2798: Room Temperature

|< < Prev Comic #2798 (July 5, 2023) Next > >|

Room Temperature

Title text: They're also refusing to fund my device that demonstrates uncontrolled hot fusion.

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a LUKEWARM FUSION REACTOR - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

Semiconductors are a common electronic component of many modern day devices including computers. Cueball has “discovered” a semiconductor that works in normal temperatures, which already exists, so this “discovery” is not useful to anyone. It appears Cueball has confused room temperature semi-conductors with room temperature superconductors, which would be a huge boon to the advancement of quantum computers, as most superconductors are predominantly only superconducting at 70 Kelvin or below.

In the title text, he is talking about a device that produces “uncontrolled hot fusion”. This is also known as a thermonuclear weapon, which is not something Cueball should possess.^{[citation needed]} In reality, “cold fusion” is theoretically a way to produce lots of cheap energy, which many people would be interested in and has received significant research funding as a way to provide environmentally-safe energy for humanity. Again, in proposing something that sounds new he has “invented” something that already exists.

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.

Cueball: My layered silicon crystals can amplify or switch current while sitting right here on the table!

Ponytail: Uh huh.

Another Cueball: I see.

Caption: No one is impressed by my discovery of room-temperature semiconductors.

 add a comment! ⋅  add a topic (use sparingly)! ⋅  refresh comments!

Discussion

Isn't there actually quite a lot of funding available for uncontrolled hot fusion? https://www.icanw.org/squandered_2021_global_nuclear_weapons_spending_report ;) 162.158.38.32 23:29, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

Note that controlled hot fusion (e. g. a functioning Tokamak) would also be really valuable. Nitpicking (talk) 02:17, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Someone explain why superconductors are a big deal

Arguably the temperature has to change for a semiconductor to work. For it to work at room temperature alone would be pure magic.

While I agree that a semiconductor that does not heat up in operation (IE stays at room temp) would be revolutionary, the way Cueball describes that they work "while sitting right here on the table" suggests they are "Room Temperature Semiconductors" in the sense that they can operate while immersed in a room temperature environment not necessarily that they themselves stay room temperature. Akin to the contrast between current superconductors that need to be blisteringly cold before they super-conduct and the hypothetical "room temperature superconductors" that could simply be strung through the air like present day power lines.172.70.174.223 14:04, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

A note about the fusion connection. In recent years, there have been breakthroughs in high temperature superconductors, which theoretically would allow to build controlled hot fusion reactors at a much smaller scale (because they can create much higher magnetic fields). There are seveal private companies that attempt to do that, most notably CFS with their SPARC Tokamak. I think this is what is being referenced here. --172.71.160.54 08:16, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Maybe you could add that yourself? I wrote the current explanation but actually have no expertise in that area, and also I'm not sure how to incorporate that into the current flow of the explanation. Rebekka (talk) 09:01, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

I assumed the title text (which says "demonstrates" and not "produces" uncontrolled fusion) - could be as simple as a device proving the sun is a fusion reaction --Nico (talk) 11:49, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

It could also be that he does have a device that produces uncontrolled hot fusion, and they won't fund it because the government does not negotiate with terrorists. 172.69.247.40 11:56, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

As I understand it, "cold fusion" doesn't necessarily mean room temperature. That would actually be quite useless. Cold fusion could mean anything from "doesn't need millions of degrees" to "cool enough to directly hook up to boilers to power steam turbines" (and potentially a lower pressure requirement). The "room temperature" thing is mostly due to bad "science" and frauds (though it is still questionable if higher temperature cold fusion can be a thing, too). It's easier to cheaply make an alleged "cold fusion device" if you don't have to heat it up to or contain it at up to several thousand degrees. 627235 (talk) 11:23, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

I took that phrasing directly from wikipedia, but you appear to be right. I did some further reading and apparently there are working methods of cold fusion (most notably Muon-catalyzed fusion) which are very different from the badly-performed experiments that gave cold fusion a bad name. But the difference is, reputable cold fusion still requires vast amounts of energy, just not as heat, while disreputable cold fusion is claimed to perform nuclear fusion basically for free (commonly by doing an electrolysis of palladium in heavy water). I'll try to incorporate that, but it would be great if someone with actual expertise would chime in and do their own edits.Rebekka (talk) 12:33, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

