Are other forms of diamagnetism temperature dependat?Because this one is.

From what little I understand the levitation effect doesn’t necessarily equal all the properties of a superconductor. It’s one of them though.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Diamagnetism" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Diamagnetism</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Earnshaw%27s_theorem" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Earnshaw%27s_theorem</a>

There are diamagnetic non-superconductors like pyrolytic graphite that can also evade Earnshaw&#x27;s theorem, but this would be the first metal with this strength of diamagnetism at room temperature AFAIK.

You can stably suspend graphite pencil lead on permanent magnetic fields. E.G.:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=yeIizmhzPQc">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=yeIizmhzPQc</a>

I believe there’s no way to stably suspend an object on permanent magnetic fields, so if this is stable and doesn’t fall down then it’s hard to argue superconductivity isn’t involved.

Wow, is this it? Is this the confirmation?

They said they are testing that next. Sounds like they wanted to get the initial results out.

So far, from my understanding, the sample size of the material has been small enough it&#x27;s been difficult to rule out resistance from corrosion on the contacts of the sensors, though I seem to recall a post not too long ago on here about resistance below the threshold of measurement around 100 degrees k.The compound must be tricky to synthesize with a good degree of purity- I think we&#x27;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.

Ok, didn&#x27;t read it. What about electric resistance at room temperature ambient-pressure under critical current?

The exact same video URL (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bilibili.com&#x2F;video&#x2F;BV14p4y1V7kS&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bilibili.com&#x2F;video&#x2F;BV14p4y1V7kS&#x2F;</a>) is linked to in this article. There doesn&#x27;t seem to be anything new here.

&gt; this pushes my odds above 50% for the first time.Time for you to make some money then? :D<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;polymarket.com&#x2F;event&#x2F;is-the-room-temp-superconductor-real&#x2F;is-the-room-temp-superconductor-real" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;polymarket.com&#x2F;event&#x2F;is-the-room-temp-superconductor...</a>

Magnetic transitions as a function of temperature are not unheard of, and it makes sense for them to depend on external field (they are magnetic after all). Lanthanum cobaltite for example has transition from diamagnet to paramagnet, likely due to change of spin state (see, e.g., [1]). I&#x27;m not saying that&#x27;s what&#x27;s happening, but transition (if it is there, hastily written papers tend to have subtle inaccuracies) doesn&#x27;t rule out non-SC diamagnetism[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedirect.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;article&#x2F;abs&#x2F;pii&#x2F;S0925838819315889" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedirect.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;article&#x2F;abs&#x2F;pii&#x2F;S09258...</a>

The paper shows a clear phase transition to diamagnetism as the material is cooled. That would be seen in superconductors and not in regular diamagnetic materials. I&#x27;m not aware of any that have that kind of phase transition. Though since we&#x27;re in weird territory here, it&#x27;s important to note some weird non-superconductor behavior that&#x27;s beyond regular diamagnetism might be going on as an alternative explanation. But it is weird.ETA: also, in the presence of a magnetic field, that transition temperature decreases. That&#x27;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.

Yes, in two forms: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 &quot;stable&quot; levitation. In the video they approach the sample with the magnet and flip it while the piece is mostly &quot;in place&quot;. A regular diamagnet generates a external field that &quot;follows&quot; the field applied so it would likely move sideways, that is why to &quot;levitate in place&quot; 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.

They have quantitative magnetization-versus-temperature data taken using a PPMS (an automated physical property measurement system). It shows strong evidence of some kind of diamagnetic transition at ~ 320K. It seems very likely now that this material has some kind of interesting magnetic property, whether or not it&#x27;s due to superconductivity.

Seems to be the same one that had a video a couple of days ago <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36953396">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36953396</a>Back then, many asked if this was superconduction or merely diamagnetism. Does the new paper shine any light on this question?

IANA physicist, so grain of salt etc. but yes, I agree with your assessment - even if not as impressive as we&#x27;re all hoping, at the least we have a very promising new vein of superconductor research to mine (as it were).In other words: even the downside here is great, and the upside is...

Hopefully this is the AlexNet of the superconductors :fingers-crossed:

At this point, even if this doesn’t turn out to be the holy grail this seems like it would still be a very big step&#x2F;promising avenue for research on the path right?

&gt;we successfully verify and synthesize the LK-99 crystals which can be magnetically levitated with larger levitated angle than Sukbae Lee&#x27;s sample at room temperature. It is expected to realize the true potential of room temperature, non-contact superconducting magnetic levitation in near future.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.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Space_Race" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Space_Race</a>

Yeah, nah <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hwang_affair" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hwang_affair</a>National pride and science are not a very good mix

Korean scientists embody key cultural values: (Jeong) fosters deep bonds and commitment to their work; (In-gan-mi) encourages inherent honesty and sincerity; (Che-Myun) upholds honor, discouraging dishonesty; and Confucianism instills respect, loyalty, and duty. These values shape their dedication to research integrity and professional conduct.
I choose to believe!

I feel like the host of “in 30 years we would have X” made 40 years ago are suddenly manifesting.

Agreed. It&#x27;s felt like so many of the technological marvels have either happened quietly (e.g. the reductions in chip size) or in the past (e.g. all the physics breakthroughs of the 1900s). Like ChatGPT, this seems to have the characteristics of being both accessible and completely novel.

