Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - RED FLAGS! Room Temperature Superconductor or FRAUD? Jorge Hirsch on the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast (#316)

Episode Date: May 17, 2023

Video version of this episode: https://youtu.be/cAMSoAUo288 UC San Diego Physics Professor Jorge Hirsch... ...joins Professor Brian Keating to discuss recent claimed a breakthrough in high-temperature superconductors, including claims they work at near ambient pressure and temperature. Here come cheap magnetic levitating trains, low-loss power distribution, free MRI scanners in every clinic…. Or not? Watch my solo episode about the controversial claims here:  https://youtu.be/hbER0AnwXD4 Since the discovery of superconductors in 1911 by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, earning the 1913 Nobel Prize in Physics, they have been the subject of much fascination and inquiry. Some of the greatest minds in physics have grappled with how superconductivity works to drive electrical resistance to 0. The 1972 Nobel prize in Physics was awarded to John Bardeen, Leon Neil Cooper, and John Robert Schrieffer "for their BCS theory of superconductivity. Now the race is on to get the highest temperature superconductor possible; another Nobel Prize was awarded just for getting the temperature up to 35K or -396 Fahrenheit! Superconducting has remained impractical, until now... Maybe! The HUGE claim: zero resistance, at temperatures up to 65 degrees Fahrenheit. Is it a scientific breakthrough, or is it very probably fraud? The Nature Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05742-0 Key Concepts: Superconductors are materials that conduct electricity without resistance. Room-temperature superconductors would have a wide range of potential applications, including in power transmission, medical imaging, and quantum computing. The researchers at the University of Rochester claim to have discovered a room-temperature superconductor. However, there are some concerns about the validity of the research. It is too early to say whether the discovery is a breakthrough or a fraud. Subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show for amazing content from Apple’s best podcast of 2018! https://www.jordanharbinger.com/podcasts  Please leave a rating and review: On Apple devices, click here, https://apple.co/39UaHlB On Spotify it’s here: https://spoti.fi/3vpfXok On Audible it’s here https://tinyurl.com/wtpvej9v  Find other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast Support the podcast on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating  or become a Member on YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join To advertise with us, contact [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the experiments on the hydrates, people claim to have seen the first type of experiment where if you apply a magnetic field to a superconductor, it doesn't go inside, it gets repelled. But when they do the other experiments, which is they cool the system in the presence of a magnetic field, they don't see a signal. And I think that's a red flag that says these are not really superconductors. And we'll see. Welcome, everyone, to this special episode. episode of Into the Impossible. Here is the much-anticipated follow-up to your host, Professor Brian Keating's

Superconductor Showdown solo episode. In his first podcast interview, veteran UC San Diego physics professor and inventor of the famed H. Index, Jorge Hirsch, provides a crash course in superconductors and defends his critique of the now famous or infamous paper published in nature this past March. The paper, with the not so memorable title, evidence of near-ambian superconductivity and an N-doped lutecium hydride, was published by Ranga Diaz and his team at the University of Rochester, New York. Following its publication, the paper is triggered a firestorm of hype and controversy. Listen now and get the facts firsthand so you can draw your own conclusions. Do you think Professor Hirsch should have been penalized with a temporary publishing ban?

Do you think his critique is too harsh? Are the seemingly magical properties of super-connecting materials about to revolutionize almost every modern technology? Is Dr. Diaz on the short list for a Nobel Prize? In this episode, Professors Keating and Hirsch don't hold anything back and give you the facts so you can decide. Please keep into the impossible in your feed by subscribing and following. For some extra credit, jump over to YouTube at Dr. Brian Keating.

that's DR Brian Keating, where you can see the video version of this and all our episodes and subscribe there too. Do you want to hear about more science controversies? Please let us know what you think in the form of a review like this one. From Audible. This podcast covers the most important topics on science and technology, often with a philosophical angle. Professor Keating, together with the most brilliant minds on different subfields of science and technology, dive deep into their topics. And now, let's go beyond the headlines and the hype with this in-depth dialogue on the controversial Superconductor Showdown in this episode of Into the Impossible with Brian Keating and Jorge Hirsch. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Open the pod bay doors, please help. Welcome to a very refreshing episode of the Into the Impossible podcast. Today, we're joined by a renowned physicist, a condensed matter theorist, who happens to be the inventor of many things, including the indomitable, the precariously named H-Index, which I think is named after his last name. But this is Professor Jorge Hirsch of the University of California, San Diego. Jorge, thank you for coming on the show. Thank you for inviting me, Brian. I apologize for the mix-up last time.

I was totally unprofessional of me, but I had a little visitor, as you remember. And sometimes these things happen. But it's very gracious to you to come back. time commitment so I apologize or not stuff. This has been a couple months coming since the announcement of a major discovery in the Annals of Physics, which could go down as one of the greatest discoveries of all time. It could be worthy of a Nobel Prize. Or it could be flawed.

It could be a fraud. It could be many, many things that we are looking to you for interpretation. So the first thing I want to ask you is, when did you become aware of these results, the first time, what sort of is the impact of superconductivity on physics? And what does this all mean? Help us interpret it. We're just simple cosmologist around here. You mean when I became aware of which results? The Diaz at all, or the group ideas originally, and got you interested in this particular. Yeah, well, on October 14, 2020, Diaz and co-workers published the paper

with the title room temperature superconductivity in carbon as a sulfur hydrate. And so the same day, I saw it and became extreme interest in it because, as you well said, superconductors are fascinating and they are basically macroscopic quantum systems and if we have them at room temperature then it's just amazing what you can do with it. Now, of course, the paper was room temperature, but also very, very high pressures.

And so that makes it a lot less interesting, but still, it's an enormous breakthrough because we have been looking for room temperature superconductors for 120 years. And the promise of those room temperature superconductors will demonstrate here, This is not a room temperature superconductor. This is a piece of yitrium copper barium oxide, sometimes called Yibico, which needs to be cooled below its superconducting transition temperature, which is approximately 90 Kelvin or so. So this is 77 Kelvin, which of course is very balmy compared to what we do in the cosmic microwave background. But nevertheless, if you could have such a device, if you could have a true levitating device, let me say, I'm going to get some more liquid nitrogen. But describe the history of superconductivity, and what does a theoretical condensed matter physicists do?

And I'm just going to go get some... All right. It's a long story. It was discovered experimentally in 1911, and it was immediately realized by its discovery. It's discovered coming on, that this is an amazing thing, that the resistance of a metal when you cool, instead of gradually going down, at one point, it suddenly drops to exactly zero. And exactly zero means that if you set up a current going, it will keep going forever. So it's really qualitatively zero, not quantitatively only. And of course, from day one, it was very important to understand why this happens and how can you make this happen at a higher temperature.