I don't claim any great expertise, but I was already (when I wasn't being edit-conflicted) adding little bits such as the "meeting at 'room temperature' speculation" whereby a nigh-on perpetual room-temperature process (albeit with 'hot products') could be the Holy Grail (or "Mr Fusion") of future cheap and manageable (and somehow not weaponisable/fail-deadly) table-top-scale fusion devices. Of course, this is is at least twenty-minutes-into-the-future stuff (deLoreans aside!) and may or may not ever become realistic. Perhaps less likely than the "flying cars and jetpacks" (or hover-boards!), of common imagination. But perhaps we might sometime get something the size (and surface heat, beyond the layers of necessary insulation and shielding for temperatures, fusion products and magnetic flux) of a household gas boiler. Probably not even that, in which case it could be justneighbourhood "CHP"s to add managed resilience across the power-grids. 172.70.90.230 13:43, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Do we really need "citation needed" that uncontrolled hot fusion is dangerous? Really? Because anyone who doesn't understand this is not going to understand "room temperature superconductors", probably not uses of any superconductors. Like ever. Oh wait! I'm sure this discussion statement has a citation needed^{[citation needed]}!!! -- Cuvtixo (talk) 01:56, 7 July 2023 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

It's a joke... albeit one that I think is somewhat overused. Currently 817 out of 2798 articles include it, just under 30%. BunsenH (talk) 04:36, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

Oh good. I tend to think that it should be maybe, as a ball-park figure, no more than one in four articles that has the {{Citation needed}} (in order to keep it special, not shoehorned in everywhere...), and it's almost down that. (It must also be on the absolute blinding obvious and perhaps even tautoligicous to the point of being a tautological tautology, of course. And funny. If it aint funny, it has no purpose.)

Though bear in mind that some articles have multiple occurances, so the use-count is probably higher as a proportion. And I'd have to check to see if the count counts the common redirects (thus aliases) of "citation needed", "Citation Needed", "cn" and "fact", at the very least, which might get used accidentally or because they're easier to type.

But, remember, if anybody wants an actual {{Citation needed}}, there's always {{Actual citation needed}}. And, naturally, if you see one of those then you are truly invited to confirm/deny or just more accurately word the 'fact' so labeled - if you are in a position to do so.

Here endeth the lesson. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled program... 172.70.91.213 05:02, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

I don't think that blindingly-obviousness is the right test - rather it should be that imagining that it were untrue results in a humorously absurd scenario. There are plenty of blindingly obvious statements that don't meet that test, and there are some less immediately obvious ones that do (in fact, these are often the more effective uses of the CN tag).172.70.86.26 13:31, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

I did say "And funny. If it aint funny, it has no purpose." Plus, how can it be funny if someone (let's say the 'reasonable reader-on-the-web') doesn't recognise the underlying factuality without extensive additional research? There's going to be subjectivity, on both measures, but that's probably why I judge others' usage of the tag far more than I ever (have I actually ever? ...off my own back?) deign to impose it upon others. Horses for courses, but it's how I've become acclimatised to the local editing culture, and how I interpret it should be best perpetuated. YMMV, but its a POV. 172.71.242.65 15:05, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

There's a big space between 'blindingly obvious' and 'requires extensive additional research to realise why it must be true'. The best ones are where it makes you stop and think a moment and then realise why it would be absurd if it weren't true.172.71.178.51 11:17, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

Now here I thought the device to demonstrate uncontrolled hot fusion was a pair of binoculars to observe the sun and stars. Jamcdonald (talk) 06:10, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I thought the joke was telling people to look up at the sun. --172.71.222.162 18:52, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

I usually prefer controlled hot fusion with gravitational confinement. We are already using one such power plant. 162.158.62.90 13:21, 7 July 2023 (UTC)