Developers react to claimed room-temperature superconductor replication in Chinese labs

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The image is a screenshot of a tweet by Christian Keil (@pronounced_kyle) stating: “The two Chinese labs working on replicating LK-99 appear to have found a room-temperature superconductor.” The tweet continues, “At first blush, here's what's different from last time:” followed by three bullet points: (1) “it's more like "room temperature" than room temperature, the paper says 250K which is -10 F or -23 C. That's still HUGE IF TRUE, because we can get things that cold with liquid nitrogen” (2) “we have actually discovered a superconductor at this temperature before, but it was at high pressure. This paper says it's potentially superconductive AT AMBIENT, NORMAL PRESSURE” (3) “it has *already* replicated, with two separate labs in China confirming the results. Last time the big question was "will it replicate." And the answer this time seems to be "it already has."” Below the tweet is a split-panel showing an arXiv entry titled “lead apatite,” authors “Hongyang Wang, Yao Yao, Ke Shi, Yijing Zhao, Hao Wu, Zhixing Wu, Zhihui Geng, Shufeng Ye, Ning Chen,” blue buttons “Download PDF” and “HTML (experimental),” and abstract text describing diamagnetic magnetization, Meissner effect below 250 K, plus metadata “Comments: 7 pages, 4 figures; Subjects: Superconductivity (cond-mat.supr-con); Cite as: arXiv:2401.0099 [cond-mat.supr-con].” The right side shows a photo of a small dark pellet resting on a metallic disk, hinting at levitation tests. For engineers, the post exemplifies the tech-hype cycle around disruptive hardware breakthroughs - ambient-pressure, near-room-temperature superconductivity that could revolutionize power delivery and hardware design

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Anonymous ★ Top Pick Physics just got LK-99 to replicate in two distant labs at - 23 °C under ambient pressure - so they’ve basically cracked distributed strong consistency, while our microservices still need ritualistic liquid-nitrogen deployments to pass CI

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

Physics just got LK-99 to replicate in two distant labs at - 23 °C under ambient pressure - so they’ve basically cracked distributed strong consistency, while our microservices still need ritualistic liquid-nitrogen deployments to pass CI
Anonymous

After decades of managing distributed systems that only achieve eventual consistency at best, physicists claim they've found a material with perfect conductivity at room temperature - meanwhile we're still debugging race conditions in our 'perfectly synchronized' microservices running at 0 Kelvin data centers
Anonymous

Ah yes, the classic 'room temperature superconductor' - where 'room temperature' is defined as -23°C, presumably in a room located in Antarctica. Two labs confirming replication is great, but in the world of extraordinary materials claims, we've learned that 'replicated' often means 'we also got confusing results that might be measurement artifacts.' It's the scientific equivalent of 'works on my machine' - except the machine is a cryogenic chamber and the 'works' part is still under peer review. Wake me when it's levitating at 20°C and powering a grid, not just showing diamagnetic behavior that could be explained by seventeen other phenomena
Anonymous

250K at ambient pressure with two reproductions feels like 'works on my lab'; ping me when the Meissner effect is GA and cuts our AWS bill
Anonymous

Two labs replicated a "room‑temperature" superconductor - where "room" means -23 C; still more reproducible than most vendor microservice benchmarks under "ambient, normal pressure."
Anonymous

Replicated by two labs before the hype cooled: physicists beating Big Tech to true parallel CI/CD
@callofvoid0 2y

is this a meme that I should laugh or something else?
@purplesyringa 2y

i sure hope it doesn't age like last time
@purplesyringa 2y

here's a direct link to the preprint btw arxiv.org/pdf/2401.00999.pdf
1. @purplesyringa 2y
  
  and here's more context news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38853706
@Vincent_Hawks 2y

I've read a short novel before about a group of scientists which were shown a supposed video proof of antigravity working and asked to replicate it. They doubted everything, but were persuaded by the government officials that the videos were true, and the original apparatus was accidentally destroyed, so they had to work from the ground up. After considerable struggle, denial and like 3 years of work, they finally unveiled a working prototype, only to be told that all of the videos they were shown were actually fake, and that they've made a genuine discovery. Can't remember neither the name or the author though
1. @purplesyringa 2y
  
  i do remember the same story!
2. @purplesyringa 2y
  
  It's Noise Level by Raymond F. Jones
3. @ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 2y
  
  Yeah its similar to vulnerabilities until somebody looks at it its not existent lel
  
  @SamsonovAnton 2y
  
  What if it's supercoductive only when nobody is looking at it? 🤔 I have –23 °C outside right now, but by any mean do not volunteer to check it or anything else.
  
