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Superconductivity—A Challenge to Modern Physics

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History of Artificial Cold, Scientific, Technological and Cultural Issues

Part of the book series: Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science ((BSPS,volume 299))

Abstract

The discovery of superconductivity could not have happened without the liquefaction of helium by the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes in 1908, which allowed physicists to reach temperatures close to absolute zero. Helium liquefaction was the result of Kamerlingh Onnes’s lifelong enterprise to apply large-scale industrial means to fundamental research. It delivered the final blow to nineteenth-century conceptions about the existence of non-liquefiable “permanent” gases. Until 1923, his Leiden cryogenic lab would remain the only place in the world where helium could be liquefied (see, e.g., van Delft 2007).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    That Onnes often strayed from the path indicated by his famous dictum is demonstrated in (Matricon and Waysand 2003:18ff).

  2. 2.

    Similar models had already been proposed independently by the Swedish metallurgist Carl Benedicks and the American physicist Percy Bridgman (Benedicks 1916; Bridgman 1917; see also Kaiser 2001).

  3. 3.

    At the time, thermal measurements were not sensitive enough to detect the jump in specific heat at the transition that would have suggested a phase transition (see below).

  4. 4.

    The use of the word quantum mechanics [Quanten-Mechanik] in (Einstein 1922), to our knowledge, is one of the earliest—if not the earliest—appearance of this term that would raise to prominence with the advent of quantum mechanics in 1925. It is to be noted, however, that Einstein refers here to a quantum-theoretical many-body mechanics, rather than to a new “quantum” mechanics that is to replace classical mechanics, which is how the term would be later used by Born and Heisenberg.

  5. 5.

    In 1933, Lev Landau published a similar idea in a paper that foreshadows elements of his later work with Ginzburg (Landau 1933).

  6. 6.

    For a detailed historical analysis of Ehrenfest’s classification of phase transitions, see (Jaeger 1998).

  7. 7.

    “Nous allons montrer que le problème que l’on a attaqué de façon si malencontreuse n’est pas posé par la nature des faits, que l’interprétation des expériences a dépassé les faits observés; et c’est pour cette raison qu’on a posé à la théorie électronique un problème certainement insoluble.”

  8. 8.

    A similar passage can be already found earlier (London and London 1935:87), received by the journal in October 1934 (“But now suppose the electrons to be coupled by some form of interaction. Then the lowest state of the electrons may be separated by a finite distance from the excited ones and the disturbing influence of the field on the eigenfunctions can only be appreciable if it is of the same order of magnitude as the coupling forces.”).

  9. 9.

    For a detailed account of the history of BCS theory, see (Matricon and Waysand 2003:146ff). See also (Hoddeson et al. 1992; Hoddeson and Daitch 2002).

  10. 10.

    For an example, see (Bloch 1966).

  11. 11.

    See the contribution by Knolle and Joas, Chap. 7 in the present volume, and the references therein.

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Acknowledgments 

Substantial parts of this text are based on a German article published in Physik Journal (Joas and Waysand 2011). The authors wish to thank Dieter Hoffmann, Jeremiah James, Stefan Jorda, Johannes Knolle, Jean Matricon, and Alexander Pawlak for helpful comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich, Germany

    Christian Joas

  2. Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society/Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany

    Christian Joas

  3. Laboratoire Souterrain Bas Bruit de Rustrel-Pays d’Apt (UMS 3538 UNS/UAPV/CNRS/AMU/OCA), 84400, Rustrel, France

    Georges Waysand

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  1. Christian Joas
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Correspondence to Christian Joas .

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  1. Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Athens, Athens, Greece

    Kostas Gavroglu

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Joas, C., Waysand, G. (2014). Superconductivity—A Challenge to Modern Physics. In: Gavroglu, K. (eds) History of Artificial Cold, Scientific, Technological and Cultural Issues. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 299. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7199-4_5

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