Let's just try to think of things anew. I'll work in dialog form. The following is a discussion between guy-in-quote-marks and guy-without-quote-marks. Old friends. What is the most plausible path to peace? "What are we talking about now, Ukraine?" Not today. I'm thinking of Israel, or Palestine, or whatever neutral name we might want to give to the territory between Lebanon and Egypt on one axis, between the Jordan River and the Sea on the other. "Let's call it X, as in algebra." Okay. What is the most plausible path to peace for X? "A two-state solution." Really? Won't two states in that enclosed space be constantly at war -- or at war until one conquered the other, whereafter the warfare could be reclassified as civil unrest, but would continue unabated? "Very likely." So: the problem I take it is the violence, not the classification. "The point, though, is that peace for X cannot really be considered in isolati
Superconductivity is one of those things, like fusion energy or quantum computing, that are always JUST ABOUT TO make a big splash in the world, change everything ... and ten years ago this was just on the verge of happening too, and in another ten it will still be right on the knife's edge of realization. And so on. The notion that superconductivity will be the next big thing comes from experience of materials at very low temperature, Properly cooled materials (most often metals such as lead, tin or aluminum) conduct direct current (DC) electricity without energy loss: resistance vanishes. If you've watched cheesy old sci-fi movies in which aliens tell humans "resistance is futile" you will probably be at work on your puns already. Still ... the absence of current resistance is enticing. It is a prospect with no end of possible practical applications. But, of course, the process of cooling the proposed superconducting material below the threshold temperature and ke