RED FLAGS! Superconductor or FRAUD? Jorge Hirsch on the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast

so anyway we're saying the meissner effect as applied to these claimed high temperature superconductors in the experiments on the hydrates people claim to have seen the first type of experiment where if you apply a magnetic field to a superconductor it doesn't go inside it gets repelled but when they do the other experiment which is a cool the system in the presence of a magnetic field they don't see a signal and I think that's a red flag that says these are not really superconductors we'll see and it's sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic welcome to a very refreshing episode of the into the impossible podcast today we're joined by a renowned physicist a condensed matter theorist who happens to be the inventor of many things including the indomitable the the precariously named H index which I think is named after his last name but this is Professor Jorge Hirsch of the University of California San Diego Jorge thank you for coming on the show thank you for inviting me Brian apologize for the mix-up last time I was totally unprofessional of me but I had a little visitor as you remember and sometimes these things happen but it's very gracious and then come back time commitment so and uh this has been a couple months coming since the announcement of a major Discovery in the annals of physics which could go down as one of the greatest discoveries of all time it could be worthy of a Nobel Prize or it could be flawed it could be a fraud it could be many many things that we are looking to you for interpretation uh so the first thing I want to ask you is when did you become aware of these results uh the first time uh what sort of is the is the impact of superconductivity on physics and what does this all mean help us interpret it we're just simple cosmologists around here you mean when I became aware of which results the Diaz at all or the group ideas originally and got you interested in this in this particular yeah well on October um 14 2020 uh yes and co-workers published the paper uh with a tighter room temperature superconductivity in carbon measure sulfur hydrate and so I the same day I saw it and became extremely interested in it because as you well said superconductors are fascinating and they are basically macroscopic Quantum systems and if we have them at room temperature then it's just amazing what you can do with it now of course that paper um was room temperature but also very very high pressures and so that makes it a lot less interesting but still it's an enormous breakthrough because we have been looking for room temperature superconductors for a hundred and twenty years or so and the promise of those uh room temperature superconductors will demonstrate here this is not a room temperature superconductor this is a piece of yitrium copper barium oxide sometimes called yibaco which needs to be cooled below its superconducting transition temperature which is approximately 90 Kelvin so this is 77 Kelvin which of course is very balmy compared to what we do in the cosmic microwave background but nevertheless if you could have such a device if you could have a true levitating device let me see I'm going to get some more liquid nitrogen but describe the history of superconductivity and what does a theoretical condensed matter physicist do and I'm just going to go get some all right it's a long story yes discovered experimentally in 1911 and it was immediately realized but it's discovered coming on so this is an amazing thing that the resistance of a metal when you cool instead of gradually going down at one point it suddenly drops to exactly zero and exactly zero means that if you set up a current going it will keep going forever so it's really qualitatively zero not quantitatively only and of course from day one it was very important to understand why this happens and how can you make this happen at a higher temperature and so for that we need to understand why it happens and what characteristics of the material favor this phenomenon and how can you modify the materials to make it happen at higher temperatures so the original Discovery was at a Mercury at 4 Kelvin I believe and then people started working experimentally on trying to increase it and gradually went up to 23 Kelvin over about the next 40 years or 50 years and the next big jump came actually only in 1986 with a high temperature superconductors where the temperature went from 23 Kelvin all the way to 90 and Beyond so why bco which is the one you have is 90 Kelvin which breaks the nitrogen barriers so liquid nitrogen is much cheaper than liquid helium and so this of course was a big breakthrough and then the temperature went up all the way up to 140 or 150 for these materials right so as I say it's a very long story let me try to shorten it the the thing is in 1957 a theory of superconductivity was proposed which um is called the BCS theory that is believed to describe what's called conventional superconductors and it's generally accepted to describe all superconductors at low temperatures that were known at the time and others but not these high temperature superconductors recuperates okay and so the conventional theory is based on one basic interaction which is called the electron phonon interaction which says that electrons will do this remarkable thing if they pair up and in order for pair up you need an effective attraction between them in that the bcsc research results from the motion of the ions as the electrons move they move the ions and in turn that creates an effective attraction between electrons so it's an essential part of the theory and the one thing then it predicts is that for lighter ions you will get higher temperature superconductors and so as you know hydrogen is the lightest atom we have so the theory predicts that if you can make superconducting materials or materials that have a lot of hydrogen you will get higher critical temperatures and there was a seminal paper by Ashcroft in 1968 where she specifically proposed to look for metallic hydrogen which is hydrogen pressed to enormous density so that it becomes metallic that hasn't been achieved yet but then in 2004 he proposed that if you mix up hydrogen with some other metals you'll have an internal chemical pressure and you can achieve this high temperature superconducting state if you have an hydrogen compound it's called the hydride that has a lot of hydrogen and some other metallic elements and so the at that point experimentally people started working very hard to create these materials and they need to be created under pressure or at least it's easier and so the focus has been on this Hydra materials under pressure is that to make the hydride form or is that to mimic the rep replicate some phonon interactions to make it be a metal the hydrogens have to be the material has to be sufficiently dense and usually for example if you have sulfur hydride it's a gas it's not a metal and then you apply very very high pressures to it and it