Meanwhile, all our known physics have no issue with an RTAPS existing.
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.
National pride and science are not a very good mix
Bookmarking this for the future ;)
It wouldn't be like the investment in something that would be similarly revolutionary but with a less certain end game like fusion.
Also, are there other blocking points for inertial confinement fusion ? Would it also make solar power and wind farm pointless ?
Supplementary video 1：Meissner effect for sample 2.
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV14p4y1V7kS/?spm_id_from=333... c8fec748481fb4b933932e80c
Supplementary video 2：Exclude ferromagnetism of sample 2.
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV13k4y1G7i1/?buvid=XY81B1F84... A291&is_story_h5=false&mid=jLEqsyica5eHkvtMXQ2K1A%3D%3D&plat_id=193&share_from=ug c&share_medium=android&share_plat=android&share_source=QQ&share_tag=s_i×tamp= 1690894807&unique_k=B6gawMH&up_id=7590247
Typically you measure resistance that small like this:
+<-------sample------>-
---------p p--------
https://polymarket.com/event/is-the-room-temp-superconductor...
As long as the blue line doesn't cross the red one, I won't believe in it. Money talks, bullshit walks.
Wait, I missed that one. Was it yesterday?
Because this one is.
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...
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...
I'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
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.
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.
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!
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.
(Don't get me wrong, I think there's a significant chance that it's fake, but I've been told that if it is in fact a superconductor this is very much how it would move)
Notice how much force needs to be applied to move a real superconductor into a new pinned state
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 ;)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
What are you referencing?
Although I'm pretty sure there are plenty that many people can think of, so it doesn't really detract much from your point.
Shoutout to 50 things that made the modern economy, a great podcast/book.
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.
There hasn’t been a full scale war between major powers since.
Electric cars mainstream
City of Hope scientists develop targeted chemotherapy able to kill all solid tumors in preclinical research
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.
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...
> 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
Some of the “good” black swans at the top of my mind…
5) programmable matter / nanobots - the applications of a swarm of nanobots or even microbots are pretty much endless.
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.
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).
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.
3) has already happened. The AI chat bots aren't very smart, but they're clearly capable of some degree of basic reasoning.
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.
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.
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.
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
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)
How do you build a warning system for a unsurvivable event, with not wittnesses? Eternal unease and anxiety, regardless of reality.
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"
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.
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.
And as technology is getting better, both of those outcomes become more probable.
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
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.
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
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.
Do you mean communism?
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.
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...
>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)?
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.
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.
>> 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.
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
Doesn't seem that it would cure high speed lead poisoning. People will continue killing each other just as well.
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
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...)
https://chat.openai.com/share/c1c779c7-3b5f-4ea7-a864-38561d...
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.
EDIT: I continue the conversation with ChatGPT to try to poke holes in the argument if you’re interested: https://chat.openai.com/share/19871222-9810-4a25-9604-8e690b...
LEDs are genuinely revolutionary in a way everyone just kind of overlooks.
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
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)
I think there should be a bigger effort to change public perception about nuclear fission reactors if we're on the cusp of what is effectively the equivalent of the dream of endless fusion energy in the latest generation fission breeder reactors.
'Connections' (1978). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WoDQBhJCVQ
Economies of scale do apply.
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?
Not the revolution people are claiming, but it's a huge gain nonetheless.
There's research around finding ways to use them but nothing that is currently viable.
https://www.cell.com/cancer-cell/pdf/S1535-6108(02)00133-2.p...
and you CAN imagine it : Viagra
Penicillin was the first highly effective AND mass producible antibiotic, though.
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.
Also, tea making was a huge sanitary step forward.
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.
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.
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).
Cheap unlimited energy will just make us push these boundaries even further.
We need a reduction of human impact on our planet, not an increase of it.
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.
https://www.usa.philips.com/a-w/about/news/archive/standard/...
I guess the need is somewhat alleviated by using MRI which seal their helium:
https://www.usa.philips.com/healthcare/resources/landing/the...
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.
the authors managed to squeeze 24 years of grant funding out of it
The entire premise of your retort was wrong. You should have challenged them to take their certainty to the prediction markets.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nothing we have currently moves closer to that. Just doing more of the same of the current models will not get you there.
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.
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).
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.
Not sure if there is a difference, for sufficiently abstract interpretations of “satisfy the input”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-war-already-wit...
Yet all the major powers have launched multiple, lengthy full scale wars since.
So I would argue they are either neutral or massive negative.
> Also the vast majority of people like nature, more energy is directed into cleaning up and preserving nature in the US than every before.
