{"id":611,"date":"2006-09-18T10:57:42","date_gmt":"2006-09-18T10:57:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/09\/18\/fun-with-linear-extrapolations\/"},"modified":"2006-09-18T10:57:42","modified_gmt":"2006-09-18T10:57:42","slug":"fun-with-linear-extrapolations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/09\/18\/fun-with-linear-extrapolations\/","title":{"rendered":"Fun With Linear Extrapolations"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alternate title: Imminent Death of High-Tc<\/sub> Superconductivity Predicted. Film at 11.<\/p>\n

PhysicsWeb has a story about a study of condensed matter papers<\/a> that has been posted to the arxiv<\/a>, predicting the imminent death of high-temperature superconductivity:<\/p>\n

\n

The new study was carried out by Andreas Barth from the FIZ Karlsruhe and Werner Marx from the Max Planck Institute for Solid-State Research in Stuttgart, who examined the number of papers listed in the INSPEC and Chemical Abstracts Service databases with words like “superconductivity” or “superconductor” used in the title or listed as “keywords”. <\/p>\n

By plotting these as a function of time, they found that the numbers shot up rapidly in the late 1980s, following the unexpected discovery of high-temperature superconductors by Georg Bednorz and Alex M\u00c3\u00bcller at IBM’s Zurich lab in 1986. The numbers in the INSPEC database reached a peak of about 8500 a year in 1990, but have been slowly falling and now stand at about 4400 (figure 1). A simple linear fit to the data reveals that the numbers will reach zero by 2010-2015.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If you ever find yourself thinking that Ph.D. physicists are somehow above statistical silliness, keep this in mind as a counterexample.<\/p>\n

Has there been a decrease in the number of papers about superconductivity? Probably (though keyword searching is a lousy way to check). That’s usually what happens when a field goes several years without a major new development, either experimentally or theoretically. There are exceptions, and people write books about them, but for the most part, physics is as faddish as anything else– a splashy discovery leads to a huge burst of publications on a tpic, but in the absence of sustained progress, most people move on to something else.<\/p>\n

But honestly, does anyone really think that a simple linear extrapolation to zero is meaningful in any way?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alternate title: Imminent Death of High-Tc Superconductivity Predicted. Film at 11. PhysicsWeb has a story about a study of condensed matter papers that has been posted to the arxiv, predicting the imminent death of high-temperature superconductivity: The new study was carried out by Andreas Barth from the FIZ Karlsruhe and Werner Marx from the Max… Continue reading Fun With Linear Extrapolations<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=611"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/611\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}