>> In a world of finite energy resources, the elimination of any inefficiencies can benefit everyone: energy providers, distributors, and consumers at all levels
Furthermore, a super-conducting belt around the Earth would greatly mitigate solar and wind energy's Achilles heel; intermittency.
Renewable power, generated elsewhere, could become accessible in the calm of a windless night. Grid storage? Thanks, no need.
This is actually the plot behind Larry Niven's Ringworld! A gigantic civilization has created a Ringworld (a rotating wheel artificial world), until a superconducting plague (https://news.larryniven.net/concordance/main.asp?alpha=S#sup...) destroys the material that enables room-temperature superconductivity, thus reducing the entire Ringworld to the dark ages...
Presumably the relay protection would trip the breaker for over current.
Essentially they would function like HVDC cables, and we already operate plenty of those.
"However, it seems that practical applications remain significantly far off. Achieving superconductivity at mundane temperatures but extreme pressures is not significantly more accessible than achieving it at mundane pressures but extreme temperatures;"
I know the response is 'not close at all', but even a -50° lightly pressurized (less than 10 atmosphere let's say) semi would do wonder for on-site energy storage, fusion. Anything twice as good as what I described and our world change again.
It's a better silver bullet than fusion (and would unlock fusion too).
Anything not-super-exotic, preferably not-brittle that only needs nitrogen boiling point temps (and yeah, a reasonable pressure) would be a big deal. Currently known high-temp SCs tend to be difficult to make practical things out of.
MRIs or anything with very high magnetic field requirements become a lot easier to build once you don't need to cool them down as much. Inversely, Generators etc. would benefit.
Magnetic levitation (Meissner-Ochsenfeld) would also not require such low temperatures.
Even Quantum computing using superconducting qubits might become easier (although there, superconductivity is not the main reason for low temperatures).
"Only" better conductivity is a big deal, after all.
Along the same line of thought, but flywheel energy storage would become quite appealing when the rotating mass can maintain stable levitation without any energy input (in the form of electromagnets or refrigeration as needed today).
Flywheels main problem is already just energy density, they're more similar to a capacitor than a battery. There are situations where they would certainly be better, but as it is for the situations where they are useful I don't think the very low rate of power loss the best ones currently have is that big a deal.
better electric motors in general, they can be smaller when they have less waste heat to worry about, and higher torques. The navy was playing around with miniaturization of vessel motors more than a decade ago[0] but I haven't run into how that projects gone in the intervening years.
I remember that listening to all the harmonics was very interesting. I thought I could hear the vertical and horizontal refresh frequencies. Maybe I was imagining that though.
Just a note that even if falling short of room temperature, liquid nitrogen (77 K) is a lot cheaper and easier to work with than helium, and is not a scarce resource. A lot of useful technologies would open up if we get past the 77 K threshold, at manageable pressure.
huh? we have LN2 temperature superconductors. In this clip I show flux pinning in YBCO, cooled by LN2 on my dining room table: http://nt4tn.net/random/superconductor.mp4
There are many limits in current HTS-- like it's hard to build coils out of brittle ceramics-- so having alternatives would be very useful, so perhaps that's what you meant?
Is ductile HTS a major research target too, or even believed to be possible? Or is the hope that by studying RTS' we'll stumble into something that can be manufactured by chance or gain some deeper understanding of their behavior that let us design more useful materials? It seems the media spills the most ink on room temp but I agree than LN2 temp but able to be formed would be more important-- I think if YBCO worked at -70C it still would not see that much commercial use.
No expert by any means, but SQUIDs[1] rely on superconductivity to detect tiny magnetic fields. One use is for recording neuron activity[2], so perhaps room-temperature superconductors could allow for a portable setup.
This article[3] goes into some of the advantages of a less restrictive setup, but the laser-pumped sensors they rely on still require a lot of additional hardware.
I'd love to have a SQUID of my own to directly detect the |A| field that physics courses usually describe as "merely an abstraction" (Electromagnetic Vector Potential). I have some experiments I'd like to try.
