Superconductivity and the [near] future

Superconductivity is one of those things, like fusion energy or quantum computing, that are always JUST ABOUT TO make a big splash in the world, change everything ... and ten years ago this was just on the verge of happening too, and in another ten it will still be right on the knife's edge of realization. And so on.

The notion that superconductivity will be the next big thing comes from experience of materials at very low temperature, Properly cooled materials (most often metals such as lead, tin or aluminum) conduct direct current (DC) electricity without energy loss: resistance vanishes.

If you've watched cheesy old sci-fi movies in which aliens tell humans "resistance is futile" you will probably be at work on your puns already. Still ... the absence of current resistance is enticing. It is a prospect with no end of possible practical applications.

But, of course, the process of cooling the proposed superconducting material below the threshold temperature and keeping it there is not costless. Indeed, the danger is that any serious attempt to implement this will involve the expenditure of more energy of the cooling than is then saved on the resistance-free transmission.

The latest company to claim that it has solved this problem and is about to unleash superconducting upon the world in a big way is VEIR, a firm based in Woburn, Massachusetts. It aspires to change the US power grid. Here is a link to the website.

Are they going to pull this off? You heard it from me first, psssst, probably not.

Comments

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog