I worked for the Texas Center for Superconductivity, where Paul Chu discovered superconductors that operated at liquid nitrogen temperatures, in the 1980s a yea

I worked for the Texas Center for Superconductivity, where Paul Chu discovered superconductors that operated at liquid nitrogen temperatures, in the 1980s a year or so after his discovery. We spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how the mechanism worked, and about half the team were theoreticians who would try and posit theories, or evaluate theories posited by other teams, and the the other half of the team spent time either testing the new theories, or experimenting to try and improve the results of previous experiments. Y1B2C3O is not even a metal, but a ceramic crystal. This was kinda mind blowing at the time. It shouldn't even conduct. IIRC the best theory at the time was that it was superconducting because of particular errors in the formation of the crystal due to the production process. But I left the lab in the early 1990s.