🔥 Did LK-99 superconductor just got confirmed? Manifold at 40%

Oh, wow. There's some folks in here. I open the space real quick to to just cover whatever the thin twist. He's talking about national lab results, and, hopefully, some folks who joined me in the plus the last space will join as well. I was feeling this could be a big one. However, I don't know, folks. I've been pretty sick on the last one. I still feel a little sick, but, hey, people join and people really like what what folks have to say. so, yeah, I'll add a few folks as well.

Meanwhile, I don't know if we can pull on music, and I definitely don't think all we can just, like, wanna listen to me. dope. Okay. We we got Andrew joining. Yeah. That's alright. What's up, Marsh? I think I think I've seen her around. Come up if you want. Alright, folks. A few minutes, and we'll get started. And I don't know if we're gonna open this app or not. We'll see if it's, like, not too big. then fine.

But at this at this level, when there's, like, more than twenty five people in the space, it sounds like you get trolls, and then people get not that interested. Oh, okay. We have people that are saying it's not replication. So I I went out on the limb, and I'm already getting checked. Okay. Bye. There's Andrew. Alright. I guess we can get started. Andrew?

Hey. Thanks for thanks for hosting again.

Oh, absolutely. I honestly didn't didn't think about this before. Didn't expect that this wasn't planned, and I just wanted to kind of voice some some stuff and and have some folks explain this to me and maybe to other people. And I'll again pretend to be the the dumb guy who's just asking questions. Apparently, this work time. So you had a tweet that's pinned up to the top of the space for folks, and you told me you were a little side about this.

Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, Wow. This is this is this is wild. This is some I mean, I mean, I don't wanna say it yet, but I I think this might be some real history here.

So so I mean, like, you off if you if you don't mind. In the last phase that we had, we, at the end, asked which was, what, 2 days ago? 3 days ago. I kinda lost count because I stopped sleeping. We asked each other kind of how many percentages how many percentage this replicate or this okay is a real thing. Did you after this last week update that presented in your mind?

Yeah. Great question. So 2 days ago, I was, like, 10, 15% thought this could be a potentially viable material. That this simulation result just to summarize, so a simulation result just came out an hour ago from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. And it is just a simulation, but it it reproduces what the authors claimed was happening in their original publication from Korea, and the result is essentially exactly what you would hope to see if this material was indeed a superconductor that worked at high temperature. So that's totally wild.

This is, like, a totally wild in my mind just because there's this, you know, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. It's one of the Department of Energy's National Labs, very well respected scientific work there. You know, this was a a serious simulation run on, like, Department of Energy Supercomputers. it's not a second experimental verification. Right? But it's it's it's pretty I think it's very newsworthy that this could happen so quickly, and I'm signing up to Polymarket right now. This is not investment advice. I think the markets are slow to react. Yeah.

The markets are slow to react, and American Morocco is kind of the lead appetite place in the world. I saw J Friedberg from the all in podcast. Tweet something about Morocco. So you're saying so you wanna talk in the space or you wanna go to the market? I'm just kidding, of course, as I wanted to ask you, you mentioned it's not a second experimental replication. Could you tell us the difference between what we're seeing now and what's, let's say, Iris is cooking or Andrew McKay or McAllen is cooking. Is that not like that?

Yeah. Certainly. So this is very different from another team trying to replicate the experiment procedure, and it's very different also from I mean, there's grades of this. Right? So so Lawrence from the National Lab, it's a very serious research institution. and this result is based on a simulation. Meaning, there is a model of the relevant physics here called density functional theory. And what this does is it models what is the allowable set of energies or or how do electrons How can electrons move through a material given a certain kind of structural composition?

Right? So using the simulation software, they made a model of the material, and the simulation results were that they were actually very surprising. It the paper itself I have it open right here. Yeah. Remarkably, remarkably, I find a set of basically, energies. Right where you'd find energies if it was a superconductor. And so, you know, the author is an academic and a professional, but they're expressing surprise at this as well in the sense that this is not perspective. Right?

Like, you have this copper lead material with sulfate and oxygen and so forth, and you know, if you have this, basically, what the Korean authors said happened was that copper atoms percolate into crystal structure, and they attach to a place where there is normally lead. And when that attachment occurs, the crystal structure distorts slightly. You can kinda think of it, like, if you had a cube, it made a tooth fix, and then you twist the cube a little bit. Right? It puts all of the connections under a bit of tension.

And it's it's this structural distortion of the original crystal that creates these new energy levels that exist and it's in those energy levels that you get this amazing superconducting phenomena And so there's another really interesting thing here that that does corroborate or corroborate the experimental work that was done in Korea. It's that there's different places the copper can go. Some of them are more likely than others. Right? And for this twist to occur in just the right way, the copper actually has to attach to a less likely location.

And so that that explains why this material is so hard to develop, so hard to synthesize is that, you know, it naturally doesn't wanna form this kind of material. but it sometimes can't. And and that's the art of the preparation and and likely why the sample quality was worth sample purity was low, why you didn't have a fully levitating sample in the original publication photos and so forth. So just there's a lot here that really supports what the Korean paper published. It's not, like, a 100 percent verification, but it's shocking. It's it's totally shocking that there's a lot here to be optimistic about I'm excited.

And this is getting uploaded to first of all, I'm also excited. I'm very excited. The the author is a single offer. Correct? Shanae Griffin, I believe. He's posting this on Twitter 2 hours ago. when they give Obama backdrop, which -- Yeah. Pretty incredible. It it works. the let me just ask it. One thing and then introduce some other folks on stage, Andrew. Andrew, it works along the size of, like, the craziness we've seen surrounding lk99, right, from the last base and then the lord that we have 8 to 5 moving through this.

And the 7th through. There was only in the Korean first paper, and then no mention of the quartz to break it. There's a a bunch of stuff surrounding this. And the way she made announce this also on Twitter. I believe this, like, this draft. I was just, like, fit to how we're seeing this explode in in the atmosphere. I won't say hi to March and and Ben up on stage or at least some of them in the previous space as well? Are you guys reading this paper as well tonight? What's going on then?

Yeah. I mean, I'm still working my way through it trying to give it the attention it deserves. Yeah. It's really exciting.

Yeah. And my with that.

Yeah. I'm too much of an amateur to really understand this stuff, but I what I do understand is that there are a lot of very smart and knowledgeable people who are well, you don't usually see scientists behaving in this way. And I I just had a question. Like, I mean, this is a and simulations never as good as, you know, the the real floating rock or or whatever you wanna use.

So, like, what are the chances this is wrong that, you know, that they're simulating something but they didn't quite they got what the answer they were asking for instead of the answer that we're gonna get with real atoms involved.

Interesting.

So one thing which is, like, I think, for sure, a 100%, a good conclusion the paper is they did confirm the, like, lattice contraction. Basically, one of the main series that the Korean team has is that the the copper atoms when you substitute, you know, at a 1 to 10 ratio, it results in a contraction of the lattice. Basically, the Chris shrinks, which puts extra strain, blah blah blah. And this the the type of simulation they're doing DFT using VAST, which I it stands for, like, Vienna Ad Initiio something something.

It is particularly good at that, which is, like, calculating the the size of a unit cell of a crystal, things like that. That that's like a pretty rudimentary thing you can do with the simulation. It's very, very benchmarked. And so, like, at the very least, it corroborates that, and that is, like, pretty important. And then there's, you know, other more and more sophisticated conclusions in the paper, and you can kind of pick and choose how many of those you wanna believe or yeah. But I mean, just at the very least, it it confirms that.

Alright. I wanna I wanna say hi to Sam on stage. Hey, Sam. Feel free to introduce himself from your bio. It seems that you work in the same place. Hi. Yeah. Can you hear me? Yeah. Yeah.

We can hear you fine. Hi. I'm Sam Blau. I'm a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley Lab and a colleague of Chenaid. I haven't had a chance to read the paper yet, but I wanna to at least say that Shane is an excellent computational scientist with years of experience in computational material science. And she If she put this out, then she's done her due diligence, and this should be taken seriously.

I I will just say that I she made is also welcome here if you wanna text her, and you think she'll be up for this. If you don't think and she wants to not talk, that's also also very okay.

Yeah. I I can email her. I tried to message her on Twitter, but she's has her -- Yeah.

-- permission.

I'm getting a lot of emails right I would expect that. One one thing I just wanna say is that, you know, you're talking about, oh, is this simulation an accurate representation of reality, which is a very important question to about any simulation. There are underlying approximations built into density functional theory because we cannot actually solve the many electron shorting or equation beyond hydrogen. In short of quantum mechanics, it physics ends with the hydrogen atom because it's the last exactly solvable things thing. So, certainly, there are approximations here, but I I'm guessing that she chose a level of theory that she thought was was sufficient.

Another approximation is that this is, like, one specific unit cell structure I don't think we yet know exactly the, like, the atomic structure of the material. So she, I believe, probably took the I know there is a structure in the materials project, which is a scientific endeavor that we both contributed to of a similar structure but with one of the elements swapped. So I'm guessing that she took that structure from the materials project and and put in the right elemental composition.

But, certainly, there is uncertainty about the exact structure of the material, which is critical to the certainty about the calculations. That's good. With that, I will I'll I'll hit her up.

But yeah. Awesome. Sam, I I wanted to welcome you to also start stick around as we may have some other folks and then maybe some questions and you sound knowledgeable. You have these spaces before, and many people kind of prefer this to just, reading text. So I'll go to the ground. I wanted to say, Andrew, as you know, in the few days that this insanity has unfolded on all of that. We're seeing multiple replication attempts. At this point, there's is it battlegrounds or something with, like, there's tables full of people replicating with references. Some of folks.

I just mentioned Elsa in in the audience. Some of them are from the Chinese Internet, some of them from the Korean Internet, some of them on Twitter, a lot of them on Twitter, But there are definitely replication attempts that are happening. Some of them even show potential promise even though we, you know, quote on, quote waiting for video. This adds to these attempts as well. Right? So, like, many of the folks who are trying to the Kate aren't able to. We've seen Professor Awash, I wanna believe, from India, and they also reached the paper today saying that their obligation the first obligation attempts did not succeed. Have you folks intentionally have a chance to to look at that effort?

And comment on that if you want?

I wanna see if I can -- I said -- I'd briefly comment. Just a quick comment. And just to know is Sam. I just messaged you the paper link to your DMs. So in a moment, maybe you could comment on the people that review the paper. It says some acknowledgments there. If you know any of those names would be interesting. I I just say that so the at home hobbyist replication efforts, I think, are real valiant. really valiant, you know, sort of garage level like science, and that's awesome. I went index too heavily on those. My personal take is that I I would put a lot I mean, this is a large claim, so it requires extraordinary evidence.

And that that would come from validation from multiple well known groups at National Labs, not just in the States, but in other countries too. So I just kind of, like, put that up there as, like, a this is, like, this is a good simulation from a very well known place, and I that's I'm very excited for that. People doing this at home or at work where their main line of work isn't in superconducting material science and applied physics and condensed matter physics and so forth. I just say it's like, that's a very long shot. I went I I went indexed too heavily on those panning out or not, personally.

But I think it is awesome that it's something people are trying to. I I think that's really commendable.

Yeah. For sure. And to to cover the other application attempts that are also put on archive, I I think I saw I need to go and fine. So I'll let Ben maybe react to some of the stars that sounds good if you like. But there was a replication attempt from India that did not succeed apparently, their material that they produced was a little heavier, something like this. And then some of the attempts on Twitter or referenced in some comments as well.

And I don't know if if the simulation that we're seeing right now probably extends or adds to that, but you had something that you mentioned at the end of last phase and you said that the replication, and they don't succeed, like failures. Like, recent professor Sun, I think, from China. I think you posted on on my on my feed. saying that they weren't able to replicate to also not over index on that.

And I gotta wonder, like, what's if you're updating your percentages, what the next thing that you would like to see? Like, a floating visual thing, paper and archive? Like, what would what would put you at a 100?

Yeah. Good question. So so the biggest thing right now is having a really well verified measurement set up for all the other measurements they make to determine this superconducting property. Right? things like heat capacity, things like resistance, but down to a very, like, very fine resolution on their instrumentation and and a very well known sort of calibration setup and so forth. I think videos about things floating, like, those are really compelling as as messaging tactics or or messaging material to say, look, everyone. This is a really magical thing. But I think, like, the brass tacks comes down to, like a okay. Here's, like, our serious professional applied physics research laboratory.

Here's all our $1,000,000 calibrated equipment. Here, we're gonna, do this experiment a whole bunch of time and test a bunch of samples from this big batch production run. And, look, we found this kind of, like, consistent properties and this fraction or yield of the bat and so forth. That's the kind of thing where you're like, okay. Alright. But, like, that's a done deal then. that takes a while. So, you know, I'm I'm trying to be super enthusiastic and express my enthusiasm without saying it's a done deal, but it's you know, I'm I'm pretty I'm pretty stoked. I'm pretty excited.

Ben, are you are you also on that level of protection?

Yeah. I mean, I would say this in in, like, betting market or prediction market terminology, I would say, like, this shifts me, like, 5 to 10% towards yes. I think it was, like, 15 to 20 last maybe, like, 25 to 30 now. Maybe higher. I don't know. I'm still processing. But I yeah.

I would say the biggest thing, but we might see the next week or so is if if what the information is true that they've shipped this sample to other labs, just getting another lab who may actually know more about superconductors than than, you know, the people on the preference to to just redo the measurements, and if they get similar things, that would, like, shift me a lot more than than this even.

Yeah. To to address, I think I saw today that the original when I say original, that's debatable as well. Like, there's multiple flavors, but the last, at least, I the last English paper from Kyung Tak Kim, the 6 author paper again. This was updated also today. Right? So we had some debate whether or not, you know, this is a this is another replication of superconductor like we had before and and got retracted. And many folks pointed the fingers like, the disorder between the papers, and we're now seeing updates to the original one.

We're seeing different US based labs, the China based labs doing replication. Some of them communicating. A lot of them are obviously not communicating. I think we saw some an total evidence, a thing on Twitter that that some suppliers ran out of Led Appetate. But, again, nobody is, like, to me, like, speaking, but we definitely see a good amount of potential applications. And I haven't seen a lot of, like, this will never work. takes. I haven't seen a lot of papers that say, hey. We definitely proved to whatever, like, kill in 89 was was about cannot, like, physically happen, and and to me, this also updates.

Marshall, have you heard go ahead, ma'am.

I keep hearing about heat capacity. Like, what is it then? How does it relate to super conductivity? It it's not intuitively obvious to me how they would be connected.

I can give the quick answer there. It's kinda cool. I'll use a analogy, actually. He's at the front end of the day. So heat capacity, you know, you think of it like how much energy you put in to move the temperature by a certain amount. Right? The thing is as materials get colder and colder, the heat capacity goes down, and you can almost imagine it, like, I'm gonna suppose a restaurant is closing down. Okay. And, you know, the closing off sections, right, that are empty. And so how full the restaurant feels, depending on how many people enter it, it's easier to feel full in a smaller room, right, with more people.

So the heat capacity is going down, the kind of available space is shrinking. The in other words, the degrees of freedom are being frozen out in the crystal lattice. There's no more ability to say vibrate or or store energy in different modes. And when things start just superconducting, what happens is this another sort of state opens up. You know, you kinda think, like, the rest is closing down. The heat capacity is decreasing. It's shrinking. It's getting colder. It's getting colder. And then when it gets, like, to midnight, like, the downstairs nightclub opens up, and that was his basement that opens up. Right? And that basement's, like, the superconducting, I guess, conduction pathway.

And so now, suddenly, the the heat capacity will spike a whole bunch because it's nicely declining curve and then it spikes vertically all at once at the critical transition temperature and then it starts to fall back down again. So that's something that's definitely observed in lots of superconductors. It's kinda one of the the tells. It wasn't observed in the original clean paper. They had an explanation for that in terms of some elements of super 90 theory I'm not as familiar with, but sounds like in Sinead's publication just now, she mentions actually that some of those interpretations are also supported by her simulation results.

And, yeah, I I I'm sure someone on the call actually probably understands that area of of spin coupling of electrons electron electron spin coupling better than I do. So I don't wanna, like, give people wrong information. But, yeah, of, there was this telltale thing we kind of, you know, we look for. Original paper wasn't found due to this explanation, this proposal of a theory that that could explain that feature, and then that explanation was also supported in this recent simulation. So I feel like that's kinda things out a bit.

So It's like to tell that something important changed in the structure of the material almost like changing from water to ice or something, but not that dramatic in terms of you know, the shape of the material or the the state of matter, but something important changed about the Chris structure. Is that correct to say?

Certainly, yes. For this simulation result and the original author's proposal of the mechanism, those are in alignment with how the substitution of copper into the crystal lattice creates this distortion of that crystal like a like a cube kind of getting twisted, and now it's that rotational or that twist that enables these sort of new conduction pathways to form. which we measure as superconductivity.

