Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Superconductor Smackdown: Breakthrough or ‘Probable Fraud’? (#309)

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Starting point is 00:00:35 Welcome everyone to this solo episode of Into the Impossible, Superconductors Showdown. Here come Maglev bullet trains, ultra-cheap electricity, desktop MRI scanners in every clinic, even small fusion reactors, or not. Since the discovery of superconductors in 1911 by Heike Camberling Onus, earning him the 1913 Nobel Prize in Physics, it's been the subject of much fascination, speculation, and inquiry. Some of the greatest minds of physics have grappled with how, superconductivity works to drive electrical resistance to zero and two more Nobel Prizes 7-1. Alas, superconductivity has required super-cold temperatures and super high pressures, making it impractical. Until now, maybe.

Starting point is 00:01:23 Rangadas and his team at the University of Rochester in New York, has published a paper on their breakthrough creation of red matter, a room-temperature superconductor triggering a firestorm of criticism. Is this a case of Nobel-worthy science? Fraud or folly? Is cancel culture getting in the way? Listen to Professor Keating's in-depth presentation of the controversy and form your own opinion.

Starting point is 00:01:47 And please, keep into the impossible in your feed by subscribing and following. And for some extra credit, jump over to our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating or DR Brian Keating and subscribe there too, where we just broke the 100,000 subscriber miles on. Please help us make the show better by filling out our listener survey linked to in the show notes. And let us know what you think of the show in the form of a review like this one.

Starting point is 00:02:17 From NYC Lawyering. Dr. Keating is the absolute best among hosts of current science, tech, cosmology, physics, and science-related news. He's wonderful to listen to. He's funny without being snarky. And now, go beyond the headlines and hype into the science of science. superconductivity on this solo episode of Into the Impossible with your host, Brian Heeding. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the bud bay doors, please help. Hello everybody out there interested in the academic media hype complex.

Starting point is 00:02:55 Kind of a play on Eisenhower's military industrial complex, except applied to academia. And little known in that speech by Eisenhower was. the following quote. And this is actually his farewell speech. But in the military industrial complex portion of the farewell speech, of course he warned of the unified entity a whole where military and industry would come together. And some say that his warning was not heated. But little known or lesser known as his warning about a scientific technological elite, which he also worried about and warned about. He said akin to and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial military posture has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

Starting point is 00:03:41 The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by federal employment, project allocation, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific, technological elite. Of course, as Carl Sagan said, never has the power of science been so strong, and yet the public's understanding of science been so weak as it is in his day, which is in the late 1990s. So part of the complex, I believe, the academic hype cycle involves not only money, as Eisenhower was warning about, but also the prospect of fame, attention, and even the Nobel Prize,

Starting point is 00:04:32 like my first book. Losing the Nobel Prize warns about. But today we're going to talk about something that actually has a connection to UC San Diego. And I had hoped that we would have my colleague Jorge Hirsch on this podcast, who has been a very, very vocal critic of the claims of the discovery of a truly room temperature ambient superconductor using luteinum hydride, which has made the rounds for the last few weeks. says it is March and physicists gather together in an event called the March Madness for Physicist. It's called the March meeting or sometimes it's held in April, American Physical Society. And it all centers around this article, which I will show in just a minute about superconductivity.

Starting point is 00:05:24 And the claim of the absence of electrical resistance exhibited by superconducting materials would have enormous potential for applications if it exists at ambioccurndictivity. temperature and pressure conditions. Abstract says, despite decades of intense research efforts, such a state has yet to be realized. At ambient pressures, cuprates, which is the previous class of high temperature superconducting record holders, these cuprits are material class exhibiting superconductivity up to about, temperatures up to 133 Kelvin. And so the precomposition they claim over the past decade has led to new materials, which can have interesting behaviors, including one that they're reporting here in this

Starting point is 00:06:02 nature paper, luteum hydride, with a maximum critical temperature where it starts to become a superconductor, stops as you're cooling it down, of 294 Kelvin, which is below, which is effectively room temperature, at 10 kilobars, which is amount of pressure. That is superconductivity at room temperature and near ambient pressure, and that's important because previously the same group, more or less, reported a discovery that required tremendous pressure, much higher pressure. And so they go through the evidence that they've obtained this behavior. And I'm going to go through their paper and with help from one of our graduate students here, Bryce Bixler has put together this presentation and Lucas Schenelbach, who's also assisted me,

Starting point is 00:06:44 putting together some slides for your reference. So let me just tell you, though, cut to the chase to some extent, which is that these results are highly controversial. And it's not the first time that this group has come up with highly controversial concerns about over their research. And in fact, as I said, there was a retraction of a previous result. So, retraction note. This is published in September 2022. So this is just a few months ago, about six months ago.

Starting point is 00:07:16 They retracted the room temperature superconductivity in a carbonaceous sulfur hydride. The editors of nature was to retract this paper. Following publications, questions were raised regarding the manner at which the data in this paper have been processed and analyzed with the authors and nature have been working to resolve. We have now established that some key data processing steps, namely the background subtractions applied to the raw data used to generate the plots in trigger 2A, use a non-standard user-defined procedure. I don't know exactly what that means, but all authors disagree with this decision.