And so for that we need to understand why it happens. and what characteristics of the material favor this phenomenon and how can you modify the materials to make it happen at higher temperature? So the original discovery was at Mercury at 4 Kelvin, I believe, and then people started working experimentally on trying to increase it and gradually went up to 23 Kelvin over about the next 40 years or 50. years. And the next big jump came actually only in 1986 with the high-temperature superconductors where the temperature went from 23 Kelvin all the way to 90 and beyond.

So YBCO, which is the one you have, is 90 Kelvin, which breaks the nitrogen barrier. So liquid nitrogen is much cheaper than liquid helium. And so this, of course, was a big breakthrough and then the temperature went up all the way up to 140 or 150 for these materials all right so as I say it's a very long story let me try to shorten it the thing is in 1957 a theory of superconductivity was proposed which is called the BCS theory that is believed to describe what's called conventional superconductors and it's generally accepted to describe all superconductors at low-time temperatures that were known at the time and others, but not these high temperature superconductors

equiprates. Okay? And so the conventional theory is based on one basic interaction, which is called the electron phoenon interaction, which says that electrons will do this remarkable thing if they pair up, and in order for pair up, you need an effective attraction between them. And that, the BCS theory says, results from the motion of the ions as the electrons move, they move the ions and in turn that creates an effective attraction between electrons. So it's an essential part of the theory and the one thing that it predicts is that for lighter

ions you will get higher temperature superconductors. And so, as you know, hydrogen is the lightest atom we have. So the theory predicts that if you can make superconducting materials or materials that have a lot of hydrogen, you will get higher critical temperatures. And there was a seminal paper by Ashcroft in 1968, where she specifically proposed to look for metallic hydrogen, which is hydrogen pressed to enormous density so that it becomes metallic. been achieved yet. But then in 2004 he proposed that if you mix up hydrogen with some other metals,

you'll have an internal chemical pressure and you can achieve this high temperature supercontracting state. If you have an hydrogen compound, it's called a hydride that has a lot of hydrogen and some other metallic elements. And so at that point, experimentally, people started working very hard to create these materials. And they need to be created under pressure, or at least it's easier. And so the focus has been on these hydrodite materials under pressure.

Is that to make the hydride form, or is that to mimic the, replicate some phonon interactions or reminiscent of conventional superconduct. To make it be a metal, the hydrogens have to be, the material has to be sufficiently dense. And usually, for example, if you have sulfur hydride, it's a gas, it's not a metal, and then you apply very, very high pressures to it, and it starts conducting electricity.

And in fact, that material was claimed in 2015 to be the first hydrate, high-temperature superconductor that was discovered. Oh, was it a copper? Was it also a copper hydrant? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no copper. So we need to make a clear difference between the cup rates, which is what you have there, which we know are so-called high-temperature superconductors, but high temperature means up to 150 Kelvin,

and the hydrates that are claimed to be superconducting up to room temperature. And the big difference that I must say is important is the following. For the cup rates, everybody agrees that the interaction causing superconductivity is not the electron-photon-BCS interactions. There are no Cooper pairs? There are cooper pairs, but they are not formed. They're not generated by this electron ion interaction.

So the mass of the ions is irrelevant. There is other mechanisms that people have proposed, which we can talk to if you want to, but they are not related to the electron-furnal interaction. Instead, in the hydrant materials, people believe that it is the original BCS electron-phonal mechanism that's driving the superconductivity there. So it's kind of paradoxical that, you know,

before the hydrates was thought that there was no way to get high-t-C with the conventional electron-fondon mechanism and you need to find another mechanism like in the cup rates, and then suddenly the conventional mechanism became again the driving thing for high-temperature superconductor. And what have been your contributions in this field? I know about a great deal of your work as a condensed matter theorist, but we haven't had many of those on the podcast. In fact, we've only had Felix Flickr recently on.

but he was one of the first theoretical condensed matter physicists. What do you do? First of all, condensed matter physics. Anderson came up with that name. Is it a good name? I don't know. I mean, he wanted to generalize it from solid state physics, and it's whatever you think.

I don't think it's particularly necessary, but whatever. So I am interested in actual solids as opposed to more general condescary. Well, not quite, but like, for example, liquid crystals would be some condensable that's not a solid. But so my interest is in collective phenomena in solids due to electrons deciding to somehow do something together as opposed to moving independently. And superconductivity is clearly one such phenomenon, other phenomena, have to do with magnetism, for example, why iron is a magnet and aluminum is not, things like that.

Right. But so initially in my career, I was focusing on general, kind of correlated states of electrons in solids, but then starting more or less like 30 years ago, I focused very much on superconductivity. So because you have a, dot edu email address you are eligible to receive this piece of iron uh also cobalt nickel any guess where this might have come from hori hey you didn't even have to join my mailing list at brian keating

dot com no where they just go from this came from outer space cool so this is magnetic material cool which has come from outer space and it is highly magnetized you can put it on there and you might not be able to get it back yeah jumped up steward get us on camera on my camera please so we can of the demo here. So you will get your own piece of space dust if you have a dot edu email address because I love to reach out and I will give this one to you. So you didn't have to join my email list although I hope you do it. The next time I come you'll send me a superconductor from outer space. That's what I'm going to ask you. So could it be that there are superconductors in space? Could it be maybe not tangentially related perhaps to our issues of dark matter? There are

those who propose that dark matter could be a superfluid, including people like past guest Stefan Alexander, Justin Curie, Sabina Hasenfelder. What do you think about the superfluid? Have you paid attention to it? Not very closely, but I do agree because I paid a little bit of attention to superfluid helium, which is a material we have on Earth, which has some very close similarities with superconductors and some important differences. But the basic phenomenon, which they share, and I suspect in these other ideas,

Cosmology is microscopic quantum coherence. Quantum coherence, phase coherence at the microscopic scale. That's what defines a superconductor and a superfluid. Now, when I look at the field of, you know, I still sometimes lapse and call it solid state physics. I remember it was called squalid state physics, and that's why Anderson repeatedly wanted to perhaps change it. Nevertheless, I see a lot of acrimony,

and it reminds me of some of the guests I've had, on the podcast that we talk about consciousness and I ask them what is consciousness and what is possible to be conscious and they'll say things like an electron or a monkey or in other words they can't really define it there's a famous essay by Thomas Nagel called what's it like to be a bat the end he says we don't know so when I look at superconductivity it's pretty clear they talk about a couple of classical tests for what is a superconductor absence of electrical uh resistivity critical temperature critical, critical magnetic field, curie temperatures, things like that. And then there's things, you know, subtle things like magnetic induction and so forth that we'll talk about. For these claims,

it seems pretty clear cut. You could just, here's a chunk of material, give you some of it, and you can see if it has resistance, cool, at room temperature, even, you know, a theorist can do that, no offense. But you could do that. I'll give you the volt meter down the hall. And we'll be able to get it. But, so what is so suspicious about it? What tests do these high temperature superconductors fail in your expert opinion? Well, I mean, the main problem with these hydrant superconductors is that you have to apply very high pressure. And actually, that was the case, until the latest announcement in March that we'll talk about. But before that, pressures were around 200 giga-pascal or at least over 100 giga-pascal. And for those high pressures,

you need a diamond anvil cell and you need to have a very small sample which is maybe at most 50 microns in diameter and a few microns in thickness and so they are tough experiments and when you measure things first of all there's a lot of background that signals that can come in and it's just very difficult to for example when you measure transport resistance what you really is resistivity, which is an intensive property, as opposed to resistance that depends on the size of your sample. And if you look at all these hydrant materials, they usually give you resistance,

but they don't talk about resistivity. Because- And that's just for my audience that might not be familiar as resistance per unit length, essentially. Per unit length, unit area, and so on. And because there is difficulty in knowing exactly what is the size of the sample and the geometry and so on, it's hard to estimate the resistivity.

