The Breakthrough
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The Breakthrough Robert M. Hazen (Summit Books, July 6, 1988)
The history of science, like the history of political events and war, has become steadily more variegated; the newest format is instant history. The book under review is a distinguished addition to this subcategory. Roger H. Stuewer's book, The Compton Effect (1975), is a classical book about the origins of a modern scientific phenomenon—an eminently respectable text with an extensive bibliography of books, papers, and letters. Perhaps more suspect to traditionalists is Daniel J. Kevles' The Physicists (1971), a study of the growth of a scientific profession in one country. The source of possible suspicion is Kevles' extensive use of newspaper and magazine sources. Kevles did not go for interviews, however, like T.R. Reid, author of The Chip (1984). A journalist, Reid wrote his fine study of the invention and apotheosis of the integrated circuit on the basis of interviews, as well as books and published papers, all of which he cites. The extreme, till now, of this less conventional approach to sources was James D. Watson's The Double Helix. In 1968 this "instant" history, based on memory and notebooks...with no bibliography...and with its candid delight in the fact that scientists share the foibles and frailties of humanity, proved a shock. The editor of Nature couldn't persuade any biologist to review it and the task fell to a professor of comparative literature. Perhaps this is why the MRS BULLETIN'S editor thought it politic to approach someone who has never worked on superconductors to review Robert Hazen's gripping book, in some respects closely akin to Watson's book. MRS BULLETIN readers will scarcely need to be reminded of the scientific stampede unleashed when Bednorz and Mu'ller's cautious, low-profile paper of September 1986 became widely known on the occasion of the MRS superconductivity symposium of December 1986. During the intervening weeks, only a few scientists took in the full significance of what Bednorz and Miiller had shown—that a ceramic (usually an insulator) had driven up the superconducting transition from« ! 23 K (for the best alloy) to over 30 K. Paul Chu of Houston and his team quickly improved this figure and their breakneck labors led to the Y-Ba-Cu-O superconductor, with T, «90K.
MRS BULLETIN/JANUARY 1989
It then became extremely urgent, first to identify the composition of the superconducting phase in the polyphase ceramic, and second to determine its crystal structure. Chu was convinced the crystal structure would be the key to improving and, eventually, understanding high temperature superconductivity. Chu experienced a personality clash with his local x-ray diffraction expert and so turned to David Mao, a member of the informal "mafia" of Chinese-American scientists (the thumbnail sketch of which is one of the book's many minor felicities). Mao, at the Geophysical Laboratory in Washington, at once gave the task of structure determination to his colleague Robert Hazen, who in turn brought in further co-workers. Formall
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