Reuters World News - Weekend episode: The hype and hope around superconductors

Episode Date: August 12, 2023

A claim by scientists in South Korea has reignited a global race to prove the existence of a practical superconductor. But was their claim legit? In a special weekend episode of Reuters World News, host Kim Vinnell and tech journalist Stephen Nellis go beyond the viral headlines to find out what's really going on. Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt-out of targeted advertising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A claim by scientists in South Korea has reignited a global race to prove the existence of a practical superconductor. It's one of science's holy grails and would usher in an era of floating vehicles, supercomputers which can solve any problem, and would mean you never have to replace your batteries ever again. But was their claim legit? In this special weekend episode of Reuters World News, We go beyond the viral headline to find out what's really going on.

I'm Kim Vennel in London. And I'm Stephen Nellis in San Francisco. My co-host, Stephen Nellis, has covered business and technology for more than 15 years. When the news broke about a supposed holy grail material called LK99, he went and dug into whether it was real or hype and spoke to US national laboratories and physicists. So, Stephen, first of all, what exactly is a superconductor? So most simply, a superconductor is any material that can conduct electricity without any resistance. Anytime you design an electrical system, resistance is kind of your enemy.

It means that whatever energy you put in, you won't get all of it out on the other side. So that's a problem for things like the power grid. and it also creates a speed limit for things like signals inside computer chips. And lastly, it's what generates heat when you put a lot of electricity into something. All that energy that you're losing is heat. Most of that is because of resistance. So figuring out how to solve that would be really transformational in a lot of applications like the power grid computer chips and other fun things as well. And speaking of other fun things, further down the line, just let your imagination go there. What other sorts of things might this create one day?

Yes. So this is where the really fun stuff comes in. One thing that you can do with superconductors is create really, really powerful magnets that create powerful magnetic fields with almost zero heat or loss. So that gets you into things like levitating vehicles, rail guns, which are kind of a sign. science fiction weapon that can, you know, shoot a projectile, friction-free at super-fast speeds. So those are absolutely possibilities. I think you would see things, though, like, let's just make the current magnets that go into electric motors and electric vehicles much, much more efficient so that you're not losing a bunch of that energy that you're storing, and the battery is heat.

But yes, there are much more fun things than the horizon like flying cars and sci-fi weapons. But we shouldn't be getting too excited just yet, right? Absolutely. So the search for a practical superconductor actually goes back many, many decades. Probably the last really big episode of this was in the 1980s. And what everybody is looking for is a material that will show these properties at a temperature that's not really, really cold. And by really cold, I don't mean go out in winter and shiver.

I mean so cold that the only one. ways we can practically reach them is with really specialized equipment, liquid nitrogen, those sorts of things. So we actually have quite a few superconductors today that work, and even some that work at temperatures that are really cold but not completely impossible. So for example, if you've ever gotten an MRI scan for a medical condition, you've actually been around to superconductors. So those are very expensive to run and to cool, but obviously it's worth it for the medical benefits would get out of being able to see inside of people's bodies without having to cut them open. But this search has been going on for a very long time, and there have been so many

failures over the decades where people, even very smart people, thought that they had a material that would exhibit these properties at a useful room temperature, and then they didn't. That scientists actually have a name for it. They call them unidentified superconducting objects, and they basically see, oh, here's a few properties of a superconductor, but then once you really start to test it and really start to put it through its paces, it comes up short. So how is the race to replicate this material going? So there's actually been quite a bit of activity even before this most recent episode with a material called LK99. So let me back up a little bit. There were claims earlier this year about room temperature superconductors, but they only exhibited those properties at very, very high

pressures. Imagine making a giant clamp out of two diamonds and putting it in crazy high pressures to get it to show this property. So the more recent bout of this, though, basically exploded in two ways. It was done in an open source science kind of way, and it was kind of carried out on social media. So what was posted here is a paper on a website called archive.org, and this is a site that scientists used to share research with each other, before it's peer reviewed. So before anybody else is at a chance to look through it, ask questions, before other teams have had a chance to try to replicate results. And so to a certain degree, this is really just a rough draft or raw data. But that doesn't mean that there's nothing

important on this site. So for example, Silicon Valley has been just overtaken by artificial intelligence over the past six months to a year. And a lot of the fundamental enabling breakthroughs, have been sitting on archive.org for five years or more, and we're just published openly by AI researchers. So open source science has certainly taken the tech world by storm. The other thing that happened here is this got big on social media. I think ever since the meme stock era, people have been looking on social media for obscure things that they might be able to find a way to invest in or somehow get a piece of that magic sort of wealth creation that can happen with technology, and they tend to get really excited about things.

So this gets seized on by a few accounts and really pumped up. And that ticked off a lot of interest by scientists around the world to take a look. Okay, let's take stock for a second. A bunch of scientists publish a paper, well, actually two, on this website, archive.org, which is known in the science community for being legit. It's a place to make discoveries and theories open to the public, open source. That sparks huge interest from physicists, but also from your average Joe who's thinking, wow, okay, if this is real, then I could make some serious cash.

At this point, there's a huge flurry of activity, but also a lot of doubt. So one of the fascinating things here is that every physicist we spoke to for the story at Reuters was incredibly skeptical of the claims, but they also said to a person, well, hey, this material looks pretty easy to replicate. Let's give it a try. This is the fun part of science. So around the world, the labs in China, the United States, Korea taking a look. And as of Tuesday, August 8th, I think the default position is now this is probably not going to be the material people were looking for. There was a lab at the University of Maryland that published some data saying this really doesn't look like a superconductor. and that sort of jibes well with all the other data that's come out to date from other labs in China and elsewhere. So is this it? Has the superconductor been discovered?

Sadly, the answer is probably no. As of August 8th, there was some interesting data out of a lab at the University of Maryland saying this does not show the properties we would look for in a superconductor. and I should say that that data generally went in the same direction as all the other data that had come out of labs in China and elsewhere up until now. So this is probably going to join the long history of materials that showed a few interesting potential properties of a superconductor, but then failed under closer scrutiny. That's it for this special weekend episode. Special thanks to Stephen Nellis for his help. We'll be back with our daily headline show on Monday.

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