And so if you really could demonstrate, OK, the resistivity of this is two or three or four orders of magnitude less than that of a good metal, that would be very convincing. But people don't do that in the experiments. Also the experiments are not very reproducible. You do it once, you get one result. Even the same lab does it again. They get a different result at a different temperature, a drop.

Sometimes it drops to very small values, sometimes it drops to finite values. And what's interesting is that for some reasons, the experiment they seem not to be very critical of the tests they do in the sense, in my opinion, they rely very much on theory. So if a theory calculation tells them there has to be superconductivity in this material, they see some drop in resistance and they say, okay, that's it, we have found superconductivity. if the resistance then go to zero, they attribute that to, well, maybe there is some contact or some contact resistance or some part of the sample that didn't go superconducting. And they do not, I believe, take into account that there is other reasons why a material

under high pressure can undergo changes in resistance that are not superconductivity. But dramatically so in the demonstrations that we'll talk about, it seems like there is a qualitative difference between an ordinary, you know, axial stress strain, dependent resistance or resistivity and these kind of near zero or close to zero resistivity measurements that they claim to have demonstrated. Although we can't say for sure because they're not replicatable right now, right? First, they are not replicatable. Then when you look at the papers, very often they don't tell you whether they are subtracting

what they call the background resistance. Yes. You've had particular attention to this. In particular, if you look at the latest paper on this Lutisium, nitrogen hydride, you look at figure 15. They show you curves that drop and go to zero and continue at zero. But they happen to be honest enough because, and that's partly because of the history with this group, to say, well, we subtracted background resistance.

And they don't show you what the road data looks like, but they did upload the road data at the website because they were required to do so by nature. And if you now take those road data and plot them, that same plot that in the paper looks like this and then zero looks like gradually coming down and doing nothing, okay? And it's obviously no evidence for superconductivity, but after you subtract something, it looks like superconductive. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill, four-burner gas grill, on special buy for only 100. $499 and entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $499. This Memorial Day get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot.

While supplies, price in valid May 14th or May 27th, U.S. only exclusions apply. See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. And, you know, famously in my field of astronomy, you know, Edwin Hubble published in 1929, in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the plot of the recessional velocities of galaxies, his distance. And this particular plot, these data will show this on the B-roll background film that will show along with the paper from

Diaz's group, the figure that you mentioned. And he plots it and he shows these data points and they're just boxes, there's no error bars. The Y axis instead of being labeled kilometers per second just says kilometers. And there's some strange scatter. And he fits a line

through it. Okay. So famously, this is Hubble's law. The slope of that line. It goes through, it's as simple as law possible. goes through zero the slope is now called hobble's constant h which you would love actually lose little h in many varieties throughout all the physics from plank's constant all the way up to reduced Hubble constant now

he also got the slope wrong by a factor of seven but is that important because the general law is of course correct and it holds over not just the 10 to 50 mega harcics that he looked at it holds to thousands of megaparsecs so what's wrong with this Jorge. I mean, just to be devil's advocate. If indeed, look, this is, you know, very close to zero resistance. They're making a plot. They're subtracting stuff. Yeah, but even a great Hubble could make errors. Is this just a petty thing that scientists care about because of, you know,

error bars here. One thing doesn't prove that. The fact that Hubble turned out to be right is great. Yes. The question is, is this true or not true? In science, we deal with facts. So either this is a superconductor or it's not a superconductor. I'm convinced it's not a superconductor for many reasons. Okay. Let's go through them. Okay. And so it's something that needs to be determined. It's not a question like in other social sciences or political sciences where there can be different opinions. Here we will have an answer. All right. The long list of reasons why I don't believe in this? Yes. It's very long. As long as you like. Well, it starts with a group that is publishing this paper. On the surface, the paper looks impressive. It has a lot of

different measurements for superconductivity, resistance, AC susceptibility, DC susceptibility, specific heat. So, all right. Now, about this group, we need to remember that they published their first claim of room temperature superconductivity in 2020. The paper was retracted in September 2022. Why was it retracted? It depends who you ask. If you ask a journal, what they published is that they retracted it because it was not, they used a non-standard procedure to subtract the background from the raw data to arrive at the published data. If you ask me and Dirk van der Marrell, we work together on this, it is because what they claim are the raw data that they measured in the laboratory are not measured, they are

fabricated. Fabricated. We should stop there for a second. That's perhaps one of the most serious charges in academic could have leveled against them. And you have substantial reason to believe that. But as yet, we're still

this is open to, you know, to debate. They can respond to this video. I've actually asked him to come on the, not today, but come on the podcast anytime. I know you have corresponded with him. But just for my listeners, I have a lot of young, you know, PhD students that listen to 100,000 plus strong

undergraduates. You're thinking about becoming in condensed matter physicists. This is extremely serious. And I think to have someone of Jorge's caliber open, honest, and vulnerable enough to discuss this, this is a very rare treat for my audience. So I just want to, you know, put a double click on that and say, this is an extremely serious allegation from an extremely serious group of scientists here against another group where there's no, there's no monetary, you're not doing this for fame, for attention. You're really quite a private person. So explain what this means.

that they're potentially fraudulent. We published two papers with Dirk, and in fact, I wrote the third paper, just four pages, trying to concisely show mathematically that this is fabricated. That paper was published today, coincidentally. Really? Oh, Model Talk.

In the journal Chemical Communications, as a comment on a paper that they published in chemical communications last year on the same material, CSH, that was a subject of the nature paper that was retracted. So in this paper, I published it as a comment. It was reviewed for seven months, and the authors were invited to write a reply, explaining why they don't agree with what I'm saying in the paper.

And they have not provided a satisfactory reply to a journal, and the journal decided to to publish my comment without a reply. I am sure that the journal will publish a reply if they submit one. And I know my audience subscribes to this journal. I'm sure that they do, but let's summarize what are the, some of the piece of evidence that you bring against it mathematically, physically, et cetera.

