SIO377: Did Scientists Really Invent A Room Temperature Superconductor?

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:16 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 377. I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and I'm excited for today's show. Let's see, before we get to the topic, I was recently on Cognitive Dissonance. Tom and Cecil, two of my faves from going way back when, from the beginning, great. Their show is great. Make sure you listen to Cognative Dissoniance. And if you want to hear a little guest spot from me, that's on the latest episode, so check them out.

So, today's episode, you may have seen in the news, possibly, that lab out of South Korea claimed that they had produced a room temperature superconductor, you're like me, you're wondering, oh, I kind of remember what that is, but not really, and I also don't know know, like how extreme a claim that is. Is that like cold fusion, or is that like, you know, is that like perpetual motion machine?

Or is that, I don't know, a reasonable thing that someone may discover, and so how exactly does that work? Has it held up to scrutiny? Was it instantly debunked or not? These questions are things that I can't answer. So how about I bring on the expert. Anne, back for, I think, the third time, after for the three-peat, it's superconductors. What are they? This one legitimately invented, what happens if it was, what would be good for if it was, all kinds of questions.

Let's get on over to my interview with Ann. As a reminder, if you want ad -free shows, each and every episode, go to patreon.com/seriouspod, and of course the bonus monthly, Seriously Awful Movies, can't wait for another one of those, oh that was fun. So, know, based on the Patron comments, uh, think patrons enjoyed that that Armageddon one as much as I did, as much as all of us did, actually, all four of us doing it. Ton of fun. Can't wait to do it again.

So, that said, let's get to the show. We're once again joined by secret government agent and Anne. I call you Quantum Anne, but are you now Superconducting Anne? How are you doing today?

0:02:06 Anne: To be Superconducting Anne, now I'm Quantum Anne.

0:02:09 Thomas: Oh, oh, really? Okay. What a plot twist. For coming back on the show. Always love these episodes. Messaged me because of this kind of viral claim that I had seen, but I didn't, you know, really understand, which was about a room temperature Superconductor. And going to be so fun to talk about because not only does it seem like a pretty, I don't know, crazy claim, so it'd be amazing if true, but it'd also be a chance to learn about why would that be really cool and what's going on there. And I have tons of questions for you, plus I'm sure you have your own spiel to give, and I can't wait to hear it.

0:02:46 Anne: Thing I'm going to do is say that this isn't just a claim for a room temperature superconductor, it's a room-temperature ambient pressure superconductor. And

0:02:56 Thomas: Oh, I didn't catch that part. Well outline the basics for us. A lab somewhere, was it South Korea or something? They, they did, I do declare we have superconductivity. And you said, okay, not only room temperature, but ambient pressure. So not under, all don't need a bunch of dill fridges. Is that what we're, does this hypothetically negate the use of, make fridgers or is that a separate thing?

0:03:03 Anne: Yes. Um, Well, Oh, So the ambient pressure means that you don't need, um, typically what's called a diamond anvil cell. And yeah

0:03:25 Thomas: Right. I meant the room temperature thing, but the whole thing combined, I guess, is what I'm talking about.

0:03:29 Anne: Because there have been other, um, room temperature-ish superconductors. Um, this other paper, it was 294 K, which is room temperature, and not a lot of pressure. It, so I actually cannot say for certain if they used a diamond anvil cell or not. But typically your room temperature

0:03:47 Thomas: Are talking about this other thing that already happened or? OK, so

0:03:49 Anne: Yeah, Yeah, Paper that they reference, so are a few of nearly room temperature superconductors, but they are typically at very high pressures, Like, Um, hundreds of thousands of times the atmosphere.

0:04:00 Thomas: OK, like how many dead crunch submarines Are we talking about? Yeah.

0:04:06 Anne: Oh, Goodness, wait, wait, oh gosh, I used to know this because I used to have it on all my slides. Um, What the Pressure at the Mariana Trench was, or is.

0:04:13 Thomas: Oh, oh, they didn't even get close to that far, though.

0:04:17 Anne: No, but it's, um, I don't want to say the wrong thing, but I'm gonna say it's maybe, maybe thousands of atmospheres, and temperature superconductors are like hundreds of thousands of atmosphere, if not millions of atmoshpheres of pressure. So they're not applicable to be useful.

0:04:35 Thomas: Right. So what is a superconductor and what do we need it for? I know we've kind of talked about it, but pretend we're all not scientists. So we've already forgotten. Forgotten, huh?

0:04:43 Anne: So there are two main things about a superconductor that are useful. One is it conducts electricity with zero resistance. This is probably what you hear the most. Reason it is called a superconductor and not a perfect conductor is it also has another property, that it is a perfect diamagnet, which means It rejects all magnetic field, so

0:05:07 Thomas: Interesting. So there's also something called a perfect conductor?

0:05:12 Anne: Um, or not any of those materials are useful or synthesized in any sort of manner that can ever be used, I don't know, but If You do calculations certainly they exist, yeah.

0:05:23 Thomas: Are those Still theoretical, you're saying?

0:05:29 Anne: Or if they exist, they're in such, you naturalized circumstances that nobody can ever use one. Whereas superconductors we use, I use superconductors every day. Um, of people use superconductors. Uh, when you go to, uh, get an MRI, that'S that's, a superconducting magnet. I don't know exactly what superconductor they're using, but, uh, typically some sort of what we call a conventional superconductor, something that is a metal that can be spun into a wire. So maybe like, you know, niobium, or maybe tin, whatever has good properties for them. They make just a giant coil out of this wire that is superconducting. They cool it all down to somewhere below four Kelvin. And that makes These just massive magnetic fields that that you can use for MRI?

0:05:39 Thomas: Oh, Really, really?

0:06:14 Thomas: Are you telling me that's that's Happening in an MRI machine they've got it somewhere? They've got that cooled down to four, four Kelvin? Wow, I had no idea.

0:06:17 Anne: Yeah, Yep, Yeah, They use Uh, they use a closed cycle helium cryostats to, uh, to circulate and compress the helium. And if you've ever been like in the, the back room of where they have, you know, these sort of like any sort of medical imaging that involves like fields, like an MRI, Um, probably hear this, this noise, this this

0:06:24 Thomas: Yeah, Oh, you hear a lot of noise that's for damn sure.

0:06:43 Anne: Um, Yeah, Um, rhythmic, rhythmic chunking noise that's the compressor for the helium, yeah.

0:06:47 Thomas: Yeah, Really, oh, so I've had a couple MRIs, I, I, all right, and it uh, it does kick in like when there's a difference between like the ambient noise and the like, all right, going in for another cycle noise, I think. So, suffice to say there's going to be some noise going on the whole time because they have to keep something four Kelvin, which sounds pretty cold. That sounds chilly. Yeah.

0:07:11 Anne: Yeah, so it's, you know, like how occasionally your fridge starts going with this compressor, it's the same thing. Um, it's just instead of Freon, it's compressing helium, and it, it compresses the helium so much that the helium turns liquid, and then they cycle that helium through the, a superconductor that they want to use, it can stay superconducting and just make these massive magnetic fields. Your MRI is, I think your typical MRI is like between two to four Tesla. So it's a big field, you need a superconductor to get that.

