Description
In February 1987, Robert Hazen, a research scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Geo-physical Laboratory, received a message from University of Houston professor Paul Chu that would land Hazen at the center of the most exciting scientific race of the century. Chu, by mixing three ordinary substances, had gotten alchemic results: a compound that was a perfect conductor of electricity at a far higher temperature than had ever been achieved before. He needed Hazen to tell him pre- cisely what his compound was. But the news of his remarkable breakthrough was already out, and scientists around the world were going to try to identify the superconductor first.
Hazen knew that to join Chu's team he would have to drop everything-his own research, family commitments, the small matter of sleep-but he knew too that this was his chance to be involved in a discovery of unlimited possibility. Scientists had known that certain bizarre compounds could conduct energy without loss of power at unimaginably cold temperature but a practical superconduc- tor, one that would work at manageable temperatures, was the fodder of futuristic dreams: trains that could travel at 300 mph; immensely powerful new supercomputers; limitless, cheap, and safe energy resources. And now Chu had the key.
Plunging into a hectic four-week odyssey of high-stakes scientific research, Hazen and Chu compressed what might normally have taken months, even years, of experiments into a breathtaking race against thousands of scientists worldwide. In The Breakthrough, Hazen captures the fevered atmosphere in which they worked-rife with plots, counterplots, explosive tension, and paranoid fears -- including the suspicion that one member of their research team was leaking secrets to another lab.
ISBN:9780671658298
