Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Ultraconductor

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. --Coredesat 02:57, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Ultraconductor

One company's theory. No verifiable reliable sources (no publications in scientific/engineering journals). Please delete. --Pjacobi 08:33, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

Hundreds, if not thousands, of samples of Ultraconductors have been produced since 1981 when a piece of polymer was found to conduct electricity when it should have been an insulator. This work was discovered in the former Soviet Union by Dr. L. Grigorov and could one day be the subject of a Nobel Prize. Three floors of laboratories and a staff of Ph.D. basic research scientists performed the early work at the Institute of Polymer Materials, of what is now the Russian Academy of Science. In 1991 a paper entitled: On Genuine Room Temperature Superconductivity in Oxidized Polypropylene was published in Russian. The title appeared in HiTC Update, a publication supported by the U.S. Government. It stated the paper was only available in Russian. Magnetic Power Inc. had it privately translated six months prior to a published translation by the American Institute of Physics. The experimental work was impressive enough that our team visited the Moscow laboratories in late 1992 and evaluated the excellent science. We also arranged for applications to be developed by our subsidiary, Room Temperature Superconductors Inc., that was incorporated in 1993. This private firm has completed four Small Business Innovation Research Contracts for the USAF and what is now called the Missile Defense Agency. The Air Force did its own tests before awarding a Phase II Contract. It then had the work independently reproduced by Fractal Technologies. Dr. Matt Aldissi, the CEO of that firm, was the monitor of the Russian work for the USA while a staff scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He also convenes the annual International Conference for Conducting Polymers. Papers have been published in refereed publications including the Journal of Superconductivity, reflecting extensive laboratory experimnents. These materials offer an alternative to copper and the next goal is developing them into wire, which will take three years of laboratory work that may begin in the near future. In my opinion deletion will be a sad reflection on the inability of Wikipedia to intelligently deal with new and controversial science.

Mark Goldes, CEO, Magnetic Power Inc. and Room Temperature Superconductors Inc.

• delete. Non-notable crackpot spam. yandman 09:02, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
• Delete hoax/scam. useless. non-notable. —ptk✰fgs 09:40, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
• Delete - as with many pseudoscientific hoaxes, if this were real there would be countless reliable sources available. Of course, there aren't any reliable sources listed in this article, so out it goes. Zetawoof^(ζ) 11:12, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
• Weak Delete change to Delete---not just "one company's theory". It's one of several theories from a well-known crackpot entrepreneur. On the other hand, the parent company is well-known in pseudoscience circles, and the Ultraconductors company has actually gotten DOD grants---much to the embarrassment of the DOD, according to the linked Wired article. Content-wise/science-wise, yes, it's non-notable crackpottery. However, the existence of this company might be noteworthy---I can imagine a would-be investor hearing about Ultraconductors, buying the CEO's spiel, and Googling around for more info. For such a user, the connection between RTS and Magnetic Power, Inc. is noteworthy, as is a link to the Wired article and a few comments from mainstream scientists. (NB: a Google search for "ultraconductor" brings up nothing but free-energy websites and Wikipedia.) On the other hand, a) Wikipedia is not, at the moment, a database of all possible scams, and perhaps it shouldn't be b) with the CEO editing actively, NPOV would require constant attention; scientific-point-of-view even more. On the other hand, that view of noteworthiness is inherently a NNPOV one---I sort of want the article kept in order to insert a few scientific sentences there documenting that Ultraconductors are bunk. The CEO will presumably have another NNPOV idea of noteworthiness---he wants to make his company's thing look good by having it listed under "Physics" on Wikipedia. Combine those two dueling edits into an NPOV article, and you're left with something non-noteworthy, hence delete. Ugh. Bm gub 14:12, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
• Delete - The article is functionally an advertisement for a scam (despite efforts to add statements debunking the scam). George J. Bendo 14:56, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
• Strong Keep - There has been at least one peer reviewed paper on this and if valid it would have enormous implications for physics. Keep at least until 2007, when products are supposed to become commercially available.--hughey 16:11, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Products in 2007? WP:NOT#Wikipedia_is_not_a_crystal_ball. The free-energy branch of the company has been promising "products next year" since time immemorial; if someday they release something and it works, someone will create an article about it then, and no-one will fault Wikipedia for not previewing it. Anyway, convincing people that "enormous implications" are just around the corner is how the scam works---that's the hook, just like the huge Nigerian trust fund which will be wired over after just one more fee. As for science, there's one peer-reviewed *theory* paper from 2003 entitled "Possible high-current superconductivity ... " and one from 1994 entitled "Speculative model for ...". These papers do not pass any sort of notability requirement on their own: certainly WP can't devote an article to every untested solid-state-physics theory. There are (quite literally) thousands of them. An article on any similar paper would be so deeply un-notable as to barely attract an AFD nomination. Ultraconductors combines science non-notability with WP:ADV and WP:OR. Bm gub 17:09, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
• Delete I think this fits perfectly in the original purposes of WP:OR and WP:ADV.-- danntm ^T _C 17:36, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
• Delete WilliamKF 20:38, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
• Delete Original research + likely hoax. --Polaron | Talk 23:00, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.