0:07:15 Thomas: So um So wait, just compressing the helium and making it liquid makes it cold somehow? Oh,

0:07:46 Anne: Yeah, it's that ideal law, You know, you have your PV equals nRT or KB, capital NT, depending on whether you're a chemist or a physicist.

0:07:58 Thomas: Pleasure, so there's some function of pressure, volume, temperature? Is that what it is? And so if you, so

0:08:02 Anne: Yeah, yeah, everything has a, so that's called an equation of state. Has an equation of state. Pressure times volume is energy. It's basically your energy curve. Yeah.

0:08:13 Thomas: The, up in the mountains where the air gets really thin, I associate that's a lower air pressure and that gets all cold. Is that a different thing? Oh, retaining the heat of the sun.

0:08:21 Anne: That's just Because There's Less Air Mal Yeah.

0:08:23 Thomas: Yeah. Okay. Or yeah. Okay, okay. So separate thing, but this suffice to say, if you compress or change the volume, the pressure of anything, I guess that affects the temperature just because it's some sort of conservation anything like it all has to, you all ends up with some sort OF number and you change the other kind of things. Then it's okay. I didn't know that.

0:08:25 Anne: Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yeah.

0:08:43 Thomas: So it just makes it super duper cold. And had no idea that the MRI had all that stuff. So that is a superconductor of sorts. Now, is there a different kind of, I don't know, levels of supercondructor? Is there some, like, of conductivity that you need to reach to be that? What I'm asking is, is it just the room temperature thing that would be better about this hypothetical one? Or could it also be an even better superconductor just in the conductivity? Or is that kind of constant?

0:09:11 Anne: A good direction to go in, because if you, if you noticed what I said, that MRI is running at like, say, four Kelvin or so, and it just has some compressors and it's this giant magnet. It And, you know, when we talked about, uh, superconducting qubits, you talking about dill fridges that are hopefully

0:09:25 Thomas: Mm-hmm. The Dill Fridge. Ba -ba -ba bam! We got back to the Dill fridges, everybody. That's what we came here for.

0:09:35 Anne: People aren't acting like too much of dill fridge is here, but we dill fringe goes to like tens of milli Kelvin, um.

0:09:35 Thomas: Oh so oh so as in like super close to zero but not oh

0:09:46 Anne: So like getting Getting to 4 Kelvin, 2 Kelvin, not that hard. We can do it by just relatively easily by compressing helium and running it through a closed cycle machine. But once you want to get below 2 Kelvin, now it starts to get hard and we need two stage fridges. Once you get down to tens of millikelvin, it gets really hard. And so you might wonder, if an MRI can run on a superconductor at 4 Kelvin, why are we using a dull fridge for superconducting qubits?

0:09:46 Thomas: Right right yeah yeah you

0:10:21 Anne: And that goes back to your question of, yes, not getting it down the curve more, it is the type of material that it is, pretty much. So there are different flavors of superconductivity. And yeah, there's different performances.

0:10:24 Thomas: Need it to be even more conductive, I guess, right, there's dill flavor, I prefer, I like dill. Yeah. Dill is really yummy. Okay, what are some of the other flavors and

0:10:44 Anne: Like dill flavor too. So mentioned like a, you probably an MRI. I'm not sure exactly what superconductors they're using, but I would assume what I called a conventional superconductor or a BCS type superconductor. Um, a, and superconductivity is a, it's a phase transition, so another one of those phases of matter that we don't learn about in school, so, you know, there's more than gas and, uh, and solid, there's tens of different phases, and super superconductivity is one of them. So what happens with the superconductor is your electrons are able to interact in your lattice, and they can effectively couple together and form a Cooper pair. And now you have electrons, which are fermions, and fermions don't like each other.

So, a can't have all the fermions in the same state, just don't do that. So if you have a lot of electrons in your material, all your electrons cannot be in the lowest energy state because they have to stack, not going to live happily in that sort of degenerate state. State. So if pair up, though, what happens is your fermion is now a boson, and your bosons can all happily be in the same state. That's what happens with a superconductor.

0:11:05 Thomas: These are all just electrons, they're different configurations of electrons, things those you said?

0:12:19 Anne: Electrons are fermions, but when you have two electrons coupled together in a Cooper pair, now the Cooper pair is a boson and that's what allows you to have superconductivity, because now your charge carrier is not forced to be in different energy levels, it can all be, they can all effectively share the ground state, and now your charge carriers can freely carry charge throughout your material, so

0:12:29 Thomas: Okay.

0:12:49 Thomas: Okay, conductivity is a thing. Obviously, every day we have a billion things that need that, right? I mean, our power lines, right, is that kind of like, so contrast that super conductivity with like, I don't know, a wire, something we would be familiar with.

0:13:03 Anne: So like your copper wire, is electrons or holes, depending on whether you're an engineer or how you want to think about what the sign of current is, they are carrying charge through your wire, so you, you, you, voltage, you, you apply an energy difference on either end, and you're going to get current flowing through the wire, the carrier of that current is an electron in a copper wire, in superconducting wire, the carrier of that charge is a Cooper pair, no.

0:13:34 Thomas: Assume that when you have the copper cable, we're nowhere near superconductivity, right? So, let's see if we can handle this amount of technical stuff. But, like, why is that exactly?

0:13:45 Anne: Just the structure of the copper and it's just the phase of the material. Yeah. Like say you have, uh, niobium. Can have that In a wire. I could make a circuit with niobium if I wanted to for some reason. And it would work, um, same way, uh, you have electrons carrying charge, uh, throughout the material, so I, I apply a voltage difference across my two ends of the wire, electrons carry my current through the wire. Um, if you cool down the niobium, um, actual metal is going to change structure and it will allow, um, it goes through the phase transition. Once it gets past a certain energy, the actual physical structure of the metal and, you know, the bonds and sort lattice sites are interacting will allow for the electrons to pair up into Cooper pairs, and then it will become a superconductor. So you can have materials that will be a normal conductor and then you cool them down or change whatever parameter you want to change and then they will become a superconductor.

0:13:52 Thomas: Even heard of it.

0:14:51 Thomas: I get the, the versus the, you bosons or the whatever's It's those conducting better for some reason. So what, what does that mean then? What are we losing? Are we losing energy or something if we are using copper wire versus if we hypothetically had some like superconductive wire? Yeah, give it to me that way. Imagine our power grid or something and imagine a hypothetical wire technology that's like superconductive wires somehow. We gain?

0:15:16 Anne: And that would be great, that thing that we would gain. And this is something that we definitely want out of a room temperature supercondructor, we would want power lines to be superconductors because then we would not have waste heat because You would not have resistance in the wire dissipating your energy, so you're, you're applying some voltage, some of that voltage that you're supplying is being lost because it's being dissipated as resistance, which then, you know, is waste heat, yeah.

0:15:22 Thomas: Yeah, right. Ah, okay.

0:15:43 Thomas: Creates heat. Okay. Okay. So we're losing essentially power relative this hypothetical. We're losing some amount of it. This would be good for our energy.

0:15:51 Anne: So Yeah. Oh, we're We're, um, we're, think energy transmission lines are about 60 efficient because

0:15:56 Thomas: Okay. Okay, and I'll try one more time, but I don't want to get bogged down on it. I know it's the difference between just electrons doing it versus these other configurations, but like why exactly? Is there any way you can explain that simply or no?