For me from how the saga of 1st paper and 2nd paper started I had a feeling that something really unique has been found and the drama and politics is because of trying to claim the glory of it not because it was fake.

Exactly, it&#x27;s like sifting a mountain of ore looking for diamonds. The original Korean team has essentially been doing a slightly guided brute force search in a domain that they thought was promising doing 100&#x27;s or even 1000&#x27;s of experiments. It&#x27;s a clever approach: you have a real problem because the parameter space is so large but if you get &#x27;close enough&#x27; to pick up an anomaly that might help you home in on something that is really promising. I&#x27;d love to see their notebooks and everything they tried. This is pretty much how we first got electric light: endless failures and then one success.

Well steady on there. The problem people have with bad science is not that there are misses, it&#x27;s that there&#x27;s no way for them to reliable decide when they&#x27;ve had a hit and so they end up inventing fraudulent pseudo-science. What&#x27;s happening with LK-99 is science as people tend to imagine it working. Hypothesis -&gt; experimentation -&gt; replication -&gt; theory.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&#x27;s not merely &quot;a lot of noise with unknown variables&quot;, that&#x27;s &quot;nobody will care if we don&#x27;t do real science so let&#x27;s not bother&quot;.

You know, most of that stuff you hear about are bad takes on science. Science has moved into the realm of trying to understand complex systems with a lot of noise and with unknown variables. There will be a lot of misses; but that is how sausage gets made.

It’s a breath of fresh air reading about actual revolutionary science happening.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.

They do both. But measuring the resistance of something that is that small is super hard because it will be close to zero anyway even if it isn&#x27;t superconducting. So a larger sample would give much more conclusive results.

Just getting the probes to connect reliably is tricky. depending on how large the superconducting features are it may be anywhere from just difficult to next to impossible to do accurately (for instance, if the size of the superconducting features is smaller than the probe size).

so none of the previous more esoteric superconductors were ever measure for zero resistance?

Right, if our best regular conductors (used in your ohmmeter) are ~10^-8 and superconductivity is (by convention) less than 10^-11, one can see right away the simple regular methods won’t work and some cleverness is needed.

I have heard people much more knowledgeable than me say that measuring true zero resistance is actually quite difficult and takes some degree of specialized equipment, especially with such small samples. That may be part of it.

&gt; a badly attached probe could also result in zero resistance for exampleNo, a badly attached probe would usually show a larger resistance, not a
smaller one. That&#x27;s actually the easiest error to make, making improper contact with the sample. The resistance is measured indirectly using a reference 
current. So you&#x27;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.

That&#x27;s right. The standard way to measure resistance without being sensitive to contact resistance is called the four-terminal method, see (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Four-terminal_sensing" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Four-terminal_sensing</a>). You drive a current using two outer wires, but then detect the voltage across the sample using a different pair of wires. You&#x27;ll measure zero voltage if it&#x27;s superconducting, since V=IR. Or if one of the probe wires became detached.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&#x27;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&#x27;t understand how a loose terminal could mimic that figure (I think it was in figure 1).

It’s difficult to rule out external factors - a badly attached probe could also result in zero resistance for example.Showing diamagnetism is one of the least error-prone ways to demonstrate the superconductor effect.That’s my understanding anyway.

It&#x27;s difficult to produce a sample large enough and pure enough to have its resistance measured.

Purely speculating, but might it be easy to doubt resistance measurements by claiming that equipment was faulty or used incorrectly?

No. Any device to measuring resistence ALWAYS have a minimal value that can measure. They can never measure exactly zero ohms.

Not an expert, but I would guess a direct measurement couldn&#x27;t distinguish between a true superconductor and something with very very low resistance.

Thank you, this is the best explanation I’ve heard for why it’s so hard of measure.

How do you explain the almost three orders of magnitude drop in resistance in Fig. 6d in one of the original articles ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;2307.12037.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;2307.12037.pdf</a> ) with a few LK-99 particles sprinkled here an there? There must be a current path along which more than 99.8% of the material is in the supposed superconducting state. So the particles almost touch but not quite yet?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&#x27;t disrupt superconductivity because they are 3D superconductors, but in this allegedly 1D superconductor the superconducting channels in most cases don&#x27;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%.

I believe that with the synthesis method proposed by the Korean team, i.e. by the chemical reaction between a certain kind of lead sulfate with copper phosphide, the chances of progress are slim.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.

&gt;Most likely, the material LK99 as reported in [1-3] is a heterophase structure, with co-existent non-superconducting constituents. This may yield superconducting droplets surrounded by nonsuperconducting material...<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2308.01723" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2308.01723</a>&gt;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.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2307.16892" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2307.16892</a>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&amp;D fund will pour in to improve the fabrication process. When the first transistor was invented, people probably weren&#x27;t imagining that we&#x27;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?

Maybe a dumb question, but could you grind them up and separate out the superconducty bits with a magnet or would that destroy the effect?

With the current fabrication process, they&#x27;re only getting a chunk with LK-99 particles sprinkled in. Since nobody yet knows how to fabricate a pure chunk of LK-99, it&#x27;ll be hard to measure the true resistance of LK-99.

kinda like with Graphene, cool material, hard to produce.

My understanding is that synthesis of the exactly right crystal structure is very hard (for every 10 lead atoms, 1 - the exact right one - needs to be substituted with copper), so the samples are small and inhomogeneous. As a result measuring resistivity won&#x27;t be illuminating until large amounts of perfect material can be produced.

