Fantastic overview of superconductors - thanks! Although my day job today is in biology, my background is in engineering - materials engineering - but unfortunately not superconductors. In another world, I might have wandered down that path - totally fascinating!

I'm just spit-balling here… as you note, all the superconductors require either very low temperatures or very high pressures…. Both require tremendous amount of work to maintain. I think there is something fundamental there, about superconductors, their requirements, and not really being able to get us any closer to a perpetual motion machine - because we have to provide the input energy somewhere - and in the case of superconductors it is not additional electrical energy, but either energy to provide the temperature or pressure requirements for the SC property to arise.

My non-technical finger-in-the-wind prediction is that we will never get a room-temp superconductor - but that we’ll get close enough for it to be more practical for specialty applications (cheaper MRI machines, etc)… But that the cost of the work to provide the temperature or pressure requirements will make superconductors impractical for, say, our iPhone 1232 Pro. ;)

Best,

S.D.