caa a22 4500 388075392 CHVBK 20180307125159.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e199901 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1557/S0883769400051745 doi S0883769400051745 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1557/S0883769400051745 Hoddeson Lillian John Bardeen and the BCS Theory of Superconductivity [Elektronische Daten] [Lillian Hoddeson] Every theory of superconductivity can be disproved! This tongue-in-cheek theorem struck a chord when Felix Bloch announced it in the early 1930s. Virtually every major physicist then working on theory—including Bloch, Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Lev Landau, Leon Brillouin, W. Elsasser, Yakov Frenkel, and Ralph Kronig—had tried and failed to explain the mysterious phenomenon in which below a few degrees kelvin certain metals and alloys lose all their electrical resistance. The frequency with which Bloch's theorem was quoted suggests the frustration of the many physicists who were struggling to explain superconductivity. Neither the tools nor the evidence were yet adequate for solving the problem. These would gradually be created during the 1940s and 1950s, but bringing them to bear on superconductivity and solving the long-standing riddle required a special set of talents and abilities: a deep understanding of quantum mechanics and solid-state physics, confidence in the solubility of the problem, intuition about the phenomenon, a practical approach to problem-solving, patience, teamwork, and above all refusal to give up in the face of repeated failures. When John Bardeen took on the problem of superconductivity in the late 1930s, he held it like a bulldog holds a piece of meat, until he, his student J. Robert Schrieffer, and postdoctoral candidate Leon Cooper solved it in 1957. Copyright © Materials Research Society 1999 MRS Bulletin Cambridge University Press 24/1(1999-01), 50-55 0883-7694 24:1<50 1999 24 MRS https://doi.org/10.1557/S0883769400051745 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1557/S0883769400051745 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Hoddeson Lillian NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- MRS Bulletin Cambridge University Press 24/1(1999-01), 50-55 0883-7694 24:1<50 1999 24 MRS CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge