After the Breakthrough:The Emergence of High-Temperature Superconductivity as a Research Field

After the Breakthrough analyzes the new field of research that emerged after the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity. Contrary to the impression given by the American press that the field originated in the United States, it was K. A. Muller and G. Bednorz at the IBM Laboratory in Zurich in 1986 who made the initial, and later Nobel Prize-winning, discovery of a new class of materials that exhibited superconductivity at temperatures higher than had been previously observed or predicted by established theory. During the next two years, a number of researchers around the world, including P. Chu and M.-K. Wu in the United States, found other materials that displayed superconductivity at even higher temperature ranges. That these materials achieved superconductivity at temperature ranges obtainable with relatively inexpensive liquid nitrogen, rather than with much more expensive liquid helium, opened up the possibility and promise of new technological and commercial applications.

Based on a series of more than seventy interviews with scientists, industrialists, administrators, and government officials, Helga Nowotny and Ulrike Felt attempt to analyze how the emergence of the new field of high-temperature superconductivity reflects changes taking place in the system of scientific research and its relationship to commercial and industrial development, national politics, and the media. The book makes detailed comparisons of the development of high-temperature superconducting research programs and science policy in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, and Japan. Although the main focus of the book is the sociology of science, it touches on several issues that should be of interest to historians of technology, such as the relationship between science and technology, and the emergence of what has been called technoscience.

The authors argue that the emergence of high-temperature superconductivity as a research field is an example of the blurring or merging of the divisions between science and technology into technoscience. They assert that an essential characteristic of technoscience is that “scientific research must continually create new products and generate demands for them” (p. 5). Technoscience, they claim, extends into the wider society through a vast heterogeneous network labeled the extended lab, which links each research laboratory to its economic, political, administrative, technological, and scientific environment. This expansion makes the boundaries between various scientific, technological, political, and economic areas harder to discern and to maintain.

The book provides a detailed description and analysis of how the emergence of the field of high-temperature superconductivity reveals a dynamic interaction between scientific research, efforts to organize that research, and the creation of technological expectations for that research. Through a comparative analysis of developments in the United States, Europe, and Japan, the authors conclude that the successful establishment of a national research program depends upon the strengths of national industries and their relationship to university research programs. In particular, they show how “industry continues to serve as a politically legitimizing factor for government funding of basic research,” and how “industry-university relations affect the more general directions national research programs take” (p. 119).

An important element in the establishment of national research programs in high-temperature superconductivity was the role played by the media. One strength of this book is its analysis of the media’s role in negotiating a link between scientific research and its relevance to the public sphere. The media seized on and encouraged the idea that high-temperature superconductivity research should be seen as part of an international competition for technological and commercial advantage. Much of the research, and the government funding behind it, was driven by the media’s promise of loss-free power transmission, magnetically levitated trains, and a new “little science” that would be accessible to all, even though such promises have not come to fruition.

In the end, this book should be useful to historians of technology because it provides yet another counterexample to the...