0:16:09 Anne: You have like the most efficient way to carry current through a material, but if you have a collection of fermions, you cannot have all of them in the state that's the most sufficient, efficient. You have bosons, they can all be in the state that's the most efficient.

0:16:09 Thomas: Oh, Okay. So some amount, so in a normal copper wire you got some electrons in the best state just because of probability, but like nowhere near all of them, and that best state is just like they're at an energy level where for whatever reason that's more efficient. I can't quite get all the way there, but I think I know what you mean, so

0:16:43 Anne: Yeah. The only thing I would, I would correct there is that it's not because of probability. It's actually the chemical bond structure, the way thatthe electrons are bound to the atom. You, you probably learned, you um, know, the electron shells, the orbitals. Yeah, that's because they're fermions. You You can't have more than, you your set number that's for your shell.

0:16:58 Thomas: Yeah, right. I I shouldn't have said probability. I just meant like for a given collection of these electrons, some percentage of them is going to be because that's all that's allowable or that's what will be there essentially. Gotcha. To say some percentage of them, some proportion of them. And if you go superconductive them, all of them are. So they're all at that level. Okay.

0:17:06 Anne: Yeah. Mm -hmm. Yep. At least all the Cooper pairs can be. Yeah.

0:17:26 Thomas: Hmm. Are we still talking about levels of superconductative or is superconducting just mean like, oh, you're at a hundred percent?

0:17:33 Anne: So is where I are ways that we can talk about levels of superconductivity in, like, how close you are to a transition. Composition, one of the uses for like superconductors that that is used, um, say a SQUID, which I think you're going to like this because it's an acronym that stands for Superconducting QUantum Interference Device. Um, this device basically uh uses a superconductor and it interferes to beams of superconducting material on what's called a Josephson junction. But that interference that you get from these two paths of superconductivity can effectively trap very, very small amounts of magnetic field. And that's how you measure really really small magnetic fields, um, in that sort of device we care about what you'd say like, you know, the spectrum of superconductivity because a lot of times we like to run those devices on the edge of superconductivity because we want to know when there's like something that hits it that makes it stop functioning. So in that sense we do care care about levels of superconductivity. So

0:18:45 Thomas: I guess the other sense I was going for is, you know, you mentioned there's a reason you have to use a dill fridge instead of whatever the heck the MRI is doing. So what is that reason exactly? Because you need different materials to be superconducted?

0:18:55 Anne: That's thing where the materials and the type of superconductivity are not equal. So some materials, they might have a very high superconducting transition temperature, but they're not useful for a precise application location because maybe they're not uniform. This is a problem we have with a lot of high-temperature superconductors like YBCO. You know when you look up online and you see that picture of a magnet floating on a disc and it's got the cloud? Yeah, that's a disc of YBCO with a magnet on it. Used to do this demo all the

0:19:06 Thomas: Okay. Oh yeah. Those are words. Yeah,

0:19:37 Anne: Time.

0:19:37 Thomas: I agree with those being letters that you can say.

0:19:39 Anne: I think it's yttrium barium copper oxide.

0:19:44 Thomas: It was literally like initials or whatever. Okay. Bring that up? That's a different kind of, which

0:19:46 Anne: Yeah. So that one will superconduct at liquid nitrogen temperatures. So 77 K.

0:19:55 Thomas: Is balmy, which is nice and warm compared to, yeah, gotcha.

0:19:57 Anne: Yes. Oh yeah. That's, that's so warm. It's so might as well be room temperature. Liquid nitrogen is super easy to make and super easy to work with. And it also kills terminators. So it's, it's useful. There's a reason why we can't use though. We can't even use an MRI eye out of that material. Because, It's it's a ceramic, it's not machinable, I can't make a wire out of it, um, It's very difficult to solder leads on to it, um,

0:20:16 Thomas: Ah, right. Okay. It's not that it's different levels of superconductivity per se. Say. It's that different materials that you need to be superconductive for different purposes.

0:20:37 Anne: And and there's different mechanisms of superconductors too, there's... there's lots of different flavors of this, like, um, high temperature ones, there's lots of different ones, but we'll typically call it like a type two superconductor. And that's something that's, it's a ceramic or it's a semiconductor. And then it transitions into a supercondructor. They have a very different response to magnetic field. Your traditional conventional superconductor, it can apply a magnetic field. And the more magnetic field I apply to it, I can destroy the superconductivity and it follows this nice round curve.

0:20:49 Thomas: Okay. Okay.

0:21:17 Anne: Type two superconductors can be that they can trap magnetic fields and little vortices. They can take way more field than a type one and it gets very, very complicated. So not as useful in terms of, say, measuring magnetic field because don't have a good response curve to them.

0:21:38 Thomas: So I think I get it. So when these folks at this lab were shooting for a room temperature superconductor, and also you're saying roughly room pressure -ish or something, not super high pressure.

0:21:51 Anne: This one was room pressure, ambient pressure, room pressure.

0:21:52 Thomas: Okay, ambient pressure. Yeah, Sure. Kind of material are they going for there, like

0:21:54 Anne: Yep, yep. You're going to go for whatever gets you a room temperature superconductor at ambient pressure.

0:22:00 Thomas: Well, Seemed like you already said we had those for stuff that wasn't useful though.

0:22:06 Anne: But not at room temperature and ambient pressure?

0:22:09 Thomas: At Room temperature, so it was still It was

0:22:10 Anne: Yeah. Have had room temperature superconductors at very, very high pressure. And also one that wasn't so high pressure, but it was still high pressure. Had never, well, okay, let me back up. People have claimed that there have been superconductors at room temperature and ambient pressure before. Those claims have never panned out.

0:22:21 Thomas: I've Claimed Okay. Okay. Okay. We're still in terms of room temperature and, you normal pressure, which is where we're going. We're still at the, whatever the fuck material you can get to be superconductive would be still amazing. Don't have to go down this, this route, but based on the conversation, is it possible you could achieve that, but it's still not really very useful because the material you're using is not useful? Or would that still just be useful for something.

0:22:43 Anne: Yep, exactly. Sure, it could be useful for something, but it's not going to help your quantum computer. It's maybe not going to help your MRI. Eye. However, you ceramics know, are a pain in the ass to deal with, but if you had one that superconducted at room temperature and room pressure, then maybe we'd be willing to deal with the pain in they ass that they are a bit more to make them work for applications.

0:23:21 Thomas: Gotcha.

0:23:21 Anne: Right now, nobody's going to really, I'm not going to bother developing, being, if you want to get into business speak, nobody's going to develop a product that It takes so much work to make the material work if it still needs to be cooled to, you know, 100K.

0:23:31 Thomas: Okay, okay. So, let's suffice to say, it still would be amazing. It wouldn't be like, you know, we've developed an amazing quantum computer instantly or something, but it's still, I'm sure someone would find an application for it, and it would be every bit as impressive or whatever. It would still be a very impressive claim. We'd, scientists or whoever, engineers, or just, you now, CEOs, I don't know who, would be super excited about it.

0:23:46 Anne: Yeah.

0:23:58 Anne: Yeah. Yeah. It'd still be impressive. It'd Still be useful. No, it's not going to help with quantum computing. No, It's not gonna help with MRIs. No, It's Not gonna really help with any quantum sensors that we have that need superconductors right now.

