Description

This iconoclastic book proposes that superconductivity is misunderstood in contemporary science and that this hampers scientific and technological development. Superconductivity is the ability of some metals to carry electric current without resistance at very low temperatures. Properly understanding superconductivity would facilitate finding materials that superconduct at room temperature, providing great benefits to society.

The conventional BCS theory of superconductivity, developed in 1957 and awarded the Nobel Prize in 1972, is generally believed to fully explain the lower temperature ‘conventional superconductors’ but not the more recently discovered ‘high temperature superconductors’, for which the charge carriers are positive Holes rather than negative electrons. Instead, this book proposes the holistic view that Holes are responsible for superconductivity in all materials. It explains in simple terms how the most fundamental property of all superconductors, that they expel H-fields (the Meissner effect), can be understood with Hole carriers and cannot be explained by BCS. It describes the historical development of the conventional theory and why it went astray, and credits pre-BCS researchers for important insights that were forgotten after BCS but are in fact relevant for the proper understanding of superconductivity.

The book’s author, Jorge E Hirsch, is a renowned expert in the field of condensed matter physics who has published over 250 articles on the subject. He has developed the theory of “Hole superconductivity”, the focus of this book, over the last 30 years. He is also the inventor of the H-index, a bibliometric measure of scientific impact which, he admits in this book, fails to identify high scientific achievement in the field of superconductivity.