He didn’t know it at the time, but the Dutch scientist had just discovered an entirely new field of physics, a feat that would earn him the Nobel Prize in 1913. It’s from this moment that the era of superconductors truly began.
“[Superconductivity] is an amazing phenomenon, and it took about 50 years before they figured out how it works,” Greene says. “You actually need to understand quantum mechanics—you can’t understand it using classical physics.”