Schrieffer

Dr. Hirsch is a bull-in-a-china-shop contrarian taking aim at B.C.S. theory, which was devised in 1957 by three physicists — John Bardeen, Leon N. Cooper and J. Robert Schrieffer — to explain how superconductivity works.

The phenomenon remained a mystery until 1957, when physicists John Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and Robert Schrieffer explained those first superconductors.

Superconductivity was first discovered in 1911 by Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes in a mercury wire chilled to 4.2° above absolute zero, or 4.2 K. In 1957, physicists John Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and Robert Schrieffer explained the phenomenon: Their “BCS theory” suggested an electron zipping through a superconductor temporarily deforms the material’s structure, pulling another electron behind in its wake without resistance.

Following John Bardeen, Leon Cooper and Robert Schrieffer’s discovery that superconductivity results from electrons forming Cooper pairs, Anderson realized that these pairs are a kind of pseudospin.

Other Nobel-worthy ideas seeded on the move include Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar’s insight into the maximum mass of a white dwarf star, and John Robert Schrieffer’s mathematical description of the ground state of superconducting atoms.