Chapter 178: The Mysterious Superconductor
After marveling at the "Superalloy Series," the group walked a few steps further and immediately spotted a white pedestal. Hovering in the air above it was a grayish-black stone!
It was the centerpiece of the entire exhibition hall. The stone itself was unremarkable, looking like any ordinary piece of rough ore. Yet, it was completely suspended in mid-air.
An uninformed observer might have mistaken this for some sort of anti-gravity technology, but that wasn’t the case. The massive rock was being held aloft by nothing more than a small semi-metallic ring beneath it. This unassuming ring was something humanity had dreamed of for generations...
A room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconducting material!
The sheer brilliance of this single piece of superconductor completely overshadowed the seventeen revolutionary metals of the Superalloy Series, leaving Dr. Arthur Lambert with an awkward, slightly embarrassed expression.
Room-temperature superconductivity was a world-changing technological leap!
Dr. Lambert was genuinely astounded. He couldn’t fathom how such a groundbreaking achievement,involving such an incredibly complex material had been developed so quickly. The Martian extraterrestrial alloys possessed similar room-temperature superconducting properties, but their structures were highly fragmented, and the manufacturing processes were so complex that humans had found them impossible to replicate.
It was like expecting primitive hunter-gatherers to build a modern laptop from scratch; the theoretical and technological gaps were simply too vast.
But now... someone had inexplicably done it?!
A large crowd of scientists gathered around the floating boulder, shouting and debating excitedly. These were top-tier experts in electromagnetism and materials science. Their faces were flushed as they made wild gestures, tossing out technical jargon in a heated frenzy. They deeply understood the epoch-making significance of this material.
This was true superconductivity under normal conditions. To be precise, it required an environment below 15 degrees Celsius at standard atmospheric pressure to function. But that was close enough; the conditions were easily manageable and basically mirrored room temperature!
Many scientists, seeing a working superconductor like this for the first time, were so awestruck by the hovering boulder that they wanted to drag it back to their labs immediately. To them, the invention of the Superalloy Series was plausible, but... a working superconductor? It was entirely unexpected. It made them feel like they were going crazy.
Almost every piece of futuristic, cutting-edge technology required the support of superconducting materials. Controllable nuclear fusion, ultra-high-speed railguns, high-power pulse lasers, and quantum computers,all of these were nothing more than pipe dreams without superconductors.
At room temperature, metallic silver was humanity’s best electrical conductor, possessing a resistivity of 1.59 × 10⁻⁸ Ω·m at 20 degrees Celsius. However, for ultra-high-power, military-grade equipment, that resistance was still far too high.
Any conductor with resistance generates heat, and heat is fatal to high-tech devices. Weaponized laser pulses can generate bursts of hundreds of millions of watts. Even a microscopic amount of electrical resistance would produce a massive amount of heat, risking the complete meltdown of the internal wiring. Such devices were inherently unstable, which severely impacted their final power output and accuracy.
Using superconducting wires with zero electrical resistance would completely eliminate these issues.
In addition to "zero" resistance, superconductors also possessed perfect diamagnetism, which was the fundamental principle behind the hovering rock. Because a superconductor strictly "expels" any magnetic field from its interior, if an external magnetic field tries to penetrate it, the superconductor will automatically generate an opposing magnetic field to ensure its internal magnetic strength remains zero. This creates a powerful repulsive force.
This repulsive force could be used to counteract gravity! When a magnet is placed directly beneath a superconductor, with its magnetic field lines passing perpendicularly toward it, the superconductor gains an upward vertical buoyancy. It was the exact same principle that allowed the massive mountains to float in the old Earth movie, Avatar.
The greatest bottleneck holding humanity back from a true electromagnetic era had been inexplicably and easily shattered. It left many people with a lingering sense of unreality.
Jason and the others listened to the scientists’ discussions. Some lamented the arduous historical journey of this research, while others painted beautiful pictures of the future. Most had assumed this specific technological hurdle would take decades, if not centuries, to overcome. For it to suddenly be solved felt like a fever dream.
