I did a quick Google search and couldn’t find an article that would explain plainly why this discovery is so important in tangible terms, and not just in “this is the holy grail in physics because there is no other known material that’s a superconductor at sustainable temperatures”.
Could you summarize for dummies what are the implication of this discovery? Which industries could be disrupted? Are we going to have floating rocks advertised on Instagram pretty soon?
So when power goes from the power station to your house, a lot of it gets lost due to resistance. If this material is cheap enough, you could have 100% efficient power distribution. Beyond that, it could make a lot of supercomputing and quantum research a lot easier and there’s all kinds of possibilities in decades to come.
Can anyone tell me if regular computer processors would also be much more heat and power efficient?
Like what % of the world’s energy is spent powering and cooling data centers? And I want a laptop that gets better battery life and doesn’t get hot on my lap or need a noisy fan
You can be skeptical of any of these. For me the most immediately interesting thing is energy storage, but I’m seeing it’s not so simple. Still, even small advantages could change things completely.
We can’t know all the implications. Like when the first guy started forging iron, probably not everybody ran to dump their bronze stock. Uranium wasn’t immediately a big deal either. But unlike Rivaldo, I think if you give people a material with useful properties, they’re going to figure out things to do with it we can’t anticipate. Hopefully, good things.
Probably depends on whether you can scale down this process as much as you’d need to to make a processor out of it. Like currently the interconnect between chips could probably be changed over easily, but for processors themselves it would be a huge undertaking to re-engineer everything from scratch.
It don’t see it helping with your laptop anytime soon. Chips are going to be made of silicon for a long time and no matter what cooling method you use, you still have to dump the heat they produce somewhere else.
The chips we have are made of semiconductors, with conductors for interconnection. You couldn’t make them exclusively from conducting or superconducting material. Not that you couldn’t make memory and logic circuits using them, though idk how off-hand. It would be a completely different kind of thing.
For the chips we have, you can lower power consumption by decreasing the operating voltage, and that has historically happened, but there’s a limit due to noise.
More than energy efficiency or quantum computing, the first thing to change in your computer would likely be a whole host of new logic devices that use spintronics and other weird crap I don’t understand.
There’s some cold water being poured on the simulation paper. It’s interesting but not as big a deal as people initially made it out to be. That’s to be expected. In the end only replications are going to be convincing.