The Science & Technology Thread

They will do powerful things with it, as with all tools. Most of those powerful things will be good, but the problem humanity faces is that it is creating more and more powerful things, and there are always crazy people and desperate governments who will act recklessly.

That’s true.

Only a few months later, in July 1954, Teller made it clear he thought 15 megatons was child’s play. At a secret meeting of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission, Teller broached, as he put it, “the possibility of much bigger bangs.” At his Livermore laboratory, he reported, they were working on two new weapon designs, dubbed Gnomon and Sundial. Gnomon would be 1,000 megatons and would be used like a “primary” to set off Sundial, which would be 10,000 megatons. Most of Teller’s testimony remains classified to this day, but other scientists at the meeting recorded, after Teller had left, that they were “shocked” by his proposal. “It would contaminate the Earth,” one suggested. Physicist I. I. Rabi, by then an experienced Teller skeptic, suggested it was probably just an “advertising stunt.”[4] But he was wrong; Livermore would for several years continue working on Gnomon, at least, and had even planned to test a prototype for the device in Operation Redwing in 1956 (but the test never took place)

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I heard a story, I can’t remember where, that when cold fusion was initially announced, Teller was intensely interested, because bombs ofc.

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No idea wtf any of this means! Materials science Twitter is the craziest fucking Twitter out there.

https://twitter.com/daniellefong/status/1686500942328573952?s=46&t=9xanL2tZoKj22erGoTuL4A

It’s pretty muddled. I asked Bing to rewrite it and it did a decent job.

Summary

You want to explain what a superconductor is and how the new discovery of a potential superconductor is different from the conventional ones. Here is a possible way to rewrite your text:

A superconductor is a material that can conduct electricity without any resistance, which means it does not lose any energy as heat or sound. Normally, when electrons move through a material, they bump into atoms or other electrons and slow down. This is called resistance and it causes the material to heat up.

In some materials, when they are cooled down to very low temperatures, the electrons pair up and form what are called Cooper pairs. These pairs act like a single particle that can move through the material without bumping into anything. This is because they obey a different set of rules called Bose-Einstein statistics, which allow many particles to occupy the same state. This is how conventional superconductors work.

There are two types of conventional superconductors: type 1 and type 2. Type 1 superconductors are simple materials that expel all magnetic fields from their interior when they become superconducting. Type 2 superconductors are more complex materials that allow some magnetic fields to penetrate their interior in the form of tiny vortices that get pinned by defects in the material.

The new discovery of a potential superconductor is based on a theory of one-dimensional superconductivity. The idea is to confine the electrons to move along a single line of quantum wells, which are thin layers of material that trap electrons in two dimensions. This reduces the number of ways that the electrons can move and lose energy.

However, there are some puzzles about this potential superconductor. For example, it does not seem to have zero resistance, but rather very low resistance. This could be due to the difficulty of making good contact between the probes and the sample, or it could be due to something more fundamental.

Another puzzle is that this potential superconductor does not seem to form Cooper pairs at all. This is because the electrons at the highest energy level, called the Fermi level, can only have one spin direction, which is up. This means they cannot pair up with another electron with opposite spin, which is down.

But how can this material be superconducting without Cooper pairs? One possible explanation is that the electrons in one dimension do not dissipate energy when they collide with each other. This is because they have the same mass and momentum, so they just exchange places without losing speed. This is similar to how two pendulums attached together can swing without slowing down.

This suggests that there might be a new way of achieving superconductivity in one dimension that does not rely on Cooper pairs. This opens up new possibilities for exploring and creating novel superconducting materials.

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No update from the mainstream journals yet. Seoul U appears to be appropriately cautious. ngl I’ve got a little hopium in me.

https://twitter.com/floates0x/status/1686755491719139328?s=20

https://twitter.com/floates0x/status/1686799780830420992?s=20

So that’s roughly -170C and 1 atm? I have no idea if that impressive but those people on Twitter sure think so

They wouldn’t be covering their bases like this is if wasn’t potentially a big deal.

I’m kinda going in the other direction. :frowning_face:

But it does look like there’s enough that’s interesting about LK-99 that it could provide clues that unlock the real thing. Like my 15 year old intro physics textbook says there’s no good theory of how high-temperature semiconductors even work. And that’s still true!

Real experts are taking it seriously and checking it out, so fingers crossed.

And hey, there’s a wikipedia page now. They are tracking replication efforts.

It’s not exactly Nature but it’s hitting the mainstream.

American Superconductor Corp. saw its shares increase by nearly 130% in the days after the South Koreans published their paper.

Seriously, what is happening lately?

Free NYT article

Hyun-Tak Kim (author of the 6 author LK-99 superconductor paper) has given a new interview to a korean outlet here: https://yna.co.kr/view/AKR20230803057400017

https://twitter.com/floates0x/status/1686967867311550464?s=20

Some other groups are releasing preprints but I’m not even thinking about them until they pass review.

I wonder if this is a result of that program that was able to predict like all the possible protein structures?

Aliens.gif

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He argued that the diamagnetic data of LK-99 in this paper is much larger than that of graphite (graphite), and that “it cannot be explained unless it is explained by superconductivity.”

I haven’t seen anyone check this. Seems weird when you could at least rougly estimate it based on the floating sample video and published data. I guess you could say it was a fake or contained ferromagnetic particles or something, idk.

Been in development for 20 years, so probably no. There are a lot of reports of promising things that end up going nowhere. Maybe google/X just started feeding me more of this kind of story lately, idk. People say the hype is bad, and maybe it is, to some degree, but I say hey, get used to disappointment.

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At least it’s something to be hopeful about.

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Could be this thing isn’t quite a superconductor but is still doing something interesting no one quite understands.

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Biden is really going to cure cancer :vince:

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Yes, the Biden-Fauci “cancer cure” that gives you MaYoCaRdItIS that 40% of cancer patients won’t take because freedom.

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