Starting point is 00:07:48 An earlier version of this note stated that not all authors expressed their opinions, but the editors have since been contacted by the missing authors. So they went to the authors. They made sure, as you do, when you publish the page, paper, that they all agree with the findings of the paper. So what's going on here? Well, the discovery was basically claimed to be really junk conclusions in some sense by my colleague, Professor Jorge Hirsch here at UC San Diego.

Starting point is 00:08:13 Now, Jorge Hirsch himself is also a controversial character, and I hope to have him on to discuss this today, but it was not to be. And then the complaints about Diaz by Jorge Hirsch here at UCSD became so persistent and strident that other people in the field circulated a letter complaining about the decades of disruptive behavior by Dr. Hirsch. He didn't really back down. There are other things that are kind of interesting, peculiar that we'll get into, including intellectual property and patents and financial backing or perhaps the lack thereof. So I'm going to go through some slides that my students have prepared, and I think it'll kind of set the stage for why this is so important. Well, first of all, what is a superconductor? Superconductor is a material that conducts electrical current with virtually no resistance.

Starting point is 00:09:10 And certain things occur when this behavior is manifest, including things that can be tested experimentally in the laboratory and used to verify whether or not. not true superconductivity is actually taken place. Superconducting materials are inherently quantum systems. So typically quantum systems are destroyed by, they're very delicate, and they're destroyed by decoherence and effects that occur when there's an interaction between ambient conditions, say the laboratories temperature or other effects like pressure, magnetic fields, and otherwise. So it's very difficult to get a room temperature superconductor as it is to get a purely quantum state of something otherwise non-classical in its behavior. And actually, curiously, its discovery

Starting point is 00:09:57 of the theory behind it, so-called BCS theory, was the C and BCS theory, Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrefer. The C was my advanced quantum mechanics professor at Brown University. Leon Cooper, put a picture of him here. And Leon came up with this, apparently according to my friend Stefan Alexander, past guest, many-time past guest on the podcast. He came up with that while riding the A-train. New York City in 1957 or so, and they won the Nobel Prize a year or two after I was born for this. And the so-called key phenomena, so-called Cooper pairs, which are pairs of electrons, which you normally think would be repelling each other, but they're bound together because of interaction with the lattice, quasi-particles called phonons.

Starting point is 00:10:42 We'll have some more to say about that later on, and also in our interview with Felix Flickr, which will also cover the announcement of this room temperature superconductivity phenomenon because he was actually there at this press conference. Another thing that happens is the so-called Meisner effect, which is that the magnetic fields become zero within the material. They're restricted to tiny little vortices called fluxons. And these can be obtained at temperatures considered to be, you know, by most people, high temperature superconductivity is above 77 Kelvin, and that's the temperature which nitrogen boils.

Starting point is 00:11:21 And it's a common, cheap, relatively cheap material that's easily available. And it's fact used to cool down many superconducting materials and even trains and other technology and coils at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN and Europe. But these phenomena are not manifest unless there is. a very low temperature. It's 321 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, which means it's 400 degrees Fahrenheit below room temperature almost. So these are very cold, even though they're much, much warmer than the original superconducting properties of the original superconductors found by Cameron-Lanums back in the early 1900s when he became the first to liquefy the element

Starting point is 00:12:09 liquefy the element hydrogen, liquid hydrogen, then he put different materials in it, measured the resistance, and it happened to be that lead was demonstrating zero electrical resistance when it was cool to liquid nitrogen, which means that it transitions from an ordinary metal with finite resistance, and therefore heating when you pass a current through it, to zero resistance and no heating when you pass current through it, once it goes below about 11 Kelvin in the case of lead. And then since then, many, many materials were discovered, different temperatures, always trying to get higher and higher in a quest to get to room temperature superconductivity

Starting point is 00:12:45 because then you wouldn't even need liquid nitrogen, which, though cheaper compared to liquid helium, a liquid helium is about the cost of a decent bottle of wine or, you know, a liter of wine is about the same as a liter of helium, liquid helium. And liquid nitrogen is about the cost of a fine, you know, liter of coke or some other soda. premium cola, not the kind I used to be given as a kit. So these materials are, you know, not free. They're expensive, you know, compared to room temperature where you need no cooling mechanism, liquid or otherwise, to cool them down. So there's considered to be two types of superconductors, so-called type one, type two, very creative. And they're really of interest to

Starting point is 00:13:28 physicists primarily and has to do with the way that the phase of the material changes upon cooling down at a so-called critical temperature. And it's not as important for us to get into, except the fact that it does allow you, once you claim superconductivity, the fellow physicist, scientists will want to know what kind of superconductivity is it. Is it of a type 1 superconductor or type 2 superconductor?

Starting point is 00:13:54 And they really do differ only by the behavior of magnetic field penetration. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel as California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Levato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamavat Theater.com,

Starting point is 00:14:22 only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. UN must be 21 to enter. In typical superconductors that are used, the original ones like lead and so forth, pure and they're usually type 1 there is complete exclusion of magnetic field even when embedded in a strong external field is shown here in blue there'll be no there'll be no magnetic field penetration now if you then allow the magnetic field to penetrate

Starting point is 00:14:51 neither by because of the fact that you're using a type 2 superconductor some of the flux can penetrate in if you're not well below the critical temperature it will they'll all behave in that they'll allow magnetic field to penetrate once you're above this critical temperature. They become just like a normal metal. The metals don't screen magnetic fields the way they screen electric fields. And that's a hallmark of superconductors that we can use to then determine if the claims are actually accurate because if they're superconductors, they should exhibit these behaviors. And then we can ask the question, well, how disputed are these behaviors? The other things that can happen to various types of superconductors, type two subcontractors, kind of

Starting point is 00:15:34 be frozen and you can actually trap a magnetic field inside of them because as they said before, they allow the penetration of a field within them, unlike a type 1 superconductor. So you can pin them and get them frozen in place. And these vortices are effectively behaving, allowing them this thing to have a permanent magnetic field. Once you cool it down, you'll have some ambient field. And that's why they become the exhibit this levitation effect, where if you cool down, a superconductor below its critical temperature. It's in the Earth's field and it will trap some magnetic field within it. And then it will then levitate above an ordinary static room temperature, room pressure, permanent magnet. And these could be these high magnetic field objects that you can

Starting point is 00:16:24 buy on Amazon, these very high fields or rare earth element magnets or just an electromagnet. And so they could be used for levitation, which would allow almost frictionless travel of trains and other transportation. Again, the history of superconductivity really began because the history of cryogenic fluids. So in 1908, Cameron-Lanons, who's a Dutch physicist, had the ability, because of something called the Hampson-Linday cycle, that, and not the Andre Linde cycle, which we'll be talking with Professor Linde, about inflation, the multiverse, coming up soon, so stay tuned for that. So Cameron-Lan-Oms, he used this advancements in cryogenic technology to liquefy helium, and he actually cooled it way below its ambient pressure boiling

Starting point is 00:17:14 point of 4.2 Kelvin. So then he dunked different things in it, and I said lead before, I meant mercury. So he put mercury wire in it, measured the voltage versus current relationship, and found that it behaved as if it were obeying Oms law, but with a zero amount of resistance. So it was really fascinating. And of course, this attracted a lot of attention that people wanted to understand how it was actually occurring. And some of the greatest minds in history tried to grapple with it, including Einstein, Feynman, and most were unsuccessful. And despite the tremendous advancements in sort of the classical theory of how these things would behave, it really took the three gentlemen at the bottom, Bardeen, Cooper, and Shrefer, and I recognize Leon Cooper anywhere. He's the guy in

Starting point is 00:18:00 the middle, they discovered 1957 the effect that allowed a lattice material to create the bonding between otherwise repulsive electronic electron pairs. And so that was a critical discovery. And this was theoretical nature and then was applied to other types of superconductors. By then, the race was on to get higher and higher temperatures because it was known for a long time that you could get a tremendous number of applications from superconductivity if applied to technological applications. And so the race was on to do higher and higher temperatures because it's very inconvenient to use liquid helium all the time.

Starting point is 00:18:41 It's very expensive. So in the 1980s, two scientists, George Bednarz and Karl Mueller, discover that if you took this type of material that uses egotrium, barium, copper, and copper oxide, that you could get them to become superconducting at temperatures higher than 4.2 Kelvin. So these were some of the first so-called higher temperature superconductors, not very high. It's only 10 times higher than the temperature of interstellar space and the cosmic microwave background temperature. But nevertheless, this material allowed them the year after they won a Nobel Prize, which is very

Starting point is 00:19:18 rare. It's one of the first ones that actually adhered to what Alfred Nobel stipulated in his will, as I point out, losing the Nobel Prize, that he wanted the Nobel Prize to go to somebody who made a discovery or invention in the preceding year, unlike, say, the Higgs boson, which was awarded 40 plus years, maybe closer to 50 years after the prediction by Higgs, Zenglard, Hagen, and my quantum mechanics group theory teacher, Professor Jerry Garalnik. So this was actually perfectly suited Nobel prize to the intent of Alfred Nobel. And you know how I railed down about that.

