Robert Laughlin is back with a vengeance. After a decade away from physics, the Nobel laureate at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, argues in a pair of soon-to-be published papers that most physicists' basic assumptions about the origins of high-temperature superconductivity-the ability of certain materials to carry electricity without resistance at still frigid, but unusually high temperatures-are wrong. Instead, Laughlin argues, the biggest mystery in condensed matter physics can be explained starting from the conventional theory of metals, a tack most theorists abandoned decades ago.
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