I didn&#x27;t see any references to cups or water in these papers.

That&#x27;s a really good way to reason about the difficulties.

How would you prove there isn&#x27;t any water in a cup?

Because (like someone explained very well in another HW notice) you can&#x27;t measure zero ohms. Any device to measure resistance ALWAYS would have a minimal value that can measure. It&#x27;s far more easy to detect superconductivity using the weird things that does all superconductors in presence of magnetic fields (ie, levitation).

Without being intentionally snarky, the same logic applies to measuring current and voltage. What is observed is an effect of zero resistance, not zero resistance itself (whatever that would mean).

The korean guy say this is a 1d superconductor (as opposed to 2d sheet or 3d, which means you would need a single line of superconducting molecules from end to end. Its likely why it doesn&#x27;t float all the way as only parts of it has these and scattered all over the chunk of solid.However, if they perfect 1d production, they can layer in a bunch of them to create a quasi 2d or 3d superconductor.

Why are folks trying to prove that this material is a superconductor in roundabout ways, like levitation, dimagnetism, etc? What is the reason they don&#x27;t just test to see if electrical current flows without resistance? Surely there is something I am missing here.

That&#x27;s not a trivial measurement with a small sample.Typically you measure resistance that small like this:<pre><code> +&lt;-------sample------&gt;-
 ---------p p--------
</code></pre>
The + and - leads send a reference current (using something called a &#x27;current source[1]&#x27;, a specialist supply that cranks the voltage up and down to maintain a steady current, within some arbitrary range, usually from a few mV to 10&#x27;s or even 100&#x27;s of volts) that you pick (not so low that you won&#x27;t get a voltage, not so high that you exceed the expected maximum current for the cross section that you are measuring) 
down the two leads to the sample and then you measure the
voltage across the two points &#x27;p&#x27; using the other two 
leads. This is similar to using a shunt for measuring a 
current, only now you are interested in the resistance of
&#x27;sample&#x27;. It also elegantly rules out accidentally measuring the resistance of the probe wires and has the added advantage that you can measure the voltage almost without drawing a current (though at such low resistance you have to take great care to ensure that your measurement doesn&#x27;t consume a disproportionally large chunk of the reference current). If &#x27;sample&#x27; is a nice fat chunk of material you
can expect an accurate result because it will be easy to attach to in a reliable way, you can use a lot
of current and the sample is large enough to have a resistance
high enough that the voltage you are measuring is well outside
of the noise. But for a small sample the resistance is almost
always going to be very small and the difference between a few
nanovolts and zero are hard to distinguish. So that&#x27;s why
you won&#x27;t be seeing any conclusive measurements of the real
resistance (or zero) until larger samples can be made, long
enough to show a sizeable voltage drop or none at all.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Current_source" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Current_source</a>

This can take a while. With the current fabrication process, they&#x27;re only getting a chunk with LK-99 particles sprinkled in. Since nobody yet knows how to fabricate a pure chunk of LK-99, it&#x27;ll be hard to measure the true resistance of LK-99.

There have been quite a few papers about LK-99, but the only thing I want to see is whether we observer sudden drop of resistance to zero below the critical temperature that is well above the room temperature at ambient pressure or not. So far, I haven&#x27;t seen one.

This simplifies them a fair bit: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=pXWbdxOAuDs">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=pXWbdxOAuDs</a>

I hope Smith charts become less required learning. When I was in school, I could not wrap my head around them. I should look at them against. (Yes, of course you’d still need to account for traditional loads)

Magnus Carlson said that if you tell him there’s a winning move on a chess board he could find it very quickly, because his focus becomes extremely narrow.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.

Reading further below, I&#x27;m actually amazed by all the theoretical studies that have already been done from first principles (all apparently supporting the possibility of superconductivity). That&#x27;s a pretty fast pace for science!

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;LK-99#Replication_attempts" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;LK-99#Replication_attempts</a>This Wikipedia article has a good summary of the replication attempts to date (including this paper).

“People always overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in ten.” - someone much smarter than me.

If true, five years not that much difference. A few decades, large differences.

Anything that uses an electric motor can use a smaller more efficient motor, id expect big changes in e.g. electric cars, but also probably things like robotic actuators getting smaller and more efficient.Also there are superconductor based batteries that are very efficient, would would become a thing, likely revolutionising batteries.

Superconductors have applications in computers, MRIs, maglev trains, and power transmission to name a few.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.

Well... maybe. Or it could become like graphene.

I think with a solid verification of superconductivity at room temperature, we probably don&#x27;t see anything in 5 years, just because the production is so hit or miss. But I do think we see massive investment and research on this line of materials and different production techniques. Going from Science to Engineering and making this a thing you have plant making. I think its a 10+ year thing but its big.

Hear me out: superconducting railgun for launching multi-ton payloads to supply a lunar colony without rockets

Not an expert in the area, but being passingly familiar with other major advancements and the timelines it&#x27;s taken them to move from discovery to day to day use.Let&#x27;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 &#x27;how ductile is it&#x27;, 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&#x27;ve got minimal details to go on there. It&#x27;s a ceramic, so it&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s a world where all these answers aren&#x27;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&#x27;re probably going to spend the next year at minimum figuring out what all the deal is with LK99, and then it&#x27;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.