Starting point is 00:19:58 I won't go on much further, except to say that a discovery, just as the discovery of a higher temperature, you know, less than 10 times higher temperature, revolutionized things so much that they were awarded a Nobel Prize. So, too, would another factor of 10 in temperature and Kelvin scale at least, almost, would that lead to a Nobel Prize? Everybody believes that if we can even find a high temperature superconduble prize. or that whoever does that will win in a ball prize. So inspired by their work, researchers in Houston and Alabama did an experiment on this

Starting point is 00:20:33 copper-yatrium barium oxide, which is called Yibico. It has a superconduct temperature of 93 Kelvin, which is much higher than the temperature of liquid nitrogen. So this is very easy to cool down below its critical temperature, and then you get all the cool uses of superconductivity. And so this is less than a year after the Nobel Prize was awarded. And then you could produce commercially this material. You could use it in wires. You could use it as a levitation mechanism, as I've said. But it doesn't have quite as many uses as a pure, elemental wire piece of mercury or copper even. Sorry, copper doesn't superconduct. Aluminum and so forth.

Starting point is 00:21:20 are not as useful because you can't really cause them to carry like very large currents. They have a so-called critical current. And that's another hallmark that we're going to use to assess and appraise the validity of a claim of high-temperature superconductivity. What is its critical temperature? What is this critical current? What is this critical magnetic field? What type of phase transition is it? Those are all hallmarks that have to be passed by any reasonable claim of superconducting phenomena. So many of these new ones use so-called cup rates. and prior to this prior to this discovery by our announcement by the Diaz group

Starting point is 00:21:56 the record holder was this lanthanum decahydride decahydrine must be lanthanum decahydride so it's 10 hydrogens and lanthanum it's not that very complicated material and it doesn't have a cuprate and it superconducts you know at a frosty temperature, but a temperature that I've enjoyed many, many times at the South Pole and elsewhere, negative 23 Celsius. It's not that bad, speaking from experience. But it requires an

Starting point is 00:22:30 incredible amount of pressure, 150 gigapascals, you know, a pressure that would be basically prohibitive to ever construct. Now, you hear in my conversation with Felix Flickr, which is coming up on his wonderful new book, The Magic of Physics. You'll hear more about why this is so crucial to have this room pressure, ambient pressure, behavior. And that's what's claim with these high-temperature superconductors that we're going to turn. So here's the current nature paper, an evidence of near-ambience superconductivity in an end-doped luteanium hydride. So this is not a copper one. The last author is actually the lead PI of this project.

Starting point is 00:23:13 And so it's not alphabetical either. So again, this is a little bit more technical. When you have bound pairs of electrons called Cooper pairs, they have a precursor property, which is the phase transition below a critical temperature. That's how you recognize that they've gone from normal, above zero resistance, not non-zero resistance, to true zero resistance. There are other phenomena, other properties, including the heat capacity, how much temperature rise do you get in a material for a given

Starting point is 00:23:45 amount of energy injected into it, that will have a discontinuity. The Meisner effect already talked about, which is the magnetic field expulsion. And also you can measure the susceptibility, which is the amount of applied magnetic field is required to get a produced magnetic field in a material. And that has this crucial property that you'll actually get a negative sign. So you'll going to, you apply a strong magnetic field to a true superconductor. It will have an opposite, it will generate an opposite or diamagnetic magnetization. And this will occur at a critical, they'll also exhibit a critical magnetic field above which you will not see superconductivity. It breaks down. There's also the critical temperature. So we use these in our detectors for the

Starting point is 00:24:34 Simon's Array and the Simon's Observatory. Here's one from my former graduate student. It's now postdoc at UC Berkeley, Lindsay Lowry. And it's a should. shows this change in resistance of our transition edge superconducting detectors. These are our ballometers that we use to measure the faint C&B signal. And you see it drops from some finite resistance and about one oam to zero. And it does so of a very, very narrow temperature range. It looks nearly vertical, but it's not quite vertical. And we use that intermediate region where it's red basically as a thermometer. So when there's a small change in temperature because the kilometers heating up because it's seeing a slightly higher patch of temperature on the sky,

Starting point is 00:25:14 because the cosmic background radiation's polarization is brighter there, you'll see this behavior and it will change and rise or raise or lower its resistance. And so we use it as an almost perfect, noiseless thermometer. And when it goes below the critical temperature, it's almost useless. Now, it's shown here as having a finite resistance of 0.2 oms, but that's all that 0.2 oms is all from electrical resistance that's not associated with the superconductor. So that's like other copper wire. have to get this out of the cryostat somehow. And you see that this is way below room temperature. This is almost at absolute zero. So there's finite ordinary wire, like copper wire and some copper and aluminum alloys and stuff. So we do use it in all of our astrophysics sensors,

Starting point is 00:26:00 and many sensors will be using this in the years to come. So you see, again, we've got a bunch of different properties. You claim you have a new superconductor? Great. Let's test it out. Let's see if first meets the definition. Does it superconduct? Zero electrical resistance. Does it have a heat capacity discontinuity? Can measure that. Does it exhibit the Meisner effect? Does it expel magnetic fields? Does it have a magnetic susceptibility that's negative, indicative of diamagnetism? Does it have a critical magnetic field? And does it have a critical temperature dependence on the external magnetic field? So I described already this property of type 1 and type 2. There's a critical temperature below which all fields are expelled in a type 1.