0:24:10 Thomas: Okay. Okay and so the at that lab and they've made that claim. Um. Where do you want to go, you want to talk about like your reaction to it or do you wanna, where where, do you, wanna go on this?

0:24:19 Anne: Yeah, so I I'll say is like I've that there was a lot of kind of like a lot of people rushing to talk about this, and think that was the wisest thing to do There's some weird stuff in the paper, and there's some weird things about how this paper came about, like just that you can tell from the outside, like they, it's nothing, there's nothing wrong with publishing your paper on archive, um, fine, oh.

0:24:28 Thomas: Mm-hmm.

0:24:47 Thomas: What, you mean the literal like website or journal they're using?

0:24:49 Anne: Oh yeah. That's Uh, um, repository, serves a good purpose. You pulled up on Google and it says preprint. Um, nice about archive is that it's it's a way for you to like, um, didn't notice this, this field's highly competitive and all, and you know, I I'm not a very competitive person, so, um, one thing, Exactly.

0:25:10 Thomas: That's why you work in government, right?

0:25:12 Anne: I am not allowed to compete, um, it's sometimes, times like before going to a conference, you know, get all scared that somebody's gonna steal their stuff, right? So one thing that that helped taper down a little bit of the toxicity of the field was being able to go, okay, I'm gonna put her in archive first, that means I've peed on this, so it's mine and I've staked my claim.

0:25:14 Thomas: Yeah.

0:25:35 Thomas: That's a very scientific term. Yeah. Yeah. Well, do you mean just in terms of like what, a patent or something or like a Nobel Prize or, you know, what are we talking about here? Or just pure like cred.

0:25:37 Anne: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, Yeah, I know. And then There's Oh, Pure ego, I guess. I guess, like, grants and and And for thing, yeah, speaking of the Nobel, it's original paper they put on archive only had three authors, and you can only split the Nobell Prize three ways, so yeah, um, also named it after themselves, so I mean, come on. It's it gauche.

0:25:48 Thomas: OK, OK. Right. OK. They're so they'RE fish fishing for a for a Nobel. Is that what you're saying?

0:26:06 Anne: Yeah. Whoever gets this discovery is getting the Nobel Prize, yeah.

0:26:11 Thomas: Gotcha. But so is this? You're saying this isn't exactly a red flag, but it is, I don't know, an orange flag, a yellow flag. Where are we?

0:26:17 Anne: Wouldn't Yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say like, so, so this is this is where we're

0:26:20 Thomas: If someone really did this, what would they do? Tell us what would happen.

0:26:23 Anne: See this exactly, I think this is the part where I I warned you that my take on it is going to be a little bit different because

0:26:31 Thomas: Lucky for you, I don't know any of the takes on it. So I'm just getting different from what I'm just getting your take. Just give it to me. Sock it to Me.

0:26:37 Anne: That question of, if people had really discovered it, what would they have done? This.

0:26:41 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, okay. Well sure.

0:26:45 Anne: Exactly this. Because, um, there's this thing that we have that, um, want to put this science on this pedestal and be like, this is science, science said X, science is always right, and if X isn't right, then they want real science, and here's all the crap that they did, and people get really bitchy about. And it's like, scientists are still people. People are people. Sometimes they do crappy things. Sometimes they do things that are great. Sometimes I do things aren't great. Sometimes they make mistakes. All have egos and motivations. And not every paper that's printed in a journal and peer reviewed is is perfect.

0:27:11 Thomas: Okay. Right. Sure.

0:27:33 Anne: So we can, it's very easy to look at something like this and be kind of a crappy person on the sideline and go, oh, look, their resistivity curve sucks. They didn't apply external magnetic field. Why didn't they do that? Oh my God, that's what I would have done. And it's like, well, yeah, but you is really hard to solder leads onto a ceramic. Maybe that's why their resistive recurve looks so crappy. Should they have published it and claimed it's a room temperature superconductor? Yeah, questionable. But, you know, people do weird stuff all the time. So I wouldn't say there's necessarily like, oh, it's a red flag, oh they're frauds, they're scamming. I think they're very genuine.

0:27:33 Thomas: All right. Here's where I think I'm struggling and the listeners are going to struggle. I think you're one or two steps into an argument that we don't know about. So I, yeah.

0:28:20 Anne: That's probably true.

0:28:21 Thomas: So, I think, I think you need to reset. You either, I'm, hey, I're happy to go there. I want to hear about your Twitter feud. Don't get me wrong. But, no, we don'T, I don'T think you're overestimating the amount that I even know about the first levels of this argument versus kind of your, your take on it. So, but I gather from context clues here, are you saying that this was what ridiculed pretty hard? And you're saying like, okay, don't need to ridicule it as hard as maybe people are or what?

0:28:48 Anne: Yeah, I think there was a reaction of a lot of people who were either deep in the field or even people who were kind of on the periphery of the field that were looking out for something wrong with it and then, like, doing the mic drop. Oh, look, it's this thing, you know, because, like I said, the paper's kind of weird. I mean, so they publish one paper.

0:29:03 Thomas: Ah, okay. Well, and it's the nature of the thing, right? I assume this is something that is this, what is it? Is this like cold fusion, you know, where someone claims it and you're like, all right, this is probably bullshit. Let's be honest.

0:29:23 Anne: I it's very analogous to Cold Fusion in that this is not like some fly-by-night operation that this isn't from. This is a real institute. These are real researchers, but like there was for Cold Fusion. That was a real university. Those were real researchers who had done real work and went on to do real work afterwards. You know?

0:29:31 Thomas: Oh, I actually don't Know that that, whatever that is, that would be an interesting story to. I just know that that's something that people try. If I don't even know what that means, I assume it's cold, it's fusion, it's good, sounds good. Um, I guess the only reason I brought it up is the comparison being, if someone, this is something that people would love to claim it will, as you say, it would probably guarantee you a Nobel if true. And so when scientists, somebody makes this claim, you're going to get a lot of other people with professional, I've, you know, I don't mean to say like professional jealousy in a, in a bad way, but like you're gonna get other professionals who are like, all right, this has got to be BS. Is that What you're saying? Okay.

0:30:17 Anne: Yeah. Yeah.

0:30:19 Thomas: And so And, and, as a result, maybe people looked for the first thing they could to discredit it when that wasn't necessarily entirely valid in your view. Do I understand you correctly? Okay, okay.

0:30:29 Anne: And the criticisms are, I think, not really fair. Like, so, so part of the story of how this was, this came out was you had, you had a paper come out on Archive that claimed room temperature, the title of it is the first room temperature ambient pressure superconductor. That's, take some balls, right right?

0:30:43 Thomas: -huh, yeah. Yeah. Sure, that's pretty Uh, pretty Clear. Yeah, yeah. Really?

0:30:52 Anne: It only has three authors, also kind of take someballs.

0:30:56 Thomas: Like, so, so, like, they decided a month, they drew straws, like you're assuming there's more people, like this is getting, this is Nobel worthy, so we gotta

0:31:03 Anne: Yes. Because what happened is, like, hours if not a day later, you have a second paper put out by the same group on Archive that has more authors and a little bit of a scaled back title, so This indicates that you had Kind of a fight in The group Over who published, whether they, they were going to publish and what they were going to publish.

