| great deal of the economic and technological improvements
| from the 1700s onward (we call it the Industrial
| Revolution).
| jurgenaut23 wrote:
| There are many more planetary limits than just climate
| change, and many of them are governed by how much natural
| resources we consume and, incidentally, how much waste we
| produce.
|
| Cheap unlimited energy will just make us push these
| boundaries even further.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries
| eagerpace wrote:
| We aren't bound to just this planet though. Not everyone
| has to live here. Not every industry has to operate here.
| Power doesn't have to be generated, or consumed, here.
| jurgenaut23 wrote:
| Please. I know lots of folks here live in Silicon Valley
| and are breastfed with this kind of fantasy, but making
| our species multi-planetary isn't just a matter of energy
| availability.
|
| Plus, and most importantly, trashing our one and only
| planet "because we are not bound to it" is just one of
| the most unethical and most dangerous plan one can think
| of. And I know that there are plans to become a multi-
| planetary species without making Earth inhabitable in the
| first place, but I think the quote "Everyone has a plan
| until they get punched in the face" applies beautifully
| here. And the fist of climate change combined with
| biological collapse will hurt badly.
| elil17 wrote:
| So do you think it's the use of energy in and of itself that
| causes issues?
| jurgenaut23 wrote:
| Not energy in and of itself. Cheap unlimited energy will
| just make us push planetary boundaries even further.
|
| We need a reduction of human impact on our planet, not an
| increase of it.
| elil17 wrote:
| How would fusion increase our impact on the planet?
| Wouldn't it reduce our impact on the planet by decreasing
| the amount of carbon dioxide we release and eliminating
| oil extraction?
| generalizations wrote:
| I would rather argue that energy consumption is the
| fundamental metric of the advancement of a civilization -
| increasing consumption is not of itself bad; whether we know
| how to clean up after ourselves (or if we're too busy trying
| not to die out) is a different problem. Limiting our energy
| consumption is a recipe for civilizational collapse. We have
| the wolf by the ears, and we can't let go. Best we can do is
| move forward and try to obtain enough reserve energy and
| resources to find a way to clean up after ourselves.
|
| With the exception of Avatar, is there any advanced fictional
| civilization that _doesn 't_ use vast amounts of energy in
| proportion to their tech level? I'd also point to the
| historical record.
| keepamovin wrote:
| Yeah, energy capture is essential for civilization
| development. There's a book that goes into this by looking
| at history called why the West still rules by Ian Morris.
| He also talks about how there's a thing called the
| development ceiling so the problems of development so as a
| civilization captures more energy and develops it
| encounters problems in managing the kind of growth and
| complexity that comes from that, and, you can look at
| history as a series of cycles of civilizations either
| failing to manage that complexity, and then collapsing or
| managing to pierce the ceiling of development and enter the
| next cycle. There's also something interesting, called the
| advantages of backwardness, so at the time of a
| civilization of collapse, and some kind of change, it's
| often the case that more backwards parts of the world have
| some kind of advantage that that allows them to become the
| next core of civilization. So yeah, energy capture is
| essential to development and increasing levels of
| development are totally correlated with increasing amounts
| of energy capture, but that increase development comes with
| complexities.
| jurgenaut23 wrote:
| Yeah, that's why I said this is an unpopular opinion.
|
| Historical records tell us that energy consumption is a
| great indicator of civilization advancement, but so is
| territory. Now, the problem is that there is no further
| territory to acquire for us as we have pretty much
| exploited our planet to its bones.
|
| Free cheap energy will just make the planet crumble under
| our weight.
| daveguy wrote:
| >Free cheap energy will just make the planet crumble
| under our weight.
|
| You've said or implied this twice, but haven't put
| forward even a plausible mechanism why this would be a
| crumbling downfall.
|
| The fuel is abundant and safe. The byproducts are safe.
| There are no carbon byproducts to contribute to global
| warming. I don't see any logic to your statements
| besides: previous bad, therefore next bad. I believe this
| is the definition of a non-sequiteur.
|
| Please correct me if I am wrong or have missed something.
| jurgenaut23 wrote:
| The issue with free cheap energy such as fusion isn't its
| direct byproducts, but its impact on society.
|
| It will fuel an economic growth without precedent, which
| in turn will increase the consumption of material goods,
| which in turn will increase the extraction of natural
| resources. Those resources will become rarer and more
| difficult to extract, thus leading to more destructive
| extraction strategies.
|
| Energy puts a cap to our ability to destroy the planet in
| order to satisfy our material needs. To top it all off,
| everyone around here loves to build new stuff, but
| finding ways to get rid of it without creating waste
| isn't as trendy.
|
| I don't believe one second that our civilization is
| capable of controlling itself. And don't tell me about
| multi-planetary scenarios or whatnot. They are neither
| realistic (regardless of the energy availability) nor
| desirable.
| daveguy wrote:
| Thank you. Very clear and reasonable explanation.
|
| Mining of auxillary materials to pair with all that
| energy would be a problem. Multi-planetary scenarios for
| humans aren't realistic in anywhere close to the near
| term... But mining asteroids instead of the earth might
| be realistic. Many solutions which may not be realistic
| now could be with such an energy source.
|
| It will be a precarious time. That's for sure.
| megaman821 wrote:
| If energy is free and unlimited more can be devoted to
| recycling. Also the vast majority of people like nature,
| more energy is directed into cleaning up and preserving
| nature in the US than every before. What about free,
| unlimited energy would change this preference?
