FloatyRocks.fm intro - understanding LK99 superconductor

Hey, my name's Alex Volkov. I'm gonna start by saying I'm not a scientist, not even remotely so. I'm really bad at math I'm a computer guy. I write software. I love AI.

or one thing that I do have in the ability to get excited by new information and dive in deep on Twitter and other places. And this podcast is the outcome of that as you will hear. following this introduction.

So I invite like minded people, curious minded people, people who have hoped for the future, people who don't let the inner scenic and the doubter, prevent them from dreaming and thinking about the world at large and how it may change, to listen to this podcast. It outlines from the very beginning.

My hope process of learning about LK99.

I hope you enjoy.

And I hope this turns out to be true. In both cases, whether or not LK99 turns out to be true, This has been a fascinating week for me. It's been only a week so far, and I think I wanna tell the story of how it started regardless of whether or not it works out or not.

With that, I welcome you to the podcast and hope you enjoy.

For some unexplained to me reason, I found myself curating the stream of information of a very obscure hashtag called LK99 very early on. Some of you may have heard some spaces around. Some of you may join the lists on Twitter that I curated or other spaces in Airjet and in WhatsApp. And it all started with just me trying to understand what is this thing. than with me trying to understand. Holy shit. What is this thing?

And, as I do, I create To release first, try to follow everyone there, and then try to understand with not a lot of prior knowledge, but with a lot of excitement. and something like LK99 shows potential for a lot of things to change and definitely generates excitement. So here's the short version of the best summary of the LK99 madness for the past week that I can think of.

Q Center, quantum Center for Research in Korea is releasing a paper on archive. The paper has 3 authors on on it. 1 of the authors, the one who raises the paper, did not actually affiliated with the center. 2 hours later, Kim Tak Kim, the current, I don't know, CEO, person who works there, a respected scientist. Very well cited, releases another paper, looks different, talks about the same thing. What both of them talk about is a room temperature ambient pressure superconductor called LK99.

Now if you don't know what superconductor is at all, superconductor is a property of material to pass current through it without losing the current to heat. And we already have superconductors being used in MRI machines, and in different other applications, including fusion reactors. Now fusion reactors currently are not operational on producing energy. more energy that they take to operate.

And part of the reason is superconductors that those machine use need to be held in very low temperature. There's several different ones, but the gist of it is maintaining that temperature and pressure for the existing superconductor materials that we have is very expensive. The reason to use superconductors, one of the main ones is magnets, wherein if you run enough current through this material, it becomes a electromagnet. And, this is how we get MRI and FMRI scans of magnetic resonance.

And, this is also use inferior reactors to contain the plasma that they use to fuse together, or in other newer fusion reactors to kind of move the plasma along with future magnets. And in both these cases, superconductors are the most powerful magnets that that those guys can get now. A room temperature superconductor is One can say almost a holy grail of material science.

In fact, good dramatization of Something like a room temperature superconductor is actually in the movie avatar and also almost the whole plot of the movie. It's called unobtainium there. And, essentially, this is why humans invade Avatar, and they try to mind this. And, in some weird coincidence, the avatar world is full of floating kind of islands in the sky.

And one of the properties of superconductor is something called meissner effect, where they essentially float on top of a magnet, which is also another use case for superconductors, which is magnetic levitation, and the the they have been trained designs from magnetic levitation and and multiple other applications of superconductors. Room temperature superconductors mean that It will be way cheaper to produce some of the existing use cases for superconductors, but also mean many, many other potential applications.

for energy storage, for energy movement, for magnets, and different other areas. And the obscure group of scientists from Q Center, potentially obscure, they're not obscure anymore, They released this one paper in the second paper, and the scientific world is already burned because they remember a previous superconducted paper and retraction where a fabricated data was actually provided, and quickly Many people around the world try to start to replicate.

The reason why everybody's rushing, and the reason why it's so exciting, is because the process which Q Center released for us is fairly simple, and the materials are fairly common. It's led and copper and some other materials. I think the main one is being red phosphorus that's, restricted in the US. And, many folks on Twitter start open source experiments. National Labs around the world start. not so open source experiments to replicate.

