Room Temperature Superconductor!

Physicists discover new quantum electronic material

Well, technically, its not exactly a superconductor, but the next best damned thing! The scientists are exploring Topological materials, where the size and shape of a number of different materials can suddenly change their properties in dramatic ways. You can think of it as "Dimension Squeezing" where the shapes and properties of the material exchange identities. Topological Insulators are relatively new, but make even graphene look wimpy with the amazing potential applications they have as room temperature superconductors capable of exploiting a wide variety of different funky quantum mechanical effects. These are the kinds of materials you want to make a Star Trek style tricorder out of and levitating trains and cellphones that use almost no energy.

Materials wise, physicists are about to master light circuitry and how to multiplex light the same way we do with telephone signals, leveraging their greatest potential in a fiber optic. They have also discovered how to make any high performance magnet dirt cheap, and with addition of room temperature superconductors it means they are figuring out the most efficient and optimal ways to communicate and share resources. Some of these ways of sharing, are quantum mechanical and more than 100% efficient. Even classical computers could use plasmons and other exotic particles capable of speeds in excess of 270thz, compared to roughly 5ghz for an overclocked Intel chip. A single optical chip like that using room temperature superconductors would probably use as little as .1w, be smaller than a postage stamp, capable of sending a signal six feet without amplification, and would never require anything silly like a graphics card, even for rendering real time photo-realistic VR or a Star Trek holodeck.

 

Nothin' From Nothin'

What's missing from this picture,
Becomes a great deal more compelling,
Once you realize it can substitute,
For anything it might otherwise contain.
What comes around goes around and around,
Reality without dreams is just someone's nightmare,
While dreams without reality are someone else's fantasy.
Stay awake too long, and you will hallucinate, possibly online.
Close your eyes for too long, and the wonder of life passes you by.
Wonder remains the beginning of wisdom,
For those who are born to fall on their butt!
Falling gracefully counts for extra points in duets!
Darwin had an institutionally stunted sense of humor,
And assumed life is merely about survival of the fittest!
When sex assumes that you have already survived!
And are quite possibly more creative than Darwin.
Nothin' from nothin' ain't nothin' in Wonderland!
Ya gotta have something, if you want to dance with me!
(Billy Preston)​

 

You'll see your problems multiply when you continually decide to faithfully persue the policy of truth. Never again is what you Swore the time before....

Ignorant Experts

None require, that physicists speak plain English!
For science is the belief, in the ignorance of experts,
And Western civilization stands by its two great heritages!
One is the scientific spirit of adventure,
The great adventure into the unknown,
An unknown which must first be recognized,
And acknowledged as being unknown.
In order, for one to become an explorer!
To boldly go where none has gone before,
We must all first be willing to look within.
To demand the unanswerable mysteries of life,
Remain forever largely unanswered!
In short, The humility of the intellect,
Modestly content just doing a good job,
Forever certain of our own uncertainty!
Thus certain, of the ignorance of experts!
We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible,
Because only in that way can we possibly make faster progress.
Whenever, you can no longer recognize what you are looking at,
You almost always recognize the truth by its elegant simplicity,
Which becomes glaringly obvious, if you happen to get it right!
If you have enough, personal experience,
Usually more truth comes out than goes in,
If you don't things can get a little confusing!
In order to cope with all that kind of crap, in physics!
Resigned to running in circles screaming and shouting,
While insisting words are useless for describing things!
Unless familiar, with the mystical mathematical runes!
Mathematics can never describe a beating human heart!
Or blathering nonsense about knowing the mind of God!
At times trying not to be funny we regret ever succeeding,
Thus the ignorance of some experts giving rise,
To progressively more brilliant expert opinions,
Concerning the ignorance of the experts in their own damned opinions!
(Richard Feynman, Murry Gel Man)
​

 

We will need some superconductors on a commercial scale if the transition to electric vehicles ever fully materializes.
Th UK government have taken 2 years to work out that we will need 10 additional powerstations (it took me less than an hour to work it out and my figure is 8) perhaps the government committee would have needed a few more million pounds to factor in the drop in consumption due to LED lighting. LOL.
However they have yet to spend another 5 years and a few billion pounds for the penny to drop that doubling power generation will also require doubling the infrastructure to distribute it.
Are these new cables yet capable of carrying 3000 amps at 11,000 volts. 50-hz over hundreds of miles and 33,000 volts through cables suspended on overhead pylons.?

 

This is the first experiment, and nobody has a clue yet what can made out this material. However, its the first magneto-topological insulator discovered, its just iron and tin, and what else they could make is anyone guess.

 

Lets just hope that by using iron, they are not just replacing the heat with magnetic energy losses.
Sadly, most experimental successes are a very different story when applied to large scale commercial production.
A few years ago, researchers produced an endothermic semiconductor junction. In theory it could have been used to cool power transistors in broadcast quality amplifiers. However, it was simply an inefficient heat pump that emitted more heat from its driver components than it absorbed, leaving it with little practical use.
Newtons laws have yet to be broken, but LED technology has certainly helped change the heat / light ratio of our lighting. Now at 8 watts per thousand lumens and color temperatures to match tungsten (2,700-k) available, it will become the only lighting used in the future.

