: Henry Mühlpfordt/TU Dresden/Wikimedia Commons)

In our conventional lives, we’re all familiar with electricity: where charged particles move through a complete circuit, and where that electrical energy can be used to power all sorts of devices. Whenever you have a conventional electrical current — caused by the motion of charged particles — one of only two things are typically happening. Either the electrons within a material are being forced through the entire material, both on the surface and on the interior, or they’re all traveling exclusively on the surface of the material. When electrons , that’s evidence that you have a conductor; when electrons move all throughout the material, those are the properties of an insulator, or a material with low conductivity/high resistivity.

But some materials behave fundamentally differently from both insulators and conductors: . Whereas moving charged particles create magnetic fields and magnetic fields, in turn, influence the movement of charged particles, superconductors are instead defined by two remarkable properties: