What difference can a breakthrough in science make over two decades? A quick comparison of the respective fates of two discoveries made twenty years ago reaffirms how daft it is to try to predict research outcomes over such a timescale. Both tales begin at IBM's Zurich research laboratory in the early 1980s. In one corner of the lab, Gerd Binnig, Heinrich Rohrer and others were building an instrument that would come to be known as a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM). In another, Georg Bednorz and Alexander Mueller were doing experiments on materials that they thought might hold promise as superconductors.
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