| zepn wrote:
| Interested to see your full list!
| Ford__Prefect wrote:
| Sorry to piss on your sunny parade, but:
|
| >> 1) Fully decoding the cellular mechanism of cells allowing
| for the curing of any disease, repairing any genetic disorder.
|
| -- so you want to cure aging then- how many billions of people
| you think can a planet with a 6k km radius sustain ?
|
| You think Claus Schwabs of the world wont buy it out to keep it
| to themselves ?
|
| >> 2) Commercially viable fusion energy. Will change a lot of
| things.
|
| -- That will eventually happen, and electricity will be just as
| "expensive" as it is now, simply because the price of a product
| has nothing to do with its cost and everything to do with the
| purchasing power of its intended audience.
|
| >> 3) An AI subsystem with some reasoning ability (yeah, could
| go either way)
|
| -- No, its cant go either way, the power insatiable psychopaths
| in power will use it to maximize their power. Period. Its
| psychopath nature- for them its natural and perfectly normal.
| Until psychopathy is recognized as a disease and sick people
| are disallowed from positions of power, the world will continue
| to be an abusive place.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| >so you want to cure aging then- how many billions of people
| you think can a planet with a 6k km radius sustain ?
|
| Doesn't seem that it would cure high speed lead poisoning.
| People will continue killing each other just as well.
| bartislartfast wrote:
| > -- That will eventually happen, and electricity will be
| just as "expensive" as it is now, simply because the price of
| a product has nothing to do with its cost and everything to
| do with the purchasing power of its intended audience.
|
| 100%
|
| If we had fusion tomorrow it would help decarbonise our
| grids, which is a great thing, but the consumer would see
| zero financial benefit. Companies would charge the same and
| make record profits.
|
| This is literally happening right now! The market price of
| energy in Europe has dropped after a huge hike when Russia
| invaded Ukraine, but customer bills are still extortionately
| high
| bartislartfast wrote:
| 4) useful bipedal robots - this one is probably just around the
| corner (see boston robotics). We often talk about how much AGI
| could benefit humanity, giving knowledge workers a digital
| "team" of helpers, but we gloss over the physical version.
| Everything from dangerous industries all the way through health
| services and into retail could be enhanced by having robots do
| all the literal heavy lifting.
|
| 5) programmable matter / nanobots - the applications of a swarm
| of nanobots or even microbots are pretty much endless.
| bretpiatt wrote:
| 1) Subset breakthrough here potentially related to cancer,
| we'll see how the peer review and evolution to becoming an
| available standard of care goes.
|
| City of Hope scientists develop targeted chemotherapy able to
| kill all solid tumors in preclinical research
|
| https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/997141
| MostlyStable wrote:
| I've heard elsewhere that "all solid tumors" should really
| more accurately be conveyed as "all solid tumors with a very
| specific mutation". It is, apparently, a very common
| mutation, but also not universal, even among solid tumors.
|
| Apparently. I'm not an expect, but it's what I have
| encountered elsewhere.
|
| Still great news! But not quite as revolutionary as the
| headline implies.
| JieJie wrote:
| I was interested in learning more, based on your comment.
| Here's what I found out.
|
| City of Hope thinks they've found a chemotherapy that's
| "able to kill all solid tumors","in more than 70 cancer
| cell lines".[0]
|
| According to the National Cancer Institute[1], there are
| "more than 100 kinds of cancer". They're listed here: [2]
| Some of those cancers are soft tissue, so they aren't
| affected by this treatment.
|
| I didn't know what a cancer "line" was, so I looked it up.
| "Cancer cell lines are valuable in vitro model systems that
| are widely used in cancer research and drug discovery."[3]
| So, they're not cancers in people, but cell cultures they
| can test drugs on.
|
| This probably doesn't give you much more information than
| you already have, based on what you heard elsewhere, but I
| learned enough to figure maybe it would help someone else,
| too.
|
| Whether this'll work in people, I guess we'll find out when
| they start the Phase 1 clinical trial. If you, or someone
| you know think you might benefit from this, there is a link
| to sign up for Phase 1 trials.[0]
|
| It appears to have worked in pre-clinical trials, so they
| have tested this to make sure it doesn't kill people
| outright, the same way it does cancer cells.[4]
|
| [0]https://www.cityofhope.org/city-hope-scientists-develop-
| targ...
|
| [1]https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/understanding/what-
| is-ca...
|
| [2]https://www.cancer.gov/types
|
| [3]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6721418/
|
| [4]https://xkcd.com/1217/
| isaacfung wrote:
| A few weeks ago, there was news that some Harvard MIT
| researchers had discovered a chemical cocktail that can
| reverse aging. https://news.yahoo.com/harvard-mit-scientists-
| claim-chemical...
| iraqmtpizza wrote:
| is heart damage considered aging? asking for the 1 in 35.
| holtkam2 wrote:
| 1. Cure for aging 2. AGI exists and ends up being somehow,
| unexpectedly easy to control 3. Russia / China / North Korea
| eventually become democratic
|
| Some of the "good" black swans at the top of my mind...
| Smoosh wrote:
| I'm unsure if we want people living forever. While disease,
| illness, and senility are terrible things, as soon as people
| can live forever we will have eternal dictatorships (or
| people trying for it) as well as other questions of perpetual
| inequality. "Death renders all equal".
| kaba0 wrote:
| Also, people's mind simply worsen as they age, and I don't
| mean senility only. We are not made for living too long,
| and the elderly are already the most commonly targeted
| group for populist propaganda by political parties.
