Alex Kaplan on the LK-99 Superconductor: the Drama, Democratization of Science, and Future

I think people are still underestimating the importance of this thing you know if there's a chance it's real which I'll say publicly kind of for the first time I would put it around 10 or something like I don't think it's gonna turn out but there is a chance it's real this would be like the most important physics discovery of Our Lifetime by far I I think that it's still highly undervalued and uh under discussed how important this thing could be it's a topic you know room temperature superconductors you may have heard about it in like a science class documentary in eighth grade to get you excited or if you like took an introductory physics seminar at College there's like these are the big open problems in physics we want to solve this is one this is like really the Holy Grail that I think we should all be chasing after it's been interesting to see you know a lot of the skepticism a lot of the kind of tamping down of enthusiasm and excitement instead I think we should use this opportunity to get everyone saying like guys we should put a lot of effort behind finding something like this even if this one's not it it would be really really impactful if you can find it [Music] Alex thanks for thanks for joining us thanks so much for having me do I want to briefly introduce why you're here so about 10 days ago I tweeted a thread about a new physics paper on the archive called the world's first room temperature ambient pressure superconductor and I got people really excited about what would happen if it was true um everything from nuclear fusion to Quantum Computing as well as some quotes from the paper itself and since then 30 million people have viewed that thread it kind of took over the internet and um I have like 40 000 Twitter followers up from 200. 11 days ago and uh kicked off a lot of interesting conversation about superconductors room temperature superconductors and a lot of drama and gossip about this paper and replication efforts so it's been a fun ride on the twitterverse or X as it's now called and I'm excited to chat about that paper about the implications and hopefully some things that aren't yet public and widely known okay so Alex before we hop in just to kind of give the people who want an answer do you feel like the paper has been replicated at this point or if you were right down on a scale of one to ten I hate to break it to you no one has proven that LK 99 is a room temperature superconductor yet we have a lot of interesting data and as one physics suppressor put it interesting in many of the right ways but there is no proof yet that LK 99 is a superconductor what you'd look for for proof is a really clear phase transition from an insulator or a conductor into a superconductor where you have a graph that shows some resistance and it goes from some positive value to basically zero at a certain point look for this sharp drop it's a Hallmark of superconductors it was the first way a superconductor was ever discovered in 1911 as well as there's a lot of other measurements you can make but that's the surest one we haven't seen anything really close to that yet and no one's convinced that it's it's real yet I I mean I know we could get into some of the drama around why this was published the way it was published and kind of the the lack of details but the the thing that I haven't been able to piece together because I live in a world of of uh bits not atoms is so in theory you have this paper and I says this is what we did to kind of go create this thing and then you know you kind of have the guy at varda who you know a lot of the stuff seems to be happy outside the US but at least we got like one English language version I know Iris was doing stuff uh from her home furnace but but the thing that I don't quite understand is why isn't it kind of like just like baking a cake right so if you follow the recipe put it in the oven and it pops out and then you have it so like I'm very naive in that sense so maybe educate me a little bit on what why is it so difficult to replicate this this uh you know material yeah so in order to fully understand it I think it's interesting to talk a little bit about the chemistry and physics of crystals uh so indulge me for a second or so any material with a regularly structured lattice of atoms is called a crystal in physics and crystals have interesting properties in that they can share electrons between atoms the electrons can flow in different paths in the crystals and when you're making them either default by Chemistry by what's most energetically favorable or via some fancy technique you have certain Arrangements of atoms that contribute to the crystal structure so the current you know confirmed highest temperature superconductor are are called these cuprate crystals which are copper oxide crystals usually have some kind of rare Earth element like yitrium and then barium and copper and oxygen and these are very carefully ordered and structured so that the electronic bands or the places where the electron is allowed to flow can be a super smooth and kind of clean path through this Crystal at the right temperature that's a little bit of an oversimplification but what it gets at is the ordering of the atoms in this Crystal is extremely important for the electronic properties how the electrons can flow through this material and what we currently think is probably the case with LK 99 it's a crystal based on lead appetite which is a lead and sulfate kind of Crystal where you move some of the lead atoms and replace them with copper atoms now the challenging thing is it's very hard to choose which lead atoms you're going to replace with copper atoms if you just grind them in a bowl and blast it in a furnace and some computational calculations have showed that the version of LK 99 that's most likely to be superconducting has certain lead atoms replaced with copper atoms but the less likely or less energy energetically favorable lead atoms are the ones that are supposed to be replaced so you're kind of working against nature when you melt the copper into this lead in a process called doping you add some free electrons from the copper you replace some of the lead atoms and unfortunately if you just did it kind of by chance you'd get very few lead atoms correctly replaced with the Copper at least what we think would be the right configuration because it's the less energetically favorable lead atom that you need to replace to get the right structure so that's a little bit as to why the synthesis may be harder than we initially thought if you looked at the initial paper you know it was like three steps just melt some appetite add some copper grind it up put it in an oven and like you'll get you'll get a superconductor so that's why I got really excited initially it's like wow we could go do this it's looking like it may be harder to produce than we initially thought but to the point where if you do get it in the right structure some of these interesting properties seem to be showing up like and maybe to explain the different things that people are observing like the floating rock is is the meme and I see