Sure… but for every 1 of those examples, there are 100 or 1000 variants that showed astonishing properties in the laboratory that were never manufactured at scale due to cost or other undesirable material characteristics.

Lead apatite may turn out to be an important step, or maybe not. When Paul Chu made the first big breakthrough with yttrium/barium superconductors at liquid nitrogen temps, everybody thought that workable room temperature superconductors were right around the corner. That was almost 40 years ago. As of right now, we don’t know whether “room temperature superconductivity at scale” is 1 year or 1 century away. It’s closer, probably? That’s about all we can guess.

There are about a zillion ways it could prove to be impractical. Apatite is a crystal, and presumably this lead apatite is also a crystal. We also don’t know if it can be deposited in a useful thickness; the samples tested so far were created by gas deposition on glass. Can it be built up to a useful thickness, and maintain its superconducting properties? All unknown.

But, real progress always comes in small steps. It’s exceedingly rare for any discovery to result in a useful product immediately.

And sometimes superconducting materials are wholly impractical – making it superconductive could make it incredibly brittle, etc. Supposedly this new material is an “apatite”, which is a geological term for a kind of crystal. Who knows what properties it has, yet? Supposedly these samples were made and tested by depositing them on to a glass surface.

So would this mean that cpus would not generate heat?

Not quite. Charges undergoing acceleration and state transitions still generate EM radiation, and still lose energy. In a semiconductor, charges start moving, stop moving, and change direction all the time. So that form of energy loss & heat generation will continue.

In addition, the semiconductor itself is still a semiconductor, not a superconductor. To take advantage of the ability of a semiconductor to hold charges in specific states, there will be some heat losses.

But, a practical superconductor could be used to form all the interconnects in a PC board or the surface of a silicon chip device, providing an efficiency improvement.

Uhhh

I’ve seen the Andromeda Strain and this does not end well!

Fair point, I was taking that at face value merely because that was the argument that was made. I don’t know if that’s true or not.

I see the same kind of flawed thinking in modern health advice.

Doctors: Eating too much is putting you at statistical risk for conditions X, Y, and Z.

Patients: It’s normal to want to eat!

Doctors: We didn’t say it wasn’t normal, we said it will hurt many of you.

Patients: Having X, Y, or Z doesn’t make us bad people!

Doctors: We didn’t say you’re bad, we said eating too much is bad.

Patients: You shouldn’t use normative good/bad judgements to describe health risks!

Doctors: We didn’t do that, now lose some weight you dinks or yer gonna die!

… etc. ad infinitum.

Or, take the dialog around sexual assault, or abortion, or… almost any human activity. The human tendency to take objective fact (as much as anything can be considered objective) and convert it to subjective value judgements underlies, and undermines, everything.

I find myself of two minds on this.

The theory seems almost bizarre on its face – if smarter parents with big-brained babies were less likely to survive reproduction, natural selection would automatically select for smaller heads. Because, you know, the mothers of big-brained babies would die during childbirth more frequently, which (by definition) means reduced fitness for reproduction. It then comes down to whether small headedness or adult intelligence is the larger predictor of successful adult reproduction, I guess.

It’s always a bit of a “just so” story to try and reason out the precise mechanisms of long term statistical natural selection that is influenced by MANY factors, but this one seems a bit more ridiculous than most.

But also, “the obstetrical dilemma leads to a widespread notion of the female body as inescapably defective”… seems like a silly takeaway. There may be ample scientific problems with the obstetrical dilemma, but worrying about the message it sends is a moral position, not a scientific one. Acknowledging that certain activities – such as pregnancy and birth – carry statistical medical risk is not an accusation that anyone is “inescapably defective”. That’s an extremist, normative interpretation of the medical facts.

If a doctor tells somebody, “you have a medical condition that is statistically likely to increase risk of X”, that’s NOT telling somebody that they are “defective”. There is no active creator who “made” a person, there was no decision made to produce an inferior product, there is no fumble-fingered worker who screwed up. The recombinative genetic lottery is what it is, and a plain statement of the facts is not a value judgement.

If would be one hell of an error, if so, to get measurements across several different properties and temperature ranges that were all consistent with superconductivity.

But even if true, we can make lots of things in very small quantities in laboratories that are far too expensive for practical manufacture. That’s where engineering will come in.

Are you @GhostOnTheHalfShell@masto.ai ?

If so, I’ve been following you on Mastodon for awhile.