starts conducting electricity and in fact that material was claimed in 2015 to be the first hydride high temperature superconductor that was discovered oh is it a copper was it also a copper hydrant no no no no copper so we need to make a clear difference between the cup rates which is what you have there which we know are so-called high temperature superconductors but high temperature means up to 150 Kelvin and the hydrates that are claimed to be superconducting up to room temperature and the big difference that I must say is important is the following for the cooperates everybody agrees that the interaction causing superconductivity is not the electron found on BCS interactions there are no Cooper Pairs and there are coupons but they are not Financial formed they're not generated by this electron ion interaction so the mass of the ions is irrelevant there is other mechanisms that people have proposed which we can talk to if you want to but they are not related to the electron phoner interaction instead the Hydra materials people believe that it is the original BCS electron phonon mechanism that's driving the superconductivity there so it's kind of paradoxical that you know before the Hydraulics were thought that there was no way to get high TC with a conventional conform mechanism and you need to find another mechanism like in the culprits and then suddenly the conventional mechanism became again the driving hey friends just a quick request while you're enjoying this video to leave a thumbs up my thumb's a little bit preoccupied with all Carl Sagan over here but I hope yours is free enough to leave a like it really helps me with the algorithm and for extra credit homework assignment leave a comment down below what you're enjoying about this video now back to the show and what have been your contributions in this field uh you know I know about a great deal of your work as a condensed matter theorist but uh we haven't had many of those on the podcast in fact we've only had Felix flicker recently on but um uh he was one of the first uh theoretically against metaphysicists what do you do what is first of all condensed matter physics Anderson came up with that name um is it a good name uh I don't know I mean he wanted to generalize it from solid state physics and it's whatever you think I don't think it's particularly necessary but whatever so I am interested in actual solids as opposed to more General conditions well well not quite but like for example liquid crystals would be some condensed model that's not the solid but the so my interest is in Collective phenomena in solids due to electrons deciding to somehow do something together as opposed to moving independently and superconductivity is clearly one such phenomenon other phenomena have to do with magnitude for example why iron is a magnet and aluminum is not things like that right but so initially in my career I was focusing on General kind of correlated states of electrons in solids but then starting more or less like 30 years ago I focused very much on superconductivity so because you have a DOT edu email address you are eligible to receive this piece of iron also Cobalt nickel any guess where this might have come from Jorge you didn't even have to join my mailing list at Brian keating.com this came from outer space cool so this is magnetic material cool which has come from outer space and it is highly magnetized you can put it on there and you might not be able to get it back see it jumped up Stuart get us on camera on my camera please so we can show the demo here so you will get your own piece of space dust if you had to have a DOT edu email address because I love to reach out and I will give this one to you so you didn't have to join my email list although the next time I come you'll send me a superconductor from outer space that's what I'm going to ask you so could it be that there are superconductors in space could it be uh maybe not tangentially related perhaps to our issues of Dark Matter there are those who propose that dark matter could be a superfluid including people like uh past guest Stefan Alexander Justin Curie Sabina hasenfelder what do you think about the superfluid have you ever paid attention to it and not very closely but I do agree because I paid a little bit of attention to superfluid helium which is a material we have on Earth which has some very close similarities with superconductors and some important differences but the the basic phenomenon which share they share and I suspect in this other ideas and cosmology is microscopic Quantum coherence Quantum coherence phase coherence at the microscopic scale that's what defines a superconductor and a superfluid now when I look at the the field of you know so I still sometimes lapse and call it solid state physics um I remember it was called squalid State physics and that's why Anderson repeatedly wanted to perhaps change it although nevertheless um I see a lot of acrimony and it reminds me of some of the guests I've had uh on the podcast that we talk about Consciousness and I ask them what is consciousness and what is possible to be conscious and they'll say things like an electron or a monkey or in other words they can't really Define it there's a famous essay by Thomas Nagel called what's it like to be a bat the end he says we don't know um so when I look at superconductivity it's pretty clear they talk about a couple of classical tests for what is a superconductor absence of electrical resistivity critical temperature critical um critical magnetic field Curie temperatures things like that and then there's things you know subtle things like magnetic induction and and so forth that we'll talk about um for these claims it seems pretty clear-cut you could just here's a chunk of material give give you some of it and you can see if it has resistance cool at room temperature even even you know a theorist can do that no offense but you could do that I'll give you the voltmeter down the hall and uh and we'll be able to get it but um so what is so suspicious about it what tests do these high temperature superconductors fail in your expert opinion well I mean the main problem with this hydraulic superconductors is that you have to apply very high pressure and actually that was the case until the latest announcement in March that we'll talk about but before that pressures were of around 200 gigapascal or at least over 100 gigapascal and for those High pressures you need a diamond and whistle and you need to have a very small sample which is maybe at most 50 microns in diameter and a few microns in thickness and so there are tough experiments and when you measure things um first of all there's a lot of background that signals that can come in and uh it's just very difficult to for example when you measure transport resistance what you really want is resistivity which is an intensive property as opposed to resistance that depends on the size of your sun right and if you look at all these hydrated materials they usually give you resistance but they don't talk about resistivity because and