Starting point is 00:26:41 Type 2, there can be flux within it. And that's just kind of a diagram taken from Wikipedia, the source of all scientific knowledge. Now, here's an interesting plot that Bryce collected. It shows all these different, you know, chemistry was my nightmare subject. I never really was quite comfortable with chemistry in high school or college. So forgive me if I mangled these names. But you see the temperature scale and you see the data.

Starting point is 00:27:09 different years in which these superconductors were discovered. Starting way on the left, the discovery in mercury and then lead was slightly higher critical temperature. These are all at ambient pressure, except for the one that's marked Lantantham decahydride, or Lach 10, which required this huge pressure and does superconduct at these extremely high temperatures. extremely high pressures and also extremely high temperatures. We're getting up to room temperatures shown us about 300 Kelvin as a classical accepted definition of it. So starting at the lower left corner, going up to the right, temperature is increasing, and the year is increasing for some of these things.

Starting point is 00:27:53 But you really sort of hit the wall even in the year 2000. So this is almost 100 years after its discovery, more than 100 years after discovery superconductivity. and the green dots are sort of petering out. They're really not able to get much higher up in super-connecting temperature until with ordinary materials, like just simple, you know, divalent or, you know, commonly available compounds. Then in 1987, you see discovered these Yichium-Berium copper oxides. So you see those skyrocket up, about 90s. 100 Kelvin, the 1986 ones are measured, the first high-temperature superconductor, the so-called

Starting point is 00:28:39 it was above the temperature of the Sniobium germanium compound. And that led to the Nobel Prize, as I mentioned before. And then it kind of skyrocketed up, and then it plateaus again, and then you start requiring higher and higher pressures. It's not exactly clear to me why the pressure comes into place so much, except for the fact that this is a mystery to my theoretical condensed matter call. like Professor Jorge Hirsch, which is why I wanted to have them on the show today. So you do need higher pressure and for some of these things to really start to interact.

Starting point is 00:29:12 And they don't understand why or exactly why some people have ideas as to why high pressure comes into play. And I asked Felix Flickr about this and it's still an open debate. Why is this the case? So the claim in this current paper, DS's team is that they found a superconducting Lutium-nitrogen-hydrogen compound, critical temperature of 294 Kelvin. So that's like 12 degrees below room temperature. You know, it's like 60 degrees, 65 degrees Fahrenheit. They're calling this near-ambient pressure, Ken Killebar is not that high. And they show the behavior of the different,

Starting point is 00:29:48 the compound as they're changing the pressure. They put it inside of a cell, a pressure cell, where they can increase the pressure compressing it. And then they're running AC and DC currents through it, and they're also checking its magnetic field when they switch the magnetic field or they keep it constant. And that's what they're doing. They're showing that it, they're claiming that it does satisfy these different properties. No resistance. It has the proper magnetic diagnetism. It has heat capacity discontinuity, and it reduces the critical temperature when you have a magnetic field. So that that also isn't super practical. You have to have a huge magnet to make it lower its temperature. But anyway, it's satisfying.

Starting point is 00:30:28 The claim is that satisfying all these properties that make it a classical superconductive. Here's their setup. This is where it gets really cool. They put it inside what's called a diamond anvil cell where they have this huge capacity for pressure and squishing this material. But it doesn't have to be squished all that much. They're able to put in with ordinary metal, platinum, non-superconducting metal foil probes. And you see those there. And they compress it in the same.

Starting point is 00:30:56 cell that also has diamond powder in it for suspension and mechanical purposes. And then they're measuring out what's called a four point measurement. They're using two leads to measure voltage and another two to measure current. So the voltage is measured across the sample and the current is measured through the sample. And then they can change a temperature. They can heat up the sample. And they can also measure the temperature using a thermos, basically a thermometer called the thermocl. So they go through, they pressurize it, they measure the temperature at different pressures. They put this odd sample in, and they have pictures of it. Here it is. So it's this little chunk. And there you see the platinum electrodes coming in on the left. And then it's showing it's resistant.

Starting point is 00:31:44 Boom, it looks clear as day. I mean, it's clearly superconducting. It's going to zero resistance. the pressure is 10 kilobars in 1K, 16 kilobars, and then as a function of the temperature is lowering as you get to higher and higher pressures. So that's actually kind of the opposite of what you might want. So this is behaving in a very positive way that the critical temperature is going up as you reduce the pressure, which is kind of cool

Starting point is 00:32:13 because you'd like it to be zero critical. You'd like the temperature that it transitions to zero, resistance to be room temperature or even higher than room temperature, if you're using it in the desert or something, to conduct electricity from giant solar panels or solar water heater generator, steam turbines. You'd like that to be maybe slightly higher than room temperature, maybe 310 Kelvin, and you'd like it to be zero kilobar. You'd like to not have to carry around a diamond anvil press around with you at all points. So they do this, they show it superconducting, zero resistance, and then they are measuring as a function of pressure on the right, its behavior.

