I'm hopeful but a 'human' room temperature and pressure is a pretty narrow range of possible conditions when you think about all the possible conditions actual superconductivity commonly is seen. Superconductivity is a fact of nature but there's nothing in nature that says it has to be possible near the wet body existence zone of conditions humans could tolerate. It doesn't exclude the possibility, IMO it just makes it a lot less probable.

 

I'm hopeful but a 'human' room temperature and pressure is a pretty narrow range of possible conditions when you think about all the possible conditions actual superconductivity commonly is seen. Superconductivity is a fact of nature but there's nothing in nature that says it has to be possible near the wet body existence zone of conditions humans could tolerate. It doesn't exclude the possibility, IMO it just makes it a lot less probable.

Yes that's a good way of looking at it, and more broadly, the universe is under no obligation to work in a way that would be so convenient for humans

It is interesting that at one time Cooper pairs was the only theory behind superconductors but that has changed.
More generally, i think superconduction is just ONE aspect of quantum behavior where the quanta are not subject to our common interpretation of nature. There should be many processes left to be found that have 100 percent efficiency by my account because quanta either remain quanta or they change into something else. When they remain quanta and they are involved in some process, they are unchangeable and thus do not lose energy. The only problem left then is finding the conditions that allow them to remain as quanta and still do something useful for us. Perhaps a time crystal is the ultimate example but i am better that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Please note that when i say 100 percent efficient in the above i dont mean 101 percent, or even 100.0001 percent, i mean exactly 100 percent which means that overall in the end it will still be slightly less than that because we have to instantiate the process which requires at least a small amount of energy, so we may see 99.999999 percent or even better, and that is because we just need enough energy to get the process started and once started it can evolve on it's own in some confined quantum realm until later when we can extract some result.

 

https://www.science.org/content/art...nflammatory-papers-superconductor-controversy

A debate over claims of room temperature superconductivity has now boiled over into the realm of scientific publishing. Administrators of arXiv, the widely used physics preprint server, recently removed or refused to post several papers from the opposing sides, saying their manuscripts include inflammatory content and unprofessional language. ArXiv has also banned one of the authors, Jorge Hirsch, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), from posting papers for 6 months.
...
Hellman says the superconductor controversy may stem in part from the ethos of physics, which has historically encouraged combativeness. “The culture of physics is one that is more aggressive and not very welcoming,” Hellman says, which can lead to accusatory language ending up in papers. She would like to see that change. “I flinch at some of the language being used.”

Snowflakes.

 

With this much heat the temperature of superconductors must be going up. I do wonder how close we are to a room temperature superconductor that does not need high compression or other conditions to super-conduct.

 

There is a rumor, in Nome Alaska they got a superconductor to work at room temperature.

 

With this much heat the temperature of superconductors must be going up. I do wonder how close we are to a room temperature superconductor that does not need high compression or other conditions to super-conduct.

I don't think we are even close but you never know until it happens. Most rely on metallic hydrogen-like materials which are unlikely to be low pressure using current scientific calculations.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/superconductor-room-temperature-pressure-physics-electricity

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.128.047001

 

With this much heat the temperature of superconductors must be going up. I do wonder how close we are to a room temperature superconductor that does not need high compression or other conditions to super-conduct.

There are now quantum physics explanations for some superconductor action which i think involves entanglement. Since entanglement is possible using other methods, there may be a solution to come.
Well, using quantum mechanics, i believe we will either come up with a solution to room temperature super conductance or we will find a counter solution that proves it isnt possible.

There have been so many advances in quantum physics since Schrodinger it's hard to say what could happen. It's like we are seeing the real universe for the very first time, and that means that some doors are opening and some are closing up. Things happen from our point of view but dont really happen in the quantum world (electrons dont spin but act externally as if they do, how strange is that).
I think we may finally be jumping the classical-quantum bridge. Quantum rules, classical is just along for the ride. It's hard to accept things that do not act in a classical way, yet we have to ... and we know it now

 

https://www.science.org/content/art...temperature-superconductivity-study-retracted

 

Awww crap. But it sounds like the research is still continuing.

 

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.00484.pdf
A superconductor free of quasiparticles for seconds

In conclusion, we have investigated the dynamics of the
number of quasiparticles on a superconducting island via
real time monitoring of single electron tunneling. We
demonstrate that a mesoscopic superconducting island
can remain completely free from quasiparticles for time
periods up to seconds. These findings open a new route
to identifying periods of quasiparticle free operation of
superconducting devices, of key interest for e.g. superconducting quantum computation.