0:31:03 Thomas: Oh.

0:31:28 Anne: And there's Different, yeah.

0:31:18 Thomas: Interesting. Okay. Oh. Oh. That's Interesting. I love that detail, so There could be people on the team that were like, no, man, like we probably shouldn't claim that. And then there's other, like, Nobel hounds, they're, They're like, no, we've done it by Eureka. And then they want, so they put out two different papers. That's, that's fascinating. Okay.

0:31:30 Anne: Exactly.

0:31:46 Anne: Now, what what, my, what my beef on some of the criticism is, is that the, that a group put out two different papers with different data. I mean, the data is clearly all from the same place, but Like different pieces, like a certain subset of data was presented in the first paper and a bigger subset of data was published in the second paper. The second paper has more authors. The language on the second page is a little bit more complex. The second page on the first paper is scaled back to be significantly less dramatic.

0:31:58 Thomas: No more careful. Okay. Gotcha.

0:32:15 Anne: That does not make it a scam. And I'm sorry, but people do that all the time. This seen some people going like, "Oh, the fact that they did this shows that they're not real scientists." It's like, no, real scientists can be just as bitchy as anybody

0:32:18 Thomas: Sure. Okay. So not a scam.

0:32:32 Thomas: Ah, that was the, I think that might've been the information I didn't have. So people were calling these people, not real scientists. Ah, now what you said makes sense.

0:32:33 Anne: Yeah and I think there's this tendency to

0:32:41 Thomas: Science, this isn't a guy like in his basement who's like, "I figured out a perpetual motion machine," and you're like, "All right, that's obviously wrong," and you're not a scientist. You're saying that's unfair to call this that? Okay,

0:32:41 Anne: Do that where Yeah, Yeah, I think I think that's unfair, and also it's this thing of whenever there does tend to be this, this tendency of when people, when scientists are wrong about something, or maybe misled, to jump to the discrediting of them as people, saying they aren't good enough to be a scientist, when it's like, scientists are just people, yeah.

0:33:19 Thomas: Like, Maybe We're trying to know true scott's minute, like, we're trying to, like, make, give this appearance that, "No science is perfect, so these people couldn't have been scientists." Okay, yeah, yeah, no, I see your point, I I think you're yeah. Yeah, no, so, okay, but all that is a little bit ahead of ourselves, I think, maybe, because we, I don't think the audience or I know, we haven't gotten there in the story, so I think I get what they're claiming, I mean, the paper, as you say, the title is super fucking clear.

0:33:23 Anne: Exactly, Yes, Yes, that's that's perfect, yeah, probably and is gold, I mean, it's really oh, boy.

0:33:47 Thomas: Oh, do you want to read it? It's pretty short, maybe you could, I dunno if it'll be, yeah,

0:33:51 Anne: Oh, it goes there. But I mean, like, their first sentences, for the first time in the world, we succeeded in synthesizing the room temperature superconductor working in ambient pressure.

0:33:59 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yep, yep. So it makes that claim. Is

0:34:04 Anne: Part that I guess would say is, is, is kind of missing is that they talk about the, um, curve, and they don't really present data on that. They talk a lot about the Meissner effect and, and a lot of this is, um yeah, graphs aren't, that aren't great. Going to give some amount of sympathy here because clearly, you this is a ceramic and ceramics are very, very difficult to work with.

0:34:30 Thomas: To figure out, you know, in real time, what's worth asking you about. When you say the graphs aren't great, do you mean like, oh, that that font is bad? Or like you're saying the graph of like what this actually accomplishes isn't great or something?

0:34:45 Anne: Like the actual quality of is kind of noisy and a bit messy.

0:34:49 Thomas: Oh, okay. Okay. Because presumably they've hooked all this stuff up. They've done this. They've put some fucking, I don't know, sensors on it. And that's how you would tell like, ah, we've got these results. And then you print that. You also, I imagine, do they, you know, do they tell everybody their secret formula or they, have they built a, you know, like a guide for anybody who wants to like, try to, to verify it or what?

0:34:51 Anne: Um.

0:35:13 Anne: Yes, and um, it was funny, I actually had this conversation with with with my boss, who's who's a significantly less toxic physics background, just culture-wise than me, so I was trying to explain to him a bit of where, and he's also a theorist, so I mean, experimentalists can get a bit like, "Oh, this, I grew this sample. I don't really want other people to be able to grow the sample because I want to get my 20 papers out of it." Does happen. I'm going to say in this group's defense here, they are very open about the chemical structure. They share the X-ray diffraction patterns, share a lot lot about its synthesis. And they have provided a lot of supplementary materials, which I think is in a genuine attempt to let other people grow

0:35:23 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah. So they think they've

0:36:05 Anne: It. I think so.

0:36:05 Thomas: Done this. Like from your view, it's not like, oh, let's pull a fast one on everybody. It's like, no, we think we've done this and we're providing a bunch of proof. Yeah.

0:36:10 Anne: Yeah. Now, first thing my boss asked me is, so why didn't they just give the sample to another lab for them to measure? And I went, I am from a different world where I've never worked with something that works in air. I'm like, yeah, if this is just, he was like, that's a very good point. I don't have an answer for you.

0:36:20 Thomas: Oh, being normally you've got a bunch of dill fridges, not literally, but you can't really do that because the lab and the thing you're making are almost like the same thing because it's so, you in terms of the equipment kind of thing. But if you've got this, it's like, well, yeah, it is ambient temperature, ambient pressure. Yeah, you're right. Why don't we put it in a Tupperware, you know?

0:36:34 Anne: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah! Yeah! And mail it to someone. That is a very good point!

0:36:51 Thomas: Exactly. Okay. Yeah. Does Does it have like a half -life? That's probably not the right term. Does it Have some like short life that it couldn't, you know, like, mm

0:37:01 Anne: Not that I know of, I mean, and I've worked with a lot of materials that are, they don't work great in air, or moisture will really Fuck them up. Doesn't seem like that's the case here, but I, I wouldn't discount that because, you know, certainly things can work great in, you know, Colorado at, you know, 300 or 3000 meter elevation and 10 humidity, and then you take it to Florida and it dies, you is a thing, you know, particularly like humidity and Moisture. And whatever

0:37:09 Thomas: -hmm, mm, mm. Sure. Yeah. Like education, for example, if you but works you take it to Florida and it's like, God, we can't even do this. Yeah. Yeah. Gotcha.

0:37:34 Anne: Yeah I don't know why I went to Florida, um, I

0:37:40 Thomas: Okay. So you're saying that might be a good point your boss is making. That might be like, oh yeah. Okay, maybe then maybe it's bullshit, but,

0:37:47 Anne: Made a very good point. Yeah, but why didn't you just send your sample to other people to have them measure and you know what maybe they did, um, maybe they didn't I don't know

0:37:52 Thomas: Okay mate. Uh, we don't. Okay is there, there other reasons I it's been a few what weeks I think it's a couple of weeks. Has this been discredited? Is this, can we start start that journey of like, have people called bullshit. Is this bullshit? Give us your view on that.

0:38:09 Anne: So people are, so lots of people are calling bullshit, and you also have, uh, kind of like people building, like, people love to build factions, right? So, I don't know, I, I stumbled, Google seems to think I'm on the side of some blogger, keeps sending me posts from this blogger, and I watched a couple videos, so, uh, is a lot of work that people are doing, clearly, to to reproduce this, um, not all the papers that are claiming, you know, this is discredited, I think are good.