this term diamagnetism and it's like people are like oh this is just eye magnetism this is not superconductor like maybe explain a little bit of that like because clearly some of the fragments of whatever people are making are exhibiting weird or kind of interesting properties so one of the Hallmarks of superconductors is that they float in a magnetic field because the electrons can flow with zero resistance they tend to form currents in the superconductor that oppose the magnetic field and allow it to float freely so there's some superconducting maglev trains that use this property or you may see some cool videos of like a little puck of a superconductor going along a track of magnets it's called the meissner effect and it's really a Hallmark of superconductors on the other hand there are other materials that oppose magnetic fields that we broadly classify as diamagnetic so material can be paramagnetic ferromagnetic or diamagnetic and that refers to how it responds in a magnetic field I'm a ferromagnetic material is magnetic by itself like it's a magnet whereas paramagnetic can be magnetized the diamagnetic materials on the other hand are those that naturally oppose magnetic fields because of how the electrons interact with magnetic fields in that bulk configuration in that material so we have some examples of diamagnetism in nature for example bismuth is naturally somewhat diamagnetic if you put it next to a magnet it kind of pushes away and floats away but recently we've developed more and more materials that exhibit diamagnetic properties one of them is called pyrolytic graphite and you can see pictures of graphite pencil lead that's treated in a certain way floating on top of magnets and that's pretty cool so we've seen pictures of samples that have claimed to be LK 99 floating on magnets there's two possible explanations basically one is that it's diamagnetic and the second is that it's a superconductor these aren't necessarily either or you know there are a class of superconductors called type 1 superconductors that are moderately diamagnetic they don't perfectly float but they do repel magnetic fields and then type 2 superconductors can float perfectly in a phenomenon called flux pinning where it just stays in the exact same place never wobbles or anything it's also called Quantum locking so it could just be that it's a non-superconducting diamagnetic material or it could be a superconducting diamagnetic material that opposes magnetic fields what I'm not convinced we've seen yet is super strong flux pinning where that thing is stuck in place they won't wobble at all and that's uh you can see videos of yatrium barium copper oxide cuprate superconductors that are just totally Rock Solid you can move the magnets and it stays in the exact same place but uh but that's a little bit on diamagnetism versus superconductivity not necessarily exclusive but uh interesting phenomenon so if I was to kind of play that back what we're seeing now and in some of these results and internet videos maybe because they haven't been tested in the physics lab or kind of you know formerly verified by a bunch of different expert types but the the LK 99 process that people are trying to replicate are creating materials that do start to have some of these properties but no one has actually been able to tie everything together right so the the Meisner effect Stuff Plus the actual phase shift you were saying around temperature or now temperatures resistivity yeah so I mean the main property of a superconductor is it should conduct electricity with zero resistance and we haven't really seen a convincing graph that shows that it conducts electricity with zero resistance most of the data we've seen is very noisy and shows that it could have some resistance but the materials and instruments aren't precise enough to measure it yet um but floating rocks are a pretty big deal because like it's pretty hard to make a diamagnetic material and I think the only reason people are taking this result seriously in the first place is it came out with this picture and video of a floating sample of something and that's really remarkable it's it's pretty rare to find new diamagnetic materials and they're pretty interesting and to do that in a claimed superconductor is above and beyond a lot of the recent discoveries of claimed superconductors we really haven't seen a lot of pictures of them floating like we have for this one with Material Science like this is a lot of just trial and error like how do people even come up with new materials and is it happening in academic lives is it happening kind of in industrial processes like I don't even like how do you even go invent a new material yeah that's a great question there's so many ways you could do it right now a lot happens uh via computer simulation where you try to model what some interesting properties that you're looking for are and then come up with what materials might fit those configurations so superconductivity has been a holy grail of physics for 100 years or so at room temperature and ambient pressure because of its implications for power generation and so many things you could do with it and so that's been a subject of a lot of study is a computational modeling of superconducting systems we have some theoretical understanding of how they work but we don't have a great understanding I would say of you know all of the interactions happening within a superconductor and what are some of the key criteria that would allow it to superconduct at higher temperatures so in Material Science in general a lot of it you know in industry and things will come from we need a material for a specific use case you know probably the canonical example are the millions of different types of plastics that we have that have different properties where you can adjust them one way or the other in order to make them bendier or firmer or thicker or more insulating but there's obviously a lot of different materials that we work with usually start with the properties that you're looking for and then kind of do an overview of what are some similar materials how can we improve on them whether it's by doping it you know for electronic properties to add more electrons into it or changing some of its parameters like its strength or elasticity insulating properties and one interesting Parable here is when we first discover these cuprate superconductors they're extremely brittle extremely hard to make and they didn't work very well and there were only tiny parts of the sample that usually ended up being super conducting but since they were initially discovered we've pushed their critical temperature from what I think was initially 40 degrees Kelvin when they were first discovered now all the way up to 100 degree Kelvin as well as improving on the synthesis process their purity and their use cases and now you see a lot of these Cube rates used in some really cool physics experiments like Fusion systems like Commonwealth Fusion uses tapes of them in order to try to create nuclear fusion so I'm optimistic we can improve LK 99 but yeah there's a lot that goes into Material Science bro and maybe for our audience maybe explain why going from 40 