Starting point is 00:32:52 Now, another topic is the specific heat, how much heat is stored for a given change in temperature, how much energy is stored. This behaves properly. It exhibits a characteristic specific heat discontinuity. And its OMS law changes from linear, which is OMS law, V equals I times R, to nonlinear when it gets below the critical temperature. So far so good. They do magnetization measurements.

Starting point is 00:33:19 They measure that is in a vibrating sample magnetometer where they're actually moving it to generate a changing AC, alternating current magnetic field, moving it back and forth, moving it up and down, and then also having a pickup coil to measure the resulting magnetic field. And they see as they do this what the behavior is like. And this is where the controversial behavior comes in, according to my colleague Jorge Hirsch, claims that the background subtraction technique that they're using is problematic. And we'll get to some of that in just a bit. They measure the DC magnetization, the AC magnetization, whether there's zero field and field cooling conditions. Those are technical properties. They measure the onset of magnetization.

Starting point is 00:34:11 They see the magnetization changes in response to sample. pressure. This is all great. What does this look like? Well, they don't know exactly what it is. Statistically, this luteinium hydro-nitride, this has been made by taking this foil of luteinium, which I don't know where you can get them, but I'm sure they can get you some and maybe even sell you some. And it's made by heating it in a hydrogen, atomic, sorry, molecular, hydrogen, molecular nitrogen, gas mixture up to 63 Celsius, which is, you know, toasty, but not crazy, high temperature, and then under high pressure. That's just to make it.

Starting point is 00:34:50 They characterize it using what's called Roman spectroscopy, which is a type of similar to like fluorescent spectroscopy. They don't know exactly the composition of how much of these different, they're called stoichiometric relationships. Again, I failed chemistry. Not I didn't fail chemistry, but it's been a while decades since I had chemistry. chemistry. And now we get to some of the, so it checks all the boxes. It's making zero resistance. It's having magnetic susceptibility as a diamagnet. It's having a critical temperature

Starting point is 00:35:22 behavior. It has a critical field behavior. It has a otherwise, you know, completely, completely, I don't want to say classical, but it has a completely objectively well-behaved magnetic field are superconducting properties. So what is a controversy about? It seems like they're, you know, ticking all the boxes. A lot of this comes down to who do you trust? Do you trust the experimentalist? Is there a reason to maybe suspect them? Is there something wrong with what they're doing? And so I'm going to take you through some of the controversy. Again, it's too bad my colleague decided not to be here for this, but maybe I'll get him some other time. And so let's go through some of the complaints about this particular finding. There was a response, and we'll have

Starting point is 00:36:13 this in the show notes down below, that the discovery of superconductivity, this is by Dirk, Van Denmarrel, and Jorge Hirsch. And they talk about the discovery of room temperature supertivity for carbonaceous sulfur hydride under high pressure. This is a different type of materials, not the luteinium. And they measure this, and they claim this, but then they say this susceptibility, again, this getting into the magnetic susceptibility. The background, they claim the authors, D.S. at all, the background signal determined from a non-superconducting sample has been subtracted from the data. From a thorough analysis, we show the data are incompatible with the notion that the susceptibility data are obtained from the measured voltage, using a background correction correction. On the other hand,

Starting point is 00:36:57 the data are compatible with the reverse procedure, namely the measured voltage is obtained by adding a background signal containing noise to what was reported as a background corrective susceptibility. For all six of the reported pressures, our analysis leads to inclusion like that, one, the reported background corrected susceptibility data are pathological. Two, they were not obtained by the method described in the paper, nor by any one of the alternative three methods that were subsequently provided by the authors. And three, the measured voltage data are not raw data. So it's basically alleging improper conduct, laboratory conduct, perhaps. but it gets worse in some sense or better in some sense. So there was another manuscript that this one was submitted by just by Jorge Hirsch.

Starting point is 00:37:51 It was published. And this is called on the room temperature superconductivity of carbonaceous sulfur hydride. Here I provide an analysis of the underlying data. The analysis calls into question the generally accepted view that carbonaceous sulfur hydrant is a room. temperature superconductor. And he goes through in great detail what is the notion of what they claim to have detected. Now, this fell into a lot of attention. So this was actually reported in all the popular press, and it was reported at this meeting in the so-called March meaning of the American Physical Society. The plot kind of thickened after this.

Starting point is 00:38:37 and this is from a science paper in the journal science, about the treatment of Jorge Hirsch after he was banned from publishing in what's called the archive, which is the largest repository of scientific and exchange of scientific documents in the world right now. It's an open source, open access, a system to publish preprints before they get accepted under peer review. Sometimes they're not accepted under peer review. Okay, so they banned him. They banned Jorge Hirsch, a theoretical physicist at UCSD, from posting papers for six months.