that's just for my audience am I not be familiar with resistance per unit length essentially per unit length in the unit area and so on and because there is difficulty in knowing exactly what is the size of the sample and the geometry and so on it's hard to estimate the resistivity and so if you really could demonstrate okay the resistivity of this is two or three or four orders of magnitude less than that of a good metal that would be very convincing but that's people don't do that in the experiments right also the experiments are not very reproducible you do it once you get one result even the same lab does it again they get a different result at a different temperature a drop sometimes it drops to very small values sometimes it drops to finite values and what's interesting is that of course some reasons the the experiment I seem not to be very critical of the tests they do in the sense in my opinion they rely very much on Theory so if it's a theory calculation tells them there has to be superconductivity in this material they see some drop in resistance and they say okay that's it we have found superconductivity even if the resistance then go to zero they attribute that to well maybe there is some contact or some contact resistance or some part of the sample that didn't go superconducting and they do not I believe take into account that there is other reasons why a material under high pressure can undergo changes in resistance that are not superconductivity but dramatically so in the demonstrations that we'll talk about it seems like there is a qualitative difference between an ordinary you know axial stress strain dependent resistance or resistivity and these kind of you know near zero or close to zero resistivity measurements that they claim to have demonstrated although we can't say for sure because they're not replicatable right now right first they're not repetitive then when you look at the papers very often they don't tell you whether they are subtracting what they call the background resistance yes in particular if you look at the latest paper uh on this luticium nitroen hydride you look at figure 15 they show you curves that uh drop and go to zero and continue zero but they happen to be honest enough because and that's probably because of the history with this group to say well we subtracted background resistance and they don't show you what the raw data looks like but they did upload the raw data at the website because they were required to do so by nature and if you now take those raw data and plot them that same plot that in the paper looks like this and then zero looks like gradually coming down and doing nothing okay and it's obviously no evidence for superconductivity but after you subtract something it looks like superconductivity and you know famously in my field of astronomy you know Edwin Hubble uh published in 1929 the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the plot of the recession of velocities of galaxies versus distance and thus a particular plot these data will show this on the b-roll background film that will show along with the paper from Diaz group uh the figure that you mentioned and he plots it and he shows these data points and they're just boxes there's no error bars the y-axis instead of being labeled kilometers per second just says kilometers and there's some there's some strange scale and he fits a line through it okay so famously this is Hubble's Law the slope of that line it goes through it's as simple as law possible goes to zero the slope is now called Hubble's Constant H which you would love a little or actually we lose little H in many varieties throughout all the physics from Planck's constant all the way up to reduced public constant now he also got the slope Wrong by a factor of seven but is that important because the general law is of course correct and it holds over not just uh the the 10 to 50 Mega parsix that he looked at it holds to thousands of megaparsecs so what's wrong with this her Jorge I mean just to be Devil's Advocate if if indeed look this is you know very close to zero resistance uh they're making a plot they're subtracting stuff yeah but even a great Hubble uh could make error errors is this just a petty thing that scientists care about because of you know error bars here one thing doesn't prove that the fact that Hubble turn out to be right it's great yes the question is is this true or not true in science we deal with facts either this is a superconductor or it's not a superconductor I'm convinced it's not a superconductor for many reasons okay let's go through them okay and so it's something that needs to be determined it's not a question like in other social sciences or political sciences where there can be different opinions here we will have an answer all right the long list of reasons why I don't believe in this yeah it's very low as long as you like well it starts with a group that is publishing this paper on the surface the paper looks impressive it has a lot of different measurements for superconductivity resistance AC susceptibility DC susceptibility specific heat so all right now about this group we need to remember that they published their first claim of room temperature superconducted in 2020 the paper was retracted in September 2022. why was that retracted it depends what you ask if you ask a journal what they published is that they retracted it because it was not they used a non-standard procedure to subtract the background from the raw data to arrive at the published data if you ask me and Durk Vander Mario we work together on this it is because what they claim are the raw data that they measured in the laboratory are not measured they are fabricated fabrication so we should stop there for a second that's perhaps one of the most serious charges in academic could have leveled against them and you have substantial reason to believe that uh but as yet we're still this is open to you know to debate they can respond to this video I've actually asked them to come on not today but come on the podcast anytime I know you've corresponded with him but just for my listeners I have a lot of young you know PhD students that listen to 100 000 plus strong undergraduates who are thinking about becoming condensed matter physicists this is extremely serious and and I think to have someone of Jorge's caliber open honest and vulnerable enough to discuss this is a very rare treat for my audience so I just want to you know put a double click on that and say this is an extremely serious allegation from an extremely serious group of scientists here against another group um uh where there's no there's no monetary you're not doing this for fame for attention uh you're really quite a private person so explain what this means that that it that they're potentially so we published two papers with Dirk and in fact I wrote the third paper just four pages trying to concisely show mathematically that this is fabricated that paper was published today coincidentally really yeah on the journal chemical Communications okay as a comment on a paper