I&#x27;m not too familiar with this space. Could someone explain how big of an impact to the world this discovery is? What does the future of this technology look like over the next 5 years?

My layman understanding is that this paper states the team replicated LK-99, and confirmed that it has a property of a super-conductor - this particular type of magnetic levitation.

So, these folks replicated the material and it does highly unusual things, is that right ?   It had seemed the fabrication process was still very dodgy and unreliable, this team got it to work independently?

Indeed, operating temperature seems to me less of a concern.
Considering how difficult it‘s been to produce LK-99 so far, some skepticism on being able to manufacture the material in mass is warranted, I think.
Still, exciting! I’m hopeful :)

The initial paper claimed superconductivity up until 400 K (127 °C or 260 °F), so I think if that&#x27;s the case it would be able to withstand outdoor conditions just fine

i wonder if this will become the next version of hopium, where we struggle to refine a material that can actually be used in a wide enough temperature range to operate outside.

Almost certainly: improving the ease&#x2F;consistency of producing this stuff.

Where will the money flow from here, presuming that the reproduction keeps happening?

That&#x27;s kind of my thinking - there is almost no chance they stumbled upon nirvana + did it in the best or most efficient way. There must be many possible optimizations to the chemical structure + fabrication techniques.Is it possible that the inventors do not receive a dime of royalties?

You can get a composition of matter patent (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Composition_of_matter" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Composition_of_matter</a>) for something shockingly novel, and this might be. It&#x27;s super hard to find anything that would qualify, but I&#x27;ve been awarded them before for materials science research.You can write stuff down generally enough that it&#x27;s hard to make small changes and get around it. I did a lot of &quot;1-10%&quot; stuff in the claims.

&gt; in the US, you can&#x27;t patent a materialI&#x27;m no patent lawyer, but there is literally a US patent-office category covering &quot;material&quot; for exactly this kind of invention. Section 505 - &quot;Superconductor Technology: Apparatus, Material, Process&quot;.&gt; 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.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.uspto.gov&#x2F;web&#x2F;patents&#x2F;classification&#x2F;uspc505&#x2F;defs505.htm" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.uspto.gov&#x2F;web&#x2F;patents&#x2F;classification&#x2F;uspc505&#x2F;def...</a>

It would be good for countries to put a bounty on these sorts of things. That would encourage this sort of research.Better yet would be to offer partial payouts for failed efforts if research is made public.This is probably more relevant for pharmaceuticals though.

Maybe success in life and science isn&#x27;t about becoming a billionaire?Even so - if this works out, their prizes and paid speaking gigs will cover a very comfortable life if that&#x27;s what they want. I&#x27;m not sure why they should be entitled to more than that.

I&#x27;m sure it depends on jurisdiction, but in the US, you can&#x27;t patent a material, only a method to make it.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.

Or what if AI assists in generating the discovery? “AI” meaning anything from a transformer model to brute-force breadth-first search with heuristics.

I&#x27;m generally anti-patent, but if there were any valid case for patents, this is it. Long, hard labor to discover something entirely new that has massive uses for society.I&#x27;d rest my hopes on them not being dicks about it, not on them not getting benefit from it.

The worst possible outcome of weak protection is not creating new materials.

Transistors, lithium batteries, leds, etc all enjoyed significant patent protection, but still changed the world.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.

It would be the opposite. Nobody with develop technology to utilize it because there are no protections.No MRI, No Fusion, ect.

I hope they&#x27;re as weak as possible. The worst possible outcome of a room temp superconductor being discovered is stifling innovation to make money off it

Completely my train of thoughts. And it is not only china. Patents are based on laws and laws serve a society... If that does not work anymore (obviously after a long and broken process) the law changes.

&gt; let&#x27;s say the paper completely checks out and they have discovered this miracle. How strong are the patent protections on materials science?If it&#x27;s literally a room-temperature superconductor, the present state of the law is irrelevant. China won&#x27;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.)

On a completely different front, let&#x27;s say the paper completely checks out and they have discovered this miracle. How strong are the patent protections on materials science?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?

&gt; AGIWait, I missed that one. Was it yesterday?

This makes me so happy for my children and their children. God bless those scientists and all scientists that push our species forward. I&#x27;m so lucky to be in my prime at the same time AGI and superconductors become a reality. Wow.

you&#x27;d hope that if we know that, the actual scientists confirming this stuff know that too

The paper shows that the sample isn&#x27;t attracted to the magnet, only repulsed.

If this thing really was super conducting, they should be able to rotate the sample upside down from flux pinning right? That&#x27;s why this thing is probably just a magnet and not a superconductor??

The problem is that no one has a pure sample of LK-99, only chunks of rock containing small areas of LK-99. So even if LK-99 is a true RT superconductor, we&#x27;re only going to see levitation on the side of the chunk that has a high enough concentration of it. It&#x27;s like trying to evaluate a diamond by poking at a rock that might or might not have any diamonds buried inside. It must be really frustrating.So yeah, I hope there&#x27;s a better way to evaluate this substance than &quot;it floats!&quot;

All of the &quot;it floats&quot; videos are unattributed leaks or come from less-than-reputable sources.The reputable sources only ever show videos of the sample touching the magnet.From what I&#x27;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&#x27;s not confirmed that LK-99 is superconducting.

A room temperature superconductor would, by definition, maintain quantum coherence (of the superconducting order parameter) at room temperature.