Kelvin to over 100 Kelvin a why are you using Kelvin as the measurement and then B like why is it going up being good so the really important thing with this first cuprate superconductor is um it crossed the threshold of the temperature of liquid nitrogen I don't know off the top of my head but my dad once told me that liquid nitrogen is about the same price as milk uh so it's a lot cheaper than liquid helium or other ways to cool things and if you can just get a giant tank of liquid nitrogen it's a lot more economical to run your superconductors with that than um other you know much more expensive ways of cooling like liquid helium which are only a few degrees Kelvin the Kelvin scale is useful for this um because you know most superconductor superconducted just a few degrees Kelvin very far away from our room temperature like 300 Kelvin I do want to get to the the like trace the the drama a little bit like what what's the evolution here yeah it's a really weird story I mean you have to think that there's something sketchy going on when two papers appear on the same day both of them are written with typos claiming to have found the Holy Grail of physics they don't have the same authors list and in fact one of them only has three authors which implies that one of the authors thinks that they're going for a Nobel Prize which can only be split amongst three people and uh and both of them have these totally nonsensical charts that really don't make any sense measurements that are done in very non-traditional ways and a claim of the superconducting material is potentially very easy to make so a really weird set of facts to start with also no one had ever heard of these physicists they weren't affiliated with the university it came super far out of left field and so you can be sure that every respected scientist when they saw this kind of shrugged it off um there's been lots of claims of materials like this that have been super conducting and almost all of them have turned out to not be replicated in Research Laboratories hey we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors hey everybody if you're a business owner or founder like me you'll want to know more about our sponsor netsuite netsuite provides Financial software for all your business whether you're looking for an Erp tool or accounting software netsuite gives you the visibility control you need to make better decisions faster and for the first time in netsuite's 25 years is the number one Cloud Financial system you 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working outside of a traditional lab or traditional model may take a novel approach a lot of superconducting research is about marginal improvements to current Cube rates rather than really throwing random stuff at the wall to see what sticks so you have to have some prior that there's a chance that if we did discover a room temperature superconductor it might come from a very odd place in a very odd format the drama between these authors the publication the papers is very odd it seems like the two main authors Lee and Kim whose initials make up LK initially found some signs of superconductivity in 1999 with some form of this you know copper doped lead appetite Crystal so they named the material LK 99 and tried to work on it for a while but couldn't really get any clear results that would be worth publishing so one of them went off to work in a battery lab the other languished as a postdoc who couldn't get who know never got an offer for professorship and just languished in various Labs until I think it was a few years ago Quan is one of the third authors got funding from some external private party in order to commercialize this technology restart some research then during covid Lee and Kim seemed to have just shot themselves away in a lab and made thousands and thousands of these samples to try to find the signs of superconductivity yeah there's some comment that like the sample that they showed in the paper was number 1500 or something that they've been making and in this total obscurity they've been like languishing just making these materials and finding things that they thought were really interesting they partnered with uh United States career-based Korean physicist um hyundtak Kim who's at the College of William and Mary in Virginia in order to try to Shepherd some of their results through the prestigious United States academic publishing system and then it sounds like for some reason the Korean Quan who uh the the third author brought in to help Shepherd it uh and get funding was fired from their research project in April and then went off on his own wrote up his results in a paper he added Lee and Kim's co-authors and put it on the archive to try to get some press for himself and and tell the world about this as soon as uh Hyundai came at William and Mary saw this he was like oh crap we have to get our own paper out there like a few hours later published his own paper to the archive that didn't have Quan as a co-author and had some different graphs and different findings as well and uh and since then there's been like a lot of feuding between them they're all very uh skeptical of the scientific establishment and not really collaborating closely with with other researchers but Hyundai Kim at the College of William and Mary at least has been on the phone trying to help Labs replicate it and really does believe that this is real so there's a lot of intrigue here a lot of really weird things and it's coming from weird angles to make the story even crazier as you were saying Dan there's people just doing this in their kitchens like trying to make this material tweets of unverified floating Rocks coming from all over the world so it's a very dramatic story uh that has been very fun to follow along uh live as it's happening I happen to be an investor in varda and so I know one of the co-founders there pretty well and he kind of you know quote tweeted or quote-exed or whatever they call it now uh one of the employees to say well you know well I have to go try to replicate this and so similar to your story in terms of going kind of from the nobody on Twitter to now all of a sudden 60 70 80 thousand followers I forget his name is Andrew I think Andrew mccallop yeah yeah he just became kind of overnight the the call it English language version the internet person outside of this Anonymous uh you know anime character Iris who I I guess is a real scientist like that people know of but maybe he's just kind of under this Anonymous account but they were kind of going back and forth uh while one is sleeping one is is kind of taking up the mantle of trying to do the replication yeah it's pretty cool I mean I think it's great for science to be democratized for people to try this themselves I think that uh Andrew and Iris are probably very good scientists and it might be harder if you're doing it in your oven at home you know they have some really professional material and years of experience and material synthesis that is under the hood helping a lot of their experiments come out better than ours would be but um I think it's awesome for science to be democratized like this for there to be like live tweets about