Yeah, so they give, so the susceptibility shows a drop where the system goes superconducting. Susceptibility versus temperature. Okay, explain susceptibility as a magnetic phenomenon. Magnetic susceptibility means the response to the system when you apply a magnetic field. When the system becomes superconducting, it responds differently than when it's normal,

in particular it doesn't like the magnetic field to penetrate inside its body. So it generates diamagnet. It generates a current that prevents the magnetic field. It shields the magnetic field. Unlike this meteorite or the one I've given you, which is highly... That's exactly the opposite. Ferromagneticists. They couldn't be more opposite.

Highly diamagnet. Yes. Precisely. Go on. And so you measure that susceptibility, which goes to a large negative value. So as a function of temperature, there is a drop when this happens. Now, because of this being a very small... sample they have a background signal that they need to subtract and so what they

published in the paper is the raw data minus the background signal okay and that's called the signal so signal or yeah data equals raw data minus background signal all right so the data that they published have a very very peculiar structure and so we asked I asked them to provide the raw data and the background signal in order to understand whether these are real and so it turns out that the data can be expressed by mathematical formulas so the data versus temperature there is to be specific 450 data points that are given to eight decimal places, we can represent those 450 data points to eight decimal places by the

sum of two mathematical functions. One is a series of integer steps multiplied by one number, which happens to be 0.16555. And the other function is a set of third-order polynomials that can be figure out what they are. Can I stop you for one second? Eight decimal places. You're talking about tens of nano. This would be a nano or the unit of magnetic susceptibility. Well, no, they measure voltage.

So, yeah. Okay, so that's a reason. So, but they converted to a number. I mean, are they saying they trust all those numbers? I mean, the implication where, hey, let's be honest, is that this is fit. I mean, they've basically constructed a model. No, no, but it doesn't matter where they trust them or not.

Okay. They say that they measure this raw voltage to eight decimal places. What I'm saying is that I can mathematically calculate that raw voltage by using my formulas. And so if you take 450 and multiply by eight, how much is that? 3,000 or so? A thousand. That's the number of digits you need to reproduce the results. Now in my formula, instead of 3,000 digits, I need like 100 digits, okay?

To reproduce those 300 digits that they say they measured. Okay. I don't think you can explain that. Does that happen for any other super? Like if you just took this superconductor. I mean, could you make some function and say if you do, let's say an alien or an artificial intelligence machine learning algorithm, you give it the magnetization, then it says, here you go, we fit to it.

Oh, that's where the Cooper pairs form or something like that. like that. Is it totally implausible? It's absolutely impossible that you would be fitting these, you know, measurements of noise. And so each one of these points has some noise. Yeah. And they give me the numbers, including the noise, and I have a mathematical formula that can fit the noise. Of course, it's impossible. Okay.

Mm-hmm. So that's the D-C-R-A-C magnetization? This is AC susceptibility, which is measured by measuring a voltage in a coil with a voltmeter. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And all these have to be done in the diamond anvil cell. In other words, once you do it, are there, I mean, this is a side note, but if you, let's say you put them in anvil and then press them and then there was some, you know, plastic deformation and it just remained ever, forever. These things don't have that phenomenon.

In other words, you have to continuously apply pressure. You do. Although this pressure is not so high, right? In the most recent results. The latest paper is not so high. Right. But in the retracted paper, CSH, it was very high, 200 GPA. But yes, these materials, if you release the pressure, they don't stay.

They stay. They don't stay. Sorry. Right. So going back to the reasons. So one reason is, look, I can understand if people make mistakes. I can understand if there is one member of a big group that does something that wasn't quite proper. But to have the principal investigators refuse to answer questions about how was this obtained and explained so that one can reproduce what they see. say that was measured, I don't think it's acceptable. And that's why I cannot believe what they are saying now or trust what they are saying because they haven't responded to those very

factual questions. So this speaks to their integrity as experimental scientists. One of the greatest and biggest challenges that a physicist has in an experimental field is not the measurement of a quantity like Hubble showed. It's the errors that you ascribe to that. And there are two different types of errors that can be ascribed. There are statistical errors which can get better with repeated measurements of the same quantity. And then there are systematic errors, which must be removed if and only if you can do another experiment that gets rid of the thumb on the scale or the excess resistivity.

Surely these people, they're an eminent institution in Rochester. I mean, they must know the concept of an error budget. Do they break out the statistical and the systematic errors? I covered some of their findings. I showed their data in my previous video, which we'll get to because you had some criticism that I do want to learn what I did wrong because I'm always trying to improve and I can't resist with such an eminent colleague that as yourself to I need to know what I did wrong. But I don't remember that they actually separated out the in their air and provided an error

budget. So that's a huge red flag that I would think nature, although you know what the saying is about nature. Just because it's in nature doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong. But it was also in the New York Post and other journals. So so tell us what are some of the other red flags? All right. So that's for this particular paper the main red flag. Now, all right. I'm sorry to interrupt her. But let's say it didn't, let's say the magnetic susceptibility is kind of wanky and whatnot. But let's say it still has zero resistivity. Let's stipulate that. Well, how do we stipulate that? Well, I mean, there are two different measures, right? Right. So after they subtract the background. So there's two, there's multiple cascading errors is what is what's been.

They show in this latest paper, they show curves, where they show one curve that is very broad, the resistance versus temperature, and then they say this is due to sampling immogeneities which happen in these small cells, and that sounds reasonable. And then they show another curve where the curves are a thousand times narrower. So the transition is incredibly sharp. And you don't expect that in a reasonable experiment making the samples the same way, that suddenly the width of the transition will change by a factor of a thousand. Now, red flag is that they measure voltage versus current, but they don't seem to find a critical current. It kind of rises slowly from zero, while in superconductors

you expect that if you're at low temperatures, for small voltage, you get... So for small current, you measure voltage versus current, you have no voltage, and then at one point you have a threshold and you start developing voltage. They don't see that either. There's a critical current,

sorry to interrupt, but is it essentially a different manifestation of a critical magnetic field? Absolutely. Okay. So absolutely. That was figured out, yeah, by some famous person way back. Yes. There's a relation between them.

And so again, so now that's multiple, I was envisioning that perhaps it is that, you know, it has zero resistivity. I mean, can you imagine such a thing? Could you imagine something that doesn't have a critical field or we can't measure its critical field? Let's say a complete different group, you know, I come up, my kid comes down, makes a superconductor or your daughter or whatever. Can you imagine, is it possible? Like, what would they call such a material? No. Superconductors have some properties that are common to all superconductors. Immutable.

Now, there is some properties that can be different, but there's some basic things that are the same. You need to have a critical current, and you need to have zero resistance below that. The one other property that's very important and interesting is what's called the Meissner Effect, as you know. And there is two aspects of the Meissen effect that people sometimes confuse, which is, one thing is to have a superconductor and apply a magnetic field, and the magnetic field doesn't penetrate. And that's what happens if I take a magnet and put it on top of an existing superconductor and it floats.

