Jay Novella

That's the critical thing right there.

That's what I would guess.

That's much less well-known.

Well, you should have just set me up with that dancing part.

I know.

I know, you bastard.

Yeah.

So this is called – this is BCS theory named after the physicist who developed it in the 50s, physicist John Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and John Robert Schreifer.

They won the Nobel Prize, as you might imagine.

And yes, it's this idea of Cooper pairs, of electrons kind of getting together and traveling together and that being a critical component to what allows superconductivity to happen, electricity flowing without any resistance through electrons.

wires, whatever it's moving through.

But this theory, this BCS theory, it's only an approximate framework.

I wasn't really aware of how approximate it really is.

It can't describe all the aspects of superconductivity or even all the different types of superconductivity.

So researchers have known for years that there is critical stuff missing in this BCS theory and they've been searching for years and have really hadn't

had any major breakthroughs.

There's been some developments for sure, but actually understanding it at a fundamental level has been kind of very elusive.

So this gets us to their new experiment.

They used a new imaging method.

This involved an ultra-cold atom microscope, which is fascinating, out of scope for this talk.