AT THE height of his career in 2001, Hendrik Schön was producing papers at the remarkable rate of one every eight days. Physicists were spellbound by the speed and sheer number of breakthroughs coming from the young postdoc. He and his supervisor Bertram Batlogg at Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs were even tipped to win a Nobel prize.
The Bell team seemed to have struck gold by producing tiny organic crystals that behaved like semiconductors, the key ingredient of computer chips. Scaling down the size of transistors to squeeze more electronic components onto a chip has allowed computers to double…