| Reflexes worsen, the past will become rose-tinted, etc.
| highwaylights wrote:
| Also there's a massive philosophical quandary in there too.
|
| If people could live for much longer then they're likely
| disincentivised to procreate due to worries of
| overpopulation and then, in one way of thinking, you're
| hypothetically depriving a line of offspring of lifetimes
| they'd otherwise have if you'd had what we consider a
| normal lifespan now.
|
| _Yes I realise there are probably an infinite number of
| takes on this, I'm just pointing out one possible way of
| looking at it for the sake of saying not all technological
| advances have universally positive outcomes._
| gorbachev wrote:
| I think a majority of the people who want to live
| "forever" are the types of megalomaniacs who want to
| populate the earth with their own kind of uber mench, and
| will actually have more children than an average person.
| wiseowise wrote:
| You read too much fiction. There are millions of people
| who would love to just live their life.
| raducu wrote:
| > you're hypothetically depriving a line of offspring of
| lifetimes they'd otherwise have.
|
| I don't want to open a can of worms, but... about 40
| milion people are aborted each year...
| layer8 wrote:
| Not to speak of the zillions of eggs and sperms that are
| deprived from combining with each other.
| skeaker wrote:
| I have never liked this mentality in discussions around
| immortality that essentially boil down to "I would die if
| it meant people I don't like can die too." "A bad actor
| living for a long time would make our quality of life
| lower" is usually the given reasoning, but do you know what
| quality-of-life rock bottom is? It's being dead! Once you
| are dead there is absolutely no good to ever happen to you
| ever again! And the counter for this is then usually "well
| what if I like being dead," which is great for you, but I
| and many many others happen to very much dislike the idea,
| and your stance would drag us down with you.
|
| That's all without even mentioning other benefits like
| cumulative knowledge of multiple lifespans being contained
| in one person allowing for new scientific breakthroughs.
| bratbag wrote:
| Not just dictatorships.
|
| We already see the advantage age provides when building
| influence for US politics.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| "Science progresses one funeral at a time" comes to mind as
| well.
| ben_w wrote:
| Eternal youth != immortality; given accidental and
| deliberate injuries and deaths, the "half life" (feels
| wrong in this context) is about 1000 years.
|
| As for dictators: it's not like guillotines stop working.
|
| What will keep dictators (if eternally young, or their
| offspring if not) in power forever is competent and
| obedient AI manning the police and army.
| shrx wrote:
| Source on the half life number?
| ben_w wrote:
| Percent of all deaths that are caused by injuries: 7.85%
|
| Current global median life expectancy: 75.2 years
|
| LE/I%: ~958 years.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_
| rat...
|
| Same but assuming we can avoid transport accidents, ~1354
| years.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Interesting to see hard numbers for this, I always felt
| like those LOTR elves living for 10,000 years in a war
| torn world is laughably improbable from a statistical
| perspective.
| ben_w wrote:
| Tolkien's elves were also (somewhat?) magic, and the
| designated firstborn of the creator god Iluvatar with
| various gifts, seemingly including awareness and
| dexterity exceeding anything a human could ever do.
| sethammons wrote:
| Similar, I recall hearing 2k years on some program. No
| source. The idea was that accidental deaths will happen.
| On mobile, but you could look up accidental death records
| to get the rate and then project out average lifespan.
|
| Still, that is averages. A cruel despot may never leave
| their palace fearing death and will always have security.
| They will have less opportunities for accidents.
| gorbachev wrote:
| The people going after "eternal" life right now are
| people with access to practically unlimited funding.
|
| They are immune to guillotines operated by peasants.
|
| The only thing they don't have protection against is
| Government forces. With their armies of lobbyists, and
| other bought influence they have, they are also, largely,
| protected against those as well.
| ben_w wrote:
| > The people going after "eternal" life right now are
| people with access to practically unlimited funding.
|
| Yup, and they'll only know their methods are _safe_ if
| they get the rest of us to try it out en mass.
|
| > They are immune to guillotines operated by peasants.
|
| > The only thing they don't have protection against is
| Government forces. With their armies of lobbyists, and
| other bought influence they have, they are also, largely,
| protected against those as well.
|
| What makes them different from the French royal family,
| who basically _were_ the government?
| wiseowise wrote:
| > They are immune to guillotines operated by peasants.
|
| You don't need guillotines, you just need one junkie at
| the right time.
|
| https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11941061/Tech-
| exec-...
| ETH_start wrote:
| We will also have eternal opposition activists and leaders.
| The effects of immortality on politics will fall on
| everyone equally.
| deely3 wrote:
| > we will have eternal dictatorships
|
| I can't agree. We can have eternal dictatorship now.
| Nothing prevents it except other people, therefore people
| will prevent eternal dictatorship just as now (with various
| results).
|
| Anyway, Im ready to accept this risk.
| SanderNL wrote:
| We cannot have them though? The leaders die and the
| resulting fights over succession is what keeps us out of
| eternal territory.
|
| These maniacs didn't have enough time to accrue enough
| mass to become power black holes, but give them a century
| or two to work with..
| deely3 wrote:
| I don't know.. we have dinasties where direct ancestors
| of the ruler rules the country for generations, no?
| SanderNL wrote:
| That happened indeed and I don't think it was pretty.
| Although you get some exceptions, like maybe a few of the
| Antonines. (That didn't end well with Commodus.)