Starting point is 00:39:13 And Jorge is quoted as saying, The ban is very unfair. I can't work if I can't publish papers. Well, they're not really not free to publish papers. You just can't put them on an archive. But anyway, now, the Southern Scientist Archives ban in removal of papers amounted to stifling scientific debate. And here they quote,

Starting point is 00:39:30 my other colleagues here at UCSD, Nigel Goldenfeld, Dan Arrovas, another physicist agreed, squelching what is essentially a purely scientific exchange. Even one where the respective parties engage in some distasteful accusations is highly problematic. There are no papers, according to the archives administrators, there are no papers in this whole chain that are rejected because we do not like the scientific content. It says Ralph Ouizier's a physicist at the University of Amsterdam, who is the preprint server's board chair. People's emotions became too affected. They got acrimonious. It goes on to describe what the archive is all about, how many papers are accepted, and how it's voluntarily moderated by people that there's legitimate scientific research, interest in the community.

Starting point is 00:40:17 Papers that don't appear to be scientifically sound are used unprofessional language can be rejected. Review boards, then manage appeals. Rejections are rare, perhaps 1% of submissions, said Stein Sigurdsons, their executive director. If we allow this stuff, all this stuff, he says, Paul Finley says, rather, a Fenley, a theoretical physicist at University Oxford and advisory commitment. If we allow this stuff, what's the difference between the archive and Twitter? Indeed. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet.

Starting point is 00:40:48 How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app

Starting point is 00:41:04 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, moderators believe that Jorge Hirsch here at UCSD crossed the line in papers critiquing the October 2020 Nature publication by Team Lynn by Ranga Diaz, the physicist at the University of Rochester. The paper reporting the discovery of a hydrogen-containing material

Starting point is 00:41:28 under intense pressure, superconducts at near room temperature, was hailed as a culmination of a century-long quest. As I said before, now, then it got really interesting. Hersch asked Diaz for the raw data, and he said D.S. rebuffed him repeatedly. Eventually, Hersch did receive some data from one of D.S.'s co-authors, and that's kind of one of the sticking points. And in August 2021, Hurst submitted his own analysis to both the archive and Physica C. The paper was titled, On the AC Magnetic Susceptibility of a Room Temperature Superconductor, anatomy of a probable scientific fraud.

Starting point is 00:42:07 So pretty harsh words. After publishing it online, Physica C removed the article because it contained data published without the original team's permission. And then the archive took it down in December. Then, the plot thickens, 2021, DS and one of his collaborators, Ascan Salamat, at the United States, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, posted a response to Hirsch's criticisms, included some of their raw data, and December, Hirsch submitted two papers analyzing those raw data and followed up with

Starting point is 00:42:34 three more papers, all of them responses to work by DS and his colleagues. They blocked all five. Archive did. Hersh said posting multiple submissions also been delayed for weeks or more, and papers were taken down even after they were posted. Last week, the site, archive site, also removed a paper from DS in Salamette due to inflammatory. content, an unprofessional language. So this is wild. This is happening in theoretical and experimental condensed matter physics. Now, Hirsch, to his credit, defended D.S. and Salomon's paper in an effort in an email to their administrators that prevent scientific arguments the community should be able to judge in their merits, rather than prevented by doing so by your

Starting point is 00:43:13 arbitrary, self-righteous decorum standards. They've been invited to modify the offending language and resubmit it, and a modified version of Hershey's papers on which he's a second offer has been posted. Modification is not like to happen with Hershey's other offending papers in which he was the first or only author. Sigritsen said as he's unable to discuss the case, but bans can occur for other reasons. We don't want to be flooded by separate comments and single papers. Our moderators are a noise suppression machine, he says. Other physicists worry moderators are making arbitrary judgments, and we don't know what those prejudices might be. according to Brian Josephson, who I hope to get on the podcast someday at Nobel Prize winner, also controversial in his own right, creator and mentor of the Josephson Junction,

Starting point is 00:44:00 Josephson effect, which we use and our squid amplifiers. This new discovery is now in a room of ambient pressure as well, but it's the same team. And to add to that kind of some of the questions are, you know, perhaps it is the fact that Diaz has started this company, unearthly materials, and he has already made, according to some of the claims and articles and tech crunch and elsewhere, because of new luteum-based materials superconducting at much lower pressures, many other researchers will attempt to reproduce the experiment. Dr. Diaz said he wants to provide a more precise recipe of how to make the compound and share samples,

Starting point is 00:44:40 but intellectual property issues need to be resolved first. He founded a company, unearthly materials, that plans to turn in the research. research into profits. And allegedly, he claimed that he had obtained $20 million in funding. They made claims that could later not be verified. So TechCrunch reports just last week unearthly materials claimed to have big name investors, but they weren't all on board. Start claims is on the cusp of the superconductor breakthrough despite the questionable scientific record. We have links to that as well. So they want to capitalize on their research. There's nothing wrong with that necessarily, though it's curious as to whether or not he or his company can

Starting point is 00:45:20 actually make a lot of money. He patent something like this. It's a material. Can you really own a material? If there's something proprietary about it that no one else could figure out, should you put a patent on something that could benefit the whole planet? Should you try to leverage it to make money? And so this author of this TechCrunch article, Tim DeChant, which we linked to, talks about a video which was stumbled upon by the author of a virtual talk that Diaz gave to scientific society and Sri Lankan investors in a university,