that they published in chemical Communications last year on the same material CSH that was the was the subject of the nature paper that was retracted so in this paper um I published it as a comment it was reviewed for seven months and the authors were invited to write a reply explaining why they don't agree with what I'm saying in the paper and they have not provided a satisfactory reply to a journal and the journal decided to publish my comment without a reply I am sure that the journal will publish a reply if they submit one but and I know my audience subscribes to this journal I'm sure that they do but let's summarize what are the concl the some of the some of the pieces of evidence that you bring against it mathematically physically Etc yeah so they give so the susceptibility uh uh shows a drop where the system goes superconducting susceptibility versus temperature okay explain susceptibility as a magnetic phenomena magnetic susceptibility means the response to the system when you apply a magnetic field when the system becomes superconducting it responds differently than when it's normal in particular it doesn't like the magnetic field to penetrate inside its body so I generate diamagnet it generates a current that prevents a magnetic field it Shields the magnet unlike this meteorite or the one I've given you which is highly that's exactly the opposite ferromagnetic exactly they couldn't be more opposite highly dire magnetic yes precisely go on and so you measure that susceptibility which goes to a large negative value so the as a function of temperature there is a drop when this happens now because of this being a very small sample they have a background signal that they need to subtract and so what they publish in the paper is the raw data minus the background signal okay and that's called the signal so signal or yeah data equals raw data minus background signal all right so the data that they published have a very very peculiar structure and so we asked I asked them to provide the raw data and the background signal in order to understand whether these are real and so it turns out that the data can be expressed by mathematical formulas so the data versus temperature there is to be specific 450 data points that are given to eight decimal places we can we can represent those 450 data points to eight decimal places by the sum of two mathematical functions one is a series of integer steps multiplied by one number which happens to be 0.16555 and the other function is a set of third order polynomials that can be a figure out what they are they can I stop you for one second eight decimal places so you're talking about uh tens of Nano um this would be Nano orc unit of magnetic susceptibility well no they measure voltage so okay yeah oh so okay so that's that's the reason so but they converted to a number I mean are they saying they trust all those numbers I mean the implication Jorge let's be honest is that this is this is fit I mean they've basically constructed them no no but it doesn't matter whether you trust them or not okay they say that they measure this row voltage to eight decimal places what I'm saying is that I can mathematically calculate that row voltage by using my formulas and so if you take 450 and multiply by eight how much is that 3 000 or 700 000 yeah that's the number of digits you need to reproduce your results now in my in my formula instead of 3000 digits I need like 100 digits okay to reproduce those three signs of digits that they say they measured okay I I don't think you can explain that does that happen for any other super like if you just took this superconductor I mean could you make some function and say if you do let's say an alien or an artificial intelligence machine learning algorithm you give it the magnetization then it says here you go we fit to it and oh that's what uh that's where the Cooper pairs form or something like that is it is impossible you would be fitting these you know measurements of noise and so each one of these points has some noise yeah and they give me the numbers including the noise and I have a mathematical formula that can fit the noise and of course it's impossible okay so that's the d That's DC or IC magnetization this is AC susceptibility which is measured by measuring a voltage in a coil with a voltmeter and all these have to be done in the diamond Anvil cell in other words once you do it are there I mean this is a side note but if you let's say you put them in the Anvil and then press them and then there was some you know plastic deformation and it just remained ever forever these things don't have that phenomena in other words you have to continuously apply pressure you do although this pressure is not so high right this paper it's not so high right but in the in the retracted paper the CSH it was very high 200 GPA but yes these materials if you release the pressure they don't stay they stay they don't stay sorry right so going back to the reasons so one reason is look I can understand if people make mistakes I can understand if there is one member of a big group that does something that wasn't quite proper but to have the principal investigators refuse to answer questions about how was this obtained and explained so that one can reproduce what they say that was measured I don't think it's acceptable and that's why I cannot believe what they are saying now or trust what they are saying because they haven't responded to those very factual questions so this speaks to their to their integrity as experimental scientists one of the greatest and biggest challenges that a physicist has in an experimental field is not the measurement of a quantity like Hubble showed it's the errors that you ascribe to that and there are two different types of errors that can be ascribed there are statistical errors which can get better with repeated measurements of the same quantity and then there are systematic errors which must be removed if and only if you can do another experiment that gets rid of the thumb on the scale or the excess resistivity surely these people they're an eminent institution in Rochester I mean they must know the concept of an error budget do they break out the statistical and the systematic errors I covered some of their findings I showed their data in my previous video which which we'll get to because you had some criticism that I do want to learn what I did wrong because I'm always trying to improve and I can't resist with such an imminent colleague that as yourself to I need to know what I did wrong but I don't remember that that they actually separated out the in their and provide an error budget so that's a huge red flag that I would think nature although you know what the saying is about nature just because it's in nature doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong but it was also in the New York Post and in other journals so so tell us what are some of the other uh red flags all right so that's for this particular paper the main red flag now um all right so I'm sorry to interrupt her all right but let's say it didn't