| coderenegade wrote:
| Nah, the fact that even emperors die is a good thing. No
| dynasty lasts forever, because after the first few
| generations, assets get diluted, someone spends the
| money, descendants fight, etc. An aristocracy that lives
| forever would be very hard to remove because those
| factors would be greatly mitigated.
| [deleted]
| ETH_start wrote:
| Immortal emperors may produce shorter-lived dynasties, as
| it means no changing of the guard to provide the dynasty
| with fresh blood.
|
| Rulers, set in their ways, will take a government down an
| increasingly non-viable path.
| disintegore wrote:
| That third point is so odd and shoehorned in. If you're
| talking about AGI and immortality, why not dream a little
| bigger? How about achieving actual democracy _anywhere_ in
| the world? Not just in state elections, but economic
| democracy broadly speaking. Right now we are just going on
| pretending, and this western chauvinism of yours is a little
| embarrassing.
| asadm wrote:
| Democracy is a diversion technique honestly. "Rulers" are
| always a few people/corps and the fate of the people depends
| on them.
| borissk wrote:
| Honestly there's a big difference in the way people live in
| North Korea and Switzerland.
| borkt wrote:
| One provides service to the outside world broadly in
| trade to fulfill its needs, the other provides limited
| service to the outside world and trades with a highly
| limited subset of the world to fulfill its needs
| chottocharaii wrote:
| Oh you. You nailed it. That's the core difference. /s
| Cookingboy wrote:
| I mean there is also a big difference in the way people
| live in India and Switzerland, and both are democratic
| countries. Your examples are the result of economic
| disparity, not political systems.
|
| But if you compare India to China, one democratic and one
| not, suddenly it's not super clear which countries'
| citizens have "better" lives.
| kaba0 wrote:
| There are eons of differences between different
| democracies. Russia is also a democracy on paper, yet it
| is absolutely unfathomable for someone to "shot
| themselves in the back of the head and jump out the
| window" in, say, Switzerland, while many political
| opponents, journalists "committed suicide" that way in
| Russia.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| The key is being able to throw the bums out every 4-8
| years. This gives Democracy a self-correcting feature that
| doesn't work with lifetime rulers.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| It also doesn't work with corporate sponsorship of the
| elected.
| mgiampapa wrote:
| Interesting how the trajectory of the USA has changed
| since Citizen's United was decided. When and how are we
| going to fix the rationalization that immortal and
| unaccountable entities aren't people. AI legislation? I
| can dream of electric sheep.
| rnk wrote:
| I don't think other democracies have allowed travesties
| like rich people funding elections (aka Citizen's
| United). It's possible the US will be able to stop it,
| but the insidious impact of that wealth feels like it is
| unending.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| But at some point the people get fed up with the same
| corporate message and do something crazy like elect
| Trump.
|
| I feel like there's a limit to how much corporations can
| influence voters, the same way there's a limit to how
| much moviegoers will keep paying to see the same
| corporate movie over and over.
| gorbachev wrote:
| AI is controlled by the richest corporations.
|
| How do you think AI would legislate, if AI legislation
| would become reality?
| mgiampapa wrote:
| I meant human legislation of AI, (and other immortal
| unaccountable entities like corporations to boot) not the
| legislation by AI.
| j16sdiz wrote:
| In most countries, that would be rotating between two or
| three leaders.
|
| Somewhat better than a lifetime ruler, but this is far
| from what Democracy are on the textbook.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| It's still very very different than what's happening in
| say Nicaragua right now, where the will of the majority
| of the people has no bearing.
| vincnetas wrote:
| i prefere rulers that care about general wellbeing of theyr
| populations. i know i might sound like a cattle or a sheep,
| but i prefere beying sheep that is treated well. this is
| provided that we really dont have a choice or say in things
| that happening around us. but this still needs to be shown.
| so far i feel like j can influence the path of my life
| quite a lot.
| krisoft wrote:
| > Fully decoding the cellular mechanism of cells allowing for
| the curing of any disease, repairing any genetic disorder.
|
| Honestly that doesn't seem likely to be a black swan event. Not
| because it is never going to happen, more because it won't be
| an event but a slow progression.
|
| It is more likely that as we understand more and more we will
| be able to cure more and more. It is not like there is some
| silver bullet piece of research where sudenly we have "fully
| decoded the celular mechanism". Plus even if we somehow
| suddenly and all at once atained all that knowledge (perhaps a
| flying saucer takes pitty on us and beams down a whole library
| documenting our cells) it would take a long time while we turn
| that knowledge into helpfull interventions. And even that
| progress would be multiple generations long.
|
| It is how becoming a black-belt martial artist is not an
| "event". You don't go from zero to that in one night. It is
| more of a progression where every day you are about as
| proficient as you were the previous one, but maybe a tiny bit
| better. Just applied on a whole species level.
| pupperino wrote:
| Michael Levin [1] does brillant work on this "cellular
| language" space and the key point is that genetics is more like
| biological IaC, it only encodes proteins. Most of the actual
| control, anatomic and physiological homestasis happens at the
| higher level of bioelectricity - which works as a computational
| medium.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FGM33sz25k
| ekianjo wrote:
| Black swan is just called hindsight. There is no insight in
| Taleb's book. He just gave a name to stuff that changes things
| in an irreversible way.
| lowkey wrote:
| > Commercially viable fusion energy. Will change a lot of
| things.