0:38:37 Thomas: Hmm.

0:38:37 Anne: Some papers are better than others. Thing I'm going to call out here is when have their effect. So, you know, I said that there's two big things that a superconductor does, is conduct electricity, you now, with zero resistance, resistance the other don't know that reference

0:38:39 Thomas: Okay.

0:38:53 Thomas: The other is do Sanford Meisner's acting technique. I get it. Yeah, for sure. No, totally. That's what we want out of it. Famous acting coach. You know, had a whole technique. Meisler technique is it's anyway, different MeisNER. I think so. But if not, that would would be pretty fucking impressive. Is it Sanford Meisner? You tell me it

0:38:59 Anne: Okay are sure I actually don't know what the first name of Meissner is, so, um, so the Meissler effect is where it's a perfect diamagnet, and a diamagnет is something that ejects all magnetic field, um, are lots, you know, I said there's lots of different superconductors, uh, mag magnetic

0:39:31 Thomas: A what sorry, it does what? It eject, so it, so it's a magnet that's better, that, okay, it'd be a really good fridge magnet or really bad fridge magnet, or what, you know, interesting

0:39:32 Anne: Field, so okay really bad one. Well, it would float on your fridge.

0:39:47 Thomas: Is that why you brought up thing, the the floating on the thing?

0:39:49 Anne: So that's the Meissner effect. And what happens is that a superconductor ejects all the magnetic field. The magnetic field just can't exist in a superconductor. There are other materials that are diamagnets, because magnetism is much like superconductivity. It's a phase of matter, and there's lots of different flavors of magnets. There's so many more, you probably know ferromagnets, that's your iron, your permanent magnet, that, that's where you got like these, you, you had a perfect ferromagnet, all your electron spins are aligned, um, it makes a field, it has a permanent magnetic field, uh you also have, um yeah

0:40:30 Thomas: Okay. Those naturally occur? You just got, did you do something to that iron or are you just, some metals are just naturally that way or what?

0:40:38 Anne: Yeah, so that's why the Earth has a magnetic field because iron just does that, um yeah, and also have paramagnets, so, um, pair, like a copper is a paramagnet, where it's, it's not magnetic unless it's in a changing magnetic field. It will have a response to a changing magnetic field, so a really cool physics demo that I used to like to give was dropping a magnet down a copper tube because it will fall really slowly through the tube because what's happening is the the field of the magnet is inducing a field, in, inducing of reaction out of the copper tube, and that reaction works against gravity and slows it down, so

0:40:43 Thomas: Right. Okay. Hmm. Oh, interesting.

0:41:23 Thomas: That the same thing as the kind of metals where it feels like you can make a magnets temporarily? Is it that kind of thing? Okay.

0:41:29 Anne: Yeah, yeah, sort of, I mean, you can, yes, there's lots of different magnets well

0:41:33 Thomas: All right. So when we, we get to Meisner, that's, so you're saying it's this weird thing where, like, the magnetic field somehow, uh, it changes its location, shape, it's of nature, what does it do, uh

0:41:46 Anne: Like, ferromagnet will will make a field, it has a field in of itself, um, paramagnet, um, spins will will align if there's a changing field. Um, you can also have, you could magnetize something where the spins are doing whatever the hell they want, but when you put a field on it, the field will make the spins align and then that will last for some certain amount of time before you take it away.

0:41:57 Thomas: -huh, okay

0:42:09 Anne: Diamagnet rejects field, thing you can do is, yeah, that's really fun. You can, you can, uh, go on on YouTube and search for levitating frog um, a frog is a diamagnet and so we're, people, I mean, like, we're water, we're, it's a diamgnet, or, well, I mean, I want to say that blanket statement, there's a lot of complicated stuff that happens with responses to magnetic field, but for the most part, like, organic material, it's not magnetic, and parts of us, you know, parts of your body will actually eject magnetic fields as a diamagnet.

0:42:09 Thomas: Checks what eject meh

0:42:44 Anne: Sure this is related to why MRIs work. A

0:42:45 Thomas: Huh not understanding the ejecting part, that's what I'm not getting. Eject magnet.

0:42:50 Anne: So like if you had a magnetic field line, it cannot go through the material. It can't go through a superconductor. It gets, there's a boundary there. So, like for a normal metal, you know, light can't get through it. Light bounces, is off, it's reflected Um, a magnetic field can just, it can just do whatever, I mean, well Yeah, I mean, there's there's skin depth and all this other stuff, but, you know, it will, there's different reactions to it, but the the the feel, it can, it can exist in it, um, diamagnet is going to force the field to go around it, and that's why the magnets float on top of a superconductor, or you, we could say a superconductor floats on a magnet, whichever one's bigger, because it's

0:43:06 Thomas: Uh -huh. Sure. Yeah. Kind of goes through everything, right? Or not everything, but okay.

0:43:31 Thomas: Okay. Right.

0:43:39 Anne: Ejecting the field. You can't get it. You can'T make the field go in it.

0:43:45 Thomas: But how does it still float then? Why doesn't it just fall onto it? It like crunching it down a little bit or something? Is that

0:43:52 Anne: It just forces it to go around. Oh,

0:43:54 Thomas: Forces it to go around? So I'm now understanding why it floats then. That's what I am not getting

0:44:00 Anne: Because then you have the upward force of field is acting against the gravity, pulling the magnet down. And as the magnetic shield is forced to bend around the magnet, that force is counteracting gravity, pushing it back up. Is kind of like how, you know, you have a, when you have two permanent magnets and you make them repel. You know, if you balanced it well enough, one would float on the other. It's a little bit different. Instead of having two fields that are opposite, opposed, counteracting each other, you, you have this you bindiness of it around it. It makes it more stable, I guess you'd say. That they're really fun to poke, um,

0:44:21 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, I assumed it was something different from that because that just happens without superconductors. Right.

0:44:41 Thomas: In the opposite magnet thingy, they both have a magnetic field that are bouncing off each other. In this example, the one thing doesn't have a magnetic field, But it still is kind of acting in a way that kind of looks like that same magnet-y thing we all know where they won't hover, or they kind of hover because they won't stick to each other.

0:44:49 Anne: Yeah.

0:44:59 Anne: Yeah. And and and I'm, I'm avoiding saying the term anti-magnet, because that is a different kind of magnet, um, so there are lots of different kinds of magnets, um.

0:44:59 Thomas: Hmm. Okay. Sure. Yeah, not totally grasping that, I think we can move on, though. So how did we get on this? It's, there was something about we're trying to debunk the thing

0:45:14 Anne: So Well They had, um, the South Korean group, um, showed these videos of the Meisner effect, and they weren't good. Um, I

0:45:22 Thomas: So You're saying, okay, if you're like, ta-da, we got a superconductor, proof would be, look, it's doing this thing we all know that those do. So

0:45:31 Anne: My world, I would say proof would be showing a resistivity curve as a function of temperature and magnetic field and showing suppression of the superconducting phase with known parameters that we know will mess with it. And, um, the Meisner effect, fact through, um, susceptibility test. But sure, you can make it float too, um.