All right. So we'll do that experiment now. Okay. Hopefully this will, this will work, but, you know, we've had a lot of budget cuts. Right. It's sort of floating. Okay. It's not great.

Let me try another one. And it floats in a very different way. does it not Jorge, then just a normal magnet, right? So if I had a normal magnet, let's see this. The normal magnet cannot be in equilibrium with another magnet. There is something called Ernshaw's theorem. And that prevents it, unless it's an AC current, right? If an AC current, you could do it.

But these DC magnet, there we go. All right. So now the hope, of course, is that we are calibrated high temperature supercondu- not high temperature, it's a higher temperature that superconducts at some of these cup rates. And it could be used, and the hope is that it'll be used for magnetic levitation. and we'll get to your hopes and dreams for truly room temperature superconductivity in towards the very end

we talk about magical technologies and whatnot. Let's see how long that goes. So we're talking about this theorem that prevents an ordinary magnet like this refrigerator magnet keychain. This could not do that nor could this ferromagnetic meteorite that I've given you. But we could put people on top of this thing and turn it

into a frictionless or mostly frictionless travel mechanism. So anyway, we're saying the Meisner effect as applied to these claimed high-temperature superconductors. Let's continue. Yes, let's see. Yeah, I was going to clarify an important distinction

in the Meissen effect. One thing is to have a superconductor and bring it close to a magnet and get this repulsion that makes it levitate. A somewhat different process is where you have the magnet close to the normal metal when it's not cold yet. And let's say I take a piece of metal that's going to become superconducting, but it's not superconducting.

I put the magnet on top, it just rests on it. And now I cool the system. So that's a different phenomenon. Flux trapping. Because, no, because here, Faraday's Law plays a big role. When you're bringing the superconductor and the magnet close together, there's an induction due to Faraday's Law. In the experiment I'm describing, you are just cooling,

and there is no change from external change, And by itself, the superconductor will develop a current not induced by Faraday's law that will make the magnet rise so that it expels the flux. And that is an important distinction of the two experiments. And in the experiments on the hydrates, people claim to have seen the first type of experiment, where if you apply a magnetic field, to a superconductor, it doesn't go inside, it gets repelled. But when they do the other experiments, which is they cool the system in the presence of a magnetic field, they don't see a signal. And I think that's a red flag that says these are not really superconductors.

And we'll see. How much of the technological application could we get from a low, resistivity, but maybe not zero resistivity, room temperature, ambient pressure, material. Would that be as revolution? I mean, it certainly would be as revolutionary. Look, I think there is really a qualitative difference between zero resistance and small resistance. And I don't think it's actually feasible technologically to get non-zero small resistances.

Either we succeed in making room temperature superconductors or we don't. Binary. And if we do, it's going to have. lots of very important consequences. What do you most? Yeah. I'm not the right person. I know, but what are you interested?

So here's my knock. I'll be, I'll play devil's advocate again. I hear a lot about quantum computers and how important they are and what they're able to do. And we heard that the quantum computer teleported a wormhole and or to quantum. There's a lot of hype in science. There is a little. And, and it's particularly strong in what I do. Yeah.

Rare in what you do. But let's say the, you know, you can make a superconductor. What would that mean? I've always heard, you know, Feynman talked about this, and I remember reading about it in the 80s and 90s. He said, you know, quantum computers are really good at describing quantum mechanical Hamiltonians and the Grangians. So, okay, that's great if you, I mean, I don't happen to need that for my iPhone. So is that really true? And then what is a quantum computer good for as far as you're concerned?

Look, I'm not an expert in quantum computing. I can well imagine that if we are ever going to make a quantum computer, it's going to be with superconductors. because superconductors are microscopic quantum systems. And if anybody has chance of making a quantum computer, it's a system of superconducting Josephson-junctions or whatever. But, you know, just having room temperature, look, when the transistor was discovered back in 1950, it wasn't clear either that it would be everywhere.

and, you know, 15 million of them just as... Exactly. That's exactly what would happen with superconductors. I mean, initially, maybe you don't quite realize what it's going to change the world.

If... So the question is, is it possible? Okay. And how do we get there? That's the key question. And so that's the question that I think

the community is in the wrong track. And all this enormous effort and money that is being spent in these hydrate superconductor research is misplaced, in my opinion. Okay, so let's talk about that. Incentivization. People think of us as scientists as we're just very dispassionate. We just care about the truth.

We stroke, you have a beard. I'm still kind of trying to grow a beard like yours, Jorge. And we just sit around and we just really just think about what's good for nature and what Mother Nature or God or whatever will reveal to us. So I always think that's kind of bogus. I mean, scientists have very good qualities, and we have very many, say, petty or less highly refined characteristics. Let's talk about those. So the propensity for hype is huge, especially in this little.

It is. Yeah. So talk about that. What do you think if we're not, we're doctors, you and I, but we're not psychotherapist. So what do you think is going on? Is it a fraud? I'll read from this New York Times. article. I don't, and this is from Dr. Struble.

A Strubble says, I don't want to read too much into it, but there could be a pattern of behavior here. He's talking about D.S. He really could be the best high pressure physicist in the world, poised to win a Nobel Prize, and you know how I feel about the Nobel Prize, or there's definitely something else going on. Same article by you, Jorge Hirsch. His complaints about Diaz grew so persistent in strident that others in the field later circulate a letter complaining about decades of disruptive behavior by Jorge Hirsch. But Jorge said, in my opinion, the junk sometimes become conclusions. What did you mean by that? I never said that. That says, well, this is the New York Times article. Never said the junk becomes

conclusions. No, let's talk about what that says. Yes, let's see it. There is a letter that, in fact, the New York Times editor sent to me that I hadn't seen before, apparently has been circulating over the last four or five months, claiming that for the past 30 years, I have been doing disruptive behavior, which I, yes, I would like to respond to it. Yeah, please. The person that wrote the letter has not made their name public, nor is the letter signed as far as I know, but I know some people that received it and so on. Well, the disruptive behavior refers to the fact that, yes, starting in 1989, I suddenly

discovered a different way to explain superconductivity. At that time, we were all trying to understand the cup rates that had been discovered in 1986, and I came up with an idea of how to understand the cup rates, and immediately saw that that same idea can explain all superconductors, not just the cup rates, which would mean that the electron phonon mechanism, that is part of the conventional theory does not really apply. It's not responsible for superconductivity in any material. I came to the conclusion back in 1989. And so since then, I've been working on that a long time. But I have made a lot of progress. And it took me like a very long time to

understand certain things, in particular the Meissner effect that they were studying you about, which I finally understood only like six years ago or so, all based on the same basic idea that is different from the conventional idea. Now, my understanding has a lot in common with the conventional theory, but it has some fundamental differences. Anyway, ever since I came to a realization,

I've been writing papers, developing the theory, and questioning the validity of the conventional theory. And that has not gained me a lot of friends, I have had very much trouble publishing the results. I have published a lot of papers on this, but not on the most highly prestigious papers, journalists like science or nature. And so for reasons I don't quite understand, the theory is not considered valid by many people.

people find it interesting, but people, what happens in science is people don't address questions, for example, they just ignore. So if I write the paper saying the BCS conventional theory cannot explain the Meissen effect. For this reason and this reason and this reason, in order to explain the Meijsner Effect, you need to have this physics that the conventional theory simply doesn't have. Sometimes we solve problems, and I don't have to tell you this, in quantum mechanics or classical mechanics by doing separation of variables. Okay.