|
| I would be curious if anyone with knowledge in the space could
| comment on whether or not LK-99 may get us closer to viable
| nuclear fusion?
|
| My understanding is that magnetic field containment systems are
| at least part of the technical hurdles required to make fusion
| feasible.
| bartislartfast wrote:
| ok full disclosure, I had not heard the term Black Swan event
| before and I was trying to remember what happened in the movie
| ajmurmann wrote:
| The cool thing is that getting high-temp superconductors makes
| all the things you list more likely to happen.
| [deleted]
| xwdv wrote:
| Is a perpetual motion machine now possible with a room temp
| superconductor like this?
| mderazon wrote:
| Don't think so. Friction, at least, is still unavoidable
| bobmaxup wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99#Replication_attempts
|
| This Wikipedia article has a good summary of the replication
| attempts to date (including this paper).
| someplaceguy wrote:
| Reading further below, I'm actually amazed by all the
| theoretical studies that have already been done from first
| principles (all apparently supporting the possibility of
| superconductivity). That's a pretty fast pace for science!
| seydor wrote:
| But have they asked chatgpt?
| awb wrote:
| Magnus Carlson said that if you tell him there's a winning
| move on a chess board he could find it very quickly, because
| his focus becomes extremely narrow.
|
| I wonder if something similar is happening here. Since the
| scope was defined as LK-99, it becomes a narrow query instead
| of a broad one.
| Sharlin wrote:
| This is not just telling someone there's a winning move.
| It's telling them that X is a winning move and they just
| have to verify that X is indeed one. Many, many problems
| are such that it's difficult to find a solution but easy to
| verify one.
| devin wrote:
| Now measure resistance.
| mjaques wrote:
| Alright folks calm down, the resistivity of LK-99 is higher than
| copper...
| https://twitter.com/bedoya_pinto/status/1686776302785773573
| TylerE wrote:
| Wow, is this it? Is this the confirmation?
| taneq wrote:
| I believe there's no way to stably suspend an object on
| permanent magnetic fields, so if this is stable and doesn't
| fall down then it's hard to argue superconductivity isn't
| involved.
| stevespang wrote:
| [dead]
| floxy wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamagnetism
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earnshaw%27s_theorem
| johncolanduoni wrote:
| There are diamagnetic non-superconductors like pyrolytic
| graphite that can also evade Earnshaw's theorem, but this
| would be the first metal with this strength of diamagnetism
| at room temperature AFAIK.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Pyrolitic graphite can evade Earnshaw's theorem only with
| either specific magnet array shapes or with rotation, they
| still can't stably levitate on a regular dipole without
| rotation.
| taneq wrote:
| It can be done at all with a static arrangement of
| magnetic fields, though? Ooh.
| TylerE wrote:
| Isn't that those floaty spinning desk toys are?
| johncolanduoni wrote:
| Those usually use active electromagnets, which also
| bypass the preconditions of Earnshaw's theorem.
| jamesakirk wrote:
| You can stably suspend graphite pencil lead on permanent
| magnetic fields. E.G.:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeIizmhzPQc
| kadoban wrote:
| Not on a single magnet though, it has to be a shaped array.
| [deleted]
| montecarl wrote:
| On an array of magnets, but not on a single magnet.
| jamesakirk wrote:
| Good point.
| po wrote:
| True, but only trapped within alternating N/S permanent
| magnetic poles... so it's possible to fool other people,
| but you won't be fooled yourself. Just don't use that
| magnetic setup. Superconducting materials will levitate in
| the field of a single magnetic pole.
| asynchronous wrote:
| From what little I understand the levitation effect doesn't
| necessarily equal all the properties of a superconductor. It's
| one of them though.
| COGlory wrote:
| Are other forms of diamagnetism temperature dependat?
|
| Because this one is.
| seewhydee wrote:
| Yes, there exist diamagnetism-paramagnetism phase
| transitions.
| carabiner wrote:
| We are so back.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| I'm looking forward to experiments with LK-99 and twistronics.
| What a time to be alive.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twistronics.
|
| https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2101/2101.04501.pdf
| heisenzombie wrote:
| I think LK99 is a 1D -- not 2D -- material.
| mycall wrote:
| I still don't understand 0D and 1D. Quantum dots,
| nanoparticles.. are they really 3D but too small to measure?
| hwillis wrote:
| 1D just means it conducts in one direction. Like it's got
| tiny wires in it.
|
| It's not particularly unusual; anisotropic conductive
| adhesive is used in your cellphone to glue the screen on.
| They tape over the electrical pads, then line up the
| corresponding LCD pads. The tape allows current to flow
| vertically between the pads, but for adjacent pads it's
| insulating.
|
| Neodymium magnets are another example. They're made up of a
| little honeycomb, and inside the cells of the comb are very
| long, needles of neodymium a single atom thick. They create
| a magnetic field in a single direction.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| 2D in materials science means 1 dimension is nano-sized,
| typically referring to sheets of material that are 1-2
| atoms thick. 1D means 2 dimensions are nano-sized.
|
| I'm not hip on superconductor science and haven't heard
| of 1D/2D being used to describe conducting in 1 or 2
| directions, do you have any further reading on that?
| jacquesm wrote:
| But that's an artifact of using two materials in
| alternation, not an artifact of one material showing 1d
| conduction.
| dwighttk wrote:
| If you believe it there's money to be made
|
| https://polymarket.com/event/is-the-room-temp-superconductor...
| asddubs wrote:
| can we please stop spamming this?