I'm going to check while I try to wrap my head around what else we need to see and what else we may see tonight, because it's Monday, so it's been around a week, maybe a few more days than the original paper. And the world is starting to catch up. We're saying more and more inbound. We're seeing more and more re requests for information and and trending things. I only see manifold. I said to I I said this to folks in the last space as well. Manafort actually has manifold markets is like the the prediction markets. there's poly market as well.

Many folks just go there to update and get updates. That's, like, on its own in in this to Twitter. It's a great, like, information feed. So I found quite a few stuff from there. I don't wanna take a speculation or ask folks on stage whether or not they can predict anything.

Right? Actually, a colleague from the Shyam Dorknath is on the call, I think, you might have requested to speak. I'd love you know, there's definitely some real condensed matter of businesses in this call. By now, probably. Send me a d DM if you'd like to comment here because I I I wanna get the most information, the most accurate as can.

Yeah. Andrea, I do use cohost. Feel free to bring somebody up by just, like, searching them if they would, like, Ben.

On top of that, there's the person who who created the I think it's, like, the highest volume market on man perhaps on any prediction mark in the world right now. I think our kind of quantum observer is currently on the call. So if you wanna have a manifold mark You can maybe call them up.

Yeah. Quantum, if you want, come up here. Let's talk about let's talk about the the call. Andrew, do do you see the person you said? Sorry. I I don't think I can see any request from them.

I don't. If you just request to speak, I'll see your name.

You can also search them, Andrew, if if you want, you know, go request them. There's, like, a little search, and they can ask cool. Just a sec, folks.

Okay. Well, a lot of people just joined. So I guess I'll give the quick recap, right, so far. This -- If that's a good idea? Yeah. Okay. So just a couple hours ago, a material scientist at Lawrence Berkeley national lab put a paper on archive that had actually been circulated for review among some of her call leagues. And the simulation it was a simulation of the Korean original team of what they proposed as this of superconductivity at high temperatures. Right? And so the original Korean team, they had this material, this lead appetite crystal, and the gist was that you know, it's this kind of material you can bake.

You can prepare pretty easily, and there's this very subtle effect where copper atoms are entering this Lattice and by entering substituting in where lead atoms normally go, it creates this interesting structural distortion in the crystal. And that structural distortion kind of opens up this kind of crazy conduction pathway whereby electrons can start to travel with So that model, that toy model was put into simulation software, running what's called density density functional theory, which is, you know, a method of simulating these crystal structures in different materials and finding out, you know, what are the electronic structures in here.

Right? What we kind of try to solve the shorter equation through a series of approximation But it's a very well, you know, it's well benchmark software, and this is a professional scientist at a national lab run by the Department of Energy. running, you know, high grade or professional quality simulation software on supercomputer. So, you know, very very legitimate kind of procedure. And the author was quite shocked.

In the paper, they were saying it's, you know, remarkably what we found was all of these interesting they're called bands energy bands, but but they really are conduction pathways in the crystal that are completely aligned with what you'd expect to see if this material was a superconductor. It was really interesting to read the paper, which I think I put a link to in the post. And this is you know, I've gone from cautiously optimistic or wouldn't this be cool, isn't this a great time to learn about material science to, oh, wow. Holy crap. This is a really big deal. And I'll I'll just put this out there.

So, you know, the authors in the original paper talk about how it's hard to synthesize material. the density functional simulations also projects this material is hard to synthesize because the copper isn't falling into the most, like, location. Right? It's falling into a higher energy level, which is actually hard to reach sorry. It's falling into yeah. Yeah. That's right. Sorry. The the lowest energy or the most likely configuration is not the kind that produces super productivity. So you you would you would think it's hard to synthesize. And I'll just throw this out there for context So the last time this happened was in 1986. Right?

It was with a material called yttrium barium oxide, and that won the Nobel prize. And, you know, at first, that material seemed to be very not too impressive from an engineering perspective. It it, you know, it failed under even the week magnetic fields. It was very hard to produce all this kind of stuff. But the fact that someone found that material and could start working on it in terms of engineering improvements and making it better over time. That's taken, you know, 30 years. But today we have high temperature superconducting tape. And when we say high temperature, I mean, 70 kelvin, or negative 200 degrees Celsius, but that's better. That's great because it works with liquid nitrogen. Right?

So that has unlocks, like, all these new kinds of amazing technologies in the world, like Fusion Energy.

And this is what I work on.

86 and I yeah. That's right. -- 6. Right? So so this kind of thing has happened before. It's not unprecedented, and this isn't verification experimentally, so it's still more to come there. But but, yeah, this is very exciting. So but I just summarized why I'm excited.

So welcome to all the new folks in space, and welcome Ben and Andrew and and Simon Stage. There's a few other folks requesting access, feel free to DM me and kind of maybe tell you what what you're doing. We have a few trolls and folks who come up, and and whether or not. Andrew, last phase, you had a great recap of what superconductors are getting used today. And I think some of them are this type 2 superconductor that that you just talked about, the a 6.

Could you give us, like, a brief, but possibly with 10%, like, if you upgrade a previous 10%, you know, stake based on this news, so give us a 10% more exciting thing about the potential superconductors in room temperature and ambient pressure. And just before before I enter you you go, I want say hi to Alex Capital as well. Hey, Alex.

Welcome to the stage. Thanks. Hey, Alex.

We have Alex and Alex think Andrew McAllen, while he's baking his reputation to tend to push the major in the lot. So, Andrew, can you give us, like, a like, a layman's stake of what superconductors are basically are and also where where they use today and what could improve with ambient and room temperature once.

Yeah. Sure. I'd be happy to. So what a superconductor is, it's a material that can let current flow with 0 resist sense. And so, normally, to transmit electrical power over any distance, you lose some energy as heat along the way. You can think of this heat at like tax. Right? The government always taxes every transaction. Whenever you make money, whenever you spend money, whenever you move money, there's a tax, and it's the same for true. It is energy. Right? Elect energy. Every time you generate it, there's losses as heat. When you transmit it, there's losses as heat and so forth. So a superconductor is like a duty free, right, where, you know, everything's tax free. Okay? It's way cheaper. When you produce the energy, there's no losses.

When you transmit it into losses and so it's it's kinda awesome like that. energy production. It has other cool properties too. Right? Like, it can perfectly expel magnetic fields and some other things like that. So, you know, one place this would be kinda cool. I was actually reading about it today, is if you had such a material, right, you can make a cell phone that could basically pick up signal from anywhere. Right? It it would be so sensitive. Okay? So it's like the sensitivity of antennas Right? Like, an antenna works by basically catching some magnetic field that's passing by. It induces some current. Right?

But there's resistance in that coil and there's background noise and so forth. And so you could think of this in one small area designing these, like, insanely sensitive sensors and antennas that you could use in your phone quite cheaply. It would be widely abundant mass produced. Another another place you might recognize this is, like, an MRI, like a magnetic resonance imaging machine. So that produces this amazing volumetric 3 d image of the human body completely non invasively. Right? This is a total, totally, like, American kind of future tech type thing that now we're just used to.

So the the sensitivity limit on MRI is, in large parts, establish by, you know, how sensitive the antennas are that can pick up the magnetic signal radiated by different parts of your body.

And brain. Just just very -- And brain.

-- body and brain. Body and brain. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. So you could think of, you know, well, we can make this 12 times more sensitive as an antenna with superconductor, and you could get 12 times better resolution in the body. Right? Like, really sub you know, at the sub micron scale perhaps, which would be pretty exciting.

So -- Is is the power the only improvement there? would something like a a cost to keep the super magnets not very, very cold will also go down potentially making this more available? Because riser is too good expensive right now.

Right? Yeah. 100%. That's really what it is. Right? So a lot of these things don't make sense because right now, you have to use cryogenics like liquid nitrogen to cool things down to that temperature, which is super expensive and totally unwieldy. And it only really makes sense and, like, kind of really custom research applications kind of stuff. Right? It's not very common.

So this would make it, like -- Like, say, like, say fusion reactors, stuff like that.

-- reactor for sure. So know, one of the biggest design trade offs in fusion energy for magnetic confinement fusion, which is things like Tokamax or Stellarators, and that's, like, the big plasma doughnut is that you have a really hot plasma that's a 1,000,000 degrees Celsius, and you have to get this magnetic coil, like, kinda wrapped around it as close as possible. So you generate a strong field, but that magnetic coil has to stay at, like, negative 200 degrees Celsius, right, which is very difficult. So having things that work at higher temperature. There's another cool thing here. Right?

So the our current generation of superconducting superconductors that go into things like particle accelerators that go into things like fusion energy, quantum computers, and so forth, they're all made out of rare earth metals. Right? earth metals are super expensive, and they don't come from everywhere in the planet. Okay? So, like, on the other hand, right, this has made it OLED. Lead is cheaper than copper. Okay? It's 20 or 30 percent, like price of copper. I might be kinda wrong there, but it's, like, a good fraction of copper. Right?

And So the, you know, superconducting room temperature, like, superconductors that work at ambient pressure that are as cheap as wire or cheaper than wire that could be produced, you know, on mass. I mean, I I don't wanna get people's 22 hopes up. Where where I'm where I'm a picture.

This is a big deal. I would just extend your your sentence there. The cheap as wire, but also could become wire. Right? Like, we could get wires that are effectively not losing heat. I think in the last space, you said something about 10 to 15% of all energy we generate the United States just goes to waste just into heat.

Is that correct? It's it's about 5 to 7%.

I've heard 50% to 7%. It's lost in transmission. with, like, transformers and things like that?

That's a great point. So transmission line losses are one thing. Yes. Very good point. but there's also transformer losses. Right? Yeah. 100%. So transformer is what steps down voltage from high voltage to low voltage, also generation. So there was this German experiment, and, you know, this this stuff is expensive, so it's experiment. But they refitted a generator with superconducting tape, and it generated 36% more energy, which is pretty exciting. I'm gonna yield the floor a little bit, Alex.

I think other people want lots of cool stuff to add to. I wanna add I wanna hear from Alex as well.

Cool. Hey, everybody. Nice meet you guys as well. I think it'd be fun to talk a little bit about the science here of superconductors. What are they? How do they work? are very odd materials and extremely finicky because as Andrew was explaining, you lose a lot of energy in these electron to heat as they encounter resistance. You can basically think of electrons in a conductor as moving around freely in a sea of metal ions, I think, copper, they kind of just bounce around.

So the key in the superconductor is how can they flow through this lattice without bouncing into anything or being paired in such a way that they flow with zero resistance. And I I kinda give hint to it there, but one thing to know about electrons is that as particles, they're fermions, then fermions have to obey something called poly's exclusion principle, where no 2 fermions can be at the same energy level. Now in superconductivity as well as super fluidity and liquid helium and some other exotic states of matter, you can have some weird things happening when you're dealing not with fermions, but bosons.

And bosons are subject to Poly's exclusion principle, and therefore, it can occupy the same energy state. So at very low temperature, bosons are known to to occupy the same energy state, and that's called the bose Einstein condensate. Now the trick in there superconductors, how do you get these electrons to act more like bosons? And it happens through what are usually called Cooper Pay years in bardene Cooper and Shafer Theory of super conductivity. BCS theory has a pretty funny story of, I think, Ardeen had a stack of unsolved problems on his desk in physics.

And the top one was how the superconductors work, and he assigned it to Cooper, and Cooper went and figured it out when they published a paper. So there there's some fun stuff there in the history of physics. But a Cooper Pair is a very kind of weird thing, and and that really gets into the this preprint, then we can talk about some of the findings and proposed mechanisms. But Cooper Pairs are really fundamental for most understanding super productivity and that they're how electrons compare in a lattice. And the key is the way it was first described to me is think about a mouse running across a water bed. And it sounds very weird, but but give me a second. In the mouse's track, you'll leave small ripples in the in the bed.

And if you put a marble in some of those ripples, some of them may kind of this is a stretch analogy, of course. But some of those ripples may push the marble along the track as well. And in that sense, you kind of these electrons that are interacting with each other through vibrations in their surrounding material. Now in a actual superconductor, the surrounding material is a lattice. You know, think of a regular superconductor. It's just a a crystal of a of different atoms that are vibrating slowly. Vibrations in the lattice are called Phonons, and those are the particles of heat.

And so in VCS theory, you have electrons, that are paired with other electrons that are mediated by phonons or heat particles. This is one of the reasons why superconductivity is high temperature dependent as these phone on electron interactions are relatively weak. And if you have a lot of heat, then it'll disrupt any cooper pairing. So I hope that gives you a little bit of background into reading some of the discussion in this paper where it proposed some really interesting mechanisms for BCS theory and Cooper pairing of the electrons based on the structure of this crystal.

And I really encourage you to read the discussion section here because it's, I think, extremely insightful in some of the results of this crystal structure and as well as the DFT calculations to explain how this could be feasible, and, honestly, gives me the fair amount of confidence sense that this this research is pretty sound.

So, Alex, thank you for that. And then at least I found out about LK 99 from your first threat. And I know many, many other people as well, and I think glove a little bit even to a viral. And I think you're gonna talk the algorithm that this is happening. And then I followed you gonna around, and then I saw that you I don't know if it said disillusioned. Like, it's been, like, 3 days. Right?

But I did -- Yeah.

Yeah.

I kinda gave know.

-- for a while. Yeah.

I mean, the papers itself by by Kim, Lee, and Kwan were a total mess. And there were some you know, nice words put out by physicists that they were, like, unconventional, but the results reported in there were just, like, laughably bad, you know, that I don't know if you saw the condensed matter theory in University of Maryland said they would have given this paper an f minus if an undergraduate hand ended it. So there were a lot of reasons to not like the pay and -- And then -- -- read it more closely.

Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. And and we covered many businesses to write in this potentially is because of the surprise and somebody the author on the first one, not appearing with the second one, etcetera. However, you then upgraded towards we're back again with this Julius. And tell us about your percentage where you are right now.

They're helping 99 with unobtain -- Yeah, guys. I am here to announce we're back.

Oh, no. What I mean Give us give us, like, a percent something.

Look, the important thing to understand is extraordinary claims require truly extraordinary evidence. We have no physical proof that this thing is a superconductor. have some physical proof of diamagnetism where it opposes magnetic field lines from, you know, some sketching replication efforts on the Internet. I'll say it again. If you want to know what is true, you can wait for replication. There's clearly a lot of great experimentalists working on it. But if you want the gossip and the insight, I think that this is probably the strongest update we've had since the original papers were published. Can I can I ask you an interesting?

Yeah. Go ahead, Andrew. And just two things, and then I wanna hand over to Sam Blau. I just wanna make the comment that I'd push very strongly back against this notion that those original papers were laughably bad. I think it's very easy to have certain assumptions on what things should look like when they're published in top journals and, you know, really recognize there's a big diversity of access to resources and access to well, I mean, not access, but things like growing up in the English speaking country that can contribute to how someone's work is presented in a professional scientific context.

Yeah. We we may be talking about Nobel Laureate here.

Yeah. Totally. Totally. So, look, these these results warranted serious consideration and in best investigation, and I think it's it's easy to get caught up in a pessimistic mindset that looks to, like, discourage or exclude people from claims of legitimacy. I think, yeah, that there's plots that could have been formatted more nicely, and there was noise floor on the instrument, which was getting the way of better measurements. And I agree that there's problems to take there, but, like, yeah, you know, this isn't really like a that wasn't just not something that was serious, and and now it is. I I think it was all always worthy of pretty serious consideration. I also wanna let Sam Blausby because he, I think, is a colleague of made.

We just published the simulation results early today, and that's I think what we're really excited about right now too.

Yeah. Sam, there's more folks joining this space since before, so feel free to please reduce this up again. Yeah. And then yeah.

Thanks so much. Yes. I'm Sam Blah. I'm a research scientist at LBL, but I mostly wanted her Sham Dora Aknaf, who is a former colleague of mine who has worked closely with Shenay in the past. This is this scientific area is much more within his realm of expertise than mine, and I've asked him to join the space. He's just finished reading the paper, and I think my have some things on for us.

Hey, Sean.

How are you? Hey, all. Thanks for the introduction, Sam. Yeah. So, I just wanted to start off by like acknowledging that the end of the day, Shanae is the like, of Sam, myself, and Shanae, she is the closest expert to really understanding sort of how this connectivity or the mechanism, super conductivity could come out in this material. But I wanna touch upon a couple things that I think that she pointed out that are really important for discussion.

And they sort of start at the base level of, like, what these calculations were designed for fundamentally and sort of approximations that are in them and how she walks a a very fine line in terms of how she explains the phenomena and sort of the limitations of the calculations. There are fundamental assumptions, like, this is a perfect crystal. In reality, most materials we make never perfect. Whenever you're trying to dope one material into another one element into another material, the combinations there are massive.

I mean, if you wanna think about this, like, one gram of silicon has on the order of 10 to 21 atoms. So, you know, you have a couple grams as material, you have something like 10 to 20 choices that you have to permute. It's just massive numbers of combinations. So the the theory is really designed to try to distill that down to something that we can compute. And I think the the most important part this is that the theory is what's called a 0 Kelvin theory. So, basically, everything is computed as if the system is at 0 Kelvin.

