Looking for inspiration in these dark times? Meet the conductor.

In most respects, the conductor is a pretty ordinary bundle of atoms. Peek through the insulating rubber, and you’ll notice him hard at work inside your local lamp cord or power line.[1] The conductor is a transporter—his job is to usher electricity as quickly as possible from where it’s made (say, a power plant) to where it’s meant to be (sizzling through the filament of that local lightbulb).[2] The conductor is able to do this fairly quickly and efficiently, thanks to the arrangement of his electrons. Each of his atoms has an outermost electron level that isn’t completely full, which means those further-out electrons can easily jump between atoms from beginning to end, like square dancers twirling through a line of partners.

The conductor is much better at this job than other materials are—plenty don’t have the right electron setup at all![3] Still, he’s not perfect; he’s got faults and impurities built in, and sometimes he gets a little shaky from the stress of it all. When the energy he’s transporting runs into the resistance this creates, some of it gets away, transforming into heat and light and quickly burning out, and slowing down the whole operation.[4] Again, a very relatable guy, right?

But the conductor has a secret. Sometimes, in some situations, he is perfect. One-hundred-percent-transport-efficiency-plus-some-extra-powers-for-kicks perfect. He’s not shaky or impure, he’s certified resistance-free, and he certainly won’t make you waste energy on footnotes. Suddenly, he’s no longer just the conductor. He’s the Superconductor.

The Superconductor’s transforming environment—his Batcave, his phone booth, his Ironman suit—is extreme cold. At temperatures approaching absolute zero, a thus-far theoretical state in which virtually no energy exists, the superconductor has unique, near-mystical powers. Because it lacks internal resistance, electricity can flow through it, unimpeded, virtually forever. When he’s bent into a loop, the superconductor is the closest thing the known universe has to a perpetual motion machine.

The first superconductor was unmasked in 1911. For decades, physicists had wondered how extremely low temperatures would affect the behavior of conductors. Some theorized they would lose their transmissive powers completely, while others thought they would become more and more effective as heat decreased. After years of painstaking procedural improvements, a Dutch physicist named Heike Kamerlingh Onnes finally cooled mercury down to 4 degrees Kelvin, or – 425 degrees Fahrenheit—just a little warmer than outer space. Immediately, the element’s resistance fell to “practically zero,” Onnes wrote. Its conductivity hadn’t just increased linearly; the mercury had, like the god it was named for, winged over a threshold “into a new state.” Onnes deemed this condition “superconductivity,” and, two years later, took home a Nobel Prize for his efforts.

Since then, scientists have worked steadily to find the specific temperatures at which different average-Joe conductors don their capes. Along the way, they’ve uncovered a startlingly large arsenal of additional superconductor superpowers. They can pass notes through concrete walls: put two superconductors near each other, and electrons will teleport from one to the other, even through intervening nonconductive material. They can transmogrify: in 1986, German physicists Alex Muller and Georg Bednorz made a superconductor out of ceramic, which, at normal temperatures, is about as conductive as, well, a dinner plate. You could even argue that superconductors have a Midas-like quality: Muller and Bednorz also won Nobel Prizes for their work.

On top of all that, there’s the levitation. All conductors, when in use, emit a magnetic field, and all conductors react when magnets are passed over them. But only superconductors read the strength of the intruding magnet and send out an equal and opposing magnetic field that’s precisely potent enough to repel it. Try and drop a magnet on an active superconductor, and the magnet will hover helplessly over it, like a villain held back by an invisible force.

But perhaps this phenom’s most impressive feat is the degree to which it has, thus far, eluded scientific explanation. As the number and type of superconductors diversifies, theories that previously accounted for their talents become inadequate. We know some things: for example, electrons in normal conductors stay far away from each other, but below a threshold temperature, they overcome this repulsion and pair off resulting in an easier passage. But what of higher-temperature superconductors, or those that aren’t made with conductive materials? Their motives remain shrouded in mystery.

Despite our lack of understanding, scientists have found ways to marshal the superconductor’s enigmatic powers for good. Doctors use superconductor-powered magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines to visualize internal tissue, no incisions necessary. China and Japan have installed levitating trains driven by the superconductor/magnet animosity. Experts think the superconductors will help meet major needs of our developing civilization—for faster computers, more efficiently powered cities, even less staticky cell phones. And if his former exploits are any indication, the superconductor has tricks up his sleeve we don’t even know about yet. So if you’re worried about the future, remember: a humble bundle of atoms can do a lot, especially if it’s chilled out.

[1] Pro tip—don’t peek through the rubber!

[2] Or where it’s not meant to be—for example, short-circuiting your heart muscles. That’s why you shouldn’t peek through the rubber.

[3] Other materials, like potatoes, are close—but also have other, better properties, such as the ability to be made into french fries.

[4] Sometimes people build extra resistance into conductors, like in that lightbulb we were talking about earlier. The filament’s high level of resistance is what makes it light up.