Comment on Why are we focused on a room temperature superconductor instead of a less cold superconductor?
RedAggroBest@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Even something at -15 would’ve been pretty substantial. The problem is before now, it was super low temps like the MRI you mentioned were just the norm. The fact that this one is potentially room temp one is an even bigger deal. That’s also why you see so many skeptics who doubt that THAT big a leap could happen seemingly over night.
ShakeThatYam@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I guess that is sort of what bugs me. Why are we jumping from one extreme to the other instead of figuring out stuff in between first.
RedAggroBest@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s not an intentional jump. Most superconductors are extremely impractical for consumer use (and even just cold ones are too realistically) and materials scientists are always just chasing improvements, this one just happens to be a very dramatic one. Popular science is only a small chunk of what’s happening globally.
Again, I say all this under the hopes that the SK guys aren’t full of shit because this would actually be so cool.
Squeak@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Because if you can make one at 25C, why bother with one at -100C?
wahming@monyet.cc 1 year ago
It’s not a video game tech tree. Scientific progress isn’t linear. We hypothesise, we experiment, and sometimes we get lucky. If it was an engineering problem we could make incremental improvements to the manufacturing process to get small improvements in the results, but it’s not.