let's say the magnetic susceptibility is kind of wanky and whatnot but but let's say it still has zero resistivity uh let's stipulate that um how do we expect stipulate that well I mean it after yourself right so after they subtract it so there's two there's multiple cascading errors is what is what's contract background they show in this latest paper they show curves yes where they show one curve that is very broad the resistance versus temperature and then they say this is due to sampling homogeneities which happen in these small cells and that sounds reasonable and then they show another curve where the curves are a thousand times narrower so the transition is incredibly Sharp and uh you don't expect that in a reasonable experiment making the samples the same way that suddenly the width of the transition will change by a factor of a thousand wow another red flag is that they measure voltage versus current but they don't seem to find the critical current it kind of Rises slowly from zero while in superconductors you expect that if you're at low temperatures for a small voltage you get uh so for small current you measure voltage versus current you have no voltage and then at one point you have a threshold and you start developing voltage they don't see that either there's a critical current all right sorry to interrupt but is it essentially a different manifestation of a critical magnetic field absolutely okay so absolutely okay let us figure out yeah by some famous person way back yes yes there's a relation between them and um so again so now it's multiple I was envisioning that perhaps it is that you know it has zero resistivity I mean can you imagine such a thing could you imagine something that doesn't have a critical field or we can't measure its critical field let's say completely different group you know I come up my kid comes down makes a superconductor or your daughter or whatever can you imagine is it possible like what would they call such a material no superconductor system properties that are common to all superconductors immutable now there is some properties that can be different but there's some basic things that are the same you need to have a critical current and you need to have zero resistance below that the one other property that's very important and interesting What's called the meissner effect as you know and there is two aspects of the Micron effect that people sometimes confuse which is one thing is to have a superconductor and apply a magnetic field and the magnetic field doesn't penetrate and that's what happens if I take a magnet and put it on top of an existing superconductor and it floats all right so we'll do that experiment now okay hopefully this will this will work but you know we've had budget cuts right it's sort of floating okay let me try another one and it floats in a very different way by the way does it not Jorge than just a normal magnet right so if I had a normal magnet let's see this remember my magnet cannot be in equilibrium with another magnet there is something called earnshow's theorem and that prevents it unless it's an AC current right if the AC current you could do it but these DC magnets there we go yeah all right so now the hope of course is that we are calibrated high temperature super not high temperature it's a higher temperature uh that superconducts that's one of these cup rates and it could be used and the hope is that'll be used for a magnetic levitation and we'll get to your hopes and dreams for truly room temperature super connectivity in uh towards the very end we talk about magical Technologies and whatnot let's see how long that goes so we're talking about this theorem that prevents an ordinary magnet like this refrigerator magnet keychain this could not do that nor could this ferromagnetic meteorite that I've given you uh but we could put people on top of this thing and turn it into a frictionless uh or mostly frictionless travel mechanism so anyway we're saying the meissner effect as applied to these claimed high temperature superconductors let's continue yes let's see um yeah I was going to clarify an important distinction in the meissner effect the one thing is to have a superconductor and bring it close to a magnet and get this repulsion that makes it levitate a somewhat different process is where you have the magnet close to the normal metal when it's not cold yet and let's say I take a piece of metal that's going to become super conducting but it's not super conducting I put the magnet on top it just rests on it and now I cool the system so that's a different phenomenon flux trapping because no because here Faraday's law plays a big role when you're bringing the superconductor of the magnet close together it is an induction due to Faraday's law in the experiment I'm describing you're just cooling and there is no change from external change and by itself the superconductor will develop a current not induced by Faraday's law that will make the magnet rise so that it expels the flux and that is an important distinction of the two experiments and in the experiments on the hydrides people uh claim to have seen the first type of experiment where if you apply a magnetic field to a superconductor it doesn't go inside it gets repelled but when they do the other experiment which is a cool the system in the presence of a magnetic field they don't see a signal and I think that's a red flag that says these are not really superconductors and um we'll see how much of the technological application could we get from a low resistivity but not maybe not zero resistivity room temperature ambient pressure material would that be as Revolution I mean it certainly would be as revolutionary um look I think there's really a qualitative difference between zero resistance and small resistance and I don't think it's actually feasible technologically to get non-zero small resistances either we succeed in making room temperature superconductors or we don't binary and if we do it's going to have lots of very important consequences yeah I'm not the right person I know but what are you interested so here's my knockout I'll be uh I'll play Devil's Advocate again I hear a lot about quantum computers and how important they are and what they're able to do and we heard that the quantum computer teleported a wormhole and or to con there's a lot of hype inside and and and it's particularly strong in what I do rare in what you do um but let's say uh the you know you can make a superconductor what would that mean I've always heard you know a Feynman talked about this and I remember reading about it in the 80s and 90s he said you know quantum computers are really good at uh describing quantum mechanical hamiltonians and lagrangias so okay that's great if you I mean I don't happen to need that for my iPhone uh so is that really true and and then what what is a quantum computer good good for as far as your concerns look I'm not an expert in Quantum Computing I can well imagine that if we are ever going to make a quantum computer it's going to be with superconductors because