What is a superconducter?

Baloo55th

Normally any substance that conducts electricity has a resistance. This can be regarded as being equivalent to a narrowing of a pipe - it reduces the flow. This ain't the truth, but it's good enough for starters. With most substances, the lower the temperature, the lower the resistance. A superconducter basically has no resistance, so if you start a current flowing in it, it just keeps on going. Round and round and round.... The trouble is that this happens at such low temperatures that you can't really do anything useful with it. They are working on room temperature superconducters, but they're not good enough for practical purposes yet. Not sure what they want to do with them, but computer memory is one possibilty - so I've heard, anyway. Feb 08 04, 4:05 PM

Hamlet.

Superconducters allow electrical current to travel without resistance. They are elements that have no electrical resistance when cooled past their low critical temperatures. All electrical systems would run much better and more cheaply if electricity could travel without resistance. They were once thought to be impossible, untill in 1911 a Dutch physicist named Heike Kamerlingh Onnes demonstrated them. The potential help to society through superconductivity is immense. Feb 08 04, 4:12 PM