replication efforts and the whole world's watching superconductivity Twitter has been a wash with many any stories that I don't think really benefit the public conversation whether it's like a latest political Scandal or the Elon Zuck cage match or something and for us all to be so excited about like potentially the most world-changing technology out there I think it's a great thing for us to focus on to talk about yeah I think it's an interesting characteristic of Twitter and it's a bit of a Rorschach test in that if you don't like the the raw stream of most stuff could potentially be fake or or you know it's like low signal like you know a lot of foot I think there's a certain type of person on the internet that just that thrives with that it's like oh it's almost like you're kind of trying to piece together what is actually true and maybe if you're the type that likes to get into the newspaper the next morning with a stamp of approval like that that just sounds awful but I I work in crypto and crypto when SBF was blowing up last year the big joke is that you kind of have all these these autists and and you know sizzo type folks who are on the blockchain piecing together all of these kind of you know movement of funds and and I I just think that that is uniquely enabled by something like Twitter where you get this real-time-ness and easy you know kind of virality that can spread and people to be able to add their context on top of whatever's happening I think the establishment doesn't like that because you're outside of the control right and and now any expert and this happened also with covet right yeah I mean the citizen journalist of that aspect of this is super strong and interesting the other thing that I've learned from being now one of the Twitter voices is the barrier to entry to pointing out things no one has noticed is extremely low and most of the people reporting on this stuff are no more experts than any one of us and if you can read a paper and look at a graph and really like think about it for a second or two you can be as um you know genuine a participant and voice in the conversation as anyone there's one graph in one of the initial papers that everyone said was a phase change in resistivity like random Twitter account pointed out actually this line is less conductivity or is worse at conducting it's more resistive than copper so very common you know conductor and so it's like literally more resistive than copper and people are claiming it's a superconductor if you just looked at it and thought about it for a few seconds almost anyone could have come to that inclusion so it's been very enlightening to me to to understand that you really can I think be as genuine and interesting a voice as anyone if you just do the reading and look into it do some research Etc well it's it's the classic thing where you know the quickest way to find truth is just post something on the Internet that people find out is wrong right and it is kind of interesting to think that you know stuff that has to live through the the truth seeking nature of Twitter with all of the kind of distributed set of people rather than going through maybe a little bit more Byzantine and and kind of close process for for peer review I don't know I think it's it's a pretty special property yeah and and the other Dynamic of this story is so many of the mainstream science journalists just have like disdain for the people on Twitter getting excited and you know pointing things out and it's it's really weird how uh they don't like all of this excitement and enthusiasm and they're like everyone calm down you know this is irresponsible to to say that something important has happened here when we don't know all the facts yet but living in that like exciting interlude I think is totally fine and it's cool to get excited and care about it and there's a a lot of you know kind of patronizing from The Establishment class of science journalists that I think is interesting to see firsthand as well well the one that was really striking for me as I wake up usually and I check Twitter and I check tech meme which kind of the front page of tech news and the front story that had just popped up onto Tech meme was a nature article talking about how LK 99 the results you know have been not fruitful from a replication standpoint and then the contrast was as I went to Twitter I had a very clear video from Andrew at varda where I don't think he's claiming that it is a superconductor but he's showing off the the kind of floating rock in a very clear way right like no more grainy photos that kind of like okay why didn't you just like post a video like we have modern cell phone cameras and so it just felt like such a kind of like the establishment wants to bless something versus kind of like the internet is saying like hey here's something cool I did maybe someone else can take it from here and the great part of this story is there's something tangible at the end of the day that like shows who wins like if you get a graph of resistivity it doesn't matter if it comes from some super fancy billion dollar established lab or from your garage like if you find the truth first you can actually be the the voice and and the proof in the conversation that's in theory what science is right yeah yeah but like you know at least in this case we have all these Gatekeepers trying to keep people out from the conversation but if you can prove it you know then then your results speak for themselves what's the difference here between physics and chemistry because from a Layman's standpoint I always think of physics as being much more theoretical and chemistry is kind of being the applied aspect of of physics right and then chemistry is what builds you up to biology but maybe maybe uh for again an ignorant person here what where is that kind of phase change uh from a scientific standpoint so the field of physics we're talking about has this insane name it's called condensed matter physics which is a ridiculous way to describe just like actual things you can touch the third co-host of that Moment of Zen was a Dropout from a PhD program at Berkeley on condensed matter physics but he decided to not show up on the podcast today because he had some other conflicts so we'll we'll save it for another time last minute bailing and if the audience wants to hear more of Antonio just constantly shame him yeah Twitter shame them on YouTube condensed matter physics Dropout he didn't show up for the conversation well it would have been cool to have it on and I can't wait to hear he thinks as well about the whole LK 99 Saga but um so there's not really a sharp line you know chemists are very interested in the interactions between atoms and molecules different energy levels different you know states that you can grow and there have been a lot of great um I think contributions from chemistry professors as to whether this crystal structure is actually stable or not you know based on the configuration of atoms and electronic properties physicists on the whole you know try to I think think about systems a little bit more abstractly or like a another layer of either abstraction or in depth so it's very common you know