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HERE are three words guaranteed to make most lay people yawn and most
scientists roll their eyes: high-temperature superconductivity. If you’re a
little hazy about the concept, take a trip back to 1986. That was the year a
team at IBM in Zurich made superconductivity sexy when they invented a material
that offered absolutely no resistance to electricity. Currents simply flew
through the material, without creating any of the usual heat—and hence
woeful energy wastage—that plagues ordinary copper wiring. It had been
seen before but only at impracticably low temperatures close to absolute zero.
Soon teams were seeing…