Welcome to The WC — your weekly shot of awesome.
This week is dedicated to one topic — superconductors. If you’re not Extremely Online or a physics nerd, you may have missed what’s going on in this space over the last week or so.
If so, you’ve missed a lot.
I’m not a physicist or materials scientist, but when this many nerds get this excited about something, it’s potentially huge. This discovery, if it’s proven out, will change everything about your day to day life.
In short, it’s potentially world-changing.
So I’m going to break it down for you as best as I can using the smallest possible words (so even I can understand them):
- What is LK-99?
- What’s the story so far
- Potential application – MagLev trains
- Potential application – Portable MRI machines
- Potential application – Unlimited fusion power
[note I’m writing this on Tuesday to send Wednesday, so things may have changed in the interim]
Special thanks to Roja Buck, who is the smartest person I know. He explained a lot of this to me and was very patient while doing so.
Table of Contents
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What is LK-99?
LK-99 is the world’s first room temperature ambient pressure superconductor. That means it works at normal temperatures and at normal air pressure levels. Existing superconductors need to be very cold or under tremendous pressure, and that makes their infrastructure very big and very expensive.
They need casings around them that are full of liquid nitrogen and / or create a tremendous amount of pressure.
That’s why an MRI machine is the size of a car, costs $3 million, and you can’t move it. It’s also why a bunch of sci-fi stuff that could exist doesn’t. They’re feasible but just too expensive or big to be practical.
If LK-99, which is dead easy to make cheaply, is legit (more on that below), it means we can make very small, affordable, and moveable superconductors that will pave the way to building a huge variety of everyday items that are impossible today.
The drama around LK-99
However this turns out, events over the last week and the next month or years will be the subject of any number of films and books.
It began on July 22nd, when two hastily written and released papers showed up on an academic peer-review website.
The papers described an easily manufactured and affordable substance that works as a room temperature ambient pressure superconductor that will change everything. Everything.
The first had three authors (the max number that can receive a Nobel Prize) and didn’t give much detail; the more thorough second paper was released a couple hours later and included six authors — though it was missing the third author from the first paper.
That missing author in paper two is the scientist who submitted the first paper, Young-Wan Kwon.
On July 28th, Kwon presented the paper at a conference in Korea without the rest of the team’s approval / knowledge.
An interview then surfaced saying Kwon was no longer affiliated with the team and hadn’t been for four months.
So the guy hasn’t been with the team for four months, possibly gets wind that they’re about to release the most significant discovery in a century, and publishes it himself without their knowledge or consent. He then goes on to present it at a conference to solidify his claim as part of the Nobel-winning team.
Meanwhile, the real team sees the paper go out and hastily publishes their own, removing him from the authors list.
Both the first two papers are riddled with “first-draft” errors and mistakes, which sort of supports this chain of events. Scientists are an ambitious lot.
Meanwhile, the internet has lost its mind.
Because the concept is world-beating AND it’s a substance that any armchair scientist can create in a home lab, we’ve got a race to replicate the results at quickly as possible.
Literally dudes are live streaming themselves trying to replicate the material and results from their garage.
This page is tracking all the various replication attempts in real time.
Replication means it’s legit. If no one else can reproduce the substance and achieve the claimed results, it’s not.
So is it legit?
As of Tuesday 1 August at 12:52pm CET, no one knows.
There are a few prediction markets running. The two on Metaculus and Manifold are now above 50% to the good.
You’ll get better odds (depending on your point of view) at Polymarket, which is at 44%.
There’s been a big swing into positive territory today against the backdrop of a significant announcement demonstrating a supercomputer has run simulations on the findings and confirmed them.
The first claimed replication (unconfirmed) has also occurred.
First claimed successful replication of LK-99
— Andrew Cote (@Andercot) August 1, 2023
Accomplished by a team at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology and posted 30 minutes ago.
Why this is evidence:
The LK-99 flake slightly levitates for both orientations of the magnetic field, meaning it is not simply a… pic.twitter.com/bh0x9oqaz2
Two final pieces of drama to throw into the mix.
This substance was originally discovered in 1999 by Suk-bae Lee and Ji-hoon Kim, which is why it’s called LK-99. They sat on the discovery for 24 years, and no one really knows why.
