Grand Unifying Theory of High-Temp Superconducting Materials Proposed 48
An anonymous reader writes "Years of experiments on various types of high-temperature (high-Tc) superconductors — materials that offer hope for energy-saving applications such as zero-loss electrical power lines — have turned up an amazing array of complex behaviors among the electrons that in some instances pair up to carry current with no resistance, and in others stop the flow of current in its tracks. The variety of these exotic electronic phenomena is a key reason it has been so hard to identify unifying concepts to explain why high-Tc superconductivity occurs in these promising materials. Now Séamus Davis, a physicist who's conducted experiments on many of these materials at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Cornell University, and Dung-Hai Lee, a theorist at DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, postulate a set of key principles for understanding the superconductivity and the variety of 'intertwined' electronic phenomena that applies to all the families of high-Tc superconductors [full academic paper]."
Re:NOTHING to do with Grand Unified Theory (Score:5, Insightful)
"A grand unified theory of X" is a very standard English idiom [google.co.uk] used to refer to a broad and extensive theory of a subject "X". It does not mean that the subject involves grand unified theory, but rather something that is the metaphorical equivalent of GUT in a different field.
It boggles my mind that you would be able to make such a misapprehension. It's not a particularly complex sentence to parse. If the article was about how tuna is the "beef cow of the sea" would you be complaining that tuna don't have hooves and aren't made of beef?