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Historical Note
March 1987 was a heady time to be a physicist. At the annual meeting of the American Physical Society (APS), held that year at the Hilton Hotel in New York City, reporters followed physicists around town, trying to get interviews about the new high-temperature superconductors that were supposed to make electricity super-efficient. An APS meeting badge was sufficient to get you to the front of the line in at least one trendy New York night club, and free admission. Paul Michael Grant, then a physicist at the IBM Almaden Research Center in California (later with the Electric Power Research Institute and now the founder and principal of W2AGZ Technologies), was surprised to see a photograph of himself, blown up two stories tall on the side of the downtown Sony office building, performing a "dipper-stick" measurement of the transport properties in a liquid helium dewar of a sample of YBCO-123(YBa2Cu3O7-y ), whose single-phase structure Grant and his group had identified only two weeks before the APS meeting, exhibiting a critical temperature (T c) of 93 K. "Seeing that photo displayed in mid-Manhattan knocked my socks off," said Grant.
The highlight of the March meeting week was a special session of five-minute talks on the copper oxide perovskite high-temperature (high-Tc) superconductors. Starting at 7:30 Wednesday night, March 18, and continuing into Thursday morning, the session, dubbed the "Woodstock of Physics," due to...