And that is really important in understanding, I think, the limitations for when we talk about high temperature superconductivity because, fundamentally, this is no man's land. both from a theoretical space and from an experimental space. From a theoretical space, we like, the tools that we have do not naturally exist in this space. There's lots of things like how the phoneons are gonna happen, how the the the symmetry of the Jaunteller distortions that she talks about, these sort of local distortions in the items, how they're displaced or how they're actually dispersed within the material.

Whether that's even or not, when you put the stuff together, you're never gonna get, like, perfectly, you know, symmetric perfect material all throughout. So is that gonna cause a problem? Room temperature is relatively high temperature compared to 92 kelvin, which is BCO's critical temperature. So a lot of things have changed in that regime. So a lot of chemistry, physics, and material science almost unexplored when we talk about high temperature superconductivity. Because all the tools that we have to get into that space, we're never designed in that space. And as a result, we don't have any way of telling whether our tools are actually gonna work.

And I think that's the line that Chanay walks, which is, you know, given the assumption that my tool still work. How would I look for this? And are those signatures still there? And they tend to still look like I would expect them to be. But, again, I don't know the tools actually work in this space. And I think that's the big challenge here that if it is in fact a high temperature superconductor, it's gonna blow the world open. It's not because it's fundamentally superconducting. but it's because the physics are so different from what we're used to that it's gonna change the way we think about materials in the space.

I I don't know if other folks get chills at the exact same time where I get chills while you were talking, but I will definitely let Andrew and Ben speak because this is incredible. And I think we'll have more folks join us that talks about different other procedures, but we've been all following different replication attempts, some of them live on Twitter. And some of the folks are talking about the process that we written in the original papers or wasn't exactly how should I say? A lot of it could have been done better, but the the approaches.

And when I hear you speak about, hey. Some of the tools that we have currently may not apply, here or, you know, we need to take into account the tools still do apply. That's that's just incredible to me. Andrew, go ahead. You're actually feel free.

Sure. Yeah. I think that's awesome. And it's a really good commentary there on the nature of the tools we use, the kind of really idealistic assumptions that go into this. And I would someone in the audience wants my attention, actually, but I'll pass it along. So this this flatband structure or this characteristic signature of the superconducting property that's put forward in the simulation result is something that's previously been discussed before engraving. Apparently, I'm looking at this article from 2018. You know, it's the article's name's unconventional superconductivity and magic angle graphing super lab is.

And it talks about how basically, there's a similar effect here where a small twist angle or a small distortion in this crystal structure of graphing produces a superconducting like property And this is, you know, similar to twisted bilayer graphite, similar to that of copper oxides or cuprates, which are the, you know, the current kind of, like, the standard superconnecting materials.

So this isn't like you know, this there's I guess there's other touch points to be acting to make literature on this, but I think, like, the previous speaker just emphasized, you know, this is very much like, at the realm of, like, contentions between theory and practice where, you know, we're trying to prove theories with new experiments. And so definitely, there's there's gonna be other opinions on this too and other interpretations quite likely.

I wanna to say hi to Skylar. And, folks, I will say some folks are DMing me, some folks wanna come up and ask questions that I honestly am too dumb to understand. I've said this before in the previous space, and I hope it didn't mind. I a lot of the chemistry physics and stuff goes above my head is what Andrew and and other folks here. I will bring up folks who want to ask intelligent questions, and feel free to DM and Drew them as well. But if we get roles, we will just kick him out. And I wanna I wanna before we get to Scarborough, one second. I wanna let Alex a chance to to ask Sham Shamia a question while we to scholar in just a little bit.

Thank you. I mean, Shyam, thanks so much for that explanation. I think there's a of questions we'd have and your expertise on. First, if if you could talk a little bit more about these DFT calculations and other, you know, moderate temperature superconductor like YBCOs? Do we see similar trait signatures? Does this match up but we typically expect if you have expertise on the subject, we would love to know.

Yeah. So I think that's a a really good question. I think there's so the short answer is yes and no. basically, what these calculations do is they try to do an approximation to a perfect solution. And the reality is is that until we get real quantum computers and they're at, like, massive scales, we're probably never gonna get perfect simulations of like this. And so DFT effectively is one of the cheapest accurate methods of actually trying to compute materials like this and what their properties are.

And there's a huge number of challenges associated with that. One challenge is fundamentally in Chenay's pay she took one lead atom out and put a copper atom in. And the way these simulations work is that you have as few atoms defined as possible, and you basically mirror them for infinity. So whatever arrangement that she put in is perfectly mirrored for infinity for all ten 21 atoms or, you know, to whatever number of atoms you want to actually pretend you made a sample of. And that's really not realistic because that's such a large number, the nature is gonna have a lot of entropy.

It's basically gonna put randomness in terms of where it wants that copper, where it wants those young teller oceans or not. And I think, you know, when we think about that, that's actually a standard problem that we have when we're running these DFD calculations for materials. whether it's superconductors or batteries or next generation semiconductors or whatever. It's it's standard across the field.

There are ways deal with that when we talk about things like the effect of temperature, they require, a, more time and, b, a sort of an understanding of the mechanism it's self before we can go after it because the comma towards again, they're basically more, you know, like, you go to a small number of, like, complexity in terms of number of atoms, and the combinatorics already blows beyond the size of the universe. It's a it's a very rapidly, like, exponential growth problem. So it's something I'd be very careful how you actually tackle.

So that's that's one so basically, we can get some of the aspects of YBCO, but we can't actually we predict the superconductivity of YBCO with DFT. There are higher order methods that can do that, but they are extreme expensive. And the reality is, again, when we talk about temperature, they're all 0 Kelvin methods. And as soon as you have some of the complexity of temperature where atoms move, all of that becomes extremely expensive because you have to average over all the ways in which those can move.

And the reality is I don't think we'll ever get to a definitive theoretical simulation of how this material if it is in fact superconducting works until we experimentally understand it. We can produce it and experimentally understand it at a level that will tell us what the fundamental mechanism is.

And then one last question for you is, it's made tantalizing against here at this proportionality between the critical temperature and the, you know, effective interaction for attraction as well as the density of states calculation around the firm energy. But I don't think explicitly lays it out in the paper. If you happen to know if you were to do that rough proportionality, what the implication for the critical would be based on the 50 calculations.

Yeah. I mean, I I think that is you know, I think so my again, I think my experience from other spaces is that it's very hard to talk about these materials or those kinda properties or temperature and predict them from the electronic structure typically. Superconductors are probably the one space where that may not be valid, because it is such an electronic thing. But, again, my intuition sort of tells me that the chemical and the structural variation that's gonna happen room temperature, that's not gonna be insignificant, and it's gonna be on the same order as sort of the error you're gonna get by that proportionality.

If not, potentially, even swamp it out. There are materials where the electronic structure itself changes rather drastically as a function of temperature. And we're talking about, say, 5, 10 degrees. I mean, take a YBCO around a critical point, and the electronic structure changes dramatically around a critical point. So when we talk about a 0 kelvin you know, simulator, and then talk about room temperature, which is on the order of 300 kelvin. I really hesitate to estimate like, what that is. And I think that's also the reason why Chenay doesn't put an actual number or anything there because it's more of, like, hey. This feels right. but I don't know. I don't have any good way of saying what the number is.

Probably not even the magnitude.

Got it. Thank you so much for walking us through that. Last quick question. Any hints about replication efforts there at Livermore?

Well, so I'm no longer at Berkeley, so I can't really talk about whether they're doing it. I think a number of institutes are do are trying to make this. So, you know, it's not an easy process. I've tried to mix solid state materials before. If there's a 1000000 and a half ways that you can screw it up. So I say, good luck to everyone trying to remake this with, like, 80% of the recipe defined in the paper.

Is that across all the tweet papers that we saw? The 80% of the recipe? Yeah. Because the original authors said they're willing to work with folks in provide the rest of it, and I think we saw today an update to the 3rd paper, the 6th author paper. And we've seen modification that I'm India, I believe, that they've also communicated with Lee over email and kinda talked about the process. So yeah, talk talk to us about this potential stuff that you know what.

Yeah. Someone who's tried to recreate with, you know, recipes from before, and I'm sure the people in here who are organic chemists who've done organic chemistry, which is much well is much better structured in terms of, like, how these recipes are defined and how the processes are. There is always secret sauce, and it may not be intentional. It just might be like, oh, I stirred in this one counter wise direction, which caused slightly more turbulence, or I mixed it in this one -- Wait.

Wait. Wait. Wait, Shyam. I'm sorry to interrupt. You said something, and I'm I'm the Jessy Pinkman on the stage here. I'm the 2 guys who doesn't understand science. Y'all are Heisenbergs. You said, stir in the other direction, and I flash back to, like, the first fucking Harry Potter movie the first thing. Yeah.

It's on that level.

Are you are you serious?

It's honestly on that level. There are very few production recipes that we have today where there is not some secret method involved in there where somebody does something that they don't understand that that critical. You'll see it in production even at the level of, like, Dow and 3 m where some operator leaves, and their yields have suddenly or their material quality has changed. And this is the reality for us making material today, whether it's YBCO, single crystal sync silicon ingots for semiconductors or polypropylene at a DOW chemical plant.

I will I will kinda add to this from my downside knowing about this for all of 3 days that in the last phase, Sam Yum, who's currently in Korea, and joined that last time. He read all the three papers, and he saw a translation that wasn't, like, made it to the other papers where the quartz tube, they used either cracked or broke, and the transition was, like, really clear. And, apparently, in 2018, when this happened, suddenly they've tested and suddenly they got something. And then I saw many folks talk oxetization or or or some sort that they've kinda found. And I'm clear whether or not were able to replicate since then. This was back in 2018 or or so.

However, this sounds like what you're discussing. And, Ashana, I I wanna say hi to Andrew. Calib, and we've talked about replication in them. And, folks, if you don't follow Andrew yet, Andrew, is currently live stream on Twitch, Andrew? that we're running?

Can you say hi and tell us about that? Yeah. Yeah. The the furnaces are burning right now. I I'm just now catching up on everything that's happening, but glancing at the edited paper, it seems like there's still some discrepancies on some of the procedures such as the the the lead synthesis step still references a vacuum when so much of the other paper references open air crucibles. So it seems like there might have been some edits, but there's still some there's not clarity around things like ramp rates for the thermal steps, which are absolutely critical.

That echoing what the previous speaker said, we deal with this in small molecule pharmaceuticals crystallization where the the smallest change to the process parameters can influence away the polymorphs form. It is incredible that your procedure captured all of the required information and that something is not happening by accident. Most of the times you get lucky and the process is stable enough Other times, you have a knife edge process where you can fall on either side of equilibrium and not really realize that that is happening.

So I find it very hard to believe that we will be successful with this recipe for quite some time. It's gonna be, like, a long slog to get there.

Go ahead, Alex.

Another question here is so, I mean, Chenay had hints in the last paragraph of the discussion that the copper doping really only works if it's sensitive to that one of the 2 lead sites, which could definitely explain a lot on the challenges for rep location here in that we might have to just get lucky. Or I'm not sure if could any material scientists speak to you how you might control, you know, which of the sites this copper doping is going to affect Syama or anyone else here. If you can figure that out, you have a Nobel Prize. So it sounds pretty tough.

You might have to just break your courts to when you exited from the reaction vessel, I guess.

So so another follow-up for Sham is if if if that's another Nobel price or whether or not this is another Nobel Prize, do you think that currently based on what you're seeing, Shyam, based on original papers, based on simulation with a field that you're very close in and sounds very involved in. Do do you think this is a Nobel Okay. As it currently stands, the Nobel Prize kind of paper release, recipe, material.

I mean, I I will again, I'll caveat that the end of the day, superconductivity is not my specialty. So I can't really comment on whether or not it's been, you know, a pro really found. I think the community where the scientific community has to demonstrate that via replication. But I think at the end of the day, if it is demonstrated that this is room temperature, you know, a really high TC super connectivity, then we have entered a new realm of sort of physics.

And at least at the material science and condensed matter physics level, there is a whole new world that's been opened up in terms of what can explore, and that is typically one of the critical factors for a Nobel Prize. It's not just this is super cool, and we can, you know, do all kinds of, you know, fun things with it. But has it fundamentally changed the state of the science itself and how we think about it.

Ben, I think. You had a question.

Go ahead. Sure. Yeah. I got a question about so okay. The the section about the isolated flat bands at the fermi level, could you comment, like, okay, if you if you saw a DFT generated, you know, band diagram like that and you saw those features, would you which how confident would you be that that material was was a superconductor, knowing nothing else about it. Is that something you'd only find the superconductor or something that could be found in the superconductor? Could be found in other things?

Like, maybe walk us through that a bit. Andrew talked about this sort of same for a ban phenomenon showing up in graphene. And the reality is that it on its own does not indicate superconductivity. It just something that has been proposed as a mechanism for superconductivity, and Shenay's whole discussion is that this is relatively flat in comparison with what we'd direct and other Kuberit systems, which suggests that it could be more stable when we go to higher temperatures.

So it's really talking and it's not saying that this is mechanism, but it's saying that if it is the mechanism, this is should be more robust to temperature than other materials and could be the reason why, then it would be a high TC thing.

One thing I'd love to see is if did the same simulation with the un with the unsubstituted structure without the copper. and to compare the band diagram or the so the band structure between those between the control, I guess, and then the copper sub student structure. Do you think she might something like that?

I'm gonna imagine that she did. So the original structure comes from the materials project. And I recommend everybody who's interested go and register an account on there. It's a 100% free. It's a large database of computer materials properties. So it's basically other materials that have we found pretty much throughout human history that we have crystal structures for. and a variety of computed properties using this density functional theory methodology, all totaled up, ends up being hundreds of millions of CPU hours, 1,000,000 of dollars of calculations that have all been compiled and put in a very presentable, nice, easy to use interface.

the original crystal structure is on the materials project. If I remember correctly, she tweeted at one point the LK99 crystal structure, the materials project link So, the baseband structure is there. What she did on top of that is basically these thin polarized calculations which are about an order to 2 orders and magnitude more expensive than the original calculations. So, there is that aspect. And so, I would say that I think she might have it, I would expect that she would probably have it, but and then she probably saw that deviation in the in the flatbeds themselves.

But again, like the presence of those bands, even if the bands weren't there before and they are there now, that itself not indicate that it's a superconductor, partially because Sorry.

Is anybody else having trouble hearing?

Oh, sorry. No. Marshall, I think that's probably just you, I think, excuse me, Sean.

I'm having a bit of trouble here.

I hope. Sorry. Oh, yeah?

Can you hear me now? I'm also having a bit of trouble here.

Okay. Sean, can you try to move Yep.

Can people hear me now? I can hear you. Okay. Cool. Yeah. So, you know, the the presence of the ban does not indicate It's a superconducting material. It's the fact that the bands are relatively flat. So if we assume that flat band is the mechanism for superconducting then we could understand that flatness as a potential way in which this could be a a high t c superconductor versus say, you know, 9 you know, belonging to Kelvin basically close to 0 Kelvin superconductor.

And, Sean, I think -- -- questions.

What is the name? Oh. I'll answer it quickly then follow-up with my question to Sean, and you might know this better than mine. But so a band here, it's basically where electrons are out to be in terms of energy. And so it's sort of like, you know yeah. You know, Shyam, you can correct that if you want. the band think of it as a conduction pathway. Right? It's if a band is there, it means electrons can can exist there.

So one thing in the paper that stood out to me, and maybe you can correct me on or or qualify this, but it was saying that the bandwidth that band, meaning, like, how wide that band is is a lot smaller than the separation between it and the other nearby energy levels, and that that might also suggest kind of resilience of the superconducting property to to temperature and so forth. Is that in line with your understanding?

Yeah. So effectively, there's there's 2 things there. One is that I I don't think you wanna think it as a conduction pathway. That's not the right way because a and pathway I think of, like, in space. The way you wanna think about this is it's basically a space. It's a if you think about, like, a set of stairs, and then you have sort of like certain landing areas on those stairs, the they're the landing areas. It doesn't mean that the electrons can't move between them.

It doesn't mean the electrons can't somehow temporarily exist between them, it just means that when they are, you know, going to go and act and they're sort of existing long enough in a certain specific state that, you know, this is sort of quantum physics level of, like, it can't be you know, there's sort of a a a entanglement between sort of how well we understand or how localized electron is versus how long that is localizing that state. Basically, like, in terms of thinking about how the system works, it's gonna spend so much time in that one position, that that's where we wanna think about how, you know, imparts the the functionality or the properties of the material.

And so when we have a band there, what we're basically saying is this is where the electrons are sitting most of the time. And so the way in which they control if this is a superconductor, if it's a semiconductor, if it's a conductor, if it's an insulator, if it's, you know, allowing this material to be voltaic material or a battery material, whatever it is, is it's mostly gonna spend it in that time. And so that is where we interrogate how does this electron contribute to the property of this material.

When we talk about the bandwidth, I think the reason that Washington brings that up is, again, when we get to high temperatures, we really don't have good tools for directly computing the properties and materials, so we're always making estimations. And one way to think about that is the temperatures basically smear things out. You know, you can convert a temperature directly into an energy, 3 KBT, or 3 halves KBT, where KB is the bothman's constant, you can basically convert that into an energy, and that's about the smearing amount for a lot of things, including potential electronic structure, so the sort of these bands.

