Room-temperature superconductor

[Psi]

Rubbish! White LEDs are basically a blue LED plus a phosphor. And white LEDs have revolutionised lighting!

Yes, it's moved the cost of lighting from electricity to installation and maintenance.  Net savings: zero. What a fucking con

The LED technology didn't do that, all the manufactures making LED stuff designed to fail did.

Not sure what you are going on about. 

I was commenting on AVGresponding saying that the LED lighting revolution was a con because they fail so often.

[PlainName]

Your statement about Blue LEDs is complete nonsense.
Only these made white light available for portable and battery driven devices.
Only Li batteries also made all these portable devices useable.
I.e. there would be no smart phones w/o both inventions.

Er, that's what I was asking - what equivalent nice thing(s) would the end user experience because of room temperature superconductors? That is, to be clear because it seems to need to be made clear, what existing product would be made much better? Or new product brought into existence?

I can see perfectly well what effect LEDs and Li batteries have had. For instance, I buy electric garden tools now instead of petrol-powered ones, and LEDs aren't just indicators now but actual useful lights. But for superconductor... I am lost as to what difference that would make to my day-to-day life and toy depository.

[gnuarm]

Rubbish! White LEDs are basically a blue LED plus a phosphor. And white LEDs have revolutionised lighting!

Yes, it's moved the cost of lighting from electricity to installation and maintenance.  Net savings: zero. What a fucking con

The LED technology didn't do that, all the manufactures making LED stuff designed to fail did.

Not sure what you are going on about. 

I was commenting on AVGresponding saying that the LED lighting revolution was a con because they fail so often.

I was commenting on the false statements you appeared to be making.

[AVGresponding]

Rubbish! White LEDs are basically a blue LED plus a phosphor. And white LEDs have revolutionised lighting!

Yes, it's moved the cost of lighting from electricity to installation and maintenance.  Net savings: zero. What a fucking con

The LED technology didn't do that, all the manufactures making LED stuff designed to fail did.

Not sure what you are going on about. 

I was commenting on AVGresponding saying that the LED lighting revolution was a con because they fail so often.

In fact that wasn't what I said at all; I said the installation and maintenance costs have increased.

MTBF is a problem yes, but the more serious issue is that replacement lamps are now a thing of the past; entire fittings and in some cases entire rooms and floors of fittings have to be replaced, because manufacturers force obsolescence.
Note that I'm talking about commercial and industrial applications here.

[Marco]

In a competitive market manufacturers do what customers let them get away with.

They could/should standardize some new 48V DC sockets for LED bulbs, but apparently the customers on average don't care. One really big customer could force the issue. Just create some procurement offers for spot lights and linear with new 48V DC specific sockets and once the ball gets rolling it won't stop, it just makes too much sense. CFLs got new sockets for linear lamps, why the hell haven't LEDs? Because the large industrial customers are stupid.

[AndyC_772]

Er, that's what I was asking - what equivalent nice thing(s) would the end user experience because of room temperature superconductors?

I'm glad I'm not the only one for whom the answer to this isn't completely obvious.

My first guess would be that it might improve the performance and/or efficiency of CPUs / GPUs, if it can be incorporated into ICs in the form of an interconnect layer in place of aluminium or copper. There's a lot of process engineering involved there, though; if it's not straightforward to incorporate into existing wafer production processes, it'll simply never happen.

Slightly easier might be replacing bond wires for power electronics - but again, lots of engineering required to replace a ductile gold wire with a brittle ceramic material.

There will be desktop toys galore, obviously. Toy maglev trains, inverted monorails, that kind of thing.

Or it may be a complete non-starter, not because it doesn't work, but because it contains lead. Since people seem to have become completely incapable of understanding the concept of a trade-off, especially where environmental issues are concerned, it may just end up being banned from useful applications 'because lead'.

[KedasProbe]

nice summary of fails and partial success in reproducing
https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/claims-of-room-temperature-and-ambient-pressure-superconductor.1106083/page-11

https://twitter.com/ppx_sds/status/1686790365641142279
110K is still very cold though.

[gnuarm]

Er, that's what I was asking - what equivalent nice thing(s) would the end user experience because of room temperature superconductors?

I'm glad I'm not the only one for whom the answer to this isn't completely obvious.

My first guess would be that it might improve the performance and/or efficiency of CPUs / GPUs, if it can be incorporated into ICs in the form of an interconnect layer in place of aluminium or copper. There's a lot of process engineering involved there, though; if it's not straightforward to incorporate into existing wafer production processes, it'll simply never happen.

