This result could be very big news, and overnight revolutionize all of electronics and energy. It might not.
Here's a mental model for the non-expert to understand what's going on.
RTAPS: The good, the bad, and the ugly: 🧵
Summary
The good: There's some plausibility here, and if so, it's game-changing
The bad: Reasonable chance this is a similar but different physical property
The ugly: Their plots, and engineering usefulness
Let me explain:
The Good:
Lee-Kim-Kwon (LKK) use familiar materials, Cuprates, and measures some key metrics of a room-temp superconductivity (SC):
- Zero-resistivity
- Critical current
- Critical magnetic field
- Meissner effect
For context, past progress was measured by successively higher temperatures using new kinds of materials. LKK result does fit the rough trend of increasing temperatures, but, they do it at ambient pressure.
The highest-temperature results before were at >1 million atmospheres
To understand, think of electrons normally bouncing off everything as they fall, plinko-style; in SC they glide smoothly. To make electrons glide, either you cool them down a lot, or squeeze them together.
Therefore you can sort of just trade pressure for temperature
The key difference in LKK paper is this: the channel for letting electrons glide doesn't come from low temp, or by squeezing together.
It comes from an internal tension that forms as the material forms, just like the tempered glass of a car windshield.
LKK hypothesis that copper atoms are percolating into the crystal and replacing lead atoms, and this creates a structural shrinkage of ~0.5% and produces internal strains, creating this smooth-electron-channel
Good: Plausible materials, fits an overall trend, easy to reproduce
The bad:
Normally the superconducting transition temperature is predicted by measuring heat capacity versus temperature. This is the Debye Temp.
TKK say they can't measure this, because the usual theories of SC don't explain their sample: a lil bit sus
There's two two papers published, which present results in different ways, using different scalings. One result seems almost unphysical altogether.
Normally SC's perfectly repel magnetic field, or have a diamagnetism of -1. These guys report it as -154
A 'super diamagnetic' could also weakly levitate itself above a large permanent magnet, like what the authors video shows.
There's some reason for caution here, but this could also boil down to non-standard presentation of results and genuine impurities in the sample
The ugly:
Some of their plots.
More seriously, there's really three numbers that are relevant for superconductors in engineering practice:
Current density, magnetic field, and temperature.
You can think of it as your 'magnet budget' that you get to spend on either high current density, high magnetic fields, or high temperature. There are limits too - you need to stay well below Tc, and, pushing the limits will burn out your magnets by 'quenching' them
If you want to design a magnetic confinement fusion reactor, you need a balance of all three: magnets that can withstand their own high field, be compact, and not require too much cooling
LKK haven't put out a full set of numbers on critical current density, just total current, so its hard to compare. However, magnets for fusion have to withstand fields of ~10 Tesla or more, or about 300x the fields that kill off SC in their samples
That being said, the temperatures these operate at are enormous by comparison. In Fusion, the magnet-killer is the neutron heat flux that escapes through the reactor walls and heats up your coils.
Heat-resistant coils would still make my job 10x easier
The net-net:
No champagne yet, but watch closely - this would be a serious game changer in things like power transmission, energy storage, and future-tech like quantum computers, fusion energy, mag-lev trains.
Archeologists just found ancient highly advanced stone structures in West Java radiocarbon dated to be between 27,000 - 16,000 years old, drastically upending our theories of human civilization.
Along with Gobli Tepeke it seems like our entire conception of history is flawed 🧵
This study made extensive use of Electrical Resistance Tomography to reconstruct subsurface features, chambers, and structures leveraging high sensitivity measurements, spacing metal electrodes in a 3D grid to measure the entire area and reconstruct it volumetrically
Stunningly the authors found that the lowest layer dated back to between 25,000 - 14,000 BCE, showing extremely advanced monolithic masonry and structures suggesting construction skills far surpassing the expected level of hunter-gatherer technological development
My last job was as Senior Stellarator Engineer at an early stage fusion startup. I was the lead design 'ideas' guy for stellarator systems - here's some things I learned about the art and science of stellarator design 🧵
First off, a stellarator is indeed a work of art:
Like Tokamaks stellarators have a kind of periodic symmetry in the coordinate space of the magnetic field enclosing the plasma, but, unliked Tokamaks this doesn't translate into nice symmetries in our 3 dimensions.
A Stellarator is every CAD designers nightmare
The key to having good confinement in a Tokamak or Stellarator is as-perfectly as-possible reconstructing the 'last closed magnetic flux surface' with superconducting magnets.
If the magnetic field is perfectly closed then charged particles can't escape, helping trap heat
Collectivism has a natural advantage over individualism in political fights because every cell of the collectivist body politic is programmed to fight against unorthodox views, while individualism naturally defends diversity of perspectives 🧵
Under collectivism, there is only one acceptable narrative and any departure from that is viewed and then portrayed as an existential threat to the entire society.
To be contrarian is to be a threat to the "progressive revolution" and painted as counterrevolutionary
Meanwhile individualism respects the right to dissent and form ones own belief system, supporting and defending things like free speech and the diversity of ideology that naturally emerges from different experiences of social reality
People think socialism is liberation for the working class but the underlying premise is the State knows what's best for the Individual, so really it's just economic enslavement by a political elite.
Engineered scarcity and fear to keep everyone playing zero sum games. 🧵
The people advocating for greater government control are all politicians that put up a narrative that it's in the best interests of everyone because the world is too dangerous and we cant trust individuals to exercise their liberty judiciously.
So you should take it away.
For people to vote for this they need to believe the world is fundamentally unjust, that systematic inequalities explain individual outcomes and not individual decisions, that wealth is morally evil, etc.
This makes expropriation and redistribution of wealth a moral duty
The thermodynamics of industrial capitalism demands energy to keep growing.
But our economy isn't setup to be an energy-producing machine, it’s a money printing machine, money backed by nothing.
Fiat currency and its implications have been a disaster for the human species 🧵
The US Dollar has been devalued by 25% in the last four years. The government is printing its way out of a short term deficit into a longer term one.
It wasn’t always like this - money used to be backed by something, such that the government couldn’t just issue it arbitrarily.
It used to be that an ounce of gold was pegged at $35 dollars as part of the Bretton Woods system.
But the US couldn’t keep up its gold reserves to match the USD in circulation - so Nixon had to sever the exchange rate. Every since the USD is backed by belief - fiat currency
Former RF engineer and superconducting magent engineer here - along with finding that microtubules have perfectly diamagnetic cores, a sign of superconductivity, it means that a highly structured superconducting tubule network can act as a quantum-limited noise floor RF antenna.
The sensitivity of an antenna is ultimately limited by the resistance in the conducting wire, because thermal motion of the charge carriers produces voltage noise. The temperature and resistivity set the noise floor of measurement sensitivity
For an antenna to be superconducting means it has zero resistance at a certain temperature. If microtubules can do this, it means as they form structures they become perfectly resonant antennas able to filter and select for a specific frequency based on the modes of the antenna