SuperVideos

"Super Interviews," Produced approximately May-July, 1987 by IBM Zuerich. [An hour-long production divided more or less evenly between Praveen Chaudhari, Alex Mueller, Georg Bednorz, Paul Grant and Ed Engler. Rather poorly edited with many gaps/repetition, with focus on both near term issues/applications for IBM, as well attempting to forecast, with limited success (as of 2015) societal application in a broad range of science and energy scenarios...well worth viewing and reflecting upon from today's perspective.]

"Reagan 1987 Speech," Delivered in mid-May, 1987, in the downtown DC Hilton Hotel. I was invited to attend, along with Praveen Chaudhari. [An hour long presentation, with most of the cabinet attending, on the "promise' of the newest "American" discovery against the background of the political agenda that "the Japanese were "eating our lunch"") (Today (2015) it's the Chinese). The first 10 minutes were a review of current foreign policy developments, the rest proposing what became the DOE Superconductivity Partnership Initiative, a partnership of industry, national labs and the congressional budget committees, that performed with tremendous success up to its end in 2010, by which time most application efforts were tested and whose fruits now "sit on the shelf," awaiting deployment by the private sector. A personal tale for "future telling" was a conversation between Praveen and I on the internal politics pursuing the IBM program shared by by Yorktown, San Jose and Zuerich.

"PMG Remarks on the IBM JJ Project," Abstracted from the 1988 CBS Nova program, Race for the Superconductor (see below). [As reflected in Pres. Reagan's 1988 talk (above), there was a wide ranging belief in the mid-1980s that American companies were abandoning product development of their R&D activities to the Japanese, and significant portion of this Nova production reflected this attitude.. An oft-mentioned example at the time was IBM's "abandonment" of its 5-year, 300 M$ Josephson computer program, and the Nova producers asked me to briefly address this issue. What in fact had transpired was that MOSFET technology, also under development by IBM, had surpassed the advantages offered by Josephson. By 1990, Japan had learned the same lesson, and they terminated their Josephson program as well. This episode illustrates the difficulty politicians, bureaucrats and academics have understanding how profit-oriented technology actually emerges...and still do! (2015).]

"Superconductivity is Superexciting!," 27 May 1988, San Jose, Costa Rica. [I was asked by IBM de Costa Rica to address a meeting of most of the then members of the Costa Rican Assembly on the excitement endemic worldwide over the discoveries of the past 20 months (I also got to share lunch with President Oscar Arias Sanchez). The talk is rather long and rambling, but form the basis of subsequent presentations I was asked to deliver to subsequent IBM-organized conferences throughout Europe and Northern Ireland. At the end of this talk, I pointed out the first "application" of the Bednorz-Mueller discoveries was the development of levitation kits built in high schools worldwide as part of their science education experience. This first application remains perhaps the only one even today (2015).

"Race for the Superconductor," 1987-1988 Nova Production, Released 1Q 1988. []

"Superconductor: The Race for the Prize," 1988 BBC Horizons. []

"System Crash," 2008 Production by Omnifilm Entertainment (Vancouver, BC). [An excellent documentary expounding the concept of the "resilient" or "smart" grid. In several places throughout this one hour video, particularly 15 minutes, the concept of the Energy SuperGrid is put forth, a symbiosis of nuclear, hydrogen and superconductivity as the future energy scenario planetwide.]