4/1/2026 at 2:18:33 PM
Takes me back to the week we all thought room temperature super conductors might be a solved problem.by NewLogic
4/1/2026 at 3:21:55 PM
That served a useful purpose- it let you objectively identify how gullible everyone you know is.by Bratmon
4/1/2026 at 5:42:51 PM
There was more than enough skepticism and cautious optimism too. While it sounded too soon to be real, it wasn't unlike carbon nanotubes, graphene, or solid state batteries — previously unachievable material-tech getting validation in the lab, with a 20yr pipeline for global production. With even nuclear fusion being achieved in very specific / limited instances in the last decade, it's not inconceivable to hope that maybe RTSC are just around the corner.by chime
4/1/2026 at 3:39:20 PM
It also served the purpose of finding out who the cynical Debbie Downers who have no hope are as well!by fragmede
4/1/2026 at 4:08:58 PM
How?by Sharlin
4/1/2026 at 9:46:06 PM
The joke is, more or less, you can reduce everyone into two piles. But that's almost assuredly wrong.It's very very hard to have what most people would call "autistic" levels of rationality in discourse in this world. But if you hold yourself to high standards, you quickly compute the logical argument OP is making (people who were excited were gullible marks etc. etc.) and realize it's wrong in several different ways (happy to explicate if unclear).
This is, of course, very easy if you were A) excited and B) didn't think it'd come to pass. Also observing that A does not imply B and vice versa is the minimally sufficient observation to rule out OPs comment being rational*
* n.b. "rational" means something akin to "not affected by a psychoactive disorder" in everyday discourse. In philosophy / logic class, it means, the statements x conclusion are internally coherent. "The moon is made of cheese because it is yellow" is rational, "The moon is made of cheese because Teddy Roosevelt likes cheese" is irrational. "The moon is made of cheese because the Pope likes cheese" is rational with the implied premises "God controls all, and he loves the pope"
by refulgentis
4/1/2026 at 3:50:11 PM
If your hope for the future is based on believing the most obviously-impossible technological claim in the world, you're way more cynical than I am.by Bratmon
4/1/2026 at 4:11:18 PM
Why are room temperature superconductors an 'obviously-impossible' technological claim?Asking since we've managed to increase superconductor temperature several times in the past, right? (to ~ -130 degrees celsius right now IIRC). Why is our current temperature of, say ~30 degrees celsius special?
by ppsreejith
4/1/2026 at 8:51:32 PM
If you look at a list of known superconductors and their transition temperatures - it appears that the difficulty of getting a material to superconduct is proportional some unfriendly power of the absolute temperature.Superconducting does seem much easier under a few hundred GPa's of pressure - but that's less convenient to maintain than liquid helium cooling.
by bell-cot
4/1/2026 at 9:54:21 PM
> Why are room temperature superconductors an 'obviously-impossible' technological claim?Disclaimer - all I know about superconductors, I know from high school physics, and I left high school some 35 years ago so I know the State of the Art is waaaay over there somewhere now, and here I am still playing with my mercury cuprate stuff.
Anyway.
You have a car. It's similar to my car. It has a 200bhp engine, weighs about two tonnes, and tops out at about 100mph. How would you make that a 200mph car?
Well, you'd need more energy, for a start, but E=1/2mv^2 turns into sqrt(2E/m) right, so you need four times as much power for twice the speed. This is okay. You're not getting 800bhp out of the engine you have now but it's doable. You can buy cars with 800bhp engines, these days maybe you'd be looking at some electric motor.
But you're still not doing 200mph because the drag increases as the square of the speed too, so you'd actually need 1600bhp to get to 200mph, which is still doable but opens up even more problems because now everything needs to be heavier to cope with the power.
So all else being the same you're actually onto about 2400bhp or so before you crack 200mph.
Which you achieve just as you either run out of road, or more likely petrol, at £1.50 a litre, so you're not taking too many attempts at it.
Anyway, the tl;dr - it's not just one thing that's stopping you getting that transition point higher, it's a bunch of stuff that interacts in weird ways.
by ErroneousBosh
4/1/2026 at 5:12:59 PM
Its not at all clear that room temperature superconductors are impossible, it's a materials problem. If someone was to find one that is probably how they would do it - testing materials for some other property and finding it accidentally.by idiotsecant
4/1/2026 at 10:06:59 PM
Room temperature is totally possible. Room temperature AND room pressure is another story. Superconductivity acrose a couple nanometers inside a diamond anvil is not very useful even if at "room" temperatures.by sandworm101
4/1/2026 at 7:15:14 PM
Oh god, wow. It's obviously impossible? Please please please write a paper on that, you can save so much scientist time!by ChrisClark