Excellent choice of article, Uncle G. I noted in the body of that article that two of the researchers earned a Nobel Prize for their work. They are not the first to have earned one, though, in the field of superconductivity.
John Bardeen,
Leon Neil Cooper and
John Robert Schrieffer won the Nobel Prize in 1972 for their work on the subject. They treated superconductivity as a "2nd order phase transition" and their math solidified the concept.
To simplify the idea of "phase transitions," various properties of matter change with changes of temperature. For example, ice melts or water freezes; water boils or steam condenses. These are changes to/from solid, liquid, or gas. These are called "1st order phase transitions." Simple enough, right? An example of a 2nd order transition is when you heat up a permanent magnet above the Curie temperature, the magnetism is lost because the atomic-level "magnetic domains" of the magnetic material become scrambled. The magnet doesn't melt (so not 1st order) but DOES lose its magnetism. We now understand that this means the spin orientation of the valence electrons of the magnet, which had been aligned, become randomized. Bardeen and his colleagues showed that like magnetic disorientation through heat, the development of superconductivity through cold was a 2nd order transition. Chalk up yet another big win for Bell Labs.
Their idea of electrons "joining up with one another" was the early statement of entanglement before that word had come into common usage in terms of quantum physics. I had to do a presentation on this topic as part of my doctoral program. Their work put a stronger theoretical foundation under something that was just being discovered at the time - measuring devices that used superconductivity to improve sensitivity by literal orders of magnitude. One example I recall was a bolometer (remote sensor of infra-red heat emissions) that became capable of measuring things to the level of 100 nanowatts. (In 1972, that was BIG stuff for astronomers trying to measure information about stellar gas emissions.) This was important to chemists because more sensitive detection devices permit more precise measurements.
