This ongoing research saga pretty much the most excited I’ve been about anything since before Covid. It feels like the science equivalent of watching your favorite sports team on an epic rise towards winning a world championship.
Even if this turns out to flop, I hope history remembers the original authors favorably. They really did find something that by all accounts could plausibly be a room temp superconductor. And of course this seems to have turned over quite a stone. Peripheral research as a result of this will likely continue for years, even if superconductivity is disproven.
CF wasn't something that was possible under our understanding of physics at the time. Room temp ambient pressure superconductors are perfectly possible under our understanding of physics.
Super conductors exist. Room temperature net out fusion does not exist, and may never exist, and there are no known pathways in physics that would lead to it. Super conductors do not require any new physics, they require a material that may or may not exist but given the steady progression in the temperature range over which superconductivity has been observed there is a good chance that it exists, we just haven't found it yet.
Note that the 'room temperature' thing is a human requirement, and not one grounded in physics of conductivity per se, and that we started around 3 Kelvin (or -270 degrees Celsius)
In about 100 years. That is on average a two degree per year increase over that period. But the rate of improvement isn't linear and the closer you get to zero the bigger the market is and so the larger the amount of funding available to search for the bit that will close the gap.
This is why we will likely have room temperature superconductors somewhere in the near future, assuming it doesn't already exist. Obviously there is no guarantee that anything that hasn't been discovered yet exists. But in this case, given the arbitrariness of the boundaries set and the fact that those are mostly dictated by chance conditions on planet Earth (if we were living on the dark side of the moon we'd already have room temperature superconductivity...).
I identify with that. It didn’t help that around the end of Covid I went through a terrible break up and all my grad school friends finished their degrees and moved while I was still working on mine.
It felt like I went to the bathroom at a party and came back to an empty room and I had to stay and clean up. I knew I’d be done in a year or two, so it felt weird to try and find a new social group when I was on short time, but boy was the end of my PhD a slog in part due to feeling disconnected socially.
I can relate to both comments. Covid really sapped the life out of me. Some relationships broke down during isolation, I lost friends, my fiancée left, I felt stuck in a job that I hated... The research into LLMs and diffusion models started to wake me up, but this superconductor research has, for some reason, really awoken something in me. I feel excited about the future– my future!– for the first time in a while. My zest for life is back in full force, I feel like myself again, and I've been very excitedly telling everyone I know!
You need to continue down this path and find something meaningful to you that you had a hand in making directly, not merely by association. It is related to the power process described in paragraphs 33-37 on https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab...
Hang in there, that's how life is, sometimes you're up, sometimes you're down but there will almost always be something interesting waiting for you in the future that makes you forget the miserable time that came before.
I felt the same, but I also feel like it was the perfect (least bad) time in my life for it to happen. I can't imagine being in the middle of High School or University during Covid - those kids got the absolute worst end of the deal. I was also recently single, and counted my days feeling grateful I was not living with my ex when the pandemic hit.
Once in a lifetime events tend to be "Exciting" to people, watching history unfold so to speak. The excitement comes from the awareness of this fact, and the fact that it might never be seen again.
When lockdown first happened it was exciting. Nothing like that has happened in most people's lifetimes.
Of course it for tedious very quickly, but I remember going to the park and people being told not to sit on benches by police on horseback. How is that not crazy and sort of exciting?
Emotionally, it was horrible. Societally, it was depressing to see that we'll never be able to tackle any true large problems, we can't even agree on wearing a piece of paper to protect fellow humans.
But scientifically? Yeah, I'll go with "exciting". The field seemed to move at a tremendous speed, or at least that's how it looked to me as an outsider.
Sequencing within less than a week, extremely rapid movement on the mRNA front (and really, the whole vaccination field - 200 candidates in 9 months), revamped understanding of aerosol transmission, leaps in rapid modelling, tremendous progress in terms of test development, growth in international collaboration, progress in the (public) understanding of chronic diseases, scaling up of wastewater monitoring, ...