One application could be to join up the world's electricity grids, though I suspect that our land-mass politics could well be a barrier to that. It could smooth the supply/demand requirements between the dayside and the nightside of the earth.
It could likely be done with ordinary cables, but the power loss would be significant.
As a robotics engineer I would love the tiny and extremely powerful motors it would allow. Also I suppose you would not need gearboxes (or the need for them would be reduced) which would lower cost and mass even more.
>Conservative logic is a comprehensive model of computation which explicitly reflects a number of fundamental principles of physics, such as the reversibility of the dynamical laws and the conservation of certain additive quantities (among which energy plays a distinguished role). Because it more closely mirrors physics than traditional models of computation, conservative logic is in a better position to provide indications concerning the realization of high-performance computing systems, i.e., of systems that make very efficient use of the "computing resources" actually offered by nature. In particular, conservative logic shows that it is ideally possible to build sequential circuits with zero internal power dissipation
We'd finally have laptops that don't overheat (well, not heat at all) and are not constrained by thermal limits! Imagine putting a desktop CPU into your laptop! (Battery lifetime issues aside)
No heat means no power usage (unless we also find a way around the laws of thermodynamics), so no superconductors aren't going to make your laptop magically not heat up. It could help a bit with power lines going to transistors, but to do actual computions we need to consume power and thus generate heat.
You're right, I was being overly sloppy with my wording here. I was only referring to the uniform electric resistance part of energy losses that would be gone. My understanding had always been that the latters makes up a significant portion of the total energy CPUs consume because we're still many orders of magnitude away from the Landauer limit, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle .
To get there we wouldn't just need a superconductor, but a supersemiconductor that could switch instantly between infinite and zero resistance. I don't think we're anywhere near that, let alone one at room temperature.
From the top my head, most power is dissipated in switching, then leakage (for that we would actually need higher resistance in the transistors) and only then resistive losses in powerlines.
> From the top my head, most power is dissipated in switching, then leakage (for that we would actually need higher resistance in the transistors) and only then resistive losses in powerlines.
Not so fast, just because something becomes available doesn't mean it will be immediately used for everything it _could_ be used for. Cost remains a factor.
I very much doubt room temperature superconductors would ever be used in consumer electronics. They probably wouldn't even be widely used in data centers outside of truly cutting edge "no expense spared" systems.
Sure but that's true for many (if not all) things that superconductors might (in theory) enable. I do think, though, that especially in computing there'd be enough economic incentive to use superconductors everywhere if the energy savings are substantial enough.
Most of that heat is generated in the silicon, not the wiring. Unless we discover a semiconducting superconductor with which to replace the silicon junctions, we'll still have plenty of heat dissipation in the CPU.
The article mentions resistance. Things are needed to overcome resistance, and that introduces wear and tear. Magnetic levitation would likely alleviate those problems.
That's interesting. I didn't know that whether fusion power would be available depends on room temperature superconductors.
Is there a simple explanation for that?
The most common and promising fusion experiments today (JET, ITER, Wendelstein-7X, CFS/MIT SPARC) are magnetic confinement fusion: use big, powerful magnets to shape and compress a hot deuterium-tritium plasma until fusion happens. In the Sun, gravity does the job, but at an extremely low power density; on Earth, we need to use magnets. These electromagnets draw a lot of current.
The big problem in fusion is containing and shaping the plasma without any instabilities. If we had room-temperature superconductors, the smallest current through a superconducting magnet would generate a very large magnetic field, enough to shape any plasma.
It's like a corollary of Beveridge's law of headlines: if it's about a scientific discovery around the corner and mentions fusion.. it's a long way round the corner.
I've been trained like a Pavlov's dog to ignore any news article with the word "may" in the title as it allows journalists to write about any kind of bogus that may or may not be true. Makes me wonder how many innocent, truthful and insightful articles I've ignored because of this.
