1. The discovery was in a university research context, where publishing results is normal practice.
2. Maybe publication was mandated by the funding source.
3. Maybe it's not yet certain that it's a breakthrough and they want more eyes on it to help validate.
4. Maybe they want to be publicly acknowledged as the discoverers, for future patent/prize/fame purposes.
5. Maybe it's so early stage, or with so many practical limitations, that it is not yet ready to be industrialized.
6. Maybe the recipe is so simple that there's no realistic way to contain knowledge of it.
7. Maybe it's a revolutionary technology that will save the world and the best outcome for everybody, including the researchers, is to get it into as many hands as possible.
No need to invoke conspiracy.
Perhaps his fears were founded. A few hours later in fact his name was suppressed in a second version of the paper.
Also, we have no clue if the US or other military has already discovered and been using this and for how long.
I feel it was going to get out eventually. If you’re using a room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor for things which require room-temperature ambient-pressure superconducting, unless you conceal that you actually need it, people are going to realize. And once the existence is known, many top-tier labs would be analyzing it and trying to discover the manufacturing process like they are now…
The nice thing about academia is that people don’t hide breakthrough discoveries, they post them publicly and get rewarded for that. If real, these people are on track to win a nobel prize and lifelong fame and probably, lifelong funding (though probably not as much, but more than enough to survive). If real and these people hide how to produce, what would they get? Possibly more money, because governments and businesses would buy what they make for a lot and hire for even more. But governments and organizations would also want to kidnap and extort them, and most people would hate them. Meanwhile many, many labs with as much equipment and as talented researchers would be working on reproducing, and taking whatever samples they can get to do so, so their extra opportunities may not even last for long, but their notoriety would
Highly relevant: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36967333> and <https://np.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/15fy1xw/superconductor...>
Why I say this? The events of publishing, retracting and re-publishing the original paper happen over drama among the people involved with the discovery.
It also appears that that the development wasn't a smooth sail as would a conspiracy may theorists like to describe technological innovations. They had hard dime finding funding and people who believe in them, so having this great epiphany in 1999 then working with the governments to develop it is not a realistic scenario at all. Instead, they grinded for 2 decades and finally got something good enough to show for. Even then, their discovery is still under heavy scrutiny and it might turn out to be a dud(Although, at this point I would bet that they are onto something real).
Here is a thread on the history of the development of the substance: https://twitter.com/8teAPi/status/1685641634892128256
Or it's just public science funding working as it's supposed to - scientists with high-impact findings get rewarded with citations, prizes, tenure and further research funding.
To me it's no mystery why an academic researcher would want to publicise findings like this - I'm surprised they didn't rush to publish it 20 years ago!
But yes, there was a leak in the form of the first whitepaper published by Kwon who was a former member of the group—so perhaps had it not been for that release then they would still keep trying to enchance the process more before releasing.
Like for a decade ;).
When energy flows from one and of a wire made from a superconductor to the other end, then no heat is produced? Where did the energy go then?
If CPUs were made from material without resistance, would they stay cold?
How much of the heat a CPU expells is inevitable?
Could (non-reversible) calculations be done without creating any heat? If yes, where did the energy go? There is no way to compute something like 10+20 without "using up" energy, right?
So many questions...
Just to make an analogue. Imagine that you're stitched some reactive engine to some cart without wheels and trying to move it. Lots of friction, so lots of energy will convert to heat. That's basically insulator. Need a lot of energy to go through it.
Now you add wheels to the cart. Well, it moves quickly now. Though still you have some friction and some heat. That's conductor.
Next: you add wings and don't need wheels after lift-off. Only air friction. Still some energy converts to heat, but speed and efficiency much higher. That's copper, one of the best conductors.
Now remove air, you're in the space. Well, no friction, you can accelerate as much as you want. So this is superconductor in a nutshell.
There's nothing fundamental about resistance. Yes, most elements are not superconductors, but some are superconductors and they require not very exotic conditions. So there's nothing groundbreaking about inventing room-temperature superconductors, physics won't be rewritten because of that. But lots of practical applications, of course, so it's incredible useful invention if true.
