The Incredible Potential of Superconductors

Touched 220v with a wrench the other day... Pretty sure I am a super conductor. Wasn't even cold 😂

Let's just think about this for a second. Someone put a ceramic wire, very brittle stuff, in the ground for a KILOMETER and it works. That in and of itself is a massive achievement.

Very important to note Is that 'a' superconductor is not a technical/usable superconductor. By far. There's a lot to being practical for superconductors, for example their current carrying capability is also limited by magnetic field and mechanical stress. At one of our recent conferences on applied superconductivity (EUCAS 2023) there was a nice plenary targeted at the general public which I would recommend to watch after this nice video here. It can be found on the youtube channel of the university of Bologna, where the conference was held.

If you're going to talk about superconductors for power transmission, I believe you should also be talking about their critical current density and critical magnetic field density. The temperature at which they're superconducting is not independent of the magnetic field around them and the current that runs through them.

I am LOVING these renders. The liquid in the cable looked SO good.

At first I was like, hold on, wasn't this posted a good while ago? Then I checked Nebula and sure enough, I had indeed already watched it.

There actually is a second way for the wide spread implementation of superconductors. And thats if we find a way of cheaply and simply cooling something to cyogenic temperatures. In that case we could just use the ones we already know of. Not as practical as a room termperature superconductor, but it would still be a massive step forward.

I love your notebooks. I've used the little graphing one and the bigger softish graphing notebook for a few years. I love your channel, love your logo on them, and enjoy the quality. And of course, the videos

Hi Brian, great summary! Part of the hype about Lk99 was due to the fact that they had a peer reviewed paper published in Korean in 2021 as well as 3 patents. In one of the patents they state a resistivity value well within the superconductivity range, but this number is only in the text.

There is a small mistake around 4:00. Cooper pairs are physically very far apart, much further than the nanometer scale.

Think I appreciated one of my favorite mech anime - Code Geass - a lot more when I learned that the source of its advanced technology wasn't actually some mysteriously dense energy source or hypothetical miniaturized fusion reaction, but the fact that the series' phlebotinum, Sakuradite, was a naturally occuring room temp superconductor. It says a lot that the series writers went out of their way to state that the in-universe calendar starts about 55 years before the Gregorian calendar, meaning there's things like sophisticated high speed rail, power grids, pocket coilguns, humongous mecha, etc. in what would be the equivalent in our timeline of the mid-60s.

The animations are so cool! Some of the best work I've seen on YouTube. Hats off to Mike and Eli

Excellent work as always I must admit I do believe you are the best science communicator on YouTube to date

Man, I love this channel. That super conductor cable is so awesome and yet I never heard of it until now.

The first SC Powerline was laid in Essen several years ago. It was for similar reason like in South Korea. Space constraint in the city and in the tunnel which had to be used forced to use SC Wire for the first time commercially. If there is another application preceding this, please let me know. Media can be very narrow. I guesstimate the US or Japan could have similar projects too.

From what I've gathered about the topic and video, these seem to be great explanations of the social-scientific and physical processes involved, congrats!

Love the video on superconductors! However at 8:25 it seems you’ve left a gap in your editing as it says “Media Offline,” but keep up the great videos!

Already watched on nebula. 💪

This is a great video and makes me realize how important it could be to create a high temperature superconductor material. Hopefully soon more capital will get dedicated to research as it has with fusion.

A room temperature superconductor would indeed be great. Just think about using using it in an electric motor, the power it could make would no longer be limited at all by overcurrent or anything like that. The only limiting factor would be the torque and centrifugal forces the material would have to withstand.