Likewise. Especially for: solar power, wind power, nuclear fusion, super conductivity, battery technology, cures for cancer. If a had one $ for every article that I saw over the years that didn't pan out I'd be able to retire instantly.
Solar, wind, battery and cures for cancer had significant incremental improvement for the last 20 or so years. What kind of claims wrt to these technologies don’t you think panned out?
The key is incremental. The problem is that every news article about any of that stuff invariably hails things as 'may be revolutionary' and they never are. But I'm perfectly happy with the incremental stuff. I just can't stand the way the news gets hyped.
There's a fundamental tension between "news" and "incremental". Which means that in many many important areas of human enterprise (and progress), the "news" model is fundamentally counterproductive. So don't consume the news.
Instead, read a new textbook every year (or however often you can afford to).
The definition of breakthroughs is that nothing happens for 10 years, and then suddenly everything happens and is possible.
AI was wandering in the wilderness just like fusion, a theory without results or practicality. But first alexnet in 2012, then transformers in 2017, and we are now at the stage where "AI is moving too fast and we must pause it!!!"
Who knows, maybe the alexnet of superconductors is lurking somewhere.
> we are now at the stage where "AI is moving too fast and we must pause it!!!"
I disagree. The problem isn't the technology, but that for once we have something that demands more deliberate use. LLMs directly confront the literacy gap between the most and least educated members of the public, and I really do mean that in all senses of the word "literacy".
They take a long time to set up and then they can happen quite quickly but they are usually incremental and tend move the needle only bit-by-bit as we go forward in spite of being a revolutionary science breakthrough.
Take flight as an example. People had been experimenting with it probably since the first human saw a bird and wanted to be able to do that. That went exactly nowhere until someone built a kite large enough to support the weight of a (light) human. And since then every few hundred years there was some kind of 'breakthrough', each of which building on probably hundreds or even thousands of failures in the intermediate. Until finally the Wright Brothers made their first powered flight and then we were off to the races. If not for all those failures and all of those baby steps the revolution wouldn't have happened when it did. The Wrights had a number of pre-requisite inventions at their disposal and as much as theirs was the true breakthrough without those other inventions they'd be sitting on a beach playing in the sand.
It's layer upon layer of failure, the occasional step of real and measurable progress and even rarer a real breakthrough.
We have all grown up reading about how inventions were the sole genius of one person. Take the case of Edison's light bulb. Even he admitted he tried 10,000 varieties before getting it right. And even his invention probably came of the back of many others before who probably did research for producing glass at an industrial scale, research into various materials and elements (which could be used for filaments) and so on so forth.
It will be quite a while before we get super conductors produced reliably.Of course the prerequisite is that a true super conductor is really created, in a lab condition, is going to take quite some time.
The breakthrough of Edison in the case of the light bulb is less the filament (which he did try thousands of materials for) but the innovations:
1. He figured out that the filament wouldn’t immediately burn out in a vacuum
2. Built machinery to blow glass to the right shape and form the vacuum inside (so he figured out how to make the glass on an industrial scale)
3. Most importantly, figured out how to build a commercially viable system of power generation and distribution in Manhattan so his bulbs would be of use.
Yes he worked incrementally. He also invented ways to manufacture and create markets for his novel inventions.
Electromagnetic control of liquid crystals is from 1927 (and original research on the chemistry/material side being from 1888) .. things did take a long time to evolve.
> It will be quite a while before we get super conductors produced reliably.Of course the prerequisite is that a true super conductor is really created, in a lab condition, is going to take quite some time.
We do have working super conductors produced at scale, some of which are just 'boring' alloys. The problem is that the cryogenics required for operation are expensive and complex, making them not very appealing for widespread use.
There's a sort of bermuda triangle of notorious physics vaporware that's been 20 years into the future ever since they were first conceived.
* (useful) Fusion
* Room Temperature Superconductors
* (useful) Quantum Computers
There's always breakthroughs but nothing seems to ever come out of it. Will they ever happen? Maybe. That said I've got a degree in theoretical physics and I'd bet against all three within my lifetime.
