HISTORY OF PHYSICS

Superconductivity, the electric conduction without energy loss below a critical temperature, was discovered in 1911 by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, at Leiden.

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In Berlin, 1934, Walther Meissner and Robert Ochsenfeld discovered that superconducting materials expel magnetic fields from their interiors.

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@VergaraLautaro I'm surprised by the gap between 1911 and 1934.

I would expect the lack of magnetic field inside to be theorized ~immediately (or at least once it was noticed that the zero resistance also applied to AC), given that Lenz's law was formulated in first half of 19th century.

So was it just hard to directly observe the magnetic field around superconductive samples?

@robryk
Both World Wars had an impact on research, also on superconductivity.

@VergaraLautaro @robryk

Field expulsion does not follow from Lenz’s law, since perfect conductor would produce currents to *maintain* a field that was present already, and for years that’s what experiments seemed to show.

Here’s a book-length history that does a nice job of describing the intellectual history and putting it into social and political context.

https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/the-cold-wars/9780813532950

@jsdodge @robryk

broken link

@VergaraLautaro @jsdodge

It works for me. Is it 404 for you, or is the website unavailable?

Anyway, the book is "The Cold Wars: A History of Superconductivity" by Jean Matricon and Georges Waysand.

@robryk @jsdodge
Strange.
Now it works.
Previously it appeared "ISBN number not found."

Thanks!

@VergaraLautaro @robryk
Looks like the link from the image is broken, but the link itself works? Is this a Mastadon bug?

@jsdodge @VergaraLautaro

(By image you mean preview, right?)

I confirm that this is the case for the post when viewed on fediscience.org, but it does not happen for the post when viewed e.g. on my instance. The broken link is https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/book-details/

Each instance generates the preview on its own when it receives a post. I suspect that when fediscience.org did that, the website in question issued a redirect to the broken link for some reason. Let me try to find the raw form of the post to confirm what was actually sent out though.

@jsdodge @VergaraLautaro

If you take a look at https://fediscience.org/@jsdodge/109480278297608998.json, you can see that the wrong link is nowhere present. So, it seems that fediscience.org managed to break the preview. Can you try replying with the same link (e.g. in this conversation) to see if that's repeatable?