Can Superconductors Put an AI Data Center into a Shoebox?
Added 2025-09-25 04:00:07 +0000 UTC
Comments
This video brings up so many memories. I remember going to see that group at Northrop around 2013. Do they still have the Tinker toy demo of RQL? that was a great demo. There is a mechanical analog where everything is a pendulum of some kind and you spin one pendulum around it it spins other pendulums. Josephson junction circuits are all pendulums. Quantum JJ circuits are just quantum pendulums. I remember giving a talk on some of this stuff to an audience of those old Russian guys from Hypres and the rest of their crew from the SUNY system. As usual, they had comments of the "this was all done in the USSR back in the 70s and 80s" variety, but when I pointed out that the nonlinear oscillator math goes back to pipe organs physics from the 1800s, they were quite pleased. It's not so much that they wanted the Russians to get credit as that they're tired of Americans thinking we invented a thing that's actually been around since before we were born. We've learned a lot of great pendulum tricks in the last 100 years but it's all still just pendulums. The problems we have to overcome to build a useful computer, however, remain pretty severe. I am 100% a skeptic that this will work in my lifetime. So far it seems like analog to digital converters using this tech are closer to being useful than any computing application. Or put more broadly, "detectors" of one kind or another are what Josephson Junctions turn out to be worth all the hassle for. That and quantum voltage standards. but calling everything a "computer" is how you make it rain money, so everything has to become a computer.
Trash Robot
2025-09-26 03:36:14 +0000 UTCI sure hope so. Because a orchestra with a superconductor would have less resistance from the audience than a regular conductor. Joking. π
frisky dingo
2025-09-25 05:10:07 +0000 UTC