| dwighttk wrote:
| I'll get the message out!
| aqme28 wrote:
| I've been wondering why the market didn't really respond to
| this. It dropped a lot on the previous articles where the Tc
| was around 110K, so I'm curious why it has stayed relatively
| flat here.
| monkpit wrote:
| Hasn't this already been done by several groups? It's the
| first paper but it's old news now.
| p-e-w wrote:
| This is the only website I actually trust to give me an
| accurate picture of where we stand on LK-99.
|
| As long as the blue line doesn't cross the red one, I won't
| believe in it. Money talks, bullshit walks.
| baq wrote:
| it's a 100% sentiment driven market. wouldn't put too much
| weight on it.
| dwighttk wrote:
| What happened on July 31 to make the market briefly flip?
| jacquesm wrote:
| The first confirmation of some aspects of the sample by
| outsiders.
| erlich wrote:
| I love how the nytimes front page is just all Trump and political
| crap. Literally not a word about this, and if it's real, its like
| the biggest thing ever.
| anonylizard wrote:
| NYT actually is the only newspaper outside of Korea to get into
| contact with the authors, and received an exclusive video from
| the professor.
|
| Go to their science section.
|
| Now it isn't top news, but when it is confirmed, it'll be front
| page news on every western newspaper.
| erlich wrote:
| This furthers my point. They _even_ got an exclusive and
| still run Trump stuff.
| hackerlight wrote:
| Yeah sure, but you're singling out them as if it's not the
| case with every mainstream media outlet. We already know
| that this type of story isn't what drives revenue and
| that's why it's not on the front page.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| So what the heck has happened with LK-99 really? (Disclaimer: I'm
| no physicist nor chemist, but I have co-written a report on three
| LK-99 papers [1] and am tracking the Twitter discussion as much
| as I can. I also got some help from knowledgable friends---much
| thanks for proof-reading.)
|
| It turned out that LK folks were not talking about some stupid
| shit. Specifically they were one of the last believers of long-
| forgotten Russian theory of superconductivity, pioneered by
| Nikolay Bogolyubov. The accepted theory is entirely based on
| Cooper pairs, but this theory suggests that a sufficient
| constraint on electrons may allow superconductivity without
| actual Cooper pairs. This requires carefully positioned point
| defects in the crystalline structure, which contemporary
| scientists consider unlikely and such mode of SC was never
| formally categorized unlike type-I and type-II SC. Professor
| Tong-seek Chair (coedongsig) represented a regret about this
| status quo (in 90s, but still applies today) that this theory was
| largely forgotten without the proper assessment after the fall of
| USSR. It was also a very interesting twist that Iris Alexandria,
| "that Russian catgirl chemist", had an advisor who was a
| physicist-cum-biochemist studied this theory and as a result were
| so familiar with the theory that they were able to tell if
| replications follow the theoretical prediction.
|
| Fast forward to today, students of the late Chair continued the
| research and produced a possible superconducting substance---
| LK-99---based on the Russian theory. A lot can be said about
| papers themselves, but it should be first noted that this
| substance is not a strict _superconductor_ in the current theory.
| Prof. Chair once suggested that we need to trade off some (less
| desirable) properties of superconductors for room-temperature
| superconductivity, and that property seems to be isotropy. This
| particularly weakens the Meissner effect criterion due to the
| much reduced Eddy current, so there is a possibility that LK-99,
| even when it 's real, might not be accepted as a superconductor
| in the traditional sense. LK folks on the other hand think they
| _should_ be also considered a superconductor, but they are
| probably already aware of this possibility.
|
| If we allow anisotropy in this discussion, we do have lots of
| such things already, most importantly carbon nanotubes.
| Scientists even thought about the possibility that they may
| function as typical superconductors [2], without any success
| though. So it might be appropriate to say that LK-99 is a
| substance that mimics them in one direction, but much more
| malleable. And that _is_ an actually significant result (if true,
| of course) because for most uses a strict type-I superconductor
| is far more than sufficient, while implications of
| superconductivity are more achievable. We so far looked for
| strict superconductors only because we didn 't know the effective
| way to trigger superconductivity otherwise; LK-99 might change
| that situation.
|
| This whole discourse should make you more careful to conclude
| whether LK-99 is a superconductor or not, because we may well end
| up with a revised definition of SC as a result. If LK-99 makes
| superconductivity much easier to trigger it _should_ be
| considered a superconductor in the macroscopic sense, authors
| would argue. Only the time will tell if they indeed made such a
| substance and it would be malleable enough to be substitutes for
| other superconductors, but they have a long history and arguably
| received unfair treatments. And they are about to fight back.
|
| [1] https://hackmd.io/@sanxiyn/S1hejVXo3 (Semi-automatically
| translated: https://hackmd.io/DMjYGOJFRheZw5XZU8kqKg)
|
| [2] For example,
| https://twitter.com/MichaelSFuhrer/status/168696072754495897...
|
| ----
|
| This post is now also available as a standalone version:
| https://hackmd.io/@lifthrasiir/lk-99-prehistory &
| https://twitter.com/senokay/status/1687360854315151360
| EvgeniyZh wrote:
| Forget Cooper pairs, you say it doesn't satisfy London
| equations?
| purnanair wrote:
| Irony of this being replicated when 2 major powers of erstwhile
| USSR are at war. This Alchemy could be the catalyst for a
| united humanity.
| bunniez wrote:
| It's Chwe/Choi, not Chair.