superconductors are microscopic Quantum systems and if anybody has chance of making a quantum computer it's a system of superconducting Josephson Junctions or whatever and but you know just the the the just having room temperature look when the transistor when the transistor was discovered back in 1950 it wasn't clear either that it will be everywhere in you know 15 million of them just exactly that's exactly what would happen with superconductors I mean initially maybe you don't quite realize what it's going to it's going to change the world if uh so the question is is it possible okay and and how do we get there and that's the key question and so that's the question that I think the community is in the wrong track and all this enormous effort and money that is being spent in these hydride superconductor research is misplaced in my opinion okay so let's talk about that uh incentivization people think of us as scientists as we were just very dispassionate we just care about the truth we stroke you have a beard I'm I'm still kind of trying to grow a beard like yours Jorge and we just really just think about what's good for nature and what Mother Nature or God or whatever will reveal to us so um I always think that's kind of bogus I mean scientists have very good qualities and we have very um many say Petty or less highly uh refined characters yeah let's talk about so the the propensity for for hype is is huge especially in this in this little yeah so talk about that what is what is what do you think of we're not we're doctors you and I but we're not psychotherapists so what do you think is going on is it a fraud I'll read from this New York Times article I don't and this is from Doctor struggle as trouble says I don't want to read too much into it but there could be a pattern of behavior here he's talking about Diaz he really could be the best high pressure physicist in the world poised to win a Nobel Prize and you know how I feel about the Nobel Prize or there's definitely something else going on same article by you Jorge Hirsch his complaints about the ass Guru so persistent and strided that others in the field later uh circulated a letter complaining about Decades of disruptive behavior by Jorge Hirsch but Jorge said in my opinion the junk sometimes become conclusions what did you mean by that they never said that that says well this is the New York Times article never said that young becomes conclusions no let's talk about what that yes that's it there is a letter that in fact the New York Times editor sent to me that I hadn't seen before apparently has been circulating over the last four or five months claiming that for the past 30 years I have been doing disruptive behavior which I yes I would like to respond to it yeah and the person that wrote the letter has not made their name public or is it a lot of signs as far as I know but I know some people that received it and so on well the disruptive behavior refers to the fact that yes starting in 1989 I suddenly discovered a different way to expand superconductivity um at the time we were all trying to understand the Cup race that had been discovered in 1986 and I came up with an idea of how to understand the cooperates and immediately saw that that same idea can explain all superconductors not just the cooperates which would mean that the electron phonon mechanism that is part of the conventional Theory does not really apply it's not responsible for superconductivity in any material I came to the conclusion back in 1989 and so since then I've been working on that a long time but it you know I have made a lot of progress and it took me like a very long time to and the sensors and things in particular the meissner effect that they were studying you about which I finally understood only like six years ago or so all based on the same basic idea that is different from the conventional idea now my understanding has a lot in common with the conventional Theory but it has some fundamental differences anyway ever since I came to a realization I've been writing papers developing the theory and questioning the validity of the conventional Theory and that has not gained me a lot of friends I have had very much trouble publishing the results I have published a lot of papers on this but not on the most highly you know prestigious papers the journalists like science or nature and um and so for reasons I don't quite understand the theory is not considered valid by many people I think some people find it interesting but people what happens in science is people don't address questions for example they just ignore so if I write the paper saying the BCS conventional Theory cannot explain the meissner effect for this reason and this reason and this reason in order to explain the major effect you need to have this physics that the conventional Theory simply doesn't have sometimes we solve problems and I don't have to tell you this in quantum mechanics or classical mechanics by doing separation of variables okay we take the radial part we separate the radial part from the angular asymmetal and polar angle why combine both the refutation of the BCS Theory with a concomitant new Theory why not separate those variables um we can but I've tried to do that too I've written papers simply addressing what's wrong with BCS here and that's not accepted no really no people simply ignore them those papers so the conventional wisdom for my audience is saying that the BCS Theory it co-invented by my graduate quantum mechanics professor at Brown University Leanne Cooper who's still very much alive and well yes uh allegedly on the 4 train in in Brooklyn in 1957 or whatever that that theory is incapable of of explaining one of the Hallmarks of superconductivity in fact one of the motivations for the demonstration that's what you're calling myself in particular expulsion of magnetic fields yes are there any unique observables or experiments that could be done to either falsify the BCF BCS Theory or to motivate your theory yeah there are experiments that could be done to validate what I'm saying happens in superconductors that have not been done the physics I'm talking about is extremely simple maybe I can even try to explain it to you a superconductor as I say when it goes from normal to superconductor will expel magnetic fields in order to do that it has to start generating a current near the surface that generates a magnetic field opposite to the one that's applied from lenses law and no or no no are they no really it's actually the opposite of lenses law really okay lenses law says that the metal wants to oppose changes in magnetic flux okay and so you start with a metal that has magnetic flux in it lenses law says it doesn't want to change that instead One Step It Takes parasites it does exactly the opposite of what lux's law tells is it should be doing I was conflating expel with no it's very important yeah it is important because it says if for some reason somebody wants to expel those lines lets us lawsuit oppose it okay and I'm saying BCS theory has no explanation of how you