Nope. Quantum computing requires low temperatures not because of resistance but to maintain coherence.

It won&#x27;t have a direct impact on quantum computing. People make qubits out of superconducting materials that become superconducting at 4K or higher, but you have to cool them to around 0.03 K for them to really work well as qubits. See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Superconducting_quantum_computing" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Superconducting_quantum_comp...</a>.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.

Noob question. Does this breakthrough also translate to advancements in quantum computing? Can we expect quantum computers with far more qbits?

To add to your list of possible reasons:- There are way more STEM graduates in China by a wide margin- 18&#x2F;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): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;nature-index&#x2F;institution-outputs&#x2F;generate&#x2F;chemistry&#x2F;global&#x2F;all" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;nature-index&#x2F;institution-outputs&#x2F;gene...</a>- Supply chain is faster in China for chemicals and materials- China has more money&#x2F;equipment for this sort of stuff- China is on average, more pro-science than the rest of the world

&gt; Why are&#x27;t more labs outside China making LK-99 and publish videos?some possibilities:- they have not been able to conclusively replicate anything and don&#x27;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&#x27;t care so much about the whole &#x27;science in the spotlight&#x27; 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.

These studies help enthuse people though. I welcome them. Not for science but potential. Tells me that something is there, rest is on experts as you said.

Because all of these replications aren&#x27;t contributing much; they&#x27;re bare bones efforts with little to no scientific insight. Not one of these papers is conclusive in terms of showing evidence for it being a superconductor. None of them even contribute meaningfully.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&#x27;re meaningless because it takes time to do a good job.Good labs don&#x27;t want to announce half done maybe results. They want to announce conclusive comprehensive high quality results they can stand behind. That&#x27;s what moves science forward.Plenty of labs are working on lk-99, but they won&#x27;t publish this sort of half assed analysis.

While it&#x27;s true that good science often takes time, I believe it&#x27;s not necessarily the whole picture. In fast-paced and rapidly evolving fields like this one, swift and open sharing of progress can be incredibly valuable. This is evident from the recent developments in AI and large language models (LLMs), where real-time collaboration and data sharing have led to exponential advancements.

&gt; 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&#x27;t fully understand. The way people have talked, if this LK-99 doesn&#x27;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&#x27;s almost as if a good chunk of the scientific community don&#x27;t care about the benefits the science brings but the reputational benefits.

&gt;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.Implying that Chinese science is bad?Chinese universities absolutely dominate in chemistry: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;nature-index&#x2F;institution-outputs&#x2F;generate&#x2F;chemistry&#x2F;global&#x2F;all" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;nature-index&#x2F;institution-outputs&#x2F;gene...</a>By my count, 18&#x2F;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&#x27;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&#x27;s not surprising that most of the first replication attempts are from China.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cnevpost.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;01&#x2F;04&#x2F;global-ev-battery-market-share-in-nov-2022&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cnevpost.com&#x2F;2023&#x2F;01&#x2F;04&#x2F;global-ev-battery-market-sha...</a>

&gt; Why are&#x27;t more labs outside China making LK-99 and publish videos?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.

&#x27;Excuse me sir, would you like to buy a kilo of red phosphorous?&#x27;

&gt; Why are&#x27;t more labs outside China making LK-99 and publish videos?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 guess it&#x27;s a mix of
 - It&#x27;s a good opportunity to gain visibility by working something grabbing the news. 1st room temperature superconductor, that&#x27;s big
 - (Under)graduate lab interns can be thrown onto any crash projects at will without much repercussion or resistance, boss is boss and should not be subject to questioningI did a post-doc in China, so that&#x27;s my sample size N=1 piece of cheap opinion

Several months ago a professor from Tsinghua University got 2 million views in bilibili.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bilibili.com&#x2F;video&#x2F;BV1cY4y1y7ZM" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bilibili.com&#x2F;video&#x2F;BV1cY4y1y7ZM</a>Translation of the title: If room temperature superconductivity is really repeated, I will eat shitThen this topic became hot in bilibili. Currently the first LK-99 replication video reaches nearly 10 million views.

Would this lead to rushed results? Or it&#x27;s worse to give bad results than no results?

&gt; lack of long-term career security can be challengingI don’t know, my fellow PhD students in EU have the same fears.

I am from China. Not surprised at all..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.

There seems to be a few live efforts underway on Twitter:* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;andrewmccalip&#x2F;status&#x2F;1687288889717989376" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;andrewmccalip&#x2F;status&#x2F;1687288889717989376</a>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;CondMatfyz&#x2F;status&#x2F;1687051547337781248" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;CondMatfyz&#x2F;status&#x2F;1687051547337781248</a>I imagine over the next few weeks there&#x27;ll be an explosion of efforts to replicate if it&#x27;s truly that straightforward to produce for reasonably-equipped labs.

A lot of commenters here are from the West, and the atmosphere between the PRC and the West (particularly the US) at the moment is quite a bit more acrimonious and competitive than it has been historically. It makes sense that people would leap first to essentially &quot;They aren&#x27;t as smart as us&quot;&#x2F;&quot;They&#x27;re less honest than us&quot;&#x2F;&quot;They&#x27;re less trustworthy than us&quot; etc. The simplest and most likely correct explanation is that the PRC has a lot more STEM students in absolute terms and even proportionately, more and very well funded labs with very ambitious leadership and &quot;national spirit&quot;&#x2F;&quot;something to prove&quot; style thinking, and that particularly in chemistry&#x2F;materials science the PRC is dominant, with a huge proportion of all the highest quality chemistry focused universities, academies etc.