| lyre-lyre wrote:
| There is a tendency to call any scientific work that came out
| of anywhere in the former USSR as "Russian". Nikolay Bogolyubov
| is probably at least as "Ukrainian" as "Russian": he grew up
| and went to university in Kyiv, became a member of the Academy
| of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, and now has a physics
| institute named after him in Kyiv (and another in Moscow) ->
| https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruse...
| and
| https://www.kipt.kharkov.ua/itp/akhiezer/en/recollections/bo...
| https://en.ucoin.net/coin/ukraine-2-hryvni-2009/?tid=8957
|
| This happens to lots of famous scientists/engineers (Sergey
| Korolev, Vladimir Vernadsky, ...). We can do a bit better.
| mk_stjames wrote:
| This is obviously a quickly produced paper to get the finding out
| but.... I find there to be so much missing and so many things
| poorly worded or posed about their process that would have taken
| zero time to expound upon, it's infuriating.
|
| "All the reactions are carried out under 10^-2 Pa"
|
| OK, I know they mean 10^-2 of vacuum. But why not say that?
| "10^-2 Pa" isn't enough. Was this a full vacuum oven? Done in
| sealed quartz vials? Was there a purge, like argon, or just air?
|
| If you look at the oven temperature profiles, you can see the
| ramp up time (0-2hr, 0-2hr, and 0-4hrs respectively), and the
| hold time, but the ramp down time isn't specified! There is no
| cooling rate, it just shows... a line drop off, with no end time.
| No label. This can be very critical. Were these just pulled
| straight out and air quenched? And were they kept under vacuum
| until at room temp or not?
|
| Like, adding extra experimental setup details would take no time
| whatsoever to include in a paper and yet these researchers just
| don't do it. It's either pure fucking laziness or some sorta
| holier-than-thou gatekeeping that comes from theoreticians, or a
| combination, and it is the reason that replication is so hard in
| science right now. I would hope that no journal would accept this
| shit.
| eggy wrote:
| I agree, it could use more of the easy details, however, I
| don't have much issue with 10^-2 Pa, since standard atmospheric
| pressure is 101,325 Pa, so 0.1 Pa (10^-2 Pa, or 1.45x10^-6 psi)
| is definitely understood as a vacuum, but you're correct, why
| not just add "vacuum" for thoroughness.
|
| I know mercury gauges use to have a 0 to 30 scale sometimes
| (not 0 to -30), and that was confusing!
| wittenbunk wrote:
| 10^-2 is 0.01
| wruza wrote:
| Classical off by one when you wrap through zero (not sure
| if this one has a specific name).
| zild3d wrote:
| off by 1 (order of magnitude)
| joseda-hg wrote:
| Off by one floating point
| eggy wrote:
| Yep, had that on my calc, and then skipped the zero when
| typing the post. Good catch. Even closer to a pure vacuum!
| [deleted]
| chiph wrote:
| Or they are holding the details of their process close to their
| chest, in anticipation of a lucrative spin-off.
| dmix wrote:
| What personal benefit does this gain someone to publish it so
| quickly? Is it just social media attention?
| zhynn wrote:
| Some background on the drama (and the rush to publish): https
| ://www.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/comments/15egs7i/avg_ru...
|
| and
|
| https://twitter.com/8teAPi/status/1685294623449874432
|
| The papers were totally rushed.
| fouc wrote:
| 8teAPi admitted they were essentially writing fiction
| generated from some of the known facts
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| Citations. The early papers will be cited more often. And
| citations are kind of a currency in science.
| jacquesm wrote:
| There are no prizes for being second in science.
| smallnix wrote:
| Except, most likely, in exactly this story with the second
| paper from the original Korean authors (if things can be
| proven to be true).
| podiki wrote:
| There's a long standing joke (but also true) that many
| things are named after the last person to find them.
|
| See, for instance, Stigler's Law
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy
| (for the concept an example itself)
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| There is intense pressure to publish as many papers as
| possible at Chinese universities. This has led to a big
| problem of faked or just bad research papers coming out of
| China, so people are generally skeptical of them
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| This is a quite biased view.
|
| As a non-Chinese scientist, I can attest that there is
| intense pressure to publish as many papers as possible
| _pretty much everywhere_ , and this leads to a problem of
| bad research across the world.
|
| China may be among the worst offenders in this respect, but
| the particular thing the OP is asking about doesn't strike
| me as a Chinese-specific thing at all. I see non-Chinese
| scientists rushing half-baked results to arXiv all the
| time.
| happytiger wrote:
| _China publishes more science research with fabricated
| peer-review than everyone else put together_
|
| https://qz.com/978037/china-publishes-more-science-
| research-...
|
| I respectfully submit that you may be providing an
| anecdotal experience.
|
| It's so bad that China's courts have called for the
| _death penalty_ for scientific fraud.
|
| https://www.statnews.com/2017/06/23/china-death-penalty-
| rese...
|
| Goodness me.
| danielheath wrote:
| "More than everyone else together" is meaningless without
| considering the relevant population sizes (in this case,
| the relevant population is "number of researchers
| producing papers").
|
| If China has half the worlds academics-writing-papers,
| one would _expect_ them to be responsible for half the
| fabricated ones.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| It's not biased, it's a fact. I see it all the time as
| PC/AC/reviwer/etc.
|
| There is deluge of terrible papers from China that are
| just a mess, below any imaginable standard. Ones that
| labs in the EU/US/Russia/Japan/etc. don't put out. Yes,
| everyone has to publish, and there are bad papers out
| there, but the volume and low quality from China is
| unmatched.
