Bismuth is going to be the metal of the future, TSMC is also using it in their 1 nm process. As the uses for topological insulators make it to industry I think Bismuth is going to become a priority for companies to secure sourcing. China currently controls 75 percent of the supply.
It seems that magnets have some truly remarkable properties as applied within electric/energy applications. Do we have evidence that it is not possible to essentially bypass certain laws of thermodynamics in the presence of magnetic fields?
I assume you're referring to how some popular science articles report things. That's just wordplay. Nothing is being bent, broken, or bypassed.
Usually it just means they did something an ordinary homogeneous material couldn't do, for example. Which is genuinely interesting, even if it's not actually breaking physics.
With a generous interpretation, they can be said to break classical thermodynamics, since they quantum physics onto the table, most notably magnets can have negative temperature according to the statistical definition. Nothing that breaks physics at large, but would probably cause Ludwig Boltzmann a mild headache if he heard about it.
It's still not going to allow you to make perpetual motion machines, though.
Why would you use a classical model to describe a quantum system? That's the kind of wordplay that those articles do, and almost identical to my example about materials. It's entertaining, but meaningless.
Well in this case you absolutely can, the results just seem counter to our intuition about temperature. Negative temperature is a meaningful description of these types of systems.
I'm trying to explain how articles often conflate "intuition" with "breaking physics", and you're making your argument by conflating them. We're having different conversations.
This is just sophistry. You're omitting the crucial context of what it is in these sentences, and it is only when this is done they appear contradictory.
> Do we have evidence that it is not possible to..
No, I don't think so, it's just that no-one's ever been able to construct a perpetual motion machine, so that inability is codified into a presumption that energy can't be created out of nothing (for example). That is an axiom AKA a law of thermodynamics.
I guess there's no possible proof of it but feel free to try making your own PMM - you'll make a fortune if you succeed!
They're just creating bandgaps magnetically. I'm unsure exactly what the "breaking time reversability" refers to, but I don't think it looks like breaking any laws of thermo. Potentially, it could lead to superconductor-like effects near room temperature?