I want to preface this: I'm not trying to be snide, genuinely curious.
What kind of person gets a degree in "theoretical physics", something that is by definition speculative, if they also bet against any of the speculation panning out?
The point is that they specialize in the theoretical side, not that they don't try to validate it. The difference is that their validation focuses on math rather than physical experimentation.
Eg there's no way to verify Hawking radiation in person (because well, good luck getting near a black hole to do so). But it's still supported by existing models of physics, thus it is science and not mere speculation.
Another recent example would be that the idea of time crystals was a theoretical physics result, backed by existing physics. That backing made it more than just speculation, leading to the investment of resources that eventually led to them actually being created.
Of course probably the most famous example of a theoretical physicst would be Einstein.
Lots of stuff typically goes through theoretical physicists before experimentalists determine how to test the idea. For example, all the particle accelerators, synchrotrons etc are initially designed by theoretical physicists via simulations etc to meet certain goals before putting in the billions of dollars it costs to actually translate those designs into something that can be built and used.
Okay, first of all, no, that's not the fundamental principle of science. That's the fundamental principle of science according to Karl Popper. Karl Popper is probably the single most influential philosopher of science, but his perspective is not the whole story. I know, I know, your high school science teacher told you otherwise, but I promise you there's more to philosophy of science than that. There's a reason they teach Kuhn and Feyerabend and so on.
But even if you ignore that, or don't believe me, or whatever...
You're conflating two different meanings of "speculative" here, which I think is probably whence your confusion stems.
On the one hand, you're (reasonably) saying that theoretical physics is speculative, in the sense that, once you finish your modelling work, your output could be said to be a speculation about what would happen in an experiment.
On the other hand, you're (again, reasonably!) describing certain proposed engineering projects as speculative, in the sense that if someone says "we'll have economically viable fusion within N years", that's a speculation.
My point is that those are just very different types of speculation, they really don't have much to do with one another. It's perfectly reasonable to be someone who wants to use theoretical (a.k.a. model-based, a.k.a. speculative) techniques to try to advance human knowledge about the nature of reality, while also being someone who is skeptical about the practicality of various (speculative) proposed exploitations of that knowledge. "I'd like to advance physics in areas P and Q; I don't think engineering is likely to advance in areas X, Y, and Z".
For example, Einstein was a theoretical physicist (very much not an experimentalist). He wasn't (initially) particularly bullish on the plausibility of doing engineering based on his work (and when it became clear that atomic bombs were gonna happen, he was horrified). For a later famous example of theoretical physics, Peter Higgs (and others who did the same work) were not concerned with whether or not it would be possible to design an experiment to validation the existence of the Higgs Boson, while still being vaguely hopeful that someone might one day figure out that experiment (using equipment invented decades after the proposal of the Higgs mechanism).
ALSO, btw, just because someone is a theoretical physicist doesn't mean they don't think that they're uninterested in experimental validation. It means they're not working on experimental validation. Maybe someone else will figure out how to do experiments, maybe not, it's just not the theorist's problem.
I think those types of breakthroughs are entirely orthogonal to physics. The point of physics isn't to develop new technology. It's to further human understanding of nature.
Right, and a hammer is not a saw. Different tools do different things.
In this example the llm helped point me to a few relevant tools in the field, including https://materialsproject.org/ml, which is a different AI tool that might help us take this leap.
I could ask ChatGPT why you're likely to be a grumpy bad-faith asshole, but as an expert in the field of dealing with children, you probably just need a snack.
If you define "creating new ideas" widely enough to make your statement true about generative AI it's also true about most engineering and science carried out by humans.
As far as I know, there are no theoretical reasons against room temperature and pressure superconductors. There is no theoretical barrier between liquid nitrogen temperature (where we have many superconductors at normal pressure) and room temperature (were we don't have, IIRC here are a few that are (not very) close, but require a high high high pressure).