I don't know how much CPU efficiency can we squeeze theoretically. There will be losses, even if everything is superconducting. Radio waves, for example. And it's not clear if it's possible to make everything superconducting.
The answer is yes. It is possible to quench a superconductor with an external magnetic field for example and make it an insulator. These things actually do exist but i forgot the name.
But switching that field still requires energy. So while it is possible to build such a CPU there would be still energy required to do any calculations.
Today's CPU's don't heat up because of internal resistance (mostly) but because there is current flowing due to the field effect transistors needing their gate voltages being raised and lowered.
Lowering that voltage means the energy must be vented somewhere which results in heat. That would not change if any part is superconducting.
Through the circuit. Heat is energy loss.
The heat comes from the resistance. No resistance, no heat. To be more specific, the heat is from the kinetic energy of electrons bumping into the conductive material; no collision no heat.
After a moment, the electrons will be spread out evenly through the wire, right?
So after a moment, the energy that was stored in the system (When all electrons were on the left) is lost.
If no heat is emitted, where did the energy go?
There's a lower theoretical limit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle
> Could (non-reversible) calculations be done without creating any heat?
Thermodynamics says no.
My understanding is power is expended when current flows through a metal with resistance, and that loss is in the form of heat. The lower the resistance, the lower the loss and therefore lower the heat
When you start with 10 elecrons on the left of the wire and none on the right and end up with 5 on both sides, you lost all energy that was stored in the system.
Assuming it is real, one must consider the perspective of the discoverer. In science, it's a race to publish and this will certainly win a Nobel Prize. That's why scientists publish in communications/letters/preprints.
This is exactly how collaborative, peer-reviewed scientific research should be. Public.
Plus, the initial publication seems to have stemmed from dissension within the group. There's no way they could have kept this secret.
Whenever there's a new piece of information or "news", always stop and wonder who is telling you that, why, and why now. Not enough people do!
Science is never obviously a breakthrough, people like to talk about and get credit for cool stuff they do, and revolutionary technology isn't necessarily of any benefit if no one knows about it.
This is like asking why the US government didn't keep the transistor a secret: because the transistor is of no use to anyone until people made microprocessors with it, and to do that they needed to first make better transistors.
It took the resources and creativity of a nation to figure out what it could do, and to make it cheap enough for its advantages to create revolutionary technology with it: otherwise vacuum tubes "would do" - and did - for a very long time.
A secret program of transistorized electronics would've been of no use at all: since all the advantages came from making them ubiquitous and cheap.
What? That's not true at all. Discrete transistors are absolutely useful in a massive range of analog electronics. Open up any electronic device from the 1970s, and you're likely to find transistors — and unlikely to find microprocessors.
It's always shocking to me how software centric this site is. Everyone here thinks the world revolves around software and electrical engineering didn't exist before, just like it doesn't exist now ;)
Transistor was pretty quickly useful, I think. Integrated circuits took quite a while to catch on. Integrated circuits were available for some time before microprocessors. Microprocessors were arguable available for a long time before they became revolutionary to the average joe.
You could argue that the transistor was a bigger deal than the move to ICs & Microprocessors. You better believe everyone knew how great they were when they got their hands on a radio... it's an iconic moment in technical history.
The transistor was a big deal when people could use it to solve problems. When an ecosystem around it existed.
But it wasn't going to revolutionise anything if it was kept a secret like is being implied with superconductors like the topic title is asking.
I could've been more precise in my language, but the point was that the big revolution of transistorized technology - the game changing stuff - came much further down the line then the original invention.
A small supply of secret transistors wasn't going to give anyone a massive technological advantage.
Anyway, I wonder how important that patent https://patents.google.com/patent/KR20210062550A/en is in the end, as it seems their way of manufacturing it is not very effective anyway and it might even be possible to find nearby compounds with similar properties.