I think the comments you are receiving are missing the simplest explanation: Chinese labs are better at synthesis, and there’s a lot of them.

Unrelated, but yeah <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;7DqvweTYTI0" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;7DqvweTYTI0</a>

Depends it&#x27;s wet lab science or dry lab.but it&#x27;s a growing trend anyway.Twitter is just one of those communication platforms.

The vast majority of science does not take place on Twitter.

Most Western European researchers have been on vacation the past few weeks.I don&#x27;t fault them for failing to synthesize room-temperature superconductors while they were relaxing in some resort in Turkey or Thailand.

&gt;One by USTC <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bilibili.com&#x2F;video&#x2F;BV1Ex4y1X7ix&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bilibili.com&#x2F;video&#x2F;BV1Ex4y1X7ix&#x2F;</a> this tiny sample can stand on its pointy side.USTC is the second best university in the world in chemistry research according to Nature. [0][0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;nature-index&#x2F;institution-outputs&#x2F;generate&#x2F;chemistry&#x2F;global&#x2F;all" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;nature-index&#x2F;institution-outputs&#x2F;gene...</a>

So far lab replication efforts are:Two from HUST: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bilibili.com&#x2F;video&#x2F;BV14p4y1V7kS&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bilibili.com&#x2F;video&#x2F;BV14p4y1V7kS&#x2F;</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bilibili.com&#x2F;video&#x2F;BV13k4y1G7i1&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bilibili.com&#x2F;video&#x2F;BV13k4y1G7i1&#x2F;</a>One by USTC <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bilibili.com&#x2F;video&#x2F;BV1Ex4y1X7ix&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bilibili.com&#x2F;video&#x2F;BV1Ex4y1X7ix&#x2F;</a> this tiny sample can stand on its pointy side.One by Qufu Normal University <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zhihu.com&#x2F;zvideo&#x2F;1669820225079070720" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zhihu.com&#x2F;zvideo&#x2F;1669820225079070720</a>One with THU background but claims a personal project <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bilibili.com&#x2F;video&#x2F;BV14z4y1s7Vo" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bilibili.com&#x2F;video&#x2F;BV14z4y1s7Vo</a>Why are&#x27;t more labs outside China making LK-99 and publish videos?

Wow, didn&#x27;t realize what we&#x27;re working with here is smaller than a speck of sand.

video[0] linked from wikipedia[1] showing the levitation in action.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bilibili.com&#x2F;video&#x2F;BV14p4y1V7kS&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bilibili.com&#x2F;video&#x2F;BV14p4y1V7kS&#x2F;</a>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;LK-99#cite_note-51" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;LK-99#cite_note-51</a>

Touché, but will you eat your hat if it turns out to be true?

I&#x27;ve seen some math that shows RTS are not possible.

Not even close. Cold fusion was not something we thought was possible under our understanding of physics at the time (Muon-catalyzed fusion isn&#x27;t what they thought CF was and there are all sorts of things that make it not really something that we expect to ever be particularly useful for power generation, etc., so not much purpose in talking about it)Meanwhile, all our known physics have no issue with an RTAPS existing.

Cold fusion all over again.   All the internet predictions of what this will bring are kinda cringey and pathetic

I&#x27;d go as to far as saying GPT-4 is capable of fairly complex reasoning, at least in my experience tossing complicated questions and situations at ChatGPT Plus.

There&#x27;s a wonderful paper on 1) from a few years ago:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;journals.plos.org&#x2F;ploscompbiol&#x2F;article?id=10.1371&#x2F;journal.pcbi.1005268" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;journals.plos.org&#x2F;ploscompbiol&#x2F;article?id=10.1371&#x2F;jo...</a>&gt;Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?&gt;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.

The &quot;event&quot; I was trying to describe in #1 is that DNA and cellular mechanics are decoded to the point where one could do these things (repair, customization, Etc). I was not trying to specify all of the threshold requirements for reaching that point. Hopefully describing it that way makes more sense?

Not sure that AI chat bots are actually reasoning in any basic way, so much as they are filtering out noise and presenting an output that might satisfy the input, but it&#x27;s often quite wrong. It&#x27;s still more of a parlor trick than it is intelligence or reason.

I interpret 3 as the chat bot requires no prompt from a human. Imagine the chat bot wakes you up in the middle of the night saying, &quot;Hey, sorry to disturb you, but I was thinking... wouldn&#x27;t eliminating all humans help to reverse the climate crisis more quickly? Just a thought.&quot; That is what I think of as number 3 (not actually wanting to kill off humans, but it is thinking on its own, without any prompts and then choosing to share what it has been thinking about with a human).

1) doesn&#x27;t make a whole lot of sense. A perfect understanding of something doesn&#x27;t mean you can fix anything wrong with it.3) has already happened. The AI chat bots aren&#x27;t very smart, but they&#x27;re clearly capable of some degree of basic reasoning.

Nuclear weapons.There hasn’t been a full scale war between major powers since.

Fair point, I felt most people would have their own list. Powered flight, semiconductors, commercially competitive solar cells, antibiotics, sterile procedure. Etc.