generate that current opposing lenses law doing the opposite of what electromagnetism once when we write down the Schrodinger equation in for the Cooper pairs I mean how do we make the quantum the classical transition I mean where a current is something macroscopic we don't usually think about currents and quantum mechanical terms in the Schrodinger equation how does that operationally occur again I'm a simple cosmology experimentalist so but I know it must involve some there must be some transition between the quantum and the classical region no well you can write the current operator in Quantum yeah right compute the expectation value and the time Evolution and so on and that will give you the classical and the problem is in the BCS calculation they don't do the actual calculation of the process whereby you start with the magnetic field inside because that's very hard to do all they do is they compute the energy of the state when the magnetic field is out already and they find that it is lower than the energy of not having expelled the magnetic field but that is not enough and so this is an energy argument right you need to explain momentum conservation and how do you go from here to there charge conservation yeah the explanation is extremely simple let me tell you because it's very simple it's something that anybody can understand it's based on the following Lawrence Force as you know tells us that when a charge moves there is a velocity there's a force use the magnetic field that is a cross product of velocity times magnetic field correct if you look at the superconductor and you think about what happens if electrons were to be flowing from the inside outward as it goes superconducting you will find that the Lorenz force will deflect those electrons and create a current that will expel the magnetic field that is a very simple concept and it tells you that the transition to superconductivity has to be associated with the motion expelling electrons very simple concept that is totally exclusive too right yeah yeah it's foreign to the conventional BCS series that says none of that takes place no pairs now I say now you also need pairs to get everything to work but this basic phenomenon that unless you have a radial charge flow it's almost a mathematical theorem that if you don't have radial charge flow you cannot opposed lenses law yeah as a consequence of the curl it's basically what happens in plasmas in plasmas there is something called Alvin serum I don't know if you know that elephant was a professor yeah of course I do because the Nobel Prize yep among other things for Elephants theorem that is basically just saying when you have a conducting fluid and magnetic field lines are moving in it is because the fluid is moving with the field line so there is motion of charge and Mass when the magnetic field has moved so that basic concept is missing in the in the convention convention understanding I see now another wrinkle um in this story is the um is the intellectual property rights that Diaz and and his company have asserted so he's created a company called unearthly materials and you know Jorge you and I are are public you know University professors uh we don't get paid that much but we do what we do because we love it um but you know if an opportunity came along to you know patent some I have two patents I've got pictures of them somewhere I've made exactly zero dollars for my two pets uh but but tell me um is that a red flag honestly to you it isn't to me but but in the in the context that we are they are using that as an excuse to not share samples of course this can be settled in in one day I mean the latest claim they can just ship a sample to our colleague Brian Maple that has been doing experiments on superconductors Academy member former chair 60 years maybe or 50 years and he could check in a day whether this is true or not they say because of proprietary interests of the company they cannot do that so how can you patent an element or you know a compound like this I think you can so there have been patent fights over ybco as far as I know really yes really so I can't just go out and synthesize my own I mean also there's another wrinkle which is that there's a stoichiometric factors and you know I failed uh high school chemistry so I can't even remember this but there are these deltas and you know it seems like the recipe is like one day you can get a souffle and the next day you get a chicken salad they say one third of the time they get the Supercar two-thirds they get chicken crap yeah but yeah look and I don't know yeah we are we're talking for a long time yes a lot of other things I wanted yeah please God we don't have the time or what we have a lot of trouble with archive I don't know if you know that I know about that I know you were banned for six months allegedly because of uh the The Improv well you explain why why what was the reason they gave that because I'm extremely upset instantly upset with the whole situation with archive I submitted the paper to physical see the journal in August 2021 because for eight months I was trying to get the raw data for the the susceptibility measurements and they were refusing to give them out claiming patent reasons that were totally transparently not applicable because this is just a simple measurement right so I wrote this paper to physical C I sent physical C saying um these are just probable fraud that was the title of the paper the title of the page so archive got that paper and they put it on hold which I totally understand they want to think about it's a tricky thing all right one month later physicacy publishes online and another month later after the archive moderators had considered it and thought about it I didn't know anything I'd let them do their job they posted it online so that means they cleared whatever moderation standards they have so they posted online in October magically then in December they wrote to me saying that my papers are improper and they are saying things that accuse of people of Fraud and so they removed the paper and my first question is well you know you analyze the paper for two months and then you posted it so it's your problem it's not my problem if the paper is not something you think is improper and at the same time what was happening is they finally had released a rotate ideas at all and I started analyzing them and I found immediately that they were very clear anomalies with the raw data and so early December I submitted two papers to Archive not saying fraud simply doing a very dry analysis of the raw data saying that there's a problem here and they claimed you had gotten that data via some means no no no no no the raw data were published okay and co-workers on archive in early December so immediately after they were posted not just for me for everybody I started analyzing them and I sent them some papers with the analysis now I was careful because I and didn't say anything like for they still say no we're not going to post it so they didn't post anything I kept sending them papers and then sometime