Against the grain

WOODSTOCK. For most people the word prompts memories of a summer concert decades ago, and cool fantasies of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Not for physicists, though. They remember a gathering of the American Physical Society in the winter of 1987 which turned so raucous that it has become known to them as the Woodstock of physics. They remember a rather different cool fantasy, too: superconductivity.