-2F superconductor (Tl4Ba)Ba2Ca2Cu7Oy

Since outer space is full of superconducting elements and compounds, I think they could help explain the increasing expansion rate of the universe (through strong diamagnetism).

Oooooo-kay! (He said, backing away and suddenly remembering a previous engagement.)

Unfortunately, being affiliated with a university is no guarantee that you are not a crank, nor is it a guarantee that you are immune to the danger of misinterpreting your own data. I've met Ivy-League cranks; it is a condition that can arise at any time. And falling hopelessly in love with an optimistic appraisal of your own data is something that happens to everyone, Nobel laureates and freshmen alike.

But it is more likely that the plots are real, that he really did make some high Tc material in his personal lab and do some measurements. It's not rocket surgery, to someone with a bit of training. It's just chemistry, electronic equipment, and liquid nitrogen, none of which is especially expensive.

The problem arises in the interpretation. He points at some random squiggles and calls them a Meissner transition. I see squiggles. It would sure be nice to have a control, yes? A curve traced from a piece of boring commercially-available YBCO, plugged into the same apparatus, and showing similar squiggles at the known transition temperature of commercially-available YBCO?

Similarly, if you take any data enough times you will get some odd discontinuities now and then. Your chart recorder software will glitch, you'll leave a switch in the wrong position, your sample temperature is changing during the measurement in a way that is being missed by your apparatus, your sample is in the middle of disintegrating, etc. The initial impulse is always to suspect that each glitch is an amazing new discovery, but they almost never are. So it would be nice to know if the results were repeatable. How many samples did he make? Can he show me the data from all the samples?

Where did the stoichiometry data and the structural data come from? Mixing up a batch of a compound is one thing, but analyzing it is something else: That actually does require equipment, and money. How was it done? Where was it done, and by whom? What is the margin of error in the results? Has this material really never been made before? If someone else has made it before, why didn't they publish this first?

I should stress that, compared to many cranky projects (cough cold fusion cough) this is a highly believable report. It's not as if high-Tc superconductors are unattested in the literature. It's not as if this guy's results require throwing out established theory. It's not as if he couldn't have gotten lucky and built a one-off sample with an amazingly high Tc in his basement -- most good physics is done in someone's basement, and most reproducible results start their lives as barely reproducible results. But, because he's an incredibly sloppy publisher, the author forces us to assume that he is a crank until proven otherwise.

What is interesting in this whole superconductivity business is that in many years of research there actually is real progress in return for all the money spent.

Also the molecules appear to be getting larger and larger as the transition temperature goes up, suggesting that if that trend continues the 'room temperature' superconducting molecule will be something that will take a long time to find because of the number of combinations increasing as the length of the molecule goes up.

The highest temperature superconductor has a whopping 247 atoms in its structure. By comparison, the one before that only had 19 atoms, the one before that 12. And that's for a 46 degree K difference.