I've never heard anyone say the resistivity of copper or aluminum produced much heat in ICs.  The energy used is mostly from charging/discharging capacitors.

Or are you talking about some other problem?  I doubt it would impact the speed much.  I expect most of the resistance in the RC is from the channel driving the trace.

Slightly easier might be replacing bond wires for power electronics - but again, lots of engineering required to replace a ductile gold wire with a brittle ceramic material.

There will be desktop toys galore, obviously. Toy maglev trains, inverted monorails, that kind of thing.

Or it may be a complete non-starter, not because it doesn't work, but because it contains lead. Since people seem to have become completely incapable of understanding the concept of a trade-off, especially where environmental issues are concerned, it may just end up being banned from useful applications 'because lead'.

Lead is not banned.  Lead in throw away, consumer items is banned.  The military and various exempt uses are excluded.  The point is, lead needs to be collected and removed from the waste stream, rather than thrown in a dump.  A local conservation club got a shooting range to change their layout, after they were able to scoop up handfuls of lead pellets from the stream behind it.  That's the sort of negligence we need to end.

[PlainName]

Er, that's what I was asking - what equivalent nice thing(s) would the end user experience because of room temperature superconductors?

There will be desktop toys galore, obviously. Toy maglev trains, inverted monorails, that kind of thing.

I guess I could manage with just those. Could be some big improvements over marble machines! 

[TimFox]

A true room-temperature semiconductor with reasonable current and magnetic field capability would reduce copper loss in utility-system transformers (although there are other losses there including core loss).
A commercial from the copper industry:  https://www.copper.org/environment/sustainable-energy/transformers/education/trans_ad.html

[thm_w]

nice summary of fails and partial success in reproducing
https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/claims-of-room-temperature-and-ambient-pressure-superconductor.1106083/page-11

https://twitter.com/ppx_sds/status/1686790365641142279
110K is still very cold though.

Good table. One cool thing is some teams were able to get a resulting material that levitated really well, so the material is already shown to be unique in some way.

Translation: Currently the zero resistance test takes a few days to focus on the diamagnetic value. Judging from the video of the author of the paper, it is far superior to pyrolitic graphite.
https://www.zhihu.com/question/614426480/answer/3142610238

Now, let's move on to the most important part - the zero resistance results. Let's take a closer look at our measurements. We started measuring from 300K and gradually decreased the temperature. The current passing through the sample was one milliampere. Due to the fragility of the sample, it was difficult to shape it into a regular form. Therefore, we used an irregularly shaped sample to save time. We measured the resistivity using the four-probe method. Under a current of one milliampere, we observed that the resistivity exhibited slight semiconductor behavior at high temperatures. As the temperature decreased, the resistivity decreased as well. The most crucial observation was made at 110K. At this temperature, we observed that the resistance approached zero. Why do we say it approached zero? If you look at the scale of the resistance on this side, it is around 10^-5 to 10^-6 ohms. Considering the current of one milliampere, the corresponding voltage is around 10^-8 or 10^-9 volts. This is within the measurement range of our instrument, PBMS. Therefore, we believe that we have observed zero resistance.

We tested a total of six samples, but we only observed zero resistance in one of them. In most of the other samples, we observed behavior characteristic of semiconductors.
https://twitter.com/altryne/status/1686796796859908096

[Psi]

I was commenting on the false statements you appeared to be making.

Ok, fair enough, I should have said "most" instead of "all". I know there are some LED lighting manufactures that sell good products.
I was not suggesting that manufacturers are having design meetings on how to get their devices to fail just outside of the warranty in order to sell more. Or they're testing them to ensure they do fail soon after warranty.
I'm saying they are choosing their product design requirements based on their chosen product lifespan and they are doing that process wrong. Lifespan requirements in the design process should be determined by a cost/benefit analysis from the users perspective, not the sellers perspective. If you can add $0.05 of extra parts to a product with $2 BOM cost and that will make it last twice as long then you should do that. Not doing that means you are designing it to fail prematurely.

[gnuarm]

I was commenting on the false statements you appeared to be making.

