There’s a [perhaps apocryphal?] story about Onsager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Onsager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Onsager standing up at a confe

There’s a [perhaps apocryphal?] story about Onsager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Onsager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Onsager standing up at a conference and saying to someone discussing super conductivity, “No no no you’re off by a factor of two!” “A factor of 2?” “Yes, definitely.” He couldn’t explain the factor two under further questioning. It turns out he was exactly right, there is a factor of 2 that arises from the fact that to superconduct electrons form Cooper pairs. [Aside: Actually, related to Bardeen, since Cooper pairing was first really well explained by the BCS theory!] Onsager also had some calculational techniques nobody else understood; he could calculate statistical mechanics results in ways that really seemed alien at the time. He was understood to be completely right, years later; his method was similar to Feynman diagrams. When we were told these stories by my stat mech professor during my PhD, the [tongue-in-cheek] end of the story was “The only reasonable explanation is that Onsager was sent back in time.”