Posted on 09/27/2022 9:49:11 AM PDT by BenLurkin
In 2020, Ranga Dias, a physicist at the University of Rochester, and his colleagues published a sensational result in Nature, featured on its cover. They claimed to have discovered a room-temperature superconductor: a material in which electric current flows frictionlessly without any need for special cooling systems. Although it was just a speck of carbon, sulfur, and hydrogen forged under extreme pressures, the hope was that someday the material would lead to variants that would enable lossless electricity grids and inexpensive magnets for MRI machines, maglev railways, atom smashers, and fusion reactors.
On Monday Nature retracted the study, citing data issues other scientists have raised over the past 2 years that have undermined confidence in one of two key signs of superconductivity Dias’s team had claimed. “There have been a lot of questions about this result for a while,” says James Hamlin, an experimental condensed matter physicist at the University of Florida. But Jorge Hirsch, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and longtime critic of the study, says the retraction does not go far enough. He believes it glosses over what he says is evidence of scientific misconduct.
Nature editors took the step over the objection of all nine authors of the paper. “We stand by our work, and it’s been verified experimentally and theoretically,” Dias says. Ashkan Salamat, a physicist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and another senior member of the collaboration, points out the retraction does not question the drop in electric resistance—the most important part of any superconductivity claim. He adds, “We’re confused and disappointed in the decision-making by the Nature editorial board.”
(Excerpt) Read more at science.org ...
Ping
You get the science you pay for.
Well, I want a robot that cleans the toilets and barks when somebody comes to the door.
That it superconducts at any temp?.................
Awesome.
Too bad. I was pretty amped up about it.
Well, I want a robot that cleans the toilets and barks when somebody comes to the door.
I had one of those dog robots, it barked at the toilet
and pooped by the front door.
Bad robot, bad!
And can also be a slot machine.
A while back some folks claimed they had exceeded the speed of light. One of the cables in the system was a little shorter than was used in the calculation.
Keep peanut butter-flavored water in the toilet and get a dog. Solved.
OK, that was clever.
Resistance is futile
“He believes it glosses over what he says is evidence of scientific misconduct.”
(related: Fauci, vaccine, climate change, ozone layer)
winner
winner
I’m not surprised.
My simple minded view is that we see superconductivity at extremely low temperatures because the atoms in the material are not experiencing thermal induced motion.
All is quiet on the Western Front and electrons slide through without being bumped around.
If something like that is actually the case then room temperature superconductivity may be a pipe dream.
Watts the problem?
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