And, we currently believe that the first person to actually replicate this is a, Russian biologist named Iris Alexander who showed the whole process on her Twitter account. back then with, like, a 100 followers or so, very, like, obscure tiny account. And, the whole process took a few days for a tiny speck of dust to kinda levitate in her part. Now everybody's asking, does this replicate?

Does the claim that LK99 actually is a room temperature ambin pressure superconductor, replicate because this means a lot for everything. Another Twitter replication attempt came into the spotlight from Andrew McCallup, an engineer in Vardaspace who saw this paper read it, read the recipe, and decided, hey, I have most of the materials.

I have the lab in our office at the back of our office, and he also started live tweeting. And the Eventually showed a replication attempt on Friday, August 4th, with a piece of LK99 that levitates I'm under a microscope when sits on top of a magnet. Now, I want to make this clear. Replication of some of the levitation attempt just adds to the credence of the papers and that what they released.

There is the materials, the process to bake them together, it's not a full fraud. It's not fake. and, the replication attempts to get That result have been concluded, and it's pretty clear at this point that they have something.

What that something is whether or not that something is a superconductor with superconducting properties where the resistance is essentially 0, the storage of energy, all of the incredible things, that we expect from a room temperature superconductor, that's yet to be proven under microscopes of real labs, a huge labs with scientists, that are checking the characterization of this material. However, this does go to show that the paper as it was released in a messy fashion and the fairly obscure people from Q Center, they're not lying, and they're not fabricating this data.

And, we had many conversations during this week, with him and many other, friends in the group chat that I've opened and found myself in the middle of including iris and, some folks from Israel and some folks from Korea who try to get us the latest news and translate. and the world still holds breath. Jim Takim the very respected scientist who raised the second paper have gone on record and said that they're confirming and they're sure that what they have as a room temperature superconductor.

And so we still wait for a full replication. the jokey meme is we wait for the rocks to float. Well, we have seen for sure. With a video evidence that concludes that at least the way they synthesize this material. It's a definite superconductor, but for lower temperatures, I think they talk about a 100 kelvin, which is low, still low. Remember, we already have superconductors with low temperatures. If everything else stops, just right now, many of the scientists that we've talked to last week, and I've talked to many, and I wasn't prepared for for this.

I had to learn up really learn really quickly. Many of the scientists say that it's on its own is a very significant breakthrough because the materials to synthesize LK99 or lead in copper way cheaper than the rare earth materials or previous superconductors that also need to get, generated very low temperatures. So even if we stop notification attempts, even if you don't believe QCenter that they have or they say they have, we already have incredible breakthrough.

However, the speed with which this sample can be generated takes around 36 hours or so, And every every institute with the lab is probably trying to replicate something like this. And the reason why it's incredibly exciting is because It just affects everything with electricity. So I'll say again, this Material change that humanity could potentially unlock. We're still waiting for full confirmation.

We're still waiting for this ability to, hold some amount of current to see if this is applicable to a batteries in energy storage. We're still waiting for a lot of things. However, when you talk to physicists, and physicist, their mind starts flying. I wanna call out one specific physicist from Finland that we've talked to who start talking about, planes with no motors, planes with just the wings coated in this material potentially and then charged to ionize the air around it, for example. And, when physicists start to answer with, why not?

Because they are no longer restricted by this, very problematic materials that don't hold current well, then I think it's very exciting. I will say this. The human element behind this is at least as interesting. The whole drum about the release, the Professor who worked on this and then died and on his deathbed, asked his 2 disciples to kinda continue his work. The origins of this go back to USSR, the people surrounding this try to replicate.

Everything here is incredibly, incredibly interesting to me and some of the friends that I found this week, Sanghung, and Atapai, and several other folks. And I will definitely bring you more, maybe in a separate podcast, more information as I had been able to be part of it from the very beginning. Thank you for listening to Floaty rocks podcast. And see you in the next one.