Really? Definitely in an orthogonal dimension then...
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.
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.
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.)
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
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"
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.
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.
When I say gradually, it's an euphemism, it's an _extremely_ slow process, but it's the global tendency here.
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)You could have said the same thing 40 years ago.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think a CENTRALISED management of the world's natural resources would require communism.
Decentralised management is what we have now.
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.
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...
That is the whole game.
They're level 4 with very severe location and weather limits.
But if you compare India to China, one democratic and one not, suddenly it's not super clear which countries' citizens have "better" lives.
Somewhat better than a lifetime ruler, but this is far from what Democracy are on the textbook.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
You don’t need guillotines, you just need one junkie at the right time.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11941061/Tech-exec-...
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.
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.
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.
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..
Rulers, set in their ways, will take a government down an increasingly non-viable path.
We already see the advantage age provides when building influence for US politics.
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.
I don't want to open a can of worms, but... about 40 milion people are aborted each year...
But amongst the popular left, there seems to be an aversion to competency and rationality, as they are symbolically linked to high status and social dominance. And so those who work deliberatively to end the scourge of aging and illness from humanity are—due to their displaying a rational results-oriented mindset—disdained.
That's all without even mentioning other benefits like cumulative knowledge of multiple lifespans being contained in one person allowing for new scientific breakthroughs.
Try finding at history some place where the society isn't fundamentally organized around commerce or under some heavy kind of authoritarianism.
Then Scott Walker shredded a bunch of it because socialism is bad.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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.
How do you think AI would legislate, if AI legislation would become reality?
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.
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.
However it looks like this just changed: https://www.nhtsa.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.
https://unece.org/DAM/trans/doc/2013/wp29grsp/WP.29-161-18e....
Sorry not sorry if I just subjected you to the same.
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!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.
I don't think the passport is an invention itself, so to speak.
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?
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.
> Before WWI there were no passports and no need for them.
This combination of ignorance and confidence isn’t a good look.
So unless private collection of personal data is completely illegal, I’d rather have a centralised ID system instead
It's an interesting and thought-provoking list though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/C...
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?
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_the_Modern... [1] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p04t8k2l
Why is disposable razor on the list but not electricity, computing, refrigeration, metallurgy, microscopy, or eye glasses?
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.
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.
> 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.
> > 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
You wouldn't say "Boeing 737" you'd say flight.
They're saying iPhone because it's attention grabbing. No other reason.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
[1] https://qz.com/1106064/the-entire-global-financial-system-de...
ATMs may be designed to use super precise timstamps, but they don't need to be. At all.
The interesting timing constraints are between stock exchanges... but in those situations the speed of light is a bigger factor than clock drift, even if you're just using NTP, and you can't avoid speed of light delays/desyncs.
For stock exchanges you are absolutely correct. I remember many years ago paying so much extra for the fastest internet access and sub-second delay access to our local stock exchange. Even so it was still slower (lag) when compared to those with offices placed very close to the stock exchange building/infrastruture at that time.
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.
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&prefix=fal...
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.
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/techdigest/pdf/...
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.
Wouldn't the Code of Hammurabi have preceded that by quite a few centuries?
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.
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.
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.
"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.
I know mercury gauges use to have a 0 to 30 scale sometimes (not 0 to -30), and that was confusing!
and
https://twitter.com/8teAPi/status/1685294623449874432
The papers were totally rushed.
Back then, many asked if this was superconduction or merely diamagnetism. Does the new paper shine any light on this question?
https://twitter.com/andrewmccalip/status/1687405505604734978
This Wikipedia article has a good summary of the replication attempts to date (including this paper).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 = (½)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?
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.
In other words: even the downside here is great, and the upside is...
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.
So yeah, I hope there's a better way to evaluate this substance than "it floats!"
Can someone ELI5 why this matters? What does it enable technologically?
Flying cars? Fusion reactors? Magic fix for global warming?
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.
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 (최동식) 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...
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This post is now also available as a standalone version: https://hackmd.io/@lifthrasiir/lk-99-prehistory & https://twitter.com/senokay/status/1687360854315151360
"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: '돈을 빌려서 어렵게 사업하는 분들한테 와서 조직적으로 횡포를 부리는 것은 바람직하지 못하다"며 이같이 밝혔다'."
Can anyone translate the Korean?
> 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?
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?
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.
Same for people looking at patents from other countries.
> What's your issue with Shockley btw
Well he was a mega racist, but that's not relevant
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.)
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?
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%.
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.
Showing diamagnetism is one of the least error-prone ways to demonstrate the superconductor effect.
That’s my understanding anyway.
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).