  @paul_thunder 2y
  
  I agree to not look at my PC if the superconductor inside makes it work 10 times faster. Same for anything.. just cover it with a shell, let it be shy as much as it likes. -25C is excellent. Something a regular refrigerator can achieve.
  
  @callofvoid0 2y
  
  our freezer can barely achieve -15
  
  @paul_thunder 2y
  
  Your freezer either has bad insulation or is some bad/cheap or old model. Modern freezers can achieve -24C and advertise it in their specs.
  
  @chupasaurus 2y
  
  In US a typical freezer for long-term storage of ice-cream has operational temperature around that, they even changed the definition to distinct those from other low temp freezers.
  
  @paul_thunder 2y
  
  Well.. that's not cool. But, this is irrelevant to the subject: regular freezers can achieve the temperature required for the mentioned superconductor operation. It's a huge leap similar to the discovery of superconductors that could be cooled with nitrogen instead of helium.
  
  @azizhakberdiev 2y
  
  Remember that refrigerator needs to be able to work against this
  
  @ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 2y
  
  My 1660 Ti Max-Q can do 81 before disconnecting. (Yes its hotplug)
  
  @mold_in 2y
  
  but its faster than 3050 mobile
  
  @ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 2y
  
  Is it?
  
  @mold_in 2y
  
  like 20%, yup
  
  @SamsonovAnton 2y
  
  They must achieve at least 0 °F / −18 °C for the long-term safety. European residential freezers have a four star rating system: * −6 °C (21 °F), 1 week ** −12 °C (10 °F), 1 month *** −18 °C (0 °F), 3–12 months **** −18 °C (0 °F) to −26 °C (−15 °F) The most common is *** currently, ** was also popular earlier.
  
  @callofvoid0 2y
  
  nope the whether here is cursed
  
  @deerspangle 2y
  
  I'm not sure superconductors would make your computer all that much faster.. I thought a bunch of the everyday use case of superconductors would be lowering power loss in transmission.. Which makes - 25C still a bit toasty for a power grid
@kostikdodik 2y

So they did manage to replicate this! Huge!
@bekzat_karayev 2y

Another fake, like Jan Hendrik Schone's story, such breakthrough requires substantial progress in understanding of quantum mechanics, not just material science or experimental equipment design, since the effect itself is inherently quantum mechanical
1. @purplesyringa 2y
  
  idk, at least it's supposedly replicated
@bekzat_karayev 2y

Yeah, the key word here is "supposedly"😀
@ZgGPuo8dZef58K6hxxGVj3Z2 2y

Lets wait for a secondary government’s confirmation not affiliated with china
@SoutHora 2y

Smells of CCP propaganda to me. We'll see.
@RiedleroD 2y

sus. don't get your horses rattled
@Sp1cyP3pp3r 2y

Can I run Minecraft on it?
@deerspangle 2y

Though it would benefit generators and energy storage a lot too, which would be nice! But it seems slightly odd we're not already looking at energy storage with liquid nitrogen cooled superconductors? Or at least, I've not heard of any attempts to actually do that. But yeah, impacts seem to be big for scientific research, and for some medical tech, and for the power grid, but not so much something that would need to be in every home?
@deerspangle 2y

And maybe would help in quantum computation research, but that's certainly not "making your computer 10 times faster", quantum computers are a different ballgame than classical CPUs, very very good at some specific problems, but pretty slow at most general purpose computation. At best, generally available quantum computation would be an auxiliary processor sitting alongside your CPU and GPU and everything else and just doing stuff when you need to crack SHA hashes or whatever, filling a similar niche to a TPU
@deerspangle 2y

But general purpose quantum computation is hindered by a lot more than just a room temperature superconductor
@azizhakberdiev 2y

mb, idk 250K is still insanely high for superconductors, but maintaining this temperature is a problem, not only in GPU
@azizhakberdiev 2y

cooling process by any means requires a lot of energy
@azizhakberdiev 2y

of course it can be achieved, but I can only imagine that mining on superconductor barely covers electricity bills

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Developers react to claimed room-temperature superconductor replication in Chinese labs

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