0:45:53 Thomas: That's like the showier way to do it or something.

0:45:56 Anne: Yeah, and, and I, I don't find it that convincing because you, you're, you're working on this, this concept, you're going, but hold on, can't just two magnets float on each other, and the answer is yes, and which is why a video is not very convincing.

0:46:05 Thomas: Yeah. But if your read on them is that they're not bullshit artists, you know, that they genuinely think they did this, what you think's going on there then? Hmm.

0:46:15 Anne: I Think it could be that while maybe certain groups get good at certain measurements, this group is probably just not so good at those measurements that I described. Whatever work they do normally doesn't do those measurements regularly. Regularly. Ceramics are really hard to do resistivity measurements on. My world, I think, of course, you know what an AC susceptometer is. That it's a common thing. Not a lot of people would, and that's not unreasonable. So just because those are the things that I think should be done doesn't necessarily mean that that's the go-to for the the whole world, um, one. And also, uh, where you can get into kind of questionableness is, um... This is pure conjecture, but you could have, say, the data they were taking didn't look that nice on a graph, but it floats in a video.

0:47:11 Thomas: Okay.

0:47:14 Anne: And that's a very cynical Take, and that's not necessarily true, and it might be unfair. The videos were not good, um, the picture that you see when you Google it, it shows it being like lopsided and and whatnot. I'm not too put out by that because I highly doubt that their sample is uniform, and that's okay. Um, you, lot of people have put videos that there's other groups that have tried to synthesize this, and they have put out videos showing the Meisner effect. Um, did admit that their video was fraud, but, but a lot of them, like, they, they don't show the magnet, or they show, um, one of them was the magnet was on its side, and they had the superconductor on the string, and they were kind of waving it in front of the magnet, and

0:47:14 Thomas: Okay. Okay.

0:47:54 Thomas: Their end game, though, they're just trying to hoax people, that's

0:47:57 Anne: I think that, well, I don't know about the group that admitted that their, their thing was fraud that Who knows that one?

0:48:00 Thomas: What I mean, yeah like them like friggin Pranksters, elaborate pranksters, okay.

0:48:05 Anne: Yeah, I don't know the story on it. But the original group, like when they had the magnet on its side and were floating the other magnet around on a string, that And somebody should have told them, no, don't post that on YouTube.

0:48:22 Thomas: Well That seems like, like, trying to fool people, doesn't it, or what, the what possible

0:48:25 Anne: don'T think they are, But that is definitely what it looks like, because it was such a bad video. It was

0:48:26 Thomas: Okay. Well All right, here's, job is to make sure all of us listening understand what the hell you're saying, and me make sure I've got it. It, so far, nothing you've described has been like, oh yeah, they published this paper, and then every scientist was like, you forgot to carry the two, you dummies. It sounds like, not that, everything, thing you're describing so far is like, well, it's kind of, yeah, the video doesn't, I mean sure, you know, if it, if it did demonstrate Sanford Meisner's acting technique, then that would mean it's a superconductor probably, but like, why are you showing a video? Why don't you just give us all the, you're saying, like, the data or the numbers or the graphs or the whatever the curve, that really would make that ironclad, but I think it's notable at least. So far, from what you've described, that doesn't seem like there's any blatant, easy call, bullshit thing on this, sorry.

0:49:17 Anne: And and I would say that that's fair, and and there have been, so there's one paper I looked at where it, um, synthesized it, and they, they, it to be a ferromagnet, and then I saw, um, things on, uh, a different lab a different lap

0:49:29 Thomas: Are these different labs or instances or are these people Are these, is it a lab trying to verify their thing, are you saying this is a different claim that was made one time, but okay. Gotcha.

0:49:32 Anne: Yeah. No. No, a lab that was trying to verify the LK99, claimed, oh, it's a ferromagnet, that's why it floats, and then there were, I saw a bunch of people repeating this, oh no, they were fooled, yeah.

0:49:40 Thomas: Okay. And That would would be bad. Okay. So that would mean it's the magnet -y thing that is just not the one we're looking for, but

0:49:57 Anne: Um, very convincing of a debunking, because they showed some magnetic response curves and some resistivity curves that look nothing like the original paper. So it's, all

0:49:59 Thomas: Hmm. Huh. So maybe they didn't make it right, you're saying, or they didn'T?

0:50:12 Anne: Right, you know, chemistry is hard. So, could be lots of things, but I just think it's not this, it's not this slam duck thing. It's not like, oh, we made it. We found it's a ferromagnetic done drop mic. It'

0:50:12 Thomas: Yeah.

0:50:22 Thomas: Had good instructions and you've got people trying to debunk it and you've Got people pulling, putting it apart. And some of these debunkings you're saying, well, it looks like you might've made a thing. That'S not quite the thing they made based on these other curves. So you're not convinced by it.

0:50:36 Anne: And And then also keep in mind, even though they did provide instructions on how to, it, um, can be hard to synthesize, and also maybe the original lab didn't make it the way that they thought they did, yeah, keep that in mind too, um, be.

0:50:46 Thomas: They thought they made it like along the line, someone dropped their like wedding ring into it. And

0:50:57 Anne: I think – isn't that what happened with penicillin? Something like that.

0:50:59 Thomas: Oh, God, I have no idea. I was just making a joke. Okay,

0:51:04 Anne: Claiming that, oh, no, it's just a ferromagnet. I have to say I'm not very convinced by those data.

0:51:11 Anne: However – and then there's people who claim that they successfully grew it and that it floated. So there's that. That.

0:51:19 Thomas: Oh, really? So those people are like, yep, we confirmed it.

0:51:22 Anne: And then they're like, we're going to do resistivity measurements soon. Stay tuned and we'll see. Paper that I got to say I'm most convinced by, it a first order phase transition in this material. And I think they did a really good job of recreating the original data and showing that it's not a superconductor.

0:51:27 Thomas: Huh. Hmm. Oh, well, that seems pretty significant.

0:51:47 Anne: So, so I'm a big fan of this paper. Um, liked it cause they showed, uh. Resistivity curves are much better and that could just be that they're better at soldering. Really, I, yeah. It's really hard to solder. Um Another thing I'm going to point out about the, the original curves there There was the scale of the axes was a bit, you your axes very wisely here to hide something.

0:52:10 Anne: But that doesn't mean that they were. But, you now.

0:51:49 Thomas: Okay. Ah, yeah, yeah -yeah. Well, that's something I can even grasp. Okay, so doing misleading charts a little bit. Like

0:52:17 Anne: Yeah, if I were claiming that I found a room temperature superconductor, I would probably zoom the fuck in on the low resistance. They didn't do. Yeah, exactly. Then this other group that recreated it, they show the same curve, but then they take it out to like much more temperature. And then you can see it clearly has a phase transition. And dann die Resistivity goes very low. Then it starts to go up again, which is pretty, like, as you lower temperature, the resistivity goes up, which is very typical semiconductor behavior.

0:52:25 Thomas: The important part basically okay huh

0:52:51 Anne: Also confirm a diamagnetic response and I fairly well. There's a little bit of differences and all, but I think that's pretty well explained by hysteresis.

0:52:50 Thomas: Interesting what

0:53:05 Anne: That's when, like, you of machines do this, where it behaves at one temperature going down and a different temperature going up.

