Is consciousness a by-product of room-temperature superconductivity?
If so, it kind of makes us seem a bit less important in the greater scheme of things. And generally — at least over the past 10,000 or so years — movement in that direction seems to be consistent with a more realistic view of things. Yesterday, as I was reading Kenneth Chang’s superb New York Times Science section story about the celebration last month of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of “Theory of Superconductivity,” a landmark paper which appeared in Physical Review in December 1957, I got to reflecting on the halting progress of high-temperature superconductivity studies in the decades since. And then I got to thinking about how it is that after all these years and myriad conflicting theories, we seem no closer to a theory of consciousness today than we were fifty years ago. Well, the way I see it, if you’re getting nowhere in two different avenues, that’s no reason not to see what happens when you combine them. Wasn’t it the noted physicist Billy Preston who wrote, “N
