Gary Wennick conductive polymers research talk

The shaving-mirror anecdote: Tom realized overnight that the "specific conductivity beats copper" argument failed because aluminum already had better specific conductivity and hadn't displaced copper in big generators.

People can use those phrases all the time, and they do that for the unaware. You should not be the unaware — you're MIT grads or soon will be. I was sitting in the old Shipman room, probably 20 or 25 years ago. A young professor, Gary Wenick, was in polymer science. This was at a time when people had just discovered things like polyacetylene, which were electrically conductive polymers. He was giving a talk to the visiting committee or somebody about his research. He said, these conductive polymers have a specific electrical conductivity — that means the electrical conductivity, which is the inverse of resistance, divided by the density — that is better than copper.