for example physicists will describe the shape of electronic orbitals for an atom your s orbital your p orbital that's a quantum mechanics problem and then once you have it as a chemist you can piece together how-to atoms with different orbitals will interact whether or not they'll form an ionic bond or a covalent bond but there's a lot of overlap especially in something like this where you're worried about how do we make this type of Crystal what are its properties so so arguably going back to this idea of trying to get the right amount of copper and Lead balance and the right switching of atoms there could be a version where now some you know world-class chemist is looking at this going oh interesting well I might use this technique or you know I've done this in some other area and I get a little bit more precise and so the applied you know manufacturer of this material could actually be a chemical breakthrough absolutely I mean there's there's many layers of uh different expertise that'll be important if we're if we ever get close to trying to commercialize something like this I think chemists have already suggested could we for example use gold instead of copper to dope The Matrix would that be more stable and be a little bit easier to get in to the lead appetite so a lot of I think interesting contributions from chemists physicists are mostly here to try to figure out is this material superconducting it if so why would that be what are the properties of electrons in this material that would lead to that and once they kind of have a yes or no they probably hand it off to a bunch of chemists to figure out the right way to manufacture this material and then a whole supply chain of you know machinists and computational chemists and things like that who would actually commercialize something like this can we do it aside on one of the chemicals that I or uh ingredients that are required here so something like red phosphorus yeah and so this is a chemical that's also used to make meth and that's why it's controlled and like I think Andrew was having a hard time getting access to this yeah it is pretty funny so the initial paper I think they had to synthesize their own lead phosphorus Lee and Kim because they were having trouble buying it as well um but red phosphorus I think is uh three copper and a phosphorus and it's how you can get your copper doped into the lead appetite in a way where so the lead appetite has phosphates po4s in the material and so in theory I don't understand this part that well but if you have the copper and phosphorus already bound then it's easier for the copper to make its way into the lattice when it's doping rather than just like melting it with a pot of copper or something Alex what are questions that you are most excited to to figure out over time what's um yeah what are the biggest things kind of on your mind I think people are still underestimating the importance of this thing you know if there's a chance it's real which I'll stay publicly kind of for the first time I would put her at around 10 or something like I don't think it's gonna turn out but there is a chance it's real this would be like the most important physics discovery of Our Lifetime by far I I think that it's still highly undervalued and uh under discussed how important this thing could be it's a topic you know room temperature superconductors you may have heard about it in like a science class documentary in eighth grade to get you excited or if you like took an introductory physics seminar at College there's like these are the big open problems in physics we want to solve this is one this is like really the Holy Grail that I think we should all be chasing after it's been interesting to see you know a lot of the skepticism a lot of the kind of tamping down of enthusiasm and excitement instead I think we should use this opportunity to get everyone saying like guys we should put a lot of effort behind finding something like this even even if this one's not it it would be really really impactful if we could we could find it and so that's I think a big under discussion thing right now just more broadly in the conversation there's I think other valuable interesting physics and science questions with regards to this material so the crystal structure is still not incredibly well understood and I have some I've been talking to some of the chemistry professors who are doing some analysis on different ways you could dope the copper into this one of them is saying that there's basically no stable configuration of copper in the common synthesis of this appetite Crystal and he's working on a paper right now to kind of show is it actually possible for there to be copper involved at all or is it that some of the properties may come from a different dope and you know a contaminant of some kind for example both Iris and Andrew are considering whether red phosphorus sometimes has defects of sulfur that I think are due to its manufacturing process and depending on which supplier you get your red phosphorus from it can contain a little bit of sulfur and one of the hypotheses is is it actually the sulfur that's causing some kind of levitation rather than the the copper itself so these I think those are some of the interesting science questions right now obviously the main one is like can we manufacture this material and get a resistivity plot that's the one we're all trying to look for right now but a lot of other interesting questions and tangentially so from meth rocks to to fart rocks basically exactly and so to your point though I I do think it's worth kind of observing sometimes especially now with the internet the way it is to create a meme and capture the imagination of a you know the world at a moment in time can actually have a powerful accelerating effect in terms of you know superconductors people knew about but you know what what are Silicon Valley billionaires who kind of in instead of donating to the Red Cross or traditional Charities instead they've built science companies and so you could imagine someone who has a longer term Horizon who doesn't necessarily care about the academic establishments put out a call to say hey I'm willing to fund material scientists or physics uh kind of people who who don't care about being in the lab and really just want to search for superconductors and long-term time Horizon you don't have to worry about your next kind of chunk of funding comes from it's like the mission of this institute is is to get to room temperature a superconductor so I I do think that's actually pretty powerful and again a testament to Twitter and that you can create a global moment where people are getting excited about a pretty esoteric or hardcore version of science right like when was the last time people were this excited about science maybe maybe the MRNA vaccines before uh you know you got all the baggage associated with them I was talking to my brother about this there's really only two tangible impacts of going super viral on Twitter right uh from this initial Thread about LK 99 one is we got some more sales at cometeer which is the coffee startup I work at from a lot of people clicking through my profile and that was