David Friedberg

Right.

That's so interesting.

I've always thought, and there's obviously been companies started around the idea of creating an infinite battery where you could store technically forever electricity because the electrons are just moving around.

If it's superconducting, they can just spin forever around that circuit.

So this Josephson junction is two superconductors.

They're on either side of a barrier that you create, an insulating barrier.

And then maybe just explain the experiment and what you guys measured.

And this was all while you were in grad school, right?

So I just want to simplify that you have these two superconductors split by this barrier.

There's some tunneling.

Some of these electrons are actually going through the barrier to the other side.

And then you can effectively measure all of these different changes as you change the temperature.

You guys were putting different voltage states into this circuit that you built.

And what you saw and what you measured and what you demonstrated was that there were these very kind of discrete or specific changes that happened that basically demonstrated quantum mechanics at scale.

And so by measuring those discrete frequencies, you now had proof that there was quantum mechanics happening at a macro scale.

That's right.

And you published this work.

And was there a lot of attention when you published this work?

This was in 1985, 86?

And so was there much attention on this work at the time?