Another scientist claimed the invention of a similar superconductor earlier this year, and it turned out the results were fabricated.
Ok let’s get onto the practical applications. Here’s a decent thread if you want to begin there; otherwise, keep reading.
I've worked with superconductors for the better part of a decade now in different contexts, from STM condensed matter labs, to particle accelerators, and now fusion.
— Andrew Cote (@Andercot) July 29, 2023
Time for a deep dive on what exactly this miracle-technology unlocks for us a species: 🧵 pic.twitter.com/sRALBgYbkc
Practical application – MagLev Trains
Want to travel from New York to Los Angeles in 21 minutes? MagLev trains let you do that.
Magnetic levitation traings (MagLev) are already a thing, but they require supercooling and are relatively very expensive.
LK-99 would reduce costs and possibly open the prospect of vactrains — Maglev trains that travel in a vacuum tube that eliminates air resistance.
This would enable speeds approaching 14k miles per hour with no CO2 emissions, though the true top speed would be determined by how long it takes to accelerate and decelerate.
These maglev vacuum tubes can be used to transport goods as well, of course, and it’s easy to imagine shipping containers whisking across the continent in minutes rather than taking days to pass through the Panama canal or via traditional rail services.
Even if vacuum tubes aren’t feasible (they’re hard to make and maintain), speeds approaching 1,000 mph are very doable — that’s twice the speed of traditional commercial airliners.
LK-99 could also unlock electric commercial jets, nearly unlimited range EV cars, and personal hover-vehicles in every home garage. Plus hover skateboards.
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Their second offering is this Rolex Submariner 16808 “Nipple” Dial.
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Practical application – Cheap mobile MRI machines 🏥
MRI machines identify cancer before it kills you.
The vast majority of an MRI machine’s volume and mass is the infrastructure supporting the magnet. All the liquid helium and nitrogen required to keep it very very cool.
Remove that super bulky and expensive shell, and you’re left with an affordable and possibly-portable MRI machine that can significantly improve medical outcomes for every human being on the planet.
As of 2018, there were 84 MRI machines across all of west Africa compared to 56k in the USA. That’s very roughly 100x few machines per capita in some of the poorest parts of the world.
So on the one hand, you increase the availability of these live-saving devices to the poorest parts of the world, which elevates the population more quickly to middle class and saves millions of lives.
On the other hand, every doctor’s office and local pharmacy in the rich world gets one of these devices, and cancer is caught earlier, because you can get a scan every few months if you’d like.
LK-99 also vastly improves the resolution available to MRI devices, which means smaller tumours will be caught earlier. MRIs can also spot joint problems, bone infections, brain injuries, spinal cord disorders, heart wall problems, Multiple sclerosis, and aneurysms.
This rising tide lifts all boats dramatically.
Other medical applications include water de-salination (free free water for everyone forever).
Practical application – Unlimited fusion power
Possibly the most exciting advance we can extrapolate from this discovery is a workable Tokomak fusion reactor.
As described by, our friendly nerd, Roja, “it’s a donut-like metal chamber that contains super-heated gas (plasma) which is compressed / contained by the superconducting magnets. This causes the plasma to “bump into” itself and fuse releasing neutrons (and other fun radiation) which can then be used to heat water, run turbines and make electricity.”
It can theoretically produce a tremendous amount of electricity relative to the amount of matter consumed.
These reactors are theoretically feasible today, but the energy required to cool the superconductor – and heat the plasma – is such that it produces a net negative amount of energy.
Given LK-99, it’s possible to produce these reactors at scale to generate effectively unlimited energy.
It should be noted that fission, the other side of the nuclear coin, can already do this but at a smaller scale. It’s not immediately clear that fusion would tear down the political hurdles we already face when someone uses the “Nuclear” word.
Other energy-based applications include less-sexy but still important advances to generators, wind turbines, and energy storage — our current bottleneck to significant renewable energy advances.
There are dozens more applications of LK-99 including quantum computers, mobile phones that last for months, propulsion systems that facilitate intergalactic travel, and on and on and on.
Fingers crossed for humanity.
Cheers,
Wyatt
Disclosures
- This issue was sponsored by Elephantsclub.io. There are also a couple affiliate links sprinkled in.
- Our ALTS 1 Fund doesn’t have a stake in anything here.
