xpost from https://lemmy.world/post/2494271
Researchers have discovered a new compound called LK-99 that could enable the fabrication of room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductors. Two separate sources have provided very preliminary confirmations of this breakthrough, including a simulation indicating it could be possible and a short video from Chinese researchers that seems to indicate some properties of superconductivity.
This seems like a good page to keep track of the replication attempts. https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/claims-of-room-temperature-and-ambient-pressure-superconductor.1106083/page-21
Wow, great link. Thanks for that. Looking like bullshit.
Thank you so much! Comments like these is why I love Lemmy. A hidden gem in the sea of news spam.
If I can ask, how did you even find that place?
I found it on mastodon. Searching hashtag #LK99
No way this is true, come on. Room temperature super conductor made by some simple chemical reaction?
Richard Feynman had a really good bit about how bad human intuition is about quantum physics. About how we evolved to throw a rock at an animal out on a grass plane, and not to make good guesses about the nature of particles so small we can’t even fathom them.
Seems appropriate here.
The simple chemistry is pretty specific and doesn’t work very well (it usually makes a semiconductor instead, and even when it does work, it’s a few tiny impure specks most of the time).
Why is it unbelievable?
Why not? Lots of technologies are literally just about mixing chemicals together, and we could have done that at any point in time prior, we just didn’t.
Lithium ion battery technology is literally just mixing materials together. We’ve had access to lithium for centuries but we didn’t turn that technology into batteries until about 30 years ago.
It’s not the same. This is almost like alchemy.
Why not? The search space is massive, and it’s not the first time humanity stumbled upon some simple revolutionary discovery.
Just because we failed to figure out the conceptually simple thing until now, doesn’t mean it can’t be the case. Anything else is just some form of human exceptionalism.
Please be real
Well you know about all those fancy battery technologies you’ve seen in the news? Some of those are already 30 years old by now and they are still stuck in the lab whereas Li-ion actually became a product. There has got to be a good reason why that happened. Maybe the technology was too expensive, too fragile, or maybe there was another drawback the article never mentioned. Same kinds of challenges face superconductors, graphene and fusion. That’s why we have these headlines periodically.
I’m super excited and hopeful. But then I remember the EmDrive and cold fusion, so these scientific hoaxes do occur. But damn if it’s true!
No one ever really believe the EmDrive worked. It was just the media getting super over excited about it, but no one with any actual credibility ever gave it much credence.
This however is actually getting attention a real scientists so it is a little different.
NASA was testing the EM Drive. To me this feels exactly the same. I would probably also include Tabby’s star as another analogy.
I want it to work, but I’m not getting my hopes up yet.
Dave Jones of the EEVBLOG recently did an informative and unfortunate video covering this. https://youtu.be/QHPFphlzwdQ
eh, gonna remain skeptical about this until a commercial application is developed and it’s not just some stupid marketing term.