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Superconductivity

Summer 2009

Picture this

Doerte Blume is good at explaining difficult concepts. She draws as she talks, putting into pictures what she knows about the tiniest fragments of matter. Her desk is swimming in paper, with notes and graphs and sketches of atoms lapping at the sides of her computer and spilling against a jetty of books. As a theoretical physicist, she relies heavily on high-powered math; but for her, before the math come the images.

Working solely from equations “doesn’t get me very far,” she says. “I also have to have the physical picture of, what would I expect? What do the particles do? I always try to … » More …