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LK99
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this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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Great comment. However let's not forget the history of many exotic materials which were made practical to manufacture after their useful properties were found. Consider many types of semiconductors, blue LEDs, carbon fiber, etc. All once super expensive but now commonplace. This makes me at least somewhat optimistic that if a material is useful enough (and a superconductor would be revolutionary) fabrication will be solved. Hopefully.
Sure... but for every 1 of those examples, there are 100 or 1000 variants that showed astonishing properties in the laboratory that were never manufactured at scale due to cost or other undesirable material characteristics.
Lead apatite may turn out to be an important step, or maybe not. When Paul Chu made the first big breakthrough with yttrium/barium superconductors at liquid nitrogen temps, everybody thought that workable room temperature superconductors were right around the corner. That was almost 40 years ago. As of right now, we don't know whether "room temperature superconductivity at scale" is 1 year or 1 century away. It's closer, probably? That's about all we can guess.