A very 'cool' experiment.

 

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02481-0
Claimed superconductor LK-99 is an online sensation — but replication efforts fall short


Here we have a frog 'superconductor'.

 

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02481-0
Claimed superconductor LK-99 is an online sensation — but replication efforts fall short


Here we have a frog 'superconductor'.

Most recent analysis I've seen of it suspects it might be a diamagnetic semiconductor. Diamagnetism's neat, but diamagnetism does not a superconductor make (not on its own, anywho).

 

This all reminds me of the cold fusion fervor back in the 90's time frame. Story after story about all the wonderful things it means (many of which were pipe dreams even if it proved to be true) while group after group failed to reproduce the results, but several notable people concluded that there was at least some interesting physics going on.

 

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/studies-may-disprove-lk-99-superconductor-claims

These three studies certainly suggest that LK-99 could be more useful for powering a hype machine than superconducting electricity. But it's important to note that each of these groups synthesized its own substance, meaning the material they tested may not have been identical to the sample that Sukbae Lee et al. used in their experiments.

 

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/studies-may-disprove-lk-99-superconductor-claims

These three studies certainly suggest that LK-99 could be more useful for powering a hype machine than superconducting electricity. But it's important to note that each of these groups synthesized its own substance, meaning the material they tested may not have been identical to the sample that Sukbae Lee et al. used in their experiments.

One thing that Lee could do is simply provide samples to select other researchers for them to verify the properties. Heck, just sending a sample to the Superconductor and Magnetic Measurements Group at NIST would establish that their claims of achieving room temperature, room pressure superconductivity are true. Even if reproducing the material itself is difficult, that alone would open the floodgates of serious people making the effort in a serious way.

 

One thing that Lee could do is simply provide samples to select other researchers for them to verify the properties. Heck, just sending a sample to the Superconductor and Magnetic Measurements Group at NIST would establish that their claims of achieving room temperature, room pressure superconductivity are true. Even if reproducing the material itself is difficult, that alone would open the floodgates of serious people making the effort in a serious way.

That sounds suspiciously like what people told Jan Schon to do that he never could do because his samples "got thrown away...."

 

Not much we can do except give it time. And hope that it can be replicated, eventually.

 

IMO it's been given plenty of time since 1999. The balloon seems very deflated.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a44764458/lk-99-not-a-superconductor/

• Two weeks later, follow-up preprint papers from more prominent superconductor laboratories have found that LK-99 isn’t a superconductor after all, and is actually a less efficient conductor than copper at room temperature.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1688747916238684160

With a great deal of sadness, we now believe that the game is over. LK99 is NOT a superconductor, not even at room temperatures (or at very low temperatures). It is a very highly resistive poor quality material. Period. No point in fighting with the truth. Data have spoken.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/09/lk99_more_physicists_fail_reproduce/

If anyone still has any doubts, we asked CTMC director Professor Sankar Das Sarma about the evidence against LK-99, and he told us:

I do not believe that LK-99 is a superconductor because of the overwhelming amount of experimental data that have come out during the last two weeks from all over the world showing beyond any reasonable doubt that it is not a superconductor. This is my professional opinion based on my many years of research expertise in superconductivity.

Meanwhile, it was reported that the Korean Society of Superconductivity and Cryogenics was awaiting samples of LK-99 from the Quantum Energy Research Centre in order to conduct tests to determine the validity of its claims. However, it told Bloomberg that there had been no additional communication since the samples were promised. ®

 

That sounds suspiciously like what people told Jan Schon to do that he never could do because his samples "got thrown away...."

That, of course, was pure fraud from the beginning. This might be, too. At the very least, it's looking like poor science. They should have never released any press announcement unless they had reached a point of knowing that their results were reproducible, or at least verifiable, by others. When I worked at NIST, we thought we were onto something that would have been ground-breaking. But, knowing that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, we kept setting out to proof ourselves wrong and eventually we did. The same thing when I was working at the Academy. Incidental to the work we were doing, we thought we had stumbled upon a way to distinguish between different hash functions, such as SHA-256 and MD5 and some of the SHA-3 candidates. That would have been huge news. But, again, extraordinary claims. So we spent a couple of months trying to confirm the results, which kept looking promising, and assuming that they were, in fact, an artifact of some little mistake, and eventually we found the mistake. In both cases, the attitude from the beginning was that there was no way we were going to make some public claim unless we damn well knew that we had done the work to back it up.