kind of cool I love sharing the copy with people and the second is probably a lot of labs started working on this a lot faster than they would have otherwise and a lot more Labs did it TBD if that's a good thing or a bad thing maybe this thing is not real and we shouldn't have spent the time but it is interesting that public attention and enthusiasm can really spur a lot of work uh especially in China right now this has been the number one trending topic on Chinese social media for the past week and a half since the initial results came out and almost every condensed matter lab in China is working on replication of some kind so a lot of the kind of sketchy videos you see are from some chinese-like version of YouTube called Billy Billy and put all of Chinese social media is like going crazy over this so there's probably more enthusiasm excitement and work happening there but it's cool to spread a little bit about in the states as well one thing I wanted to shift back to uh because you mentioned it this this idea of the glass tube and then you kind of have to break it maybe explain a little bit like to the degree that you understand that like what what is that supposedly doing and that doesn't seem very precise it's definitely not if there's one thing that's clear it's that Lee and Kim are not I think extremely precise scientists when it comes to making this material I think it was Lee uh who's the main kind of chemist of the pair who gave a pretty long interview to Korean um journalists about his process for discovering this thing and a lot of it was like look I'm willing to put in more hours than anyone else you know melting down lead in my lab and people don't understand how hard the chemistry is here and he was like bragging with a lot of bravado and he clearly has some kind of chip on his shoulder from being shunned by the academic industry but he had a few interesting tidbits one of them was around like having thousands of samples that I think was interesting and the other was the sample that worked he noted in his lab book that he accidentally like took it out of the furnace and broke the quartz tube that it was annealing in on its way out of the furnace there was a crack in it and that sample for some reason ended up floating really well on the magnet like way better than all the other ones and he just had no idea why and I don't really have a great idea why that would be either maybe there's some oxidization happening um from like air entering the chamber or something but uh it goes to show that the synthesis of this material is very poorly understood even by the authors themselves and so it's probably going to take some work to try to get something close to their samples and materials Alice can you flesh out even more the the world in which this is true I know you said only you know 10 after something like that but let's say it's true say more about what it means or what's unexpected about what the implications are this is a scenario where it's time to like dream really big it's like something like the transistor coming where we had thought of many use cases we could use transistors for the obvious ones just being like repeating current you know for a radio or something like that but uh the the actual implications on everyday life just were blew out of the water anything we could imagine X anti and I think that's likely to be true but we can go through what are the extremely obvious things we will put this to use right away and then what are some things we might work on and then what are like the big picture crazy ideas so right now superconductors are primarily used in MRI machines where they make very strong magnetic fields in order to look inside your body MRI machines use liquid helium to cool their superconductors because the high temperature Cube rates are very fragile and harder to make so if you ever see an MRI machine there's like these giant tanks of liquid helium sitting outside the room or like underneath the floor or something which is very expensive and extremely cold and highly pressurized and it actually uh used to break your iPhone if the liquid helium leaked and you had too much helium getting into your circuits like cause some disruptions with the semiconductors anyways that's a bit of a tangent you can imagine all MRI machines would immediately switch over to using some cheaper easier version of these room temperature superconductors that's super obvious the other way superconductors used right now are mostly in I don't want to call them physics experiments but in physics research where you're trying to make very strong magnetic fields because because you have no resistance you can run so much current through this that you can make these super strong electromagnets one for example is that the Large Hadron Collider in CERN where you have these huge beams of protons being smashed into each other these are the strongest magnets like the largest strongest magnets in the world for the most part the other big one is as we talked about in nuclear fusion so in Fusion you try to use these super strong magnetic fields to hold this plasma together so that the hydrogen deuterium tritium all collide with each other at very high temperatures and pressures and fuse together and make fusion reactions one of the biggest challenges with Fusion is creating that magnetic field keeping it strong enough and tight enough to allow the reaction to replicate and so that's why commonal Fusion systems for example is using these higher temperature superconductors these Cube rates but iter and the other big Fusion collaborations all you use liquid helium cooled traditional superconductors which is really hard to use you need these huge coils of liquid helium at three Kelvin like six feet away from some of the hottest temperatures on Earth you know millions of degrees Kelvin or something and so that presents a huge sound and we would I think very quickly see a massive speed up in Fusion research which is the other big Holy Grail of physics right can we make free electricity basically uh with just hydrogen the universe's most abundant element and superconductors unlocks a major engineering update for Fusion so that that would be really exciting so those are the three like you could immediately see it being used in MRI machines and fusion and then other kind of physics research because that's where we use them right now Alex maybe explain um grid energy storage yeah so now it's like what are some potential applications it's like let's get more and more creative with it so one that I'm most excited about is right now we're in this process of trying to decarbonize our electrical grid we're trying to make electricity from low carbon sources and then use that on the grid for our for our end use cases it's very challenging because most low carbon sources are very intermittent the sun only shines when only blows at certain times so there's kind of two things you can do here and you probably have to do both of them one is transmit a ton more electricity Across the Nation so that when the sun is shining a lot in Arizona we'll use it more in New York city so building a huge transmission grid is a really key unlock for for better