re: Possible massive physics breakthrough: Room temperature, ambient pressure superconductor

I read about this a week or two ago - about some guys who claimed to have found room temperature superconductors. I wonder if it's the same researchers?

For the non-engineers that don't know, superconductors are materials that don't generate any electrical resistance when carrying current and therefore generate no heat. Superconductivity was discovered in 1911 and we know how to do it with super-cooled liquid nitrogen setups, but that's impractical for using it in the real world. If they can find "room temperature" superconductors that don't need cooling, well, that's massive. It would change how power/electricity is conducted (assuming the materials are cheap enough). Right now we use copper, but copper has resistance, heats up, and becomes more and more inefficient the longer the wire gets (and therefore, needs to be made really thick for long runs).

A superconductor can carry an electric current indefinitely without needing a power source. It would be a massive breakthrough for electronic circuits in computers and whatnot. If talking about the electrical grid, it would save lots of electricity that is lost as heat when being transferred from one place to another.

All that heat from your phone or PC is because the copper circuits heat up when they carry current. With a superconducting wire, there would be no heat generation at all (or a very, very tiny amount). So this would save on having to cool computers with heatsinks and would make them more energy efficient.