And that this happened with the theme from Rocky playing (a film franchise in which an American underdog beats up a Russian super-athlete), and there were broken plastic robot bits left on the floor... it really, really does seem like a comedy skit.
Specifically when produced with "exceptional purity"...
Wikipedia [0] lists room temperature thermal conductivity at 1300 W/(m·K) and says "Chemical synthesis of cubic BAs is very challenging and its single crystal forms usually have defects." I guess it remains to be seen how cheaply and easily this "exceptional purity" can be achieved.
Yes, this is exactly my problem with claims about the 'real' universe if we are, in fact, in a simulation. It might be literally, programmatically, impossible for us to infer anything about it. The analogy I like to use is Pac-Man believing that the entire universe exists within the confines of a blue-walled maze.
From the ghosts perspective it is of prime importance to understand the behaviour of pacman. But it is influenced by the player's psychology which is in turn influenced by the surrounding world. Then: a sufficiently advanced model of pacman must include (at least implicitly) a description of the outside world.
