Innovation is the greatest talent we as humans have, the ability to create, break down, and reform is truly a gift. This such gift has had an incredible impact on our lives, most notably in the form of the technology that we all rely on. This technology is constantly evolving in millions of ways. One such evolution is a process called superconducting.
All materials at room temperature have some sort of electrical resistance, this resistance is due to the fact that the movement of electrons is chaotic and ineffective, so for the most part it is nearly impossible to get all of a source of energy to move from one place to another. A lot of the energy is lost in heat, sound, light, electron collisions and other types of external ways. In some materials though, such as mercury and lead, there is a way to drastically decrease the amount of energy lost. To achieve this, the metal is cooled to nearly absolute zero, which is around -460 degrees Fahrenheit. This incredible decrease in temperature allows the movement of electrons to be drastically more organized, and nearly eliminates the loss of energy and turns that material into a superconductor.
Two scientists in South Korea have made claims that they have invented a copper-based room temperature superconductor. Though the news was fabricated, the possibility of one is a very real one, new things are being discovered and invented everyday, and the implications of one could impact our lives in revolutionary ways. The most popular of these possible implications is a maglev train, which is a train that uses the powerful electromagnetic field of the conductor to hover over the track, which leaves air resistance to be the only factor slowing the train. This would result in mind-bending speeds, and trips would take a fraction of their current time, this could also indirectly lead to the lessening of car traffic which could drastically improve the environment. The conductor could also have huge impacts in the medical field, making more efficient MRI machines, or in energy, it could help us get one step closer to nuclear fusion which would give us access to so much more energy that what is currently at our disposal
All the good that could come from such a discovery is astounding, and with how much technology has progressed in just the last 10 or 20 years, I have no doubt that we will crack the code to this technological marvel in our lifetime.
