| > can you make wires from cermets? Well, nobody mentioned cermets, or wires, and there are plenty of applications for superconductors beyond wires. Even so, we are perfectly able to make fibre optics cables with silica, which is a ceramic. > we need a substance that is malleable(?) enough like copper wire that electrons can pass through. Malleability (actually, ductility) has nothing to do with electric conductivity. It can be useful depending on the use case, but for example on a printed circuit you don’t care about that. Not everything is a dangling wire. YBCO a ceramic superconductor, it is used in thin films that are deposited on metallic substrates in tapes and it works well. See figure 2 of the paper here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271637455_Dipole_Ma... . Also, you might not realise this but pretty much nothing is malleable at liquid helium temperature. > Pottery ceramic wont work like that. Sigh. Ceramics are not pottery, and more than 99% of the time do not have anything to do with pottery. Ceramics are compounds that are not intermetallic, typically oxides, sulphides, nitrides, etc. Some are bendy (though generally less than metallic alloys), some are hard, some are electric conductors, some are not. They have very diverse sets of properties. They are everywhere in the chips on the device you use, in its display, in the power plants that make electrons move so you can use it, in any lithium-ion battery, etc. I don’t think I can name one device that does not involve ceramics. Even a shovel, either in the form of a passive layer that makes it stainless, or in the form of rust on it. None of that has anything to do with pottery. |