 

It could not be superconducting, or the equivalent, if it produced heat, nor is this somebody's attempt to make a better mousetrap. It is fundamental research and the number of potential applications is staggering. If they can't find one that it is suitable for manufacturing, they're doing it wrong. My guess, is the first applications will all be military and computer oriented, with Microsoft putting all their eggs in this basket now, doing topological quantum computing research. For the immediate future, the more interesting thing will be how they combine this with other topological insulators to produce a wide assortment of circuitry that cannot be created any other way. Really weird, weird, Star Trek kind of technology including the possibility of getting rid of all the power lines altogether, in favor of using quantum entanglement to send power to anything you want.

Newton hasn't been overthrown yet, but he's been on his deathbed for the last century. The simple truth is, only in the last ten years have we acquired the technology to finally explore quantum mechanics in the world around us, instead of just in labs. The results have been astounding, including macroscopic quantum effects being responsible for photosynthesis and the human brain. After a century of scratching their heads, physicists are now beginning to explore the big picture, and computers should spit out a theory of everything soon.

China is testing a reactionless drive, that violates Newton's third law of motion, while NASA is working on a variation that can, with enough power, can be used for a Star Trek warp drive and Star Gates. Field theorists think they can explain the effect, but I think they're just reaching the limits of our current theories and stretching for answers. What is becoming glaringly obvious is that none of their theories account for the results we are finding in the big picture. Newton invented calculus, Einstein took it to the next step, and we require mathematics that are four times more complex. It was fifty years before more than half a dozen people on the planet really understood the mathematics of Relativity. That's when they figured out how to simply them. The average significant paper in physics today has well over 120 authors.

The poetry I write expresses the mathematics they require and, believe it or not, I've had one mathematician whose work is classified ask me to write paradoxical nonsense for him. Several famous Taoist masters have complained in recent years that they are being bugged by people hoping they will crack jokes. I know one they call The Dragon, who they only wish they could bug, who makes my sense of humor look tame in comparison. She helped me collect the metaphors for my book, and can causally make any professional comedian look like a rank amateur, but many of her jokes go right over the heads of the average Babylonian. She embodies the systems logic that explains life, the universe, and everything which happens to be the humor of a toddler, but in an adult mind. Ask her how she does it, and she can't explain, and my job is to put it into words a child can understand.

Nobody cracks me up like her, but most would not get her jokes and, she's too young for me.

 

It will be very interesting to see whether it has any large scale applications.
Passing current through air is highly controversial, due to its potential to damage heath hit an obstacle that converts the energy into heat or ionize the air.
The microwave transmitters have now been removed from the post office tower in London and replaced with microwave cables for all of the above reasons.
People jokingly called them the death rays. The exact reason for their removal is classified, but fears ranged from them inadvertently hitting the increasing number of high rise buildings, accidentally beaming downwards due to storm damage and the dangers to police and air ambulance helicopters.

Their is one theory that an ancient civilization transmitted energy through the air and triggered a catastrophe that wiped out most of the planet, setting evolution back tens of thousands of years.
I am not a believer in these types of theories, but I do sometimes wonder about them. Several university programs have been shut down by the government and it appears that they were simply told by men in black raincoats to "stop now" and offered no further explanation.
It sounds strange, but a friend of mine in my childhood had designed the UK radar defense of the south coast during the second world war and he spoke of strange visits from government officials who checked his calculations. He was intrigued as to why and how his ground breaking developments seemed almost as if they were checking a schoolboys homework.

I do sometimes wonder if we are on occasions reverse engineering ideas from 'who knows where'.?

 

New
It will be very interesting to see whether it has any large scale applications.
Passing current through air is highly controversial, due to its potential to damage heath hit an obstacle that converts the energy into heat or ionize the air.
The microwave transmitters have now been removed from the post office tower in London and replaced with microwave cables for all of the above reasons.
People jokingly called them the death rays. The exact reason for their removal is classified, but fears ranged from them inadvertently hitting the increasing number of high rise buildings, accidentally beaming downwards due to storm damage and the dangers to police and air ambulance helicopters.

Their is one theory that an ancient civilization transmitted energy through the air and triggered a catastrophe that wiped out most of the planet, setting evolution back tens of thousands of years.
I am not a believer in these types of theories, but I do sometimes wonder about them. Several university programs have been shut down by the government and it appears that they were simply told by men in black raincoats to "stop now" and offered no further explanation.
It sounds strange, but a friend of mine in my childhood had designed the UK radar defense of the south coast during the second world war and he spoke of strange visits from government officials who checked his calculations. He was intrigued as to why and how his ground breaking developments seemed almost as if they were checking a schoolboys homework.

I do sometimes wonder if we are on occasions reverse engineering ideas from 'who knows where'.?

 

The energy is not moving through the air, quantum entanglement includes the ability to teleport quantized energy. That's part of what drove Planck nuts when he first discovered it. One physicist described quanta to me as "invisible pixies with attitude". They don't just fly around like random billiard balls, they randomly teleport all over the place. Normally, an extremely short distance, but if they are entangled, they can go further. The more particles entangled, and the more robust their entanglement, the further they can teleport.