And it was dreamy. In truth, the scientific community hadn’t even actively focused on overcoming this specific problem yet. But out of nowhere, it was solved.
The history of superconductivity dated back to 1911, when Heike Kamerlingh Onnes of Leiden University accidentally discovered that mercury lost all electrical resistance when cooled to -268.98 degrees Celsius. This earned him the Nobel Prize in 1913 and kicked off a century of research.
Yet, over a hundred years later, progress had been painfully slow. Just when it seemed room-temperature superconductivity was still centuries away, it had been conquered by an unknown genius. It left the veteran scientists feeling a bit cheated.
It was as if they had been hiking up a winding, endless mountain path, fully prepared to spend hundreds of years walking toward the summit, only for someone else to use a cheat code, hop in a plane, and fly straight to the finish line. That was exactly how the senior scientists felt, a mixture of awe and a strange sense of emptiness.
The molecular structure of this new material was exceptionally complex, completely unlike anything previously observed. It was a high-molecular-weight polymer with a silver core. Composed of millions of atoms, it was an absolute behemoth of a macromolecule!
The most fascinating aspect was the hexagonal "high-speed channels" formed between the molecules, allowing electrons to pass through seamlessly with virtually no obstruction. This was the secret to its room-temperature superconductivity.
While the basic explanation sounded simple, the actual scientific theory was baffling. The research report submitted for the material was a chaotic mess, and its explanations of the core principles were incredibly vague. It seemed that even the inventor himself didn’t fully understand how these electron "high-speed channels" formed; it read as if he had discovered the formula purely by accident.
However, the report did clearly detail the manufacturing process, and after thorough verification, the Federation’s labs confirmed it was completely replicable.
Listening to the scientists debate, Jason found himself deeply intrigued by this mysterious inventor. Was it really like a blind squirrel finding a nut? Did he just stumble onto the solution to one of physics’ greatest problems through sheer luck?
It seemed magically absurd. The probability of something like this happening wasn’t zero, but it was infinitesimally small, less than one in a trillion. It was as bizarre as a monkey randomly mashing a keyboard and typing out a Shakespearean masterpiece!
"Are the shut-in computer nerds changing the world now?"
"Maybe it was divine inspiration..."
The scientists gossiped endlessly. There simply seemed to be no other logical explanation besides dumb luck.
Jason frowned as he pulled up the inventor’s profile on his datapad. The guy’s name was Peter. He was a complete recluse who worked as a low-level researcher at the Light Lake Supercomputing Center.
An information engineering researcher? Not even a materials scientist?!
Under normal circumstances, Peter was just an average guy. How did an IT worker suddenly experience a massive breakthrough or find a real-life cheat code and manage to develop a world-changing material in a completely unrelated scientific field?
Was he an unparalleled genius, or did he just have unparalleled luck? It was genuinely bizarre.
To the great disappointment of the assembled scientific elite, this reclusive individual hadn’t even bothered to attend the exhibition. He had chosen to stay holed up in his quarters, maintaining his peculiar air of mystery.
Jason shook his head, thoroughly puzzled. He had very little impression of Peter; he knew the man existed, but only in passing. He recalled that Peter was one of the few hundred survivors who had managed to escape Earth aboard the Victory spacecraft.
Jason thought about it carefully. While he desperately wanted to visit this eccentric genius in person and demand answers, he held himself back. Everyone had their own secrets. If Peter wanted to keep a low profile, Jason would let him. He couldn’t go interrogating a rising scientific star just because he had a few personal doubts about the man’s methods.
Regardless of how it happened, Peter’s invention was incredibly beneficial to humanity. Perhaps he really did just have a sudden flash of inspiration. After all, didn’t Newton discover gravity because an apple fell on his head?
Who could truly explain the chaotic nature of scientific discovery? Perhaps it was fate, or just a miraculous stroke of luck.
The era of the "struggle" had ended; a new story was just beginning.