We take the radial part, we separate the radial part from the angular, azimuthal, and polar angle. Why combine both the refutation of the BCS theory with a concomitant new theory? Why not separate those variables? We can. But I've tried to do that too. I've written papers simply addressing

what's wrong with BCS. theory without not accepted no really no people simply ignore them it those papers so conventional wisdom for my audience is saying that the BCS theory it co-invented by my graduate quantum mechanics professor at Brown University Leon Cooper who's still very much alive and well yes allegedly on the four train in in Brooklyn in 1957 or whatever that that theory is incapable of of explaining one of the hallmarks of superconductivity in fact one of the motivations for the demonstration. That's what you're claiming.

The myzer. In particular, the expulsion of magnetic fields, yes. Are there any unique observables or experiments that could be done to either falsify the BCS theory or to motivate your theory, Jorge? Yeah, there are experiments that could be done to validate what I'm saying happens in superconductors that have not been done. The physics I'm talking about is extremely simple. Maybe I can even try to explain it to you.

A superconductor, as I say, when it goes from normal to superconduct, it will expel magnetic fields. In order to do that, it has to start generating a current near the surface that generates a magnetic field opposite to the one that's applied. Lensis law.

And no. No. No. No. Really? It's actually the opposite of Lenses law. Really? Okay.

Lensis law says that the metal wants to oppose changes in magnetic flux. Okay. And so you start with a metal that has magnetic flux in it. Lenses law says it doesn't want to change that. Instead, it wants to. It expels it. That's exactly the opposite of what Lenses law tells it it should be doing. I was conflating expel with opposition.

No, it is very important. Yeah, it is important. No, you're correct. it says if for some reason somebody wants to expel those lines, let's this law through the opposite. Okay. And I'm saying BCS theory has no explanation of how you generate that current opposing lenses law, doing the opposite of what electromagnetism wants.

When we write down the Schrodinger equation for the Cooper pairs, I mean, how do we make the quantum to classical transition? I mean, where a current is something macroscopic. We don't usually think about currents in quantum mechanical terms. in the Schrodinger equation. How does that operationally occur? Again, I'm a simple cosmology experimentalist. But I know it must involve some Aaronfest theory.

There must be some transition between the quantum and the classical regime. Well, you can write the current operator in quantum mechanics and compute the expectation value and the time evolution and so on. And that would give you the classical. And the problem is in the BCS calculation, they don't do the actual calculation of the process whereby you start with the magnetic field inside, because that's very hard to do. All they do is they compute the energy of the state

when the magnetic field is out already, and they find that it is lower than the energy of not having expelled the magnetic field. I see. But that is not enough. It's an energy argument, right? You need to explain momentum conservation, and how do you go from here to there?

Charge conservation, yeah. The explanation is extremely simple. Let me tell you to you because it's very simple. It's something that anybody can understand. It's based on the following. Lorenz force, as you know, tells us that when a charge moves, there is a velocity. There is a force due to a magnetic field that is a cross-product of velocity times magnetic field.

If you look at a superconductor and you think about what happens if electrons were to be flowing from the inside of, outward as it goes superconducting you will find that the Lorenz force will deflect those electrons and create a current that will expel the magnetic field. That is a very simple concept and it tells you that the transition to superconductivity has to be associated with a motion expelling electrons. Very simple concept that is totally... That's classical too right?

Yeah, yeah. It's foreign to the conventional BCS theory that says none of that takes place. No pairs. Now I say, uh-huh. Now, you also need pairs to get everything to work, but this basic phenomenon that unless you have a radial charge flow, it's almost a mathematical theorem that if you don't have radial charge flow, you cannot oppose Lenses law. Yeah, it's a consequence of the curl. It's basically what happens in plasmus. In plasmus is something called Alphan theorem. I don't know if you know that Alphen was a professor. Yeah, of course I do. You got the Nobel Prize.

Among other things, Ralph and serum, that is basically just saying, when you have a conducting fluid and magnetic field lines are moving in it, it's because the fluid is moving with the field line. So there is motion of charge and mass when the magnetic field lines move. So that basic concept is missing in the convention. I see. Now, another wrinkle in this story is the intellectual problem. property rights that Diaz and his company have asserted.

So he's created a company called unearthly materials. And, you know, Jorge, you and I are public, you know, university professors. We don't get paid that much, but we do what we do because we love it. But, you know, if an opportunity came along to, you know, patents, I have two patents, I've got pictures of them somewhere. I've made exactly $0 from my two patents. But tell me, is that a red flag? Honestly, to you, it isn't.

to me, but tell me what you think. No, no, it's not a red flag that, but in the context that we are, they are using that as an excuse to not share samples. Of course, this can be settled in one day. I mean, in the latest claim, they can just ship a sample to our colleague Brian Maple that has been doing experiments on superconduct. National Academy member, former chair, the... 60 years maybe or 50 years, and he could check in a day whether this is true or not.

They say because of proprietary interests of the company, they cannot do it. that. So how can you patent an element or you know a compound like this? I think you can. So there have been patent fights over YBCO as far as I know. Really? Yes. Really? So I can't just go out and synthesize my own. I mean also there's another wrinkle which is that there's a stoichiometric factors and you know I failed high school chemistry so I can't even remember this thing. But there are these deltas and you know it seems like the recipe is like one day you can get a souffle and the next day you get a chicken salad. They say one third of the time they get a supercal. by that two Thursday, get chicken salad.

Oh, crap, yeah. But look, I don't know. Yeah, we are talking for a long time. Yeah, a lot of other things I wanted to address, but we don't have the time. Well, we have a few more minutes. I have had a lot of trouble with archive. I don't know if you know that. I know about that.

I know you were banned for six months, allegedly because of the, the, the, you explain why? What was the reason they gave? I want to explain that because I'm extremely upset and still very upset with the whole situation with archive. I submitted the paper to Physica C, the journal, in August 2021, because for eight months I was trying to get the raw data for the DIA susceptibility measurements and they were refusing to give them out. Claiming patent reasons that were totally transparently not applicable because this is just a simple measurement. So I wrote this paper to Physica C, I sent to Physica C saying, these are just probable fraud.