And if the band width is small, then that smearing is unlikely to make it sort of cross another band and sort of turn it off. So whatever unique things you got from that band, if they were able to get to high temperature and all these other the chemistry is not changing. The structure is not changing. The electronic structure is not changing. The mechanism for what could be causing superconductivity is not changing. if all of those assumptions are still true, then we could understand that one way in which everything is resilient in terms of superconductivity at high t see is because that bandwidth is small enough that it doesn't get smeared to the point where it gets turned off.

That was awesome.

Fantastic. Thank you so much for that. Way way above my head, but Andrew and other centers probably cut more of it than I would. Andrew, a lot of new folks, I would love if you could explain who Sean was talking about, which paper, and basically why at least some of us on stage here, percentage has updated towards the yes, and why the manifold markets thing doesn't load for me, and it's not 40%.

Go ahead. Wow. I it's a big move. I really should have done something there. I didn't actually do anything. Yeah. So happy to give the the or the recap so far, and it might fall short of of Sean's quality of explanation just now. So a publication came out now about 3 hours ago. A material scientist at Lawrenceburg, the National Lab named Shanaeid. Can I get your last Shani Griffin.

And what she did was a simulation of this result published a few days ago, team in Korea, and that team in Korea claimed to have found the first room temperature ambient pressure superconductor, which is a huge deal for humanity for lots of reasons. You know, it could revolutionize energy and storage and a thousand places in our day to day lives. It would be, like, as big as a transistor, in my opinion, sort of long term impact.

I am. So I personally want one deep science explanation and then one hype about what else we can change.

But, yeah, please go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. So just a quick recap what happened here. So so the Korean scientists found this material that has these amazing properties. Right? And some people, you know, the their methods were entirely clear. Some of the plots could have been better. Definitely some you know, it was not a perfect paper, but it it was interesting enough to kind of generate some discussion. So what Chanay did was she simulated that material. And as as Sean mentioned, you know, the simulation, it's copying the mechanism that the Koreans proposed, which is that you have this lead sulfate or sulfate material and it has a crystal lattice.

You can think of that like a little cube structure. I mean, it wasn't a cube in the paper, but just for now, think of a cube. It's familiar. And what happened was that copper atoms started to kind of percolate or bind or to replace some of the lead atoms in certain places. And what that did was it pretty say twist or rotation in that crystal lattice. And this is a very simplified explanation. It's not at all, like, the deep physics of it, but it's sort of the gist. Right? It's that there's a very subtle structural change in this crystal lattice via copper atoms going into interesting prices, and this produces this superconducting phenomena.

So Shanay took a simulation of that, and As the other speaker mentioned, you know, it's an idealized case. It's a very kind of, you know, reduced to an ideal unit cell. the material, so it's not the billions and billions of atoms that are normally in just this cubic millimeter. But, like, you know, using those methods to simulate the material, running on a supercomputer or or, you know, some serious compute facility at the lab and using grade, simulation software, and so forth, you know, found found results that would suggest this material could have superconnecting properties according to some of our theories of the superconnecting properties.

So I'm I'm putting lots of qualifiers on there because it's not like a done deal. Right? But it it is really interesting because this this is a professional science scientist who had, you know, people in her lab, in her department, or group, review it, and look at it was a serious simulation, and there were some surprising results. Right? There were some things that were really non obvious or, you know, her language in the paper was suggesting. And that remarkably, there was energy bands right where you'd hope to see them and this and and the shape of those bands and the shape of these results even suggest why this material might be too pre melting at high temperature too.

So so that was, like, for me, really exciting, and I, you know, I think it's personally my estimation of the life hood of this really went from, you know, way below half, like 10%, 5% something. So a lot a lot more. Right? I won't see the number because I don't wanna these markets now involved. but enough to celebrate a little bit, I think.

A lot more specifically because we know several things about the process. And and some things that, like, point the finger towards there is some smoke, and there's it could be fired. And this is a simulation, so we're not taking this as kind of a experimental like, replication. Somebody doesn't show us the quote and quote workflow to to amazing effect that I hope you guys can explain as well. Some folks have heard this. Some folks have got excited. But so this isn't that. on computers, like, they don't have the material currently or at least Shenates or it doesn't have the material to the simulation.

However, the excitement that Andrew points to finds the fact that we are currently tracking. And by way, I mean, the global community science and non science alike, we're currently tracking multiple replication attempts. We had folks in in here is a a trial application. The folks in Twitter trial application, we heard stuff about other other labs, and I think Sean also even or something about other labs as well. We know about scientists that actually correspond with the Korean scientists that I remember Hunta Kim at least reacted, and and Lee reacted one of the original folks from okay.

So this simulation and this update joins other replication attempts. And the point to highlight here for folks who are not assigned to you as me is that the papers showed kinda how to create this material, and folks here on stage previously said, well, it's Sean famously I'm gonna hold this call to you. Sometimes when you swirl the thing in the other direction, sometimes you get different properties. So it's not, like, as easy as one. the 3 recipe. However, everybody agrees that this is a fairly fast replication with fairly common materials. Right? Red phosphorus is being restricted, but other, like, lead appetite and other materials.

So we should see results soon. This is this is the result of, like, simulationally saying yes. However, also replication attempts are saying are happening as we speak. And, Andrew, had a great thing about replication non successes we shouldn't over index on them. Can you can you recap that from the last space? I think those are interesting and very important point.

Yeah. Totally. So you know, build making these materials, it's very difficult. Right? This is very much an artisanal process. This is not like, you know, putting a frozen pizza in the oven. Okay? This is like, you know, you're you're you're making some magical potions, basically. So there's a lot of art and craft that goes into this. There's trade secret or things that would be trade secret, it's it's basically impossible to describe this fully in a paper, and and they didn't describe it fully in the first place. And so I think it's all and it's awesome. There's a lot of, like, citizen scientists reproduce these results, and I I'd be really excited to see what comes out of there.

I would also say, though, if they didn't hit those performance metrics, I personally wouldn't rule it out. I think it's really to be determined by collaboration with the original authors, which I understand are are going on right now. Like, other to step down to Korea, to work with them, to kind of go through it. So that's the that's the real proof, I think, is that the original people can can do it again, and we we get to see that happen, that would be I mean, well, then it's then it's, I think, a done deal. Yeah. But very difficult to reproduce these things consistently likely given what's been described in the original paper as also the simulation where the copper, it's not falling into the most likely location.

And as Sean mentioned, like, you know, you can't control that. Right? So you just kinda get a percentage yield likely depending on on on on the probability it falls in there. So likely you will get very pure samples that float magically like superconductors do in videos and they're all you know, floating there with no no strings or whatever. That being said, I think if you do get a a run of production, you know, a bad of the stuff and you test it consistently and and the measurements are coming back in a confirming way, then I think you can really celebrate. You know, I'm surprised that this simulation result came out that was supportive so soon, but those are impressive.

This is an incredibly fast turnaround time, and it's a it's well written paper too. It's well considered result. So it's definitely not you know, it's not a hasty it yeah. It's from a well respected love from a professional scientist. I think it's very bullish. I would say, replication results to be announced, you know, in the next few days from different labs. I would also be curious. But I'm, you know, I you know, really the original authors. Right? If the original authors can make it happen again with collaborative scientists, then then we're golden. I think I would I would reserve my actual like, conclusions until that point.

And I hope we're gonna do, like, a life basis when it happens.

Alex, go ahead. I wanna emphasize Andrew's point there that there are 2 according to Sinead's research, one of the really interesting findings is there are two lead sites that the copper doped can substitute for the light of Blattice, it is the less likely one that results in these traces and super conductivity. So the point is it will be extremely hard to create this material because you're basically hoping that the slightly less problem replacement happens during your synthesis, and that could theoretically explain a lot of the challenges at the original authors as well as other labs have had in replication so far.

And, also, Alex, I don't know if we're gonna see replication in the next few days if these results are correct given the challenges in this energetically unfavorable substitution that Sinee have found through theory here. So I think -- Oh, interesting. -- it could be actually really hard to make this material. And Shyam said earlier, if you can selectively choose the less likely led substitution site, you win a Nobel Prize. So I think synthesis here is gonna be really challenging and could explain why it's taking to find something like this.

Interesting. So you're seeing assigned towards the positive, but also seeing, like, replication, how should I say, problematic updates as well?

Yeah. It it seems like it could be very hard to synthesize this material from from the paper here.

So I could I could add something. So, like, there's a lot of cases where materials will form in, I guess, you can say, like, less energetically favorable structures. And that's, like, kind of all of material sciences you know, like, that so, like, the typical example, you make a phase diagram of a material. You want to heat it up and have it cooled down in such a that it, like, locks in a less energetically favorable structure. So that's part of the challenge in synthetic organic inorganic chemistry is getting materials to be in crystal structures that aren't like the simplest and most energetically favorable structure.

So it I I don't think that just because it's in the less favorable site that, like, has a a tremendous bearing on the ability of its decent the size period. But, yeah, I mean, it might make it more challenging.

I wanted to get a scholar before you drop out a I dropped out. I want to get to Scott's question. However, Andrew, if you have more questions for Sham, and please read to you Sham. I think for folks. The paper author is I don't remember the name. I'm sorry.

Let me find this. It's a quick shout audience. If anyone's here, like, a condensed matter physicist or or works in this field, send me a message. Get up here. You know, this is an open mic kind of thing. So I've I try to give, like, an explanation that's approachable to people that maybe don't have a physics business background, but it's been quite a number of years since I worked in center lab, and I'm I'm I'm pretty much I'm pretty rusty on it. So just send me a g on -- Yeah.

Oh, think you you you muted it. I only say how to 8 to buy as well. 8 to buy participated with us in the in the previous paper. Sorry. In the previous space, we don't write papers in Twitter. And I think you're the high hyping one in the previous space if I don't if I'm not mistaken. Can you talk about what you're seeing right now in your segment? Did it change, did it up? Go down. Why are you at a 100% already?

No. No. I mean, I I I I was I was already kind of, like you know, in the last phase, I was already at, like, 80% so. Right? And and and my bets were all on the on the human pieces. Right? I I I was betting on I was betting on the guys, like, not throwing away his career and blah blah blah blah blah. Right? And then after that, I yesterday, basically, I I called it. Right? I called it yesterday.

I said, you know, I I saw the Argon connection I saw Casselbas, I saw Humlta, Casselbas, and Maser, who had been working for basically 12, 13 years together, and they they, you know, don't characterization of metallic ceramics, you know, vanadium, etcetera. And, you know, at the at at the conduct conductance layer, and and it is, like, metal metal insulator transitions and, like and I was like, well, if if I were hyun tuck and I got like, the the way these things work is that they're secrets.

Right? Hey, Adeba, just just a a small dimension. Hugh. Correct? He's the author of the currently most viable English paper just go after it. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. So so so so give you the background. This is LK99, Lee and Kim. Right? So Lee and Kim basically come up with this and, you know, I'm not gonna talk about all the drama, but, you know, Hyun Tuck, who's a college professor, William and Mary, eventually gets brought over the wall. and when I say over the wall, what really happens is that all these things are little, like like, little mini cuts. Right? Like, you have to have this idea, and you have guard it against skepticism because it's a crazy idea. Right? Like, when if you introduce it into the world too quickly and you don't have proof, people shoot it down. Right? That that's the whole there's the whole of peer review is for people to shoot it down. Right? So you guard this idea, and these two guys never publish. Right?

Like, they don't publish for, like, you know, 20 years. They didn't they don't publish. Right? And so then at at the point that they bring KyungTuk over, he's basically you know, Quan has come in before, but Quan is, you know, financially interested. when when when Hunta comes in, that's the first point that you actually see an external an external voice a new member who's getting introduced to this little mini cult that they have. Right? And and and what happens at that point is 1 of 2 things can happen. Right? Like, he he can say, like, look. I don't believe you. Right? He walks up. Right? But he doesn't do that. He believes them. Right? So if he believes them, there's only 2 things two ways that this can go. 1, it's real.

Or 2, he got hypnotized. Right? It you know, he he he joined the cult, and he hypnotized.

Right? So -- I won't bring us down. Just know that the the the the folks. You mentioned several things. Just about him that came He's a respected scientist -- Yeah. -- and with a lot of citations. Right? Like a h score with about 40, I believe, which means that at least 40 of his publications has each, like, 40 citations or something. Very well respected person. And if he comes in to kinda, you know, clean house or ex you know, just verify our help. Yeah. He would not stake his, like, huge reputation on releasing something that's not very viable to his eyes or maybe he he's seen as well.

Yeah. And, also, you have to remember that everyone in the space everyone in this, like, you know, academic space has basically seen so many scams that the moment you say room temperature and superconductor, they are like, oh, is perpetual motion machine. Like, I I don't wanna talk to you. Right? So so, basically, the moment you hear it, it's a scam. And it comes from, like, you know, 2 Korean guys with no publications, you know, sitting and so is that, hey. Like, this this is scam. Right? So even regardless, regardless of all of these things, which are basically, like, noncredible, KyungTak basically places his entire career on the line. right?

So at that point, I am like, okay. But for me, the problem is that he is Korean. Right? So I I don't know whether there is some mimetic influence going on. So I'm like, I'm still a little bit uncertain. Right? I'm still a little bit uncertain at this point. Kwan, I kinda discard because he he he he he's been with the team for 3 years. He's been hypnotized. Right? So then you see, you know, Hintech there. Hintech goes back to the college of William Mary, And, you know, that's when we kinda meet these guys when the when the when the papers dropped like last week. Right? And so I'm still I'm still, like, not certain. I'm still, like, you know, you know, whatever, you know, whatever.

Oh, no. I wanna push back here a little bit. The the person, Juan, you mentioned. I I just wanna tell the audience, like, who who we're speaking about. Kwan Young Gwen, I think, is the is the name. He's the author of the first paper that's published on the archive in English. Yeah. Right? So before before all this, we have a a green paper that was later from the folks did submit for a peer review. Yeah. And that also reads, like, a log almost of what they're doing. And, Kwan, I I don't wanna, like, talk sort of thing, 8 to 5. Like, I haven't seen, like, a LinkedIn. Yeah. However, a lot of this is sleuth.

EverKwan is the guy, like, actually actually uploading this to archive and creating insanity the world witnessing. Right? Yeah. There's a first paper, potentially a reaction or a second paper, like, potentially -- Yeah. sorry, a KyungTakim potentially kind of 2 hours later, uploads the second paper, and this could potentially explain also why feels like it was right. Yeah. We had some some gun from Korea. Yeah. Last night, he can't join to them, unfortunately. He's doing it. However, he said One second, dude. You're saying, yeah, lose my focus.

So he he said to us that The first paper that both link in published in Korean, the second kind of paper that the squandered released, they have now other things in common. And the 3rd wash paper that we see from this, like, respectable scientist in. The 3rd paper, it feels actually, it doesn't include However, the thing that I wanna say is that I don't wanna talk ill about the offers because we really don't know what was going on there. However, Kwan may go down in history as the guy who pushed this for as the guy who released this in Harcourt.

Potentially, they could have worked on this, found out kinda a way for this to work, and then not to release to anyone and then, you know, hold up in, like, a secret Love in Korea somewhere. Right? And and Guam is just like, hey. Let's outsource this. Let's let's open source this. Let's put this up on archive, and and potentially kicked off this whole thing. He may go down the history. I don't know about Nobel Prizes and the three authors in the papers but Kwan is definitely maybe the money guy, maybe the guy who who came in, but he's definitely the guy who first told the world about this and started all of all of this insanity. Alex, I think I think you wanted to comment as well.

Yeah. I mean, I'll take responsibility here for drumming up a bunch of hype initially about this paper. I was very excited about it when I first took the archive that some of my friends in physics were.

I think The 1st day, 1st 1 -- Yeah. -- paper. Right? The 3 authors.

Yeah. And I I I acknowledge a lot of people maybe having data of of this most recent preprint as well. There are substantial differences in things like the credibility of the labid from. But fundamentally, these are both potentially interesting research discoveries that need further. Replication efforts as well as investigation by other labs. That being said, I think it's okay to get excited about things as they come out science is a prod process of fits and starts. You know, sometimes it's 2 steps forward in one step back.

But in case, I think we're seeing some really interesting contribution and something that really capture the attention of the world, and it's kinda on for us to to cheer on a lot of the researchers who are doing this work from the sidelines here.

I completely Thank you for the hype cycle that you started. A lot of the replication that then started while watching this hype cycle, and the news that we get may come faster because many more people laid out on on this. And we got joined by, like, thirty thousand people in the last space of Andrew, and many people just came in to, like, see what's going on. And some of them potentially start, like, replicating and hearing about this. And there's, like, a whole the first figure was released and essentially no peer Right? It's, like, uploaded to this archive archive archive. I don't know how to pronounce this. It's the place where you can just, like, upload papers.