A good one would be &quot;productive AI.&quot; People forget, but a short while ago, AI was treated as something where being actually useful was perpetually 20 years away, and the real-world status of it was exemplified by a chatbot like Eliza.

Antibiotics 
Electricity
Internal combustion engine
Flight
Li-Ion batteries
Radio communication

Penicillin has gotta be on that list. Just randomly happened to culture on a Petri dish left out on vacation, happened to be the worlds first antibiotic

Rockets landing themselves back on Earth was looked at as really weird for quite a while.

COVID 19 vaccine, plus better-than-feared virulence.Electric cars mainstream

Thousands of breakthroughs had to happen for you to be able to post your comment.

Auctions, sanitary towels, retirement, banking, disposable razor, sewing machine, canned food, interchangeable parts, antibiotics, solar cells, postage stamp, light bulb, pencil, air conditioning, insurance, dwarf wheat, spreadsheet, cold chain, double entry book-keeping, S-bend, infant formula, clocks, public key cryptography, passports, batteries, printing press, video games, GPS, contraceptive pill, shipping container, Haeber-Bosch process, concrete, iPhone.Shoutout to 50 things that made the modern economy, a great podcast&#x2F;book.

Fall of the Berlin Wall should probably be on a list of black swan but good events.

It&#x27;s perhaps not as life-changing as some of the sibling replies but one thing that has really amazed me over the past few decades is how much lighting has progressed.When I was a kid in the 90&#x27;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&#x27;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.

It would have been more convincing if you had given real past examples rather than speculative future ones :)Although I&#x27;m pretty sure there are plenty that many people can think of, so it doesn&#x27;t really detract much from your point.

Bonus points if the ET life is broadcasting useful information.

I like the idea of the list as well. Anyone know of resources that are on a similar theme? Only rethinkx “rethinking humanity” report comes to mind.

Linux on desktop should be up there. &#x2F;s

&gt; P vs NP solutionIf it&#x27;s proven to be the case that P != NP, it would hardly change much on the grand scale of things as generally, that&#x27;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&#x27;t found any polynomial reductions yet, so we&#x27;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&#x27;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.

There is a promising HIV vaccine in trial (eOD-GT8 60-mer), but it will take an extremely long time to assess, but given how efficient tri-therapies and PREP are, this is certainly not a revolution.

I like the idea of this list. Some others:
 - Quantum supremacy
 - HIV vaccine
 - Synthetic life
 - Discovery of ET life
 - P vs NP solution

So far this material (and pretty much all liquid nitrogen ones) can&#x27;t be used to create MRI sort of fields. There&#x27;s a reason they all stick with liquid helium.

Not quite related to 2) but if the superconductors research pans out, portable high field desktop sized MRIs would be in the bag. Current portable MRIs are all low field (and to a certain extent, somewhat useless).

I&#x27;ve heard elsewhere that &quot;all solid tumors&quot; should really more accurately be conveyed as &quot;all solid tumors with a very specific mutation&quot;. It is, apparently, a very common mutation, but also not universal, even among solid tumors.Apparently. I&#x27;m not an expect, but it&#x27;s what I have encountered elsewhere.Still great news! But not quite as revolutionary as the headline implies.

A few weeks ago, there was news that some Harvard MIT researchers had discovered a chemical cocktail that can reverse aging.
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.yahoo.com&#x2F;harvard-mit-scientists-claim-chemical-174910645.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.yahoo.com&#x2F;harvard-mit-scientists-claim-chemical...</a>

1) Subset breakthrough here potentially related to cancer, we&#x27;ll see how the peer review and evolution to becoming an available standard of care goes.City of Hope scientists develop targeted chemotherapy able to kill all solid tumors in preclinical research<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eurekalert.org&#x2F;news-releases&#x2F;997141" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eurekalert.org&#x2F;news-releases&#x2F;997141</a>

Fusion power engineering has gotten a lot further than most people think!But yeah I suspect the people who are most excited about this news are fusion power engineers!<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cambridge.org&#x2F;core&#x2F;journals&#x2F;journal-of-plasma-physics&#x2F;article&#x2F;overview-of-the-sparc-tokamak&#x2F;DD3C44ECD26F5EACC554811764EF9FF0" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cambridge.org&#x2F;core&#x2F;journals&#x2F;journal-of-plasma-ph...</a>

Please connect the dots for me. What does a room temp &amp; atmosphere superconductor do for space travel? I am unaware of any obvious impact.

If my understanding is correct, 2 is nearly solved if we have a room temp ambient superconductor

I would say that RNA vaccine and chatGPT are two that have happened during my adult life 05-&gt;. Iphone and some other innovations were more kinda incremental stuff.

0 write your proof then, rise to unending fame.

All of these are fantasy.0. LK99 is so obviously a fraud. They&#x27;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

Green Revolution; most people have never heard of Norman Borlaug, despite being responsible for saving hundreds of millions of lives.

Unfortunately, &quot;cancer&quot; is not one thing. We have to find different cures for many specific cancers.

Democracy is a diversion technique honestly. “Rulers” are always a few people&#x2F;corps and the fate of the people depends on them.

I&#x27;m unsure if we want people living forever. While disease, illness, and senility are terrible things, as soon as people can live forever we will have eternal dictatorships (or people trying for it) as well as other questions of perpetual inequality. 
&quot;Death renders all equal&quot;.