decarbonization of the whole grid the other is having a ton of energy storage you need to just be able to store electricity after you produce it to use it later so we have all these huge batteries coming online Lithium-ion batteries or other types of battery technologies for different lengths durations and capacities of storage batteries are pretty hard to make though lithium is we don't have a ton of lithium active mines and and refineries in the United States we don't have a ton of battery Manufacturing in the United States and so one of the most exciting I think potential use cases for superconductors and that we're actually doing right now on on the research scale are called superconducting magnetic energy storage systems or smes where you basically just have a big coil of superconductor and you inject a current into it because there's no resistance it just flows around the coil Forever Until you need it which is pretty crazy it does create a magnetic field in the middle because it's an electromagnet and so you have to be kind of careful about your geometry but you can just have these huge coils of superconductors that store electricity with zero losses for basically an indefinite amount of time and uh and then you can use that electricity and transmit it across the grid with superconducting wires to reduce all your losses so the two kind of key challenges of decarbonization I think are key targets for superconductors as well so maybe to make this like a little bit more I don't know practical is the right term but fantasy if if this exists you could in theory put solar panels all over the Sahara or you know desert where there is no I mean put in Nevada or somewhere and now you can store all that energy until it's needed and then fire it across the the United States and not have any uh loss so from transmission always being the hard problem where it's like the sun is shining over here but people live in the Cloudy area over here yeah and energy really is the key input for economic growth right over hundreds of years of industrialization the more energy you use the Richer your Society the happier and healthier people are and unlocking this much energy be it through Fusion storage transmission is I think a massive implication for like GDP for our society and is is definitely I think the highest impact way you can use room temperature superconductor but there's also a lot of other fun things you can speculate about which are like what are some crazy ideas we could we could do with superconductors if they ended up being real one of them that I think we'd see a ton of research in is quantum computers so right now quantum computers use superconductor is at very low temperatures to preserve coherence between different cubes so you have these like entangled Quantum particles that perform calculations they need to be connected to each other with a superconductor so you have to keep it really cold any small amount of heat will disrupt the whole system superconductors could allow you to make much more efficient quantum computers you still need some kind of coldness for for the qubits themselves but a quantum computer with I think something like 5000 calculating bits you also need error correcting qubits you could run what's called Shores algorithm which basically you know decrypts anything you need steals all your Bitcoin steals your bank account breaks all of modern encryption by factoring prime numbers really efficiently with quantum computer and once we get Shores algorithm like the world looks very very different uh and so you can imagine one of these quantum computers coming out and really causing some major problems to be fair the crypto currency people are actually at the Forefront of making sure that the algorithms get upgraded both in Bitcoin and ethereum to be Quantum resistant whereas you know SSL that's powering your Amazon shopping cart is that's not going to be an good place I think in order to make your encryption algorithm Quantum resistant you need to have superconducting qubits that connect from the different nodes of the system in order to pass like Quantum entangled information throughout the system I I think a lot of the research right now on Quantum encryption requires you to literally run these huge cables of superconductors in order for the computers to connect to each other I know there's some research at MIT going on right now but it's safe to say it's what we would probably decrypt things before we Quantum encrypt them if we had a superconductor I'm gonna have to go check with italic on this because I'm pretty sure that they have a curve and this is outside of my band outside of that there is an elliptic curve or equivalent that is quantum resistant but maybe maybe I'm wrong oh that would be exciting I I don't know so one one thing on the energy thing maybe for the for the fans here kardashev scale like this is like a physics thing it would be a major major change to our society a Kardashian scale civilization you know I think refers to capturing all the energy from the Sun or something we probably don't need that much energy yet you know we like what are the things that we need a lot of energy for probably like agriculture we could do it all indoors with lights instead of depending on fickle weather desalination would be helpful but it's tough to understand where we would use a billion times more energy than we're using right now or something but it would be exciting I mean we certainly unlocks a lot more possibilities like you could have a railgun that launches your spaceships instead of uh using Rockets you could just have super conducting coils through a volcano uh and it just shoots it up into the air um with a super strong magnetic field so maybe you could do more space exploration with that mag Love Trains Transportation I mean I don't think that uh High-Speed Rail will work whether or not we have room temperature superconductors over there in California but um for civilizations that have effective infrastructure process this could make your trains much faster yeah the law the laws of physics uh have nothing against the dysfunction of California's environmental review process unfortunately yeah what else should we be talking about that or you know stuff that people aren't observing right because there's a lot of chatter about this stuff and Talking Heads getting on there you know like you're you're in the thick of it and you actually have a deep understanding of science like what what is the most interesting thing to you something that's very interesting is how much a certain Equity markets have moved uh based on some of this information so there's a stock American superconducting company that was maybe mostly retail trade flows but moved by hundreds of millions of dollars of market cap on the superconducting news I don't know how deep the market was but you could potentially make a lot of money on uh public equities markets there's been some talk around private of it prediction markets like manifold Market or poly Market that are pretty Niche I think and there's a lot of first-time users there so it's tough to know how well calibrated their prediction which is I think around 30 is right now but to see