The second paper looks like a reactionary fast attempt to do something to release to to say, hey. We're the actual team. I I wanna, like, add maybe this one point, Juan. Apparently, the guide from the first paper who uploaded is no longer affiliated with the center, with the queue center, so quantum center for for research that both Lee and Kim, the guys did okay started to find this material. So when he uploaded, he wasn't a participant. But he uploads anyway, and we we started hopside many people hop on this. 2nd paper comes out more details. People tend to replicate.

Now we have a simulation from a respectable lab a a simulation kind of result that says, hey. This is possible while verplication are cooking. Andrew, I think you have another update. Is that correct?

Yeah. That's right. Breaking news.

So there's another paper that was -- Wait. I love breaking news. Can I say, hey, folks, breaking news in space? life out for coming at you in this, like, insanity over 3 days.

Go ahead and decide. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well yeah. Totally. So it's really interesting. is actually common from someone in the audience who messaged me, so so keep questions and comments going. This is a simulation on from a Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Metal Research, Shen Yang National Laboratory And Health Science. I I'm not familiar with the group or the research group, but it's a simulation of the same material, right, LP 99.

And, yeah, they find some they find some things that are right in line with the simulation that was dropped a few hours ago, really, mainly in the deformation of the crystal because of the copper doping. Right? The presence of flat bands near the fermi level that exist with that doping. And and that these suggest, you know, these strong electronic correlations that are, you know, thought to be very much contributing to superconductivity And, yeah, it's so it's just interesting. So just sort of another piece of triangulation here.

I guess this one, I I didn't cross my radar previous There was another question from the audience about, you know, how useful this material could be, and whether, you know, is it gonna be impactful? Right? because there is some concerns over, can it carry a lot of current? Right? That's a big question. it useful for that, and then also can it even exist in a strong magnetic field.

And I can comment a lot of these things. A a gun a lot of current is relevant to its magnetic properties, the more current and the stronger the magnet is?

Yeah. Yeah. So you wanna be able to carry current to use it in electronics, to use it for power transmission and power generation, and so forth. You also wanna have it be able to exist in a strong magnetic field. That's that's part of carrying a high current. Right? But that's enables lots of other applications Well, that's actually sort of, like, electrical generation that has to withstand high fields, but also in things like MRIs, in things like nuclear fusion, in things like maglev trains. Right? It has to withstand these high magnetic fields. And so just a quick story here from 3 is that the last time a discovery like this was announced, it was 1986. Right?

And it was the development of these yttrium bearing mocks crystals. So those ended up winning the Nobel Prize, and it it took a while to verify as well. But there is, you know, ultimately, like, dozens of labs all over the world that ended up independently verifying those results. And since then, those have kicked off this kind of next generation of super materials. And, you know, they also started off as very weak in terms of their ability to carry large amounts of current and self supply energy, also their ability to withstand magnetic fields. And when I when I say withstand magnetic fields, it's very interesting.

So superconductors, you can kind of think, like, whether you're superconducting as or not in terms of, like, a budget. And the budget you get to spend on a few things, you can spend it on high current. You can spend it on high field, or you can spend it on temperature. And it's it's it's hard to get all three at once. So, typically, assume doctor will fall out of superconducting state if it carries too much electrical current at once or if the field is too strong or if the temperature goes too Those are the 3 real considerations or or operating points when thinking about using this stuff in engineering applications. And that that's my experience. I'm an engineer I use this stuff in applications and nonmaterial scientists.

But but just for context, so the HTS tape we have today, high temperature surrounding tape, it's manufactured in the thousands of kilometers. Right? Like, this stuff is totally industrial grade good. It's mass produced. It's the subject of dozens of years of engineering improvements that have consistently increased its performance envelope, its ability to carry high currents, carry. You know, the original currents were tiny. Now it's, I think, almost a hundred times more, and the field as well has increased drastically. So now it's really useful. for a lot of these industrial engineering applications even though it still has to have liquid nitrogen cryogenics. Right?

So just, you know, if you hear people -- It's still very useful right now. It's still very useful. -- like, super cool, and, like, a lot of energy is gonna get wasted on getting it to be that temperature.

Right? It's difficult. That's right. That's right. But, I mean, they're building a maglev train in Japan. I forget what city is gonna connect, but it's using it's using cryogenically cooled superconducting magnets as part of its limitation system So it's it's still finding use. And every fusion company around today that is using magnetic confinement fusion, meaning, guys that build Tokamak like, the big donut things or or stellivators like I do.

Oh, Andrew, what's a Tokamak?

Could you please explain to us? Yes. Right. Tokamak is a fusion device. fusion device produces electrical energy by burning hydrogen into helium just like the stars do. That's how stars shine. stars get their energy from nuclear fusion. If we can produce nuclear fusion on earth, it would be an abundant, clean, cheap, reliable energy source that would last us billings of yours, literally.

It would just -- The whole -- -- of whatever the fuck. Yeah.

Yeah.

We are Right? Like -- That's right. Yeah. Totally. -- abundant energy if we it it doesn't seem real. Like, it's it's a science fiction with your designer.

You know? Pretty much. Yeah. So fusion energy only starts climbing the Kardasheps scale to to a good extent.

And Tokamak is this huge thing. They're working on this, like, for a long, long time, it's currently taking a lot of energy to to get it to that state, and they've with some successes, we're able to replicate. it uses, like, the the first superconducting materials that we ever created. We have folks like Helian space. They're talking about the second, 6th generation of fusion reactors, and they're using the the second the higher temperature one.

Is that correct? I'm actually I kinda forget what what their magnet design is.

So so so not to put you on the spot, but they're using magnets for sure. They're moving positive. They're, like, they're getting fusion. And the whole problem so far would like the fusion energy, at least part of the problem. I don't know if it's a whole problem, is that it it takes just more energy to produce energy than -- Well, here, let me let me put this in context.

Okay? So these these high temperature superconducting tape called called HTS tape. Otherwise, it's the mouthful, but its ability to get better over time and hit these engineering performance benchmarks in terms of current and magnetic field, that's what's enabled Conwell fusion to raise $2,000,000,000 in private venture capital to build their fusion reactor. For context, the total amount of money raised across all fusion companies in history is $4,000,000,000.

So right now, so that kind of engineering breakthrough even though it's cooled with liquid nitrogen, even though it's not room temperature, that kind of breakthrough justifies something like $2,000,000,000 of investment into a technology that's that's completely nascent.

That's never worked before. So, Andrew, let me let me pause it just real quick because I have glasses. I really the folks in the audience, for the high people, I have to ask, the whole justification that we're going to see based on the 2 simulations even at this point without, like, seeing the rock float, and I would love to also talk about measure effect if you can explain that in a second. Does this already justify the investment? Like, is this enough start, like, spending a lot of money to to to start, like, getting towards the room temperature and being pressure superconductor at this point right now.

really interesting question. I think one thing to look a bit one thing to think about here, it's it's your starting point in this search space. You know? It's like the space of possible materials to investigate is so large. It's so giant. It's like this in insanely high dimensional maze or something. So if this is a promising place start looking around. Right? If if it's hard to manufacture that's the story with the previous generation of superconductors is that they they found a new starting location to look around in. and that's how you got better over time as well as engineering practice. Yeah. So I think it would probably justify I mean, we'll see. Labs will verify Right?

Like, it'll we'll find out again within weeks if we get verification from, you know, experimental validity, which which is ex like, measuring it, right, on a bench top test, not just simulations. But, yeah, I could I could very well expect a flux of new grant funding, new research spending into basic material science. I mean, that would be awesome. I think we need more of it. I think we don't spend enough on this kind of stuff. It's probably less than 1% of the total research budget we put on cell phone cameras every year, and it goes a long way. Right? This is how you advance as a species. This is how you advance as a civilization, transistor has been developed and it changed the world.

So yeah. I I love zooming in with my third iPhone camera on my son as much as the next guy. But I also would like a hoverboard, and it feels like more money needs to go to Powerboard, at least where I'm sitting from. I also had to manifold markets. Folks heard me say this couple of times. This is not promoting them. I work there. This is just literally a place where, like, people do, like, betting, and I find out about a lot of news on on my default be on this topic. And I can't load it right now. I know. Are you guys down? Is there, like, a bunch of influx? Where are we at? What's the percentage?

Hello. Nice to meet everyone. Yeah. Our site's struggling a little bit right now, possibly due to traffic, possibly due to a push that we reverted. So just bear with us. It looks for me though. I think you if you keep trying, hopefully, it will work.

But Yeah. Yeah. But but percentage does. I'm looking at 50.

Is that correct? Oh, yeah. Yeah. It did just spike up to 50. Initially, it went up to sort of, like, boy and hover it at 40 for, like, an hour after the pay point out. And then during this Twitter spaces, it's gone up from 40 to 50%.

Oh, Andrew. That's what he meant when he said there's, like, prediction markets, and we shouldn't hype up too much.

I know. I know. I should've we should've all had accounts.

And -- Hey. I I I'm holding to no one in terms of hype. And I will just say maybe about my subjects for a little bit because there's many people, and they don't know me. I'm like, who the fuck is this guy? Hi, everyone. I'm Alex. I I by chance, by complete chance, started talking about this, found out, I think, from Alex Kaplan, And then Andrew joined and very much explained. And many of the stuff that I'm asking right now, I've learned just because I'm sitting here and have the like to just ask folks and then learn. I love hype from the other field. I talk about AI a lot.

We talk about this every week, and I got very excited because of the potential of something like this to also accelerate us in that direction because a lot of the, you know, the the artificial intelligence stuff is definitely power restricted if you look, like, strongly. There's you know, only the big companies can run the big models. Smaller models than locally on your computer at home. and that is, you know, getting power hungry. The the GPUs that run all of the AI pretty much are also, like, restricted. And so that whole field if again and I'll I'll do the warning part, Andrew, as as much as you do, but, like, I'm I'm Yeah.

If this replicate, Deepgram k99 is actually, like, easily applicable, right, then we should probably talk about how easy applications do because Tokamak is still not productionized, and that's the 1st generation from, you know, 60 something. But if this materializes, then we're gonna get way better hardware. We're gonna get way way way more AI, basically, if to cover this. And this is my area of excitement. go ahead.

Give us some either red blanket or hot One thing I wanted to say on the manifold thing, guys, nothing that we say on this space should be considered investment advice, please, make your own decisions about betting markets and other things. And I have one more comment on this really interesting sheet on paper. Andrew thanks for bringing it to our engineer. I just tweeted about it as well.

But it appears from the cursory read of it, there is a similar research team at a Chinese lab that on Saturday published very similar computational results about the van structure of this copper doped lead appetite crystal with similar conclusions that there are hints of potential super conductivity. So I would consider that, you know, not that we needed it, but potential evidence that Chenay work would would stand up in other theoretical calculations as well. And it's also interesting that that we didn't notice this.

But more broadly, I've I've heard rumors that this is a huge subject in Chinese research right now. There are thousands or hundreds of labs in China working on both experimentally replicating the results as well as theoretically looking, you know, to be compliant.

I I I think this is a good time to call out. because of the lock that I had I don't know if there's a lock. But, like, because of the chance, I've also collected a a group of folks talking about this. If you guys look at the we have tweets from Elsa, and definitely give Elsa a follow. She's been translating a bunch of stuff that comes out from China. And one of the things, you know, to strengthen Alex's point is that there's, you know, there's some screenshots that say something about providers, like suppliers of that appetite have run out basically in China there's, like, multiple multiple attempts. There's folks who put up so there's a whole other Internet over there as you guys know. Right?

So, like, the world is not only Twitter. There's also a bunch of that happening in different languages. And so I wanna personally thank Elsa for for updating us, but also they are talking about some suppliers of of these materials in terms of, like, replication running up. Are these materials run multiple? You guys talked before about different superconductors, and Andrew, I think this is for you. You've talked about different superconductors being hard to produce because of the materials required. What are we working on this here? Yeah. Can you break this down to us in terms of, like, simple, like, is this easy to produce?

Well so it sounds like and Alex mentioned this too in the previous speaker who had worked with me in the past, but to this as well. sounds like this is difficult to produce right now. You know? Like, we haven't nailed down the process itself, but I would say that the materials are incredibly cheap, which is awesome. Right? So our current generation of superconducting technology, it's all based around rare earth metals. Right? And as you probably guess, the name implies those are pretty expensive. This looks like it's made out of lead and copper mostly, which is great. Right?

Lead is a lot cheaper than even copper, and and, you know, I mean, wire is as cheap as copper. So this term could be pretty awesome in terms of overall price. Like, you just nail down the manufacturing process. You can produce in high volume. You get that learning rate. get that economies of scale brought to bear on producing stuff like this. The raw inputs themselves are incredibly abundant, incredibly cheap. which would be pretty awesome. I mean, I guess, lead has mild health risks, and that would be have to be something to be considered. Right? But, yeah, this is you know, so for fusion energy, one of the most expensive things that goes into fusion reactor is the high temperature super connected tape.

super expensive. You have to buy 1000 of kilometers of it, and it's made of rare earth metals. And those don't come out of everywhere in the world. Right? It's not as abundant as lead. So that's exciting for this. If this can really pan out experimental verification, you know, then we start to produce it at scale, get some engineering performance improvements in there, which which are really easy by comparison to finding the material in the first place. Like, that's that's I wouldn't worry about that too much. It's just a matter of time and practice. But the long run cost of this kind of material could, in fact, be very cheap. And so it's not just saving energy and generating more energy than before, but it's doing so for even cheaper.

And it's it's that would be a disinflationary force on the price of almost every thing you can imagine because energy is fundamental. half the cost of aluminum and steel is energy. The cost of shipping goods all across the world is energy. So, you know, things be cheaper, more abundant, easier on the climate, easier on our resources.

It's a huge win across the board. And this is you started with materials you gotten to to the end of the hype, I wanna let Alex react a little bit and and have him say something.

Yeah. I think the the pipe is definitely warranted of something like this is possible, obviously, for many different reasons. The ones that come to mind to for me right now are in our current process of you know, trying to decarbonize our economy with a grid that's based more on renewable energy. Some of the binding constraints are transmission infrastructure as well as energy porridge. And these are two places where super conductivity could play an enormous role in transforming our economy. So there's certainly a lot to be excited about. I also wanna shout out Seneya's tweet announcing her preprint.

In case you haven't seen it, it is literally just a gift of Barack Obama dropping Mike with a link to the pay around the archive, which is about as cool of an announcement of a research paper as I think that you can get. It's also an amazing pay that if you haven't read it, I encourage everyone on on this page here to to check out and see some of the really detailed analysis that Sanae has done.

I encourage folks also to For folks who who can't read as much science and scientific journal encourage to use the current AI tools, they're great. You can have, like, a research partner essentially to ask somebody, the only said they worked on a magnetic levitation company. It's up Joseph. Can you say hi?

Hi, everybody. Thanks for having me. this has been such an awesome conversation. celebrating tonight? It's morning for me. I'm here in Shenzhen, China. So wouldn't celebrate with the beer, but I want to.

Is is is this not a a beer type day?

Afternoon. Wait. It is afternoon. It's it's it's 127. So, yeah, let's do it.

Yeah. No no fun your advice? No alcohol advice. However, Joseph, can you tell us, like, what you worked on and why you came up? So previous -- -- this -- Yeah. -- changes whatever you worked on.

In my previous life, I was the cofounder of a company called Antigravity Industries, which is such a ridiculous and cheesy name in hindsight. what what we were working on at the time was applying magnetic levitation towards consumer scale applications. So what that meant for us was invisible robotics. So imagine, you know, you have a trash can that's on the other side of the room. You have mobility issues, and you want your trash can to come to you. You could say, okay, Google. Trash can bring the trash can over to me. or a room that rearranges itself depending on the context.

And our core application was floor tiles that had lots of small omnidirectionalmaglev empowered robots that could move things throughout the space by sticking various you know, like, little stickers to the bottoms of surfaces, and then you could apply basic magnetic levitation or basic magnetic pull to move objects from point a to point b. And the issues that we ran into at the time were just raw power issues. Right? like, the cost of power to even do that was just overwhelmingly high.

And a room temperature superconductor could, like, reduce that problem by, like, 50%, 70% and make this like something commercially viable. And there are, like, dozens of applications that are closer to moving things without physically touching them. like, that has such tremendous value to, like, so many different chem commercial applications, and that is what we were talking about. That's what I'm talking about when I say invisible robotics. It's the invisible hand that moves physical things, and I think that this this changes a lot, and this is really, really fascinating stuff.

So you're in China. I don't know if you also speak mandarin or no?

My Chinese is I can speak a little bit because I have a really bad teacher. I can't speak a lot.

I understand. So so we do we do hear a lot about, like, a lot of replication that's happening in China. And this now being out there, let's we're getting more more excited. I'm I'm all all the way there, folks. I'm ready for a world with, like, a hoverboard comes, and I I hover on it. Like, I I'm ready for this change. I I know some folks still wanna be guarded. I know some folks get burned in the scientific areas before about the limitation and the potentials of, like, room temperature superconductivity.

However, this is now available to all of the world and not to, like, one country or one, like, research or lab, Etcetera. Joseph, can you talk about what what this means? The, like, the the the simpler way to replicate this is simple materials.