Ok, fair enough, I should have said "most" instead of "all". I know there are some LED lighting manufactures that sell good products.
I was not suggesting that manufacturers are having design meetings on how to get their devices to fail just outside of the warranty in order to sell more. Or they're testing them to ensure they do fail soon after warranty.
I'm saying they are choosing their product design requirements based on their chosen product lifespan and they are doing that process wrong. Lifespan requirements in the design process should be determined by a cost/benefit analysis from the users perspective, not the sellers perspective. If you can add $0.05 of extra parts to a product with $2 BOM cost and that will make it last twice as long then you should do that. Not doing that means you are designing it to fail prematurely.

I hate reading stuff like this.  You essentially claim that "most" manufacturers actually go to the trouble of designing the product to be a time bomb, rather than simply minimizing the product cost, which sets the minimum selling price.   Yet, You offer zero evidence of anything you say.  What $0.05 worth of parts will make an LED bulb last twice as long?

Whatever.   People believe what they want to believe and there is little in the way of facts or evidence, that will change their minds. 

[Siwastaja]

Yes, it's moved the cost of lighting from electricity to installation and maintenance.  Net savings: zero. What a fucking con

What utter bullshit. Even if you consider all the bullshit low quality LED fixtures, the lifetime increased so much that installation and maintenance costs have plummeted. You just don't remember the days of 1000-hour incandescents and crap quality "10000" so actually 2000-hour CFLs which had exactly the same issues with their aging electronics as crap quality LEDs except they generated more heat and died even more prematurely. Compare to that and our "50 000" so really 5000-10000 hour LEDs are a huge improvement.

In the past changing a lightbulb was a monthly endeavor. CFLs offered only limited relief; they could not be used everywhere as they took so long to light up and did not work in cold, and still faded to significantly reduced brightness during the first 1000 hours so you had to replace all those "60W equivalent 11W" things prematurely, generating a lot of unnecessary waste. After LEDs came out my maintenance time went down by more than an order of magnitude, now I have to change a lightbulb maybe once a year. (If the LEDs lived up to their specifications, that would be even more rarely, but I gladly accept this 10x improvement.)

[BBBbbb]

Regardless of the outcome of the LK99 saga, following it for the past 2 weeks has been better than any tv show/move I watched recently - so many plot twists and the best thing there is quite a non-zero chance that it's a real deal.

[PlainName]

Sorry? Did I miss the sex scenes?

[EEVblog]

Regardless of the outcome of the LK99 saga, following it for the past 2 weeks has been better than any tv show/move I watched recently - so many plot twists and the best thing there is quite a non-zero chance that it's a real deal.

Well it's certainly opened my eyes to jusy how many people are unwilling to have anything even remotely negative said about research like this.
And how quick they are to jump on even the smalled amount of news that it might be CONFIRMED! HA! TOLD YOU SO!

If that demo video I busted had been on any other website and was related to anything else, everyone would have laughed their arse off at how dumb it was to publish on your website. But when it comes to this, nope, that's "just marketing", it's "not relevant", "it's an old video", "it's got nothing to do with the research group" etc etc 

[PlainName]

that demo video I busted

Perhaps it's the way you tell 'em.

What I mean by that is we're all aware that bad news sells. Newspapers, and especially tabloids, use bad news as clickbait. Rarely are great things pushed, and when they are there's usually some negative, because negative sells. I think that's the same with busted videos - negative sells so people flock to view diss videos regardless of merit or content.

Just out of interest, when was the last "gee, this will be a great thing" video you posted? Did you ever post a video showing some thing you 'busted' that turned out not to be after all?

So my contention is that when you wade in with the busted stuff you're triggering people. You can show it's likely wrong without the clickbait, and probably get better quality discourse, but of course you'd get fewer viewers.

[BBBbbb]

Sorry? Did I miss the sex scenes?

yup, when Kwon (it always has to be a Kwon doing some bs) tried to fu*k them over by rushing the first (Word) paper to the publication process presumably so he'd get the Nobel prize (limited to 3 persons).
There's your sex scene.

[BBBbbb]

Regardless of the outcome of the LK99 saga, following it for the past 2 weeks has been better than any tv show/move I watched recently - so many plot twists and the best thing there is quite a non-zero chance that it's a real deal.

Well it's certainly opened my eyes to jusy how many people are unwilling to have anything even remotely negative said about research like this.
And how quick they are to jump on even the smalled amount of news that it might be CONFIRMED! HA! TOLD YOU SO!