0:53:04 Thomas: Is that well interesting so right. This has been obviously to keep up with. I really do appreciate you being a good sport and trying to answer all my questions. Getting to the end of our time here, could we sum up for the layperson who's not going to be able to remember most of the technical words you just said? But, you know, I want to make sure we understand what happened here. Does sound like you're ultimately pretty convinced by this one particular debunking paper that's been done. Is guess the question is, do we know why this went wrong exactly? Or is it just like they reproduced it and they're like, it's not a superconductor, but we don't know like what obvious mistake was made or anything. What do you think?

0:53:52 Anne: I think it's possible that what happened was you had something that looked very exciting. And maybe part of a group got a little bit carried away and wanted to push something out, perhaps before the rest of the group was really okay with it. Then it maybe kind of snowballed a bit out of control. You also have, you have personalities, you have power dynamics, you all the stuff that exists in your standard office exists in a lab too. Um, I think that there was maybe, and maybe as people got very excited about it, maybe they didn't think of certain questions to ask. And then, um, people try to recreate it. Yeah. Some people are just jumping on it to try to prove anything, to say that it's not what it says, but you also have some very good work that's been done to recreate what was done in the original paper and to show why that probably isn't a superconductor.

0:54:47 Thomas: Okay. But guess I still don't know the answer to why, other than they're just like, well, we did it. We ran the numbers and no. But the analogy I'm thinking of is recently I brought up with Brian, with uh, one of the Astrophysics ones. Oh, there was that time where they thought, I think it was CERN or whatever, they're like, these scientists thought, like, hey, this thing is traveling faster than the speed of light or whatever, and they couldn't really figure out why. They weren't like, you know, they they weren't like, "Eureka, give us the Nobel." They were like, "Hey, we've all we can, we can't figure this out." And then eventually consensus was, oh, you got the fucking, the measure-y thing is not calibrated, something like that. So is there anything equivalent going on here? I guess that's what I'm trying to ask. Is there anything prevalent going on? Has pointed to like, hey, you put this thing on upside down. Notice nobody seems to have pointed to, like, here's the thing you guys did wrong. It just seems to be like we can't quite replicate it.

0:55:07 Anne: I yeah yep yeah And well, what there's no like single thing. Oh, you did this wrong. There's kind of a multitude of little things that add up, like, your video's not really that great, your temperature curves

0:55:44 Thomas: Hmm. Well let me clarify. Let me clarify, let me verify. That would all be stuff that they could still have accomplished the thing, but their video wouldn't be that great. I'm saying like Like with the example of CERN, it's like, okay, now we know we need to go fix these following instruments because we figured this out kind of thing. But we still don't know that with this per se.

0:55:51 Anne: Yeah yes I I would say we do not have that, uh, gun with this, yeah yeah

0:56:13 Thomas: Okay. Okay. Interesting. I mean, it is very fascinating. It is like, it seem as obviously bullshit as I am seeing it portrayed, which is, it must be what you are referencing with your different take, you know? It, it sounds like you don't believe this is a room temperature ambient pressure superconductor, but it's not as like obviously bullshit, bad faith as people are making out to be. Oh,

0:56:35 Anne: Yeah, don't think anybody was trying to do fraud. I mean, I don't even see what you would get out of doing fraud, because eventually you faked that you had, maybe if you had an, what is it, the Kickstarter or something, trying to get money out of it

0:56:40 Thomas: Donate to our supercondructor. Yeah, no, that's fair, that's right and

0:56:52 Anne: Yeah I don't think, I don't think if you were trying to do a scam you would put it on Archive and put everything out there for the entire world to trash on you, I

0:57:00 Thomas: Give people instruction exactly yeah, and and help people be able to try to, you, prove you wrong, which is, which is notable, and there, it just, when, when you're looking for these things, so let's say tomorrow there's another one, or whatever, sometime in the future, we get another headline like this, it sounds like it's not the kind of thing where, well, give me a sense of this. Is this the kind of thing where it's like, there a bunch of people who believe, like, no, stop even trying, 'cause this is fucking impossible, like, is this, or is it just like a matter of, maybe we will have this technology someday, we just need to keep, you know, keep, keep using those beakers in the lab and get, until, till we tinkering, till we figure it out.

0:57:35 Anne: Think the latter, but you, people have been trying this for a very long time. You know, superconductivity was discovered in, I think, 1911. people thought, oh, it's just a matter of, you the Edison approach and just finding the right material that superconducts at a high temperature. And it's been over 100 years. So, and is that we don't have very good theoretical models. Models, it's that we can really predict to say, oh, we need to have this, this, and this chemical compound. And if we could only put them in this structure, it would make a room temperature superconductor.

0:57:39 Thomas: Hmm. Huh?

0:58:09 Anne: Make predictions all the time, but, you know, our ability to predict is limited.

0:58:15 Thomas: You're saying the theoretical side is not fully, fleshed out on some of this stuff or

0:58:19 Anne: And our ability To simulate and predict what will happen with with certain changing parameters is not, you not really robust enough to, to predict, you know. Nobody knows what compound and what structure is going to be the ambient pressure room temperature superconductor that we all want.

0:58:38 Thomas: Nobody knows what combination will be it. Do Or people think like, well, there is a combination or we still don't know. There might be no combination of things that makes this.

0:58:47 Anne: I think most people are on the, the of there probably is a combination that will do it. It's just a matter of finding it. And that's something like with this group that they might have just been doing, I said, the Edison approach. They might just be trying thousands of materials to see which one does the thing. And it's not necessarily a bad approach because we just don't have the ability to model it. We have some ability to bottle, but we have the ability to just run it through a computer and say, oh, this is what we need.

0:58:54 Thomas: Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Hmm.

0:59:17 Thomas: Like CAD or whatever, like you just, oh, we'll just type it up, design it here, and then make it. It's like, okay, that's so that that gives a very, uh, interesting context to that, and that helps me understand as a layperson, at least, you broad picture of what's happening here. So I really appreciate that, um. Right, any other, any last words, any other final, uh, you know, statements on this from from your perspective?

0:59:21 Anne: Yeah.

0:59:38 Anne: To keep in mind that even were a superconductor, that does not mean that we're getting levitating trains and quantum computers right now. Because that would just not be in the cards for what this is, basically.

0:59:44 Thomas: Right, It could still because of the shitty material, material, that kind of thing. Too bad. Too bad.

0:59:54 Anne: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, sorry.

0:59:58 Thomas: Don't throw out your dill fridges, everyone. Keep those So what you're saying is, don't return the dill fridge. Okay, I'll keep my dill fridge going.

1:00:02 Anne: Keep them running. You're going to need them. Luck returning that.

1:00:09 Thomas: Alright, as always, Quantum Superconducting Anne, thanks so much for explaining that for us. Boy,

1:00:09 Anne: Um, okay, one thing I do want to say for, for people listening. Um, hope this inspires someone who might think that they're a bit of like a dumb ass that you can do this. There's lots of dumb asses in science. There is room for you. Feel like you You have to be perfect and be like this super smart, unobtainable thing to go into this field. You just usually just have to work hard and you'll be fine.

1:00:26 Thomas: Um, yeah, I love that message. Uh, maybe that's a good note to go out on. Thanks so much, Ann. And, uh. Until next time.

1:00:48 Anne: Thanks.