Now exist, if it's lead in copper, then this will be replicated in China in a matter of weeks. Like, I would say rather matter of days, but I don't wanna be overly up missed it. But, like, you know, China is still a conservative culture, but they're also, like, if there's high risk, high reward, a lot of teams will justify taking that risk. This is all over my WeChat moments right now. This is all over, like, this is this is happening. you know, people are very excited about this. And here in Shenzhen, you can throw a rock to, you know, a team that has the materials not necessarily the materials, but the the tooling and equipment to reproduce this.

Whether or not they have the starting materials is another question. There's definitely a lot of pressure on that. Other people have spoken to that. But if this can be replicated, it will be replicated. quickly, and it will be commercialized quickly. Like, you'll start being able to buy this on how about in less than a year if it's actually viable.

So batteries that hold a lot of energy. Andrew, can you I'm just gonna help with you on it because I need help some background noise. Andrew, can you talk about, like, the battery applications here? are we seeing because because I I I wanna just explain to the folks as as much as I, you know, with no chemistry or physics background understand. Battery holds energy in SMG until it runs out. Now we're talking about the material that you can run current into and holds it there indefinitely until you interrupt it. Is that correct? Is that not essentially a battery as well?

That's that's roughly roughly correct. Yes. I mean, there's lots of interesting stuff at the material science level there. But but the quick gist there, right, so solar panels have gotten super cheap. We could power everything with so and wind and so forth, the issue often is, well, they're intermittent, and so you need lots of battery storage. And there's a point at where, you know, imagine you want, like, solar in Alaska to last all throughout, like, this perpetual dark winter, you need to build almost, like, insane amounts of batteries, and it's it's hard because the lithium is expensive. And lithium ion batteries are the highest density batteries we have right now that are produced en masse.

So, you know, this kind of super nice material -- -- lithium ion. And before -- Yeah. And copper. Thank you. Talk about those.

So difference in materials. So, basically, there's there's a much higher lithium supply crunch on right now. Like, lithium price has gone up a lot over the last few years because of the emphasis on new electric vehicles and also grid scale battery storage. Superconductors can store energy in a very different way. It's not you know, with zero losses. There's a little bit, but you can basically just build a big circuit very roughly, conceptually speaking, build a big circuit and and then send the currents flowing through that circuit, and it'll just it'll keep circulating in there. Right? It's not like a little flywheel that you spin up, but there's no moving parts. The moving parts is just the actual current.

Oddly enough, there's also flywheel energy storage using mechanical fly else. This would be a lot this would be awesome. Right? No moving parts. It's made of a lead in copper, super cheap, mass produced at these very high efficiency. Right? So, normally, you lose energy every time you convert between storage formats in and out of the battery, you lose a bit and so forth. there'd be a lot of energy storage there, like potential, also a lot of energy savings, a lot of things in computing we could discuss too as how it affect computer performance and so forth. Yeah.

I I gotta ask next before Alex and Alex go. I gotta ask about space and applications. And the fact that we talked about kardashepscale civilization Andrew before, kardasheps means kinda generally don't know. Somebody's trying to summarize what it would mean for us to become, like, interplanters, pieces, etcetera. We know about travel, like, faster and, like, all the stuff, let's put them for just a sec because, you know, this is insane enough. However, just at our current speed getting to, like, Mars, whatever, a lot of the stuff that we need to do on Mars requires, a bunch of energy generation.

Is lead and copper also existed, like, in abundance out there, or is this, like, very abundant on earth and not very abundant out there?

Anybody on time on those? I I can feel that quickly. The relative abundance of materials in the solar system, it's just a function of the original stuff that formed us. Right? So, you know, the moon is made of basically the same stuff as the earth, right, in in terms of its material abundance and composition. I mean, not exactly the same because there's geological transformation processes, but in terms of elements and so forth. So these materials are just university abundant. You would find them on the moon. You'd find them on Mars. you know, we have this complicated tectonic structure that produces veins of ore and so forth. Who knows what's going on there? But these are not things that only exist on earth.

That's for sure.

I think it might be helpful to caveat with what are the potential concerns, things we don't know yet, or things that could go wrong. before we we get too hyped again as I have done in the past. So some of the things that we might think about. 1 is in the initial paper by Lee in and Quan or by the other group as well. The the facts went away at a very low current through the superconductor on the order of, you know, 20 milliamps or so. As was pointed out by a few at a time.

we don't actually know the thickness or the dimensions of the material they were using, so we don't know what the current density through that material was at the time where it broke deeper conductivity, but this could potentially be a flaw in the material if that defect is true regardless of the size that it just can't hold much current while superconducting. And in fact, if I remember correctly, some of the initial investigations were a little bit skeptical because of their relatively low density of carriers or all electrons in this modified lead appetite crystal. So it could potentially be a drawback of just very low current density.

Now if it is a room temperature, superconductor, maybe we just make a bunch of it and we're okay with that, you know, the even if the current density is low, we can just have a bunch of it. But that that's one potential drawback. Another that we've talked about a few times here is that the synthesis could be really challenging because of which lead ion the copper has to replace. But, you know, I think this would be a really big deal, but it's worth also considering some of the potential drawbacks or or downsides if if this all plays out as well.

For sure. Thanks a lot. I wanna I wanna counter that a little bit just for people that joined recently, I might have mentioned this before. So the exact same thing happened the last time Nobel prize was awarded for a a better superconductor with higher temperature, not saying Nobel Prize is being awarded here. But 1986, it discovered yttrium baryamoxide as a new superconducting material. Right? At the at the time, it had a very low critical current it had a very low critical field. It did not have a lot of promises in engineering material over decades of exploring related materials and exploring that adjacent search space of of possible compositions.

We have developed materials now that carry 1000 of amps per square millimeter across sectional area that can withstand fields that are in the in the several Tesla range. Right? and and that's what's enabled us to start doing things like those fusion reactors. So if this material pans out experimentally, I would really not be too concerned about process of engineering improvements to expand its performance envelope to become more applicable to industrial real world applications. I I would actually say that's was given. Like, I'm I'm just not that the the difficulty of that in comparison to finding material at this temperature, it's just you know, it's a 100 to kind of thing.

So that that it's true that this material might not pan out. Like, we had this graphene rush in the early 2000, and everyone thought we have graphene super capacitors, and that didn't pan out. Right? The biggest threat here is that it just doesn't experimentally verify. Right? That's that's the proof in the pudding.

If that lands, then -- When you say when you say doesn't, I wanna I'm not, like, slightly emerging. When you say it doesn't, it means that, like, in the past 72 hours or whatever a week something since the paper dropped, we haven't seen more, like, serious labs showing us that it does. I've seen some experimental evidence, like, on on Twitter, and we probably should talk about this as well at some but it's been a very short time so far. Like, it it it's something that doesn't replicate. It it's just like we're waiting, and we're getting cursor evidence. Yeah. gaining cursor evidence forward, and we're seeing 2 simulation attempts. 1 of them is from a very respectable lab. It was Berkeley, I believe.

You said and one of them is from China kind of saying about same things. While we're also waiting for many labs to kinda work together in figuring out, we saw an Indian lab that that I think also uploaded a paper today that said there a application does did not succeed. I think they posted some stuff on Facebook. Their material looked like the there's a lot of it. There was heavy and and the original paper, there's a video that's floating around. I think there's 2 videos. I I posted a longer version on on the Saks deck, and that It's a very thin piece of of of lead and lead and copper, I think.

Very thin piece and only one side of it So, Andrew, finally, after all this time, we got sidetracked, I would love if you can explain the NICE Nervek NICE Nervek and how it relates to conductivity and what we've seen and what we're waiting for. When Quick will say, we wanna see the rock levitate. What do they mean?

Totally. Totally. Great question. Yeah. So Maestro effect, it's it basically means that this object perfectly expels magnetic field Right? And so there's 2 types of superconductors. Right? There's type 1 and type 2, very creative naming scheme, Type 1 superconductors will completely expel the magnetic field. And and so it just can't penetrate. It's like a shield. Type 2 magnetic type 2 subnetters are a little bit different. Actually, what can happen is that magnetic fields can penetrate at certain locations, but they become what's called quantized.

Meaning, they they can only exist in certain amounts, and they exist as these little whirlpools or vortices that get stuck to what we think are impurities or or defections in in the crystal lattice. And so when you see something levitate, what's happening there is that the magnetic flux has been trapped or it's been pinned as it passes through this material in these quantize regions, and that's why it kind of has this levitating or or floating effect. Right? So it's really interesting. That is yeah. That's the kind of gist of it.

There's a little bit more -- I've seen I yeah. I've seen a floating before. and I think all the flooring dicing or levitating had, like, coldness effects come out of it, like like, vapor almost. Right? we're waiting for this with without, like, cool temperatures essentially. And -- Yeah. we don't see this, could this still be a superconductor? Like, if this doesn't if MISO effect is not happening, could we still look at, like, a superconductor material?

Let's know. It's it's sort of it's pretty it's the other half of the coin. Right? It's it's the one half is that conducts electric she was 0 resistance, and the other is that it has a meissner effect. There there's one way to think about these things as being incredibly linked. Right? It said if I have a piece of metal and I and I try to have a magnetic field, if I bring a magnet close to that some metal. What that metal experiences is a changing magnetic field. Right? And what that does inside the metal is that it induces some voltage. This is called magnetic induction. It's the principle behind DC motors, like electric motors, electric generation.

It all works by changing magnetic fields that make current flow in conductors. And so if the material has zero resistance, then a magnetic then a current will form perfectly. Right? It'll it'll have you know, it'll be not taxed at all. It'll be full strength. that'll be exactly opposing that induced magnetic field, and that current will produce its own field, and that field cancels out the original field inside the conductor or on the other side of the conductor. So it's sort of sort of, like, other half of the same thing. One thing though, the flux pinning, as far as I can tell, Alex, am I correct this, but it is a characteristic of type 2 superconductors, not necessarily type 1.

So whether it floats or not, whether it walks or not. That's a compelling video demonstration. But because of the like, likely impurities in the sample, right, I don't know if that's the test I'd look for. Right? Again, I'd look for the publication from Argon National Lab, from Oak Ridge National Lab, really trust the Department of Energy National Labs. They're they're pretty much the ideal league of of science in North America in a lot of ways or or other you know, other well established labs in Japan and China and and other countries like that. But, again, I did most carefully at the people working with the original authors, number for sure.

So if we do see a floating rock and, like, you know, from respect to a place, we're basically there at a 100%, and the manifold market's gonna resolve, and we're putting -- No.

-- to a very -- So -- Yeah. -- there are other reasons that could float because we've pretty extensively with with regards to diamagnetism. And, in fact, some of the rumors from the early Chinese were saying that the magnetic susceptibility graphs they were finding in similar, modified, lit, appetating crystals, you know, showed signs of diamagnetism, but did not show signs of perfect diamagnetism by flex spending for, you know, this year, a resistivity, Walmart, a superconductor. And then, Andrew, to follow-up, I I don't think Flex Penny is necessary for all type 1 superconductors.

But the characteristic of type 22 is what I was saying. Some have it. Some don't. There's 2 types. Some have it. Some don't. When you see things levitate, that's flux spinning. that means it's type 2.

If I I would say it's it's very optimistic sign. If they're seeing diamagnets but not the Meissner effect because it it it's intuitive. Like, if you had a a chunk of material of which, like, only a small percentage of it was a superconducting phase, you would detect maybe some signs of diamagmatism, and you definitely wouldn't see both meissner effect. So that is consistent with what you'd expect with, you know, what people think they have, which is maybe a a small amount of this Elk in any 9 mixed with a bunch of other junk.

So I wanna talk about how easy this is potentially to replicate and we've talked about this a few times before in regards to whether or not this be real. Right? So we've talked about this in in a from a perspective of the serious scientists, some a sighted scientist saying this is real. They wanna lose their proputation, previous attempts at superconductivity. I think Bay is a virus. I don't remember. We're attracted by nature, so the whole field is still, like, raw and some other attempts like Andrew, you you you said back in the day also didn't materialize. Sorry for the fun.

And we're we're now saying that if if the guys if the material gonna sorry. I lost material thought here. Alex, can you pick up?

I I think I'm getting -- I mean, I the only people who have claimed to make this material. You know, it took them many years to do so even after seeing some trace a bit. Oh, yeah.

Here here's my third and third question, and you help me find good. I I tried to get here. So we're talking about a potentially easy ish way to reproduce, which if this was, like, an attempt to falsify information or like, hey. We have something. They wouldn't release this, like, as easy and we're now seeing a lot of that. Andrew, you're correct. And the fact that, like, you know, still need to see. For full, this is happening folks humanity has moved forward. We need to see our application for you said Argon National Lab, right, like, reputable and maybe in China as well, we need to do this. However, based on the ease of accessing these materials, like we've talked about, let appetite, copper and and some other stuff.

We're seeing attempts, and some of them are on Twitter to replicate this in, like, a home lab almost, right, in home experience. I don't know if you guys have been following. And I know definitely that the manifold market has been changed based on this one Russian Kimest or whoever that attempts to do this. And Andrew, to your previous point, like, the only folks who say they have effectively done this with the Koreans. I think it looks from the at least from the pictures that actually not videos yet, that there could be another replication potentially. definitely from the way I was talked about.

And I had definitely seen both, you know, takes of hate towards that, and and both the it takes of, like, oh, this is awesome. Somebody's replicating this, you know, hiring and style in in delivery room. I think it moved to delivery room. I want to hear you guys' experience with, like, reading those tweets. And if you know if you decide, then what do you think? Do do we affect now that we 2 simulations, I guess. Did we effectively have, like, another application potentially in the house? Would that make sense? Or would that be, like, too crazy for this very crazy endeavor anyway?

I mean, I don't think anyone is claiming that this is rep location, as Shyam was explaining earlier, it does not even really proof that the material is super conduct. It's just some trace that you would expect to see if it were to super effect, but it's really nonconclusive because it's a simulation at 0 Kelvin. So we're not dealing with any of the effects of heat. we wanna talk about replication efforts, we've got the man himself. Andrew Macau, we could share some of his thoughts on how it's going with the furnaces.

Yeah. Andrew is think, for instance, anything he dropped out because he's busy. I'm not sure he wants to pick it up, but I do wanna like, I'm getting folks asking about quote on quote Russian animigar. Right? So I wanna talk about this a little bit and maybe Andrew as well?

Yeah. I was following that thread with a lot of interest in curiosity. the I don't know what the extent of replication there was. You know, I I personally would say it's incredibly difficult to replicate this much material science kind of chemistry, you know, production process perspective. Like, it's I would be blown away if someone could do this in their lab or or in their house or in their garage or whatever. without the original people there. I would just be blown away. I'd I'd say that's incredible. It sounds like it's a tough process.

It sounds like they did thousands of materials over 20 years to perfect this process and that there's even things that were almost happenstance or or potentially serendipitous in its to be discovered this way. So I think it's I would not index personally heavily on sort of citizen scientists, independent attempt set verification. I would look closely at scientists that collaborate with the original authors that have, you know, that have experienced track record in field of doing difficult material preparations and so forth. It it's really an art as much as it's a science. You know? It's like these these guys are not just you know, like, following recipes on a on a on a diagram or something.

It's like there's a lot of implicit skill that goes into this to understand contamination, cross contamination hazards, and and so forth.

Yep. Ben, do you have any any opinions on this? I'll just let the folks. I pinned the two tweets from Iris Iris IGB here, I wanna say. And, you know, it's a person, a chemist with a kiln in the living room that talks about science in the tweets that I haven't seen many folks who were in our spaces or different other folks core credentials who say that that science doesn't shake out. Like like, this is my sign to to resolve this. And we're all waiting. There's no video, but there's thing. I have 2 pictures of 2 specs of dust, potentially levitating inside the pipette, and there's 2, you know, 2 angles of this pipette.

Now everything can be faked by wanna hear Alex and and Ben's your thoughts.

Yeah. I mean, that's the only thing I would say here. I've seen a lot of negativity towards Iris on Twitter, and I think Iris is clearly an experienced scientist who's trying out a fun project. So I would just encourage everyone to try to be positive and supportive here and and not really come with a lot of the negativity we've seen towards Iris. I I think a lot of these experiments are really cool. I don't think any of us are in a position to validate or invalidate the credibility of anything that Irish is finding in them, but certainly cheering them on and wishing them all the best.

I so so I'm gonna go ahead on that.

Oh, yeah. I was just gonna say it's in incredibly entertaining at the very least. and also kind of genius. Like, you can see the thought process to how they're modifying the procedure, and it's extremely creative. I've been sending, like, screenshots of that thread to people in my department to see if they wanna try it out, and I'm just getting messages from another PhD student. He's like, we should we should try this, and he's, like, planning all the steps they'll need, and the equipment will need to to replicate Iris' replication. So that could be pretty fun. We'll see.

Yep.