That was the title of the paper. The title of the paper. Yeah. So, Archive got that paper and they put it on hold, which I totally understand. They want to think about it's a tricky thing. All right. One month later, Physica C published it online. And another month later, after the Archive moderators had considered it and thought about it,

I didn't do anything. I'd let them do their job. They posted it online. So that means they cleared whatever moderation standards they have. So they posted online in October. Magically, then in December, they wrote to me saying that my papers are improper, and they are saying things that accuse of people of fraud, and so they remove the paper.

And my first question is, well, you know, you analyze the paper for two months, and then you posted it, so it's your problem. It's on my problem, if the paper is doing something you think is improper. And at the same time, what was happening is they finally had released the road data at all, And I started analyzing them, and I found immediately that there were very clear anomalies with the raw data. And so early December, I submitted two papers to archive, not saying fraud, simply doing a very dry analysis of the road data, saying that there is a problem here. And they claimed you had gotten that data via some means.

No, no, no, no. The road data were published by ideas and co-workers on archive in early December. So immediately after they were posted, not just for me, for everybody, I started analyzing them and I sent them some papers with the analysis. Now I was careful because I didn't say anything like fraud. They still say, no, we're not going to post this. So they didn't post anything. I kept sending them papers. And then sometime in early February, they banned me for six months because they said I was doing improper things.

So there's several things that are wrong here, I think. which is Diaz was publishing, you know, his raw data and claiming that they are valid. I'm analyzing the raw data and have mathematical analysis that shows anomalies that I think the community should consider. Archive decides, no, you cannot publish that. And you got banned. And then I get banned for six months. Right, exactly.

You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected.

When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. So. And you couldn't appeal. No, of course I tried to appeal. But it didn't go anywhere. No, right. Right. So I believe what happened is that at some point after Archive posted my original

papers in prior fraud, Ranga Diaz, or Rangadias and coworkers wrote to archive saying, we're going to sue you if you don't do something because this is not true. Okay. And so they did not want to get sued. They didn't want to pay lawyers to defend against what would have been a frivolous lawsuit because defamation, that you're accusing somebody of something that is not true. If you're accusing somebody of fraud and it is true, it's not defamation. But also it's a private, in a private con. If I say, you know, Jorge likes to take, you know,

high altitude balloons and push monkeys out of them, then that's your private citizen. If I say your research is wrong that you published in a journal and I say that is, that has elements of fraud, that doesn't meet the standard of death, at least in the United States. They might claim because it was public nature, there's different standards. And I didn't say private fraud.

the initial paper to Physica C was basically saying, look, there is this anomalies that I cannot explain. They don't prove fraud for sure. But the fact that they are not releasing the data when they, you know, specifically saying the published paper, the data are available and they are refusing to release them, that's a very big red flag.

Yeah. Let's talk about journals for a second. Before we finish up, we have a couple more segments that I just want to ask you some existential questions. I know usually like to answer these types of things, but I'll ask just one with your forbearance. But before I do that, you are known for the creation of the H index.

Can you describe what motivated you to do that and what it's become and where you might see it going? It's not the only of its kind, but it's certainly been very influential. You can find on Google Scholar. What's your H index? My H index, I think it's 69 maybe. I'm not quite sure. All right. Elon Musk approves.

So tell me, how did this come about? I've always been interested in objective criteria for judging scientists as opposed to opinions. So I always used to look up citations of people when we're considering for hiring and so on and so forth. In the old days, I had to go to the library and look at this big books. I don't know if you still remember those. I found them extremely informative. And so, you know, but it's a lot of information. And to collect all that information and discuss it, it gets cumbersome.

And then, you know, I just started. And it was at the same time the Web of Science was coming online. And so you could find the citations online. And I found that there was this nice way to compress a lot of information into a single number that has a lot more information than other single numbers. For example, the number of publications by itself can tell you very little. the total number of citations by itself can tell you very little because of various reasons, right?

And so I used this for two years. I shared it with my colleagues, and then at some point I wrote the preprint that you know what to do with it. And somebody contacted me from Germany, experimenter is named Manuel Cardona, who was an extreme. me prolific writer and good science, excellent scientist, and he had heard of it through

word of mouth and so that was very interesting. And, well, at that time I had already written a little preprint that I had circulated among colleagues, but I didn't know what to do with it. So when I got this email from this person in Germany, I decided to post it an archive. And I posted an archive, again, not knowing whether I would publish it or not publish it, and I started getting calls from journalists asking me about. for some reason I said wait a minute I mean I've written very many more interesting papers why haven't you got in 1989 paper right and yeah and yeah so well there's

something the phenomenon because you're not on social media there's a phenomenon of you know it's called it's called gamification so you want to see after this video is posted I'll I'll see how many thumbs up the video got I'll compare it to when I have Felix Flickr on and that's a reminder to everyone to not only subscribe. You know that only 80, only 20% of the people watching actually click subscribe. So please do subscribe. Please leave a thumbs up. We want to have more conversations with brilliant luminaries. But that's a gamification. Facebook, Twitter, there are all these things. And it kind of maybe came about as a social phenomenon, although you didn't intend to become a social scientist, but you did.

And now we make the basis for hiring, or at least in part, not entirely. But I wonder how you feel about that as well. But that's a conversation. Yeah, well, it's a long conversation. But I think. It's a long conversation. But I have mixed feelings about it, let's say. Right. I mean, I think it's very useful for getting a quick impression of somebody, but you certainly have to look much further and look at the details, and it can be very misleading. Necessary, but not sufficient. No, no, and it can be misleading also. So it's some danger. So how has it been misused in your opinion? Or give me an example. No, I just think that you can have very different profiles of publications, somebody that writes

papers just by themselves or with a couple of co-workers, other people that write with a group of 10 or 50 or 100 people, and their age index can be the same, but their contributions can be very different. And so if you just rely on the age index and don't take into account that factor, you can be misled very, very clear. Many five age since PhD, you know, the age since PhD, I did discuss that in my original paper, and that's easy to take care of because I basically defined actually an index with a ratio between the H index and the number of years since the first publication, which kind of normalizes for... And what about the field differences? You know, my field, you might have no papers for several years.

Your experiment gets built. You take data. You write a dozen papers, right? Of course. Same thing. It's field dependent. You should really not compare H indices across very different fields. It's dangerous, yes. What about across continents and different, you know, institutional biases that may be present? I don't think that's so important. I think within like on this matter physics, I would happily compare edge indices of people in the US or China or Europe or wherever. When I researched my first

book losing the Nobel Prize, I came upon some statistics that it was very rare. It almost never happened that someone won the Nobel Prize, but had not been elected to say the National Academy of Sciences. Are there other correlations that have been observed by you and others about the say the Nobel Prize or admission into the

National Academy or other things like that you're aware of? With the HHS? index you mean? Yeah. Well, in particular Manuel Cardona, who was the one that got very interesting initially, that's the first thing he did. He calculated the age index of everybody that had been... One prize or... I stepped at the National Academy in the last few years and it found correlation. Oh, really? So there is obviously some correlation. Yeah, and we have standards here when we go up for promotion every three years to get a $50 raise every month or whatever we get. You know, they'll say this and it becomes exponentially hard to grow, right? It's sort of

saturate. That's what's attractive about it. I think one of the things that's attractive that when you are starting, it's easy to increase your age in ethics by one, right? It's fun, right. I get an email from Google Scholar every week. I just went up by one. I'm 51 now, which is my age, so that's pretty cool. So age since PhD is about 25, so we'll see if I could ask the master for that.