Starting point is 00:45:56 which he claims to have raised a million dollar seed round and $20 million series A for unearthly materials. And you'll know that I talked to none other than David Friedberg, co-host of the All In podcast, and David said he'd give his run. right arm for a room temperature super connectivity. So David's arm is at stake here. And it's really not clear if he'll have to give it up. But some of the other investors that were on site,

Starting point is 00:46:23 according to Diaz, the seed round featured Union Square Ventures, the founder of Spotify, Daniel Eck, and then the Series A round apparently included none other than Sam Altman, open AIs leader. So this is a... incredibly, you know, complex, difficult, and tangled superconducting web. Trying to figure it all out is not easy, but it does highlight this notion that media, academia, are in collaboration, just as the military and industry are in collaboration. Is it dangerous? Can it lead to abuses or maybe incentivize fraud in some cases? Perhaps. And there's a lot at stake.

Starting point is 00:47:14 And it's interesting to note that these things have to do with one of our greatest challenges, climate change, right? One of the greatest challenges that we're facing is, you know, the losses due to energy transportation due to the fact that we use actual conductive materials that have non-vanishing resistance, their ordinary materials. So they lose, copper loses 20 to 30 percent of the energy that's transporting. So that's a huge hit in efficiency. So we're going to change all that, reducing the need of room temperature to just have lost due to heat from the copper wires that are used for transmission lines. We'd also be able to utilize them, as I said before, for transportation, near frictionless or just mere air resistance, and many, many other scientific applications. Medicine and otherwise, we would need these huge cryogen. It could have you ever had an NMR, MRI, as we now call it.

Starting point is 00:48:11 You've undoubtedly heard the incredible sound of the cooler and that's actually used in the magnets. Those are superconductors. They need to be cool. The liquid helium and liquid nitrogen is not sufficient to generate the temperatures of Yitrium barium copper oxide. Cannot produce the magnetic fields. You need to image, say, the brain or something. So you could actually reduce that. That would benefit the world in a way that Alfred Nobel clearly intended.

Starting point is 00:48:38 So Nobel Prize is at stake. attention for the universities are at stake. Climate change is at stake. You can have room temperature, supercomputing devices using superconductors. So quantum computers operating. The qubits that are used are like these Joseph junctions. Again, I hope to get Brian Joe.

Starting point is 00:48:55 I've been in contact with him. Hopefully he'll come on. So there's a tremendous amount at stake. Prestige, money, fame, attention, and so much more makes us such an interesting topic. For me to look at as an outsider, just a physics interested nerdy outsider, but somebody who, you know, has no direct stake in this, but as an interested party, I think we can all get behind the fact that these announcements and the

Starting point is 00:49:21 vetting of them and the acrimony and that science, people think scientists are just these happy-go-lucky types, they're just curious and passionate and they never have any bad signs. We're just, you know, stroking our beards and thinking about the universe or non-existent beards in some cases. So, Where do we go from here? Well, I'll continue to pay attention to this because, as I said, I'm incredibly interested in it. Even as a layperson in this field, although I do use superconductors, I use cryogenics. But I'm fascinated with it. So I'll endeavor to keep you abreast of this.

Starting point is 00:49:51 But I'll also bring into account more topics, as I talked about in a video at the end of December last year with Professor Charles Seif, who's a journalism professor, former math physics, aficionado himself. We talked about the discovery of fusion by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, announced at the end of last year as a breakthrough in power and hope for green energy, too cheap to meter. So part of my mission, bring you the best and brightest in the universe and sometimes unveil the messy side of being a scientist. It's not all pretty. I don't want to make people feel the impression that being a scientist is all just. Everybody just contemplating the universe and how it can benefit the human condition. It's not like that. But hopefully, we'll explore more together, and let me know what you think about this video.

Starting point is 00:50:45 Leave a thumbs up, leave a comment even better, and a thumbs up. Leave a thumbs down. That also helps. You wouldn't believe it. Leave a thumbs down, but tell me what you'd like me to improve about the presentation, topics, other things. If you like more of these deep dives, kind of like an office hours, and let me know what you think. Okay. Until next time. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Starting point is 00:51:11 Thanks for listening to Into the Impossible. Keep in touch by signing up for Professor Keeney's Monday Magic email at Briankeeting.com slash list. And if you've got a dot-edu domain, we'll send you the next best thing to a room temperature superconductor, a piece of an extraterrestrial object in the form of an authentic meteorite fragment. Please help make the show better by filling out our listener survey linked to in the show notes. And thanks to all our viewers and listeners for helping us break the 100,000 subscriber mark on YouTube. Please keep it growing by following and subscribing.

Starting point is 00:51:50 Don't forget to go look at the video of this episode on the YouTube channel to see the slides. Remember, always be curious. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition. First Citizens Bank.

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Superconductor Smackdown: Breakthrough or ‘Probable Fraud’? (#309)

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