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.
However, if they perfect 1d production, they can layer in a bunch of them to create a quasi 2d or 3d superconductor.
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.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09258...
Time for you to make some money then? :D
https://polymarket.com/event/is-the-room-temp-superconductor...
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.
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
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¹ To be fair, "the entire planet" is also around 6000 km away, calculation-wise, but still!
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 100° C.
In any case, the "show" part is important. Good video quality is important.
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.
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.
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#Magnet_...
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.
- 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!
All i want is a maglev hot wheels track using flux pinning.
Just imagine all the cool toys a room temp semiconductor would enable.
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.
* 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.
So MRIs will get much cheaper, and they could end up being as cheap as taking an x-ray today.
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.
An Earth-sized MRI machine could image all of the remaining mineral deposits, and it coils could make for a hell of an autobahn.
In a thousand years people are gonna look back at us idiots filling balloons with helium and letting them disperse into the upper atmosphere and shake their heads at how stupid we were.
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?
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.
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.
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..
Again, with a payout so big and ease of replication fairly low, the evidence doesn’t even have to be that convincing.
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?
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
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.
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 ?
Maybe not worth losing 20 years ... i don't know
[...]
> 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
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.
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
If he really did it for all mankind then give him a huge prize
edit:
KR20210062550A - Mehtod of manufacturing ceramic composite with low resistance including superconductors and the composite thereof -
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).
Everyone's assuming it's about the Nobel, but it is much more likely it's about far more lucrative goals.
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.
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.
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.
But the rogue scientist wanted to share it with the entire world.
It would make for a nice movie.
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.
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.
Fiat lux!
.. by way of Back to the Future hoverboards.
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.
I don’t know, my fellow PhD students in EU have the same fears.
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.
- 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
I did a post-doc in China, so that's my sample size N=1 piece of cheap opinion
* 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.
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...
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.
I don't fault them for failing to synthesize room-temperature superconductors while they were relaxing in some resort in Turkey or Thailand.
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.
Another use-case for the Baltimore shot tower (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Shot_Tower)
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 $.
Can you also ELI5 why this seemed like such a hard problem to solve up until now? Was it something hiding in plain site?
By how much?
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 20°C there, so currently available superconductors are not up to the task.
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".
This happens to lots of famous scientists/engineers (Sergey Korolev, Vladimir Vernadsky, ...). We can do a bit better.
Bogolyubov and Korolyev both are Russian names. Bogolyubov was born in Russia and he didn't speak any Ukranian, which maybe important here.
I don't have a skin in the game. If Bogolyubov then came to US and did some research here, we could call him Russian born Ukranian-American.
It's OK to list all the affiliations, it is not OK to pick and choose.
"Russian" is correct (technicality, as this was indeed his nationality specified in the passport) but incomplete. Just "Ukranian" is incorrect.
Yeah, we can do better. This conversation is an example how things could be blown out of proportion.
By your logic Euler is Russian
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.
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.
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...
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.
Is it possible that the inventors do not receive a dime of royalties?
Better yet would be to offer partial payouts for failed efforts if research is made public.
This is probably more relevant for pharmaceuticals though.
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.)
I'd rest my hopes on them not being dicks about it, not on them not getting benefit from it.
No MRI, No Fusion, ect.
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.
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.
Also there are superconductor based batteries that are very efficient, would would become a thing, likely revolutionising batteries.
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.
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?
See, for instance, Stigler's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy (for the concept an example itself)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_examples_of_Stigler%27...
> There are no prizes for being second in science.
The reply (second quote above) fits in context, but there is more to it.
1. Publishing early at the expense of quality has a way of catching up to one's reputation. (Hopefully.)
2. History has many examples of scientists who were "too early" or not "in the right place at the right time" to get recognition.
3. A result may get little attention in one field but a lot in another. One example that comes to mind are string-matching algorithms. Sometimes they seem a dime-a-dozen in CS. But the "right" ones have transformed DNA sequencing.
I joke, of course.
(Too late for me to edit)
For future rail guns, they'd just have replacement rails available as they do barrels for tanks/artillery guns (that wear out after about 1000 shots afaik).
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
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.
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.
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...
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/oco...
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.
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.
The modern patent system is despicable.
It could be the main theme in one, and then just a short thing in many others; or the main theme in a few.
Idt CFS will care because they've already sourced much of the HTS tape that they need and their schedule doesn't permit waiting for LK-99 to be proven/disproven and all the years it will take to produce LK-99 in bulk anyway.