like huge baskets of public like equities move by hundreds of millions of dollars means there are some smart people you know trading these stocks that maybe no more than us or maybe don't and that's I think wildly under discussed right now is uh there's a lot of speculation but like where's the smart money moving you know could could be a early signal yeah I would I would caution to say that maybe maybe this far money is the money moving in but uh I think don't underestimate the power of retail and memes uh to move move the box it that that's totally true it could just be all Robin Hood yolos or something in amsc and and so maybe just to close off you mentioned that this is probably if if true right 10 but from an expected value standpoint like 10 for something so significant you know what what have we had in the last hundred years in physics like relative to something like this that you know are kind of on the same order of magnitude obviously the Oppenheimer movie coming out right at the same time as this is you know you couldn't couldn't write a better script so maybe walk us through some of the other major breakthroughs in physics that this if if true would be on par with yeah what's interesting about this discovery compared to other physics Discovery is kind of how Niche it is in the scope of physics so a hundred years ago and we had this kind of golden age of modern physics we first understood all of quantum mechanics particle physics um you know some very complicated stuff that we researched and really discovered for this first time these were very foundational understanding of how our world works and really reconstituted our whole stack of you know how nature works and it's its properties this thing is like we know we can probably have a super doctor that works at room temperature we just don't really know what it'll look like or like what the exact arrangement of atoms would be to make this thing work no Theory rules it out everyone thinks that there probably is something out there that would superconductor room temperature but it is kind of like an engineering problem of like let's just try a bunch of different things and see what works so from a physics perspective there's a lot of we don't understand just because these crystals are so complicated and how the electrons flow through them what they look like and everything and that's all pretty I think useful research but it's not as foundational as I think some of the big other discoveries we've had whether it's you know the foundations of quantum mechanics the photoelectric effect which spun off a lot of this Einstein seminal paper in 1905 or I would probably as I said before compare it to like the invention of the transistor which is I think a really important physics Discovery and how you can make a semiconductor flip a gate to allow current to flow through it you know with super precise control uh it's a really interesting I think Applied Physics engineering Discovery with a huge impact on the world and look around us everything we use has semiconductors in it they're whatever it's talking about these days so I think superconductors are likely to be on a similar scale of impact as something like the transistor so first we get talking rocks and then we get floating rocks yeah first we made the Rocks think and now they're gonna float and we'll see where we go from there we wanted flying cars but we got uh talking and floating rocks exactly in in closing here take one or two of these questions or feel free to take both a couple things you're saying we need to think bigger when it comes to physics like we need to be more ambitious one say why do you think we've gotten less ambitious over the past few decades in physics like what what's held us up and two what is sort of your request for ambition in the sense of like where should we be looking to make uh to make more discoveries or you know what have we not yet talked about as it hopes what you hope for the future there yeah there was a survey that came out like six months ago or so in the United Kingdom of uh scientific researchers where it asked what do you think is the most important problem you could be working on and are you working on it and I think it was like one like five percent of people said they were working on it and uh and that's tragic like you know the brilliant best minds of our generation are doing something other than what they think is the most impactful you know the famous quote if you show me the incentive I'll show you the outcome I think unfortunately a lot of our research systems are reward a lot of incremental progress that builds on the works of others and it's really hard to take major risks and have a huge um swing that's super outside of the mainstream you're unlikely to get funding you're unlikely to get tenure or appointed positions at universities and so in some sense that's why I think Lee and Kim you know working in a garage outside of Seoul is a really interesting wake-up call to the world of researchers that you should try crazy things like go outside the mainstream do something crazy as Venture capitals I'm sure you guys know you have a power law distribution of outcomes and it's easy to take the safe bets a lot of the times especially when your livelihood depends on it but it's worth applying all of our work to what we think is the most impactful most important things we can work on and uh who am I to tell physicists what to work on but I think it's always a helpful kick for each of us to think what is the most important thing I could be doing and am I doing it I was just going to say that that is like Silicon Valley right like if you just look at the most successful people in Silicon Valley they tend to be really good at I'm going to work on this one thing I'm obsessed with it I don't care if people care and there's a funding mechanism for those people and so I wonder I wonder how we can shift some of that and I mentioned before is you have a lot of these billionaires who've made a lot of money doing a very applied thing within the world of bids but I think have you know increasing interest in longevity Patrick Collison has the arc Institute so I I I I'm optimistic that maybe the the kind of meme from the superconductor LK 99 Twitter drama is going to spark some interest in people saying I have the infinitely long time Horizon yeah let's do a superconducting Manhattan Project like it should be out there right let's go find it that's a inspiring note to end on Alex thanks so much for coming on Moment of Zen thanks so much for having me you guys I encourage you to check out commeteer coffee which is I do with my J job we have tried to make the world's best coffee really convenient but it was great talking to you about superconductors I'm a customer uh I love it it's in the freezer boom put it in it tastes great awesome yeah and I I would just say this is the the Moment of Zen I learned the most on so really really appreciate you coming on thanks so much all right appreciate you guys have a good one

Channel: Moment of Zen

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Id: lCw2DroknMs

Length: 52min 19sec (3139 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 06 2023