If that demo video I busted had been on any other website and was related to anything else, everyone would have laughed their arse off at how dumb it was to publish on your website. But when it comes to this, nope, that's "just marketing", it's "not relevant", "it's an old video", "it's got nothing to do with the research group" etc etc 

Academia publishing has been broken for a long time for various different reasons.
Team was pushed to publish without the article being completed at a standard level due to the first submission.
Recreating it in labs is not easy (US has additional problems with substance control and also general lack of financial incentives for such work).
Chinese researcher OTOH are under higher pressure and have been known to mass produce papers of debated quality at higher % than the western ones. (Not sure if this view is distorted through western optics or really the case) In general similarly to how Covid topic attracted a lot of researchers looking for an easy funding or a spotlight this could be the case as well.

Nevertheless, the fact that there is still non-zero chance of this being something great has me excited.

[deepfryed]

that demo video I busted

So my contention is that when you wade in with the busted stuff you're triggering people. You can show it's likely wrong without the clickbait, and probably get better quality discourse, but of course you'd get fewer viewers.

I agree with this, academics are just like anyone else in a high a pressure environment - they make mistakes or overlook things. People that sometimes publish PR stuff are not academics and can end up making a mess of things, I've worked in academia so I can attest to that

Also hope is such a human quality, though always not rational.

[KedasProbe]

Extra info and video, seems they can only make small pieces 7mm flat (brittle material)
hence measuring electric resistance isn't easy.

https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2308/2308.01516.pdf

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV14p4y1V7kS/?spm_id_from=333.999.0.0&vd_source=510b6eac8fec748481fb4b933932e80c

[TimFox]

that demo video I busted

So my contention is that when you wade in with the busted stuff you're triggering people. You can show it's likely wrong without the clickbait, and probably get better quality discourse, but of course you'd get fewer viewers.

I agree with this, academics are just like anyone else in a high a pressure environment - they make mistakes or overlook things. People that sometimes publish PR stuff are not academics and can end up making a mess of things, I've worked in academia so I can attest to that

Also hope is such a human quality, though always not rational.

This is why peer review is such an important concept in legitimate scientific publication, although it tends to be conservative.
I would advise against investing money in a novelty that cannot pass peer review, but I am a very conservative investor.

[AVGresponding]

Yes, it's moved the cost of lighting from electricity to installation and maintenance.  Net savings: zero. What a fucking con

What utter bullshit. Even if you consider all the bullshit low quality LED fixtures, the lifetime increased so much that installation and maintenance costs have plummeted. You just don't remember the days of 1000-hour incandescents and crap quality "10000" so actually 2000-hour CFLs which had exactly the same issues with their aging electronics as crap quality LEDs except they generated more heat and died even more prematurely. Compare to that and our "50 000" so really 5000-10000 hour LEDs are a huge improvement.

In the past changing a lightbulb was a monthly endeavor. CFLs offered only limited relief; they could not be used everywhere as they took so long to light up and did not work in cold, and still faded to significantly reduced brightness during the first 1000 hours so you had to replace all those "60W equivalent 11W" things prematurely, generating a lot of unnecessary waste. After LEDs came out my maintenance time went down by more than an order of magnitude, now I have to change a lightbulb maybe once a year. (If the LEDs lived up to their specifications, that would be even more rarely, but I gladly accept this 10x improvement.)

No, I'm afraid it's you that is talking "bullshit". Just in case you missed the point, I'm talking about COMMERCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL applications, which are quite different from domestic ones.

I work as a sparks for a northern metropolitan council, and have direct experience of the situation whereof I speak. The best example of this wasteful new order I can give you is the full, back to bare concrete refurb we did on one of our multi-storey office blocks, some 8 years ago now.
Most of the new lighting was LED (two mezzanine floors had HF fluorescents fitted, because they worked with an automatic DALI controller), and it was mostly Philips, Cooper/Eaton for the dedicated emergency fittings, and some locally remanufactured specialist DMX compatible fittings.

The first of the DMX compatible fittings failed within a day, two others followed in quick succession, but that's entirely down to the incompetence of the remanufacturer; I wouldn't hold it up as an example.

The Cooper/Eaton emergency lights however, are worth mentioning. Within two years, the failure rate was nearly 50%, and the manufacturer had to come and do a warranty replacement on them, and on a significant number that had been fitted a year earlier to another of our office buildings. Most, though not all, of these failures were battery/charger related.