That third point is so odd and shoehorned in. If you&#x27;re talking about AGI and immortality, why not dream a little bigger? How about achieving actual democracy anywhere in the world? Not just in state elections, but economic democracy broadly speaking. Right now we are just going on pretending, and this western chauvinism of yours is a little embarrassing.

1. Cure for aging 
2. AGI exists and ends up being somehow, unexpectedly easy to control 
3. Russia &#x2F; China &#x2F; North Korea eventually become democraticSome of the “good” black swans at the top of my mind…

&gt; 6. World recognition to manage resources globallyDo you mean communism?

Gravitational wells are spherical, so this unevenness can be utilized to lift up by pumping energy into higher energy state, at higher orbit.

I&#x27;m honestly not sure whether 1, 3 or 6 is most likely to be fundamentally impossible.

&gt; 4. Mass scale carbon capture technologyone 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.

1. Anti-gravity2. Light year capable transport3. Inertia dampers4. Mass scale carbon capture technology5. Robots to prepare space for habitation6. World recognition to manage resources globally

&gt; in today&#x27;s world, where almost every aspect of life is subject to top-down controlA 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&#x2F;slave population

What you&#x27;re missing is the fact that in today&#x27;s world, where almost every aspect of life is subject to top-down control, any &quot;enabling&quot; technology above all else enables oppressors to oppress more effectively.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 &quot;black swan, but good&quot; event that could happen is a cataclysmic reset of civilization that might somehow see a better phoenix rise from the ashes. Barring that, we&#x27;re full steam ahead to a techno-totalitarian nightmare future.

Would you mind sharing that list?Also, pedantic point, you keep referring to good and bad black swan events. I thought the definition of black swan didn&#x27;t make any assumption about whether the impact is positive or negative? Only that has a huge impact (I haven&#x27;t read Taleb&#x27;s book yet, correct me if I&#x27;m wrong)

Well conveniently, &quot;room temperature superconductor&quot; directly supports #2

Michael Levin [1] does brillant work on this &quot;cellular language&quot; space and the key point is that genetics is more like biological IaC, it only encodes proteins. Most of the actual control, anatomic and physiological homestasis happens at the higher level of bioelectricity - which works as a computational medium.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=7FGM33sz25k">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=7FGM33sz25k</a>

&gt; Commercially viable fusion energy. Will change a lot of things.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.

This sounds &quot;right&quot; but i have no idea what you mean.

Just to add on the &quot;nonsense&quot; line. Using the antropic principle to talk about the future is completely absurd.There is a huge amount of what I think in unawarded debate about applying it to the past (IMO, it&#x27;s very clear where it should be used), but applying it to the future is completely against any kind of logic.

There is an anthropic line of reasoning over Everettian branch universes where you can actually expect these types of highly unlikely events to happen more often than chance alone would predict if they promote futures with more Born-rule weighted observer-moments.

Mostly public perception (annoyingly): people are still going to have a go at being anti-nuclear about it, but building a fusion power reactor is going to have a lot more public cultural cachet to draw upon then fission. We&#x27;ve got a generation of science fiction who&#x27;s core message is &quot;fusion power solved all the problems&quot;.Though there are genuine advantages: for as radioactive as the interior of a fusion reactor may get, if you cut power it&#x27;ll just sit there safely doing nothing. No decay heat, no potential isotopes to leak - maybe a puff of tritium gas - but that&#x27;s it. It is a technology that has a perfect control loop for safety because it can&#x27;t self-sustain at all.

Contolled fusion may give way to real alchemy (think synthesising water and steel just from hydrogen atoms).

Excellent insight and perspective.&gt;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)?

Slightly harder than I remembered:&gt; 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&#x27;s rough estimate

According to this, breakeven can already be achieved. Rather funny how this is a highly advanced research topic and a mistake like that could take place (if real).
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Muon-catalyzed_fusion#Alternative_estimation_of_breakeven" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Muon-catalyzed_fusion#Alternat...</a>

Commercially viable fusion can be achieved with commercially viable source of muons:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Muon-catalyzed_fusion" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Muon-catalyzed_fusion</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;link.springer.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;10.1007&#x2F;s00016-009-0006-9" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;link.springer.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;10.1007&#x2F;s00016-009-0006-9</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.annualreviews.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;10.1146&#x2F;annurev.ns.39.120189.001523" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.annualreviews.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;10.1146&#x2F;annurev.ns.39....</a><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;large.stanford.edu&#x2F;courses&#x2F;2016&#x2F;ph241&#x2F;yoon1&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;large.stanford.edu&#x2F;courses&#x2F;2016&#x2F;ph241&#x2F;yoon1&#x2F;</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chemeurope.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;encyclopedia&#x2F;Muon-catalyzed_fusion.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chemeurope.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;encyclopedia&#x2F;Muon-catalyzed_fu...</a>

Yeah. Perhaps add in some cheap battery technology to the mix of solar power and superconductor, and energy production could become co2 neutral.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).

&gt; Commercially viable fusion energy. Will change a lot of thingsConsidering 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.

For those experiencing this type of &quot;black swan, but good&quot; event for the first time, it is helpful to recognize that the human tendency to believe that all future &quot;big events&quot; will be dystopian downers, is statistically unsound.For a while I&#x27;ve kept a list of the things that could be &quot;good&quot; swan events, but to be fair I didn&#x27;t have &quot;room temperature superconductor on that list&quot; :-)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.

Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99