Go ahead. One more thing about replication here is I don't think any of us can really say the timeline is for when we might see this written material replicated if if it will replicate given the challenges of fabrication and synthesis. But I do wanna emphasize that it'll be very hard to prove that this material doesn't work anywhere in the near future. It's very tough to know whether any failure of super conductivity is due to the material synthesis or the properties of the material itself. So we likely won't have conclusive evidence against this anytime.

So if if it's a yes, and we get, like, a picture of iris levitating on, like, a homemade, you know, Ironman style, like, a patient board from few back of the future, that's a definite yes if we get the video and many other people start replicating this. But I we don't get the definite Is that what you're saying, Alex? So, like, it's a definite yes. It's a definite yes if but it's not easy to see a definite no at this point.

Well, I wouldn't necessarily get the definite yes from a picture on Twitter. I would love to see some data with the, you know, the original authors potentially involved with a resubmission plot and with some real instrumentation that can be replicated and, you know, and reviewed in terms up and everything. This is nothing against ours. It's just very hard to collect really high quality rigorous data and home setup like that. So If we do see yes. It's probably gonna be from a lab. Like, one of the national labs Andrew is mentioning that has, you know, a lot of thoughts that are grouping it.

And if we get, like, a definite yes, it's a definite yes, but you're saying, like, a a definite no is going to be hard to come by.

Yeah. And that is one of the big differences with this paper versus other results is it's actually, like, it's hard to make this, but there is a way to do it. If you looked at, you know, some of the previous superconductor hyperhound deacetal or some of the silver nano particles in the button on the there was really no inkling whatsoever into how you'd manufacture these materials. They were kind of making these claims with a lot less I don't wanna say substantially but just a lot less engagement with the broader scientific community. So I'm very encouraged by, you know, Tian Tak Kims reaching out scientists and the reports of a lot of collaboration and replication efforts. I think that's a really positive sign.

So first, who claimed they saw the rock fly now help everyone else to also get the rocks flying. Man, I thought you had your hand up for a while also.

Yeah. I just wanted to come in quickly and ask because you were mentioning how it's gonna be hard to prove that it doesn't work for a while. I know you guys are mentioning, like, you know, this hover board going on stuff But realistically, one of the big questions we have asked is, like, how what questions should we actually be asking to sort of try and predict and operationalize, like, the question, will there be superconductors and what impact will they have on the world? because that's the question everyone really wants to know the answer to. Right?

So it's, like, quite hard for a lot of people to think of the right questions to ask because you don't know what the right questions to ask are if you're if you don't have an intimate understanding of, like, the physics and science that goes behind it. So, yeah, I guess just throwing the open question out there or what like, what how can we offer operationalize these questions by besides just asking, will there be superconductors, or will this paperback okay. Are there other questions you think we should be asking and predicting instead from sort of a scientific viewpoint?

I think no, really. Whether this thing is a superconductor or not, it's it's in my mind. It's kinda binary. I guess other questions might I mean, not not to be a downer. Right? but I I know you're trying to maximize the surface area coverage of prediction markets on this phenomenon, but I think, really, it's a matter of science and hit pans out as a superconductor. That's that's that's a very binary outcome. Right? Like, there's not there's not kind of superconductor. It's not like, you know, you can't be kind of pregnant. Right? Like, someone is either pregnant or not. That'd be my take on that. Just lots of scientific questions and measurements, pretty straightforward. Right?

Does it conduct at DC with near zero resistance as as much as much as you measure it? Does it perfectly expel magnetic fields? Does it and so forth and so forth. So the scientific measurements are pretty straightforward, but they're all just, you know, that's how you confirm it's a superconductor. So this question of, is it a superconductor that's, like, kind of that's the outcome of measurement. Like, that's just a a name we use to classify a certain type of material. If that pans out, there would be a 1000 second and third order effects in the price of copper and the price of energy in the in the available grid apply and and all this kind of stuff, and and those would be really interesting to explore too.

Would it be fair to say that the world would go mad with abundance or, like, opportunities because there's abundance of energy?

I think the I think the recession was probably canceled.

Like, there's a lot to do. Right? Yeah. Capitalism turns on when when he hears something like this.

Alex? I mean, yeah, it is kinda fun going back to my original thread to think about what might happen given it replicates. So, you know, for the manifold question, if if it's a yes, like, you're gonna know. Everyone's gonna be talking about it. It's gonna be the front page news that this thing is confirmed, and it's it is gonna be a really big talk to the world, I think you'll very quickly probably see significant amount of government interest and involvement and this material to really high value sectors.

I think that the obvious ones like energy storage and transport and transmission are, like, likely to see, you know, a lot of deployment, but you can also think of, you know, basically every sector being affected by this in some way. This is it's electricity. like, look around you. Look at your phone right now. There's there's a lot of stuff that use electricity, and I think that you would you would likely see a really rapid amount investment into the area.

Yeah. It would be dope, man, as long as as long as it replicates in this way, everybody's, like, listening and trying to to see the other attempt and and big labs. And this is also why many people are cautious to to get too excited. Right? Like, because how do you prepare for a word like this where many, many things are changing. I think it would be helpful to some of the people not first of all, folks in the audience, if you work at this, if this, like, materially is your expertise area, feel free to DM, Andrew, and me to to go up. I would love to talk to you. We'd love to interview.

We'd love to hear kind of if you have a definitive a definite no, we would also like to hear because it doesn't look like it. At the present, this is, like, very hard to say that this is impossible, so the world has caught on to this, like, scent. And now whether or not it's here or some or else, it's in this area. Right, Andrew? That's that's what you said. Like, every time we explore a different area, there's multiple possibilities. We suddenly find something, and then we're gonna start digging and investing. To that, there is a video from a a a, I think, Chinese vlogger. he actually walked through the quantum energy lab. It's video it's on my feed. You guys can look it up.

I lose to it when I started looking up in The viewers in the cities longer he plan went to visit kinda I think on Friday, the guys from Acue Energy, which is like the the healthy 99 guys, And it's like a very unassuming basement somewhere in, like, in in Seoul. Very small like, it's not like a lab. It's not building. It's a basement, and it was under invested. I think for sure no matter what, you will be over invested very, very soon. Right, Andrew? Is this is this a fair assessment of things? Will they get more funding now that, like, the world has gone on to dissent?

I I think the funding is gonna you know, let's try to keep your powder dry as apps. I think, yeah, like, these if other labs here verify this. I think there'll be a tidal wave of funding into this area both in non dilutive public funding for research teams and, you know, early stage commercial applications. But, I mean, just you know, for the last time this happened, right, 1986. I said it's times, but, you know, it's just interesting to illustrate. It's we had this new super nectar, and it only works at liquid nitrogen temperatures. So it's super to cool it down. It's expensive and so forth. So there's not as much of a gold rush, right, for applications.

If this pans out, I I already have venture capitalists messaging me, asking me if, you know, what what companies should I be looking at or, you know, what's the stuff going on here. And there's gonna be a lot of that, but it's sort of something let's say, like, we all get a a performance fee in the betterment of humanity in our collective quality of life in the abundance of cheap energy. So I think I think we all win here. There's gonna be companies For sure.

I I would recommend this is shouting out to Andrew the couple of spaces we had. You have a great way to explain very technically, like, challenging things. And the other thing I wanted to shout out, and Andrew, thanks for for joining me and cohosting, is that Andrew has a talking about superconductors and their application from, like, 3 weeks before this blew up, Andrew. I -- He knew. He had us 2 months ago. How how did he not months ago to write this thread. What what pulled you? Does?

So, yeah, I don't know. I mean, I was actually just was, well, I've worked on this stuff for a while, and I had no idea this discovery was gonna be announced, of course. But it was just I was just trying to think. Like, what things that I think could be on our near term horizon, like, in 10, 20, 30 years that would inject a bit of optimism back into collective narrative, I think there's a lot of sort of, like, this pessimistic perspective that we can't solve our way out of humanity's biggest problems. and I'm an adamant believer that we can because our history as a species has been successively solving these massive problems time and time again. And so I would never not bet on science and technology to show us the way out.

And so this is one of those things where this would be, like, the or it you know, it's just an anecdote about that. So before the transistor was developed, tons of scientists and engineers knew exactly what they would do it. Right? It's like if only we had a really tiny kind of current gate, if only we had this tiny, like, vacuum tube version because the function it could perform was quite clear. and they knew if they could have that, they could design all these wonderful things. They couldn't have predicted computing as it exists today, but they had lots of ideas about you know, analog electrical circuits that would be useful in in radios and that kind of stuff. And then and so they were looking for it. So they're trying to make it happen.

when they nailed it, that we have the whole IT computer evolution. Right? So this is a similar case where it's like, there's a lot of places this this is a known win, and people have been searching for for a long time for that reason. I thought it was a matter of time before this happens. You know, I've I've chanced into a couple things before. I well, we won't get to that, but I could talk with another time. But, yeah, I think this is just an exciting thing, and this has been top in mind for me for a while. I've worked with this technology in a few places. My first job in physics was in 2012 at a condensed matter laboratory that used a certain kind of microscope to to search for this kind of material.

I wasn't a very advanced scientist at that point in my career, so I was, you know, just really helping out. Since then, I've worked with the same stuff in accelerator Laboratory that are, you know, making particles go to speed of light. And this is it's one of these things. This is the miracle technology, and it's only really exists so far in these esoteric physics research applications, which has just been it happens to be my world. So it's sort of top of mind for me as someone that's, like, if we had this, here's where it would get us. Right? Like, it's so pressingly clear to me.

Yeah. I think I got why you're so once again, Alex, I think I get why you're so guarded about, like, saying yes. We do football out, etcetera. Like, this is a this is a big deal. You're excited for for a long time, and and now you get to, like, talk about this that you love with with passion. And I appreciate that you bring this this here as well and playing this very simple. Go ahead, Alex.

Yeah, Andrew. I just if we can get down details here. I'd be super interested to hear in your experience working on Fusion. Like, what are the actual reactor designs that we would put one of these room temperature superconductors to work with? Is it simply just, you know, replacing HTS tapes with new HTS tapes? better better without the liquid nitrogen, or are you really going to be able to configure something like a more compact accelerator a better Tokamak. What are the or have anyone been thought about what the design might be with the materialized?

Is it is it better talking exist in helium. Isn't that what we talked about, like, 8 months ago where they have, like, a way more compact, you know, fusion reactor design, and they're just, like, energy restricted, I think. Tokamak is old news no?.

I I can comment on that a little bit. So Tokamak is the most well researched and well developed fusion concept that we have. It has the most amounts of track record behind it and consistently better results. In the big number to think about is usually what's called confinement, which is basically, like, how well does it keep energy in? You know, infusion, it's like you're trying to fill a cup until it overflows. And once it starts overflowing, it'll just keep producing energy. It's like unlimited water comes out or something. That's kind of the mental model. So it's really, you know, confinement with magnesium.

It's Water comes out. Sorry. I have to repeat this slowly.

It's a cup that you fill And then -- -- there's a cup with the hole in the bottom, and you're trying to fill it with water really fast. And if it starts to overflow, it'll just start completely spitting out water forever. You just have unlimited water now. It's amazing. Right? It's great in the desert. But there's a hole in the bottom. So if you can't pour water in faster than pours out, then you'll never reach this what's called a fusion condition or triple point or loss in criteria. These are just names for people that might there. But it basically means that the fusion reaction is self sustaining. So so, yeah, where this would come into play infusion really interesting.

So Tokamax and stellorators, and there's lots of other fusion reactor designs that use magnetic fields at a high strength. Helion is is all different. I I do believe they use HTS coils in some other machine. They've chosen not to publish a lot of results on their technical milestones and projects.

For focusing audience, HTS coils is the the second superconductor tape?

Right. Sorry. Yeah. So HTS is high temperature superconducting tape, and that was initially discovered 19 e 6. That was the first time this really big jump in temperature was discovered. That's been that performance of that tape and its ability to carry high current and withstand next field has improved immensely over the last 3 decades. And so now it's at a point where it's, you know, hundreds of times better than the first was when it was discovered, and it's produced in thousands of kilometers quantity. Right? You measure in kilometers, it's like this, like, super thin tape. So I I can speak to the the design trade off here because this is kind of, like, what guess my day job.

So you have a plasma that's 1,000,000 degrees Celsius. Right? And you have to make a bottle around using magnetic fields. So those fields get weaker the further they are from the magnet, and the magnet is really just a superconducting loop that carries on the current. Right? It has thousands of windings in it, has thousands of wraps in a single magnet, and these magnets are the biggest cost driver for fusion power plant. So The closer you can get your magnet, the conductor, to the plasma, the less current you need to run through it, meaning the less power it takes, meaning the more efficient you fusion reactor can become.

And the further away you have to put it because of oh, sorry. Sorry. Let me rephrase that. So the closer you can put the magnitude of plasma, the cheaper the reactor but the more heat it gets, right, because the plasma is releasing these high energy neutrons. Those neutrons can pass through solid material they bounce around. They emit heat. Right? It's very hot. Think of it like a furnace. And if your clothes get too close to that plasma furnace, then they will do what's called quench. They will fall out of superconducting state, and that is bad. That will damage them. It can destroy them over time. It basically means that your your reactions stop working. So that's the biggest trade off.

It's basically how close can we get the coils to the plasma without getting them too hot. Right? So the temperature is the number one thing. It's the number one thing. And then also, it's the cost of the materials that go into the tape. Right? That's biggest cost in the fusion plant. The 2nd biggest cost is the cryogenics to keep them cold. So this material, it kinda like, just completely blasts apart the 3 biggest issues in magnetic confinement fusion, assuming it can get engineered to perform very in the future with high currents and high fields. It gets your coils closer to plasma. That's awesome.

It makes them incredibly cheap to mass produce because it's lead, which is cheaper copper, not made of rare materials. That's awesome. And it eliminates the need for cryogenics. So these are these are just you know? And I you know, that's just for this one big kind of moonshot experiment, and there's a 1000 of the places, it would be awesome too.

So I just wanna clarify this one thing and Hopefully, you guys can hear me still. My headphones died. We've been here for a while, but we're still here. It's still very interesting. And still many, many more new people in and they have questions as well. So I think we'll open up for some of the new folks on stage as well. The I guess I wanted to get to LJD. You came up and you had maybe a question, and I think Andrew You're going to do to sign up a little bit, but we'll keep going a little bit more. So, LG, do you have a question or a comment? and they dropped.

Alex, I think you have one more question for for Andrew. And Andrew, feel free to to to sign off, and then at some point, we all gotta sleep.

Yeah. Hi, guys. I I've gotta make coffee in morning. I gotta go soon here. My my main thing was, I think, about the fusion reactor technology specifically is a space that I think worth watching really closely to see, you know, what the implementation time for HPS would actually be here. I think it's probably be the first order. Most important thing, if you think about the holy grails of physics, it's basically high temperature superconductivity and, you know, stable nuclear fusion for everyone. And this is what you learn when you're, like, in 8th grade or something in science class and your teacher wants you to be a scientist. These are the things you can discover. That is a grand unified theory.

We may be close to 2 of them. So it could be pretty exciting. I will leave it at that. Thanks all for for joining this I gotta go to bed, but I really appreciate Andrew and Alex keep putting aside.

Alex, thanks for joining, man. Talk soon. Andrew, I I don't know if he addresses to you or not, but Let let me know.

-- hear you. I I can be for another little bit, but I think we've covered the groundwork here pretty well.

So can you do -- Any legal like, one last recap, if you don't mind, of today's events updated last night. I know I've asked you this multiple times, however. Always new folks coming in, and I think it's at least one of them is gonna get, like, a good recording. Like, you did previously, like, a video and worse than that. So why why are we here? talking for the past 2 hours, I think.

Yeah. Sure. So one last go around the merry-go-round. Okay. So a few hours ago now. I guess it was, yeah, a few hours. A scientist from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, which is a large government funded lab associated with Berkeley University in California. She published a simulation result on archive, and archive is a preprint server. It's where things aren't pure review yet. But in her acknowledgments, she did say she talked about a call talked to the colleagues about it. So it had some, you know, it had some more than one person looked at it, and she's a scientists from a very well reputable lab. Right?

Very high quality as science comes out of LVNL. They invented the psych control and they all all this kind of stuff. So I I put a lot of faith in them on this. The simulation results were basically this. The Korean authors in their original publication early this week. Right? Seems like a lifetime ago. They put forward this idea that their material has a certain crystal structure. Right? It's mostly made of lead. But when you introduce copper into that, it can kind of replace some of the lead atoms in certain places, and when it does, it slightly changes the structure of the crystal. Just a tiny bit.

They measured a point 5 percent contraction in volume, half a percent smaller. Right? But they put forward an explanation that this is associated with this kind of energy level opening up, which we call a band and a previous speaker said, you know, this is a good explanation, but energy bands in a material, it's kinda like a staircase or a shelf, and it tells you where can electrons fit in terms of energy in the structure. And what the simulation from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, who's from Shanay Griffin. I her she actually on Twitter. He posted this originally.

But her simulations show that if she models this material in this idealized sense, then she finds the existence of these energy bands that are very flat in in their shape and right around the fermi surface. Now these are just kind of some words I'm throwing out there for people that don't like But, really, I guess, the gist is if this material was a superconductor, then according to the most nailing theories of super conductivity today, it would have this structure. It's very suggestive. Right? So some caveats on that. You know, this doesn't mean it's a superconductor. Right?

