Conductive polymers / polyacetylene hype

A young professor's claim that polyacetylene would replace copper because of higher *specific* electrical conductivity. Tom's shaving-mirror realization the next morning: aluminum already has higher specific conductivity than copper, but we don't use it in rotating machinery — because absolute conductivity is what matters, not specific.

About thirty years ago I was sitting in what was the Chipman Room back then, listening to a talk from a new young professor who was working on electrically conductive polymers. Anybody familiar with electrically conductive polymers? The first one that came out was polyacetylene. These are polymers with lots of double bonds, so they have some free electrons, which means they can be electrically conductive. The only problem is they tend to decompose in air — the humidity in the air and so on. But they're very light, and he mentioned something I'd never thought about before. He said these were going to be the material of the future, they were going to replace copper, because the specific electrical conductivity of polyacetylene and these new electrically conductive polymers was less than that of copper. And copper is the electrical conductor we use in general.