Bruce Schechter

Fascinating book about one of the 20th century's most unusual charcaters and greatest mathematicians. For 40 years, Paul Erdos (pronounced air-dish), lived out of suitcases as he roamed the world seeking someone, anyone, to do math problems with. He announced himself by turning up on someone's doorstep claiming "My brain is open!", and expecting them to feed and accomodate him for a week or so while he mined their brains for maths problems and proofs. He called childen "epsilons", men, "slaves", women, "bosses", God,"Supreme Fascist", and said anyone who quit maths was "dead'. For all his eccentricity he was one of the most phenomenonal minds of the 20th century, his output in terms of papers and collaborations was extraordinary. In fact he had so many collaborators that a the "Erdos number" was created, to describe the degree of separation between him, his collaoborators and anyone who collaborated with his collaborators. This is a warm and often funny book, liberally spiced with mathematics, but (thankfully) not enough to deter maths dunces like myself. Highly recommended for anyone who loves math or just loves stories about quirky geniuses.… (meer)

Alright, first a primer on superconductivity: When electricity flows down a wire, some of the flow is lost due to the resistance of the material. The opposite of resistance is conductance. Superconductivity occurs when a material is cooled to such a ridiculously low temperature that the near-absence of heat allows electricity to flow without loss. The temperature at which this happens is called the critical temperature. High-temperature superconductivity physics seeks to find materials that allows for superconductivity at a critical temperature above 77 kelvins. Everybody with me so far? Good. Here we go.

Bruce Schechter, in The Path of No Resistance, documents the early pioneers in the field of high-temperature superconductivity. Regular superconductivity was discovered as a property of matter in 1911. For 75 years, no one had come up with a material that superconducted above 23K. Then, in 1986, Bednorz and Mueller induced superconductivity in lanthanum barium copper oxide at 35K (trust me, the 12K difference was earth-shattering news). They were immediately awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics the next year. (By the way, for those that care, the current record (as of 2014) is mercury barium calcium copper oxide at 133 kelvins.)

Then, things really got fun. Research teams from across the world theorized a new frontier of superconductive ceramics where electricity could flow and maglev trains could travel across countries without energy loss. The problem was that all this was very pie in the sky talk. The only samples that could produce such effects were small and fragile at best. Schechter’s interviews with scientists a few years after the fact show just how scientific thought changes from year to year and what happens when the media gets a hold of scientific discoveries before the techniques are properly vetted. It’s an interesting book, albeit slightly dated, but fun nonetheless.… (meer)