Everyone is so excited, and it is exciting, but I guess I don't see how this will "change the world". It doesn't seem applicable for transmission lines (it's brittle and cannot conduct large amounts of current), which is what I would imagine would be the biggest world changing thing. Maybe it could make maglev trains a more common reality? But we seem to have trouble building trains of any sort. If you could use the material for PCB traces you could eliminate (a lot?) of heat loss from computing equipment. But you're still stuck with Si on the chip itself. You're still stuck with high voltage copper power lines.
What, exactly, are the "world changing" applications? Perhaps my imagination isn't up to the task of seeing this. What I see is a novelty for physics students to levitate magnets without the need for liquid nitrogen, and perhaps it will make some quantum computing designs more efficient (and therefore render PKI obsolete. yay?)
I think the excitement around this is partially people overestimating the properties of this particular material, but also partially people excited that if this is true, the method by which it works might result in the discovery of materials with even better properties.
Even this paper doesn't claim to have a particularly good superconductor as far as overall performance is concerned. It's not particularly close to the state of the art in critical field or current. But if it does turn out that their hypothesis claiming that the internal stress of the material allows it to bypass the current need for extremely high pressures / low temperatures, then perhaps there can be new materials developed that are better superconductors while still overcoming the current limitations presented by REBCOs and other leading superconductors. Also, that's not even mentioning that LK-99 has no particularly exotic materials. REBCOs rely on rare earth elements like Yttrium, but this just uses lead, copper, and phosphorus.
> What, exactly, are the "world changing" applications?
Superconducting computing is a big one - even if we stick to classical computers (i.e. not quantum computers), there are estimates that superconducting computers could be ~1000x more energy efficient than state-of-the-art semiconductor computers.
I don't see why these transistors are going to be so much better than tubes. Okay, so you can make a smaller radio? People don't move their radios around all that much anyway.
We don't know what we will know in the future, or else we would already know it.
Ah, I see. You are excited that this will change the world, but you don't know how, and you're willing to label someone who asking about specifics as a backwards luddite.
You wouldn't happen to be in crypto currency would you?
What, exactly, are the "world changing" applications? Perhaps my imagination isn't up to the task of seeing this. What I see is a novelty for physics students to levitate magnets without the need for liquid nitrogen, and perhaps it will make some quantum computing designs more efficient (and therefore render PKI obsolete. yay?)