It's so insanely cheaper, because not only do you not need the cryogenic cooling (and all the support and maintenance systems and consumables like helium or nitrogen or whatever), but LK-99 is made from relatively common elements versus rare earth elements.
I really, really hope this stuff works.
Imagine large hadron collider without cooling!
We could have the unimaginably huge hadron collider!
I like the idea that some of us will live long enough to not be defined by our jobs.
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.
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.
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?
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?
Now I hate that I have to say this (because it should be a given), but _obviously_ this does not apply across the board, but when people experience shocking behaviour like this you can see why they might hold grudges or biases, even when that's wrong to do.
That aside, China & the US (of which are are a lot of Americans on this site) seem to have held a grudge for quite a long time now, on both sides. Which is a shame, because we're all human at the end of the day and especially science should recognise that stupid tribal human concepts like nationalities and borders are meaningless to the big picture.
What would some PhD student in EU who is worried about job security be able to do about it constructively?
What practical use case could be for that new material? Can we make a battery with it or something practical?
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.
It's a human problem, we only care about what happens to us or our tribe and most of our focus is not very forward looking. We're better than other animals as evolution favoured us looking just a little more forward than other animals, but now we have to escape the timekeeping of our meaty flesh and think "if we dump money into science then this generation will get some cool stuff and the next will get a shit tonne of cool stuff".
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.
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.
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.
You'd think to put your deliberate typos in the word 'supercobductor' though...
Now I'm imagining a high-velocity corn transfer mechanism
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
> Magnetic force scales as 1/r^3, not 1/r^2 like gravity
I remember once hearing that the rate of those forces' decay indicates (but does not prove) that they decay in more than three dimensions. This was an accomplished chemist talking, so I'm sure that she was being concise but factual.
This one has a table that summarizes the answer to your question
Is that a mistake?
You can still get that effect if both forces are r^2. You can even get it with the same force—consider standing on the moon looking up at the earth. It will just be a more marked change with r^3.
[1] https://www.ni.com/docs/en-US/bundle/ni-daqmx/page/measfunds...
You can mesaure current by electrical fields, but have the same issues as before. Your testing equipment and your very tiny sample sizes.
if the area is small, couldn't it be "badly attached" directly to the other probe?
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).
Wow.
> if the current record were to be decertified then the holder would be a tie at 54.0 °C (129.2 °F), recorded both at Furnace Creek and in Kuwait.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_temperature_recorded_o...
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.
If we make a leap in room-temperature superconductors, do we also make a leap in fusion?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Was there anything in 1999 about the material that made it notable as a discovery then?
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.
This goes double for government-funded research, which the overwhelming majority of basic science research is.
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.
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.
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.
The patent is here for reference: https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2023027536A1/en
And yeah, they left off Au.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To add some context, the death penalty is used much more widely in China than a Westerner might realize, so to them this idea is not quite as radical as it might seem. The PRC government is a bit tight lipped about exact policies, but it's known the death penalty gets employed for things like corruption and even major economic crimes like fraud or money counterfeiting. And of course drug offenses and the violent crimes.
Replication is just a nice term for it. It can just as well be a crisis of fraud with the failure of replicating fraudulent results as the consequence.
Scientific fraud and garbage results is a huge problem Everywhere. It's actually big enough to nearly invalidate the entire field of psychology.
If China has half the worlds academics-writing-papers, one would _expect_ them to be responsible for half the fabricated ones.
To be fair, according to TFA the death penalty is only for clinical trials where the drug or procedure, due to faked or doctored data, causes severe or fatal consequences.
It actually seems pretty reasonable to me. You develop a drug that actually kills people but fake your data to show it saves lives. Then you make money while people start dying, essentially killing people because your career was more important than reality. I’d call that murder.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Like saying "SORRY, FIRST" to the nobel committee?
A bigger issue is going to be sample size. A 1mm-diameter 1mm-long rod of silver has a resistance of about 20 μΩ (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 0.02μΩ 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.
Not that low in range though, you will end up seeing thermal noise that dwarfs your measurement.
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).
For high temperature superconductors (50-70+K), it's not literal zero for superconducting mechanisms discovered so far.
For a complicated shape, the formula is (something like[1]) F=A/r^2+B/r^3+C/r^4+... , where r is the distance to the "center" (and some parts are closer and some parts are more far away).
An important property of magnets is that A=0, so the r^2 term dissapears. And in many cases it can be simplified to F=B/r^3 [1, again].
[1] The complete formula considers also the directions, so it's longer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multipole_expansion
I like this definition, personally:
“Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it.” ― Mark Twain
If you want to put it in game theory perspective, normalizing selfish behavior means that when you could benefit from something in another country but won’t you’ll be the one suffering discrimination.
If we can reach agreements international cooperation can benefit all parties better than the greedy solution.
The claim here was that "magnetic force decayed by 1/r³" which is the result of seeing a dipole ("two sources") from far away. Each pole decays by 1/r² and the net result (the combined effect of both poles on a test particle) is proportional to 1/r³
I would look at these:
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/184211/why-does-...
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/293310/why-does-...
And understand both electrostatic and magnetic dipoles in analogous terms.
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.
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)
This is why you list the full name, rather than just the surnames. As you've listed them they are quite helpful.
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 ?)
Now to learn physics.
"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.
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.
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.
Perhaps if the track were arranged in a grid-like pattern, the scooter could use superconducting electromagnets to accelerate and steer.
Carving up public spaces into those that are safe and those that can trivially injure or kill ruins the outdoors for so many.
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.
At the same time, other researchers around the world weren't so lucky.
But because we don't know what's going to pan out without trying it out, the other researchers are just as integral to the process of discovery.
Is it fair to reward Lee and Kim for their luck, and let everyone else get screwed? Wouldn't it be more fair to make sure everyone is appropriately compensated to begin with?
I didn’t want to get into it too much but I wrote that Chinese people are on average, more pro-science because they’re less religious or that their religion does not strongly contradict with science.
I’m guessing your parents’ HK church friends are Christians?
The mainland Chinese social order is secular. The technocratic state, the CCP, had a lot to do with that. I would actually argue that technocracy is a superficial form of scientific culture.
[1]: https://www.nature.com/nature-index/country-outputs/China [2]: https://www.nature.com/nature-index/country-outputs/United%2...
if you're doubting the veracity of the poster's claims, just say so directly
One wonders: is the unearned time as an elite university president worth being humiliated by an 18 year old on the student newspaper and being forced to resign in disgrace?
For me that's an easy no, but others may have different preferences.
Yes it could be some tiny resistance, but the same issue occurs with the resolution/accuracy of the voltage or current measurement you would make.
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.
I hope there are still those toiling away doing unpopular work, that can make a breakthrough....
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.
I anecdotally feel religious or leftist western circles very much fall under the definition of face culture though.
This is a pretty strict version, at 33% now by 2025
https://manifold.markets/QuantumObserver/will-the-lk99-room-...
Did that site predate https://xkcd.com/955/ or was it inspired by it?
Yeah, it would be the perfect solution. Problem is how to agree on that, currently we have a market telling everyone what their "appropriate" compensation is.
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.
If there is an evidence then there is no "my opinion"--provide it. If you can't provide it, then don't make loud disparaging statements.
Such style should be left for social media "influencers" where "controversy is cash"
I was only following the logic of the original question and your initial reply.
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.
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
Reading comprehension mate, cmon, don't assume bad intent.
What about the scientist who spent 23 years to develop lk99? There's a lot of solutions within the existing patent system. If governments wanted, they could simply offer them a stupid amount of money for the patent and open source it.
The “death penalty” under discussion is for faking drug results and causing deaths of patients, which sounds reasonable.
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
Yes, but official government stats have also been overstating the population a bit. I think it mostly affects the younger generation at present though.
For instance:
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Temperature-variation-of...
"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."
And I don't disagree with you, I think the scientists should get rewarded too. I just don't want access to technology that could help people to get held back by money, as it does with pharmaceuticals.
Around 6-8% per 1000 km. That's a lot.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
Some examples: https://www.yardbarker.com/entertainment/articles/popular_mo...
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.
You go out of your way to look for uncharitable ways of interpreting how others are interpreting your messages.
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.
The news mostly. But also this guy[1], who I guess is using the leaked data. But even the official data shows a huge drop in the 0-4 bucket.
> Why would the population be overstated?
As I understand it[2], the local governments are reliant on two sources for income: land sales and money from the central government. Both are influenced by demographic change, so there's incentives to adjust the numbers upwards to keep revenue coming in.
[1]: https://zeihan.com/new-chinese-demographic-data-population-c... [2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-13/china-s-p...
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."
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.
for compelling emergencies states can already waive patents, so the relevant mechanisms are already in place if anything momentous happens.
Not to mention the fact that the vaccines were developed with public money.
Uh oh, did I just jinx 2043?
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.
And you're wrong about the vaccines too. They were mostly developed with public money, private companies just profited off them.
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.
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.
Companies price their offerings so that the global north will buy it, and the global south will have to pay proportionately extortionate amounts, with no relation whatsoever to the cost of production or research.
It seems so incredibly reductive to attribute global South issues to patents.