>But scientifically? Yeah, I'll go with "exciting". The field seemed to move at a tremendous speed, or at least that's how it looked to me as an outsider.
The practical science may have been exciting. Unfortunately "The Science" has been forever tainted thanks to secrets, tight-lips, mis-direction and "just trust us".
Science served us well enough that we're all still commenting here. It's the prevention paradox all over again, if science had not done its work you'd be in a much better position to appreciate the difference that it - and healthcare - made but then you might not have made it at all... science definitely did not let us down.
Who did let us down: the people that were making things worse from day #1 by stirring the pot against science.
> Who did let us down: the people that were making things worse from day #1 by stirring the pot against science.
What is the solution to this?
The framing seems way too simplistic to ever be useful. It makes it seem as though there was just the Good side that had all the answers all along, and the Bad side who just needed to do what the Good side said.
In reality, it all came down to "who do you trust to both have your best interests at heart and to also be competent enough to achieve those best interests".
Turns out those aren't easy questions, and that people are naturally going to arrive at different answers for all sorts of reasons, and I think very few of them look like "boo science".
"It makes it seem as though there was just the Good side that had all the answers all along"
That, right there, is where so many people went wrong and what was blatantly exploited by grifters up and down the chain. The side of science didn't "have answers all along", but it was willing to learn and change.
And no, it wasn't "boo science". It was, to a large extent, political maneuvering using science as a convenient scape goat, because whenever science learned, it got turned into a "see, they don't know either". And, of course, with a large helping of grifters making money off the ensuing confusion.
In reality, it came down to seeing who was willing to change their mind in the face of new evidence, and it was a pretty clear signal. (It was not noise free, absolutely, but it was not extremely hard to read, either - if folks had a basic amount of scientific education. There's your solution, too)
> The side of science didn't "have answers all along", but it was willing to learn and change.
This is the framing that I disagree with. There is no "the side of science". There are only people making assertions.
Some of those people were practicing the scientific method competently and in good faith, some of those people were doing nothing of the sort, and from here in the cheap seats we just had to do our best to decide who was who.
Some people like to think everyone should have trusted who they themselves decided to trust. I think this is unreasonable, but also unsurprising.
mRNA vaccines are a huge discovery, not quite as powerful as room temperature superconductors but still up there in terms of impact on humanity. And encountered a very different kind of skepticism while ultimately turning out to be not only real but widely deployed with great speed.
LK-99 has been in development for longer, 24 years, if you believe a quote copied in many current articles and below. You may have heard before, "it takes years of work to become an overnight success..."
> Lee & Kim had been working on the material on and off since Kim was in graduate school in 1999 (LK-99 geddit?). Lee never makes tenure and is still stuck as an adjunct professor 19 years later. Kim goes off to work in battery materials for a decade plus. 2018 - they get funding from industry for another go at it.
Assuming it's all true what I like about their story is that they've basically been doing a guided brute force of candidates rather than to just sit around and theorize they got their hands dirty in a way that really impresses me.
OP edited their wording after my inquiry to add the word "before". Although I am sorry for the misunderstanding, it seems to have generated some interesting conversation.
I think it's the videos of levitating samples that people are getting excited about. At this point it's either outright fraud (unlikely), an interesting materials science discovery that isn't superconductivity (most likely IMO), or superconductivity itself (still unlikely, but the balance of evidence is shifting).
If it happens to be the latter, it's a huge scientific leap forward.
I don’t think people that are a little skeptical are being negative they are just being realistic. We’ve experienced things like this before and some of the hallmarks of the ones that let us down are there in this one.
It has been peer reviewed - lots of scientists reviewed the paper, found various problems, some are trying to replicate it with varying success so far, some are looking for theoretical explanation. This is the essence of science, not sending it to some journal that just mails the article to the small subset of the same scientists and gather their replies.
Even if this turns out to flop, I hope history remembers the original authors favorably. They really did find something that by all accounts could plausibly be a room temp superconductor. And of course this seems to have turned over quite a stone. Peripheral research as a result of this will likely continue for years, even if superconductivity is disproven.