Cold Wars: A History of Superconductivity

  • Jean Matricon &
  • Georges Waysand
Rutgers University Press: 2003. 304 pp. $65

This book, translated from the French, is a history of the field of cryogenics and of the two specifically quantum forms of matter in bulk — superconductivity and superfluidity (although only the first is mentioned in the subtitle). The authors clearly express their enthusiasm (which share) for the field and its history: the fascination and mystery that it held for the icons of the quantum revolution, from Albert Einstein through Werner Heisenberg to Richard Feynman; the slow and uneven advance of science as it was impeded by personality conflicts, the savagery of the Stalinist regime, and the politics of the real Cold War; the clashes of conflicting ways of doing research in disparate fields; and even, most recently, a case of the deliberate manufacture of scientific results on an unprecedented scale. There is a lot of rich material here that has been, on the whole, neglected.

This history has more than its share of fascinating, larger-than-life figures. It begins with the Dutch entrepreneur Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, who discovered superconductivity. In order to liquefy helium, he created in Leiden the Cryogenic Laboratory, the first industrial-scale lab for pure scientific research and the true precursor of today's CERN, Fermilab and Kamiokande.

Then there were the Russians: Pyotr Kapitsa, Ernest Rutherford's favourite, who was kidnapped by Stalin from Cambridge, UK, to carry on his helium research in Russia; Lev Shubnikov, who founded the great Kharkov lab but was murdered by Stalin in 1938, some 15 years before his wonderful experiments demonstrating 'type II' superconductivity in alloys — the phase that makes possible high-field magnets such as those used in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) — were understood; and the brilliant figure of Lev Landau, Russia's greatest theorist.

We also meet Fritz London, the under-recognized genius who was denied recognition for his great contribution to superfluidity — the realization that it was a Bose–Einstein condensate — by Landau. There is John Bardeen, who, with Leon Cooper and Robert Schrieffer, proposed the BCS theory of superconductivity, but only after first winning a Nobel prize for the transistor. And finally we come across the charismatic Bernd Matthias, the 'alchemist' guru of what the authors call the “age of materials”. Matthias died too early to catch the breakthroughs in high-temperature superconductivity made by his followers and students.

Having said all that, throughout the book I kept encountering historical blunders and misapprehensions that left me wondering how sound the rest of it was. For instance, in the space of two pages there are three dubious historical judgements. To begin with, “The history of physics was indelibly marked by WWII, primarily because of the ... Bomb,” write the authors, but more physicists worked on radar than on the bomb, and much more technology resulted from it. “Los Alamos made no contribution to low-temperature physics,” the book says, but research on helium-3 originated at Los Alamos, and Matthias' laboratory there played an important role later. And the authors declare that, in contrast to the experimentalists, “it was essentially the great pre-war figures who continued to hold center stage among the theorists.” But the immediate post-war generation of theorists was arguably as strong and as numerous as any in history: Feynman, Tsung-Dao Lee, Chen Ning Yang, Julian Schwinger, Murray Gell-Mann and, among the condensed-matter types, David Pines, Philippe Nozieres and Walter Kohn.

There are also errors in personal details that in many cases subtly alter the emphases in the story. Bardeen was not a “student of Slater”, he was a junior fellow at Harvard, and no other source has him seriously influenced by John Slater. Ted Geballe was not an “early student” of Matthias; rather, Geballe was his department head and mentor at Bell Labs, and the relationship was two-way. (Geballe was, incidentally, trained at the University of California, Berkeley, a laboratory that the authors condemn to 'also-ran' status in a parenthetical note.) And the authors ignore Matthias' continuous connection to Bell Labs from before he began studying superconductivity.

The book also provides a false impression of the discovery of the Josephson effect. Brian Josephson's paper predicting tunnelling supercurrents was not ten years after BCS theory — a fact that is given some significance — but five. He was also unable to put his own predictions into experimental practice, and had a public argument as to their validity with Bardeen in the summer of 1962; this was shortly settled by experiments done by John Rowell and me at Bell Labs.

But Josephson makes a late arrival (in chapter 18 of 22) in Cold Wars, which focuses mainly on the period before and immediately after the Second World War. It is almost worth reading the book just for the distressing story of London, whose books laid out the problems that the post-war generations were to solve but who died just before the solutions were to become clear. There is also an excellent view of the prickly personality of Landau and of the terrible dangers that threatened him, Kapitsa and Shubnikov as they laboured well in advance of their Western colleagues from 1935 to 1955.

In describing the controversies about the theory of liquid helium's superfluid phase, the authors include the contributions of Feynman but not the penetrating insights from the early 1950s of Lars Onsager, which in my opinion are of equal status. The story of Bardeen's “relentless pursuit” of the solution to superconductivity is well told, as is the description of the nature of the BCS theory (with a debt here to Victor Weisskopf, whose explanation is quoted).

The story thereafter becomes sketchy indeed, and misses many vital points. I might suggest that the authors' relative unfamiliarity with the anglophone world, and their weakness in theory, begin here to warp the coverage. There is emphasis on Pierre-Gilles de Gennes' group in France, with its remarkable collective ethos and a significant number of detailed applications of the BCS ideas to its credit, but does this work stand out so much relative to many things that at the time seemed more important? And I cannot let pass the authors' failure to note that although Alex Müller's great discovery of high-temperature superconductivity in the cuprates was unquestionably motivated by bipolaron theory (not an original concept of Benoy Chakraverty, by the way), that theory is nonetheless generally thought to be wrong. This is far from the first time since Christopher Columbus that a wrong concept motivated a great discovery.

In the discussion of the state of theory in this field, my words in a 2001 article for a Nobel symposium are quoted out of context, misreading or misunderstanding the message that the article was meant to convey, namely, that the source of high-temperature superconductivity is not a mystery, and that theory has not been pointless and futile. The reasons why the misleading popular impression of chaos and controversy in this field is so hard to dispel is not explored here, which is a pity. Still, in these final chapters the authors make some telling points about the overselling of the hopes for practical applications that characterized this period. But this critical observation is never balanced against the value of the MRI industry and other applications of superconductivity — by no means a unique story in the history of tensions between research and technology, where hitting the jackpot is a rarity but adds enormous value when it happens.

This year's Nobels bring out both the strengths and the weaknesses of the book. On the one hand, it is an excellent source for the background of the physics prizes to Vitaly Ginzburg and Alexei Abrikosov. But the intricate history of helium-3, now the source of yet a second physics Nobel, to Tony Leggett, is barely mentioned. I have already noted the absence of MRI, the subject of the physiology prize, from their horizon.

The intriguing piece of scientific history in Cold Wars has not been as well presented elsewhere, and the book is worth the attention of layman as well as scientist. But caveat emptor: the real inside story is not here if you're interested in what actually happened or in just who did what. But I found it refreshing to find judgements as to the broad trends of socio-scientific history, even if some of these were off by a little or, occasionally, a lot. Far too often the history of science confines itself to bare facts — when it pays attention to them at all.