Has any place in the universe been found in which conditions would allow for naturally-occurring superconductivity or is it only a process created in laboratories?
And if the latter, does this mean that superconductivity was invented rather than discovered?
Mercury becomes superconducting at 4.1 Kelvin. The temperature of “space” is 2.7 Kelvin (source). so if you launched a bolus of mercury into space and somehow contained it, it would superconduct.
(also any of the more exotic superconductors that work at “high” temperatures, but I’m going as simple as possible with my materials)
Launching a bolus of mercury is about as unnatural as you can get.
I see I wasn’t clear. Define natural as conditions untouched by the intervention of sapient beings. Only the basic four (or five or however many it is today) forces at work.
No it’s not. Elemental mercury can exist in nature. Plausible scenarios in which a droplet of mercury could find itself floating in space are not difficult to imagine.
The interior of a neutron star is probably superconductive.
Could you imagine one for those of us with more prosaic minds?
I found this article on the subject:
Talk about high-temperature superconductors!
Actually, that’s low temperature: Most models of neutron stars approximate them as being at zero temperature, and such approximations are very close. A billion kelvin might seem like a lot to us, but it’s much less than the scale of the Fermi energy in a neutron star, which is what dominates.
Here’s a list of superconducting compounds. If any of the single-component items existed in bulk out away from a radiation source, they could potentially be superconducting.
I do admit that mercury seems less likely, if only because it’s likely to react. But I could easily see Boron-doped diamonds existing (certainly other forms of diamond exist in nature, and have been found in meteorites ), and that’s superconducting at 11 K.
At least one form of copper sulphate (covellite) is capable of being a superconductor, as is pure silver, lead, tin, and probably many other metals, albeit only at low temperatures.
Superconductivity (zero resistance and complete voiding of magnetic fields) is a natural phenomenon. As such, it cannot be invented or patented. However, particular formulations or constructions of materials, systems, or processes using or displaying superconduction behavior can be invented and potentially patented or otherwise protected as intellectual property.
Stranger
The natural volcanic processes in a hot volcanic moon, something like Io, could reduce mercuric oxide to metallic form and this could be ejected so as to escape the moon. From there, it could end up anywhere.
Or a rocky comet containing mercury compounds could occupy a trajectory passing close to the sun, where the heat could reduce the compounds, then when the comet is back out at aphelion, it might collide with something else, dispersing parts of it, including a droplet of mercury.
Or a star going supernova could disperse its own solar system as a scatter of particles and when these coalesce, one of the clumps could be pure mercury just by chance.
Nitpick: to the best of my knowledge, silver has not been observed to superconduct. (I remember this because of the odd fact that the three best elemental conductors at room temperature — silver, copper, and gold — haven’t been observed to superconduct.) Here’s the periodic table of superconductivity (PDF) as of 2013; yellow elements superconduct at ambient pressure, green require high pressure.
I don’t think that would shed much light on the “invented vs discovered” question.
Clearly, if something occurs in nature and that’s how we find it, we call it a discovery.
If we think something up that we’ve never seen, that might be an invention. But not necessarily, as mathematical equations are considered (by the US Patent & Trademark office, at least) to be discoveries and not inventions. That is, you can’t invent “the truth”. You can, however, invent something that uses a Truth, and patent that.
So, even if there were possible superconducting situations in reality, but nobody had yet noticed them or put them to any practical purpose, if you invented a device that took advantage of this “naturally occurring” superconductor, you could patent it. It’s possible that you could patent all devices using this sort of superconductivity, even though you couldn’t patent the truth itself.
Admittedly, the patent interpretation is a relatively narrow one, but even there, the issue of whether something is discovered or invented is hotly debatable. For a long time, “algorithms” were considered equivalent to mathematical equations, and therefore unpatentable. Yet you could get a “method” patent using a new “method” that amounts to pretty much the same thing as an algorithm, as long as you could carefully describe it as though it were machinery rather than algorithmically. Today, you can get software patents.
There’s a very wide gray zone between invention and discovery. I suspect that the cases of pure discovery without any invention are limited to actually finding things you weren’t really looking for. And I can’t think of a case of an invention where the inventor didn’t “discover” some clever idea, but no doubt there are cases.
A good example: Edison invented a type of light bulb. It was already known that running current through a filament caused it to glow (and burn out). He tried hundreds of different options before hitting on the winning combination, which was a tungsten filament in an evacuated glass chamber. So, how much was invention and now much was discovery? It’s an intriguing question, though one that can easily slip into mere semantics.
In the interests of fighting ignorance, I’d like to point out that Edison’s first incandescent lamp used carbonized cotton thread as its filament.
From: http://www.fi.edu/learn/sci-tech/edison-lightbulb/edison-lightbulb.php?cts=electricity
Thanks! Ignorance fought.
A small star that goes to the end of its life becomes a white dwarf…which, over the course of [Carl Sagan]billions and billions[/Carl Sagan] of years cools down into a a Black Dwarf; a cold, dead cinder.
Neutron stars eventually shed heat and cool down, too, right?
In fact, neutron stars cool off faster than white dwarfs do, mostly because they have a lot more neutrino activity.
And for the record, there’s another type of black dwarf, though none of them exist yet: When a very small star, a red dwarf, dies, it doesn’t even puff off its outer layers and become a white dwarf: It just sort of sits there. This remnant would also be called a black dwarf. But red dwarfs live far longer than the current age of the Universe, so we’ll have to wait a while for those.