

High-temperature Superconductor Spills Secret: A New Phase of Matter - juiceandjuice
http://home.slac.stanford.edu/pressreleases/2011/20110324.htm

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juiceandjuice
I'd like to mention that this sort of research at SLAC and other Office of
Science facilities and programs in the DOE, is being targeted for heavy
cutbacks. A bill passed the house proposing a 20% cut ($1Bn) from the Office
of Science budget, but the consensus is that it won't pass the senate or the
president.

More extreme examples come from people like Rand Paul who have proposed
eliminating the DOE completely.

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Judson
I agree that this kind of research is needed, but surely you aren't suggesting
that the DOE is the only entity capable of investing in research of this kind?

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jessriedel
Investments in research which have a time to profitability longer than 20
years, which is the length of the patent term in the US and most of the world,
cannot be supplied by for-profit companies. That pretty much leaves government
or philanthropic entities. Philanthropic entities do not invest at the level
justified by the expected benefit to society of the research. If you want
funding at the appropriate level, you need to either do it through the
government or you need to modify patent law to enable corporations to capture
profits with very large time horizons.

Is there a reason that the DOE is a particularly bad agency, among potential
government agencies, for doing this investment?

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dantheman
Wouldn't it be better to fund this through NSF so that it could be part of a
cohesive portfolio? Instead of the through the DOE which adds massive
beurocratic overhead/duplication of effort. Wouldn't one science funding
research body be sufficient?

Also, as for nuclear weapons research wouldn't that be best carried out by the
dod, perhaps throug DARPA?

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juiceandjuice
There's a lot of things wrong with what you are assuming, and assuming that
the DOE adds massive bureaucratic overhead is a bit naive, frankly.

The NSF doesn't have a physical presence, and given that particle physics is a
very natural extension of nuclear physics, that's why the DOE does particle
physics (which includes lightsources). DARPA is purposefully limited in scope,
they also have very few facilities (really, they are sort of like the NSF for
weapons). Nuclear Weapons research is a small (but very important) part of the
DOE's mission, but weapons and reactors are so closely tied together that it's
really impossible to separate the too. There's certain levels of civilian and
military separation that have been put into place by law. Many of the labs do
weapons (usually conventional, only two do nuclear) research, many do only
science, some do both, some do reactors and some do accelerators. The DOE
services everyone though, defense, civilian, academic, everything, and that's
largely why they are there and set up the way they are. It sort of ends up
being this buffer zone between pure science and defense, and that's generally
a good thing I think.

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BoppreH
As a layman, I've grown to associate "new phase of matter" with concepts that
I'll never hear about again. It sounds like "there's a hole here, but we made
a cork for it, and guess what, it fits!", aka too much model rearranging.

Said that, I hope they are right this time.

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jerf
Phases or states of matter at the higher end of physics do not necessarily
entirely correspond to the ones you learned in school. For instance, look at
this state chart of water, and note how many entries there are:
<http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/water/phase.html>

It seems likely to me that this new state would be a subset of what you'd call
a "solid", just as you'd call both water II and water III "ice" without
worrying about it. You can say the same thing about plasma and how it is a
subset of what you would call a gas, if you don't care about the electrical
differences.

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ChuckMcM
Nice to see some progress coming out of this. Its one of the areas in basic
science that can be massively disruptive overall. (probably no need to tell
this crowd was room temperature superconductors would change, I know they
would sure lower my datacenter cooling bill :-)

I don't doubt for a minute that this is something google.org would fund if the
federal gov't money dried up. To much benefit for their business to overlook
it.