Now to the meat. The Philips fittings started to fail about 3 years in, mostly ones that had integrated emergency backup batteries, but soon after the control gears (obsolete and not compatible with anything still made), and then the LEDs within the fittings themselves. Now, these are a completely integrated fitting, and you cannot replace the LED. Further, they are an "architectural" design, and not a generic one, and so when one fails in an area, they all have to be replaced in order to maintain a homogenous appearance.

This is far from a unique issue; I recently mentioned this to Big Clive and he replied with the fact that Glasgow council have also had the same problem with some rather expensive street lights. My guess is that anyone that works for a council or large business and is involved in estate maintenance will have similar stories.

I was commenting on the false statements you appeared to be making.

Ok, fair enough, I should have said "most" instead of "all". I know there are some LED lighting manufactures that sell good products.
I was not suggesting that manufacturers are having design meetings on how to get their devices to fail just outside of the warranty in order to sell more. Or they're testing them to ensure they do fail soon after warranty.
I'm saying they are choosing their product design requirements based on their chosen product lifespan and they are doing that process wrong. Lifespan requirements in the design process should be determined by a cost/benefit analysis from the users perspective, not the sellers perspective. If you can add $0.05 of extra parts to a product with $2 BOM cost and that will make it last twice as long then you should do that. Not doing that means you are designing it to fail prematurely.

I hate reading stuff like this.  You essentially claim that "most" manufacturers actually go to the trouble of designing the product to be a time bomb, rather than simply minimizing the product cost, which sets the minimum selling price.   Yet, You offer zero evidence of anything you say.  What $0.05 worth of parts will make an LED bulb last twice as long?

Whatever.   People believe what they want to believe and there is little in the way of facts or evidence, that will change their minds. 

Yes, they do. This is not a secret, nor is it difficult to understand; if lights lasted as long as they could be made to, the manufacturers would go out of business from lack of sales, once everyone had all the ones they needed. Replacement sales through non-wear breakage wouldn't be enough to sustain them.

The $0.05 worth of parts that could make them last twice as long is actually much much cheaper; a simple change of resistor value in the current sense of the driver would do the job, and indeed, to mention Big Clive again, he regularly posts videos of him doing exactly that.

[gnuarm]

<much pointless rambling trimmed>

I was commenting on the false statements you appeared to be making.

Ok, fair enough, I should have said "most" instead of "all". I know there are some LED lighting manufactures that sell good products.
I was not suggesting that manufacturers are having design meetings on how to get their devices to fail just outside of the warranty in order to sell more. Or they're testing them to ensure they do fail soon after warranty.
I'm saying they are choosing their product design requirements based on their chosen product lifespan and they are doing that process wrong. Lifespan requirements in the design process should be determined by a cost/benefit analysis from the users perspective, not the sellers perspective. If you can add $0.05 of extra parts to a product with $2 BOM cost and that will make it last twice as long then you should do that. Not doing that means you are designing it to fail prematurely.

I hate reading stuff like this.  You essentially claim that "most" manufacturers actually go to the trouble of designing the product to be a time bomb, rather than simply minimizing the product cost, which sets the minimum selling price.   Yet, You offer zero evidence of anything you say.  What $0.05 worth of parts will make an LED bulb last twice as long?

Whatever.   People believe what they want to believe and there is little in the way of facts or evidence, that will change their minds. 

Yes, they do.

Not sure who "they" are in your reply. 

This is not a secret, nor is it difficult to understand; if lights lasted as long as they could be made to, the manufacturers would go out of business from lack of sales, once everyone had all the ones they needed. Replacement sales through non-wear breakage wouldn't be enough to sustain them.

I believe you are in the UK.  From this comment, I have to assume this means your economy has zero growth.  Sounds like the comments I hear from many people in the UK.  Improvement is not possible.  They have to continue doing things the way they've done them for a hundred years.

The $0.05 worth of parts that could make them last twice as long is actually much much cheaper; a simple change of resistor value in the current sense of the driver would do the job, and indeed, to mention Big Clive again, he regularly posts videos of him doing exactly that.[/color][/b]

I've never seen Big Clive test anything I can buy in a store in the US.  The tests I've seen are of junk he buys from Aliexpress and such.  The original claim was that all devices were designed to be crap.  Psi had to step back from that.   The reality is there's no proof of any of this.  It's just like I've said, people believe what they want to believe.  You would seem to be a perfect example.  You can only offer your personal experience as "proof" of the quality of industrial equipment.  The problem is, you don't realize that your argument is not valid.