Word: physicist
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...look like they needed the money. Maybe they were all too busy to stop for a while and smell the roses. Maybe they were all too accustomed to thinking they can get something for nothing, only to find out that you have to sign up for seven months of Physicist's Weekly in order to get a free gift. Maybe their experience had told them that we were just two jerky college students trying to make fun of them. Or maybe they were just stupid...
...smaller scale, superconductors have already been used to create superfast electronic switches called Josephson junctions (after Nobel Laureate Brian Josephson, the British physicist who discovered the principle on which they are based), which until now could operate only at liquid-helium temperatures. For both technical and economic reasons, IBM abandoned its Josephson junction project in 1983. But IBM Physicist Sadeg Faris quit the company, obtained licenses for the technology and formed Hypres, Inc., which has begun marketing its first Josephson junction product -- a high-speed oscilloscope. Says Faris: "The new materials are at a primitive stage, but we're anxious...
High-temperature superconducting magnets may become important in the maglev, or magnetically levitated, trains under development in Japan and West Germany. And scientists at Japan's Mercantile Marine University in Kobe have already developed a working scale model of a ship with a propulsion system based on magnetism. Physicist Yoshiro Saji sends current through the seawater from an onboard electric generator via ship-bottom electrodes. A superconducting magnet, also on board, creates a strong magnetic field. As the electromagnetic field produced by the electric current pushes against the field of the magnet, the ship moves forward. Saji has already moved...
...tiny, powerful electric motors, drawing current from superconducting storage devices. But even the daydreams are taken at least somewhat seriously. At Ford, for example, a study group has been assembled to rethink the feasibility of the electric car in light of the recent advances in superconductivity. Says IBM Physicist John Baglin: "The question is not 'How can we take this material and do something everyone has wanted to do?' but 'How can we do something that no one has yet imagined?' " Some tongue-in- cheek suggestions overheard at a superconductor meeting: superconducting ballroom floors and rinks that would enable dancers...
Some scientists, particularly those opposed to the SSC for other reasons, have expressed concern that the rapid developments in superconductivity could warrant a redesign of the accelerator. "It might be possible to shrink the radius down to ten miles," says Cornell Physicist James Krumhansl, president- elect of the American Physical Society. "What I say is, let's put the matter into one more year of research and development and review it next year...