Pregătește-te pentru epoca superconductorului (poate)

Sâmbătă, 05 August 2023 20:22

A pellet of LK-99, which was claimed to be the first ever room temperature, ambient pressure superconductor

Want a flying skateboard? Your own personal home fusion reactor? A wearable MRI scanner you can buy online? If a room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconducting material really has been found, that is just the tip of the technological iceberg.

Recently, the internet has been abuzz with the news that a new superconducting material called LK-99, which retains its properties at room temperature and ambient atmospheric pressure, may have been developed by a team of researchers at Korea University.

Because there have been false alarms about this sort of discovery in the past, the announcement was met with widespread skepticism and, to date, no one has been able to verifiably replicate the research. That being said, what if it's true? What would be the implications of such a material? It turns out that we're talking about a fundamental technological revolution on the scale of the invention of the transistor or the dynamo.

What is a superconductor?

A superconductor is a material that takes on some really exotic properties. When the right conditions are reached, all electrical resistance in the material suddenly vanishes and it generates a magnetic field. What this means is that it can carry an electrical current with incredible efficiency and almost no loss of energy through heat. It can also generate powerful magnetic fields.

The practical applications of superconductors have been known for decades, but these have been hindered because most superconducting materials have to be cooled with liquid helium to near absolute zero. Needless to say, maintaining these cryogenic temperatures requires a lot of very complicated, expensive, bulky, and hard-to-manage mechanisms.

This is the reason why MRI scanners, which use superconducting magnets, are so massive and why the bill for an MRI scan can make your eyes bug out of your head like a Tex Avery cartoon character.

Then came the silicon chip and computers shrunk like my bank account at tax time. Computers went from the lab to the office and then the home. Millions of people used them every day and had the chance to simply play with them. Very soon, everyone from software engineers to school kids understood computers not as number crunchers, but as data processors, and that they weren't mechanical oracles, but very useful, albeit frustrating, idiots. Meanwhile computers evolved from discrete machines to components, filtering deep into our technology and our daily lives.

After that, the computer revolution exploded, giving us an increasing cascade of digital advances, including the internet, virtual libraries holding more knowledge than anything in human history, ChatGPT, the smartphone, social media, and cat memes.

The same may turn out to be true for room-temperature superconductors as they change our lives and become so much a part of it that we no longer notice them. But, as the cookbook says, first catch your rabbit. We still don't know if LK-99 works, is practical to manufacture, or if it's the latest in a long line of tantalizing dead ends.

Still, it doesn't hurt to dream.

**-- https://newatlas.com/science/get-ready-for-the-age-of-the-superconductor-maybe/?utm_source=New+Atlas+Subscribers&utm_campaign=2e921c0bc8-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_08_04_08_07&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_65b67362bd-2e921c0bc8-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D