Jorge, we don't have that much time left. You've been so generous with your time. First of all, I did a video previously in which I mentioned some things. I wanted to give you a chance to respond. You said that there were some important errors that the audience would be left. I'd be remiss as a host if I didn't ask you. I'm sorry. I do not remember all the details.

The one thing I do remember is that you did not make a clear distinction, which we have done in our conversation today between what's understood to be conventional superconductors and unconventional superconductor. Fair enough. You did not make that the same. It is very important. It is very important. Everybody accepts and beliefs are unconventional.

The hydrates, everybody believes are the conventional BCS mechanism. And I disagree with. the BCS mechanism and IP but that distinction I think is important for understanding I appreciate that converse so the last question I was going to ask are you going to try to patent the H index like Diaz and all are pat not just kidding Jorge just kidding but there is one question I always ask my guest if you're willing to to sort of address it it's it's an existential question and it owes to the namesake of the of the organization that I'm the associate director of, which is called the Arthur C. Clark Center for human imagination. And Sir Arthur said many things.

You've heard me say this in a faculty meeting, quoting after him that for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. He used to say things like that. He also said the following, I'll give you two of his quotes, and then I want you to respond to one or both. He said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I don't ask you first. What is the most magical thing in all of physics that if we were to summarize what humanity has come up with in physics, as Feynman said, it was the atomic hypothesis. That was like the coolest thing, the most important thing, the most basic fundamental truth that could be expressed in the fewest words. Jorge, to you, what is the most magical thing that you've ever encountered as a scientist? That's a really tough question.

Look, I mean, if you ask me about all of physics what I find the most amazing in some sense, is Maxwell's equations. I just love maxis equations. I mean, the fact that he could express so much and so many different phenomena in those four equations, I think it's just a miracle. Yeah. And of course, I often point out

that his original model, like Hubble, in some sense was flawed, right? He believed in these vortices. It was not flawed. It was very intuitive, very physical. Mechanical, mechanically. I appreciate that very much. It wasn't based on very formal mathematics, it was based on physical intuition.

I think that is really, really important. Very good. There is one subject that we didn't touch on, even though you mentioned, this issue about hype and all that where it comes from. I just want to say that I think there's a big problem with the way research is funded, and people are driven to make these claims and hype things because of funding. And I don't know. I think there should be possible improvements in the way.

way science is funded so that not so much funds, taxpayers' funds are wasted on hype that is not real. I agree with you. And part of the mission of this podcast, which you know, you may have looked at maybe once in your life, but I do it because the public pays our salary, right? So not just because we're public university professors, but every scientist in America and around the world is supported at some level by his or her government institution. Now, what do we get out of that as a taxpayer? I find we don't give back very much to the taxpayers. We say, we're doing something very esoteric. You can't understand it. And even if you could understand it, I have better things to do with my time. I think that's horrible, not only for the public who pays our salary, but for scientists as

well, because the minute the public loses confidence in what we're doing, they're going to stop funding us. So it's very dangerous. I'm glad you brought that up. I call it the academic media hype complex, which is that we have these media offices here and University of Rochester has a media office, right? Very powerful. So what's... you start going and then get a hint and then and then maybe you need to get you know tenure or maybe a graduate student needs a postdoc or made the postdoc music it's very very tempting and it's so hard as Feynman said in his famous essay at caltech commencement in 1964 or five or whatever he said you know I hope you never have to sacrifice your integrity to to get attention to your results or to what you do

as a scientist because that when that happens not only will your own integrity be compromised but the public's confidence in how integrity is maintained and science will be undermined. Anyway, Jorge Hirsch, professor of physics, you predate me by some years. I've been privileged to know you for 19 years now. It's our 19th anniversary. And I just want to say, I thank you for your integrity and your courage. And I always say one last piece of advice, although I hate, I know you hate to do these things, but I can't resist. The name of the podcast is called Into the Impossible, which is another quote of Sir Arthur C. Clark, who said the following. He said, the only way to know what's the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.

And I like to re-invert that and say, Jorge, if you could talk to 20-year-old Jorge Hirsch, what one piece of advice would you give him to give him the courage to do as you've done to go into the impossible? Is that a question? That's a question, yeah. You're teleported for 30 seconds back to see young Jorge. I'm sorry. I wasn't prepared for this.

I, look, I find myself very fortunate to have stumbled upon things that I think I would never have imagined that made me understand things that I never understood. Would there have been a way to make things so that I would have made more progress in getting others to pay attention and join in trying to understand these things. And I probably wasn't good enough at doing that. and I don't know. Perhaps I would advise my younger self to try to do that better. Fair enough. Al Jolla, you've been an inspiration to many of us throughout your career.

I find you not to be disagreeable at all or whatever you were accused of in this letter nailed to the cathedral door of physics in the cathedral of New York City, the New York Times, whatever that is. Thank you so much. I do want to again extend a request to my enlisting audience. A couple of requests. One is to sign up for my mailing list where you can get a ferromagnetic sample of the early universe.

That's 4.3 billion year old fell in Argentina of all places. Campo de Cielo, which Jorge can pronounce better than me. And it was found about 500 years ago. The natives used it for tools and so forth. We now use it to talk about the formation of the solar system and the dust that's contained within our galaxy. But more than that, I encourage you if you have a dot edu address, email address, sign up for my mailing list. Brian Keating.com. And you will guarantee to win one of these.

And if you don't have a .edu email address, sign up anyway. I give away a hundred of these on a regular basis so you can still win. Second of all is if anybody is in contact with Professor Diaz, I would love to have him on the podcast to address some of the conversation

that I've had about him and others have had about him. And my last request is to leave a thumbs up on this podcast or wherever you're listening to it, leave a review. If you like to have more guests on than are doing the cutting edge at the highest level research that you could imagine, I will let you know. Also, I should tell you, Jorge, I had a guest on David Friedberg, who is a billionaire investor, an incredible intellect.

And when he was on, he was on in February before the announcement, and he claimed that he would cut off his right arm to get room temperature superconductivity. So David, I think Jorge, you owe Jorge, a great deal of gratitude. for saving your ride-up. Anyway, that's all from The Into the Impossible Studios. Thanking you so much. Stay tuned for the next episode right here. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Thanks for listening. Keep in touch and inspired by signing up from Professor Keating's Monday Magic email at briankeeting.com slash list. And if you have a dot-edu domain, we'll send you an artifact older than the earth forged in the fire of an exploding star in the form of an authentic meteorite fragment.

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