in early February they banned me for six months because they said I was doing improper things so there's several things that are wrong here I think which is Diaz was publishing you know his raw data and claiming that they are valid I'm analyzing the raw data and have mathematical analysis that shows a normal list that I think the community should consider archive decides no you cannot publish that and you got banned and then I get banned for six months right exactly so and you couldn't appeal no of course I tried to appeal it but it didn't go anywhere right right so I believe what happened is that at some point after a archive posted my Arena papers in Prior fraud rang ideas or Rangers and co-workers road to archives saying we are going to sue you if you don't do something because this is not true okay and so they did not want to get sued they didn't want to pay lawyers to defend against what would have been a frivolous lawsuit because defamation means that you're accusing somebody of something that is not true if you're accusing somebody of Fraud and it is true it's not defamation but also it's a private in the private car if I say you know Jorge likes to take you know high altitude balloons and push monkeys out of them then that's your private citizen if I say your research is wrong that you published in a journal and I say that is that has elements of fraud that it doesn't meet the standard of death at least in the United States they might claim because it was probably nature there's different states and I didn't say private fraud the initial paper to physical see was basically saying look there is this anomalies that I cannot explain they don't prove fraud for sure yeah but the fact that they are not releasing the data when they you know specifically say in the published paper the data are available and they are refusing to release them that's a very big red flag yeah yeah let's talk about journals for a second um before we finish up we have a couple more segments uh that I just wanted to ask you some existential questions I know you usually like to answer these types of things but I'll ask just one with your forbearance but before I do that um you are known for the creation of the of the H index um can you describe what motivated you to do that and uh what what it's what it's become and where you might see it going it's not the only of its kind but it's certainly been very influential you can find on Google Scholar you can find what's your H index I think my age index I think it's uh 69 maybe yeah that's quite sure all right Elon Musk approves uh so uh so tell me what what how did this uh how did this come about yeah I've always been interested in objective criteria for judging scientists as opposed to opinions so I always used to look up citations of people when we're considering for hiring and so on and so forth in the old days I had to go to the library and look at this big box I don't know if you still remember those uh I found them extremely informative and so you know but it's a lot of information and to collect all that information and discuss it it gets cumbersome and then you know I I just started and it was at the same time the web of science was coming online and so you could find the citations online and I found that there was this nice way to compress a lot of information into a single number that has a lot more information at other single numbers for example the number of applications by itself can tell you very little the number of total number of citations by itself can tell you very little because of various reasons right and so I used this for two years I shared it with my colleagues and then at some point I wrote the preprint I didn't know what to do with it and somebody contact me from Germany [Music] experiment that is named Manuel Cardona who was an extremely prolific writer and good signed excellent scientist and he had heard of it through word of mouth and so that was very interesting and well that time I have already written a little pre-print that I had circulated among colleagues but I didn't know what to do with it so when I got this email from this person in Germany I decided to post it on archive and I posted an archive again not knowing what I would publish it or not publish and I started getting calls from journalists asking me about it for some reason I thought wait a minute I mean I've written very many more interesting papers whatever you think calls on this 1989 paper yeah right and um yeah so well there's something the phenomenon because you're not on social media there's a phenomenon of you know it's called uh it's called gamification so you want to see after this video is posted I'll uh I'll see how many thumbs up the video got I'll compare it to when I have Felix flicker on and that's a reminder to everyone to not only subscribe you know that only 80 only 20 of the people watching actually click subscribe so please do subscribe please leave a thumbs up we want to have more conversations with brilliant luminaries but that's a gamification Facebook Twitter they're all these things and it kind of maybe came about as a social phenomenon although you didn't intend to become a social scientist but you did and now we make the basis for hiring or at least in part not in entirely but I wonder how you feel about that as well but that's a conversation yeah it's a long conversation but I have mixed feelings about it let's say right I mean I think it's very useful for getting a quick impression of somebody but you certainly have to look much further and look at the details and it can be very amazing necessary but not sufficient no no and it can be misleading also so it's there's some danger so how has it been misused in your opinion or give an example I just think that you can have very different profiles of Publications somebody that writes papers just by themselves or with a couple of co-workers other people that ride with a group of 10 or 50 or 100 people and their age index can be the same but their contributions can be very different and so if you just rely on the H index and don't take into account that factory you can be misled very very many very age since PhD uh you know yeah institutions PhD I did I did discuss that in my original paper and that's that's easy to take care of because I basically defined actually an index with a ratio between the age index and the number of years since the first publication which kind of normalizes for and what about field differences you know my field you might have no papers for several years your experiment gets built you take data you write a dozen papers right of course it's field dependent you should really not compare agent this is across very different fields it's dangerous yes what about across continents and different uh you know institutional biases that may be present I don't think that's so important I think within like on this matter physics I would happily compare each indices of people in the U.S or China or Europe or wherever when I research

2023-05-21 20:19

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