That's a measurement, but this does align with our understanding of it so far. Another one, another caveat is that this simulation is not a perfect model of reality. It's very idealized. Right? The solutions or the methods that you are approximate solutions, but they're approximate solutions that are very accurate. Right? This is there's a lot of effort that's gone into simulation time. You know, she's not a scientist that just wrote this on her own and then simulated it. These are codes that have been developed by dozens 100 design tests over many years to get better and better of time running on large, government funded, supercomputers that are funded by the Department of Energy and so forth.

So it's a very, very serious kind of simulation result. It also corroborates almost perfectly the simulation results of a team from China that published a few days ago as well. So there there's some convergence here in the simulations of this material. It's not a, you know, It's not a win completely yet. Right? So that's gonna be the validation of more material that's been produced in collaboration with the original authors that has the same properties measured on the bench. But this is a big in my mind, this is a big thing to be like, okay. Wow. This if this was true, we would be seeing this so far. Right? It's not a guarantee, but this is a green light. Right?

And and they're green until they're not. and that'll be really the test is I'm gonna guess in a week or 2, maybe less, we'll have experimental results that that can be a lot more elling than the simulations, but the simulations agree so far.

Awesome. Andrew, thank you so much. I know this is maybe best of luck then. And tomorrow, you're probably gonna have some TV interviews to explain this as well. I appreciate your time here as well. Thanks for coming up. I'm still interested in hearing, like, a bunch of other stuff. I enjoy all of you. sign off, and then we'll continue.

Thanks, guys. Yep. Yeah. I I hope to write more about physics stuff in the future. That's kind of my hobby right now. Thanks for having me up here. This was great. You know? Physics is fundamentally the force by which we understand nature and grow closer to it over time as a species, and I think it unlocks what is basically magic. Right? Nuclear power is one of those. It has great destruction potential but great potential to generate energy too.

So I think I hope everyone kind of gets more interested in this space and and a little more optimistic for what the future can be if we collaborate if we invest in basic science research, if we take these bold risks on ourselves. And I, yeah, I hope to have more conversation the future.

Thank you for coming up. Thank you for explaining. Thank you for summarizing. I know it's not easy, and yeah, we'll talk again folks. Feel free to let us, you know, give us subjects and come up here as well. I have had multiple people asking me multiple questions in the audience, and now we have a few folks on stage. Some folks that I haven't talked to before, I will moderate if you start doing, like, a better Twitter in in farming.

However, if we keep this interesting, I think people will get some value out of this I have people asking questions about specifically applications to computers and to AI and to how this affects, you know, computation. and folks in stage feel free to chime in. And the other one is well, there there's many other thing that changes. Right? So there's a lot of questions, but since I do talk about that, like, every week, and I haven't since the the paper released, how does change computers. Are computers easier cheaper to run, but just the specific nature of, like, there's more electricity?

or a little more to this?

I could try to field this one if you want. Yeah.

Go ahead. So it there's a big if here, and that is if I mean, well, first, if it's real. But then if if it's real, they're doing bulk synthesis currently. And in order to make useful for the semiconductor, you know, manufacturing method. You have to develop methods of of appliance material by by vapor deposition, either physical or chemical vapor deposition. And there are different parts of semiconductor device manufacturing processes that use these 2 techniques. You can think of PVD physical vapor deposition as you have some chunk of material.

You heat it up to vaporize it and then it redeposits on some tar it. Whereas chemical vapor deposition is a lot more sophisticated, and you can think of it like, let's say, you you coat material with one type of Lego block, and then you you have another material come that, like, removes part of the Lego leading something behind. You do this lever multiple cycles to get some complicated structure. And so if if it turns out that LK99 is a superconductor, the race will be on to kind of see whether it can be it can be used with PVD and CBD. One problem is that the semiconductor device manufacturing process has no tolerance for defect.

If you have a single defect in your chip, right, the chip can short. So you need to have defect concentrations that are extremely low, which will really limit its application in, you know, like, from going into, say, your Intel chip or something like this. But there are there are definitely applications in other types of semiconductor devices. So maybe, like, I don't know, larger larger things, basically. Like, transistor or diodes.

What about what about -- Woo hoo. -- scale of computation? One second to somebody who's talking over me. Yeah. Ben, what about scale of computation? Would we, like, would we see, like, Because technically, like, for a smaller piece of this electricity, it's superconductor. Now we we don't have to keep it super cool. What if it's just in, like, a neural link chip? Does that, like, run the chip for longer, which means, like, the chip needs to be smaller? because, you know, there's battery and there's charging, etcetera.

Yeah. So someone should correct me if I'm wrong, but I think if you I mean, well, if you if if you were based say copper or aluminum, which are, you know, common metallization processes in these chips with something like LK99, you would have basically no heat loss, which would mean, yeah, you wouldn't have to cool your chips. You could run them maybe faster. I I don't I'm not a I'm not like a computer engineer. but I think that would definitely be an improvement. It wouldn't hurt. But, yeah, I I think that it would be I mean, this image after manufacturing process is, like, maybe a decade delayed from basic research. So that that would be a while from now.

I wanna I'll I'll just -- -- with, like, a stupid organization that I just had. You said semiconductor industry, which is a superconductor. and both of them are conducting something. So we're potentially looking at conducting your information faster because, like, it's, like, not resistant at all. That's interesting that the semi semiconductor industry is now getting into super drive. I wanna hear more opinions about how this affects computing and AI folks if you're in the audience and you're into this, and you wanna talk about, like, an explosion of whatever x potential that this gives computation feel to raise your hand and come up.

Joseph, you have your hand up. What's up?

Well, hypothetically, a room temperature superconductor would have a pretty significant impact on quantum computing. Now There's a caveat there because we're not really sure of the major impacts of quantum computing yet. But if you didn't have to deal with massive amounts of cooling to maintain superconductivity on the chip, then you're going to see a massive reduction complexity of the platform in itself, and you'll be able to put more cubits together and you'd be able to get more meaningful results out of the system.

And, you know, like, it's hypothetical because you're, like, implementing a hypothetical solution to facilitate another hypothetical solution, but that's when area where this could have a major impact on computation at the fundamental level.

Yeah. Great. I wanna say hi to other folks here. What's up? George, and what's up? I'm sorry, Vanshi. let's say, once you first I I think you unmute it a couple of times. Do do you have comments on this specific paper or the whole LPA 99 events? Wanchi, if you can unmute. And if you're not, we'll go to George. What's up, George?

Oh, thank you, Alec. two part question regarding AI. 1st, how can AI advance fast track this technology And then the next question would be, how could then soup room temperature, super conductivity, advanced AI, especially making it more intelligent?

I I can you know, I'm not a scientist here, but I can speculate because I've been, like, looking at AI for for time. Everything is restrained, and a lot of this restraint is just pure energy. We have folks on stage that talked about the HDX I think, from NVIDIA, which is like a box that you get, and most of NVIDIA's best chips are stored in there. And Jensen from the c CEO of NVIDIA is basically saying they're pulling as much energy, like, current, whatever from the wall as they can, and, basically, then spreading this on just computation, and this is what this, like, a a g x box essentially is.

If we're talking about way more energy being able to get transmitted, we're sending you're talking about, like, whatever percentage x the computing power that we currently have. Right? Like, energy trans translates pretty directly into computation, and we're all, like, energetically constrained. Everything blows up. And when everything blows up, like, the the current trend that we see in AI, they also, like, accelerate significantly faster. The ground trends we see in AI indicate very, very positive things to humanity. Like, you can listen to market You can listen to some rumors as well. I don't wanna I really don't wanna get stuck in here because we we are talking about, like, a a a logical breakthrough.

However, many of the positive things that we expect the guy to do in the world now accelerate significantly. If, again, this replicates and if, you know, if they can use this energy for for computation.

You know, if this does replicate, what it allows generative models to do is to come up with new material preparation techniques, new synthesis techniques, new production techniques, basically simulate those techniques that can then be applied and tested by researchers to better place those copper atoms within the lead structure. So to get a more realist more reliable and more predictable method of placement of copper atoms within the lead structure.

Mhmm. Yeah.

Mhmm. I I hear. Cool. Hi. Can you talk? I I don't think we can hear you, Ben, or somebody. Can you hear around you? Alright. No. Let's let's get some other folks in So sorry. Joseph, you mentioned sorry. I was just, like, doing some logistics here on the space.

you mentioned that -- It's okay. You've been doing this a long time.

Yeah. No. No. Sorry. get distracted because I have to kick somebody off and then send so many requests that people do wanna come up, and I'm trying to do this as I'm speaking. However, It's not only about the simulation of the materials that that you mentioned kinda scientifically. Right? We the the current models that we currently have in in in, you know, language, the modeling language. Many of the folks who work on them, they talk about their ability to, like, simulate a reality within themselves or, like, have a build a world all essentially. Right? The size of these models is restricted not only based on the size of text of the Internet. I think everybody's already trained models on most of the text on the Internet.

But now these models are are moving to a multi model world. Right? models that understand not only text but also, like, video and heat and and and movement, etcetera. And now these models are a little bit, like, underpowered, essentially, because they need to spread this this computation towards all of this. And so we need to train them on much more data and there's many scientist that can can otherwise, but, like, there are scaling laws, etcetera. Like, the more data you shove in tomorrow's, the performance you get. And the more multi model, they get the more than the real world. And so now you're talking about AI.

You can simulate the real world with I I just for you these of talking about this, let's say, LK Ninety 9 add, like, a 100 x. Just a 100 x to whatever. Energy output to, you know, energy consumption scale. 1 of the metrics that we have, and this seems like it applies to many. But let's say a 100 x and 1 of the metrics the ability to, like, con con to do produce more energy to the wall. If this just this one thing, jump to 100 x than the models that we're gonna get. Essentially, pretty directly also get to 100 x.

We're already sitting on a an exponential scale of progress in AI because, you know, the GPUs get better twice every, I don't know, 16 months or something. like this, the the amount of papers on AI. Like, we're talking about archive papers today. Right? We came in here and said, hey. A respectable scientist from United States replicated or so similarly at some parts of LK Ninety 9, it looks more legit than it looked yesterday. And we're sitting here talking these these archives? The modern archives archive papers on AI has also grown exponentially.

There's always, like, more performances open source models that we now would be able to run a 100 x better at home are already beating GPT 3 and GPT this is, like, another exponential scale. And now we're essentially writing this financial wave even with just, like, limiting our imagination, let's say, for just a 100 x of what we currently have. If this comes fast, this is, like, you know, really hard to predict the quality of this.

I agree with you. What I'm saying is how we get LK99 if it is provable, if it is validated, and how we get LK 99 to LK 99 at a 100 x. Right? So it's gonna be something like a flywheel where we get LK 99 if it's validated, that's the basic template. Right?

And then generative models that are doing physical simulations, whether it's MATLAB or some other FAA approach, is going to come up with new approaches to improve the reliability of LK99, which gets you to LK99@2x@5x@10 So these models are going so, basically, supercomputing is going to improve superconductivity far quicker then super conductivity will improve supercomputing if that makes sense in the short term. And then in the long term, supercomputing will be massively improved by super conductivity. I hope that makes sense.

Yeah. We're we're seeing we're seeing an exponential solution here for sure. Yeah. Manifold. You've been up here for a while. Give us an update. What's what are the numbers saying? In manifold markets for those folks who don't know is, like, a market where people go and say maybe an handful can present themselves. But tell us the tell us the score.

What are the folks that -- Yeah. Once Let me take a look. Our site seems to be working fine now, by the way. It's currently still at 50%. So it's, like, starting to stabilize around there, it seems.

50%. Right? So it's a like a towing cost whether or not we are, like, climbing a new from the Kardashianscale optimization or, you know, somebody doesn't replicate it and solve bots and somebody is, like, lying. But I don't see a lot of ways out of this that are unknown. I wanna get some more folks up here. Let me let me take a look. And I think I can go for, like, maybe 20 more minutes. I'm getting a little window here, folks. Some folks texted me. There's many people who wanna talk to. Let's give it some folks. here. I wanna get Alex Lang. I think I saw you in the comments, and you're excited. And Okay, man.

What's up? Hi. I just want to get more material science guys to speak. I think there should be someone down there. So the method in this paper is sort of classical method. I remember my friend who was doing to conduct simulation. They used to do the simulation, and their simulation use up all the computing power in Oaktree National Lab. But that work was about 20 years ago.

And super the quantum computer cannot do the simulation of the structure for very simple structure like a benz benzene structure, but not not this LK99 thing. So does any material science guys can comment on this?

Yeah. I don't know who who material science guys we have left open stage to to ask questions, but then take some Can you can you repeat the question again?

Well, the method used in dissimulation in this paper. I assume it's using classical methods using supercomputer. Right? So what about, like, quantum computer? They are using it for simulation as well, simulation of structures.

I actually don't know if they You you mean the BERPERCENT? the paper that we did flex out today. That's right. It's quantum simulator.

I'm actually not sure that we saw that. No. It's a it's a conventional supercomputer cluster they're using surely. I don't think quantum computers are at the point where they can simulate that that size is structured, but I'm not a 100% sure.

But, yeah, we're definitely looking at improvement of of that area of simulation. Those somebody I hope during the audience might give Sean a scene, I think. And the whole thread about how much would have to simulate to get the LK99. He he talked a lot about, like, the the chances of this being able to simulate is, like, a 100,000,000, some crazy number. is driven viral, and I don't know if people yeah. A 100000000 years basically around it to be able to simulate this. even if we give a lot more power to our computer. I don't know if Mike is here and wants to comment. If it's not, I think if it's alright with you folks. I'm kinda done for tonight.

This is great. We talked about this. We're not I'll try to summarize this in in the previous way that I can. we today saw 2 simulation confirmations. Right? So not a replication, not somebody creating the the the whole degree of material know, the unobtainium. Oh, yeah. I have to review something. If if you are, like, to understand the scope of what we're talking about, watch Avatar again. They're kinda talking about this The whole thing about avatars that, you know, humanity grows to the other planets, and then villages them for LK 99, the LK 99. Actually, the real deal So watch out if they're gonna extrapolate it from there if you need the emergency unlock.

But we've seen 2 simulations from respectable labs, one from Berkeley, one from China. Did basically say, like, the the the path is right. It it does seem like, okay, 99, the superconductor at room temperature and ambient pressure, at least exudes some properties. We're currently also seeing a lot of replication and some are, like, Gang Hall on Twitter and they tell us what they do, and many of them are in labs around the world. They don't tell anyone what they do.

And those replication attempts are trying to follow at least 3 different papers that one of those in Korean is now getting said it's slowly in other 2 that we saw a few days ago. And if this actually shakes out, is what we're all watching. This is at least a Nobel Prize endeavor to the authors. Not sure which of the authors. there's several, and we talked about the drama. And if you wanna follow the drama, hit me up on, I think, on my profile. My subject should be somewhere there. I wrote, like, a whole summary of the drama that we had from 2 days ago. So we also wanna focus on the human element here.

And the world is, like, basically waiting for this thing to exist because if it exists, we have multiple folks here on stage. They talk about the potential of a material exists from MRIs and fusion reactors at the current iteration of how we use these very expensive things to AI getting, you know, way, way, way more better, and we talk about AI in separate space and basically impacting all of humanity. So the world is, like, waiting. We're all watching together I would encourage you to kind of follow this list that I have with, like, LK99 folks. I've been trying to maintain this. This is how some of the experts show up up in here in in spaces.

Many folks translate from different world, the Internet, basically, from Korean from Chinese, and if you have recommendations who to add, there's only, like, twenty people in this list. Definitely DM me. Oh, this guy, they're talking about, okay, 9. We'll hold most faces on this. Probably, there's gonna be more folks talking about replication attempts. We had Andrew McAllen from VARTA space in in here. He's currently replicating this material and live streaming and Twitch. And so this live stream could could do some sample, I think, tomorrow. There's many If you look through the pin to it, the last one talks about the Russian scientist, Iris.

I think her name is which starts to replicate this in her first kitchen with a tiny speck sample that she claims she reproduced and with a kiln in her living room. it's not like it's like a mad scientist type thing. So we see this publicly live on Twitter, and, hopefully, folks don't heckle that scientist to this because it's clearly a scientist. clearly doing something. So we've seen a potentially replication attempt. However, many big labs around the world right now, ArgonLab and some other places, they'll definitely work in replicating this material. Whether or not they failed to do so, effectively, folks on stage also said it does not mean that, you know, there's nothing there.

and today's papers showed that there's definitely a good direction. So we're looking somewhere that, you know, the humanity hasn't been before. Abundance of energy means a lot of things. Just a lot. Just like an impossible amount of, like, predict what abundance of energy means or it means for geopolitics for, A lot of it is, like, energy related. Right? Middle East, oil, like, all this. A lot of the A lot of the sorry. I just saw Ira just posted something in a second. Hopefully, it's not replication. You know? Example, as we speak because I I I do wanna go to sleep.