History
The priority of many discoveries in science is vigorously disputed (see, e.g., Nobel Prize controversies). Another example, after Sumio Iijima has "discovered" carbon nanotubes in 1991, many scientists have pointed out that carbon nanofibers were actually observed decades earlier. The same could be said about superconductivity in covalent semiconductors. Superconductivity in germanium and silicon-germanium was predicted theoretically as early as in the 1960s. Shortly after, superconductivity was experimentally detected in germanium telluride. In 1976, superconductivity with Tc = 3.5 K was observed experimentally in germanium implanted with copper ions; it was experimentally demonstrated that amorphization was essential for the superconductivity (in Ge), and the superconductivity was assigned to Ge itself, not copper.
Read more about this topic: Covalent Superconductor
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“... all big changes in human history have been arrived at slowly and through many compromises.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)