David Friedberg

I got really fascinated by superconductors when I was maybe 12 years old.

I went and bought a superconducting disk, yttrium barium copper oxide.

From the back of popular science.

And then I went to UCLA and I got a jug of liquid nitrogen.

And then I floated a magnet above the disk because of the Meissner effect.

And I had it at the science fair and I did very well with the science fair that year because I showed this really cool.

That must have been 91, 92.

Yeah, the hard part is getting the liquid nitrogen, but... Yeah, and I had a friend whose dad was like a doctor at UCLA or something like that.

So he was able to get the liquid nitrogen for our demonstration.

I've always been fascinated by the physics of superconductors.

And maybe you can just explain one of these important features of superconductors as it relates to kind of resistance and current flow.

And then we can talk about your experiment.

Sorry, I think we should just explain that.

So you have a metal.

All the electrons are kind of moving around.

They're perturbed.

They're different energies, different states.

In a superconductor, meaning a material that's cool enough that it reaches its superconducting critical temperature, right?

So suddenly all the electrons can still move.

They can still create a current.