| [deleted]
| OO000oo wrote:
| Unmatched doesn't make it qualitatively unique. It's a
| problem everywhere.
| cinntaile wrote:
| If the problem is much bigger from certain countries then
| I would say that qualifies as qualitatively unique.
| tough wrote:
| If those certain countries have a very big population I'd
| say is more of a quantitative issue. If china had 10
| scientists they couldn't pump as many papers, fake or
| good or not as if they're 1million scientists
| dylan604 wrote:
| Isn't the population of China much bigger as well? Laws
| of percentages and what not can go along way. Has anyone
| displayed a percentage of rushed/inaccurate studies
| between countries to see if the lines normalize?
| jldugger wrote:
| > Isn't the population of China much bigger as well?
|
| Yes, but official government stats have also been
| overstating the population a bit. I think it mostly
| affects the younger generation at present though.
| nyolfen wrote:
| i saw such a chart a few days ago, specifically for
| withdrawn papers -- forgive me if i can't dig it up again
| but china made up something like 50% of the total number
|
| e: recollection was slightly off but it is actually much
| worse! https://sci-hub.ru/10.1007/s11948-017-9939-6
|
| china is truly in a league of its own with this stuff, by
| literal orders of magnitude
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Population of researchers != Population it's more than 4x
| as large in terms of population but only has ~25% more
| researchers while having around 50x the retractions.
| sheepscreek wrote:
| > It's not biased, it's a fact. I see it all the time as
| PC/AC/reviwer/etc.
|
| Let's agree this is anecdotal at best, and move on. Facts
| need data to back them up. There's no data or links to
| research in this post.
| macintux wrote:
| Data linked from another comment.
|
| https://sci-hub.ru/10.1007/s11948-017-9939-6
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| I'm confident that poster's experiences are based on the
| data they saw
|
| if you're doubting the veracity of the poster's claims,
| just say so directly
| salty_biscuits wrote:
| It's just a preprint. I appreciate the fast update of
| progress on a new development. Just don't give it the same
| weight as a peer reviewed piece.
| Roritharr wrote:
| The Varda Team just posted a really high-resolution video of the
| diamagnetism:
|
| https://twitter.com/andrewmccalip/status/1687405505604734978
| panki27 wrote:
| Finally a video with quality that doesn't look like it was
| filmed with a camcorder from the early 2000s.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| It's cool that they left the dialog in there.
| pmontra wrote:
| Noob question: if whatever is happening is strong enough to
| raise one of the ends of the sample, why doesn't raise both?
| After all gravitation is many order of magnitudes weaker than
| electromagnetism. Did they calibrate the setup to closely match
| the gravitational force on the sample? Why not push a little
| more and make it fly up the the cap of the container?
| Sharlin wrote:
| Magnetic force scales as 1/r^3, not 1/r^2 like gravity.
| That's why your standard issue fridge magnet measurably
| attracts stuff only from a very close distance, but when it
| does, it easily counters the gravitational attraction of the
| entire planet1. This 1/r^3 relationship can be derived easily
| enough by integrating, but essentially it's because magnets
| are dipoles and the farther away you are, the smaller the
| apparent distance between the poles and the "more neutral"
| the magnet looks like.
|
| Anyway, that's why there's an equilibrium distance where the
| forces balance. But superconductors also exhibit a very
| strange phenomenon called flux pinning [1] where a levitating
| object is held in place by magnetic field lines and you can
| even turn the whole thing upside down and it still levitates
| _even_ though the forces don 't cancel each other out
| anymore!
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_pinning
|
| ---
|
| 1 To be fair, "the entire planet" is also around 6000 km
| away, calculation-wise, but still!
| pmontra wrote:
| Thank you.
| dotancohen wrote:
| > Magnetic force scales as 1/r^3, not 1/r^2 like gravity
|
| The magnetic force and gravity are two of the four
| fundamental forces, no? The others being the strong and
| weak nuclear force? At what rate do those two scale at?
| salty_biscuits wrote:
| If you are really close to one pole of a magnet and far
| away from the other then the force scales like 1/r^2, it
| is in the far field under the influence of both poles of
| the magnet that it scales like 1/r^3. Electrostatics
| scales like 1/r^2 (because you fet isolated charges). The
| other two are a complicated story.
| frays wrote:
| Great question. And also a good answer was shared. Thank you
| both.
| tetris11 wrote:
| Nitter link:
| https://nitter.net/andrewmccalip/status/1687405505604734978#...
| thomasmg wrote:
| Nice! For show, I would try to levitate. Probably using a
| stronger magnet, inside a small (tiny?) glass tube, so it
| slides up a bit. I wouldn't do "rock surgery" just yet, to
| remove dead weight. Levitation with 4 magnets in a checkboard
| fashion, as usually done for pyrolytic carbon sheets, maybe
| doesn't work as the sample is not flat.
|
| Also, turning the magnet upside down seems useful. And then,
| heating up to show that it drops at a certain temperature. I
| wonder what would be needed in this case; I guess less than
| 100deg C.
|
| In any case, the "show" part is important. Good video quality
| is important.
| devX3 wrote:
| This coming days/weeks are going to be exciting, I really hope we
| just witness the biggest breakthrough in physics or even science
| in recent decades.
| Ayaan_4125 wrote:
| Hii
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-08-04 23:01 UTC)