Superconductivity is just one of the incredible phenomena that is changing our lives. Every decade there's a huge breakthrough which changes our views and it usually comes in an unexpected way. Stephen Bondal: I think probably all of us have been told at some point in time something we've been working on or found is impossible. There are materials out there that we can find so what are we going to do when this revolution happens? Nigel Hussey Sushita Asabasyan, Stephen Bondal and our studio engineer Steve Greenwood next week talk about 16th century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe renowned for accurate observations of the heavens without telescopes.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the discovery made in 1911 by the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (1853-1926). He came to call it Superconductivity and it is a set of physical properties that nobody predicted and that none, since, have fully explained. When he lowered the temperature of mercury close to absolute zero and ran an electrical current through it, Kamerlingh Onnes found not that it had low resistance but that it had no resistance. Later, in addition, it was noticed that a superconductor expels its magnetic field. In the century or more that has followed, superconductors have already been used to make MRI scanners and to speed particles through the Large Hadron Collider and they may perhaps bring nuclear fusion a little closer (a step that could be world changing).
The image above is from a photograph taken by Stephen Blundell of a piece of superconductor levitating above a magnet.
With
Nigel Hussey
Professor of Experimental Condensed Matter Physics at the University of Bristol and Radbout University
Suchitra Sebastian
Professor of Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge
And
Stephen Blundell
Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Mansfield College
Producer: Simon Tillotson