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• PUBLIC
  LECTURE

• Department of Physics
• Brown University
• Box 1843
• Barus Holley Building
• 182 Hope Street
• Providence, RI 02912
• physics @ physics.brown.edu

The BCS Theory of
Superconductivity

Leon Cooper
Ledyard Goddard University Professor
Brown University

Recipient of the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics together with John Bardeen and John Robert Schrieffer for the theory of superconductivity, usually called the BCS-theory.

Prof. Cooper's Wikipedia Entry
Prof. Cooper's Brown University Research Profile

Lecture
"Superconductivity and Other Insoluble Problems"

Abstract
A somewhat personal account of the events that led to the BCS theory of superconductivity will be followed by a discussion of other problems, past and present, that have seemed or do seem to be insoluble. This leads us to consider whether there are limits to what science can tell us. Are some things intrinsically unknowable? Is anything in nature permanently hidden from the human mind?